Reading the Cityscape in Post-9/11 Fiction:
Urban Manifestations of Trauma and National Identity
in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
by
Katerina Tsiokou
A dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture,
School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
February 2017 Reading the Cityscape in Post-9/11 Fiction: Urban
Manifestations of Trauma and National Identity in Don
DeLillo’s Falling Man and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
By
Katerina Tsiokou
Has Been Approved
June 2017
APPROVED:
Supervisor Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou
Examiner Dr. Zoe Detsi
Examiner Dr. Georgios Kalogeras
Tsiokou i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………...…………….……iii
ABSTRACT...... v
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….…………1
CHAPTER ONE
The City in a State of Emergency:
New York City as a Terrorist Victim in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
1. Approaching Falling Man from an Urban Perspective………………….………..…..15
1.1 Falling Man and Post-9/11 Fiction…………………………………...……………..17
1.2 “This Was the World Now:”
Reconsidering American Exceptionalism through the Wounded City………………....25
1.3 Manhattanites and the City:
Private Encounters with the Urban Landscape in the Aftermath of 9/11…………..…..33
1.4 Counter-Hegemonic Appropriations of New York City in Falling Man …………..42
CHAPTER TWO
New York City, Immigration, and Transnational Relations after 9/11 in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
2. Situating Netherland within Post-9/11 Fiction…………………...…………………..53
2.1“Deterritorializing” the Post-9/11 Metropolis,
Hybridizing Post-9/11 Fiction …………………………….……………………….…….56 Tsiokou ii
2.2 Urban Space as “Alien” Territory:
a Foreigner’s View of Post-9/11 New York City …………………………...... ………..65
2.3 Re-Negotiating American Identity in the Heterogeneous Metropolis…..…………..73
2.4 New York City and Global Trajectories after 9/11…………………...………….….81
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………...…………….90
Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….…96
Tsiokou iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to begin by expressing my most heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou, for the invaluable guidance and support she has provided me during the supervision of my thesis.
Her kindness, her insightfulness, and her genuine interest in my work have been a significant source of encouragement throughout this long and demanding process. Working with Dr.
Rapatzikou has not only helped me strengthen my critical and analytical skills; most importantly, this collaboration has taught me how to approach the quest for knowledge with care, patience, and respect, and for that I am extremely grateful.
I am also taking the opportunity to thank the rest of the instructors of the MA in
Anglophone Literatures and Cultures for leading us through the intriguing fields of literature and criticism. I particularly owe special thanks to Dr. Zoe Detsi, who introduced us to theories of national identity that have served as one of the main influences of this project. Furthermore, I am really thankful to Dr. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou and Dr. Anastasia Stefanidou for always being welcoming and cooperative and for encouraging us to step beyond our limits.
Next, I would like to thank my parents and my dearest sister for the security and safe space they have lovingly built for me throughout the demanding period of my Postgraduate studies. These two years would not have been the same without the material, emotional, and intellectual support of my family. After all, it is to them that I owe my lifelong love of literature and dedication to learning.
The whole course of the MA program and the completion of this project have also been immensely eased by the precious intervals of relaxation provided to me by my friends, who are always an infinite source of energy and strength. Special acknowledgements go out to Georgia,
Foteini, and Stratos, whose bright spirits never stop illuminating new, inspiring paths. I would Tsiokou iv
like to thank the three of them for always showing me how much they believe in me and for being my most trusted advisors in every step of the way.
Last, but definitely not least, I would like to thank my friends from the MA group of
Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. Studying and working among such wonderful people has helped me progress and improve myself on every level. Thank you for your friendship, for our meaningful conversations, and for all the good times we have had together. Sharing with you the difficulties, challenges, and, above all, the excitement of working on the MA thesis has taken a great amount of weight off my shoulders. As a token of my appreciation and gratitude, I am dedicating my thesis to you.
Finally, from the beginning of my research to the completion of this project, my thoughts have constantly been with the victims of terror and their families throughout the world, and, most of all, with all the people who are currently in search of new homelands and new homes, whether voluntarily or not. Tsiokou v
ABSTRACT
The present thesis looks at the key role that urban representations come to play in works of post-9/11 American fiction, one being Falling Man (2007) by American writer Don DeLillo and the other Netherland (2008) by Irish/Turkish writer Joseph O'Neill. Certainly, cityscapes have always been in the foreground of literary narratives, not only as the necessary setting for the unfolding of stories but also as agents that generate and promote meaning-making. Drawing from the idea of the textual power of the cityscape, this project examines the inscription of New York
City’s urban space in two American post-9/11 novels in order to accentuate the city’s relevance to the expression of trauma and belonging, as well as its ability to accommodate national, racial, and cultural tensions in a changing, increasingly interconnected world. The first chapter focuses on Falling Man and studies in what ways an urban perspective can offer a more palpable understanding of post-9/11 trauma. The second chapter discusses Netherland with particular attention paid to how post-9/11 New York City can be transformed in a narrative that emphasizes its diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural character. Ultimately, the present thesis aims at involving the discussed novels into a dialogue regarding the role of fiction in the crucial process of re-negotiating individual and collective national identities by acknowledging their hybridity and in-betweenness. Due to the combination of different approaches in this project, the sources that are employed to support the commentary carried out in the thesis include space and urban theories, scholarly and journalistic commentary on post-9/11 literary production, as well as social and cultural theories focusing on national identity and transnationalism.
Keywords: 9/11, cityscape, urban space, terrorism, New York City, American exceptionalism, diversity, transnationalism, globalization. Tsiokou 1
INTRODUCTION
―. . . you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me
to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go
on, I can't go on, I'll go on.‖
—Samuel Beckett, ―The Unnamable‖ (1953)
― Samuel Beckett, ―The Unnamable‖ (1953)
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 in New York
City have irreversibly marked the beginning of the twenty-first century in political, historical, economic, as well as social terms. The mass-mediated event of the attack itself, the subsequent War on Terror declared by the government of the USA to Iraq, and the social turmoil that has prevailed on a global scale since then still resonate over current political, social, and cultural affairs. With a violent refugee crisis currently spreading worldwide and unceasing terrorist attacks on urban centers around the globe, the present thesis aspires to approach the pressing issues of terrorism and global mobility by examining Don DeLillo‘s novel Falling Man (2007) and Joseph O‘Neill‘s novel Netherland (2008). My aim in this project is to explore the significance of New York City both as a target of terrorist attacks, as well as a spatial intersection of diverse nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures in the texts of an
American author of Italian origin1 and an Irish/Turkish author respectively.
1 While DeLillo acknowledges his Italian origins and influences (―Don DeLillo, the Art of Fiction No. 135;‖ ―Dangerous Don DeLillo‖), he does not explicitly refer to himself as an Italian/American writer. Here, DeLillo‘s ethnic heritage is emphasized because it helps us view his work within an ethnic context that allows us to appreciate his oscillating perspective between being an ―insider‖ and an ―outsider‖ in relation to the American culture. This validates his critical eye towards the mainstream American society in the aftermath of 9/11. Tsiokou 2
More specifically, I am interested in the question of how the events of September 11 have affected the multi-ethnic and multicultural character of New York City as a cosmopolitan urban center and a major Western metropolis. In order to investigate this matter, I will focus on representations of the urban setting of New York City in post-9/11 fiction. To be more specific, the two discussed works will serve as a starting point from which to expand on the role of New York City as a multi-faceted and diversified urban space that stands for the expression of collective terror, trauma, and memory of the events of 9/11.
At the same time, its urban environment encourages us to take into consideration both public and individual projections of national and ethnic identity, as well as examine the idea of national belonging. In so doing, the 9/11 attacks and the city of New York will be employed as the common denominators upon which the analysis of the two works will be based. In more detail, I will look at the ways in which the immediate, realized external terrorist threat that paralyzes New York City in Falling Man resonates with the immigrant subcultures that transform New York City in Netherland into a global, multicultural and multi-ethnic metropolis.
More particularly, my reading of Falling Man will concentrate on the representation of the psychological effects of the terrorist attack of September 11 (hence 9/11) on the main characters, who are almost exclusively white middle-class Manhattanites. To begin with,
DeLillo‘s novel tells the story of Keith and Lianne, an estranged married couple who live and work in Manhattan. After his narrow escape from the collapsing North Tower, Keith returns to his wife and son searching for familiarity and stability in a chaotic and disorienting city.
However, Keith appears unable to come to terms with the disaster and this helplessness brings about Lianne‘s further estrangement from him. Eventually, the main characters separate once again and deal with the altered Manhattan cityscape in their own, different Tsiokou 3
ways. Thus, Falling Man articulates how manifestations of collective or personal trauma and memory are infused with the depiction of urban space. This approach largely draws from the degree to which the characters‘ relationships and, subsequently, their psychological and emotional conditions transform their viewing of the city from within—the meanings they attach to it, the way they are positioned, move, act, and interact within its limits. In examining the above issues in Falling Man, I wish to touch upon the ideological and symbolic weight of New York City as an American metropolis targeted by terrorism in the context of the 9/11 narrative.
My approach of Netherland will commence from the point where the discussion of
Falling Man aspires to conclude—namely, the symbolic role of New York City as an urban construction with political, economic, social, and cultural significance that has been victimized by terrorism. Interestingly, the story in Netherland begins with a New York City couple separating in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The main character, a Dutch equities analyst named Hans van der Broek is left alone in the city when his wife, Rachel, an English lawyer, leaves New York City with their young son in order to escape the shadow of terrorism. Dividing his life transatlantically between New York City and London, Hans overcomes his loneliness by rediscovering the game of cricket and with it the ethnic subcultures living in the periphery of the city. Taking cue from this contextualization of urban space, I will mainly focus on the representation of the immigrant communities of New
York City in Netherland and the need to revisit issues of race, ethnicity, and national identity in the aftermath of 9/11. Viewed from the perspective of a Dutch immigrant, the city of New
York is unraveled as a multicultural urban center with diverse subcultures and immigrant population. Such an outlook has the potential to contribute a refreshing twist to the Tsiokou 4
representation of the post-9/11 recovery from the material, psychological, emotional, and ideological trauma of terrorism.
Ultimately, my objective is to compare Falling Man and Netherland based on the
American-centered perspective of the former and the ethnic/transnational perspective of the latter. More importantly, this approach will unfold in the context of a globalized world where notions such as terrorism, immigration, and national, racial or ethnic identity acquire gigantic dimensions and possibly unfathomable repercussions. Thus, I aim to bring together urban, transnational, and cultural theories, which address the current postmodern conceptualization of fragmented identities and fluctuating boundaries. The overall objective of this contextualization is to arrive at a better understanding of what the Western metropolis stands for in the turbulent map of global geopolitics.
The first step towards attempting to fathom the many and complex ways in which the events of 9/11 mark the narratives of Falling Man and Netherland would be to examine their place within the general framework of post-9/11 literature and the overall artistic, cultural, and intellectual response to the terrorist attacks. In the years that have followed the events of
9/11, a growing number of writers, scholars, journalists, and artists on both sides of the
Atlantic, among whom notable figures such as John Updike, Paul Auster, Jay McInerney, Ian
McEwan, Art Spiegelman and many others, have taken up the challenging task of providing the audience with an understanding of the event.2 Nevertheless, it goes without saying that this challenge has been an extraordinary and unprecedented one. Significantly, in the beginning of his book After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 (2011), Richard Gray informs us that ―[i]f there was one thing writers agreed about in response to 9/11, it was the
2 This early literary production includes works such as Spiegelman‘s comic book In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) and Auster‘s novel Man in the Dark (2008). For more information on the rest of the writers mentioned here, see pages 5 and 50. Tsiokou 5
failure of language‖ (1). In a similar fashion, Christian Versluys contends that ―September 11
[…] is ultimately a semiotic event, involving the total breakdown of all meaning-making systems‖ (14). Yet, both Gray and Versluys firmly address the urgent need on the part of writers to introduce the unspeakable events of that day to the realm of discourse and representation. For Gray, ―silence is not an option‖ (53), while for Versluys, the terror of 9/11
―must be possessed‖ by succumbing to ―the inevitability of discourse‖ (15). Their call for a decisive production of discourse which would manage to contain, represent, and explain the attacks and the chaos the terrorists have left behind is, without doubt, abundantly answered.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, several articles by well-known writers were published and widely circulated in the media. Pieces such as Don DeLillo‘s ―In the Ruins of the Future,‖ Martin Amis‘s ―Fear and Loathing,‖ and Updike‘s ―Tuesday, and After‖ constitute only a few of those early and, arguably, emotionally charged responses to the shocking realities that were established in the blink of an eye for New Yorkers on that
Tuesday morning.3
In the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a proliferation of writing about 9/11 has been recorded. This production has extensively replaced earlier, short responses, which ―often attempted directly to capture and convey the events of 9/11 and emotional responses to the events; as time has passed, the approach to the attacks has become more nuanced‖ (Keniston and Quinn 3). Among the novels that have adopted 9/11 as their predominant theme are McEwan‘s Saturday (2005), Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Claire Messud‘s The Emperor’s Children (2006), and
McInerney‘s The Good Life (2007). Additionally, the anthology 101 Stories: New York
3 DeLillo confesses that ―[w]hen the second tower fell, my heart fell with it‖ (n.p.), while Updike reports that ―[w]e knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; we clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling‖ (n.p.); Amis concludes his piece by stating: ―[t]hinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear‖ (n.p.). Tsiokou 6
Writes after September 11 (2004), which was edited by Ulrich Baer, can be said to constitute one of the first works that consciously attempts to bring forward the spatial significance of the city of New York for the representation of 9/11 and the active role the city plays in the production of the 9/11 narrative, as indicated by its title. Such works, along with a number of theoretical approaches by thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas,4 Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek, add to the ever-growing body of discourse about the terrorist attacks while they enhance the symbolic power of the events of 9/11.
In fact, the discursive character of the attacks has been stressed by several critics who have sought to disentangle the chaotic national and global reconfigurations these attacks have brought about. Baudrillard and Žižek refer to this day as being the ultimate ―real‖ event,5 while Alex Huen comments that ―it was more than real, too real to be real‖ (2). Taking cue from this idea, both Gray and Versluys point out that the excessive ―reality‖ of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center pushes the boundaries between reality and fantasy, and ultimately places the event in the realm of the imaginary (Gray 6-10; Versluys 15). In a sense, it can be argued that the matter-of-factness of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which was to a great extent augmented by its excessive mass media coverage, was too harsh to be faced directly, and thus called for a milder, more indirect approach. As Tatiani Rapatzikou and
Aliki Varvogli have put it when reflecting on the outburst of responses to the attacks, ―public opinion seemed to need some degree of mediation‖ (9). While language and narrative have without doubt served as a conceptual bridge between the raw, unspeakable terror and the struggle to comprehend and contain it, the very process of representation has generated
4 Derrida and Habermas‘s insights on the 9/11 attacks are included in Giovanna Borradori‘s Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2004). 5 For more information, see Jean Baudrillard‘s The Spirit of Terrorism and Slavoj Žižek‘s Welcome to the Desert of the Real!. Tsiokou 7
problems of its own.6 Many of those have revolved around the perceived inability of the already available literary and conceptual forms to effectively address the events of 9/11.
Additionally, a substantial amount of criticism has been directed towards the failure on the part of writers who have focused on 9/11 to provide solace against the collective trauma inflicted by the attacks. Rapatzikou and Varvogli underline the inadequacy of existing narratives that have dominated American fiction until the beginning of the twenty-first century to express the ―new realities‖ that have followed 9/11 (9). Gray expresses a similar concern when he argues that several American writers have not succeeded in coming up with novel ways to represent the devastating consequences of the terrorist attacks for the collective
American consciousness (16). For Gray, this constitutes ―a failure that is not just a formal but also a political one,‖ since the writers‘ ―desperate retreat into the old sureties‖ sustains the, now shuttered, illusion of the ―myth of American exceptionalism‖ (16-17). Under these circumstances, the inscription of the devastating effects of 9/11 into a genuine body of literature that would capture the anxieties, imbalances, and distortions of the aftermath of the attacks reflects a broader and more permanent political, ideological, cultural, and national crisis, which is arguably still in effect today.
In this contested literary arena, the two works discussed in this project illustrate different approaches to the narration of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. These differences are not coincidental, as they establish the key frames of reference for the comparison of
Falling Man and Netherland in the chapters to follow. In broader terms, it has been argued that Falling Man demonstrates the tendency to incorporate 9/11 into familiar patterns of
6 This point is aptly illustrated if one takes into account the controversy that has followed the publication of the photograph of the Falling Man—taken by amateur photographer Richard Drew—in several U.S. newspapers. The shot of the unidentified ―jumper‖ was reported to cause such a discomfort to the audience and was soon banned from publication. For more information, consult Tom Junod‘s article ―The Falling Man‖ (Esquire, 2003), and Rob Kroes‘s piece ―Indecent Exposure: Picturing the Horror of 9/11‖ in American Multiculturalism after 9/11. Tsiokou 8
domestic or relationship narratives (Gray 27; Keeble n.p.). Gray in particular appears rather reproachful towards Falling Man because it achieves to ―simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures‖ (30). Verily, the limitation of the subject matter of the novel to the depiction of the psychological and emotional devastation of its characters after the terrorist attacks and the adoption of ―family-drama‖ narrative model to deal with such unprecedented events may leave readers with a sense of disappointment or even hopelessness. The reason for that might be the continuous negotiation of post-9/11 trauma in various manifestations of personal and social life. As Versluys puts it, ―[t]he endless reenactment of trauma represented in Falling Man allows for no accommodation or resolution‖ (33). As I will discuss later, this absence of resolution in the narrative may be attributed to the existence of a closed-circuit system of white, upper-middle class Manhattan residents, whose relations with each other continuously reproduce the terror of the attacks. This limited point of view certainly fails to address the complexity of the incident and its multi-dimensional repercussions for the diverse and contradictory terrain of a metropolis such as New York City.
O‘Neill‘s novel, on the other hand, stands out precisely for opening up to the multi- ethnic and multi-national population of New York City and for exploring the theme of 9/11 on a wider scale. This is achieved by representing the way the attacks have affected the immigrant communities of the city as well as European residents across the Atlantic Ocean.
With the writer being of an Irish/Turkish origin, the novel attempts a different both engaged and distanced insight into the 9/11 events. In his 2008 review of Netherland for The New
York Times, Dwight Garner acknowledges this aspect of the book as a longed-for approach to the terrorist attacks that had been missing from post-9/11 fiction:
But here‘s what ―Netherland‖ surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most
desolate work of fiction we‘ve yet had about life in New York and London after the Tsiokou 9
World Trade Center fell. On a micro level, it‘s about a couple and their young son
living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event‘s rippling
emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it‘s about nearly everything:
family, politics, identity. (n.p.)
The fact that the narrative of Netherland manages to support a ―macro level‖ is perhaps the reason why the novel has received considerable attention by critics and scholars.7 More precisely, it has been discussed as an instance of post-9/11 literature that transcends national limits and reaches out to the global resonance of terrorism and the war on terror, on multiculturalism and national identities, as well as on spatial politics of mobility and migration. Significantly, Gray asserts that the ―strategy of deterritorialization‖ adopted by works such as Netherland (55), along with the ―intercultural connection‖ that could result from a traumatic experience, may have the potential for ―social transformation‖ (83). Hence, part of the concerns of this project is to examine to what extent and with which mechanisms elements of multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity, and hybridity answer to the political urgency for genuine transformation of the genre that has been labeled as the ―post-9/11 novel.‖ 8
Yet, the major concern of the present thesis with regards to the post-9/11 novel is the unlimited potential of urban space to allow readers to reflect on the terrorist attack per se and its repercussions. It is without doubt that New York City maintains a powerful presence in the fiction of 9/11, since the city itself can be added to the list of the victims of terror. At the
7 Articles and pieces on Netherland as a transatlantic post-9/11 novel have appeared in monographs and collections published between 2009 and 2014, such as Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11: the Wrong Side of Paradise (ed. Kristine A. Miller), American Multiculturalism after 9/11 (eds. Derek Rubin, and Jaap Verheul), After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 by Richard Gray, and The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity by Arin Keeble. 8 The term is extensively used throughout Gray‘s After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 as well as Michael Rothberg‘s piece ―Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.‖ In Literature after 9/11, Keeble employs the terms ―9/11 novel‖ and ―post-9/11 novel‖ almost interchangeably for ―novels […] written under the pressure of an expectation that literature would provide answers and give meaning to a newly uncertain world‖ (n.p.), while specifying that the latter describes those novels that feature ―more direct approaches to important post–9/11 social and political issues‖ (n.p.). Tsiokou 10
same time, the cityscape constitutes a ubiquitous witness of the events and their aftermath, as well as a mirror on which the physical, emotional, psychological condition of its people is reflected. In this light, New York City acquires a particularly dynamic role in 9/11 narratives, as it constantly incorporates and reverberates the way its residents respond to the catastrophe and the rapidly-changing conditions around them.
