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“Encounters with Strangeness” in the Post- 9/11 Novel

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/intelitestud.14.1.0095

1524-8429

Ahmed Gamal,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Ever since September 11, 2001, and the so-called war on terror consequently declared by the U.S. government, terrorism and fundamentalism have probably been two of the most discussed terms in the media and academy worldwide. Many recent studies have focused on the sociopolitical dimensions of 9/11 in relation to terrorism and Middle Eastern politics, but very few have ventured to analyze its cultural and aesthetic representation. Not surprisingly, several novels have also recently appeared that thematize directly the causes and effects of the 9/11 events on individuals and the image of the perpetrators as America's other. Studies of the literary and cultural image of the cataclysmic events of 9/11 and their aftermath still lack a comprehensive theory that can accommodate all the major approaches to the questions of how and what, or (e)valuation and representation, of the disaster and its assumed perpetrators. This research project proposes to analyze the content and representational modes of the traumatic events of 9/11 in relation to otherness as reflected in most recent American fiction. Updike and DeLillo's two novels are explored as narratives that are basically consecrated to encounters with otherness and strangeness.Many works of fiction that deal with 9/11 engage with the traumatic nature of terrorism and the war on terror in its confined domestic context.1 They are concerned with merely the traumatic affects of the disaster and the apocalyptic obsessions with dystopian end times. Richard Gray asserts that "a further measure of the limitations of these texts is their encounters with strangeness" (135). John Updike's Terrorist (T) (2006) and Don DeLillo's Falling Man (FM) (2007), however, manage to portray terror in regard to otherness in its global as well as domestic contexts. Not only do the two novels shed light on the intricate nature of otherness in relation to capitalist utopia, but they also attempt to reconstruct the missing link between aesthetics and politics and audaciously point out the potential intimacy between the victim and the victimizer. Although both novels draw heavily on popular Orientalism and stereotypes, they venture to analyze and intermesh the quiescent parameters of Islamic radicalism and Western autoimmunity as dramatically reflected in the personal lives of the perpetrators and their victims. Further, they supersede the shallow image of the uncanny Middle Eastern villains dismissed as "the bad guys" in Cormac McCarthy's The Road (92) with a passionate analytical portrait of a terrorist prone to emergent individual and social frailties rather than to inherent debilitating cultural and intellectual models or value systems. These narrative works are thus an expression of the cultural ambivalence toward the other, a step toward beginning a new kind of writing that does not easily conform to Orientalist conventions and simply perpetuate existing traditions. It is a writing that challenges these conventions and traditions that are informed by the familiar oppositions between "them" and "us," East and West, and the premodern and modern.One striking similarity between the two works is that what initially appear to be three disparate experiential territories (the modern, the sacred, and the feminine) at some point merge into one another and are seen to be multiple facets of the same structures of strangeness and strategies of reconstruction. The encounter with strangeness has varied almost infinitely from one writer to another. However, there are recurrent themes in the post-9/11 novel: a disenchantment with, and at times a rejection of, Western modernity and consumerist capitalism; a quest for redefining the relationship between the human and the sacred; and the view of strangeness as problematically engaged with gender and sexuality. For Updike, the exploration of the postcolonial relation between the United States and its Arab others reflects his fundamental concern with middle, white America in relation to his construction of race, ethnicity, sexuality and religion, while for DeLillo, the engagement with strangeness and terrorism is in line with his suspicions, disappointments, and anger regarding Madison Avenue's dream of American corporate capitalism. Given the significance of cultural criticism in the context of a postnational global system, Updike's and DeLillo's novels are viewed and analyzed as cultural texts that are critical of home as found. With regard to the relation between terror and cultural critique, this article adopts a postcolonial perspective, according to which, in Elleke Boehmer's words, an "alternative reading of terror allows us to examine its occurrence in the reciprocally violent historical contexts of colonialism and global neocolonialism rather than of the ahistorical 'war on terror' in which terror is viewed simply as savage and irrational, an irruption of the primitive" (147). By adopting a postcolonial stance concerning terror, the article attempts to readdress the problematic relationship between the histories of colonial and postcolonial terror. Far from justifying state or nonstate terrorism and national or international terrorism, such critical reading would attempt to deconstruct the equivocal and hence politically charged concept of terrorism against the grain of American public and official political discourse. Western media and the U.S. State Department use the term terrorism as a self-evident concept of the non-Western other or enemy. According to post-9/11 public discourse, terrorism is inextricably bound up with the concept of the enemy, a vague abstraction that is amorphous and pervasive in different and unrelated political contexts. For