Literary Nostalgia, 9/11, and Terrorism in Seamus Heaney, Chris Cleave, and Martin Amis

“Blow the World Back Together”: Literary Nostalgia, 9/11, and Terrorism in Seamus Heaney, Chris Cleave, and Martin Amis

Brandon Kempner

This article deals with a broad range of British works that frame the events of 9/11 with an abrupt turn towards literary nostalgia. Such texts include Seamus Heaney’s poem “Anything Can Happen” (2001), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Chris Cleave’s Incendiary (2005), David Lle- wellyn’s Eleven (2006), and Martin Amis’s essay/story collection The Second Plane (2008). Each of these turns to older (humanist) literary techniques—whether in the form of allusion, a reliance on epistolary form, or a return to the universalized Western subject—as a way of counteracting the idea of 9/11 as a permanent rupture in Western history and culture.

When it comes to 9/11 and the broader “War on Terror,” the United Kingdom is second only to the United States in the production of literary texts. While novels like Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist challenge orthodox interpretations of terrorism (Rushdie) and 9/11 (Hamid), a much broader range of British texts frame the events of 9/11 with an abrupt turn towards literary nostalgia.1 These texts include Seamus Heaney’s poem “Anything Can Happen,” Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Chris Cleave’s Incendiary, David Llewellyn’s Eleven, and Martin Amis’s essay/story collection The Second Plane.2 When closely examined, these texts appear remarkably similar in their textual, theoretical, and political approaches.3 Each of them turns to older literary techniques—whether in the form of allusion, a reliance on epistolary form, or a return to the universalized Western subject—as a way of counteracting the idea of 9/11 as a permanent rupture in Western history and culture. Rupture is one of the dominant theoretical and political ideas to emerge from the 9/11 attacks. From a theoretical perspective, thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism, Slavoj Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and Jacques Derrida in Philosophy in a Time of Terror have all

1 Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (New York: Random House, 2005); Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (New York: Harcourt, 2007). 2 Seamus Heaney, Anything Can Happen (Dublin: TownHouse, 2004); Ian McEwan, Satur- day (New York: Anchor Books, 2005); Chris Cleave, Incendiary (New York: Anchor Books, 2005); David Llewellyn, Eleven (Brigend, Wales: Seren, 2006); Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (New York: Knopf, 2008). 3 Other significant British texts about 9/11 and its aftermath include David Hare, Stuff Hap- pens (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004), a play that directly satirizes the Bush presi- dency and its cabinet, and Simon Armitage, Out of the Blue, (London: Enitharmon Press, 2008), in which his long poem “Out of the Blue” depicts 9/11 as a total rupture, concluding with the line “Everything changed. Nothing is safe.” 54 Brandon Kempner explicitly argued that the 9/11 attacks completely reconfigure Western culture and subjectivity.4 For instance, Baudrillard claims that “the whole play of history and power is disrupted by this event”; Derrida says “such an ‘event’ calls for philosophical response. Better, a response that calls into question, at their most fundamental level, the most deep-seated conceptual presupposi- tions in philosophical discourse.” 5 The political claims of absolute change as a result of 9/11 are equally widespread; Fred Halliday, a writer explicitly referenced by McEwan in Saturday, identifies 9/11 as an “all- encompassing”event that forces fundamental change in “a multiplicity of life’s levels, political, economic, cultural, and psychological.”6 From a literary perspective, such a mantra of total rupture would imply that older modes of literary expression and Western identity are no longer relevant in a post-9/11 age. Indeed, these pronouncements of total change can be found in many authors’ initial reactions to 9/11. Amis, in his essay “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” writes that, as a result of 9/11, all writers need to abandon whatever they were working on and to begin writing all over again:

The so-called work in progress had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of autistic bab- ble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus. The page headed “By the same author”—which, in the past, was smugly consulted as a staccato bio- graphy—could now be dismissed with a sigh and a shake of the head.7

Despite his insistence, Amis’s call for total change is not born out by close examination of British literature written about 9/11 and terrorism. In the texts I discuss in this essay—Heaney’s poem “Anything Can Happen,” Cleave’s epistolary novel Incendiary, and Amis’s terrorism stories “In the Palace of the End” and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”—what emerges is not the “gangrenous futility” of past literature, but rather a re-statement of some tra- ditionally Western modes of narration, interiority, and literary framing.8 Instead of presenting a post-9/11 world where Western thought is disrupted, each of these texts presents a world where Western interiority remains the best intellectual framework for understanding terrorism. By rewriting a

4 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. by Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003); Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, (New York: Verso, 2002); Giovanna Bor- radori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Der- rida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 5 Baudrillard, p. 4; Borradori, p. 100. 6 Fred Halliday, Two Hours That Shook the World (London: Saqi Books, 2002), p. 31. 7 Amis, p. 12. 8 Amis, pp. 11-20, 93-122.