Although the depiction of the city has been commented upon in the scholarship on
9/11 literature, it was not until very recently that works focusing explicitly on the role of the urban environment in 9/11 novels have made their appearance. The most notable of these works are Karolina Golimowska‘s The Post-9/11 City in Novels: Literary Remappings of
New York and London, which was published in February 2016, as well as the collection The
City since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television, which was edited by Keith Wilhite and published in March 2016. Both works approach 9/11 narratives—verbal and visual ones—by applying a reading of the urban environment as it is inscribed within the stories that have sprung from the ruins of the World Trade Center. The ―ruins‖ of the twin towers are thus assigned with a productive role, similar to the main idea in DeLillo‘s article ―In the Ruins of the Future.‖ Two months after the events, DeLillo writes: ―[t]he narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative‖ (n.p). In the article, he continues by associating these ―counternarratives‖ with instances of life-stories of ordinary people affected by the attacks. Yet, it could be suggested that one may also look for them in the stories told by the cityscape in order to interpret the rich narratorial inventory of New York‘s urban environment.
Having said that, the reference to the practice of ―reading‖ representations of the city invites further analysis, all the more because it constitutes a crucial aspect of the present thesis. The search for meaning in the urban landscape has its starting point in the work of the Tsiokou 11
urban planner Kevin Lynch and his book The Image of the City (1960). In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the idea of the significant power of the city was systematized under the term ―urban semiotics‖ by theorists such as Martin Krampen, Umberto Eco, and Roland
Barthes. In his piece ―Semiology and the City‖ (1986), Barthes brings together the city and language in order to construct a mechanism through which the urban system can become accessible or legible (my emphasis). In Barthes‘s words, ―[t]he city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it‖ (92). Thus, the urban experience is presented here as a conversation between the city and the people who live in it; a reciprocal process of meaning-making between the cityscape and the urban subject.
Carrying Barthes‘s ideas into their discussion of the American city, Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean argue that ―the city is a gathering of meanings in which people invest their interpretations and seek to create their own (hi)story, and therefore resembles a text‖ (176).
Verily, the city-as-a-text metaphor serves as a useful tool for the interpretation of urban spaces and the meaning they are capable of conveying. At the same time, this metaphor allows a systematic association between cities and literature and draws attention to urban texts that intermingle with literary narratives and enhances their depth and complexity. This idea could prove especially useful for challenging texts such as 9/11 fiction, in which, as it was explained earlier, writers struggle with articulating thoughts and situations that are extremely difficult to name and represent. In Falling Man, for instance, the problems created by the dead-ends of the preoccupation of the narrative with mundane themes that do not manage to adequately contain the bizarre effects of the attacks can be recuperated if one pays attention to the way the city is re-written through terrorism and trauma. Thus, if the stories of the characters are read along the story told by the city, the narrative of Falling Man emerges Tsiokou 12
as a powerful, multi-layered text, where urban signs and symbols may offer the interpretative tools necessary for the challenge of representing life in New York City in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Another way of reading the city in post-9/11 fiction is its function as a reflection of its diversity. Barthes makes a point towards the plurality of meaning that necessarily derives from this process of reading, since the tendency ―to multiply the readings of the city‖ (97) is a product of the numerous, diverse points of view of its residents. In a similar fashion,
Campbell and Kean refer to ―postmodern ideas about the collision of voices in the city‖
(192), thus emphasizing the fact that the multiple texts that make up the city narrative are usually fragmented, contradictory, and possibly hostile to each other. The emphasis on the plurality of meaning acquires additional significance in the context of the contemporary metropolis, the quintessential multicultural and multi-ethnic community. This is particularly true about New York City, which, according to the Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST),
―remains the most eye-catching and emblematic example of the multi-ethnic metropolis‖
(75). Yet, this remark begs the question of whether, and how, this multi-vocality of the urban landscape of New York City has been affected by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Since the multiple and different voices that make up the (hi)story of the city are very often oppositional, it follows that ―certain interpretations emerg[e] at specific points in time with more authority and subsequent power than others‖ (Campbell and Kean 177). Taking into account that the attacks have profoundly impacted the attitude of the American society towards ethnic, cultural, and religious otherness, one understands that it is necessary to examine the way representations of the city in 9/11 fiction bring forward or conceal difference in the terrorized metropolis. This is the case in Netherland, in which New York is depicted as an urban collage composed of ethnic minorities and immigrants. The fact that Tsiokou 13
these populations are given a strong, active presence in post-9/11 New York indicates that
Netherland is aware of the global-scale repercussions of the 9/11 attacks, which transcend national borders. More significantly, the novel stresses the demand that we review concepts such as multiculturalism, globalization, and national identity. In general terms, it is important to point out that the way each one of the discussed novels represents urban space is also indicative of the political subtext that emerges in their respective narratives.
In particular, Chapter One focuses on the representation of the personal trauma of
New Yorkers in DeLillo‘s Falling Man. By drawing on the criticism against the novel‘s domestic subject matter and commonplace formal elements, the analysis of Falling Man in the first chapter of the current thesis employs a reading of the New York cityscape in order to offer an alternative approach. The emphasis on how urban space communicates the impact of the attacks on both a private and public level makes possible a deep insight into the dead-ends
American society faced due to the 9/11 attacks to be reached. Even so, Falling Man is employed here as an instance of post-9/11 fiction which remains focused on traditional notions of Americanness, despite its experimental and postmodern character. The exploration of the above points is assisted by theorists and literary critics, such as Gray, Versluys, and
Arin Keeble, all of whom are concerned with the interpretation of the emerging body of post-
9/11 literature, with special attention paid to its cultural, national, and political strengths and limitations.
Chapter Two discusses the portrayal of New York City in O‘Neill‘s Netherland and takes particular interest in the inscription of the city‘s diversity in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks. By concentrating on the viewpoint of the novel‘s Dutch narrator and the immigrant communities he becomes involved with after 9/11, the analysis in this chapter aims at foregrounding the heterogeneous character of the American nation. As in Chapter One, urban Tsiokou 14
space plays an important role in reflecting this heterogeneity, since the action in Netherland is set in various New York City neighborhoods with a distinct ethnic character. Furthermore, the inclusion of other cities, such as London and The Hague, as integral parts of the story promotes a global perspective on imagining and interpreting the post-9/11 world. All the above parameters invite a strategy of ―de-centering‖ as regards the exploration of the narrative in Netherland, which manifests itself both in moving beyond the area of Ground
Zero in Manhattan, as well as in transcending singular conceptualizations of nationality and
American identity. Apart from employing commentary by the aforementioned scholars, this chapter also employs David E. Hollinger‘s and Michael Rothberg‘s ideas on transnationalism as well as Golimowska‘s urban analysis, so as to establish multiple perspectives for understanding 9/11 and its extended aftermath.
Thus, both chapters apply readings and interpretations of the role of urban space in post-9/11 narratives in order to illuminate various aspects of the ways in which 9/11 has affected life in New York City as well as in other parts of the world. More specifically, the symbolic character of the city as an essential part of human experience renders urban space a starting point for the exploration of issues such as national identity, belonging, and the fluidity of boundaries and borders in an increasingly interconnected world. Ultimately, such matters find their way into literature and influence the underlying themes and tropes of narratives that have been created within the emerging and altered realities of the post-9/11 world. What this thesis proposes then is a synthesizing model of critically approaching the literary narratives that attempt to acknowledge the changes that have emerged after 9/11 and offer the tools of interpreting, looking at and understanding our current reality. Tsiokou 15
CHAPTER ONE
The City in a State of Emergency:
New York City as a Terrorist Victim in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
―Where the streets have no name We‘re still building…‖ —U2, ―Where the Streets Have no Name‖ (1987)
1. Approaching Falling Man from an Urban Perspective
Opening and closing his narrative at the exact moment of the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center in the morning of September 11, 2001, Don DeLillo9 paints in Falling
Man a grim picture of the devastation, purposelessness, and disorientation that prevails in the lives of the New Yorkers in the immediate aftermath of the event. While personal drama is placed at the foreground of the narrative, New York City also assumes an active role in the novel, as being one of the most profoundly damaged survivors of the attacks. This oscillation between the private and the public sphere in the negotiation of 9/11 triggers a discussion around the politics of representing the 9/11 attacks in literature and highlights the primacy of urban space for the understanding of terrorism and its repercussions.
More specifically, the story follows a separated Manhattan couple, Keith and Lianne, as they attempt to reconcile their marriage after Keith‘s survival from the disaster. Despite their initial attempt to find emotional and psychological support in each other in the aftermath of the attacks, it soon becomes obvious that each one of them deals with post-9/11 trauma in different ways. For Keith, the city is forever marked by the terror that the attacks have
9 Don DeLillo is considered to be one of the most acclaimed contemporary American authors. DeLillo began his writing career in the 1970s, when his first novel, Americana, was published in 1971. DeLillo has been closely associated with postmodernist literary writing and praised for his acute and in-depth commentary on the American historical and cultural realities in the last decades of the twentieth century. His most well-known novels include White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997). For more information on DeLillo, see Harold Bloom‘s Don DeLillo (2003) and John Duvall‘s The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008). Tsiokou 16
triggered. Throughout the novel, this memory is persistently re-enacted in the performances of David Janiak, an artist also known as Falling Man, who reproduces the suicidal falls of those people who were in the towers after the planes hit.
Taking cue from the impact these performances have on New York City itself, I intend, in this chapter, to examine the ways in which the urban setting is employed in Falling
Man in order to represent instances of collective and individual trauma. To be more precise, I will argue that the characters‘—especially Keith‘s and Lianne‘s— seemingly reticent and irrevocable struggle with post-9/11 trauma can be re-interpreted as a historically, nationally, and socially specific condition through their interaction with the wounded landscape of
Manhattan. At the same time, a cityscape-based approach provides fertile ground for the contemplation upon issues of American exceptionalism and the difficulties that the fiction of the new millennium may be facing in imagining the altered position of the U.S. in the post-
9/11 global politics.
In order to touch upon these intricate issues, I will build upon in this chapter the significance of New York City as a major political, cultural, and economic urban center on the East Coast of the U.S. More significantly, I am interested in examining how the city‘s material as well as symbolic status has been questioned and challenged since the 9/11 terrorist events. This objective largely draws on E. Ann Kaplan‘s personal observations as a
New Yorker regarding her transformed relation to the city in the post-9/11 period. Kaplan contends that her ―relation to the public sphere was also changed since New York City, and the United States as nation, both were destabilized as concepts‖ (3). Taking cue from
Kaplan‘s remark, I wish to connect the characters‘ manifestations of post-9/11 trauma with newfound anxieties over the nation‘s challenged world dominance. By employing an urban perspective, this chapter represents an attempt to move beyond the criticism against the novel Tsiokou 17
on the grounds of its being too apolitical and excessively experimental. Instead, it explores how the incorporation of the urban narrative into Keith and Lianne‘s storyline relates to their attempt to rebuild their failed marriage within the context of a socio-cultural and political upheaval caused by 9/11. Finally, this analysis will be framed with references to the debate around the formal and contextual expectations especially the U.S. public had from the genre dubbed as ―9/11 fiction,‖ that has affected the way novels, and in particular Falling Man, have been received and commented on by both scholarly and mainstream audiences.
1.1. Falling Man and Post-9/11 Fiction
In order to gain a more detailed perspective regarding the main axes of the present discussion, it is necessary to present briefly how the novel has been reviewed and criticized since its publication in 2007. To begin with, the most striking observation from the commentary about DeLillo‘s much expected 9/11 novel is the fact that its political character is as much praised as downgraded. Most of the reviews that have appeared in major mainstream newspapers, such as The Guardian and The New York Times have made explicit references to DeLillo‘s alleged ―prophetic‖ charisma to predict the attacks of September 11, as well as the subsequent ―age of terror‖ in his previous works of fiction.
Indeed, novels like Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997) explicitly deal with the issue of global terrorism, public violence, and the dominance of the mass media in shaping public opinion about world-scale events. To be more precise, in his online review on Falling Man for The Guardian, Toby Litt describes DeLillo as ―one of the great seers and sayers of our time‖ (n.p.). Yet, although most critics seem to agree on DeLillo‘s sharp eye for political and cultural commentary on contemporary American society, their perspectives on his 9/11 novel range from ―classically spare, haunting, and treacherously beautiful‖ (Caldwell Tsiokou 18
n.p.), to ―small and unsatisfying and inadequate‖ (Kakutani n.p.). This overt dissonance in the reception of the novel is partly due to the very dissimilar attitudes with regard to DeLillo‘s stylistic options and partly due to the textual politics that inform his narrative as it will be explained below.
Writing for The New York Times, for instance, Frank Rich acknowledges the shift
DeLillo demonstrates in Falling Man from the depiction of large-scale political phenomena to the elementary, domestic material he processes in his 9/11 narrative (n.p.). Nevertheless,
Rich praises the way this ―archetypal‖ (n.p.) material is stylistically treated by the writer:
In the ruins of 9/11, relationships are a non sequitur. Disconnectedness is the new
currency. Language is fragmented. Vision is distorted. […] While there are just
enough signposts to keep ―Falling Man‖ tethered to a recognizable reality, it‘s an
askew, alternative-reality variation on the literal, as if we, too, were taking it in
through Keith‘s unfocused gaze. The entire city, not just downtown, is in the physical
and emotional limbo of a frozen zone. (n.p)
So, for Rich, it is precisely the style of the narrative that facilitates the readers‘ engagement with the traumatic present of 9/11. Contrary to Rich, Richard Gray contends that Falling
Man‘s ―structure is too clearly foregrounded, the style excessively mannered; and the characters fall into postures of survival after 9/11 that are too familiar to invite much more than a gesture of recognition from the reader‖ (27). As it was mentioned in the Introduction of the current thesis, for Gray style in post-9/11 narratives is equally crucial to their subject matter, and the writers who fail to rise to the occasion of the events in formal terms also commit a political fallacy (16).10 As far as Falling Man is concerned, the commentary about
10 For Gray, this ―fallacy‖ occurs due to the tendency of many post-9/11 novels to remain attached to the convenient and ―seductive myth of American exceptionalism,‖ instead of registering the ―hybrid‖ consistency of Tsiokou 19
its political merit appears ambivalent. More precisely, Philipp Schweighauser and Peter
Schneck‘s ―Introduction‖ in the collection Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction (2010) asserts that Falling Man, along with Libra, is one of DeLillo‘s ―most explicitly political novels‖ (2). Again, Gray‘s criticism of the novel contradicts this idea, as he argues that ―all life here is personal; cataclysmic events are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists‖ (30). Arin Keeble takes notice of the criticism against the apolitical character of Falling Man when he remarks that it is one of the post-9/11 novels that ―have come under much scrutiny for their circumscribed domestic settings‖ (n.p.). However, Keeble does not entirely endorse this view. On the contrary, he sets out to establish an approach to the body of post-9/11 fiction that will allow a step beyond the mere discredit of their limitations (n.p.)— an objective that Keeble‘s work and the present discussion on Falling Man have in common.
In order to make better sense of the controversy around Falling Man, it is first necessary to situate the novel within the more general framework of the tendency to reconsider postmodern writing after the 9/11 attacks. This overview also accounts for the ambition of this project to overcome this controversy by focusing on the prominence of the narratorial power of the cityscape. Here, attention needs to be paid to the audiences‘ expectations from the post-9/11 novel in general, both in terms of form and subject matter, as well as to the premises created by DeLillo‘s oeuvre in particular. As I explained in the
Introduction of the present thesis, the events of 9/11 have triggered a series of debates with regards to whether the available postmodern modes of thinking have facilitated or inhibited the understanding of the incident. These debates have eventually turned into discussions
the United States (17). The latter task is largely undertaken by Joseph O‘Neill‘s Netherland, as it will be discussed in Chapter Two. Tsiokou 20
about the overall relevance of postmodern thought in the post-9/11 era and have influenced the production and the reception of 9/11 literature. More specifically, critics like David Wyatt and Zoё Formby stress that the ―seriousness‖ (Wyatt 140) and ―solemnity‖ (Formby 81) demanded by the nature of the events are directly opposite to the ironic and playful style of postmodern literature that asks for a general detachment from the real and material losses that have been suffered during the 9/11 attacks.
Although points such as the ones made by Wyatt and Formby are not to be fully embraced for the conditions they describe, they can still serve as valuable insights into the criticism against instances of post-9/11 fiction in general, and Falling Man in particular.
Indeed, if we take into account Formby‘s comment on the irrelevance of the ―superficiality of postmodernism‖ (81), it becomes easier to grasp the reasons why Dwight Garner refers to
Falling Man as a ―pretentious‖ post-9/11 novel (n.p.). Evidently, the expectations of the
American public from the post-9/11 novels that began to appear during the first decade of the new millennium predominantly focus on the need to reconcile the experience of the events with the new order that has prevailed in their aftermath. As Catherine Morley remarks, ―[t]he reading public seeks a narrative that will weave the multitudinous stories of 9/11, the stories of victims, survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, into some kind of coherence that speaks to a subjective sense and experience of the moment‖ (296). If we take this demand for unity and coherence into account, it becomes apparent that the narrative of Falling Man, with its discontinuities, fragmentations, silences, and purposelessness—at least at first glance—may have disappointed quite a few readers. In his review of Falling Man for The New York
Review of Books, Andrew O‘Hagan expresses his dissatisfaction regarding ―DeLillo‘s failure in Falling Man to imagine September 11‖ (n.p). Interestingly, O‘Hagan‘s criticism against
Falling Man, and the fictional response to 9/11 in general, has to do with the struggle to Tsiokou 21
avoid transforming the literal into something figurative. Moreover, O‘Hagan defends the need for a realistic rather than a fictitious representation of events, as it happens with works of fiction such as Falling Man that embrace an ongoing deferral of reality.
Nevertheless, the criticism that the novel has stirred connects with the public‘s expectations from DeLillo as a writer. The direction these expectations have taken is twofold: first of all, DeLillo‘s body of work has been closely linked to the postmodernist literary tradition in a number of ways, both as a cultural product of postmodernism, as well as a facilitator of assessment and criticism of the postmodern condition.11 Indeed, in The
Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008), John N. Duvall writes that ―DeLillo continues to write novels that probe American postmodernity‖ (4), while Peter Knight contends ―that
DeLillo is seen as representing the turn to postmodernism in American literature‖ (27). As he suggests, this statement might be justified by the writer‘s ―detailed anthropological attention to those aspects of contemporary Western—and perhaps specifically American—life in the age of media saturation and globalized free market capitalism‖ (27). Yet, Falling Man does not explicitly display any such self-aware, and possibly much awaited, commentary on the course of the postmodern condition in the U.S. after the attacks; without it, the postmodern poetics and structure that DeLillo employs in his post-9/11 novel might end up appearing irrelevant and cacophonous. 12
Secondly, the domestic character of the narrative of Falling Man comes in stark contrast to the overt social, political, and cultural commentary DeLillo‘s previous novels have been praised for. Significantly, DeLillo‘s direct references to contemporary political issues,
11 Several scholars, such as John N. Duvall, Laura Barrett, and Peter Knight, also develop a similar argument, while in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) Linda Hutcheon refers to this self-reflexive strategy as ―complicitous critique‖ or ―historiographic metafiction‖ in an attempt to highlight the critical qualities of the postmodern novel. For more information, see Hutcheon 9-16 and 75-88. 12 For more information on the criticism against the familiar pre-9/11 stylistic patterns, see Gray 14-16. Tsiokou 22
such as global terrorism in novels like Mao II or the suffocating dominance of aggressive capitalism in The Names (1982) and White Noise (1985) have resulted in assigning the writer with the quality of a ―prophet,‖ who almost accurately predicted the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
However, as Joseph M. Conte informs us, DeLillo himself does not endorse this label, as he
―would regard these episodes—the prevalence of terrorist acts in his fictions, the shadow cast by the Towers—not as premonitions of events as they have come to pass but as the gift of the novelist for expressing the latent crises in the culture before others have fully recognized them‖ (180). In any case, despite the fact that DeLillo‘s writing has proven to be so politically insightful, his post-9/11 novel does not fulfill the audiences‘ need for a satisfying justification of the occurring events. In other words, Falling Man is far from ―illuminating the zeitgeist in which 9/11 occurred or the shell-shocked world it left in its wake‖ (Kakutani n.p.). Rather, as far as DeLillo‘s notorious prophetic charisma is concerned, many would agree with O‘Hagan‘s view ―that DeLillo‘s formerly superlative intuition has become a form of ignorance: he dangles uncertainly between what he knows of that day from pictures and what of it he predicted in his novels‖ (n.p.). So, if we take into consideration all these complicated parameters that have shaped the discussion on Falling Man, it becomes evident that the historical, political, and cultural conditions which have led to the novel‘s creation are rather particular and bizarre. As a result, they have ended up projecting onto the novel demands or expectations that it did not initially attempt to fulfill.
As stated early in this chapter, the present analysis of Falling Man is based on the premise that several of its aspects that have been faced with stark criticism, such as its limited focus on private life and relationships, its postmodern experimental style, and its superficial outlook on the way the attacks have marked the American social body, can possibly be revisited. This can be achieved if we examine the way it moves from a mere depiction of the Tsiokou 23
9/11 attacks to the inscription of the post-9/11 trauma in the cityscape. Arguably, the focus on the representation of New York City as an environment that at the same time absorbs and reflects the terror and trauma of the 9/11 aftermath can offer valuable alternatives to the dead- ends that according to certain reviewers characterize the narrative of Falling Man.
