Reading Dystopian Fiction After 9:11

A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after
9/11
Efraim Sicher
Natalia Skradol
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas,
Volume 4, Number 1, January 2006, pp. 151-179 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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A World Neither Brave Nor New:
Reading Dystopian Fiction aIter 9/11
EIraim Sicher
Ben Gurion University oI the Negev
Natalia Skradol
Tel Aviv
Under the general demand Ior slackening and
Ior appeasement, we can hear the muttering oI
the desire Ior a return oI terror, Ior the realization
oI the Iantasy to seize reality.
Lyotard 1984: 82
On ne peut pas crire sur ce sujet mais on ne
peut pas crire sur autre chose non plus. Plus
rien ne nous atteint.
Beigbeder2003:18
The End without Ending: The Intrusion oI the Real
9/11 has been imagined beIore in countless hijack or terminal disaster
Iilms such as Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and Independence Day.
Slavoj Zizek presents the TV coverage oI 9/11 as the Hitchcock moment
oI horror that is actually happening; it is the intrusion oI the real into
Iiction. This is what made similar scenes in horror movies unscreenable
in the immediate weeks aIter 9/11 and sent the CIA scurrying aIter
Hollywood scriptwriters in order to try to understand the terrorists. It is
an intrusion, Zizek argues, that is the ultimate marker oI the "passion
Ior the Real" (2002: 16-20). One instance oI this intrusion occurs in the
Iilm The Matrix (1999) when the hero awakens Irom what he thought
* This essay is dedicated to the memory oI Philippa Tiger, who Iirst suggested the
rereading oI Auden. The authors are grateIul to Dr Yael Ben-Zvi, who Iirst pointed out to
us the reversal oI reality and Iiction in Matrix. Special thanks go to Peter Hutton and Joel
Meyerowitz Ior kind permission to use their work.
Partial Answers 4/1 (2006)
152 EIraim Sicher and Natalia Skradol
was "real" into the "real reality" and sees a desolate landscape littered
with the burned ruins oI Chicago aIter a global war. The hero then
encounters resistance leader Morpheus, who utters the ironic greeting:
"Welcome to the desert oI the real."1
This essay explores how our imagining oI Iuture disaster in dystopian
literature is re-visioned and revised by the aIter-image oI the disaster
that has actually happened. II there has been a change in our reading
oI literature and Iilm since 9/11, this change may not be quantiIiable
(a measurement beyond the scope oI this essay and possibly beyond
Ieasibility), but it may teach us something about the way in which the
aIterimage oI the disaster that has actually occurred aIIects our reading
in the would-be anterior Iuture oI imagined terminal catastrophe, the
imagined end oI society, oI time, oI the story. A similar process oI
reinterpretation happened aIter the 2004 tsunami disaster in Asia,
which seemed to outdo the scenes in the Iilm The Day AIter Tomorrow
(2004) oI a submerged New York. Each oI these events challenged the
human ability to control history and the environment.
Both natural and man-made disasters leave deep impressions on
the imagination and on philosophy. For example, the 1755 Lisbon
earthquake destroyed an imperial capital equivalent to the size oI
prewar London and made a laughing-stock oI Leibnizian optimism in
Voltaire's Candide. Yet natural disasters do not usually have political,
military, and historical signiIicance and, unlike 9/11, are rarely thought
oI as marking the end oI an era. 9/11 was an intrusion oI the real that
made it impossible to un-imagine dystopia as nightmare or Iantasy. It
is not a matter oI whether or not Utopian thought is still sustainable or
practical, but oI what has happened in postmodern Iiction under the
impact oI a real collision oI reality and imagination. This destruction
was not just another demonstration oI a culture oI aIter-images but a
singular event, perhaps an ur-event, which showed that the world was
in a permanent state oI unending disasters.
What could looking backward Irom aIter 9/11 mean Ior our reading
oI dystopian texts? We do not have in mind mere "Ioreshadowing" (cI.
Bernstein 1994), or Jacques Derrida's delineation oI nuclear-holocaust
' See Zizek 15. Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow oI No Towers makes a similar point
when he has a billboard Ior Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage displayed
against the background oI the real terrorist scenario oI the burning Towers (2004: 2). On
the delayed release oI Collateral Damage and the post-9/11 reception oI war Iilms see
Lowenstein 2003.
A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction aIter 9/11 153
discourse as an entirely Iictional genre (since it had not happened and
could not happen without erasing all record, all archive, oI its having
happened).2 Rather, the eIIect oI reading any dystopian text post
Iactum, when history has given chilling new meaning to the original
context in which the disaster was imagined, reverses the relationship
between Iiction and reality and raises unsettling postmodern suspicions
oI the "real" as something that can be known otherwise than as an
aesthetic arteIact. We are always, when reading narratives, looking
Iorward, in all senses, to the end, but in this case the "end" precedes
our reading oI past narratives that imagine the Iuture. Superimposed
on our interpretation is the disaster having already happened (quite
apart Irom any meaning the disaster's may have in itselI as a discrete
historical, political, or physical event).
We shall see that a Iurther stage has been reached when dystopian
Iiction has become a Iact, no longer a cautionary tale oI the imagination.
But then destruction is embedded in Western culture. Satirized by Don
DeLiIIo, postwar America had become a site oI catastrophe beIore
disaster struck; the destruction oI New York must also be seen in terms
oI postmodern aesthetic theory expounded by Jean Baudrillard and
Paul Virilio. Finally, Frdric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan
SaIran Foer respond to 9/11 in novels that grapple with what 9/11 and
its aItermath imply Ior representation and Ior the novel Iorm.
What 9/11 has shown is that the relationship oI the real and the
imagined in dystopian Iiction has been reversed, since hypermediated
image has eclipsed the event and Iiction has become lived experience.
There is an uncanny sense oI an end that has been almost predestined,
like Winston's Ieeling oI dj vu in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
when he enters the Golden Country and makes love with Julia in a
Miltonian Paradise, a scene he has dreamed. Indeed, the topos has been
reworked enough times in literature to be uncannily Iamiliar. Read
in this context, T. S. Eliot's remark in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" about the duty oI any true artist to "live ... in what is not
merely the present, but the present moment oI the past" (1976: 22)
acquires a new and sinister meaning.
