Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 3

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Martin Amis’ 9/11: The Second Plane / Ana Raquel Lourenço Fernandes

Keywords: Martin Amis; 9/11, Terrorism; Symbolism, Essay and Short Story

But if September 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime. That day and what followed from it: this is a narrative of misery and pain, and also of desperate fascination.

Martin Amis, The Second Plane (2007)

<1> The Second Plane. September 11: 2001-2007 by Martin Amis was published in 2008. The volume gathers pieces of literary journalism written by Amis in response to the events of 9/11 and to the War on Terror. It follows Amis’s various creative nonfictions, essays, reviews, reportage and opinion pieces, published in such well- known periodicals as The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Times, from September 18, 2001, to September 11, 2007. The collection also includes two short stories: “In the Place of the End” and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.”

<2> In the present essay I would like to focus on three main aspects: a) the contextualization of Amis’s book The Second Plane within a larger literary production about 9/11; b) the discussion on the three major points of Amis’s essay: terrorism as way of communication in the globalized world, the symbolic dimension of the terrorist event, and the “irrationality and immorality of the attacks”; and c) the comparative reading of Amis’s two short stories.

<3> With the piece entitled “The Second Plane”, published in The Guardian one week after September 11, 2001, Martin Amis became one of the first writers in the Anglophone world to write an essay on the attacks in a major British daily newspaper. Before Amis, Jay McInerney wrote on the attacks on America to The Guardian on 15 September 2001. The piece entitled “Brightness Falls” is McInerney’s testimony on the event and “the week that changed his city for ever.” [1] On September 24, 2001, short contributions also appeared on The New Yorker by authors such as John Updike, Jonathan Frazen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh and Donald Antrim. [2] Other essays on the attacks and terrorism would immediately follow. Some notable examples are: Jenny Edkin’s “The Absence of Meaning: Trauma and the Events of 11 September” (The Information Technology, War and Peace Project, 5 October 2001), Jean Baudrillard’s “The Spirit of Terrorism” (Le Monde, 2 November 2001) and Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future” (22 December 2001). Furthermore, one should also mention Giovanna Borradori’s interview with Jacques Derrida five weeks after 9/11 (October 2001) and her interview with Jürgen Habermas on December 2001. [3] According to Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn:

The history of literature written about and after 9/11 can also be seen, at least in part, as a sequence of genres. That is, shorter forms appeared first—essays, brief personal reminiscences, and poetry. It took several years longer for novels and full-length memoirs to appear. (Keniston 3)

Some of the early literary responses appearing in the aftermath of 11 September came in poetry. Toni Morrison’s prose poem “The Dead of September 11” is a striking example (written on the 13 September 2001 and first published in Vanity Fair in November 2 2001). However, longer pieces of fiction, either short stories or novels appear later in time. Needless to say that some of these pieces were written on the day or on those immediately following the tragic event but were only later published in collections of fiction (for instance, Paul Auster’s “Random Notes—September 11, 2001, 4:00 P.M.. Underground”, appearing in 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11 (2002), edited by Ulrich Baer). As Amis suggests in his piece “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd” (The Guardian, June 2002): “an unusual number of novelists chose to write some journalism about September 11—as many journalists more or less tolerantly noted. I can tell you what those novelists were doing: they were playing for time.” [4] Indeed, the initial overwhelming feeling of terror collided with the immediate potential of language. Time became the necessary agent to articulate in longer pieces of fiction the events of 9/ 11. Don DeLillo expresses this same idea clearly establishing a relationship between the feeling of terror, the potential of language and the notion of time:

The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to take the shock and horror as it is. But living language is not diminished. The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon? We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. ... But language is inseparable from the world that provokes it. The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment desperately. Before politics, before history and religion, there is the primal terror. (DeLillo 33-40)

Kristiaan Versluys also echoes the dilemma consciously felt by writers of fiction, who have struggled to create imaginative works in the aftermath of 9/11: Novelists recoiled in horror and, in dealing with 9/11, in the mature manner of their craft ... they were confronted with a difficult question: 3 how to exercise one’s freedom of the imagination when faced with those who do not hesitate to use horrendous violence in order to abrogate that freedom and replace openness of thinking by prescription and religious dictate? (Versluys 151) As far as novels on 9/11 are concerned, Versluys also affirms in his study Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel: “to date nearly thirty novels have been written that deal directly or indirectly with the events on that bright September morning, and that is not counting juvenile or detective fiction” (Versluys 12). Susana Araújo, in an article entitled “Images of Terror, Narratives of Captivity: The Visual Spectacle of 9/11 and its Transatlantic Projections” (Araújo 27-46), emphasises the significance of the post-9/11 New York novels, such as: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Exremely Loud and Incredible Close (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Writing on the Wall (2005), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and focuses on the transatlantic literary projections of the event, analysing Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2004; first published in French in 2003) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005).

