Transnational Dimensions of 9/11: an Introduction

chapter 1 Transnational Dimensions of 9/11: An Introduction

Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes

In a commemorative article for The New Yorker on September 11, 2015, Joshua Rothman diagnoses that the publication of a collection of short fiction entitled In the Shadow of the Towers in 2015 “marks the beginning of a transition in the legacy of 9/11”.1 Because of its speculative angle, Rothman argues, these sto- ries usher in a new period in the era of responses to 9/11: after an extended time when it was “too soon” to write about it, 9/11 has now become a subject for fiction as any other, since “no event is permanently beyond the reach of the imagination”.2 Rothman’s historical assessment marks a suitable point of entry into this volume for two reasons. For one, as pointed as his diagnosis may seem, it demonstrates a larger tendency of 9/11 scholarship and criticism to recognize only a limited number of relatively canonized text – including, in many cases, Art Spiegelman’s graphic approach In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), or Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) – while neglecting a large corpus of other fictional approaches on the September 11 attacks. In particular, the boundary into the speculative realm had of course been crossed much earlier, in utopian alternatives, such as Mark Dunlea’s Madame President: The Unauthorized Biography of the First Green Party Presi- dent (2004) or Tom Lombardo’s The Christian President: What Jesus Would Have Done (2007); in satires such as Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2005); in revenge fantasies such as Joel C. Rosenberg’s The Last Jihad (2003), or in speculative undoings such as Vladimir Chernozemsky’s Phase One After Zero: Where 9/11 Never Happened (2005).3 For another, Rothman’s description of history as “full of unknowable realities, strange connections, and unbelievable coincidences”,4 is timely, and his sense of fiction as a particularly w ell-suited

1 Joshua Rothman, “The Unsettling Arrival of Speculative 9/11 Fiction”, The New Yorker, 11 September 2015, 2 February 2016, . 2 Ibid. 3 For a detailed discussion of these works and for a typology of 9/11 novels in general, see Birgit Däwes, Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel, Heidelberg, 2011. 4 Rothman, n.p.

2 MOHR and DÄWES arena for the negotiation and discussion of 9/11 history is a belief that the edi- tors and authors of this volume share. As early as three months after the attacks, Don DeLillo emphasized in an oft-quoted article that in light of the Bush Administration’s rewritings of the terrorist spectacle, it was especially writers of fiction that were called for “to create the counter-narrative”:5

The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to take the shock and horror as it is. But living language is not di- minished. The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon? … The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately. Before politics, before history and religion, there is the primal terror. People falling from the towers hand in hand. This is part of the counter-narrative, hands and spirits joining, human beauty in the crush of meshed steel.6

Following DeLillo, Ulrich Baer also foregrounds the role of the writer of fiction, since literature is “the unconscious history-writing of the world: as a form of expression that uncannily registers subtle shifts in experience and changes in reality before they can be consciously grasped or have fully taken place”.7 Acknowledging the steadily increasing number of contributions to the important field of 9/11 research, this volume accordingly seeks to explore the intersections between narrative and continuity in post-9/11 fiction, perfor- mance, visual arts, and film, with a decided emphasis on the transatlantic and transnational dimensions of the attacks. In the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks, cultural responses and criti- cal approaches to 9/11 had, understandably, focused on the attacks’ symbolic impact and the general notion of a dawning “age of terror”, a notion that has, if anything, solidified with recent threats emanating from the so-called “Islamic State”. Most significantly, after 9/11, artists, writers, critics, and scholars trans- nationally shared a sense of historic rupture, of a cataclysm that had changed, if not the world itself then certainly our perception of it, including our notions of globalization, of bordercrossing, of cultural exchange.8 Dori Laub claims

5 Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror, Loss and Time in the Shadow of September”, Harper’s Magazine, (Dec. 2001), 34. 6 Ibid., 39. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 See Daniel Pipes, “A New Round of Anger and Humiliation: Islam After 9/11”, in: Our Brave New World: Essays on the Impact of September 11, ed. Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, Stanford, 2002, 41.