II the Christian promise oI an apocalyptic end was repeatedly
disappointed, it could be argued that "the typological repetitions that
punctuate the more linear apocalyptic mythos entail a diIIerent sort oI
2 See Derrida 1984, as well as Saint-Amour 2000.
negotiation oI identity and diIIerence, one... whose disconIirmation (or
the Iailure oI the attainment oI apocalyptic closure), Iar Irom discrediting
or invalidating the deIining mythos or promise, serves to propel the
mythos Iorward, oIten in a redeIined and expanded Iorm" (Robson
1995: 62). In narrative terms, such repetition is built into an American
cultural discourse that can be traced back to the Pilgrim Fathers, who
believed they had arrived in the postapocalyptic promised land. In a
sense, the end was always there, since utopia presumes that something
(the rotten state oI society, human corruption, gender diIIerence, or liIe
on earth) must Iirst come to an end. Seen this way, apocalyptic visions,
in the Christian scriptures or in revolutionary socialism, build terminal
disaster into eschatology, so that the repeated non-IulIillment oI the
promised salvation implies a constant repetition oI catastrophe. Worse,
when disaster is not Iollowed by a brave new world, all that remains
is a permanent state oI disaster. Dystopian Iiction is thus implicitly
postapocalyptic.
At the same time, spatio-temporal repetition may be built into
cultural texts, such as music (see Lyotard 1988: 165), and Paul Ricoeur
reminds us that literary plot is in essence repetitive (1980: 178). It is a
Iamiliar paradox, moreover, that when we begin to read a novel, the end
oI the story has already been written, so that the Iuture has already been
imagined as the past in narrative time; in history the story is always
retold when we know the ending, even iI we cannot know its meaning.
ThereIore the dystopian Iuture is always past tense, retold and revised.
But iI dystopia can no longer be imagined except in the already past
Iuture, the story can only be repeated as a continual end, a disastrous
writing in Maurice Blanchot's terms. Speaking oI Auschwitz (a disaster
incomparable, least oI all to 9/11 ) in The Writing oI the Disaster, Blanchot
remarks that we live aIter the unthinkable has been thought. Although
it does not actually touch us physically, we live everywhere under its
threat: "The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything
intact" (1986: 1). In any case, we can barely express the Ieeling oI being
unable to write aIter the disaster. II all representation is inadequate, then
reading aIter disaster substitutes Ior an act oI representation.
Some oI the implications oI reading literary dystopias aIter 9/11
may lie in the deIinition oI dystopia and conIirm what we have long
known, namely that there is no return to innocence because there was
none. Utopia and anti-utopia have always been two sides oI the same
coin: "As nightmare is to dream . . . anti-utopia has stalked utopia
Irom the very beginning. ... As in Freud's theory oI the unconscious,
the very announcement oI utopia has almost immediately provoked
the mocking, contrary, echo oI anti-utopia" (Kumar 99-100). Dystopia
(which should be distinguished Irom anti-utopia) is not so much an
argument against utopia, as its obverse, a utopia that will inevitably go
wrong; it is utopia discovered to be the "bad place" (see Booker 1994;
Moylan 2000:111-99). John Stuart Mill mocked his opponents as "dys-
topians" or "caco-topians" because, he declared, "What is commonly
called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they
appear to Iavour is too bad to be practicable."3 Surely there has always
been a dystopian streak in Utopian writing, especially iI More's Utopia
is read ironically, as both u-topia and eu-topia, as a critique oI what is
wrong with England's social and economic situation that is Iollowed,
in the second book, by a demonstration, through the unreliable
narrator (a veritable "speaker oI nonsense"), oI a perIect society that
is impossibly "No-Where." Nevertheless, the satires directed at ideal
societies by SwiIt, Johnson, or Voltaire did not deter Utopian thinkers
in America or Europe Irom planning and occasionally building utopias
based on ideals oI universal reason and happiness. Typically, these
Utopian projects can be brought about only by transIorming human
nature, whether by social and genetic engineering (Brave New World),
eugenics (The Coming Race), genocide (Mein KampI), behavioral
conditioning (Waiden 2), mind control (Nineteen Eighty-Four), or the
banning oI literature (Fahrenheit 451). There is something inhuman
(and thus potentially dysIunctional or dystopian) in the idea oI a utopia
which requires that human society as currently constituted be replaced
(whether through natural selection or coercion) by a social order based on
diIIerent (implicitly non-human) characteristics. These characteristics
are usually based on uniIormity, conIormity, and unanimity - the very
values that brought the downIall oI the biblical Tower oI Babel.
In his critique oI the inhuman absolutism oI Utopian projects which
allowed only one possible solution to social ills, Iorced on people
dogmatically, Isaiah Berlin quoted Immanuel Kant's dictum that
"out oI the crooked timber oI humanity no straight thing was ever made. "4
Berlin detected the seeds oI revolt against the Utopian construction
3 Speech to the House oI Commons, 12 March 1857; quoted in Kumar 447, note 2.
4 "|A|us so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz
Gerades gezimmert werden" ("Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte weltb/rgischer
Absicht" |1784|, quoted in Berlin 19).
oI universal harmony in German romanticism and in Promethean
Byronic heroes (Berlin 44-45). Lewis MumIord, too, in his salutary
preIace to the 1962 edition oI The Story oI Utopias, declares that the
eighteenth-century Utopians were mistaken in thinking that human
nature was malleable and society perIectible (3). Like Berlin, MumIord
maintained his Iaith in the latent possibilities that could lead to a better
world iI the warnings oI Utopian projects were heeded, despite the
dent that World War I made in those hopes when it "suddenly
reversed the currents oI our liIe" (2). In a passage that reads quite
ironically now, MumIord dreamily looked out oI his tenement window
over the rooItops oI Manhattan, seeking inspiration Ior the Utopian
potential oI the present and relieI Irom its ugliness in the "pale tower
with its golden pinnacle gleaming through the soIt morning haze" (25).
Literary dystopia gives a negative appraisal oI the here-and-now,
a satire oI what is already possible but not desirable, as distinct Irom
Iantastic science Iiction set elsewhere, which may be desirable but not
realizable. In the century oI communism and Iascism, the revolutionary
Utopian movements oIIered the implementation oI ideals, while
dystopia mocked the tyranny oI idea (see Kumar 125). The Russian
philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev predicted that utopia was only too
possible and intellectuals would have to Iight to prevent it, a prophecy
Aldous Huxley used as the epigraph to his dystopian novel, Brave New
World (1932). Berdyaev, writing at the beginning oI Soviet rule beIore
he was expelled by the Bolsheviks, saw that the border oI reality had
been crossed when Utopian theory had become totalitarian practice and
dystopians would have to imagine a resistance to this scourge out oI
Dostoevsky's The Possessed beIore the West became inIected too (see
BerdiaeII 262-66).5
The End in the Beginning: Disaster as a Cultural Norm
Cet vnement a exist, et on ne peut pas le raconter.