To begin with, a reading of the survivors‘ emotional and psychological responses to the events through their city explorations and wanderings renders the depiction of the post-
9/11 climate more palpable. For instance, the sense of purposelessness and disorientation expressed by the characters in the pages of the novel is made more direct and tangible if one takes into account the way in which the absence of the World Trade Center is constantly registered in the New York cityscape. Thus, such an approach has the potential to restore the demand for realistic expression in the way the attacks and their aftermath have been reproduced in fiction. Furthermore, the overtly criticized retreat to the private realm of experience that Falling Man documents after the 9/11 events is frequently interrupted by the persistent intrusion of city life in the life of its characters in the form of noises, lights, images, and, last but not least, the disturbing and haunting appearances of Falling Man, the performance artist, in various parts of New York City. Finally, the way the symbolic dimensions of New York City as the hallmark of contemporary American—and, perhaps,
Western—way of life are negotiated both from the New Yorkers‘ and the terrorists‘ perspective, as it happens with the character of Hammad, is equally significant. Such an approach might allow for a wider discussion on the changed attitude with which American people may imagine their national identity within a domestic and unstable global context.
Frankly, though, DeLillo‘s narrative maintains an American-centered perspective even when he constructs the viewpoint of the Islamist terrorist. As discussed in Chapter Two, the Tsiokou 24
establishment of a global perspective in fiction presupposes an imagination that can reach beyond rigid national boundaries and their respective rhetoric.
Having said that, it should be stressed that the present project does not overlook the limitations of DeLillo‘s narrative. In fact, as I will explain in the following sections, one of its most striking omissions is the failure to register the city‘s heterogeneity and the complexity this adds to the consequences of the 9/11 attacks by focusing on a very specific group of New
Yorkers, that of a white, upper-middle class family. At this point though, it is essential to remark that the above issues are raised here after taking a significant spatial as well as temporal distance from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath. This distancing is in line with Tatiani G. Rapatzikou and Aliki Varvogli‘s syllogism when they talk about ―the luxury of a greater temporal distance‖ (18) from the incident. At the same time, a non-
American perspective on post-9/11 fiction, especially when it comes to a novel written by
DeLillo, can be seen as an opportunity to step beyond a nationally-centered, and thus more subjective or possibly sentimental, understanding of the attacks. Indeed, this geographically distinct approach has recently gained legitimacy within scholarly work. This is demonstrated by Schweighauser and Schneck, who adopt ―a decidedly transatlantic perspective‖ (2) to
DeLillo‘s work. They also contend that European readings of DeLillo‘s prose benefit from escaping to question the writer‘s display of patriotism, although this is something that
American critics are inclined to be preoccupied with (11). Thus, it could be argued that, despite the novel‘s limited, American-centered core, a nationally detached perspective may be proven helpful with expanding the interpretation of DeLillo‘s narrative towards new directions.
Such a task might be realized by first examining the inscription of traditional notions of Americanness in Falling Man, as a reflex reaction to the unprecedented external threat Tsiokou 25
initiated by the attacks. As the following section suggests, the depiction of the post-9/11 New
York cityscape through the traumatized lives of the main characters exposes the persistence an exceptionalist type of rhetoric, which is nevertheless subverted by the irrefutable and highly symbolic absence of the twin towers from the Manhattan skyline. This view highlights the central place that conceptualizations of the American nation assume in post-9/11 fiction, which is partly assigned with the responsibility to provide ways in which Americanness can be re-imagined after the 9/11 attacks.
1.2 “This Was the World Now:” Reconsidering American Exceptionalism through the
Wounded City
The commentary on Falling Man that is carried out in this chapter aims at approaching the destabilization of the narrative of American global dominance after the destruction of the World Trade Center by taking into account the way it influences the New
York cityscape. Throughout the novel, the representation of New York City and the way the characters position themselves within it are choreographed by the stark absence of the Twin
Towers. Placed at the very beginning of the narrative, both the attacks and the fall of the
World Trade Center are emblematically established as the main points of reference for the unfolding of the storyline of Keith and Lianne‘s relationship alongside several other episodes in the novel.
The following excerpt from Falling Man presents Keith‘s narrow escape from the
North Tower and his glance towards the direction of the disaster. This excerpt effectively illustrates the powerful influence the attacks have had on the configuration of urban space and the way this is experienced in the actual narrative: Tsiokou 26
In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and began to
see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem changed in the usual ways, the
cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from
the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were
unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls.
Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them. (6)
A similar scene takes place further on:
At some point [Keith] had a clear view downtown but all he could see was one tower.
He thought one tower was blocking his view of the other tower, or the smoke was. He
saw the smoke. He drove east a ways and looked again and there was only one tower.
One tower made no sense. Then he turned uptown because that‘s where he was going
and finally he saw [him] and picked [him] up. By this time the second tower was
gone. (25)
It is interesting in these two excerpts to focus on the major role vision plays for making sense of the altered cityscape after the towers‘ fall. This becomes apparent if one pays attention to the repetition of words related to vision, such as ―see,‖ ―seem,‖ ―unseen,‖ ―look like,‖
―view,‖ and ―saw.‖ Apart from configuring the 9/11 attacks as a predominantly visual event, these eye-witnessed reports from the scene of the disaster are important for setting the tone for the narrative. This happens because they indicate how the elimination of the towers can shatter a New Yorker‘s sense of balance and bring about a sense of uneasiness and disorientation. To be more precise, both Keith and the driver are constantly reviewing their understanding of what lies before them by repositioning themselves, as they move around the ruined cityscape. Nevertheless, instead of gaining awareness of the transformation the urban space around them has undergone, they constantly struggle to get a better point of view as if Tsiokou 27
they doubt what they see. This sense of uncertainty and lack of understanding is foregrounded in the first excerpt, through the use of words and expressions like ―whatever that means,‖ ―maybe,‖ ―unfinished,‖ and ―unseen.‖ As it appears, the fact that the characters find it difficult to register and face the uncontainable reality before their eyes leads them to choose to concentrate on what they are simply allowed to see.
Evidently, the disappearance of the towers from the cityscape of downtown
Manhattan affects the way people experience the city. In fact, it has been repeatedly argued that the void left behind after the fall of the World Trade Center can be interpreted as a space of presence as well as absence (Golimowska, The Post-9/11 City 27), in the sense that the eliminated buildings make a more powerful statement by not being there. In The Spirit of
Terrorism (2002), Jean Baudrillard eloquently illustrates this point about the towers‘ haunting presence by observing that ―[e]ven in their pulverized state, they have left behind an intense awareness of their presence,‖ and that ―[t]heir end in material space has borne them off into a definitive imaginary space‖ (48). This invisible influence the Twin Towers continue to exert on their surroundings demonstrates their symbolic quality. In turn, this symbolism stems from the people‘s projections on the empty space when they confront it, either directly or through its documentation in the mass media.
Such reactions compel us to examine the symbolism attached to the World Trade
Center before the 9/11 attacks. Once again, Baudrillard‘s insights are extremely useful in our understanding of how this symbolism works. As he points out, ―what was destroyed was one of the most prestigious buildings, together with a whole (Western) value-system and a world order‖ (37). In developing his argument, he explicitly connects the structure of the World
Trade Center with capitalism and globalization. In Baudrillard‘s words, the towers were
―[s]haped in the pure computer image of banking and finance,‖ while they incarnated the Tsiokou 28
―horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel,‖ and ―[t]he violence of globalization‖ (41). Indeed, the buildings were actually home to countless corporations and located at the very center of Manhattan, a fact which, for Baudrillard, accommodates ―an architectural panorama reflecting the capitalist system itself‖ (38). Simultaneously, according to Baudrillard, the symbolic dimension of the towers extends to the 9/11 attacks as well, since
―it was the symbolic object which was targeted and which it was intended to demolish‖ (44).
This position has frequently been reproduced by scholars, journalists, and audiences in the aftermath of 9/11,13 and attributed the attacks to a profound, fundamentalist hatred against the political and economic dominance of the U.S. on a global scale, as well as the progressive way of life that such dominance encourages.
Traces of Baudrillard‘s criticism towards the worldview the towers used to represent can be found in Falling Man. One of the characters, a German art dealer named Martin, contends that the 9/11 attacks actually exposed the ―narcissistic heart of the West‖ (141).
This also becomes evident when Martin asks his lover Nina, ―But that‘s why you built the towers, isn‘t it? Weren‘t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down.
The provocation is obvious. You are saying, Here it is, bring it down‖ (146). Martin‘s blunt political commentary carries unmistakable—and possibly deliberate—allusions to Slavoj
Žižek‘s assertion appearing in his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (2002) that, through the ‗spectacular‘ destruction of the World Trade Center, ―America got what it fantasized about‖ (16). What Žižek suggests is that the awareness of the nation‘s arrogant sense of superiority had already been part of the American collective mind. Constituting one
13 Approaches similar to Baudrillard‘s can be found in DeLillo‘s article ―In the Ruins of the Future‖ as well as Žižek‘s Welcome to the Desert of the Real!. Tsiokou 29
of the few cases of explicit political criticism in the novel, Martin‘s commentary against the self-centered attitude of the U.S. brings back the issue of America‘s sense of exceptionalism and creates a space for questioning its constancy in light of one of the most devastating external attacks the country has faced since the turn of the twenty-first century.
As far as Falling Man is concerned, we need to examine if, and in what ways, the novel accounts for a shift in America‘s confidence in its invincibility. Since this issue presents itself as particularly complex and controversial, it serves the purposes and limitations of the current discussion if we approach it based on the literary manifestations of New York City in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. To be more precise, the symbolic weight of the city as the hallmark of Americanness functions as a valuable starting point for the examination of how characters view their city after it has been attacked by terrorists. In other words, it is important to locate and comment upon the projections made by New Yorkers on their familiar urban surroundings after the disaster by taking into account how this sense of familiarity is now renegotiated in the course of DeLillo‘s narrative.
At this point, I would like to place emphasis on those parts of the novel where New York
City is given global dimensions after the disaster. This is necessary in order to highlight both the impact of the event and its spatial significance. This effect actually starts to develop in the very beginning of the story when we are introduced to Keith‘s escape from the North Tower.
Indicatively, the novel opens with the phrase: ―[i]t was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night‖ (3). Through this short sentence, the spot where the World Trade Center stood becomes the stage of an epic catastrophe so devastating that is strong enough to alter the way we experience spatial and temporal reality. Although on a first reading the phrase might be understood as DeLillo‘s stylistic attempt to reproduce and communicate the unprecedented size and impact of the attack, the replacement of the word Tsiokou 30
―street‖ with ―world‖ points towards the spatial politics at play here. In particular, the elevation of the area of Lower Manhattan from a local point of reference, known as Ground
Zero, to a global one referred to in the text as ―world‖ amplifies the significance of the events that have taken place there. A few lines below, as the description of the disaster unfolds, the identification of the area with a world becomes even more explicit: ―[t]his was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall‖ (3). Once again, the smoke and the ash pouring out from the falling towers blur the boundaries between Lower
Manhattan and the rest of the world, blending them together in an almost mystical way, as the word ―otherworldly‖ implies. The same motif is repeated later on, when attention is shifted towards the people trapped in the buildings: ―[t]he world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air‖ (4). In both excerpts, the nightmarish details that make up the scene of the attacks are equated to a world in themselves. Thus, they are translated into something uncontainable by its own dimensions of time and space—something that, in order to be expressed and articulated, needs to expand across the size of a whole world and eclipse over the countless tragedies that have occurred globally throughout history.
At this point, it is unclear whether DeLillo employs the comparison of the wounded cityscape to a ―world‖ as a mechanism of commenting on or a mere stylistic accentuation of the ―unparalleled‖ catastrophe through hyperbole. After all, it is true that the image of the burning towers simultaneously occupied television screens all around the globe, making New
York City the central point of reference across different continents and time zones.
Nevertheless, as the narrative in the novel progresses, a sense of uniqueness lingers for days Tsiokou 31
or even months after the attacks as a means of defense mechanism of the survivors. This reaction is articulated through Lianne‘s thoughts. DeLillo writes: ―[i]t was a rainy Monday in the world and she walked over to Godzilla apartments‖ (191). Even though she is not a direct survivor of the disaster, Lianne exhibits a particularly self-centered sense of time and space as she moves around the city. The excerpt begins abruptly by referring to New York City as
―world,‖ thus reestablishing the city as the focus of global attention, at least from the perspective of its residents. For Lianne, this impression is enmeshed with the process of walking around the city and blocks her awareness of any other place beyond her surroundings. Refusing to use the subway for fear of another attack, Lianne navigates the city mostly through walking, an activity which is equally influenced by insecurity and disengagement towards urban space. Her walking is characterized by uncertainty, since it occasionally takes place ―without plan‖ and it is predominantly guided by her own thoughts instead of her wish to reach a destination, as indicated by the repetition of phrases like ―she stood and thought‖ (196-97).14 Thus, Lianne‘s navigation of the post-9/11 New York cityscape through walking is not used here as a reliable mechanism for making sense of the urban environment. On the contrary, the overall effect of her walking exposes the incomprehensibility that characterizes the cityscape in the aftermath of the attacks.
The episode continues as follows: ―[i]t was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous. This was the weather everywhere, generic Monday, and she walked very close to buildings and ran across streets and felt the wind hit straight down when she reached the redbrick heights of Godzilla‖ (191).
14 This kind of disengaged walking performed by the main characters contradicts Michel de Certeau‘s theorization of walking as a way of assigning urban space with meaning, or as an ―experience of the city‖ as ―an urban ‗text‘ [walkers] write without being able to read it‖ (93). Deeply affected by the disorienting impact of 9/11, DeLillo‘s characters reverse this process, as their navigation of the city is designed in such a way that deprives the cityscape of its previous meaning, while it exhibits its inability to produce new meanings for the this unprecedented condition. Tsiokou 32
Just as the ash and the smoke have erased the boundaries between New York City and the rest of the world in the beginning of the novel, in this excerpt, the rain serves a similar purpose. The use of words such as ―everywhere‖ and ―generic‖ to refer to the dimensions of time and space in the episode are indicative of the tendency of New Yorkers such as Lianne to generalize their experience to the extent that it effaces other noteworthy events happening in any other place in the world.
The above excerpts are among the most fitting instances of how the urban setting of New
York City in Falling Man acquires narratorial power. In the story, the city is effectively utilized to pronounce the post-9/11 traumatic experiences of New Yorkers, as well as to give voice to issues pertaining to DeLillo‘s customary subject matter, such as American national identity, U.S. domestic and international politics, and contemporary urban American lifestyle.
In her engagement with spatial and body politics in DeLillo‘s fiction, Katrina Harack insightfully remarks that ―DeLillo has of course repeatedly explored New York as a placeholder in American consciousness‖ (316). If we take this remark into account along with the excerpts discussed above, it becomes evident that the symbolic dimension of the city provides a rich basis for a commentary on these issues to be provided. More specifically, while the absence of the towers raised some very palpable obstacles to the characters‘ sense of orientation and movement around the city, the symbolic character of the attacks has not been fully registered by its residents. On the contrary, their self-absorption, which appears to be directly tied with the New York cityscape, seems to be heightened, not in spite of the attacks, but because of them.
This is suggestive of the fact that, in the crucial moment of an unexpected external threat,
New Yorkers rush to resort to the familiar principles that sustain their collective identity and their identification with both their city and their nation. Harack takes note of this tendency in Tsiokou 33
Falling Man when she argues that ―New York becomes a locus of Americans‘ imaginations and sense of identity, so that the embeddedness of his characters in a particular place and time becomes emblematic of an American trauma that has yet to be fully explored‖ (307).
Indeed, during the direct aftermath of the attacks, New York City is represented in the novel as a reflection of a pre-9/11 way of being in the world on the part of its residents, which is reinforced by traditional ideas of American invincibility and exceptionalism. This brings us back to the politics of the 9/11 novel and the demand for new poetic forms that effectively address the unmapped expression of post-9/11 trauma in the USA.15 For Harack, DeLillo‘s focus on the cityscape in Falling Man does offer a radical break from the postmodern formal tradition of the past decade, since it accounts for real, palpable aspects of the disaster, such as
―actual bodies, physical ruins, and the altered space not only of New York but of the U.S.‖
(306). In this light, the initial impression of excessive stylization, which results from using the metonymy of a ―world‖ to describe New York City under attack, can also be understood as a narrative technique that brings the cityscape to the forefront in an attempt to renegotiate aspects of a well-established American topos, which is profoundly inscribed and symbolically represented in the lived and physical urban space as is to be examined next.
1.3 Manhattanites and the City: Private Encounters with the Urban Landscape in the
Aftermath of 9/11
While the universalized properties of New York City in Falling Man are indicative of a collective tendency to resort to traditional ideas of American supremacy as a way to cope with the shock of the terrorist threat, a more thorough examination of the novel‘s main
15 As stated in the Introduction of the present thesis, Gray criticizes post-9/11 works like Falling Man for sustaining the ―myth of American exceptionalism‖ (17), while Rapatzikou and Varvogli recognize that the events ―undermined older narratives of American power and dominance,‖ but appear ambivalent as to whether this change has produced a new wave of literary forms and patterns (9). Tsiokou 34
characters offers multiple perspectives on the issue. This part of the discussion on Falling
Man concentrates on an already-stressed point in the present thesis, namely the narrative‘s limitations due to its predominantly domestic character and the narrow scope on the events offered by its paralyzed and disoriented main characters.
According to Keeble, these limitations are pertinent to a great part of novels labeled as ―post-9/11 fiction‖ (n.p.). He points out that, ―within this emerging canon there is no more widely explored theme than marriage and relationships‖ (n.p.). Moreover, Keeble notes that several commentators, as for example Gray, Michael Rothberg, and Pankaj Mishra view ―the domestication and depoliticization of 9/11 by its literary representation‖ as a significant weakness of the fictional works about September 11 (n.p.).16 In an attempt to contest such limitations, Keeble offers an analytical model for understanding ―relationships as social barometers for the impact of 9/11‖ (n.p.) in several instances of post-9/11 works of fiction, including Falling Man. My approach of the domestic element in the novel is in line with
Keeble‘s ideas, since the core of both arguments is to bring out the implications that this domestic foundation carries for wider public matters within these 9/11 narratives. More precisely, the outlook this section maintains on the issue aims at a better understanding of the representations of the private in the novel. This is facilitated by setting them against the urban background in which they unfold and looking at how the personal lives of the characters and the public space of New York City reciprocally inform each other in the narrative.
To begin with, the types of relationships placed under the microscope of Falling Man are mainly romantic and family ones with the most central being Keith and Lianne‘s reconciliation of their failed marriage. Parallel to this main storyline there is Keith and
16 Here, Keeble draws from Gray‘s After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11, Rothberg‘s article ―A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,‖ and Mishra‘s article ―The End of Innocence.‖ Tsiokou 35
Lianne‘s family life with their son Justin, Lianne‘s close yet troubled relationship with her mother, Nina Bartos, a fine arts professor, as well as Nina‘s relationship with her lover,
Martin Ridnour, an art dealer and former German terrorist, and finally, Keith‘s affair with
Florence Givens, another survivor of the terrorist attacks. Arguably, the events of 9/11 are employed within the narrative as a spring board that sets these relationships in motion and brings the characters closer, as in the case of Keith and Lianne‘s family, or drives them apart, as it happens with Nina and Martin. This becomes evident in the very structure of the novel whose three chapters present the course of these relationships in fragmented episodes or entangled threads. Yet, each chapter goes back to the moment of the attacks that is used as an opening for the first two chapters and as an ending for the final one. As Ugo Panzani contends, ―[in] Falling Man we can notice a penetration of the public disorder generated by the tragedy into the ordinary disorder of the characters private existences‖ (86).
What he attempts to point out here is that 9/11 and its political resonance reflects on the disrupted private lives of New Yorkers in the aftermath of the attacks. In support of the case point in the present discussion, the narrative of Falling Man repeatedly manifests the encounter between private and public experience as one of the central premises in the novel by blending the characters‘ intimate moments and concerns with New York‘s cityscape.
In fact, the novel is brimming with episodes in which the main characters—usually
Keith and Lianne—walk or run through the streets of New York City with their deepest thoughts tuning with what is happening in their urban surroundings. Towards the end of the novel, when Keith and Lianne‘s relationship is unmistakably beyond repair, a scene taking place in their apartment highlights the intersection between private and public lives allowing us in this way to gain an insight into the carefully sheltered private existence of New York‘s residents: ―[t]hey spent nights in bed with the windows open, traffic noises, voices carrying, Tsiokou 36
five or six girls marching down the streets at two a.m. singing an old rock ballad that she sang along with them, softly, lovingly, word for word, matching accents, pauses and breaks, hating to hear the voices fade‖ (Falling Man 269). Interestingly, the street sounds, such as people‘s voices, singing, and passing vehicles, entering the room carry no allusions to the terror emanating from the bizarre sounds of explosions, crashes, and emergency alarm sounds connected with the actual 9/11 events. On the contrary, they represent the mundane, maybe even pleasant, routine scenery in the streets of a carefree metropolis bustling with life. Here,
Lianne‘s desire to continue singing along with the voices coming from the street signifies her longing for the nonchalant and secure order of things in the city, which, much like her seemingly reconciled relationship with Keith, is now irrevocably lost.