instance, in a discussion of the 'war on terror' in 2005, George W. Bush drew a similarity between Islam and communism, despite their political, historical, and cultural differences: "The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century" (5). Similarly, in regard to the recent antigovernment protests and revolutions in Arab countries, American public and media discourse is still generally haunted by the threat of al-Qaeda, Islamist radicalism, Islamic states, and religious directions.2This study adopts a counter-Orientalist approach in dealing with the post-9/11 novel and its representation of Islamic culture and Muslims. Although many American politicians, including ex-presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have claimed that the real antiterror battle is between the West and Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism, many neoliberal philosophers of the global state, such as Fukuyama, Lewis, and Huntington, understand globalization as an evangelical civilizing project that must dismiss oriental despotism, Muslim fundamentalism, and Islam in general. In Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, Islam is represented as the West's main other and is "seen as a source of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and, in Europe, unwanted migrants" (215). Although several critical studies of terror and religious fundamentalism provide some evidence of potential causes of terrorism in general, no comparable studies have examined the literary representation of the dormant drives toward 9/11 disasters in terms of the Orientalist tradition in particular. This research takes Orientalist notions of Islam and the Orient as a point of departure for exploring the political image of 9/11 events and their perpetrators. This stance is predicated on Edward Said's notable studies of Orientalism, in which Islam has always been regarded as belonging to the non-West or Orient, and hence has been looked at "as if it were one monolithic thing, and then with a very special hostility and fear" (4). The close affinity between the 9/11 discourses and modern Orientalism is taken into consideration as far as the dominant stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims are concerned. John Esposito has noted, "For many in the West it is axiomatic that Arabs are nomads or oil shaykhs, denizens of the desert and harems, an emotional, combative, and irrational people. Islam is equated with holy war and hatred, fanaticism and violence, intolerance and the oppression of women" (5).Terrorism is in many ways a sort of an implicit resistance to imposed modernity and global imperialism. In other words, it is not just the "rejection of the kind of modernity and secularization that in the philosophical tradition is associated with the concept of Enlightenment" (Borradori 14) as much as it is a new prism through which the Western project of modernity can be neutrally appraised and critiqued for remedy. Rather than endorsing the monolithic Orientalist view that Islam is inherently anti-Western and antimodern, many Western philosophers and cultural critics verify that September 11 marks an apocalyptic zero point for the global capitalist system rather than a mere clash of civilizations and cultures. According to Jean Baudrillard, "There is, indeed, a fundamental antagonism here, but one which points past the spectre of America (which is, perhaps, the epicenter, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalization) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either), to triumphant globalization battling against itself" (11). Slavoj Žižek, however, delivers a more detailed description of the cultural malaise of Western consumerist society in relation to 9/11: "The ultimate threat does not come from out there, from the fundamentalist Other, but from within, from our lassitude and moral weakness, loss of clear values and firm commitments, of the spirit of dedication and sacrifice" (Welcome 154). Such diagnostic critique exposes the ills of modern Western society and the intellectual paradigms that underlie their insurgence. It does not blame native culture as a negative form of xenophobic anti-imperialism and self-defeating sense of wrong.Terroristic acts are accordingly represented in Updike's Terrorist and DeLillo's Falling Man as parallel to the global terror of the modern imperium. Narrative structure, action, characters, and space reflect the analogy of global force and terroristic counterforce. In place of the ideological antithesis between capitalism and communism in the Cold War, globalization and terrorism are aesthetically portrayed as contending within a singular dynamic for a deterritorialized, transnational power. Terrorist is the story of a cultural outcast, according to the post-9/11 political discourse: a young Egyptian American, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, who is persuaded by his local imam to commit a terrorist attack against infidels, that is, Americans. The parameters of cultural and political seclusion are highlighted in the enclosed space in which Ahmad performs his rituals of transcendence and builds up psychological walls and phobias between himself and American society. American society snubs him in return for his assumed difference; he is mistreated by both his schoolmates and his Irish American mother for his seemingly affected chastity and piety. What finally supervenes with Ahmad's suicide bombing—he drives his explosive-laden truck into the Lincoln Tunnel—and the subliminal obliteration of self and other is an unexpected epiphany gained through self-revision at the conclusion of the novel. Ahmad's culturally enclosed world is thus kept intact throughout the novel until the very end, when a potential reconstruction of conviviality between an Arab American and his others is inscribed as plausible. Analogously, Falling Man is subdivided into two worlds and story lines, which