Beigbeder 19
The reasons why 9/11 seemed to repeat a dystopian scenario have
to do with a paradigm in Western culture. Despite the conclusion oI
the commission investigating 9/11 that there had been a Iailure oI
5 See also Hoyles 120-21.
imagination in the intelligence community,6 in popular culture the all too
Iamiliar scene oI destruction seemed incredible because it was, indeed,
all too Iamiliar. The common comparison with other disasters that
delivered a Iundamental psychological shock and served as historical
or epistemological turning-points, such as the sinking oI the Titanic or
the attack on Pearl Harbor, underscores the paradoxical unexpectedness
and predictability oI the event. The more the catastrophic end becomes
mythologized in collective memory and popular culture, the less we
expect it to happen as a "real" event and the more predictable it seems
to be when it has happened. Susan Sontag once commented (1966:
209-25) that science Iiction Iilms and novels are invariably more about
disaster than science since they go back to the oldest plots oI heroes
battling evil against all odds and reenact the destruction oI great cities
(such as Babylon in D.W. GriIIith's 1916 Iilm Intolerance).
The "ruins oI time" motiI (a poetic tradition Irom Edmund Spenser
to Robert Lowell) helps keep in mind the seeds oI destruction on which
Britain built its imperial project, as Rome had done beIore. Social critics
Irom Carlyle to Ruskin envisioned the Iuture ruins oI the capitalist
empire, the new Tower oI Babel/Babylon. Gustave Dor's vivid 1872
etching oI "The New Zealander" presents a vision oI the ruins oI London
150 years later, visited by an aborigine tourist. The collapse oI temples
and towers is at the core oI our cultural sensibilities - whether they
represent belieI systems, military power, or global commerce - and it
was science, identiIied with progress and rationality, that has perIected
the means oI eIIicient lethal destruction. Beginning with the American
Civil War7 and the Franco-German War, writers imagined the war to
end all wars. A memorable example is H. G. Wells's War oI the Worlds
(1897),8 which, in Orson Welles's radio rendition on October 30, 1938,
caused panic in America. Toppling towers and alien invasions have long
6 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, August 21, 2004,
www.9-1 lcommission.gov: 339`-7.
7 In his 2004 discussion oI the poverty oI literary responses aIter 9/11, Christopher
Merrill notes that the American Civil War marked a loss oI innocence which inspired
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to create a new poetics oI grieI (70-77). His point is
that Whitman and, in his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln were able to articulate a
Iuture Ior the American nation in a way not matched by President George W. Bush aIter
9/11.
8 See Kumar 65. Kumar names Sir George Chesney's The Battle oI Dorking (1871)
as the Iirst work oI this kind.
been the staple oI science Iiction plots, though since World War II no
hero trying to save the world could be innocent about the global threat
under which we all live, a collective trauma oI a global destruction which
has already happened (see Sontag 215, 225). So, to a Western public,
the targeting oI the Twin Towers and the Pentagon might have seemed
(however Ialsely) a scenario already previewed, prescribed, pretexted...
We live in a continual disaster zone and thereIore, in rereading the
modernists, we recognize that Ior them the apocalypse was present
tense, not an eschatological Iuture. Sitting in "one oI the dives / On
FiIty-second Street / Uncertain and aIraid," W. H. Auden smelt the
"unmentionable odor oI death" that "OIIends the September night."9
On that other September night, under the collective strength oI the
skyscrapers oI Manhattan, Auden despaired oI the Ialse hopes oI a
"low dishonest decade," yet put his Iaith in the individual aIIirmation oI
Iidelity. Auden could not see the coming end that T. S. Eliot described
in "Little Gidding." He could not see what that poetic Iire-watcher saw
in the Dantean inIerno oI the Blitz. However, Yeats, the ghost who
walks the dead patrol with T. S. Eliot, knew that aIter the war to end all
wars, the Great War oI 1914-1918, the next war was coming, and that
iI nothing "drastic" was done, airplanes and Zeppelins would Ilatten
the city.10 Written in July 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, a year
beIore Guernica provided Picasso with an image oI modern war, "Lapis
Lazuli" is not so much a prediction oI the coming global conIlagration
amid hysterics and playacting, as an acknowledgment oI the ancient
wisdom oI the Chinese and the gaiety in their wrinkled eyes which
have seen and outlasted the Iall oI many empires.
Countless novels and Iilms have assumed that disaster would lead
to the end oI America's liberal democracy. In Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale (1989), Ior example, an ecological catastrophe has
taken place, the President and Congress have been gunned down (Ior
which "Islamic Ianatics" are blamed), and the United States has been
transIormed into a dystopian patriarchy based on a Iundamentalist
Christian right-wing hierarchy that enslaves women. British dystopias
are no saIer. In A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess imagines
the introduction oI sadistic mind control based on Soviet techniques.
9 "1st September 1939" (Auden 1945: 57). These lines were oIten quoted aIter 9/11
(see Merrill 69-70).
10 "Lapis Lazuli" (Yeats 1958: 292).
In another novel, 1985 (1978), he imagines that an Islamic republic has
been proclaimed in the United Kingdom.
When the planes hit the Towers on September 11, 2001, despite
some tottering oI stock markets, the global superpower, the United
States oI America, did not collapse as was Ieared. Nevertheless, the
vision oI the monuments oI empire crumbling in a Iew moments
exceeds our capacity to imagine worst-case scenarios. At the same
time, the Iailure to conIront the preexisting possibility oI the disaster
and to Iind adequate cultural responses to 9/11 seems to say something
about a postapocalyptic culture which has already imagined the Iinal
disaster. James Berger wrote his 1999 book AIter the End during the
millennial high alert beIore that moment when New York moved Irom
the list oI cities oI culture (Paris, Vienna, Prague) to cities oI destruction
(Jerusalem, Nineveh, Babylon). Perhaps Ior this very reason, Berger's
observation remains true: we are always writing aIter the end that
has been written into Western culture - Irom the Book oI Revelation
through Vonnegut, Pynchon, and DeLiIIo.
AIter the worst has already happened (the Bhophal disaster in India,
Chernobyl, 9/11, or the SARS epidemic), the Iuture can be imagined
as a replay oI disaster scenarios, in which we compulsively repeat
past imagining oI the Iuture. This is a distinctly postmodernist marker
oI an end to the Western tradition oI looking Iorward to the terminal
transIormation oI the world either into a prelapsarian edenic state (a
regression to a primeval paradise) or into a radically new political
reality (a revision oI history or rewriting the Iuture). The occurrence oI
the Ioreseen catastrophe lends an uncanny inevitability to history. Kurt
Vonnegut parodies this backward reading oI history in Timequake ( 1997)
when he describes the "clambake" in February 2001 which reverses
time and returns the Iree will that has been lost to the inevitability oI
history's rerun. Airplanes on autopilot are crashing and the Iact that
this unending disaster is dreamed up by a science Iiction writer called
Kilgore Trout does not prevent us Irom realizating that this Iantasy
oI the Iuture has happened beIore. In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
(1969), Billy Pilgrim, who is living a Kilgore Trout Iantasy oI visitors
Irom outer space, complains that he cannot change the past, present, or
Iuture. There is no human Ireedom except to press the destroy button.