Additionally, several of the episodes in the novel staged within an iconic New York
City background are enveloped by the characters‘ distress over the restoration of normalcy within the city. One such episode features Lianne‘s reflections while she is moving from
Washington Square Park to Grand Central Station:
She walked across Washington Square Park behind a student saying hopefully onto
his cell phone. It was a bright day, chess players at their tables, a fashion shoot in
progress under the arch. They said hopefully. They said oh my god, in delight and
small awe. […] Half an hour later she was in Grand Central Station to meet her
mother‘s train. She hadn‘t been here lately and was not accustomed to the sight of
police and state troopers in tight clusters or guardsmen with dogs. Other places, she
thought, other worlds, dusty terminals, major intersections, this is routine and will
always be. […] But the normal order was also in evidence here, tourists taking
pictures, commuters in running flurries. (39-40) Tsiokou 37
As this excerpt demonstrates, New York City and its residents are gradually drawn back to their habitual rhythms. Such depictions of the well-known and widely-celebrated lifestyle of the city indicate that, even in the first weeks following the attacks, New York City had managed to maintain its internal order without succumbing to the terror the attacks had attempted to unleash. However, Lianne‘s reaction to the military and security presence around the train station functions as a reminder of the upheaval that had preceded even though she focuses mainly on the seeming normality of the overall scene. The interference of such images with the familiar urban fabric of New York City can be understood as an expression of the characters‘ trauma, which is not simply projected on the city but is actually embodied in the ruined image of certain parts of the city itself after 9/11. Thus, Lianne‘s gaze might find comfort in familiar scenes, yet throughout the story she demonstrates an obsessive avoidance of crowded places. Even in the episodes that unfold in the last few pages of the novel, Lianne realizes that ―she wasn‘t ready yet to take the subway‖ (297). Such reactions could possible suggest a serious, even traumatic, disruption of the heroine‘s personal balance, which is in line with the disrupted order of New York City as a whole.
The identification of the characters‘ inner post-9/11 traumatic experience with their surrounding chaotic urban environment is even more prominent when it comes to Keith,
Lianne‘s husband. To begin with, Keith‘s restless route within as well as beyond New York
City, has both its narratorial and topographical starting point in the destruction of the towers, from where he emerges ―scaled in ash, in pulverized matter‖ (7). From that moment on, Keith follows a trajectory that takes him, almost unconsciously, to his estranged wife‘s ―doorway
[…] like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes‖ (10), then to his wanderings through Manhattan, where his destination is vaguely determined as ―somewhere to go‖(63), only to lead him ―across the park‖ (172) into the arms of another survivor, and Tsiokou 38
then all the way to the desert of the Las Vegas casinos. Once again, Keith‘s impulsive and aimless movement in the city illustrates the alienation between New Yorkers and their urban surroundings as one of the consequences of 9/11. Too idiosyncratically constructed to serve as an everyman‘s account for those who survived the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center, Keith Neudecker‘s aloof navigation of New York City is a striking example of the way private lives actively intertwine with public events, as this is encapsulated in the novel‘s literary sketches of the post-9/11 New York cityscape.
Arguably, Keith‘s behavior throughout the narrative is consonant with Harack‘s outlook on the configuration of space and identity in Falling Man. To be more specific,
Harack believes that in DeLillo‘s novel, ―the experience of place is so traumatic that the mind cannot process it, resulting in altered personal and spatial relations‖ (323). Having witnessed the collapse of the towers near the heart of the catastrophe in Canal Street in Lower
Manhattan, Keith‘s experience of both the cityscape and his personal affairs is characterized by instability further enhanced due to his obsession with escape. In fact, the crisis he goes through is so severe that he is reported to collect ―bonus miles on his credit cards and [fly] to cities chosen strictly for their distance from New York‖ (Falling Man 154). Thus, on the one hand, the devastating escape from the north tower has led him back to his family and filled him with the immediate need for physical and emotional intimacy with his estranged wife.
On the other hand, both his wanderings around New York City as well as his eventual routine of crossing the park to meet Florence, which is followed by his subsequent gambling tour across major cities around the world, point towards his highly disturbed relationship with
New York City itself and his anxiety over his emotional and psychological ties with it.
Much like Lianne, Keith‘s vantage point of his urban surroundings is torn between scenes of New York City life before and after the 9/11 attacks. Keith‘s impressions of the city Tsiokou 39
range from a war-like terrain in downtown Manhattan, with ―troops in gas masks‖ and ―fire rescue cars and ambulances, […] state police cruisers, flatbed trucks, […] moving through the barricades and into the shroud of ash and sand‖ (29), to a space of ―ordinariness‖ that
―fell upon him oddly, with almost dreamlike effect‖ (63-64). However, whereas Lianne eventually manages to reconcile her troubled relationship with the city to a certain extent, as it is suggested by the contention she gains from her long walks and her ritual morning runs
(299) and from her confidence to ―be alone, in reliable calm‖ without Keith (301), her husband never quite recovers from it. His traumatic disengagement with familiar places is revealed when, upon revisiting his old apartment, he is compelled to articulate the phrase,
―I‘m standing here‖ (34), as if he needs to convince himself of his whereabouts. This
―existential displacement‖ (12), to borrow Keith Wilhite‘s expression, informs almost every interaction the main character has with his surroundings, and his walking itineraries in the city obstruct the process of assigning meaning to urban space. This is evident in the descriptions of his walks across the park to Florence‘s apartment, which he performs amidst
―half-seen images of the city‖ and ―without thinking much about‖ his destination (130, 172), or his routes to his son‘s school and back, which are characterized by a sense of ―contained elation‖ (82). While performing everyday activities and interpersonal roles—father, husband, lover—within the city‘s seemingly familiar landscape, Keith remains ―a hovering presence‖
(74) that marks his distance and disengagement from the city‘s reality.
Of course, this disengagement informs not only Keith‘s perspective towards the cityscape, but is also triggered by the altered condition of the city itself, as its potential to produce and negotiate meaning is compromised by 9/11. Eventually, Keith‘s traumatic experience of living in New York City after the fall of the towers compels him to fly ―to cities chosen strictly for their distance from New York‖ (154), in order to take part in poker Tsiokou 40
tournaments in various major metropolises around the world, as is the case with ―Rio or
London or Las Vegas‖ (271). In this sense, Keith‘s fractured relationship with the city also helps explain the broken interpersonal relationships he leaves behind. This is a resolution that highlights not only his overt psychological trauma but also his distress over his inability to keep up with the changes, both physical and symbolic, 9/11 has brought to New York City.
Christian Versluys makes a remarkable point about how the altered New York cityscape contributes to this effect. In his own words: ―[t]he topography of New York, which, as a hyperdynamized environment, is often deemed to have a redemptive propulsion of its own, is equally shorn of all redemptive power,‖ since ―September 11 has turned the streets, usually bustling with life, into a militarized, dystopian landscape‖ (43). Thus, the emotional dead-ends and the failed relationships of the main characters in the novel go hand in hand with the overall loss of the city‘s symbolic status after the attacks. As Elizabeth S. Anker puts it, ―[w]ithin Falling Man, New York itself offers a synecdoche for America‘s limitless yearnings‖ (475), a statement that underscores the position the city of New York holds in the pre-9/11 American consciousness. Arguably, what seems to fuel the feelings of nostalgia, insecurity, and disengagement the main characters of the novel project on the urban space is the exposure of New York City‘s façade of invincibility, vast political power, and infinite economic progress as a result of the destruction of its most iconic buildings being the two towers of the World Trade Center.
But the city is not the only presence that takes on symbolic dimensions in the narrative of Falling Man. To fully appreciate the role of New York City for the amplification of the characters‘ individual trauma, we have to take into account their unmistakable social and financial status. The fact that the story is based on predominantly white, upper-middle class Manhattan residents, among whom a corporate lawyer and a university professor who Tsiokou 41
owns an apartment in Fifth Avenue, does justice to the criticism Falling Man has received on the basis of its very privileged and thus very limited scope of representation with the narrative‘s emphasis being placed on the ―very elite and unrepresentative bourgeois section of New York‖ (Keeble n.p.). This may serve as the starting point of DeLillo‘s subtle yet decisive criticism of that part of the city‘s social body that fails to come to terms with its disillusionment regarding their city‘s superiority and their country‘s invincibility. As it will be discussed in Chapter Two, this failure might be relevant to the monolithic representation of American national identity in Falling Man, which comes in contrast with the diverse alternatives proposed by O‘Neill in Netherland.
Hence, it might be true that the limited socio-political point of view of the main characters of Falling Man combined with their overly-stylized and elusive manners has triggered great dissatisfaction to the readers of the novel who have possibly expected to find in its pages a concise explanation of the motives behind the 9/11 attacks. However, Anker offers a valuable insight into this point by arguing that DeLillo manages to ―capture the domestic in jeopardy and indict narcissistic American self-reference‖ (464). So, if one combines the privileged status of the Manhattanites depicted in Falling Man with the symbolic values they appear to invest in their urban surroundings, it appears that DeLillo‘s well-known cultural commentary is not only present but perhaps more inwardly-turned than ever. As Harack argues, ―DeLillo sharply observes how the events of 9/11 have ruined the future; that is, they have damaged American self-confidence and exposed an hitherto hidden vulnerability‖ (32). By using America‘s most protected and carefree group of people as raw material, he sketches the socio-political reverberations of the 9/11 attacks at the exact point where it is more difficult to spot them, namely that being the intersection of their private lives with the public realm. Nevertheless, such a restricted representation admittedly ignores the Tsiokou 42
ways in which post-9/11 New York City is viewed from non-American characters, as we are about to see next.
1.4 Counter-Hegemonic Appropriations of New York City in Falling Man
As the previous section demonstrated, DeLillo‘s examination of the impact 9/11 has had on the private and public lives of New York City residents may be viewed as an implied criticism of America‘s narrow-mindedness. Arguably, his focus on white, upper-middle class
Manhattanites allows for a close inspection of the anxieties and insecurities experienced by privileged New Yorkers when they must come to terms with their city‘s—and country‘s for that matter—altered material and symbolic substance. Illuminating as this kind of criticism might be, it is also true that it fails to account for the immensely broad spectrum of influence that the attacks have had on the social and cultural texture of a metropolis such as New York
City.
Although the racial and ethnic diversity of the city is overlooked in Falling Man, the idea of Otherness occupies a significant place in the narrative. Undoubtedly, the fictionalization of 9/11 in a story where ―the dominant narrative focus is on the white upper- middle class‖ (Pӧhlman 53) lacks a concise address of ―strangeness‖ (Gray 32) and ―alterity‖
(Wilhite 12). This might be attributed to the inability of its narrative voices to register the significance of the terrorist attacks in conjunction with the city‘s diverse population. Yet, a careful account of the structure of the novel will reveal that DeLillo has artfully placed
America‘s Other at the very core of the novel. As various critics have observed, all three chapters in Falling Man are named after men who are, either directly or indirectly, related to terror and terrorism, but the elusiveness of their names initially conceals this connection
(Conte 569; Gamal 106; Carroll 3). Thus, the first chapter, titled ―Bill Lawton,‖ alludes to the Tsiokou 43
misheard name of ―Bin Laden‖ that Justin and his friends keep hearing on the news (Falling
Man 93); the second one, titled ―Ernst Hechinger,‖ carries the real name of Martin Ridnour,
Nina‘s lover from ―somewhere in Europe‖ (Falling Man 52) and former member of German terrorist groups during World War II; finally, the third chapter is titled ―David Janiak,‖ which is the name of the performance artist that appears once in each of the other chapters in his role as Falling Man.
In addition, the fragmented and chronologically disrupted central narrative of the disoriented Manhattanites in the novel is not limited to the title names each one of the chapters employs. They are separated by two intermittent chapters that contain the narrative of the terrorist, a young man named Hammad, who follows a Jihadist training in Hamburg,
Germany, and takes part in the terrorist plot of 9/11.The presence of these three characters—
Martin, Falling Man, and Hammad— in the novel illuminates from a different angle the main narrative of trauma and disintegration the characters in the novel have been trying to cope with. Their stories articulate the counter-narrative DeLillo strives to build through different modes of expression, not only in the structure of his novel, but also in the very structure of the city, as it is represented in his work.
More specifically, Falling Man, Martin, and Hammad are placed in interpolating positions with regard to both the city and the story—they make very brief yet powerful appearances as they are spatially related to places outside New York City.17 Specifically,
Martin is presented as simultaneously residing in various cities throughout Europe, David
Janiak has been educated in Moscow, while Hammad is a Middle Eastern living first in
17 This might be considered a weak point in the way otherness and difference are portrayed in the narrative of Falling Man, since the removal of these three characters from the center of the narrative creates the illusion of a homogeneous New York City. In Netherland, on the contrary, as will be shown in Chapter Two, non-Western and non-white immigrants constitute a significant part of the urban narrative and inform the novel‘s political premise. Tsiokou 44
Hamburg and then in Nokomis, Florida. When seen within an American context, they all stand for America‘s ethnic or racial Other. This relation of difference with the mainstream social, ethnic, and racial body of the U.S. acquires broader dimensions in the post-9/11 climate and is demonstrated in the novel through the oppositional attitude towards the dominant American mentality these characters seem to represent. With the city of New York functioning once again as the material as well as symbolic background for the articulation of this opposition, DeLillo comes up with both literal and metaphorical spaces where America‘s
Other can be substantiated and the harsh realities of the post-9/11 new order of things can be narrated.
It can be argued that the storyline of Hammad, the young terrorist involved in the attacks, constitutes DeLillo‘s most decisive attempt to construct a narrative of what Gray terms as ―strangeness.‖ Presented in three separate parts, the episodes involving Hammad are named after the character‘s location, so that each one of them brings him one step closer to
New York City, which is the novel‘s spatial and conceptual center. In this sense, Hammad‘s journey from Marienstrasse in Hamburg, Germany, to Nokomis, Florida, and finally to the
Hudson corridor as a passenger on the fatal flight, unfolds in parallel to the introduction of the notion of terrorism to America‘s dominant discourse. Frankly, the structure of the novel does not immediately shed light on the connection that there is between the two separate narratives. As Gamal remarks, ―[t]he pre-9/11 world of plotting terror is kept marginalized and apart from the other narrative sections that deal with the shattered post-9/11 lives of New Yorkers‖ (99). Yet, the hostile effect of the Jihad on the Western world expressed by Hammad finds its way from the periphery into the main narrative of the novel and fuels New Yorkers‘ expression of national trauma. Tsiokou 45
During his training, Hammad comes in contact with Western culture, which he learns to regard as ―twisted, hypocrite, […] corrupt of mind and body‖ (99). When in Florida, he contemplates upon his surroundings thinking that ―this world of lawns to water and hardware stacked on endless shelves, was total, forever, illusion‖ (219), and that the Americans around him ―control our world‖ and exercise ―world domination‖ (220). Arguably, such remarks, along with Hammad‘s repeatedly stated desire to die for Islam and his hatred for Jews and
Americans (100), suggest a rather stereotypical view of the terrorist subject (Gamad 96).
What this reveals is that DeLillo‘s way of imagining the Islamist subject draws from
American-centered presuppositions and stereotypes, thus excluding alternative interpretations of the significance the attacks have had for the U.S. nation and its role in global affairs.
At the same time, though, Hammad and the other members of the terrorist group in
Hamburg have ―studied architecture and engineering,‖ as well as ―urban planning‖ (99).This fact clearly indicates their interest in the Western, scientific conceptualization of space while it acknowledges their awareness of New York City‘s topography and its connectedness with the rest of the U.S. Interestingly, Hammad‘s outlook on the Western way of life and his contempt towards the Western cities he passes through, which he reduces to ―empty space‖ and ―dust‖ (221), powerfully contradicts the image of a mighty, albeit wounded, New York
City that the rest of DeLillo‘s narrative reproduces. More importantly, the systematic translation of the jihadist ―struggle‖ against the West in spatial terms, as a space that Islam has been deprived of and needs to be reclaimed, can extend to the physical as well as symbolic scars the attacks have left on the city and its citizens, scars which ultimately equal to a serious blow against America‘s illusions of superiority.
Of course, the vast ideological and ontological gap between the two narrative strands has to be effectively bridged in order for their interaction to become communicable. This role Tsiokou 46
is assigned to the character of Martin Ridnour, or Ernst Hechinger, who, according to Aaron
Derosa, functions as a ―Western interpreter‖ (165) for the rhetoric of terror to reach the minds of the numbed New Yorkers. In fact, Martin himself is presented as a careful balance between an insider and an outsider with regards to the city and its culture. Originating from
Germany, he visits New York City for brief periods of time, usually arriving from
―somewhere in Europe‖ (52), and at some point in the narrative Nina discloses his involvement in ―Kommune One,‖ a group acting ―against the German state, the fascist state‖ during the 1960s (184). Still, Martin remains a fellow white European and ―a successful art dealer, firmly embedded in the capitalist state‖ (Derosa 168). It is then obvious that Martin‘s character is deliberately constructed in such a way that his disregard against the American nation does not appear as hostile as it could have been if this was directly expressed by the attackers themselves. DeLillo chooses to ―charge‖ Martin with provocative statements, such as ―[w]e‘re all sick of America and Americans‖ (244) and ―for all the danger it makes in the world, America is going to become irrelevant‖ (245) because the in-betweenness of his identity renders him suitable for the dissemination of these ideas into the core of New York
City‘s social body. This is affirmed by Lianne‘s guilty yet honest view of Martin as ―a terrorist but […] one of ours, […] which meant godless, Western, white‖ (249). Derosa also justifies DeLillo‘s choice to use Martin as a surrogate for the terrorist rhetoric surrounding
9/11 events, since ―in the heavily charged context of post-9/11 discourse, allowing a terrorist to speak his mind would inevitably be received as [...] reductive and ill-conceived. Ernst cannot be so easily dismissed as the Ultimate Other because he is still one of us‖ (170).
There, Derosa‘s argument outlines Martin‘s place in the narrative as a crucial link between the colliding forces of American self-preoccupation and the terrorist‘s ideological opposition against it. Tsiokou 47
This is further substantiated through Martin‘s additional role as a link between New
York City and the other side of the Atlantic. In a masterful implementation of spatial politics,
DeLillo places Martin ―on one of the first transatlantic flights as schedules resumed‖ (52) after the attacks and brings him into the heart of Manhattan, where he articulates his anti- imperialistic ideas in his lover‘s apartment in Fifth Avenue. After his mission has been fulfilled, Martin is practically devoured by the city, as he disappears in an iconic picture of the crowded streets of New York, ―arm raised to the tide of passing cabs‖ (250). The character of Martin can thus be seen as a symbol for the transatlantic interconnections in effect between New York City and European urban centers, which have allowed the voicing of criticism from ―outside‖ the U.S. nation regarding its aggressive international politics in the aftermath of 9/11. However, as implied by Martin‘s disappearance in the urban chaos of
New York City, this external criticism does not easily find fruitful ground in the U.S., ultimately failing to establish a powerful reference for interpreting 9/11 without resorting to
American-based dominant discourses.
Nevertheless, the discourse Martin voices throughout the narrative does not disappear with him. On the contrary, DeLillo makes sure that the ideas Martin mediates will circulate and become absorbed by the social tissue of New York City. This task is fulfilled by the performance artist Falling Man or David Janiak, whose public performances reenact one of the most shocking reactions to the attacks: the lethal jump many people attempted in their effort to abandon the burning World Trade Center. With performances moving from ―an apartment building on Central Park West‖ to ―a loft of a building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn‖ and his ―flies at Carnegie Hall during a concert‖ (279), Janiak contaminates the city with his grim reproductions of memories that people have been struggling to forget and completely repress. As Lianne informs us after she first witnesses one of his appearances, Tsiokou 48
Falling Man ―appeared several times, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes‖ (40-
41). Much discussed for the way he is employed in DeLillo‘s novel so as to facilitate the representation of post-9/11 trauma and despair in the aftermath of the attacks (Derosa 165), the figure of Falling Man brings out the haunting power of DeLillo‘s narrative, which unavoidably extends to the depictions of the city that accompany Janiak‘s performances. In fact, the urban environment of New York City becomes a canvas for Falling Man‘s grim performance art and thus the city becomes actively engaged with the process of familiarizing with history‘s fresh wounds and the formulation of collective memory.
Unsurprisingly, even in the form of artistic mediation, these processes turn out to be particularly painful for New Yorkers. In the novel, their reactions against Falling Man‘s appearances are characterized by shock and anger. Watching his first appearance, Lianne notices ―people shouting at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body‘s last fleet breath and what it held‖ (41). What these words emphasize is that Falling Man‘s forced performances invoke such hostility because they are received as mockery of the tragedy of 9/11. Nonetheless, the rage of the audience against Falling Man is fueled not simply by his disrespect towards the tragic ―jumpers.‖ As it is revealed in the last part of the novel, these street performances are connected to the notorious photograph of
Falling Man taken by Associate Press photographer Richard Drew in the morning of 9/11
(Fig.1).
Fig. 1. Drew, Richard. The Falling Man. Photograph. Vanity Fair, Italy. 11 Sept. 2011. Web. 25 August 2016. Tsiokou 49
However, DeLillo provides no direct reference to the photograph, which, as journalist Tom
Junod informs us in his piece for Esquire, was rendered ―impermissible‖ the day after its press publication (n.p.). Instead, DeLillo chooses to reproduce it verbally via Lianne‘s point of view: ―[t]he man headlong, the towers behind him. […] Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific‖ (282). These lines place emphasis on the arrested downward movement captured in the notorious photograph, which is, as it seems, the picture‘s most prominent aspect. In the description DeLillo presents us with, this ―free fall‖ is precisely what provokes horror; the jumper‘s body aiming directly towards the ground stands as a reminder of terrorism‘s inescapable threat.
