The Heart of the West: 9/11, the Insider/Outsider Novel, and Worlding America Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades eines Dr. phil., vorgelegt dem Fachbereich 05 – Philosophie und Philologie der Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz von Pascale Nathalie Cicolelli aus Speyer Kaiserlsautern 2015 1 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3 i. The Argument .......................................................................................................3 ii. The Texts ............................................................................................................11 iii. The Method ........................................................................................................18 iv. The Novel ...........................................................................................................21 I. The Critical Discourse of 9/11 .......................................................................... 27 II. The Turn Inward, or the Exceptionalism of Suffering in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Falling Man ............................................................................... 59 III. 9/11 and the Social Satire: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country ....................... 91 IV. Autofiction and the Boundaries between Art and Life: Beigbeder’s Windows on the World ................................................................................................................... 122 V. The Transcultural Novel and Pseudocosmopolitanism: The Reluctant Fundamentalist .......................................................................................................... 146 VI. The Emigration Novel and the Aftermath of 9/11: Home Boy ........................ 182 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 210 Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 217 2 List of Abbreviations DPC = A Disorder Peculiar to the Country ELC = Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close FM = Falling Man HB = Home Boy OPL = Once in a Promised Land RF = The Reluctant Fundamentalist WWE = Windows on the World (English edition) WWF = Windows on the World (French edition) 3 Introduction i. The Argument The cruelness and unexpectedness of the September 11, 2001 attacks shook the whole world. Having been caught live on tape, the event was a visual one, and so, people all over the globe made claims to the attacks and the ensuing trauma. Critics and scholars agreed that the tragedy could not be put into words and denied authors of fiction the ability of writing about it in any meaningful way. At the same time, American authors felt the pressure to write nothing less than the “great 9/11 novel” (L. Miller). Expectations and, consequently, the pressure particularly on American novelists were high. In 2005, Rachel Donadio claimed that up to that instant, no writer of fiction had “perfectly captured our historical moment.” According to her, works published by the first wave of authors, that is to say authors who decided to make 9/11 the immediate subject of their novels shortly after the attacks, such as Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jay McInerney, were not able to come to terms with the traumatic event adequately. Yet, Donadio acknowledges that the writing of fiction takes its time and that even masters in their field, such as Tolstoy, needed time to write meaningfully about actual historical events (in his case, the Napoleonic Wars).1 Although Donadio admits that art needs more time to respond to real- life events, she, like many other critics and scholars worldwide, apparently could not wait for “the” 9/11 novel to appear. The tragedy has given rise to important questions in regard to fiction and 9/11, two topics that seemed to be mutually exclusive to some. People voiced concerns about the ethic dimension of fictionalizing the attacks and as the corpus of novels grew, conflicting questions concerning the ethics and aesthetics of such an undertaking arose: What took so long? Has it really been long enough? Can fiction redress the wounds of that day? Are we ready to even try? Is it possible to write a novel about 9/11 that is 1 “To date, no work of fiction has perfectly captured our historical moment the way certain novels captured the Gilded Age, or the Weimar Republic, or the cold war. Then again, it’s still early. Nonfiction can keep up with the instant messenger culture; fiction takes its own sweet time. Even Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” years after the Napoleonic Wars. Today, the most compelling creative energies seem directed at nonfiction. That is, until the next great novelist comes along to prove the naysayers wrong. Time, as Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, is nothing if not amenable” (Donadio). 4 actually good? Do we now experience the representation of crisis or rather a crisis of representation? As after past great tragedies such as the Holocaust, the attacks of 9/11 once more made critics and readers alike wonder about the possible obsoleteness of art in general and the novel in particular. Many complained that it was much too soon to fictionalize the attacks when finally, in 2005, the first novels on the subject were published in the U.S. In contrast to the destitute silence following the Holocaust,2 people reacted the opposite way after 9/11. After the trauma, language was “the first healer. Expression counter[ed] obsession. Telling the tale [was] the first step in getting on with life, integrating what happened into a meaningful narrative” (Versluys, Blue 13-14). Consequently, the attacks triggered an immediate wave of responses by professional writers but also by everyday people, who gave vent to their emotions through poetry at particular sites of memory, such as Ground Zero and St. Peter’s Church, on websites,3 and in (published) essays. Writers were encouraged to share their feelings and thoughts in collections such as 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 and September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. These collections show how difficult it was even for professional writers to put their feelings and opinions into writing as Suheir Hammad’s poem “first writing since” illustrates: there have been no words. i have not written one word. no poetry in the ashes south of canal street. no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna. not one word. (Hammad 139) Consequently, the attacks of September 11, 2001 became an incisive moment for writers, and they provoked a deep crisis, especially for authors of fiction. Jay McInerney, author of the novel The Good Life (2006), explains that 2 Dori Laub, himself a Holocaust survivor, argues that people react differently to catastrophes; while some feel the “imperative to tell” in order to recover, others feel “the impossibility of telling” (“Truth and Testimony” 62-63). They prefer to remain silent and to keep their trouble and agony to themselves. One possibility to tell, is to put one’s experiences into a narrative through writing to translate the experience and finally work it through. “We are faced with versions of the event’s meaning that continue and coexist, some driven by a wish to know, to bear witness, and some driven by an equally powerful need to not know, to deny and suppress the truth of witnessing” (Laub, “September 11, 2001” 211). 3 e.g. www.voicesnet.org 5 [m]ost novelists I know went through a period of intense self- examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did. For a while the idea of ‘invented characters’ and alternate realities seemed trivial and frivolous and suddenly, horribly outdated. For a while. (McInerney, “Invention”) Although McInerney states that the attacks indeed marked a low point for authors, he already forebodes that the silence caused by 9/11 was not to be a permanent one. British novelist Ian McEwan confessed that he found it exhausting to deal with fiction and fictional characters and that a turning point seemed to have been reached with the terrorist attacks. He felt he could not return to his daily routine as a writer and that it “’was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn’” (qtd. in Donadio). Martin Amis, too, admitted that his writing had been deeply affected by the attacks: “The so-called work in progress had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus” (qtd. in Mishra, “Innocence”). Writing or not writing about the attacks seemed both impossible. Hence, one of the reasons for the relatively long silence of American novelists is that they had to overcome the shock accompanied by a writer’s block.4 Eventually, the idea of “reluctantly considering a change of occupation” was dismissed (Amis qtd. in Mishra, “Innocence”). Yet, instead of inventing “alternate realities” (McInerney, “Invention”), authors grounded their works in the actual reality of 9/11, telling about experiences and feelings that many Americans could relate to after the attacks. Reviews were seldom in favor of these early fictional outpours. Werner Jung argues “that valid treatments have only been found with a historical phase shift - frequently