History is a series oI destructions. The replay backwards oI a movie oI
the Allied Iirebombing oI Dresden is a reprise oI the point that there is
no why in history. Moreover, in the novel, the historian David Irving's
revisionist account oI this incident is taken more seriously than Bill's
own personal memory oI being there as a witness.
In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the screaming
oI the V-rockets repeats previous disasters and promises a spectacle
as great as the destruction oI the Crystal Palace, the glass monument
to the triumph oI the capitalist utopia at the center oI the 1851 Great
Exhibition (it burnt down in 1936):
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened beIore, but
there is nothing to compare it with now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre.
. . . He's aIraid oI the way the glass will Iall - soon - it will be
a spectacle: the Iall oI a crystal palace. But coming down in
total blackout, without one glint oI light, only great invisible
crashing.11
We start at Absolute Zero, where Wernher von Braun 's rocketry links
Nazi total war with the NASA space program in an apocalyptic vision
oI erotic Iantasies oI sadomasochistic ecstasy. This reminds us that
"ground zero" derives Irom the atomic testing grounds in Alamogordo
(see Davis 2003); the Manhattan Project is a code name Ior destruction
that, in a macabre twist, has, as it were, struck home. The endgame
dates Irom World War II, Vonnegut avers in Timequake, when the Iirst
atom bomb was dropped on Japan.
Other literary dystopias show how much the imagined end in
American Iiction has become an essential element oI postmodernist
poetics. Don DeLillo's White Noise (1984) is about the imperceptible
presence oI death which has been invisibly introduced into the lives
oI ordinary Americans (as the Chernobyl Iall-out would do a year or
two later, an unseen disaster whose damage could not be contained
by the habitual lies oI the regime). The Airborne Toxic Event slides
imperceptibly, namelessly, into the daily emergency routine oI the
crowd waiting anxiously to be told that the authorities know what is
happening - waiting to be transported, processed, evacuated. But the
diIIerence between simulation and a real emergency has been eroded
" Pynchon 1975: 3. Quoting this passage, Anustup Basu notes the proximity oI event
and phenomenon; Iailure to distinguish between these two categories oI thought has made
it possible to present 9/11 as a crisis situation without understanding "that which allows
the screaming to both recur in a calendar oI disasters, and at the same time, have an
untimely and incomparable aspect to it" (2003: 11).
(a SIMUVAC oIIicial explains that they are using the real thing as an
exercise!) In White Noise, moreover, the aIterimage makes us think
that we are seeing the real thing. This is as close as you can get, only
we need to get closer:
"Come on hurry up, plane crash Iootage." Then he was out the
door, the girls were oII the bed, all three oI them running along
the hall to the TV set.
I sat in bed a little stunned. The swiItness and noise oI their
leaving had put the room in a state oI molecular agitation. In
the debris oI invisible matter, the question seemed to be, What
is happening here? By the time I got to the room at the end oI
the hall, there was only a puII oI black smoke at the edge oI the
screen. But the crash was shown two more times, once in stop-
action replay, as an analyst attempted to explain the reason Ior
the plunge. (DeLiHo 1986: 64)
The event is no longer an event but its aIterimage, like the clip, endlessly
replayed, oI the second plane penetrating the World Trade Center. Zizek
sees the repeated shots oI the second plane crashing into the WTC as
approximating the appeal oI a snuII movie, the ultimate sadistic act
endlessly repeated and prolonged in virtual reality (5-6,11). Every image
oI disaster, even iI broadcast live by satellite, becomes an aIterimage
once it has happened. The aIterimage oI the disaster, Baudrillard
tells us, Ieeds an insatiable hunger Ior worse, Ior a Bataillean excess:
"Every disaster made us wish Ior more, Ior something bigger, grander,
more sweeping" (Baudrillard 2002: 11). In much the same way, the
protagonist oI Crash (1973) by J. G. Ballard, the science Iiction author
oI a number oI terminal apocalypses, is constantly on the lookout Ior
victims oI more and more atrocious car crashes.
That America and especially New York can be understood only as
images is the sustaining device oI DeLillo's Mao II ( 1991 ), a work that
links international terrorism with the art oI the novel in a metaIictional
dystopian here and now. Even beIore the aIterimage oI their downIall
in real liIe, the Twin Towers exist only as an image, seen Irom the
studio oI Brita, a proIessional photographer who is turning her mental
image oI the writer Scott into publicity images:
Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the
night intensely massed and near. This is the word "loomed" in
all its prolonged and impending Iorce. (DeLiIIo 1991: 87)
As in White Noise, the crowds are Iixated by mass death. The mass
weddings oI the Moon cult, Islamic Iundamentalists greeting Khomeini,
and the Iuneral oI Chairman Mao are televised images that reIlect the
complete loss oI individual human identity, as well as oI community,
oI emotional connection. Everything is done by remote access and
routine. A bomb explosion is something that really happens, but it can
only be perceived in a Iragmented image oI a shard oI glass, or as
a press event. Freedom is a concept tied to the media announcement
oI a hostage's release. So powerIul is an image that the photo oI a
corpse may be more important to the terrorists than any exchange or
deal. The Russian revolutionary slogan adopted by a German neo-Nazi
group, "the worse the better," sums up the cynical state oI aIIairs in
which only when you are killed are you noticed; prime-time ratings go
to mass killers and suicide bombers. While his hooded captors leave
the kidnapped poet only images to grasp, another protagonist, Karen,
discovers New York's own Beirut, a tent city oI disaIIected homeless
drug addicts and illegals. DeLiIIo warned that hostage-taking was a
rehearsal Ior mass terror, but his scenario oI midair explosions and
crumbling buildings, "the new tragic narrative" aIter Beckett (1991:
157), is, since 9/11, no longer a dystopia oI the Iuture.