By invoking this particular photograph through Janiak‘s performances all over New
York City, DeLillo touches upon a challenging issue that the American public had to come to terms with in the aftermath of the attacks, that is America‘s helplessness against raw terror and inevitable death. Junod notes the public‘s reaction against the jumpers‘ photos when he argues that ―in the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo—the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes‖ (n.p). DeLillo‘s narrative, however, leaves no space for denial. Janiak continues his persistent appearances since his intention is ―to shock the bourgeois sensibilities of his unwitting audience‖ (Anker 579).
While New Yorkers try to regain their pre-9/11 sense of order in their urban surroundings, the disturbing performances of Falling Man keep acting out the terror and defeat they all have recently experienced. It is as if Falling Man‘s public art reenacts and repeats in every corner of the city the terrorist discourse that American collective memory tries so hard to put aside.
In this light, the counter-narrative of David Janiak, Falling Man of New York City‘s Tsiokou 50
neighborhoods, exposes the ruptures and illusions of the dominant narrative of the metropolis. By articulating the most disturbing and ‗humiliating‘ aspect of the 9/11 attacks through his performance, he brings the unprecedented sense of vulnerability back to the city, not allowing it to be effaced. At the same time, the depiction of Falling Man as an urban street performer alludes to the significance of urban space as a shared site for the register and expression of collective memory, including its hurtful, traumatic aspects.
In the grim narrative of Falling Man, almost every character appears to be traumatized by the terrorist attacks. Whether their suffering is amplified by the compelling need to acknowledge the altered realities they experience as American citizens is one of the several interpretations of DeLillo‘s private stories. As the present discussion of the novel has attempted to show, the measure of personal trauma in Falling Man is artfully stitched onto the—very real and essentially public—spatial impact of the attacks. Looking at DeLillo‘s article ―In the Ruins of the Future,‖ one can discover the writer‘s intention to incorporate the politics of space in his own way of handling disaster. DeLillo firmly believes that ―[t]he writer begins in the towers‖ and ―tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space‖ (n.p.). The implementation of Ground Zero as a starting point for the fictional reproduction of the attacks and their aftermath leads to the utilization of New York City as a terrain of narratorial potential and action. In fact, the New York cityscape, which stands for technological and cultural progress, economic growth, opportunity, and achievement in
Western culture, becomes in Falling Man the setting of catastrophe that the readers are invited to approach from a political, ideological, national, but also global point of view.
DeLillo, however, is not interested here in analyzing the factors behind the 9/11 attacks. His narration takes a critical stance towards America‘s most deeply rooted illusory discourses of Tsiokou 51
exceptionalism and invincibility, an element that DeLillo has been keen on commenting on throughout his writing career. In the case of 9/11 though, he avoids exposing mechanisms of political rhetoric since his interest now is located in the personal tensions and conflicts his characters experience.
Certainly, there is no single way of telling the story that began with the 9/11 attacks. This is not only because of the immensity of the event itself, but mainly because of the multi-dimensionality of its repercussions. While it is true that literature is expected to insightfully reflect on the aftermath of 9/11 on a much larger scale, it is also necessary to stress the crucial role literature comes to play in dealing with the changes the attacks have brought about on a global level. In this sense, the literature that emerges after 9/11 in the U.S. is expected to design and produce new concepts for understanding both the attacks and their extended aftermath in their sheer complexity. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn highlight the need to ―define a new body of literature—literature after 9/11—that reveals the instability of 9/11 as an event and the ways that literature contests 9/11‘s co-option for narrowly political ends‖ (3). This call for new tropes of representation in the post-9/11 era affirms the challenges the 9/11 attacks present literature with and the responsibility of writers to abandon traditional narrative patterns in order to re-conceptualize the shifting realities emerging after the event.
Such demands are even more pressing when it comes to the field of American literature. Given that the 9/11 attacks have injured the construct of American exceptionalism,
American literature also needs to depart from a similar underlying rhetoric which is inherent in its design. This task becomes particularly challenging if one considers the tendency towards national superiority that informs the American literary tradition. As Scott
McClintock contends, ―the mode of prophetic history in American literature relates to what is Tsiokou 52
often called ‗American exceptionalism‘‖ (34). After 9/11, the register of the nation‘s history in its literary production has to acknowledge the external influences that the U.S. is exposed to. According to Judith Butler, ―if we are to come to understand ourselves as global actors, and acting within a historically established field, and one that has other actions in play, we will need to emerge from the narrative perspective of US unilateralism […] to consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others‖ (7). It thus becomes apparent that in the post-9/11 era, the fantasies of national singularity in American literature need to be replaced by new modes through which writers will envision the mutual impact between the U.S. and other nations.
Clearly, the new historical and political conditions that derive from 9/11 have created the demand for new premises on which to re-establish the patterns of American literary production. In this light, the ideas of national superiority in American literature need to be replaced by concepts that account for the new role of the U.S. in a transnational framework of global dimensions, as we are about to see in the second chapter of the current thesis.
Tsiokou 53
CHAPTER TWO
New York City, Immigration, and Transnational Relations after 9/11 in Joseph
O’Neill’s Netherland
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. ―Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!‖ cries she with silent lips. ―Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!‖ —Emma Lazarus, ―The New Colossus‖ (1883)
2. Situating Netherland within Post-9/11 Fiction
The second chapter of the current thesis explores how New York City and the U.S. can be reimagined after 9/11. Using Joseph O‘Neill‘s18 novel Netherland (2008), I set out to examine the ways in which New York City is represented after the terrorist attacks, but this time with an important twist. To be more specific, my primary concern in this chapter is the study of the literary representation of New York City with special focus on its racial, ethnic, and cultural kaleidoscope during a period of heightened political, social, as well as
18 Joseph O‘Neill is a novelist of Irish and Turkish origin. Born in Ireland and raised in Holland, O‘Neill studied Law in England and moved to New York City in 1998. As the writer has stated in several interviews, he believes that his lack of identification with a single country and nationality has allowed him to maintain a global understanding of current events. Although his early novels, This Is the Life (1991) and The Breezes (1996) belong to the field of British or Irish literature, O‘Neill considers Netherland to be ―an American novel‖ as well as his ―first novel as an American novelist‖ (n.p.), as he explains in an interview by Katie Bacon in The Telegraph. More information can be found in O‘Neill‘s interviews by Charlie Reilly, William Skidelsky, and Duncan White. Tsiokou 54
international crisis. In so doing, I wish to examine the depiction of the city‘s immigrant communities and their relation to urban public space after the events of 9/11.
The novel tells the retrospective story of a Dutchman, Hans van der Broek, an equities analyst who lives in New York City with his wife Rachel Bolton, a British lawyer. After the
9/11 attacks, Rachel‘s heightened sense of insecurity leads her to move back to London with their little son, Jake, leaving Hans alone in a city in crisis. Apart from dividing his life between New York City and London, Hans becomes gradually involved in the city‘s cricket community as a way to overcome his loneliness. Through cricket, he gets in touch with the immigrant population of New York City and befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian who introduces him to the city‘s diversity and peripheral neighborhoods. Eventually, Hans moves to London to reunite with his family, but his experience in New York City has left a profound mark on his sense of self.
In Netherland, O Neill manages to bring to the foreground those aspects of post-9/11 reality that are not addressed by the narrative of Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man, which stays at the traumatic impact and despair triggered by the attacks themselves. In fact, the approach that is followed in the current chapter is in line with the novel‘s critical reception on both sides of the Atlantic. Many commentators praise Netherland on the basis of its standing apart from the majority of post-9/11 novels produced in the U.S.19 This mainly happens because it is thought to be launching a truly invigorating outlook on the many and various aspects of
American life that have been irreversibly altered after the terrorist events. Dwight Garner‘s online review for The New York Times articulates a feeling of dissatisfaction left behind by some of the most popular authors of 9/11 fiction and valorizes the search ―for something else
19 Some of the most indicative post-9/11 novels by American writers include Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), John Updike‘s Terrorist (2006), Jay McInerney‘s The Good Life (2006), and Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man (2007). Tsiokou 55
— the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror‖ (n.p.). Clearly, it is impossible to say whether Netherland does indeed fulfill such demanding expectations. Still, most reviewers affirm O‘Neill‘s extraordinary ability to maintain a sharp eye towards America‘s new role in the post-9/11 era in an increasingly interdependent but globalized world. More particularly, in his online review in The Guardian, Christopher Tayler remarks that O‘Neill manages ―to reveal fresh permutations of the national story that America tells itself‖ (n.p.), while Garner points out that the writer ―cracks open a teeming world on the fringes of
Manhattan, and through it we witness the aspirations of countless men who otherwise are invisible to wealthy Manhattanites‖ (n.p.). Of course, it is O‘Neill‘s own foreigner‘s background and his own experience of New York City as an immigrant of Turkish/Irish origin that makes such a portrayal possible.
The perspective that Netherland offers within the genre of the post-9/11 novel also extends to its formal and stylistic qualities. For James Wood, who has reviewed Netherland for The New Yorker, the novel demonstrates an ―attentive, rich prose about New York in crisis that, refreshingly, is not also prose in crisis‖ (n.p.).20 Interestingly, Wood connects the authorial ―steady hand‖ and ―good ear‖ in the narrative of Netherland with the construction of the ―forked European perspective of the novel‘s narrator‖ (n.p.), which results in the successful register of the city‘s contradictory aspects. While the effect created by this nationally distanced point of view of the narrator constitutes an asset for Wood, it is not received with the same enthusiasm by Tyler. As the latter points out, Hans‘s ―elaborate syntax and vigorously yet fitfully Americanised vocabulary finally seem more like a literary
20 Here, Wood‘s comment about ―prose in crisis‖ makes an indirect reference to the wider argument against the formal and stylistic power of fiction that deals with 9/11. For more on that topic, see Gray. Tsiokou 56
contrivance than a plausible human voice,‖ the result of which is ―a determinedly overambitious style‖ (n.p.). Even though the reception of the novel‘s stylistic profile ranges from innovatively inspired to overtly artificial, it is certain that the Dutch narrator‘s origins and his position as an immigrant in New York City leave an ineligible mark on the formal properties of the narrative.
2.1 “Deterritorializing” the Post-9/11 Metropolis, Hybridizing Post-9/11 Fiction
Arguably, one of the novel‘s most intriguing aspects is that it avoids exhausting itself with the description of the actual attacks and their traumatic aftermath. Actually, the events of that day remain largely in the background of the narrative, illuminating pressing contemporary issues such as urban diversity, immigration, and global geopolitical conflict.
More specifically, I am going to argue that, in Netherland, O‘Neill displaces the 9/11 attacks from the center of the narrative, thus opening the story up to multiple interpretations of the emerging post-9/11 realities in New York City and the world at large.
Certainly, the analysis of a narrative that operates simultaneously on multiple levels has to be based on a synthesizing methodology. More specifically, the fact that Netherland combines so many distinct thematic strands—life in New York City after 9/11, the immigrant subcultures in the city‘s periphery, ethnic and racial difference in post 9/11 America, the gradual disintegration of national borders, and other—urges us in the analysis provided in the current chapter to resort, even though partly, to an interdisciplinary approach. This means that the present discussion of Netherland draws from diverse theoretical fields, namely urban studies, ethnic studies, and transnationalism. Each one of these theoretical fields of study offers various insights into the story that often lead to overlapping interpretations. For this reason, the framework that best accounts for the fuzziness between the issues Netherland Tsiokou 57
presents us with is that of ―de-centering.‖ To be more precise, most of the viewpoints discussed in this chapter result from the different geographical locations where the story in the novel takes place. This brings Netherland in line with a broader demand for ―a much more globalized and dialogical approach that acknowledges the lack of ‗a center‘ and accounts for the gaps, oppositions, and comparisons both transnationally and cross- culturally‖ (Yemenedzi-Malathouni et al, Ex-Centric Narratives 4). Even so, the combination of these different theoretical approaches turns out to be rather challenging due to the inevitable open-endedness that characterizes the text itself. For this reason, the aspects of
Netherland that are discussed in this chapter manage to shed light only on certain issues that emerge in the multi-leveled, heterogeneous, and at times contradictory world built up in the novel.
Given these challenges, the standpoint of urban studies proves advantageous for the present discussion of Netherland. This happens because it provides a flexible ground on which other perspectives, deriving from ethnic studies and transnationalism, can develop.
Before delving deeper into how each one of these standpoints features in the novel, it is necessary to account for the alternative depiction of New York City Netherland offers to the contemporary readers compared to the one appearing in DeLillo‘s Falling Man. As it is demonstrated in Chapter One, DeLillo‘s narrative predominantly revolves around the terrorized area of Manhattan. More specifically, the concentration of the novel on prominent areas of the city, including Ground Zero, results in a limited understanding of the ways the
9/11 attacks have affected the extremely complicated life in New York City. Indeed, Falling
Man focuses on the reproduction of iconic 9/11 scenes and the characters‘ obsession with the disrupted comfort of their privileged lifestyles. Not surprisingly, this does not leave much Tsiokou 58
room for the exploration of possible ways to escape trauma and redefine life in the post-9/11 city.
Netherland, on the other hand, demonstrates a different approach to the cityscape, which does not revolve around the ruins of the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan. On the contrary, the narrative is set within a number of New York City‘s neighborhoods, such as
Central and South Brooklyn, many of which bear a distinctive cultural or ethnic character.
For this reason, the portrayal of the people who make up the city‘s population goes beyond the mainstream depiction of New Yorkers as white, middle-class, and American-born citizens. In other words, New York City in Netherland becomes what Gray describes as
―culturally hybrid spaces, where engagements between different cultures […] are performative and identity is open to constant negotiations and renegotiations‖ (65). Indeed, the readers of Netherland encounter in its pages characters from diverse sociocultural and ethnic backgrounds that take our mind away from the paralyzing impact of the terrorist attacks.
This alternative way of representing urban space in post-9/11 fiction is valorized by
Gray, as part of his broader call for the ―deterritorialization‖21 of post-9/11 narratives, in order to ―present post-9/11 America as a transcultural space‖ (55). More importantly, in the context of his ―deterritorialization‖ strategy, the focus shifts towards what Gray terms
―interstitial space‖ that stands for ―a locus of interaction between contending national and cultural constituencies‖ (17). Given that space is almost always invested with different, yet often coexisting, sets of meaning, it follows that what is imagined as American national space needs to be reconceptualized so as to incorporate the miscellaneous forces that are already at
21 This term is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari‘s On the Line (1983), in which the two theorists urge readers to ―form rhizomes, expand [their] own territory by deterritorialization‖ (qtd. in Grey 55) in an attempt to shed light on the diverse, heterogeneous forces that make up the American nation. Tsiokou 59
play within its territory due to the extremely diverse, racial and ethnic, make up of its population. Arguably, Netherland articulates this demand by picturing the immigrant population of New York City as ―a patch of America, sprinkled with the foreign-born strangely at play‖ (158). It thus becomes evident that the emphasis the novel places on the heterogeneity of the cityscape agrees with Gray‘s vision about a kind of post-9/11 cultural production that will manage to ―reimagine disaster by presenting us with an America situated between cultures‖ (17). Evidently, the standpoint Gray is proposing here is based on the need to acknowledge the altered significance of New York City as well as the U.S. in general—a need which is partly answered by first reinventing the representations of urban space in post-
9/11 texts. In other words, post-9/11 literature is assigned not only with the task to explain and rationalize the attacks themselves, but also with the responsibility of envisioning alternative ways of coming to terms with the national crisis imposed by terrorism in the USA.
Indeed, the multi-leveled portrayal of the post-9/11 metropolis in Netherland suggests that the interpretation of urban space can move beyond the discourse of terrorism, which can be examined alongside other aspects of city life. To be more precise, the novel pays detailed attention to the lives of immigrant subcultures in the aftermath of 9/11 and thus prioritizes a reading of New York City as an inherently immigrant metropolis. This understanding of urban space derives from the close connection that there is between urban space and immigration, which, according to Marie Price and Lisa Benton-Short, ―is a quintessentially urban phenomenon‖ (2). This is especially true for New York City whose ―diversity and sheer number of immigrants‖ make it ―the largest immigrant destination in the world‖ (Price and Benton-Short 8). The underscoring of this particular aspect of the city acquires additional significance when viewed in a post-9/11 context, as the one introduced in Netherland. This is because it shifts the focus from the impact of the 9/11 attacks to the city‘s foreign-born Tsiokou 60
residents and the challenges they have been faced with due to the heightened suspicion against non-white and non-Christian immigrants. As Ariane Chebel D‘Appollonia informs us,
―there is a broad assumption on both sides of the Atlantic that the people who pose the highest threat to homeland security are immigrants and their children (irrespective of their legal status), and, more precisely, Muslim foreigners and Muslim nationals‖ (114). This assumption, which is fueled by the national and religious profiling of terrorists, contributes to the construction of a homogenizing stereotype as to who is identified as ―other.‖ This stereotype is in turn employed to control and segregate citizens further and results in the marginalization of a significant part of the city‘s population.
Such disciplinary practices constitute a significant aspect of the post-9/11 realities both in New York City in particular and the U.S. nation in general. As D‘Appollonia remarks, ―[i]n the aftermath of 9/11, the ‗trade off‘ between liberty and security was legitimized by the assumption that sacrificing some rights would provide more security‖
(131). In fact, the global outbreak of terrorist attacks during the second decade of the twenty- first century has normalized the imposition of extreme security measures in cities, along with the subsequent invasion of citizen‘s privacy due to the usage of control and surveillance defense mechanisms. Nevertheless, the issue of heightened civil security as a reaction to terrorism has a different register for white Western citizens and non-white, non-Western ones. In the Introduction to Globalization, Citizenship, and the War on Terror (2007),
Maurice Mullard and Bankole A.Cole emphasize the increased discrimination that is exercised against racial and religious others by stating that ―Muslim communities in the USA and Europe are retreating from public spaces and having to continually prove their innocence and loyalty‖ (7). Taking the realities of the discriminated immigrant communities into account, one can argue that the expression of post-9/11 insecurity and disorientation in post- Tsiokou 61
9/11 narratives has further implications for the representation of a terrorized urban space as is the case of New York City.
Netherland addresses this issue by including in the narrative marginal characters, such as the West Indian cricket players and the Turkish, angel-clad character named Mehmet
Taspinar. As the angel confesses, ―New York City […] was the one place in the world where he could be himself—at least, until recently‖ (44). In the novel, the ethnically diverse population of the city and their need to claim their presence in its public spaces play a dominant role in the narrative whose action often takes place in various ethnic neighborhoods. In this respect, ―deterritorialization‖ or the move away from centralized downtown areas constitutes a focal point of attention in post-9/11 narratives, which brings to the fore different aspects of contemporary metropolitan life. In the heart of these issues lies the problem of citizenship which after the 9/11 attacks takes on different dimensions. In his address to the nation following the disaster, former President George W. Bush declared that
―[t]his is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace‖ (n.p.). This unity, however, comes in direct juxtaposition with the diverse American character. For Mullard and Cole, ―the war on terror has created racial tensions and has revived the colonial legacy of first- and second-class citizens‖ (7). They also argue that in the
U.S., the general tendency towards globalization on the one hand, and the backlash of political and racial discrimination on the other have ―generated a meaning of citizenship that is defined by individualism, categorization and the suspicion of the other‖ (7). Thus, it appears that the façade of homogeneity dominating the political rhetoric in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks conceals the inequalities and tensions that are embedded in the American society. In this light, the immigrants‘ quest for public presence, as viewed in the novel, Tsiokou 62
transforms the cityscape into a site of political struggle, where civil engagement, national identity, and belonging are endlessly contested.
In fact, one of the basic ideas that underlie the narrative in Netherland is the need to reconfigure the conceptualization of American national identity. Arguably, the concept of a wounded American national identity is also present in other post-9/11novels, such as Falling
Man. As it was discussed in the previous chapter, DeLillo‘s narrative is preoccupied with the inability of New Yorkers to come to terms with the debunking of American exceptionalism after the 9/11 attacks. In Netherland, however, American exceptionalism belongs to the past with attention now paid to the immigrant populations of New York City, ranging from the corporate and cosmopolitan Dutch protagonist to the West Indian and African members of the city‘s cricket subcultures. All these racially and ethnically diverse characters demonstrate
―different scales of belonging‖ (Price and Benton-Short 9) as regards their position within
American society that leads to the production of a polymorphous and versatile American national identity.
Hence, post-9/11 New York City is presented in Netherland as a site where the endeavor to define American national identity is interrupted but also paradoxically encouraged. This point largely draws from Neil Leach‘s ideas on the impact of the ―built environment‖ on the formation of national identity (178). According to Leach, the attacks on the World Trade Center have transformed the self-definition of the American nation in unpredictable ways. Specifically, he argues ―that the destruction of these towers has had a radical impact on the American psyche and that it is against the backdrop of the now absent towers that a new sense of American identity seems to have been forged‖ (171). Indeed, the destabilization of New York City‘s status as an urban symbol of unlimited progress, power, and achievement has also caused the disruption of the models of national and social identity Tsiokou 63
that had dominated the public life of the city up to that point. What Netherland achieves through its shift away from the wounded Manhattan skyline is to transform this loss into an opportunity to reimagine and reinvent Americanness. The depiction of New York City as a heterogeneous, multiethnic metropolis is crucial to this process. This is because it allows a close inspection of socially marginal characters and groups that seek to forge links with
America beyond the national trauma caused by the 9/11 attacks. In this light, situating the narrative in the periphery of the metropolis leads to the examination of peripheral, but increasingly significant, expressions of American national identity.
