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Writing the 9/11 Decade

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Writing the 9/11 Decade 1 Writing the 9/11 Decade Charlie Lee-Potter A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of PhD ROYAL HOLLOWAY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2013 2 Declaration of Authorship I Charlie Lee-Potter hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 3 Charlie Lee-Potter, Writing the 9/11 Decade Novelists have struggled to find forms of expression that would allow them to register the post-9/11 landscape. This thesis examines their tentative and sometimes faltering attempts to establish a critical distance from and create a convincing narrative and metaphorical lexicon for the historical, political and psychological realities of the terrorist attacks. I suggest that they have, at times, been distracted by the populist rhetoric of journalistic expression, by a retreat to American exceptionalism and by the demand for an immediate response. The Bush administration’s statement that the state and politicians ‘create our own reality’ served to reinforce the difficulties that novelists faced in creating their own. Against the background of public commentary post-9/11, and the politics of the subsequent ‘War on Terror’, the thesis considers the work of Richard Ford, Paul Auster, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Don DeLillo, Mohsin Hamid and Amy Waldman. Using my own extended interviews with Ford, Waldman and Shamsie, the artist Eric Fischl, the journalist Kevin Marsh, and with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams (who is also a 9/11 survivor), I consider the aims and praxis of novelists working within a variety of traditions, from Ford’s realism and Auster’s metafiction to the post- colonial perspectives of Hamid and Aslam, and, finally, the end-of-decade reflections of Waldman. My conclusion is that novelists are, finally, edging closer to methodologies adequate to the challenges of the post-9/11 world. Ford’s admission that writers do not ‘have an exact human vocabulary for the loss of a city’ has given way to a new surety that the narrative and visual arts can define the unimaginable in important and expressive ways. 4 CONTENTS Abstract 3 List of illustrations 6 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: Richard Ford’s Transactor 37 Introduction Part One: Ford’s 9/11 novel Part Two: Redemption and narrative Part Three: Hurricane Katrina’s legacy Chapter 2: Narratives of Retrogenesis and Abstraction 86 Introduction Part One: Retrogenesis and retreat Part Two: Falling Man, Tumbling Woman: visual image as taboo Part Three: ‘The grandiose grows tiresome…’ Chapter 3: Paul Auster and the Post-Past 134 Introduction Part One: Auster’s post-past and pre-future Part Two: The Brooklyn Follies and Man in the Dark: Auster’s literary hyperparallelisms Part Three: Sunset Park, silence and the futureless now Chapter 4: ‘History is the Third Parent’ 173 Introduction Part One: Traces on the skin Part Two: History’s palimpsest Part Three: The Janus view Chapter 5: The Submission: The End of the Decade 213 Introduction Part One: Journalism and history Part Two: Textual toponymy Part Three: Text as memorial Coda 256 5 Works Consulted 262 Appendices 1. Transcript of interview with Eric Fischl 282 2. Transcript of interview with Richard Ford 284 3. Transcript of interview with Kevin Marsh 298 4. Transcript of interview with Kamila Shamsie 309 5. Transcript of interview with Amy Waldman 314 6. Transcript of interview with Rowan Williams 318 6 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Falling Man, Richard Drew, Associated Press Figure 2: Cover of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007) Design, Erich Hobbing. Photograph, Getty Images Figure 3: Tumbling Woman, Eric Fischl Figure 4: Ten Breaths: Falling Angel, Eric Fischl 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe Professor Tim Armstrong my gratitude for supervising this work with perspicacity, wisdom and patience, underpinned by a huge depth of knowledge. I am grateful, too, to Professor Robert Eaglestone and Professor Judith Hawley for their guidance and shrewd counsel. I would like to thank those at Royal Holloway who had sufficient faith in my project to fund my research and for providing the supportive and creative environment that helped to sustain it. I am indebted to those who agreed to be interviewed for this endeavour: Eric Fischl, Richard Ford, Professor Sunetra Gupta, Colonel Richard Iron, Kevin Marsh, Helen Schwartz, Kamila Shamsie, Amy Waldman and Dr. Rowan Williams. They were unfailingly generous with their time and insights. My family and friends have been galvanizing at times, soothing when necessary, and have thereby helped me to complete this work. 8 INTRODUCTION The decade that passed after the attacks of 9/11 was politically, ideologically and militarily fraught. The immediate shock and paranoia that the attacks spawned in