In a 1986 essay on New York (1989a: 13-24), Baudrillard likewise
noticed the total isolation oI the individual that makes relationships
outside gangs unthinkable. The world's capital has reached a degree oI
atomization and crowdedness that has outstripped the agglomeration
that baIIled Friedrich Engels in the streets oI London. The New York
Marathon, that "end oI the world show," brings a message not oI
victory but oI catastrophe because each oI the 17,000 runners suIIers
alone Ior the sake oI the achievement oI saying "I did it" (19-20).
"I did it" sums up the mystical decadence oI a vibrant and totalized
city, its cold architecture, the animal attraction oI skin color, and above
all the exhaustion oI its Utopian projects, such as the space program,
once they, too, have been implemented. Further, "America is neither
dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it
is a utopia which has behaved Irom the very beginning as though it
were already achieved." America has, indeed, become the "perIect
simulacrum" (28).
The End beIore the End: Imagining the End oI the World
Tout gratte-ciel est une utopie.
Beigbeder 26
Another way oI looking Iorward to the Iuture end was to wait Ior the
barbarians. The Greek poet Irom Alexandria, Constantine CavaIy
(1863-1933), mused on what would happen iI the long expected
barbarians did not arrive: "So now what will become oI us, without
barbarians./ Those men were one sort oI resolution."12 But these
necessary barbarian Others are no good iI they are already here. As
Morris Berman, author oI The Twilight oI American Culture, writes
in "Waiting Ior the Barbarians" (2001), the parallel between the Iall
oI Rome and America aIter 9/11 is impressive because the decay
caused by inner barbarism does not take account oI the destruction
Irom without.13 The chronically bored hospital guard on duty in the
movie The Barbarian Invasions I Les Invasions Barbares (dir. Denys
Arcand, Rmy Girard, and Stphane Rousseau, Canada, 2003) is not
particularly impressed by the repeated Iootage oI the 9/11 catastrophe;
like T. S. Eliot's Tiresias, he probably Ieels he "has seen it all beIore,"
in the invasion oI the civilized barbarians within his own society, in his
own hospital, right by his desk.
What in the title oI his essay on 9/11 Don DeLiIIo calls the "Ruins
oI the Future" is a continuing disaster, precisely in the Utopian mass
circulation oI virtual goods and inIormation:
In the past decade the surge oI capital markets has dominated
discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational
corporations have come to seem more vital and inIluential than
governments. The dramatic climb oI the Dow and the speed oI
the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the Iuture,
in the Utopian glow oI cyber-capital, because there is no memory
there, and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment
potential has no limit.
According to DeLiIIo, this is a disaster that literally ruins the Utopian
Iuture and demolishes social constructions oI technological progress
12 "Waiting Ior the Barbarians" (CavaIy 2001: 93).
13 Merrill cites CavaIy's poem to make an argument Ior the power oI literature to bring
empathy (2004: 74-79).
and endless happiness, leaving us with nothing to look Iorward to, only
the memory oI an end. The destruction Irom without is not the revolt
oI the repressed and the needy against globalization but a Iorce totally
Other and incomprehensible to the mind oI the empire, untouched, as
DeLiIIo tells us in his essay, by the woman in the supermarket, yet
touching every aspect oI the capitalist utopia, Irom its skyscrapers to
Palm Pilots.
It has been suggested (Abel 2003) that DeLillo's "The Ruins oI the
Future" may question our capability to respond because its rhetoricity
determines the understanding oI what 9/11 means. In other words,
the imaging oI the event may deIer, though not totally suspend, any
judgmental position, and the aesthetic statement oI this dilemma
impedes getting at the essence oI what happened. A good illustration
is the manipulation oI the viewers' political stance through visual
interpretation in Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 (2003).
Cinematic imaging prevents us Irom seeing the event itselI, while
hypermediation shapes public belieI.
DeLillo's real-time scenario oI a Third-World country in which people
wander helplessly in dust masks, clutching photos and descriptions oI
the disappeared, concludes with a surprising aIIirmation oI a counter-
narrative to the Cold-War arms race or the Bush administration's
declaration oI a (Iourth) world war on "the evil ones." DeLiIIo speaks oI
the power oI American technology, its own "astonishments," combined
with the multiethnicism oI New York, to survive mindless attacks. Jean
Baudrillard sees it diIIerently, as a millennial burst oI terminal events
that began with the death oI Princess Diana and culminated with the
mother oI all events, 9/11.u
The Iascination with images oI destruction imparts a desire Ior
destruction embedded in the power structure itselI, which enacts
our dreams oI its happening (see Baudrillard 2002: 5-6). The twin
destruction rules out accident and goes beyond any ideology,
energizing the absolute and irrevocable event: a zero-death game that
14In his 1989 essay "The Anorexic Ruins," Baudrillard announced that in a sense
the year 2000 would not take place because there were no more events; the end had been
played out so many times that the postapocalyptic world was a rerun oI a spectacle, while
history, culture, and truth were absorbed by the simulated image. In Baudrillard's America
this end oI ends was located in the trajectory Irom the old culture oI Europe to the utopia
oI America, where everything speeded to a terminal end. This postapocalyptic topos itselI
partakes oI the apocalyptic myth oI the Pilgrim Fathers (see HeIIerman 171-72).
deIies interpretation. The terrorists hijacked the media, in Baudrillard's
analysis, because the "image consumes the event, in the sense that it
absorbs it and oIIers it Ior consumption" as an "image event" (27). The
Iixation on aIterimages oI the event blocks out interpretive strategies
that would "Iit" this event into some historicizing, ideological, or ethical
pattern, perhaps even into Baudrillard's own postmodernist anti-
allegories oI counter-meaning. The striving Ior rational progress, Ior
Utopian happiness, would then have to be reread as a premonition oI
an end that has already "happened" and is now being experienced in
what Baudrillard sees as a radical and violent reintroduction oI a real
event into the proliIeration oI simulacra and banal images oI pseudo-
events. It is in this sense that "|t|he structure oI the spectacle . . .
'revokes' the very Utopian desires . . . that its images 'provoke.'... It
is this contradiction that is expressed by postmodern myth's perpetual
oscillation between utopia and dystopia" (Durham 5).
The End oI the End: The Postmodern Dystopia
En anglais, "end" ne signiIie pas seulement la
Iin mais aussi l'extrmit.
Beigbeder 20
Rereading dystopian Iiction must contend with the loss oI Iavor
oI utopianism in a consumerist mass-culture which values instant
gratiIication and Ietishizes material objects oI desire. The egocentric
meanness oI "me-ness" stresses the individual at the expense oI shared
ideological goals. Family ties, group identity, or the collective tend not
to be Ieelgood experiences in the global IastIood McDonald's empire.