More importantly, the fact that several alternative versions of Americanness coexist within the wide range of ethnic and cultural identities gathered in New York City leads to
―the formation of a new U.S. identity—an identity that is, by definition, always in a state of re-negotiation and never totalizing‖ (Leach 189). Central to this concept of American national identity is David A. Hollinger‘s ―postethnic‖ perspective on the U.S. For Hollinger, this ―postethnic perspective recognizes that most individuals live in many circles simultaneously and that the actual living of an individual life entails a shifting division of the several ‗we‘s‘ of which the individual is a part‖ (106). Of course, an understanding of
Americanness as a mere fragment of a person‘s self-definition appears in direct opposition to the pretext of singularity implied in traditional modes of American identity. The 9/11 attacks have undoubtedly contributed to this shift. Despite being marked by a ―singularity‖ and
―unprecedentedness‖ (Duara 35), the 9/11 attacks have also exposed the susceptibility of the
U.S. to external threats that have accentuated the nation‘s involvement in global networks of power. This leads to what Rob Kroes describes as ―the need […] to see America as presenting specific historical configurations of forces that affect the United States as much as other parts of the world‖ and place ―the United States within a transnational and comparative Tsiokou 64
perspective‖ (295-96). Thus, the re-negotiation of American national identity in novels such as Netherland reveals an increased awareness of the nation‘s global interdependencies.
For this reason, approaching the literary depiction of post-9/11 New York City from the standpoint of transnationalism demands a much broader framework from which to look at the new realities that have emerged in the aftermath of the attacks. The term ―transnational‖ here stands for the suggestion ―that the world is becoming increasingly interdependent, interrelated, mobile, and subject to pressing issues of global cohabitation‖ (G. W. Brown 81).
This presupposes the need to do away with rigid national conceptualizations in fiction and employ paths that will ―move beyond single center analysis‖ (Manning and Taylor 3-8). At the same time, a transnational outlook on both writing and interpreting fiction brings in what
Smatie Yemenedzi-Malathouni, Tatiani Rapatzikou, and Eleftheria Arapoglou refer to as ―a world of groundless centers and repositioned localities and borders‖ (Re-Inventing/Re-
Presenting xv). In this respect, the placing of post-9/11 New York City within a transnational geography establishes multiple centers from which to interpret the impact of the 9/11 attacks and the nation‘s new role in a globalized world.
In Netherland, this perspective is facilitated with the use of a ―cosmopolitan‖ first- person narrator and the division of the story in intersecting strands that take place in different historical and geographical dimensions. As a result, the primacy of a purely American perspective is destabilized as we are presented with multiple perspectives of America constructed by its foreign-born residents. The incorporation of such an outlook enhances post-9/11 narratives that now move beyond American-specific issues so as to respond to global concerns. This is facilitated in the novel by placing a non-American narrator at the center of the narrative, a strategy which destabilizes the nation-specific character of post-9/11 novels, as I am going to explain in the following sections. Tsiokou 65
2.2 Urban Space as “Alien” Territory: a Foreigner’s View of Post-9/11 New York City
It is without doubt that the first-person narrative in Netherland demands that we pay special attention to the proximity and angle from which the narrator, Hans van der Broek, views New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. This is because the main character‘s status as a Dutch immigrant grants him with a unique point of view from which to comment upon life in post-9/11 New York City. More importantly, Hans‘s foreignness produces different, more indirect ways of identifying with the city, a process that is decisively affected by Hans‘s post-
9/11 experience in the metropolis.
On the one hand, his foreigner‘s position places him at a considerable distance from the nationally inflected weight of the terrorist attacks. Thus, his impressions of the city remain to a certain extent disengaged from the national trauma that marks DeLillo‘s Falling
Man. On the other hand, as a New York City resident, he is profoundly affected by the attacks, which bring changes to his family life as well as to the way he identifies with the city. As a result, the instability and insecurity that are often projected on the urban space of post-9/11 New York City are combined with the fresh perspective of a newcomer, whose enthusiasm for the city‘s marvels is not completely shaken by the disaster. At the same time, the portrayal of the city through the eyes of a nationally peripheral character recontextualizes the way the cityscape appears in post-9/11 novels by simultaneously occupying different levels of proximity to it, thus shifting the center of the urban narrative from Ground Zero to the multi-ethnic aspects of New York City life.
For one to delve deeper in the narrator‘s multi-angled perspective, one needs to pay attention to Hans‘s first person point of view that is noticeably informed by his social background. Working as ―an equities analyst for […] a merchant bank‖ (Netherland 31),
Hans is not merely a European immigrant in the U.S., but belongs to a group, known by Tsiokou 66
Matthew Brown, as ―elite émigrés‖ (117). Thus, his status grants him with a ―geographical and social flexibility,‖ which represents ―the ideas of postmodern global metropolitanism‖
(Golimowska, ―Navigating‖ 33). As it is often demonstrated in the novel, Hans enjoys a privileged mobility that allows him to travel frequently across the Atlantic as well as to work, temporarily or permanently, anywhere in the world. This freedom has certainly shaped his perception of topography: he often occupies a vantage point of view from which to view cities or even countries, while this position endows him with a sense of control over both actual and imagined spaces. In several parts of the story, Hans faces the city from above— bridges, high buildings, airplanes—even virtually through Google Earth. In fact, Hans‘s vantage point becomes a recurring theme in Netherland and informs the perspective the narrative offers in relation to urban space.
Viewed from the protagonist‘s perspective, the urban environment is often perceived and represented as a clearly organized structure, which is easy to navigate and make sense of.
One of the opening New York City scenes in the narrative follows Hans and his wife who gaze at a cricket field along Broadway Street. Hans recalls that ―[f]rom our elevated vantage point the scene—Van Cortlandt Park on a Sunday—appeared as a cheerful pell-mell‖ (10), which he is able to reproduce in detail. Although this take on New York City belongs to
Hans‘s carefree pre-9/11 lifestyle in the city, his post-9/11 habits are still characterized by a similarly advantageous perspective. In one of the episodes from his solitary post-9/11 years in
New York City, Hans drives on ―the top deck of the Verrazano Bridge,‖ and searches for a familiar view of the ocean, which, ―when glimpsed from New York City is quite something, a scarcely believable slab of otherness‖ (155). Even during a massive blackout that resembles the paralyzing terror of the 9/11 attacks, Hans once again occupies a vantage position ―at a tenth-floor window surveying the panicked, immobilized traffic on West 23rd Street‖ (255). Tsiokou 67
This detached, bird‘s eye view the main character demonstrates brings to mind Michel de
Certeau‘s piece ―Walking the City,‖ where the writer elaborates on the ―totalizing‖ (92) experience of reading the city from above. Away from ―the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic,‖ this view from above renders ―the complexity of the city readable‖ (de Certeau 92). In this light, Hans‘s elevated perspective can be interpreted as an exercise of his ability—as well as his need—to comprehend his host city and his position in it. Nevertheless, this view of the city from above might produce the illusion of order and totality, which in turn could be seen as interfering with Hans‘s effort to make sense of his new environment. His detached point of view can thereby be connected to his lack of identification with the host city and can be interpreted as a sign of his reluctance to assume Americanness as part of his national identity.
Hans‘s detached vantage point also carries certain political implications, which become particularly evident due to the agitated post-9/11 climate in the U.S. Despite being a foreigner, Hans undoubtedly enjoys the privileges of his Western-European origin and corporate background, which allow him both uninterrupted mobility and residence in the U.S.
As a result, he exhibits a political aloofness with regards to the attacks and the subsequent
War on Terror declared by the U.S., to the extent that he is aware of himself as ―a political- ethical idiot‖ (132). However, his detachment is inevitably interrupted in several occasions by the impact of the attacks reflecting, as M. Brown puts it, ―the anxieties of post-9/11 life in the city‖ (129). When in Netherland Hans, his wife Rachel, and their young son are forced to relocate from their Tribeca loft due to the emergency state in the downtown area, Hans‘s point of view of the city is forced to shift as well. The forcefulness of both private and public crisis inevitably compromises Hans‘s privileged point of view to a great extent. To be more precise, the family‘s temporary residence at the midtown Chelsea Hotel and the gradual Tsiokou 68
disintegration of Hans and Rachel‘s relationship, which culminates in Rachel‘s return to her native London, decisively affect the way the protagonist reflects upon the wounded post-9/11 city. According to Karolina Golimowska, ―it is only after 9/11 when mobility—the foundation of Hans‘s fluctuating life—is endangered that he feels an emotional attachment to the metropolis‖ (―Navigating‖ 34). Golimowska‘s point is particularly interesting because it implies that the collective crisis imposed upon New York City in the aftermath of 9/11 transcends ethnic or national affiliations and deeply affects the relation of non-American residents with the city.
Feeling abandoned and disoriented ―in a city gone mad‖ (Netherland 25), Hans translates the turmoil around him in grim urban imagery, as it is frequently the case with post-9/11 novels. Right after the first reference in the novel to 9/11, New York City is viewed from Hans‘s room in Chelsea Hotel as follows:
Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross-streets glowed as if each held a
dawn. The tail lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts,
the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a
radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to
my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York. (23)
The unsettlement the main character experiences in response to the attacks is in line with the way the urban setting features here. This description of the New York City lights brings together the distinctive vivacity of its streets and the state of emergency that is established in the aftermath of the attacks. Although still enchanting, the glow of the cityscape seems to carry grim undertones for the observer. More significantly, the interrelation between the narrator‘s mental state and the cityscape is clearly underscored. On the one hand, the
―garbage of light‖ provokes Hans‘s ―mad thought,‖ but on the other hand, the way he Tsiokou 69
interprets the illuminated city from above echoes the anxiety and insecurity the New York
City residents experience after the disaster.
This feeling of anxiety is also experienced by Rachel who works in Times Square, due to the suspicion of a subsequent attack on that area (24). In Hans‘s words:
The Times Square subway station was a special ordeal for her. Every time I set foot in
that makeshift cement underworld [...] I tasted her anxiety. Throngs endlessly climbed
and descended the passages and walkways like Escher‘s tramping figures. Bare high-
wattage bulbs hung from the low-lying girders, and temporary partitions and wooden
platforms and posted handwritten directions signaled that around us a hidden and
incalculable process of construction or ruination was being undertaken. (24)
Once again, the depiction of the urban environment reflects the psychological state of the characters, who in turn perceive their surroundings to be threatening and distrustful. What is more, this feeling can also be interpreted as a reaction towards the continuous flux in which the city finds itself. The negative register of this description affirms the insecurity that the urban environment inspires to the citizens, who feel uneasy because they experience a lack of control over their surroundings. Regardless of Hans‘s otherwise distanced but cosmopolitan outlook, New York City emerges here as ―a metropolis rendered suddenly unfamiliar or unmappable, an uncanny cityscape inscribed by a sense of menace and angst‖ (Wilhite 6-7).
This comment further highlights the main character‘s vulnerability against his surroundings, a feeling that can be attributed to the transformative effect the attacks have had on the cityscape, while it also compromises his advantageous viewpoint.
Additionally, the feeling of insecurity that is associated with the cityscape is perceived by Hans to be a collective experience for the city‘s residents. In the months that follow after his wife and son‘s departure, the main character‘s routine involves long hours of Tsiokou 70
gazing outside his windows from his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel towards the city. As he likes to imagine, the urban view has the same engaging effect for others as well. In Hans‘s words: ―[m]y assumption was that all around me, in the lustrous boxes thickly chequering the night, countless New Yorkers […] stood at their windows, as I often did, to observe the winter clouds rubbing out—so, from my vantage point, it appeared—the skyscrapers in the middle distance‖ (124). It seems then that ―the vaporous, enormously disappearing city‖
(124) emerges here as a meeting point against which Hans is able to identify as a member of
New York City‘s social whole. This imagined unity is not merely the main character‘s own reaction against his personal post-9/11 sense of desolation. As E. Ann Kaplan reports, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks is characterized by a particularly heightened sense of collective insecurity as a response to the mass terror spread by 9/11. Kaplan writes: ―I felt a connection to strangers that I had never felt before. On the subway too, we looked at each other as if understanding what we all were facing. For at any moment, it seemed, another attack could take place […]. Nowhere was safe, just as nothing had been safe in wartime
England. And we were in this together‖ (9). Similarly to Hans‘s sense of participation in an imagined urban audience, Kaplan‘s recollection of her post-9/11 experience accentuates the tendency of New Yorkers to seek unity in the wounded cityscape, thus affirming the city‘s key role in the experiences of both trauma and healing.
The fact that for Hans this identification with the city is reinforced by the subtle yet pervasive influence of 9/11 gains additional significance considering his foreign status. More specifically, living through the event of 9/11, even as a temporarily-settled immigrant resident, seems to have strengthened the protagonist‘s emotional and psychological ties with
New York City. This bond is affirmed later in the same episode when Hans, ―in search of a fresh point of view,‖ looks outside again only to find out that the Empire State Building has Tsiokou 71
completely disappeared into the snowstorm (Netherland 124). Hans‘s shocked reaction alludes to the trauma inflicted by the abrupt absence of the twin towers from the New York
City skyline, a situation which is also reproduced in Falling Man as mentioned in Chapter
One. In Hans‘s case, the traumatized relation to the city does not only expose the powerful inscription of the disaster onto the urban environment, which is ―haunted by absences in the landscape‖ (Wilhite 6), but it also facilitates the main character‘s stronger attachment to his host city. If we take into account the nationally inflected symbolism of 9/11, it becomes apparent that Hans‘s participation in the collective trauma expressed through the way he perceives the destroyed and altered cityscape also signals his growing identification with his host nation.
This realization occurs later in the narrative, when Hans has permanently returned from New York City to London and happens to be present in a discussion about 9/11. As
Hans informs us, his British acquaintances argue that the 9/11 attacks are ―[n]ot such a big deal […] when you think of everything that has happened since,‖ (240) a statement he directly contradicts. Although he immediately thinks that it would not be honest to take advantage of his ―geographical proximity to the catastrophe‖ (241) in order to gain sympathy or attention, his intense reaction indicates his emotional ties to the 9/11 events, which, as
Golimowska puts it, ―have Americanized him‖ (The Post-9/11 City 189). Interestingly, this particular episode follows directly after Hans‘s observation that his affiliation to New York
City is largely overlooked in England because he is ―precluded by nationality from commenting on any other place rather than Holland‖ (Netherland 239). This limited scope on national identity on the part of English people seems to kindle the main character‘s feeling of nostalgia for ―the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself‖ (230). Thus, Hans‘s insistence on the significance of the 9/11 attacks appears to Tsiokou 72
stem from his urge to affirm the American side of his national identity, now further enhanced due to his 9/11 experience.
Up to this point, it has become clear that the post-9/11 New York City manifestations in Netherland break with the fixation on the attacks that dominates the characters‘ interactions with urban space. This bears important implications for both the spatial and representational politics that the novel generates. More specifically, the involvement of 9/11 in the representation of the city does not limit the narrative‘s scope neither spatially nor conceptually. On the contrary, as Sarah L. Wasserman insightfully argues, ―the novel‘s optics deterritorialize the attacks‖ (251), which, in turn, trigger a gradual shifting away from the spot of the disaster to several different places both in and out of New York City. This point is in line with Hans‘s post-9/11 geographical perspective, as a demonstration of his need ―to navigate his way out of the ruins of Lower Manhattan and out of the ruins of his marriage‖
(Golimowska, ―Navigating‖ 34). In the novel, the necessary relocation of Hans‘s family to the Chelsea Hotel and Rachel‘s decision to move back to London force the protagonist to reconnect with his urban surroundings in an effort to rediscover his sense of security and belonging, which has been jeopardized both by 9/11 and his personal matters.
Indeed, the dissolution of Rachel and Hans‘s marriage prompts the protagonist‘s encounter with the game of cricket and the city‘s immigrant subcultures as will be analyzed further down. Hans acquires the opportunity to open up to the city‘s ethnically-defined neighborhoods that transcend his familiar Manhattan setting so as to open up to the broader, heterogeneous, New York City area.
Tsiokou 73
2.3 Re-Negotiating American Identity in the Heterogeneous Metropolis
As I am going to demonstrate in this section, the events of 9/11 are used in
Netherland as a point of departure to other more peripheral parts of New York City, in an effort to challenge and transcend the limits of post-9/11 narratives. These two points are not unrelated: by expanding the narrative spatially to areas of the metropolis outside Manhattan, the focus shifts to the lives of more ethnically and socially diverse groups of people, thus bringing together post-9/11 and immigrant stories and experiences.
As mentioned above, it is only after 9/11 that Hans becomes more aware of his status as a foreigner. This realization motivates him to explore less prominent areas of his host city where he has the opportunity to familiarize himself with its multi-ethnic and multicultural population. More specifically, the introduction of peripheral parts of the city in the narrative of Netherland as well as the portrayal of marginal ethnic and social groups, such as South-
Asian working class immigrants, drastically enhance the subject matter of the novel as it moves beyond the ruins of Downtown Manhattan. Michael Rothberg remarks that, in
Netherland, ―O‘Neill maps the heterogeneous terrain of New York City—not just the affluent neighborhoods of Tribeca and Chelsea, but also the ‗outer boroughs‘ of Staten Island,
Queens, and Brooklyn‖ (156). This geographical expansion of the representation of the city also broadens the framework within which 9/11 fiction may be able to situate the attacks. To be more precise, O‘Neill‘s novel launches a more inclusive view of the metropolis, which helps to re-contextualize the 9/11 events and the different ways in which the catastrophe has impacted the diverse groups of people living in New York City. This way, the novel marks a significant break from more conventional post-9/11 works, such as Falling Man, in which the significance of 9/11 has been measured only against the ruptures it has caused to a limited group of white, upper-middle class Manhattanites and their surroundings. Tsiokou 74
This geographical and conceptual expansion is not unrelated to the negative connotations the area of Manhattan is associated with at that particular time, both with regard to Hans‘s personal troubles as well as to the city‘s collective experience of trauma. According to Golimowska, ―Manhattan in O‘Neill imposes not only geographical but also emotional limits that the main character tries to trespass‖ (―Navigating‖ 34). In the course of the story,
Hans‘s encounter with the New York City cricket subcultures encourages his participation in a non-white immigrant community. In the Staten Island cricket team, where he used to play in 2002, his ―teammates variously originated from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka,‖ a fact that renders Hans ―the only white man […] on the cricket fields of
New York (Netherland 11). This racial and ethnic difference between Hans and his teammates is not coincidental, since it contains allusions to the sport‘s colonial legacy, which is here related to America‘s own colonial origin, as we are about to see below. As far as
Hans‘s relation to the city is concerned, his active engagement with the ethnically diverse cricket communities facilitates his gradual shift from Manhattan to the other peripheral neighborhoods that are home to his new acquaintances, such as ―Hoboken and Passaic and
Queens and Brooklyn‖ (19). Moreover, with cricket being an immigrants‘ sport, it takes place mostly outside Manhattan, in areas where Hans starts now commuting much more frequently.
It is significant to point out that despite the loneliness that dominates his life after 9/11, his participation in the city‘s cricket community and his association with marginal characters, such as the Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon, result in Hans‘s heightened mobility around the metropolis after the 9/11 attacks.
More specifically, during his peculiar friendship with Chuck, Hans receives driving lessons from his new friend in exchange of chauffeuring Chuck around the parts of the city where the latter conducts his business. Although Hans initially agrees because he sees the Tsiokou 75
driving lessons as an opportunity to escape his solitary life in the Chelsea Hotel, he is quickly amazed by the cultural richness he discovers in New York City. In one such episode, Hans describes the following scene from Flatbush in Brooklyn:
As I chauffeured him around the neighbourhood, crouching conscientiously to a halt
at every junction, I became familiar with the topical sights: the chiming, ceaselessly
peregrinating ice-cream truck, driven by a Turk; the Muslim funeral home on
Albermarle Road out of which watchful African American men spilled in sunglasses
and black suits; the Hispanic gardeners working on the malls; the firehouse on
Cortelyou that slowly gorged on reversing fire trucks; the devout Jewish
boulevardiers on Ocean Parkway; the sticks of light that collected in the trees as
though part of the general increase. Lush Flatbush… (201)
This excerpt vividly portrays the various nationalities and ethnicities that reside in the area and communicates a sense of peaceful coexistence that appears to have been uninterrupted by the unrest brought about by the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan. O‘Neill‘s emphasis on the diverse character of New York City reveals here ―an alternative New York that is both new to Hans and new to 9/11 fiction‖ (Keeble n.p.). Evidently, the accentuation of both the spatial and the ethno-cultural divergence of the city in the narrative move us, the readers, beyond the wounded cityscape of Manhattan that is often associated with mainstream and corporate white Americanness. Instead, we are presented with a much more heterogeneous concept of
American national identity, which is being constantly renegotiated in the city‘s marginal neighborhoods.