never meet until the very end, on 9/11. The world of Hammad and other terrorists stretches prospectively from the past to the future and spatially from Marienstrasse in Hamburg to Nokomis in Florida and finally to the Hudson corridor up to the crash of a Boeing 767 into the World Trade Center. The world of terrorism unfolds from Hammad's secluded room or cell, whereas the world of post-9/11 trauma correspondingly develops retrospectively from Lianne's mother's New York apartment. The 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, represented by Keith Neudecker's immersion in the world of poker and Lianne's deep engagement with Alzheimer's patients and their different emotional responses to 9/11. DeLillo attempts to negotiate both possibilities and their potential convergence by alternating chapters that provide a fairly straightforward description of the terrorist plot with chapters focusing on the daily traumatic lives and experiences of various New Yorkers. The emotional numbness and psychological paralysis of the New Yorkers are thus made to correspond to the intellectual rigidity and stasis of the terrorists. The possibility of convergence is not accomplished until the collision of the plane and tower at the very end, and the final encounter between terrorists and victims is accordingly stressed as an assumed reconciliation through the shift from Hammad's narrative perspective to Keith's in the final climax of the novel. The striking similarity drawn between Hammad and Keith rests more on their common sensation of pain and horror, as the aircraft crashes into the tower. DeLillo therefore installs the premise of "the clash of civilizations" and then subverts it by constructing a counternarrative of convergence.The terrorist in both novels is presented as psychologically "normal" and undisturbed. Rather than being psychotic, both Ahmad in Terrorist and Hammad in Falling Man are young men who come from middle-class families and study at high school or at technical institutes in majors such as architecture, urban planning, and engineering. They are fictionally formed after the example of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks, who was thirty-three years old and taking a graduate degree at the Technological Institute in Hamburg. In accordance with recent social and ethnographic research on the social and psychological causes of terrorism, any clear pattern in the connection between terrorism and poverty or concern for the impoverished is reprobated in favor of the presupposed cultural threat posed to the Muslim world by the United States and the West. Addressing the conclusions of the Pew Global Attitudes Survey of forty-four countries from summer 2002, Jitka Maleckova notes, "The fear of a perceived Western threat to Islam, expressed by the respondents in the Pew poll, deserves serious consideration. The U.S. occupation of Iraq, combined with the memory of the past Western domination of the majority of the Muslim world, persuaded many Muslims that the (Christian) West is (still) fighting Islam" (160). Thus, both Terrorist and Falling Man seem to verify the hypothesis of such recent qualitative and quantitative research into the root causes of terrorism. Terrorists are hence portrayed as members of an educated elite set to fight against coercive Western modernity and global capitalism. Fundamentalist terrorists are represented as people who reject merely certain aspects of modernization and globalization, as most of them are delineated as efficient masters of technology and communications in the mass media. Central to al-Qaeda's success in inspiring its followers is a modern feature of the organization: its use of the Internet and the media in general and what is called "E-jihad" or "cyber-jihad" in particular. In Falling Man Hammad and his fellow terrorists are fully cognizant of the danger of state photo reconnaissance, microwave sites, ground stations, and floating satellites, and that is why they prefer to talk in person. Terrorists in both texts are concerned with how their terroristic acts will make headlines all over the world.However, what these terrorist-fundamentalists reject is the core ethical and intellectual imperatives of modernity. As the editors of the University of Chicago Fundamentalism Project explain, "'Modern' is a code word for the set of forces which fundamentalists perceive as the threat which inspires their reaction. Modern cultures include at least three dimensions uncongenial to fundamentalists: a preference for secular rationality; the adoption of religious tolerance with accompanying tendencies toward relativism; and individualism" (Marty and Appleby vii). Those religious radicals feel challenged by pluralistic creeds and norms, the most significant of which is the secular rationality of modernity. Thus, in Terrorist Ahmad Ashmawy feels hostile to Western philosophy and literature, for they are "Godless" and secular. He is tremendously agitated by the "Godless" sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics; to him, the criteria of physical verification required in science abrogate the metaphysical ones of religion. He disdains his American teachers, as they "say that all comes out of merciless blind atoms, which cause the cold weight of iron, the transparency of glass, the stillness of clay, the agitation of flesh…. Only what we can measure and deduce from measurement is true. The rest is the passing dream that we call our selves" (T 4). That is why he tells Jack Levy, his school guidance counselor, that Sheikh Rashid has advised him against going to college and set him on the right track so that he can learn to be a truck driver. Generally speaking, a sense of antagonism is further perceived to exist between the metaphysical and the physical or between Islam and the worldly pleasures of individualistic and consumerist capitalism and modernization. For instance, the secretary of homeland security quotes a