When power is in the hands oI multinational corporations, Lyotard tells
us, an anything-goes eclecticism characterizes a zero degree oI culture,
and "knowledge" is relegated to TV trivia games (1984: 76). Party or
organized socialism has been widely discredited, and with the Iall oI
the Berlin Wall many "isms" oI all kinds have lost their hold, resulting
in the collapse oI the myth oI progress (see Jacoby 1999: 1-27).
In Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing oI Mass Utopia
in East and West (2000), Susan Buck-Morss comments that Walter
Benjamin's Traumwelt (dreamworld) oI early commodity capitalism
has been replaced by Adorno's diagnosis oI "absolute reiIication oI the
world" (see Adorno 1991,1: 40). Buck-Morss's reading oI Benjamin's
dreamworld and catastrophe as two "extremes oI mass utopia" (2000:
xi) disregards an essential aspect oI Benjamin's concept oI historical
dynamics. For Benjamin, catastrophe is not opposed to dreamworld
but is present already at the moment oI the appearance oI dreamworld
images, since "every epoch, in Iact, not only dreams the one to Iollow
but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itselI.
... we begin to recognize the monuments ... as ruins even beIore they
have crumbled" (Benjamin 1999:13). What Benjamin said oI bourgeois
collective Iantasies can be extended to the modern Western culture oI
consumerism. Dreamworld carries the catastrophe within itselI. But
the Iormula can also be reversed: the catastrophe is an announcement
oI a dreamworld oI the Iuture, iI dreamworld is to be understood as
an assemblage oI collective Iantasies. Buck-Morss considers there to
be little diIIerence between Soviet Russia and America in this respect
and points to a parallel vision and disillusionment in Russia and
America in the twentieth century: King Kong straddling the Empire
State building is contemporary with Stalinist monumental architecture
(Buck-Morss 17488). Tatlin's vision oI mechanization oI the body,
as in his Letatlin Ilying machine (1929-1932) or his constructivist
design Ior the never built Monument to the Third International (1920),
conveyed the Iuturistic dimension oI technological utopianism that
remained, however, no more than a dream Ior the masses (see Stites
1989). But Stalinist towers and palaces, symbols oI totalitarian power,
cannot be compared with the prominence skyscrapers in the American
dream, which consigned those excluded Irom them to the poverty oI
the ghetto: no expression oI opposition to Stalinism in any Iorm was
tolerated - and the day oI avant-garde Iuturism in the Soviet Union was
all too short.
Seen Irom aIter 9/11, the twentieth century marks the twilight
oI utopia. Dystopia has Iinally arrived because, on the one hand,
the reconstitution oI society seems impossible while, on the other,
technology threatens basic concepts oI individual Ireedom and oI
human liIe. It may be that modernity is simply a state oI Iatigue, as
it was Ior Nietzsche, and that the world is slipping into idleness - the
perpetual leisure that makes any other Iorm oI utopia unthinkable.
Writing in 1888, Nietzsche asked: "Where does our modern world
belong - to exhaustion or ascent?" His characterization oI the epoch by
the metaphor oI Iatigue was symptomatic oI a general Iear shared by the
European middle classes that humanity was depleting its "accumulated
energy" and Ialling into that sleep, which was "only a symbol oI a
much deeper and longer compulsion to rest."15 Against the background
oI the pessimism that grew out oI the wholesale slaughter oI World War
I, Oscar Spengler 's Decline oI the West (1918) and Freud's Civilization
and its Discontents (1930) can be seen as strong anti-utopian key texts.
As Ior the more Iuturistic projects oI modernism, their inebriating
Utopian spirit generated an expectancy curtailed by the trench warIare
oI World War I and paradoxically suggested a Iuture that would cancel
both the present and modernism itselI.16 It is hardly surprising that,
Iollowing the liberation oI Europe in 1945, which revealed the Nazi
concentration camps, and under the perceived threat oI communist
invasion, there was a marked increase in new horror tales that depicted
impending, terminal disaster overtaking the mightiest nation in the
world (see Kumar 380-88).
Utopia was, oI course, Iar Irom dead. Yet, despite renewed hopes oI
scientiIic redemption, ecotopias, Ieminist utopias, suicidal millennial
cults, and New Age ashrams, America continues to be the Iinal dystopia
in DeLillo's White Noise, while in Martin Amis' Time's Arrow (1991),
which borrows Vonnegut's reversal oI time to trace absolute evil to
the black hole oI Auschwitz, postmodern America has developed into
a commodity-Ietish culture producing garbage - a dystopian vision
approaching Adorno's vision in Negative Dialectics oI total reiIication
in his critique oI a society that constructs death Iactories.
Postmodernism comes aIter, and it comes aIter disaster. Narrative
time can no longer maintain the Iallacy oI linear progress toward
a Iuture-oriented better world. Benjamin's angel oI history, as he
read Paul Klee's ngelus Novus (1920), has its back to the Iuture
and its Iace to the past: "Where we perceive a chain oI events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in Iront oI his Ieet. The Angel would like to
stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing Irom Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them" (1973:
15 The Will to Power quoted in Rabinbach 1990: 19.
'6On the constructs oI the Iuture in modernism see Kern 89-102. Jean-Franois
Lyotard has written oI a similar paradox in a postmodern "rewriting" oI modernity ( 1984:
33`15).
259-60).17 In this revision oI progress, a single disaster always Iaces the
angel oI history as he is propelled backwards into the Iuture; thereIore,
apocalypse should be seen not as the eternal return oI a mythical end
that will always happen, but as the postapocalypse which has always
already happened and in whose ruins we live (cI. Robson 1995).
Reread Irom this side oI 9/11, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
cannot explain an act oI total violence Ior its own sake. O'Brien
nevertheless convinces us that all totalizing systems may ultimately
be invincible, or at least unbeatable by conventional means such as
persuasion, diplomacy, negotiation, and military Iorce. We recall that
in "Shooting an Elephant" (1970, I: 265-72), Orwell tells us how,
as a British policeman in Burma, he smelled the pure hatred oI the
crowd and knew that what would come aIter imperialist rule would be
something worse than colonialism. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, terror and
Iear are means and objects oI power. Orwell, who held the common
post-World War II belieI that an atomic war was about to begin, may
also have sensed correctly that the superpower conIlict would develop
into an endless series oI wars over disputed territories. He could not
have predicted the collapse oI the Soviet Union and the Iall oI the
Berlin Wall, though it has been suggested that the Truman Doctrine oI
endless global conIlict was revived in the war on terrorism (Merrill 83).
Nor does Orwell's dystopian world model Ioresee that the challenge to
global capitalism might come Irom dormant cells oI armed Islamic
Iundamentalist insurgents. Huxley, Ior his part, did not suspect that
the Pleasure Dome might itselI carry the seeds oI its destruction in the
liberty and individual Ireedom that DeLiIIo parodied in White Noise.