This new element in the representation of the post-9/11 city calls for further commentary, since the novel opens up new directions for the portrayal of post-9/11 New
York City, with emphasis on the metropolis‘s ―transnational character.‖ To begin with, the Tsiokou 76
relationship between the notion of transnationalism and urban space is underlined by Ayona
Datta, who argues that cities play a defining role in the conceptualization of the transnational experience of migrants (89). More specifically, Datta points towards the tendency in recent scholarship to adopt ―a view of cities in the West as socially, culturally, and materially transformed through a politics of difference negotiated in urban spaces‖ (96). Given that urban centers attract the majority of immigrants in Western countries, the processes Datta is commenting on should be examined in tandem with the attitudes towards intolerance and prejudice that are formulated after moments of tension and crisis, as it happened with the
Muslim immigrants in New York City after the attacks. As Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul inform us in American Multiculturalism after 9/11(2009), ―the terrorist attacks by radical
Muslims of foreign origin led Americans to recast their perceptions of diversity and assimilation within a national framework‖ (7) that led to a debate ―between a heightened concern about national security and a longstanding commitment to civil liberties‖ (10). Thus, the national crisis that succeeded the 9/11 attacks has inevitably unsettled the position of non- white, non-Western immigrants in the public life of the city. In this light, the establishment of
New York City‘s diversity as a theme for the post-9/11 narrative of Netherland emerges as a proclaimed political stance from which to revisit issues such as difference, assimilation, and the negotiation of American national identity in a transnational context.
In the novel, the game of cricket provides a rich inventory of symbolisms related to national, cultural, and racial otherness.22 As mentioned earlier, cricket in Netherland is fashioned as a predominantly immigrant sport, whose practice is interwoven with marginality and the search for identity in the host nation. Restricted to the periphery of New York City, as
22 Cricket was employed as a means of ―acculturation‖ in the British colonies, such as India, in order to impose Western cultural elements to the subalterns. For more information, consult Arjun Appadurai‘s ―Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket‖ in his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). Tsiokou 77
Hans quickly discovers, cricket assumes a marginal position in its urban topography, thus alluding to the equally marginal position of its members in the mainstream urban society.
More specifically, as Chuck informs Hans, cricket seems to be part of immigrant culture with very young children from West India spending their time playing cricket in any open space they find available in their neighborhoods: ―they play in vacant lots, they play in schoolyards up and down Queens and Brooklyn‖ (103). Under these circumstances, the involvement with cricket is a struggle against the ongoing social and cultural confinement that immigrants in
New York City experience. Additionally, Netherland exposes the serious challenges 9/11 has posed on non-Western immigrants who wish to claim their presence in public space. As
Chuck exclaims: ―[w]e are playing this game in the United States. This is a difficult environment for us. We play where we can, wherever they let us. […] In this country, we‘re nowhere. We‘re a joke. Cricket? How funny. […] It‘s like we‘re invisible‖ (17-18). Here,
Chuck employs cricket to voice the marginalized position of the immigrants and exposes the dark side of America‘s ideals of acceptance and inclusiveness, a situation which became evident for many immigrants in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
Nevertheless, cricket may provide a means for immigrants to claim their presence in the American nation, as Chuck‘s own ambitious vision indicates. More specifically, Chuck envisions the establishment of New York Cricket Club, along with the construction of Bald
Eagle Field, a vast sports arena that he plans to develop in Brooklyn, since ―[t]here‘s no way they‘re going to let a bunch of black guys take over prime Manhattan real estate‖ (103). The allusion to the eagle as a national symbol is not coincidental. In fact, Chuck firmly believes in the American roots of cricket and frequently—albeit debatably—appropriates the rhetoric of
America‘s foundation to justify the game‘s ties with American tradition, by asserting, for instance, that ―Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man‖ (18). In this light, playing Tsiokou 78
cricket in the U.S. emerges in the novel as a practice that is bound with the contestation of ethnic and national identity for the country‘s immigrant population. According to Keeble, the way in which cricket is represented in Netherland reveals the game‘s power to ―provide a pluralism and community in the larger immigrant community in New York‖ and also ―to formulate this marginalized group as American‖ (n.p.). Cricket, then, emerges as a performance of ―othering‖ American national identity, which is re-negotiated on the cricket field as a flexible and inclusive category, able to coexist with a broad spectrum of ethnic, cultural, and racial identities. In Hill‘s words, the sport is employed by immigrants ―as a vehicle for asserting not only their presence in the United States but their heritage from another world‖ (229). Particularly, playing cricket in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11 becomes a marker for the anxieties faced by its immigrant population because of their need to defend their Americanness and their place in the city‘s public space, while they strengthen their bonds as marginal immigrant communities.
It then becomes evident that O‘Neill constructs a rather complex narrative mechanism around the game of cricket. Associated with Europe‘s colonial past, cricket returns in
Netherland as a tradition brought to America both by colonizers and colonized subjects. In the first case, the sport re-appears through Hans‘s nostalgia for his childhood past in the
Netherlands, in which he grew up playing cricket in ―The Hague, where Dutch bourgeois snobbishness and Dutch cricket are, not unrelatedly, most concentrated‖ (Netherland 53). In the second case, cricket functions as a link between the South Asian and Caribbean immigrants of New York City with their homelands and origins. These people ―had grown up playing the game in floodlit Lahore car parks or in rough clearings in some West Indian countryside‖ (62). What they relate to, however, is not only their land of origin, but a whole system of colonization tracing back to British national and cultural imperialism. It is precisely Tsiokou 79
this symbolism of cricket as a tool of colonization that supports the novel‘s criticism of
America‘s rigid national assumptions. By having foreign-born citizens claim the city‘s public space through cricket, O‘Neill alludes to America‘s own colonial past, as a nation built by foreigners. More significantly, by invoking a colonial background, national identity emerges as a necessarily unstable and hybrid concept, which is always in the process of re-negotiation.
In the aftermath of 9/11, a Dutch immigrant who, as Chuck remarks, is ―a member of the first tribe of New York‖ (75),23 and immigrants from former British colonies resort to this colonial tool not merely in order to maintain a bridge with their ethnic and cultural background but to impose their perspective on their new habitat. According to Hill, cricket in Netherland facilitates a process of ―reverse colonialism‖ of the American nation (―The American Dream‖
225; ―Queering the Pitch‖ 182). Through the game, the cricket communities of New York
City attempt ―to reclaim America for the game and in this way to ‗recolonize‘ America itself‖
(Hill, ―The American Dream‖ 225). Similarly to its foundation, the American nation is now reconstructed by foreign-born citizens who use an old means of colonization as a way to fashion new ways of being American that reveals both the complexity and superficiality in creating a solid identity. As Wasserman puts it, ―[c]ricket, then, transported onto American grass, scrambles the sport‘s complicated legacy of colonizer and colonized, a legacy which the novel suggests is relevant in the wake of 9/11‖ (259). This is because the national inflections of 9/11 have accentuated the different ways in which citizens from diverse backgrounds identify with the American nation.
Apart from that, the practice of cricket in post-9/11 New York City is also profoundly connected to a shaken sense of belonging that was imposed upon the city‘s foreign population
23 During the seventeenth century, the area that is today the state of New York used to belong to a Dutch colonial province named New Netherland, while the city of New York originated from a Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam, which was founded in the south of the island of Manhattan. Tsiokou 80
after the attacks. This oscillating emotional state emerges as a theme in Netherland, as Hans often stresses his loneliness and purposelessness in his host country. Even though Hans is a white European ―elite migrant,‖ as M. Brown would put it, his foreignness is felt much more intensely when he becomes exposed to the cultural diverse character of New York City.
Moreover, the novel points towards the obstacles this ―alien‖ status might pose when one is forced to deal with the U.S. bureaucratic services, especially after the heightened national security measures after the 9/11 attacks. When Hans is forced to deal with the U.S. bureaucracy in order to obtain an American driving license, he feels ―seized for the first time with a nauseating sense of America‖ (88). It is important to point out that his gradual immersion in the cricket subculture and the exploration of peripheral parts of New York City enhance his awareness of his position as a foreigner. As Chuck tells him: ―[y]ou want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black‖ (18). Nevertheless, it is paradoxically through cricket that Hans manages to open up to his host country and appreciate its ―fluidities‖ (63). After his initial resistance to comply with the peculiar style of playing cricket in America, he becomes ―at last naturalized‖ when, during a match, he realizes that he has ―hit the ball in the air like an
American cricketer‖ (232-33). The irony, as Keeble remarks, of Hans‘s identifying as an
American through his ―position as an outsider‖ (n.p.) is indicative of the novel‘s envisioning of an American national identity which is not singular. On the contrary, it is devised as heterogeneous and flexible in order to encompass the diversity of the country‘s multiethnic and multicultural population. Here, the reversal of cricket‘s colonial origin manifests itself in its use as a way to claim and re-appropriate American national identity as a hybrid, heterogeneous concept, which is negotiated in an equally hybrid, heterogeneous urban space. Tsiokou 81
Through the representation of a hybrid urban space, the novel allows a glimpse of the marginal lives of New York City‘s ―others.‖ These immigrant subcultures have experienced the terror of 9/11 in very different terms than the residents of Manhattan, who find themselves in greater geographical as well as cultural, social, and psychological proximity to the 9/11 attacks. For these immigrants, the blow to the center of American global financial power has not been registered as a catastrophic event because they have already been excluded from this conceptualization of Americanness. Nevertheless, 9/11 fractures the illusion of self-dependence, security and invincibility, and renders this model of
Americanness unavailable to them. Although Falling Man laments this fracture as loss,
Netherland explores the possible ways in which American identity can be rediscovered even though superficially. Through its own fluctuation between post-9/11 fiction and immigrant literature, O‘ Neill‘s novel discards monolithic interpretations of the post-9/11 conditions and promotes heterogeneity and difference as the new foundation for the reinvention of the
American nation. Nevertheless, the nation‘s internal heterogeneity inevitably produces connections between itself and other nations around the globe and points towards the position of the U.S. in a complex transnational network of mutual global influence, as it is explained in the following section.
2.4 New York City and Global Trajectories after 9/11
So far, it has been argued that the portrayal of the 9/11 attacks in Netherland is subjected to constant recontextualization in order to illuminate multiple aspects of this complicated event. The most significant contribution of the novel to the field of post-9/11 fiction is the exploration of 9/11 in conjunction with the changing realities of an increasingly interconnected world. This section looks at the ways in which Netherland articulates the Tsiokou 82
resonance of transnational and global connections in the way post-9/11 New York City is imagined in fictional writings.
The geographical shift that is evidenced in the narrative from Ground Zero to the city‘s diverse periphery emphasizes the global resonance of New York City as a contemporary metropolis.24 This view is in line with Golimowska‘s contention that ―[t]he post-9/11 metropolis is a global space‖ (The Post-9/11 City 193), due to its involvement in a complex geopolitical network with worldwide span. Under this prism, New York City is not reconstructed here as ―a world‖ in itself, as it is viewed in the narrative of Falling Man in
Chapter One. O‘Neill manages to debunk the singularity and exceptionality of the 9/11 attacks and re-position them side by side with other catastrophic historical events. In the novel, New York City is thus compared to a series of other parts of the world that have dealt with disastrous external attacks, as Hans parallels the post-9/11 climate in the city to ―a pre- apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties,‖ or ―merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and […] Moscow‖
(Netherland 29). Naturally, this pretext for reading post-9/11 New York City in Netherland requires the register of a major shift to the way the city has gradually modified its self- definition. For Leach, this shift manifests itself in the city‘s transition from an ―internal‖ to an
―external alterity‖ (188). Leach‘s argument actually stresses the fact that, after 9/11, New
York City has been faced with the realities of not only its own heterogeneity, but more importantly with its being exposed to miscellaneous influences from other nations across the globe.
24 An analysis of the global significance of megacities, such as London, New York City, and Tokyo as centers of worldwide political and economic influence can be found in Saskia Sassen‘s Global Cities: New York, London, Tokyo (2001). Tsiokou 83
These cross-national channels of impact that are increasingly affecting New York
City after the 9/11 attacks are inscribed within Netherland‘s structure, through Hans‘s transatlantic flashbacks and embedded stories. To begin with, the urban story taking place in
O‘Neill‘s New York City is fragmented by the intersection of Hans‘s transatlantic memories from his childhood in The Hague and his young adult years in London. Throughout the narrative, New York‘s cityscape is continuously transformed by the interference of the protagonist‘s flashbacks of his hometown surroundings, which are intensified by the disrupted sense of belonging he experiences in the aftermath of 9/11. Hans describes this mindset as ―New York confusion,‖ because it is through his immigrant experience in this city during this particular historical moment that he realizes that ―to leave is to take nothing less than a mortal action‖ (116-18). Of course, mortality here is related to his nostalgia for his past life in his homeland and the disruption his sense of national identity suffered when he
―drifted away from [his] native place‖ (117). As the alienating effect of New York‘s wounded cityscape interferes with the protagonist‘s already disrupted identification with a specific country, these flashbacks affirm the power of space to shape national identity and thus disclose its superficial character.
Indeed, the role of urban space in Hans‘ imaginary transportation is vital. In fact,
Hans‘s New York surroundings often trigger subconscious associations with the familiar scenery of the Netherlands. In one such episode, the filthy, frozen Hudson river reminds Hans of ―the pure canal ice of the Hague,‖ a memory which instills upon him ―a rare homesickness‖ (98). It should also be mentioned that Hans‘s involvement with the city‘s cricket community is encouraged by his nostalgia for his early years of playing cricket in
Holland. This nostalgic feeling overcomes Hans during a walk around Chelsea on a weekend morning: ―[i]t was a bright, warm day, European in its mildness, and walking past the Tsiokou 84
flowering pear trees on 19th Street I was riddled by a longing for similar days in my youth, which were given over, at every opportunity, to cricket‖ (53). Thus, an immigrant‘s view of post-9/11 New York City demonstrates the potential to produce an alternative and dynamic representation of the cityscape, whose interpretation derives not only from the terrorist attacks but is synthesized from heterogeneous transnational and transcultural experiences.
O‘Neill‘s employment of the device of memory and flashback cuts across both the narrative‘s storyline and structure in an attempt to reassemble the fractures of a wounded post-9/11 cityscape into a network of transnational interrelations.
Interestingly, New York City does not only serve as the starting point for the unfolding of Hans‘s transnational memories of his homeland. On the contrary, its urban space is imaginarily reproduced through Hans‘s recollections of his New York City days after he has resumed living in London. This way of representing post-9/11 New York City in retrospect further destabilizes its prevalence in the narrative and maintains a temporal, geographical, and emotional distance from the terrorized metropolis. This time, it is the cityscape of London that sets Hans‘s transnational memory journey in motion. Gazing at the sunset from the top of the London Eye, Hans finds himself reminiscing of a bygone sunset seen from the Staten Island Ferry. As Hans informs us, the Manhattan skyline offers a mesmerizing sight:
The structures clustered at its tip made a warm, familiar crowd, and as their surfaces
brightened ever more fiercely with sunlight it was possible to imagine that vertical
accumulations of humanity were gathered to greet our arrival. […] A world was
lighting up before us, […] a world concentrated most glamorously of all, it goes
almost without saying, in the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers going up above Tsiokou 85
all others, on one of which, as the boat drew us nearer, the sun began to make a
brilliant yellow mess. (339)
In this powerful scene, the view of the city‘s iconic skyline emerges from Hans‘s memory as an imposing yet welcoming sight, which is nevertheless idealized by the influence that reminiscing and nostalgia might cast on the character‘s flashback. Here, the metaphor of New
York City as a ―world,‖ which has dominated the urban narrative of Falling Man, is appropriated in a subtly ironic, and, at the same time, lamenting way. More specifically, the pre-9/11 World Trade Center is reproduced here as a symbol of global power and as the epitome of the city‘s boundless potential. However, this imagined reassembling of the destroyed towers through memory offers the necessary degree of mediation from which to ponder on America‘s unfulfilled expectations of exceptionality. As Wasserman puts it, this image ―is not an instance of destruction made beautiful, it is, rather, a moment in which a beautiful image connotes destruction‖ (11). What this points toward is that the revisiting of such memories from New York City in Netherland implies that the significance of this destruction for the nation‘s self-image can only reveal itself in hindsight, a statement which reflects the novel‘s general approach as a post-9/11 text.
London, however, does not only serve as a platform for revisiting memories from
New York City. Through the continuous juxtaposition between the two major Western metropolises, Netherland brings to the foreground the transnational ties a diverse metropolis inevitably develops with other nations. By employing the cosmopolitan viewpoint of the protagonist, O‘Neill rewrites the city in a global framework and forges channels of mutual impact, both actual and imagined, between New York City and different places around the world. Arguably, the connection drawn between New York City and London in the novel is Tsiokou 86
highly relevant to its post-9/11 subject matter. Published after the 7/7 London Bombings,25
Netherland brings together the two most prominent Western metropolises in a continuous dialogue that departs from monolithic, American-centered responses to terrorism. In fact, the post-terrorist climate in the two cities is registered very differently in the novel. As Hans observes after his eventual relocation to London, ―in spite even of the disturbance of 7/7—a frightening but not a disorienting effect, it turns out—Londoners remain in their business of rowing their boats gently down the stream‖ (236). For Golimowska, ―Netherland‘s London is portrayed as less emotional than New York, as a healthier organism in which the spreading of the paranoia-virus is being stopped before it reaches the masses. London symbolizes the old world, stable, experienced and down to earth, even after the attacks of 7/7‖ (The Post-9/11
City 189). In this case, Hans‘s transnational perspective as neither an American nor British subject distances him from the collective reactions to both the 9/11 and the 7/7 attacks. As a result, Hans‘s restrained point of view presents us with the opportunity to view the two events through a correlative prism. This in turn leads to the disclosure of the geographical, national, as well as cultural particularities of a city‘s response to terrorism. In addition, it may be suggested that the national singularity associated with post-9/11 trauma in Falling Man actually reflects the misconceptions of many New Yorkers regarding their exceptional place in the world, a belief that O‘Neill attempts to debunk in Netherland. On the contrary, the proliferation of terrorist attacks on a global scale has enhanced, along with other factors such as global economy and advancements in communication and transportation, the idea of an increasingly inter-dependent world that relies more and more on transnational connections.
25 On July 7th, 2005, four bomb explosions occurred in three trains of the London Underground and a Tavistock Square city bus. A total of 52 people were killed in the attacks, which were attributed to Islamist terrorist groups (―Report into the London Terrorist attacks on 7 July 2005‖). Tsiokou 87
Perhaps the most indicative articulation of the novel‘s transnational subtext is captured through Hans‘s virtual visit to New York City using Google Maps. From his house in London, satellite technology allows him to make a transatlantic journey from Europe to
Manhattan within seconds. After navigating through Manhattan and Brooklyn, however,
Hans decides to ―flee upward into the atmosphere,‖ where ―a human‘s movement is a barely intelligible thing‖ (Netherland 334-35). The image he is presented with from this spot encapsulates the major shift in the contemporary ways of understanding physical and symbolic space, mobility, and national affiliations. In Hans‘s words: ―[t]here is no sign of nations, no sense of work of man. The USA as such is nowhere to be seen‖ (335). This is, then, the world that has opened up after the 9/11 attacks. It might be true that the rhetoric of global terrorism has led us to imagine every part of the world a possible target, but it has also increased the awareness of global interdependencies between nations. In such a world, any illusion of national superiority and exceptionality is gradually exposed and disintegrated in its impossibility.
Within the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the global community has witnessed terrorist attacks in several major western cities, such as New York City, Boston,
London, Paris, Brussels, and Madrid. This ongoing terrorist threat has contributed to the illumination of the close links between cities that have been victimized by or constitute possible victims of terror, and other places all over the world. This happens because the consequences of a terrorist attack accentuate the degree to which a city influences and becomes influenced by other cities with which it interacts on multiple levels. What is more, the exposure of western cities to terrorism and its aftermath has placed them side by side with other parts of the world, where external threat and international dispute do not register as extraordinary phenomena. It is also significant to point out that the spread of terrorist threat in Tsiokou 88
the West has shattered the illusion of security that has till now characterized Western urban centers and has revealed their inherent vulnerability. This shift is expected to bring about new tendencies in literary production, as writers will need to rely on different premises in order to re-imagine the world in its current proportions, helping at the same time their readers to re- envision and re-capture their position within this fluctuating environment. For Paul Giles, this change involves the abandonment of a nationally-based rhetoric as the underlying concept for literature. More specifically, he contends that ―American literature should be seen as no longer bound to the inner workings of any particular country or imagined organic community but instead as interwoven systematically with traversals between national territory and intercontinental space‖ (44). In this light, the concept of transnationalism becomes a key element in the process of writing and interpreting literature, since it effectively reflects the new geopolitical conditions being formed on a global level.
Overall, Netherland‘s alternation between different genres, such as post-9/11 and immigrant fiction, along with the multi-dimensional depiction of New York City‘s urban landscape contributes to a manifold interpretation of 9/11. When it comes to an event as complex as the 9/11 attacks, O‘Neill‘s narrative about the emerging post-9/11 world demonstrates a considerably inclusive and diverse version of reality, as it is registered in New
York City as well as other cities on both sides of the Atlantic. More specifically, in
Netherland the textual reconstruction of the New York cityscape from a foreigner‘s perspective and the shift of the narrative focus to other cities encourage a multi-dimensional interpretation of the post-9/11 socio-cultural and political reality. This results in a narrative in which instability, difference, and dislocation become the conceptual tools with which to reimagine an emerging world and the role of contemporary individual in it. Above all, the Tsiokou 89
novel opens up new paths for writing and reading fiction in the twenty-first century by demonstrating instances of multiple, simultaneous ways of being in the world through personal and public transnational encounters.