verse from the Qur'an that reads "The Unbelievers love this fleeting life too well" to stress that "the enemy cannot believe that democracy and consumerism are fevers in the blood of Everyman, an outgrowth of each individual's instinctive optimism and desire for freedom" (T 47–48).By comparison, Hammad deprecates Americans' attachment to life in Falling Man. In Florida, he scrutinizes Americans, young and old, seeing them as entirely absorbed in their MacWorld interests of jogging, watering lawns, and eating fast food. For Hammad, whose vocabulary is markedly punctuated by references to God and jihad, what this pervasive American lifestyle represents is just "world domination" (FM 173). Both the homeland security secretary in Updike's novel and Hammad in DeLillo's seem to reiterate neo-Orientalist scholarship and what Mohammed Arkoun calls the "populist brand of theological axiology" that misconceives modernity itself as the problem challenging fundamentalism and according to which "the Islamic fact has practically imposed its priority as a platform of resistance against the 'cultural aggression' (ghazw fikri) of the West or 'Westoxication'" (266). The reawakening of a desire for life in Ahmad Ashmawy at the end of Terrorist and the convergence of the victim and victimizer in Falling Man destabilize such a monolithic view.The same sense of cultural loss associated with the emergence of Western modernity and colonialism is highlighted with regard to the loss of historical grandeur. The decline of Muslim economic and political power in the modern era is partly and apologetically ascribed to modern Western interventionism. Major modern Arab radical thinkers such as Mahmud al-Sharqawi, Sayyid Qutb, and Anwar al-Jundi adopt a repentant response to the decline of Muslim civilization in modern history; they assert that "it is not Islam that is cause of the Muslim's retardation, but rather the Muslims themselves as well as the imperialist states who have exploited them" (Haddad, Contemporary Islam 84). In Falling Man the discourse of historical loss is inextricably linked to foreign policies and ideologies through the terrorists' focalization: "There was the feeling of lost history. They were too long in isolation. This is what they talked about, being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies" (FM 80). The terrorists are hence associated with the ayatollah's shouting boy soldiers who ran to their death during the Iran-Iraq war to purge their own contaminated history of defeat; according to the old man's story, which is told to Hammad, "the boys were sounding the cry of history, the story of ancient Shia defeat and the allegiance of the living to those who were dead and defeated" (FM 78). By the same token, Osama bin Laden is pictured in public discourse as frequently making references to the experience of loss in regard to the devastating impact of Western colonization on modern Islamic history. In his videotape of October 7, 2001, he made a reference to the disgrace suffered by Islam for "more than eighty years." According to Bernard Lewis, this reference alludes to the defeat of the Ottoman sultanate in 1918, after which Constantinople was occupied and much of its territory was partitioned between the British and French Empires (xvi).In addition to Western modernization and colonization, the experience of historical demise is analogously attributed to the sociopolitical hegemony exercised by national dictatorships backed by the imperialist West. In other words, the social aspirations of the bourgeois nationalists are construed by fundamentalists as geared toward neocolonial class consolidation and oppression. In an interview with Giovanna Borradori, Jürgen Habermas identifies "disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes" as one of the main factors that contributed to the politicization of religious fanaticism in the contemporary Third World and the drawing of secular nationalists into the snare of the "holy war" (Borradori 33). In Terrorist Ahmad condemns all Arab leaders, including Hosni Mubarak, the Saudi princes, and Muammar Gaddafi, as tools of America. The problem of U.S. foreign policy double standards in its complicity with corrupt despots is nonetheless raised in a more sophisticated manner in Falling Man, where there are two different explanations for Third World underdevelopment. The first rests on dependency theory, which views the failure of modernity in terms of foreign intervention, failed states, empire, oil, and the narcissistic heart of the West. In contrast to Martin's comforting attitude of blaming the Other, Nina Bartos's stance rests on the oppositional status of the inward-looking theory that focuses on national cultural values and attitudes as the main cause of development and underdevelopment. Nina explains this cultural paradigm as follows: "It's not the history of Western interference that pulls down these societies. It's their own history, their mentality. They live in a closed world, of choice, of necessity. They haven't advanced because they haven't wanted to or tried to" (FM 47). Lianne's neutral stance between the two opposite directions and her keen interest in the mysterious stillness of the natura morta painting with which she associates the towers might suggest restructuring latent meanings and freeing them from any authoritative comment by either side.The other's experience of loss in Updike's Terrorist and DeLillo's Falling Man, it may well be argued, is not merely historical, as it engages the modern development of alienation and anomie resulting from the migration from developing to developed countries as well. The removal of the cultural props of family, religion, and social identity left a gaping void that was not historically filled by either Western capitalism or indigenous nationalism. Thus, the personal makeup of fundamentalists contributes to their sense of cultural malaise and estrangement. The need