The “Image-Event” in the Early Post- 9/11 Novel: Literary Representations of Terror After September 11,2001 Ewa Kowal The “Image-Event” in the Early Post- 9/11 Novel: Literary Representations of Terror After September 11,2001 This volume has been published thanks to the fi nancial support of the Faculty of Philology at the Jagiellonian University. Reviewer Prof. dr hab. Ewa Borkowska Technical editor Anna Poinc-Chrabąszcz Proofreader Joanna Myśliwiec Typesetter Katarzyna Mróz-Jaskuła Cover design Anna Sadowska © Copyright by Ewa Kowal & Jagiellonian University Press First edition, Kraków 2012 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. www.wuj.pl ISBN 978-83-233-3317-3 Jagiellonian University Press Editorial Offi ces: ul. Michałowskiego 9/2, 31-126 Cracow Phone: +48 12 631 18 80, +48 12 631 18 82, Fax: +48 12 631 18 83 Distribution: Phone: +48 12 631 01 97, Fax: +48 12 631 01 98 Cell Phone: +48 506 006 674, e-mail: [email protected] Bank: PEKAO SA, IBAN PL80 1240 4722 1111 0000 4856 3325 “image comes before thought” “dream is more powerful than thought” “childhood is certainly greater than reality” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (xx, 16, 16) “Media have the same claim to reality as more tangible cultural artifacts; photographs, fi lms, and computer applications are as real as airplanes and buildings.” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media (19) “reality is a principle” Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (28) For my parents Dla moich rodziców CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................. 11 FOREWORD: WORD ON TERROR ............................................................................ 13 INTRODUCTION: THE IMAGE(-EVENT) ..................................................................... 21 CHAPTER I: (AUDIO-)VISUAL MEDIA IN THE POST-9/11 NOVEL ............................. 29 I.1. Technology ...................................................................................................... 29 I.2. The Pattern ...................................................................................................... 34 I.3. Media in the post-9/11 novel ........................................................................... 40 I.4. “Bigger, brighter, life’s so short” – infl ammable art in the post-9/11 novel ........ 52 CHAPTER II: FORM ..................................................................................................... 67 CHAPTER III: MOTIFS OF CHILDHOOD AND MAGICAL THINKING IN THE POST-9/11 NOVEL.......................................................................................... 111 III.1. The “proto-child” ........................................................................................... 111 III.2. The fi gure of the “child” ................................................................................. 115 III.3. Magical thinking (1) ....................................................................................... 118 III.4. Motifs of childhood and magical thinking in the post-9/11 novel ................... 120 III.5. The post-9/11 novel in the Language Classroom ............................................ 136 III.6. Magical thinking (2): Magic – “the most childish of skills”.............................. 138 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 141 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................... 145 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the supervisor of my PhD dissertation, Prof. Krystyna Stamirowska, for many years of not only academic support. My thanks are also extended to the reviewers of the thesis, Prof. Ewa Borkowska and Prof. Stephen Regan. Many thanks also to my colleagues as well as friends from the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University: Robert Kusek, Katarzyna Bazarnik, Izabela Curyłło-Klag and Agnieszka Król-Markefka. Thank you to my friend Ania Marchewka. Thank you to Master Yoda. Above all, I am grateful to my family: my brother Adam, my sister Agnieszka and especially my parents, Janina and Jan Kowal. FOREWORD: WORD ON TERROR The fi rst public words on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were produced the moment the events began to happen. Merely reporting bare facts broadcast live, they were stunned and sparse, “as if the media itself had gone into shock” (Houen, 2). Signifi cantly, from the very beginning their relation to the reality of what was happening was problematic. At fi rst it was just lack of information. At 8:46 a.m. the fi rst plane hitting the North Tower of the WTC was described in exactly such terms: a plane hitting a skyscraper. For the next sixteen minutes, to the onlookers’ knowledge, nothing more sinister than a tragic accident was taking place. But then, after a pause “to give the world time to gather round its TV sets” (Amis, 4), the second plane hit the other tower and this excessive doubling of events dominoed an excess of information seemingly impossible to process. However, already on September 11 the process of managing of the ensuing chaos began: the ordering vocabulary, fi rst “attack” and then “war,” soon became the dominant words on terror, especially after “war on terror” was announced. After the initial stutter, the public language became more fl uent, rigorous, as if it could reverse or at least replace what the “big picture” “spelled out”: “If one were to slow down a videotape of the fi rst plane approaching then hitting the north tower (…) and then zoom in to the instants of impact, one would see the word ‘American’ slide, letter by letter, into oblivion” (Smith); one would also see “the violent obliteration of the word ‘UNITED’” (ibid.). The attacks of September 11, 2001 were “the most heinous and gigantic terrorist mission ever perpetrated” (Borradori, 48), a “unique new catastrophe” (Kaplan, 137) – and with it, says Martin Amis, we “entered a distinct phase in history” (21). “September 11, 2001, has been much infl ated, its impacts exaggerated, its real effects smothered in hyperbole,” says Terry Smith, adding nonetheless that “the deeper shifts” of which this day is a symptom “cannot be denied.” When the towers, two of the tallest buildings in the world, located at the heart of the greatest economic and military power in the world, ceased to exist in our reality, they acquired a symbolic, ghostly presence in alternative reality, the virtual reality of the mind: memory, myth and imagination, language and all modes of representation. 9/11 today “carries so many burdens – of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war – that sometimes it’s hard to fi nd the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of edifi ce we’ve built on top of it” (Rich). This abstract edifi ce will remain under construction a long time after the National September 11 Memorial in New York has been completed, and alongside the monument it will stand for the pivotal point in recent history, marking the beginning of the 21st century in every aspect of global culture from politics to art. The present study will concentrate on one layer of this developing structure: literature, an alternative stratum to the “word on terror.” The metaphor of architecture 13 introduces this subject matter most fi ttingly, not only because it comes to mind in an unconditional refl ex, considering what the literature is about. Architecture will be shown here as more than just the starting point for writers. What this study will be mostly interested in is the architecture of a literary work. Also an anthropomorphic way of thinking comes to mind naturally in the case of the Twin Towers: the very word “twin” suggests it and, as Lakoff tells us in “The Power of the Images,” “tall buildings are metaphorically people standing erect.” For New Yorkers these were close “people” – above all literally speaking, since nearly three thousand actual people were killed in their destruction. This is why after the tragedy The New Yorker needed for its cover “an image of the towers that [would help New Yorkers] come to terms with their loss” (Spiegelman 2002, 286). Words would not have suffi ced, and a required image was produced by Art Spiegelman. His black-on-black “phantom towers”1 managed to depict what one New Yorker called “our phantom limb” (Ric Burns qtd. in Marks): “You feel it, but it’s not there; you look to where you feel it should be” (ibid.). Many felt the towers were “beloved in the way a departed relative may be thought of more fondly after death than in life” (ibid.). Spiegelman’s black towers “accurately refl ect[ed] the painful new emptiness [that many] needed to see” (Spiegelman 2002, 286). Paradoxically, what they needed to see was invisibility. In fact, in Spiegelman’s image of the “phantom towers” invisibility was double, because its complete blackness covered the original colourful sketch which later was recovered for the collection 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11. The original version showed the towers “fl oat[ing] against a tranquil Magritte sky above a Lower Manhattan cityscape” (ibid.), shrouded in black like two coffi ns, or two bodies. The reference to René Magritte and his surrealism