Margaret Atwood has come to more hopeIul conclusions. Tracing
her own interest in English Iantasy romances, such as Hudson's The
Crystal Age (1867), she states (2004) that her dystopian Iiction, The
Handmaid's Tale, was begun in 1984 and was very much inIluenced by
Orwell's novel (though written Irom the point oI view oI a character who
corresponds to the seductive woman in Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell).
Atwood (mis)reads Orwell optimistically, because the epilogue (the
essay on Newspeak) leaves the retrospective impression that the regime
is a thing oI the past and we can now speak oI what went wrong. From a
1 ' Lyotard distinguishes between Benjamin's view oI the Angel, who sees only disaster
in the past, and a Hegelian approach, in which it is the "re-view" that "dis-asters" the past
(1993: 146).
diIIerent cultural and historical perspective, RaIIaella Baccolini (2004)
has pointed to political and generic shiIts, not least the rise oI Ieminism,
which marked the transition, in the nineties, Irom utopia to dystopia in
critical discourse. Baccolini cites Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale among
other dystopian texts that give hope Ior the Iuture. However, it should
be remembered that Iuturistic Iictions tend to reIlect cultural anxieties
oI the present (Ior example, American Iears oI the monstrous and the
savage in modernity projected in King Kong, urban Iears oI sexual
identity and violation in stories oI extraterrestrial encounters, or Iears oI
death by radiation in Cold War science Iiction Iantasies oI the IiIties).
A BeautiIul Ending: The Aesthetics oI Destruction
Plus la science progresse, plus les accidents
sont violents, plus les destructions sont belles.
Beigbeder 163
Susan Sontag wrote oI the thrill that movie viewers Ieel at the spectacle
oI the elaborate destruction oI London, New York, and Tokyo and
their shudder as the last vestiges oI human liIe disappear (1966: 214).
Destruction has an aesthetic appeal. The banality oI evil rarely touches
except on a grand scale and when the eIIects are visually spectacular,
as in the collapse oI a Iamiliar landmark (particularly when it is a Iixed
cultural image); hence the attention given to imaginative drawings
oI the Tower oI Babel and the shots oI the collapsing Twin Towers,
while less attention was paid to Five Mile Island or the Pentagon,
as Paul Virilio has suggested in his 2002 multimedia show at the
Cartier Foundation in Paris, Ce qui arrive. The show made a post-
Nietzschean statement about the postmodern city, the era oI disasters
in a world oI risk, the overwhelming rapidity oI events, and the danger
oI technology. The realness oI what happened was Iurther removed
because the Twin Towers were cinematically photogenic beIore they
were targeted.18
Because they can call upon images engraved in cultural memory,
photographs, Iilms, and videos oI natural and man-made disasters are
18 See the exhibition on http://www.paris-art.com/modules-modload-lieux-travail-588.
html (November 15, 2004). Paul Virilio's essay oI the same title, Ce qui arrive (Paris,
2002), was published in English as Ground Zero (2002). See also Smith 38-39.
commonly presented as postmodernist works oI art that can Iire the
imagination with visions oI destruction; Ior example, a Zeppelin in the
New York sky evokes World War I aerial bombing and the burning to
death oI passengers on the Hindenburg in 1937 (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Peter Hutton, New York Portrait: Chapter Two, 1980-1981, black and
white 16mm. Iilm (Irom Ce qui arrive) Peter Hutton
Destruction can be beautiIul, as in Baudrillard's lyrical description
oI the demolition oI a New York skyscraper:
Modern demolition is truly wonderIul. As a spectacle it is the
opposite oI a rocket launch. The twenty-storey block remains
perIectly vertical as it slides toward the center oI the earth. It Ialls
straight, with no loss oI its upright bearing, like a tailor's dummy
Ialling through a trap-door, and its own surIace area absorbs the
rubble. What a marvelous modern art Iorm this is, a match Ior the
Iirework displays oI our childhood. (1989a: 17)
For Virilio and Zizek, the spectacular deliberateness oI the planned
spectacle oI the 9/11 attack demonstrates the truth in Karl-Heinz
Stockhausen's provocative statement that the image oI the planes
hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work oI art.19
Large-scale destruction is represented as an aIterimage which
reIuses judgmental valuation. At the same time, such representations
draw attention to their problematic status as aesthetic arteIacts detached
Irom mimetic representation, which display the unbelievable aItermath
as a reality that will always be with us (see Rubinstein 15-25). The
2002 exhibition oI photographs by Joel Meyerowitz, AIter September
11: Images Irom Ground Zero (Fig. 2), belies the real-time eIIect in the
eerily spectral, irreversible aIter-ness oI destruction. In "Smoke Rising
Through Sunlight," the limp mechanical arm oI a bulldozer hangs
helplessly. The human Iigures are dwarIed by the scale oI destruction,
set in perspective by the ghostly sheen oI skyscrapers silhouetted against
the skyline, as iI they were the unreal objects, not the unbelievable
wreckage where there should be towers.
At the End, an Ending: The End oI the "End-oI-the-World"
Novels
L'criture de ce roman hyperraliste est rendue
diIIicile par la ralit elle-mme. Depuis le
11 septembre 2001, non seulement la ralit
dpasse la Iiction mais elle la dtruit.
Beigbeder18
None oI this is new, least oI all the crisis oI art caught between arteIact
and artiIice. That the novel is caught in the same crisis, a product oI
the very commodity culture which it satirizes, is illustrated by Frdric
Beigbeder's novel 99 Francs (2000) which takes its epigraph Irom
Huxley's 1946 Foreword to Brave New World and its title Irom its
price tag (with the introduction oI a uniIied European currency it was
reissued in 2002 as 14,99 Euros).
The aesthetic eIIect oI the revenant in our dystopian rereading oI
literature is parodied in Beigbeder's metaIictional novel that looks at
9/11, Windows on the World (2003). This novel records the last one
and three-quarter hours beIore the mass death that brought together
19 See Zizek 11 ; Virilio 45. Neither quote Stockhausen directly or in context.
Fig. 2: "Smoke Rising Through Sunlight" Joel Meyerowitz, 2002
the people breakIasting in the restaurant called Windows on the
World at the top oI the north tower oI the WTC. This stretch oI time
represents, Tristram Shandy Iashion, a sequence oI DVD images and
the length oI the novel (see p. 16). The end is already known to the
reader at the beginning, and all those in the Windows on the World
will be present at the end. As a cynical ex-copywriter, the narrator Ieels
the restaurant should have been named diIIerently, Ior it was both at
the end oI the world and the end oI the story, but Americans preIer
euphemism Ior the same superstitious reason that they do not have
a thirteenth Iloor in their apartment blocks: "il y aurait eu un nom
magniIique pour cet endroit, une marque sublime, humble et potique.