of the alienated for a substitute belief system, together with their social need for affiliation, presents fundamentalists with a major challenge. Updike's novel shows the social and cultural divide between Ahmad's Egyptian father and his Irish American mother, and that is why he is shown as not totally disturbed by the knowledge of his mother's sleeping with others. He is fully aware of the close affinity between Arab belonging and ethnic identity that he appears to undermine as simplistic; he rather feels particularly isolated, for he is the only Muslim believer of mixed parentage at Central High School in New Jersey. He is ostensibly disturbed by religious containment, as he is affected with uneasiness, when he beholds mosques that are created in the towns of northern New Jersey by means of substituting the Muslim crescent for the cross on Protestant churches. Ahmad might represent the third wave of Arab American immigrants, for whom "the mosque became a center for creating an Islamic ethnicity based not only on a shared faith, but also on a shred worldview that envisioned a Muslim community engaged with American society, taking its place in the American religious mosaic" (Haddad, Not Quite American 28). Moreover, Ahmad takes interest less in diluted Middle Eastern or Arab neighborhoods than in American urban reality and feels extremely repelled by linguistic barriers and incomprehension: "He does not like to linger and chat, as Charlie does, making his way in whatever dialect of Arabic is offered, with laughter and gestures to bridge gaps in comprehension" (T 177). In Falling Man Hammad is similarly enclosed in the isolated sociocultural space of his room. He is too immersed in the enclosing space of his religious identity even to remember the name of the town where he lives in Florida. For him all exteriority is dust and all people "invisible." Outside Hammad's room, the whole world is conceived as a mere struggle against the enemy, while any other social or political affiliation is negated. All Hammad and other terrorists need is a space of their own that represents their segregated authentic identity; this might be found in the mosque, in the portable prayer room at the university, or in the apartment on Marienstrasse. The only sense of unity left to identify with is universal brotherhood and identity politics; in the apartment, Hammad and other terrorists feel as though they are "becoming total brothers" in "the house of the followers," or what they call dar-ansar (FM 83).For many Western intellectuals, 9/11 exposed the imbalances of the global capitalist system from within. The West's dehumanized technoscientific culture, tremendous accumulation of wealth, and explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions are all regarded as factors contributing to the fall of the towers and the globalized system itself. The potential victimization of both the terrorists and their targets by globalization functions to disrupt political Manichaeaism and polarizing distinctions between self and other. In Terrorist, Ahmad's disenchantment with American liberal freedom and consumerism corresponds to the desolate lives of his mother, Jack Levy, and Beth Fogel, Jack's obese and agonized wife. A social and political satire of American postmodernity is hence legitimized by Ahmad and other characters' outrage at American materialism and laxity. Levy, for instance, condemns American drug companies that "have turned doctors into crooks" and denounces American leniency toward race and sex (T 304). However, Ahmad unexpectedly and progressively becomes aware that annihilating others is against the will of God, who wills life and "does not want us to desecrate His creation by willing death" (T 306). When Levy, Ahmad's Jewish school guidance counselor, joins Ahmad in his final trip toward death in the Lincoln Tunnel, it is Levy who proves more ready to die because of his disgust with the American status quo. Ahmad, by contrast, first ignores and then warmly responds to two little black children in a family car ahead of his explosive-laden truck. He recognizes their gorgeous human beauty and decides to assume full ethical responsibility by rejecting the killing and erasing of the other. As Kristiaan Versluys writes, "He recognizes their irreducible uniqueness and their undeniable appeal as fellow human beings, which no ideology or religion can gainsay. The face of the Other implies the absolute injunction—stranger and stronger than any indoctrination—not to take the Other's life" (180). At the last moment, Ahmad becomes able to reestablish mutual interactive religious and ethnic communication with Jewish Americans and African Americans.Analogously, in both Falling Man and his essay "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," Don DeLillo compares al-Qaeda to America; both are presented as investing in hypermediatized reality and injecting fuel into violence, both subjective and objective. The two kinds of violence are opposite but complementary; Slavoj Žižek classifies excessive violence as both the objective, "systematic violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism" and the subjective violence "of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious, in short racist, 'fundamentalisms'" (Violence 12). The major malfunction of such structural, global violence results from the abstraction of the future and the elimination of memory. DeLillo writes: "In the past decade the surge of capital markets has dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational corporations have come to seem more vital and influential than governments. The dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit. All this changed on September 11. Today, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists." ("Ruins" 34)In Falling Man the two Manhattan towers are simultaneously projected as icons of both global power and vulnerability. Martin asks Nina rhetori