Tsiokou 90
CONCLUSION
It is without doubt that post-9/11 fiction has significantly contributed to the formulation of the available discourses for understanding and discussing contemporary terrorism and counter-terrorism. In the two novels I discuss in the present thesis, the cityscape in post-9/11 fiction is used as a platform for the projection of the trauma, the anxiety, and the social, cultural, and political tensions that have followed the 9/11 attacks. This approach valorizes the political merit of such narratives as they reflect upon and criticize publicly expressed manifestations of national imagination.
The primary interest of the present thesis has been to investigate the political potential of post-9/11 fiction to subvert traditional ideas of Americanness by focusing on the representation of urban space. In Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism
(2015), John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec establish links between fiction and the negotiation of the crisis in American exceptionalism during the post-9/11 era. More precisely, they are interested in ―the ways in which post-9/11 narratives help make visible the fantasies that supposedly necessitate the ongoing state of exception and American exceptionalism‖ (2).
This thesis is based on the observation that this process is partly facilitated through the way
New York City is portrayed in post-9/11 fiction. Thus, the analysis of the two discussed novels foregrounds the active role of the cityscape in the way the attacks and their aftermath have been registered and dealt with both on a personal and a public level. Indeed, the prominence of New York City is unmistakable in both DeLillo‘s Falling Man and O‘Neill‘s
Netherland. In both novels, the city features as one of the main characters and demonstrates its relevance to the catastrophe itself as well as its multiple repercussions.
That being said, the two discussed works employ the urban space of New York City in markedly different ways. In the case of Falling Man, the city participates in the main Tsiokou 91
characters‘ feelings of despair, helplessness, and disorientation. Viewed through Keith and
Lianne‘s eyes, the imagery of New York City constantly oscillates between the present and the past, as the characters try to impose on it illusions of a bygone order and stability. Their make-believe, however, turns out to be impossible, since the haunting absence of the World
Trade Center from the Manhattan skyline stands as a reminder of the altered realities the city has to deal with after the attacks. This persistence of personal, collective, and historical memory permeates the narrative in the form of the street performances of Falling Man. His performances, which re-enact the horrific sight of bodies falling from the burning towers, haunt the streets of New York City and draw a link between the cityscape and the preservation of collective memory as a means of solidarity and survival after a catastrophic event. Despite this powerful statement, the urban narrative in Falling Man arguably presents certain limitations, the most important of which is the restricted representation of the cityscape in the area of Manhattan. This particular point has proven rather challenging in the course of discussing Falling Man in the present thesis as it comes in contrast to the more politically active interpretation proposed in Chapter One through the reading of the cityscape.
Although the urban outlook proposed takes a step towards assigning public dimensions to a largely private narrative, it is still true that DeLillo‘s novel provides a particularly limited scope of the impact the attacks had on the multi-dimensional and diverse metropolis of New
York City.
On the contrary, O‘Neill‘s narrative takes advantage of the heterogeneous character of
New York City in order to weave together a text that places the 9/11 attacks within multiple contexts. As it is demonstrated in Chapter Two, the inclusion of peripheral neighborhoods of
New York City, which are home to a great part of the city‘s immigrant population, makes it possible to view 9/11 in conjunction with the heightened tension the attacks generated among Tsiokou 92
the metropolis‘s foreign-born citizens. In Netherland, the reconstruction of the cityscape through the eyes of a Dutch immigrant, Hans van der Broek, opens up new dimensions for the interpretation of the terrorist attacks and their impact on life in New York City in their aftermath. Yet, despite the narrator‘s emotional and national distance from the events of 9/11, his involvement in the cricket subcultures of the city and his association with non-white, non-
Western immigrants, such as Chuck Ramkissoon, reveal his disrupted sense of belonging in the aftermath of the attacks. Thus, Hans‘s effort to accommodate his fragmented sense of national identity in his host country—a process that is experienced by the city‘s immigrant communities in general—informs the recontextualization of American national identity in the post-9/11 era. At the same time, the inclusion of characters with diverse, sometimes hybrid nationalities and ethnicities as well as the introduction in the narrative of other cities on both sides of the Atlantic, such as London and The Hague, assign a transnational character to post-
9/11 fiction and take it a step beyond singular concepts of nationhood.
In fact, the configuration of American national identity in the aftermath of 9/11 informs the political subtext of both novels and resonates with both narratives artistically as well as ideologically. More significantly, it provides a framework in which Falling Man and
Netherland are brought together to form a dialogue about how fiction written after 9/11 responds to questions regarding national unity, American identity, and difference. As the prolific commentary about the two novels indicates, such matters are deeply related to post-
9/11 fiction and the portrayal of the unmapped realities that have emerged after the attacks on a national and global level. As far as Falling Man is concerned, the present thesis is in agreement with Richard Gray‘s arguments in After the Fall regarding the novel‘s insistence on familiar structures of domestic narratives and national singularities, especially when he says that it is one of the post-9/11 novels that mark ―a desperate retreat into the old sureties‖ Tsiokou 93
and downplay trauma ―by inserting it in a series of familiar tropes‖ (16-17, 27-28). In
DeLillo, the 9/11 attacks are exclusively associated with Americanness and its arrogant self- image of exceptionalism, even when approached from the perspective of the ―other,‖ the terrorist, and the foreigner. This can partly be justified by the fact that DeLillo‘s novel was published only a few years after 9/11, when American writers would be more inclined to maintain an emotional outlook towards the attacks. Netherland, on the other hand, rests on a more distant view of 9/11, whose relevance expands to include American-born citizens and foreign-born immigrants, as well as cities and countries beyond U.S. borders. Facilitated by
O‘Neill‘s own foreign origins, this approach points towards alternative directions for the representation of historical events and socio-political conditions, since it suggests that writers can move beyond understanding such issues in strictly national terms when viewing them through the prism of a transnational context.
It is precisely this clash between political, ideological, and formal backgrounds of post-9/11 texts that the present thesis has striven to illuminate. If we accept the notion that
9/11 has marked a shift in the way writers may imagine and represent the world, the remarks that have been made throughout the discussion of Falling Man and Netherland could be seen as relevant to a wider body of fiction being written today, which does not necessarily have to be thematically linked to the 9/11 attacks. Speaking in broader terms, one can understand that the gradual dismissal of stringent national concepts on the part of writers best accounts for the national, ethnic, and cultural in-betweenness that an ever-increasing number of individuals experiences on a global level nowadays. As stated in the Introduction of the current thesis, imagining 9/11 in literature has indeed been a sensitive, even painful endeavor for many writers, especially American ones, not only in terms of dealing with the actual event but also in finding the language to talk about it. Yet, the stories that eventually spring from it Tsiokou 94
do not only speak the language of terrorism. As is the case of Netherland, the abrupt disclosing of new global realities which have occurred through 9/11 has coincided with—and perhaps accelerated—the appearance of different ways of being in the world. In the novels studied here, this has been achieved through the way language has been used and enhanced through a discourse that avoids stringent wording in an attempt to widen the way we perceive the world around us and our own position in it. In this light, current global tendencies, such as individual and collective mobility, direct online communication with every part of the world, global economy, and transnational relations, decisively shape the way one conceptualizes ideas of self, nation, and the world in general. While it is true that the present thesis has explored such issues within the framework set by a post-9/11 narrative, it is also possible that these realities might provide the basis for a broader set of narratives written in the twenty- first century, as well as inform the contexts for their study and interpretation.
This project also acknowledges the representation of the cityscape as a significant element in literary production, able to be endowed with agency and narratorial power. The implementation of urban space in the present thesis has facilitated the exploration of connections between the city and concepts such as history, memory, national identity, as well as individual and collective experience. After examining the ways in which New York City participates in post-9/11 narratives of trauma and healing, a possible suggestion for further literary research could involve the application of an urban perspective in projects that take interest in socio-political and historical aspects of fiction, especially when it comes to studying instances of the hybrid and the transnational. Cities constitute a limitless inventory of human experience. For this reason, the incorporation of urban space analysis in the present thesis demonstrates the potential to enrich literary narratives as well as their study and interpretation as they encourage us to delve deeper into the multiple, co-existing levels Tsiokou 95
making up contemporary life and world events. At the same time, an urban studies approach might considerably benefit literary criticism by inviting interdisciplinary perspectives to be introduced in the way we read or interpret socio-political conflict and major historical events, as has been the aspiration of the current project.
Finally, the examination of the impact terrorism may have on the cityscape and the people‘s relationship to it could possibly constitute a useful tool for better understanding contemporary city life on a global level. As the events of recent years affirm, urban terrorism has increased public insecurity and has led to the intensification of surveillance measures that have greatly affected the way urban experience in several major cities nowadays is understood and lived. It remains to be seen how this new urban condition will manifest itself in fiction and what new paths this can open up for literary and social criticism. As ideas of national identity, individualism, racial and ethnic intolerance, and global terrorist threat are increasingly penetrating public and political discourses on both sides of the Atlantic, the demand for alternative ways to imagine and represent difference, hybridity, and heterogeneity informs the critical potential of this project. What one realizes is that fiction provides valuable help in offering writers the terrain within which to try to come to terms with the new, unmapped conditions that have been shaping the world in the twenty-first century.
Tsiokou 96
Works Cited
Amis, Martin. ―Fear and Loathing.‖ Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 18 Sept. 2001.
Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
Anker, Elizabeth S. ―Allegories of Falling and the 9/11 Novel.‖ American Literary History.
23.3 (2011): 463-82. Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2016.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1996. Print.
Auster, Paul. Man in the Dark. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2008. Print.
Bacon, Katie. ―The Great Irish-Dutch-American Novel.‖ The Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly
Group, May 2008. Web. 25 Aug. 2016.
Baer, Ulrich, ed. 101 Stories: New York Writers after September 11. New York: NYU Press,
2004. Print.
Barrett, Laura. ―Mao II and Mixed Media.‖ Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, and Falling
Man. Ed. Stacey Olster. London: Continuum, 2011. 49-64. Print.
Barthes, Roland. ―Semiology and the Urban.‖ Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural
Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. London: Routledge, 1997. 158-72. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002. Print.
Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. The Beckett Trilogy. Trans. Samuel Beckett. London:
Calder Publications, 1994. 293-418. Print.
Bloom, Harold. Don DeLillo. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. Print.
Borradori, Giovanna, ed. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas
and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print. Tsiokou 97
Brown, Garrett Wallace. ―Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Issues in Contemporary Politics.‖
A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. Ed. Ato Quayson and Girish
Daswani. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 68-87. Print.
Brown, Matthew. ―Joseph O‘Neill and the Post-9/11 Novel.‖ Transatlantic Literature and
Culture after 9/11: The Wrong Side of Paradise. Ed. Kristine A. Miller. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 110-128. Print.
Bush. George W. ―9/11 Address to the Nation.‖ Oval Office, Washington, D.C. 11 Sept.
2001. Speech.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Print.
Campbell, Neill, and Alasdair Kean. American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American
Culture. Routledge, 1997. Print.
Caldwell, Gail. ―Darkness Visible.‖ The Boston Globe. The New York Times Company, 13
May 2007. Web. 2 June 2016.
Carroll, Hamilton. ―‗Like Nothing in this Life:‘ September 11 and the Limits of
Representation in Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man.‖ Studies in American Fiction. 40.1
(2013): 107-30. Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2016.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1984. Print.
Conte, Joseph M. ―Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man and the Age of Terror.‖ Modern Fiction
Studies. 57.3 (2011): 557-83. Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2016.
D‘Appollonia, Ariane Chebel. ―How to Make Enemies: A Transatlantic Perspective on the
Radicalization Process and Integration Issues.‖ Managing Ethnic Diversity after 9/11:
Integration, Security, and Civil Liberties in Transatlantic Perspective. Ed. Ariane Tsiokou 98
Chebel D‘Appollonia and Simon Reich. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010. 114-36.
Print.
Datta, Ayona. ―Diaspora and Transnationalism in Urban Settings.‖ A Companion to Diaspora
and Transnationalism. Ed. Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani. West Sussex: Wiley
Blackwell, 2013. 88-105. Print.
Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari. On the Line. Trans. John Johnston. Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1983. Print.
DeLillo, Don. Americana. Boston: Houghton Miffling, 1971. Print.
---. ―Don DeLillo, the Art of Fiction No. 135.‖ Interview with Adam Begley. Paris Review.
The Paris Review, Fall 1993. Web. 03 July 2017.
---. Falling Man. 2007. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.
---. ―In the Ruins of the Future.‖ The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 22 Dec. 2001.
Web. 6 June 2016.
---. Libra. New York: Viking Press, 1988. Print.
---. Mao II. New York: Scribner, 1991. Print.
---. The Names. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Print.
---. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.
---. White Noise. New York: Viking Press, 1985. Print.
Derosa, Aaron. ―Alterity and the Radical Other in Post-9/11 Fiction: DeLillo‘s Falling Man
and Walter‘s The Zero.‖ Arizona Quarterly. 69.3 (2013): 157-83. Project Muse. Web.
2 June 2016.
Drew, Richard. The Falling Man. Photograph. Vanity Fair, Italy. 11 Sept. 2011. Web. 25
August 2016. Tsiokou 99
Duara, Prasenjit. ―Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories.‖ Rethinking
American History in a Global Context. Ed. Thomas Bender. Berkeley: U of California
P, 2002. 25-46. Print.
Duvall, John N., ed. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.
Duvall, John N., and Robert P. Marzec, eds. ―Introduction: Fantasies of 9/11.‖ Narrating
9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
2015. 1-16. Print.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2005. Print.
Formby, Zoё. The Myth of 9/11. Diss. Nottingham: U of Nottingham, 2011. The U of
Nottingham Repository. Web. 11 June 2016.
Gamal, Ahmed. ―‗Encounters with Strangeness‘in the Post-9/11 Novel.‖ Interdisciplinary
Literary Studies. 14.1 (2012): 95-116. Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2016.
Garner, Dwight. ―The Ashes.‖ New York Times. The New York Times Company, 18 May
2008. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.
The Ghent Urban Studies Team [GUST]. The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self
in the Contemporary Metropolis. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999. Print.
Giles, Paul. ―Transnationalism and Classic American Literature.‖ Transatlantic Literary
Studies: A Reader. Ed. Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor. Edinbugh: Edinburgh UP,
2007. 44-52. Print.
Golimowska, Karolina. ―Navigating the Post-9/11 Metropolis: Reclaiming and Remapping
Urban Space in Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Tsiokou 100
Joseph O‘Neill‘s Netherland.‖ The City since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television. Ed.
Keith Wilhite. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016. 25-40. Print.
---. The Post-9/11 City in Novels: Literary Remappings of New York and London. Jefferson:
McFarland and Company, Inc., 2016. Print.
Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11. West Sussex: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011. Print.
Harack, Katrina. ―Embedded and Embodied Memories: Body, Space, and Time in Don
DeLillo‘s White Noise and Falling Man.‖ Contemporary Literature. 54.2 (2013): 303-
36. Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2016.
Hill, Jeffrey. ―The American Dream of Chuck Ramkissoon: Cricket in Joseph O‘Neill‘s
Netherland.‖ Journal of Sport History. 37.2 (2010): 219-34. Project Muse. Web. 1
Sept. 2016.
---. ―Queering the Pitch: Joseph O‘Neill‘s Netherland and the Cricket Novel.‖ Sport in
Society. 15.2 (2012): 181-93. Web. 1 Sept. 2016.
Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America. 1995. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print.
Huen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.
Intelligence and Security Committee. ―Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July
2005.‖ Gov. UK. Crown, 21 Aug. 2013. Web. 29 Jan. 2017.
Junod, Tom. ―The Falling Man.‖ Esquire. Hearst Communications, Inc., 9 September 2016.
Web. 28 Jan. 2017.
Kakutani, Michiko. ―A Man, a Woman and a Day of Terror.‖ New York Times. The New
York Times Company, 9 May 2007. Web. 26 April 2016. Tsiokou 101
Kaplan, Ann E. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print.
Kauffman, Linda S. ―The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo‘s ‗In the Ruins of the Future,‘
‗Baader-Meinhof,‘ and Falling Man.‖ Modern Fiction Studies. 54.2 (2008): 353-77.
Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2016.
Keeble, Arin. The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity. Jefferson: McFarland and
Company, Inc., 2014. Print.
Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. Literature after 9/11. London: Routledge UP,
2008. Print.
Knight, Peter. ―DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity.‖ The Cambridge Companion to Don
DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 27-40. Print.
Kroes, Rob. ―American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End.‖
Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Ed. Thomas Bender. Berkeley: U of
California P, 2002. 295-313. Print.
---. ―Indecent Exposure: Picturing the Horror of 9/11.‖ American Multiculturalism after 9/11:
Transatlantic Perspectives. Ed. Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam UP, 2009. 67-80. Print.
Lazarus, Emma. ―The New Colossus.‖ The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed.
Jeanne Campbell and Arnold Krupat. 7th ed. Vol. C. New York: Norton and
Company, 2007. 520. Print.
Leach, Neil. ―9/11.‖ Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Ed. Mark
Crinson. London: Routledge, 2005. 169-94. Print.
Litt, Toby. ―The Trembling Air.‖ Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 26 May 2007. Web.
26 April 2016. Tsiokou 102
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960. Print.
Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor, eds. Introduction. Transatlantic Literary Studies: A
Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. 1-14. Print.
McClintock, Scott. Topologies of Fear in Contemporary Fiction: The Anxieties of Post-
Nationalism and Counter Terrorism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.
McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Print.
McInerney, Jay. The Good Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.
Messud, Claire. The Emperor’s Children. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.
Miller, Kristine A., ed. Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11: the Wrong Side of
Paradise. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
Mishra, Pankaj. ―The End of Innocence.‖ Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 13 May
2007. Web. 23 May 2016.
Morley, Catherine. ―Plotting Against America: 9/11 and the Spectacle of Terror in
Contemporary American Fiction.‖ Gramma. 16 (2008): 293-312. Print.
Mulard, Maurice, and Bankole A. Cole, eds. Introduction. Globalization, Citizenship and the
War on Terror. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2007. 1-12. Print.
O‘Hagan, Andrew. ―Raging against Reality.‖ New York Review of Books. NYREV, Inc., 27
June 2007. Web. 26 April 2016.
O‘Neill, Joseph. ―An Interview with Joseph O‘Neill.‖ Interview by Charlie Reilly.
Contemporary Literature. 52. 1 (2011): 1-20. Project Muse. Web. 28 Aug. 2016.
---. The Breezes. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Print.
---. Interview by Duncan White. Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, Ltd., 17 Aug. 2014.
Web. 25 Aug. 2016. Tsiokou 103
---. Interview by William Skidelsky. Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 10 Aug. 2014.
Web. 28 Aug. 2016.
---. Netherland. 2008. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. Print.
---.This is the Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. Print.
Panzani, Ugo. ―The Insistent Realism of Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Paul Auster's Man
in the Dark.‖ Altre Modernità: Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali. 2 (2011): 76-90.
Web. 2 June 2016.
Passaro, Vince. ―Dangerous Don DeLillo.‖ New York Times. The New York Times
Company, 19 May 1991. Web. 03 July 2017.
Pӧhlmann, Sascha. ―Collapsing Identities: The Representation and Imagination of the
Terrorist in Falling Man.‖ Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic
Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Ed. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. New
York: Continuum, 2010. 51-64. Print.
Price, Marie, and Lisa Benton-Short, eds. Introduction. Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise
of Immigrant Gateway Cities. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2008. 1-22. Print.
Rapatzikou Tatiani, and Aliki Varvogli, eds. Introduction. Gramma. 16 (2008): 1-19. Print.
Rich, Frank. ―The Clear Blue Sky,‖ New York Times. The new York Times Company, 27
May 2007. Web. 26 April 2016.
Rothberg, Michael. ―A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A
Response to Richard Gray.‖ American Literary History. 21. 1 (2009): 152-58. Project
Muse. Web. 1 Sept. 2016.
Rubin, Derek, and Jaap Verheul, eds. Introduction. American Multiculturalism after 9/11:
Transatlantic Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2009. 7-20. Print. Tsiokou 104
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
Print.
Schweighauser, Philipp, and Peter Schneck, eds. Introduction. Terrorism, Media, and the
Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. New York: Continuum,
2010. 1-18. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Viking Adult, 2004. Print.
Tayler, Christopher. ―Howzat?.‖ Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 14 June 2008. Web.
24 Aug. 2016.
U2. ―Where the Streets Have No Name.‖ The Joshua Tree. Island Records, 1987. CD.
Updike, John. Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.
---. ―Tuesday, and After.‖ New Yorker. Condé Nast., 24 Sept. 2001. Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
Versluys, Christian. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP,
2009. Print.
Wasserman, Sarah L. ―Looking Away from 9/11: The Optics of Joseph O‘Neill‘s
Netherland.‖ Contemporary Literature. 55.2 (2014): 249-69. Project Muse. Web. 1
Sept. 2016.
Wilhite, Keith, ed. Introduction. The City since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television. Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016. 1-21. Print.
Wood, James. ―Beyond a Boundary.‖ The New Yorker. Condé Nast., 26 May 2008. Web. 25
Aug. 2016.
Yemenetzi-Malathouni Smatie, Tatiani Rapatzikou, and Eleftheria Arapoglou, eds.
Introduction. Ex-centric Narratives: Identity, Multi-Vocality, and Cross-Culturalism.
Palo Alto: Academica Press, 2012. 1-20. Print. Tsiokou 105
---. Introduction. Re-Inventing/Re-Presenting Identities in a Global World. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. ix-xxv. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates. London: Verso, 2002. Print.