On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, many televisions across the world broadcast that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. It looked like a scene from an apocalyptic thriller at first, before the sudden realisation that the yellow band with the words BREAKING NEWS on it was suggestingâno, was shouting out loudâthat everything was REAL. The image of the two towers going down in flames haunted me for a long time, then was buried somewhere, in a corner of my unconscious, resurfacing at the yearly anniversaries of the event and, rather unexpectedly, ten years later, during an academic lecture on postmodern literature , when a novel âabout 9/11 â was mentioned in passing. So, they are writing fiction about that now? I asked myself. Indeed they areâdozens, even hundreds of books, as I later found out. Preliminary research by Dawes has documented approximately 250 fictional pieces related to 9/11, two thirds of which are written by American authors (2011, qtd. in Gauthier 2015, 19). The same research brought forth the idea that the events of 9/11 left many other people with the impression that they were watching a film that surpassed the imagination of any ambitious Hollywood scriptwriter. Philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida , Jean Baudrillard , JĂŒrgen Habermas , or novelists, such as Don DeLillo or Ian McEwan , described the events by starting with their unreality, their eerie resemblance to a feature film , and their metaphorical and symbolic nature. It seemed reasonable, then, that an event so surrounded by an aura of fictionality and yet so very real, and with such serious consequences at the level of global geopolitics could draw the attention of the creators of fiction , while also remaining a major topic for politicians and journalists. Has fiction settled into the postmodern pastiche of political and media discourses, incorporating them by creating alternative worlds? Or did it have the ambition to join them on an equal footing, to add its insights into what was becoming more and more unreal and representational?
Perhaps, as many people note, fiction has assumed a cathartic role in its dealing with trauma induced by the real, embracing it and making it resonant of the painful reality lived by the survivors or families of the victims (DeLillo , Foer, Waldman), keeping it at bay and focusing on the macro consequences of the event (McEwan , Hamid ), and even confronting it through sarcasm and dark humour (Beigbeder, Banks ). Whatever the road taken, trauma seems to be the common denominator for 9/11 fiction : it is its binding element that qualifies it for intricate psychological and psychoanalytical assessment. Many critical opinions expressed in the years since the event tend towards the idea that 9/11 is unrepresentable due to its magnitude, because âwe do not yet know how to qualify ⊠we do not know what we are talking aboutâ (Borradori and Derrida 2003, 86). Therefore, focus is laid on what remains safely representable: the smaller, far less significant scale of personal trauma . Literature itself has put criticism on this track by choosing to foreground the personal, rather than the political. However, this is not all, for fiction is deceptive by definition. Yet its deceit gives way to a long list of trauma-oriented critical analyses, complemented sometimes with elements of postmodern theory and chronotopes, or with more conventional genre theory. Without attempting to write an exhaustive literature review, a few titles have been selected for a brief presentation, with a view to continuing their tradition, while also filling the gaps possibly left by their approach. A good case in point is the eclectic collection of articles brought together under the title Literature After 9/11 (Routledge) by editors Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. Essentially, the papers included in this volume discuss the role of literature in representing the unrepresentable, and especially in âoffering critiques of and challenges to political discourses that seek to simplify or fix the meaning of 9/11 â (2008, 3). The book covers novels, essays, poetry and personal reminiscences, including the famous âPortraits of Griefâ (the collection of 9/11 obituaries published by The New York Times ), anticipating, yet not convincingly pinpointing the relation between fiction and non-fiction in the representation of 9/11. An intricate analysis focusing on the novel from the sole perspective of trauma studies is Kristiaan Versluysâs Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (Columbia University Press). It sets out from the premise that âthe best 9/11 novels are diffident linguisticallyâ and that âas an event, 9/11 is limned as a silhouette, expressible only through allegory and indirectionâ (2009, 13). Aside from its psychoanalytical insights, the study provides, under Derridaâs influence, a valuable account of the language used to represent, once again, the unrepresentable. The traumatic route imagined by Versluys for his book is better represented by Art Spiegelmanâs comics In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) than by the novels of Foer and DeLillo , because, he argues, the author is a first-hand witness of the event, which makes his fictionalised/drawn trauma more cogent than that of people writing from a safe distance. Trauma decreases in intensity in the novels analysed towards the end of Versluysâs book. The fifth chapter focuses on the representation of otherness , acknowledging that âthe immediate shock has worn off and ⊠the concerns expressed will be less directly related to the experience of trauma â (183) as time has passed. Versluysâs book is undoubtedly a mainstay of the critical reception of 9/11 fiction , one that has created and imposed a canon of this subgenre in the making, and yet, its approach and the authorâs belief in the healing powers of the narrative leave some things unsaidâfortunately so, because it allows other researchers to follow in its footsteps and complement its evaluations. One of them is Tim Gauthier, who in 2015 published 9/11 Fiction, Empathy and Otherness (Lexington Books). His focus, obvious from the title, shifts from what one feels (including trauma ) to how one perceives what the other feels, in other words, on empathy, arguing that âfiction presents opportunities to witness empathy in actionâin the textâs very attempts to represent the inner lives of its diverse characters⊠and in the readerâs recognition of her own empathetic efforts at connecting (or not) with the characters presented in the bookâ (2015, 32). Gauthier makes an articulate case for the understanding of otherness , proposing a reading which emphasises that 9/11 âhighlighted our condition of togetherness at the same time that it put into relief the difficulty of negotiating issues of difference highlighted within these conditionsâ (44), which is in agreement with some of the ideas expressed below.
Also close to the intentions of this book is Cara Cilanoâs From Solidarity to Schismâ9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US (Rodopi 2009), a volume aiming to show how the events of 9/11 and their aftermath affect cultural practice at the world level, laying emphasis on âhow different peoples and cultures may represent and understand their post-9/11 worlds in non-US centred waysâ (2009, 17). It brings under the lens literary works and films from Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, Israel, Iran and Pakistan. Another thorough critical response to 9/11 fiction to which the present study acknowledges its debt is provided by Martin Randall in 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Aside from focusing on the works of FrĂ©dĂ©ric Beigbeder , Don DeLillo , Ian McEwan and Martin Amis , who are constantly referred to whenever a critical work on 9/11 fiction is published , Randall is among the first to foreground the Otherâs voice in discussing Pakistani author Mohsin Hamidâs monologic novel , The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). The volume also features analyses of a film , Man on Wire (2008), and two plays, The Mercy Seat by Neil Labute (2002) and The Guys by Anne Nelson (2001), and of Simon Armitageâs emotional film-poem Out of the Blue (2006), one of the few literary texts that venture to give a voice to the victims trapped inside the towers (aside from Beigbederâs literary âminute-by-minute reportâ in Windows of the World).
Among the most comprehensive critical works in the field is Richard Grayâs After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Blackwell, 2011). As is apparent from the title, the volume does not focus on 9/11 fiction but on the way in which the event has changed paradigms in literature (mostly prose, although he also dedicates a chapt...