the United States, produced, in turn, an unusually symbiotic and cohesive international response; a response characterized aptly by the hand- wringing of a leading British politician, who said that ‘it seems almost inevitable that there will be some sort of military response at some point – although at the moment we do not know where, when, or against whom.’1 That retaliatory paradigm was extended in George W. Bush’s binary proclamation that ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’2 In the United States the acquiescence of the news media was summed up vividly by TV news anchor Dan Rather’s admission that ‘it starts with a feeling of patriotism within one's self. It carries through with the knowledge that the country as a whole and for all of the right reasons, felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying, "I know the right question but you know what, this is not exactly the right time to ask it.’”3 Self-censorship evolved into what US journalist and author Norman Solomon called a form of news coverage that ‘is more akin to stenography for the movers and shakers in Washington.’4 In similar vein, once the military offensive was launched in Afghanistan, Howard Zinn reported: 1 Charles Kennedy MP speaking in the House of Commons, 14 September 2001, Hansard: 14 September 2001 <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo010914/debtext/109 14-02.htm#10914-02_spnew1> [accessed 16 March 2013]. 2 George W Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September 2001, <http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920- 8.html> [accessed 16 March 2013]. 3 Dan Rather interviewed by Madeleine Holt, BBC Newsnight, 6 June 2002, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/archive/2029634.stm> [accessed 15 March 2013]. 4 Norman Solomon, ‘Foreword’, in No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11, by Lisa Finnegan (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), p. xiii. 9 The head of the television network CNN, Walter Isaacson, sent a memo to his staff saying that images of civilian casualties should be accompanied with an explanation that this was retaliation for the harboring of terrorists. “It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardships in Afghanistan”, he said.5 Within the United States a key consequence of the sudden political solidarity was, against the odds, the re-election of George W Bush in 2004, voted back in by a newly risk-averse nation who, since 9/11, had been seemingly desperate to forge a sense of continuity and stability in the face of catastrophe. Before Bush’s re-election the journalist and former Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote approvingly and bathetically that she could not help when she looked at him but think of ‘earnest Clark Kent moving, at the moment of maximum danger, to shed his suit, tear open his shirt and reveal the big “S” on his chest.’6 Susan Faludi, who also pointed to Noonan’s invocation of Superman, reported that in the days after the attacks she was called numerous times by journalists seeking to take the narrative in a particular direction, ‘among them a New York Times reporter researching an article on the “return of the manly man” and a New York Observer writer seeking comment on “the trend” of women “becoming more feminine after 9/11.” By which, as she made clear, she meant less feminist. Women were going to regret their “independence,” she said, and devote themselves to “baking cookies” and finding husbands to “take care of them.”’7 Thus the rhetorical default was glibly set and not just in the United States. The former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Kevin Marsh, declared that daily journalism failed in Britain too. Marsh, who later became editor of the BBC College of Journalism, has consistently said that 9/11 and its political consequences reinforced journalists’ dislike for intellectual depth and complexity: 5 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present, Third Edition (1980; Harlow: Pearson Education, 2003), pp. 679-680. 6 Peggy Noonan, ‘The Right Man’, Wall Street Journal, 30 January 2003, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1043895876926710064.html> [accessed 18 March 2013]. 7 Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (2007; London: Atlantic Books), 2008, p. 20. 10 Journalism – even that from non-jingoistic, xenophobic quarters – was hugely influenced by the political consensus in the face of the 9/11 attacks. Both that consensus and the speed at which events careered towards war. And those failings are the usual ones; daily journalism’s aversion to complexity; its centripetal tendency, dragging the apparent plurality of multiple outlets towards common framings; its inevitable preference for the striking event over the telling trend; and its eternal excuse – we’re just telling stories.8 Journalists were not the only ones to suffer from the ‘centripetal tendency’.
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