'END OF THE WORLD'" (20; "there should have been a magniIicent
name Ior this location, a sublime sign, humble and poetic. 'END OF
THE WORLD'").The puzzling question whether Carthew will die in
the narrative Iuture or is already dead, having ended his liIe beIore
he tells it as one oI the victims in the narrative present, is clearly a
parody oI diarists such as D-503 and Winston Smith, who have been
brainwashed and/or eliminated and thereIore do not exist as conscious
characters at the time oI the narrative act. And, as iI to press home
the impossibility oI describing this event or oI documenting any event
Iully, we are given inIormation available only later and unknown to
the victims in the restaurant: the reader, the narrator teases, is robbed
oI suspense (74). Beigbeder's narrative collapses, like the Towers, into
sick jokes, comparisons with countless other disasters and with the
Tower oI Pisa, alongside readings Irom the Tower oI Babel passage in
the Bible, Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris, and Huysmans's A Rebours.
To keep them calm during the shaking caused by the impact and the
smoke Irom the explosion, Carthew tells his children this is a special
eIIect in an amusement park game (in imitation oI Benigni), but it Ieels
like a scene Irom J. G. Ballard. MetaIictional devices and reIerences
in this novel to Baudrillard and Fukuyama on terrorism show just how
derivative and inadequate any discourse on 9/11 as an event may be.
9/11 has become hyper-reality and hypertext. Beigbeder apparently
wants to demonstrate that more has come to an end than the restaurant
at the end oI the world. It is the end oI a world. Just as the Iall oI
the Berlin wall ended the communist utopia, 9/11 ended the capitalist
utopia (203). It is also the end oI "end oI the world" novels. This is an
anti-novel in which there is no "happy end." The emergency number
9-11 does not answer.
We have imagined this happening beIore. However, this time the
end has happened not as a science Iiction Iantasy but as dystopian
Iact. As Marleen Barr (2004) has suggested, 9/11 put an end to the
distinction between speculation and reality in dismissive deIinitions oI
science Iiction as a genre. This time, the real intrudes with a shock into
the imagined disaster movie, yet the Iascination with the aIterimage
produces the eIIect oI moving Irom virtual reality to the loss oI a
reality principle, a loss that Baudrillard (2002: 27-29) compares with
J. G. Ballard's reinvention oI the real (Iollowing Borges). As Ballard
Iamously explained, it is like being leIt in an amusement arcade that
has no past, present, or Iuture:
To some extent the Iuture has been annexed in the present, Ior
most oI us, and the notion oI the Iuture as an alternative scheme, as
an alternative world, to which we are moving, no longer exists.20
The liberal humanism with which Isaiah Berlin countered the excesses
oI revolutionary utopianism sounds anachronistic in an age oI
terrorism and continual disaster, aIter the collapse oI an Enlightenment
metadiscourse oI knowledge which worked toward a "good" ending oI
universal peace and happiness (see Lyotard 1984: xxiii-xiv). In his post-
9/11 novel Saturday (2005), Ian McEwan has a neurosurgeon, Henry
Perowne, musing at a bedroom window overlooking a wintry night in
central London, in the days leading up to the American invasion oI Iraq
in 2003, as disaster in the Iorm oI a burning plane lights the sky (the
novel appeared beIore the bombing oI central London in July 2005).
A thug has been deterred Irom raping Perowne's daughter by hearing
his naked and pregnant victim recite Matthew Arnold's lines in "Dover
Beach,"
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help Ior pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with conIused alarms oI struggle and Ilight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (11. 34-37)
The rereading oI Arnold's all too topical lines summons an unlikely
empathy in a particularly brutish thug and holds out the possibility that
20BBC Radio 3 interview, November 9, 1971 (quoted in Kumar 404). CI. Jameson's
remarks on the ideological and generic implications oI the "cancelled Iuture" Ior the
Utopian imagination.
literature may still have something to say aIter 9/11, yet it captures
(again, in uncanny re-vision) the real violence oI an endless dystopia that
surpasses any Iiction. Amid the unceasing private and public disasters,
there seems to be little to hold onto save a moment oI intimacy, oI
Ieeling happy to be alive.
To Perowne the Utopian dreams oI an Edwardian doctor standing
at the same window one hundred years previously now seem quite
mistaken. Utopian dreaming (which, according to Karl Mannheim's
1936 Ideology and Utopia, is a saIeguard oI understanding and
controlling history) has given way to a neo-Darwinian survival oI the
luckiest in a random series oI events that, as Perowne sees it, could turn
out, like Schrdinger's Cat, to be equally terrorist attacks and unIounded
suspicions. Since 9/11, knowledge based on belieI or disbelieI can no
longer hold against the worst possible eventuality. There are no more
possible worlds or alternate histories as in a Philip C. Dick novel or
McEwan's own playIully metaIictional Atonement; there is only the
nightmare oI a real newness in a cosmic uncertainty. The world has
stopped Ieeling saIe, and in Jonathan SaIran Foer's Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close (2005), nine-year old Oskar Schell tells us what that
is like in a stream oI consciousness that blends the styles oI Salinger
and Sebald. Oskar lost his Iather in the collapse oI the WTC, and he has
stored the unanswered phone messages Irom his Iather trapped in the
towers, as unanswerable as the messages on which Beigbeder based
his novel. This is a testimony oI private pain and total loss, oI a hole at
the center oI the selI, which links 9/11 with the Dresden Iire-bombing
and Hiroshima. Oskar has Iound a key which, he thinks, will unlock
the secrets oI his Iather's legacy but which actually opens only random
lives oI strangers in Manhattan.
We might conclude with Stephen Hawking's reply to the boy's
Ian letters in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In his novel Foer
imagines that Steven Hawking composes a letter to the boy in which
he has Einstein say that our view oI the Universe is like standing in
Iront oI a closed box which we cannot open. Given this principle oI
uncertainty, the present becomes an endless sequence oI moments oI
destruction. At the beginning oI the twenty-Iirst century, the citizens
oI Western countries seemed to be transIixed by the aIterimages oI
continual disaster, while powerless to avert a Iuture that had already
happened. Dystopia may have, in the end, no Iuture and no end.
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Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric oI Seeing 9/11." PMLA 118/3:
1236-50.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1991-1992. Notes to Literature. 2 vols. Ed. RolI
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