<4> Martin Amis’s The Second Plane appears in the midst of a constellation of fictional works dealing with 9/11. However, its publication is tainted with a polemic triggered by an interview Amis granted to Ginny Dougary [5] in 2006 that reached a peak when Terry Eagleton used Amis’s comments in 2007 in a new introduction to the second edition of his Marxist study, Ideology: An Introduction (first published in 1991). According to Rachel Donadio: “what would normally have gone unnoticed in the introduction to the revision of an academic book instead made the papers.” [6] Amis was forced to publicly clarify his position, eventually explaining that: “he [Martin Amis] is not Islamophobic, as his critics claim, but ‘Islamismophobic’ — that is, 4 opposed to militant Islam. “My slogan on that distinction is, ‘We respect Muhammad, we do not respect Muhamed Atta.’” (Donatio)

“The Second Plane”

In its desertion of every basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity. There is something empty in the sky. Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future” (2001)

<5> The essay written by Amis on September 18, 2001, and published in The Guardian identifies three major points recurrent in the discussion of the events of 11 September. First, there is the question of terrorism in a globalized world. Amis insists that “Terrorism is political communication by other means.” (Amis 3) Baudrillard in “The Spirit of Terrorism” emphasises this same idea, establishing a link with globalization and capitalism: “Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange.”

<6> Second, there is the weight of symbolism: “The Pentagon is a symbol, and the WTC is, or was, a symbol, and an American passenger jet is also a symbol of indigenous mobility and zest, and of the galaxy of glittering destinations”, writes Amis. (Amis 6] Baudrillard pinpoints accurately the attacks as an unprecedented symbolic event. In the wake of his own theories on simulacra and simulation, he alerts us to the danger lying in how the media, embodying the “aesthetics of the hyperreal”, (Baudrillard) [7] consuming the event in images can become more real than the actual event:

Among the system’s own weapons that they succeeded in turning against it, the terrorists exploited the real time of images, their instantaneous worldwide distribution. The role of the image is highly ambiguous. Even as the image exalts the event, it takes it hostage. It multiplies the event into infinity, and at the same time it diverts our attention from the event and neutralizes it. ... The image consumes the event by absorbing it and offering it up to the consumer. (Baudrillard)

Amis, who can be said to be representative of the postmodern cultural phenomenon, (Fernandes 8) is an acute observer when in his first piece of writing on the event he affirms: “it was well understood that an edifice so demonstrably comprised of concrete and steel would also become an unforgettable metaphor. This moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era—the era of images and perceptions.” (Amis 4-5) Indeed, as Guy Debord has explained, we live in a society of spectacle. The representation of the real or its image actually substitutes reality, which eventually becomes an object of contemplation: “Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is something added to the real world ... It is the very heart of society’s real unreality.” [9] The spectacle eventually substitutes reality and dictates social life. And indeed, as Amis so clearly explains in his essay “The Second Plane”, by destroying the WTC, by attacking the Pentagon (or even by trying to reach the United States Capitol, I would add), terrorists attacked the very heart of the Western world, epitomized in a number of symbols, representing the financial, the military, the political power of the American capitalist society. Moreover, the widespread images of the attacks in the media enhanced the event to unimaginable dimensions. Through TV and social media the attack became real but simultaneously it was neutralized by the consumption of images, “the aesthetics of the hyperreal”, evincing the society of spectacle we live in.

<7> The third point raised in Amis’s essay “The Second Plane”—and immediately followed in the essay “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd”—concerns the irrationality and immorality of the attacks. From an early stage, Amis establishes a divide between the West and the Middle East, laying the stress upon geopolitics and religion: “all over again the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence.” (Amis 9) Amis’s argument is further developed in “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd”, in which he defines ideology as opposed to religion: “an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.” (Amis 14) Amis’s view is extremely controversial and clearly implies a divide between center and periphery. It is precisely against Manichean discourses and the danger of reducing terrorism to the too neat distinction between Good and Evil that Baudrillard alerts the common citizen: “it is a mistake ... to characterize this as a clash of civilizations or of religions. It goes well beyond Islam and America, on which one might be tempted to concentrate in order to create the illusion of a confrontation resolvable by force.”

<8> Jenny Edkins, among other intellectuals at the time, in her essay “The Absence of Meaning: Trauma and the Events of 11 September’” had already pinpointed both the risk of rushing into action after such a massive event and the risk of misusing the shock, the horror, the desolation [10] to fulfil a political agenda, without finding alternatives. First, there was a movement of remembrance; second, a call to rebuild not only New York but also, and even more vehemently, the world; third, the increasing emphasis on 7 security; and, finally, the rhetoric of war took center stage:

The rhetoric of war has always been the rhetoric of the state and sovereign power. The immediate invocation of war by political leaders in the aftermath of 11 September events was very striking. Even though the idea of war had to be stretched almost to breaking point to be used, it provided the instantly available response. For many, it seemed an unlikely connection, and it was some while before the peace movement responded. ... The rush to war and the imposition of even greater state control in the name of security is surely not to reorder the world in any new way. (Edkins) (11]

In the name of security, then, “the unspeakable” [12] becomes the object of rhetoric aimed at war. As suggested by Edkins, it allows to place the traumatic event, which inevitably exceeds experience, into a dangerous framework. [13] Furthermore, it entails a movement towards “othering” [14] those who do not partake of Western views. As Versluys suggests: “in times of war, ‘othering’ easily takes precedence over the recognition of the Other.” (Versluys 150) “The Wrong War” [15] by Amis, published in The Guardian, March 2003, engages with the trap lying behind the war rhetoric, allowing for the notion of “axis of evil” (including nations as separate as Iran, Iraq and North Korea to raise:

Terrorism undermines morality. Then, too, it undermines reason. ... The suspicion remains that America is not behaving rationally—that America is behaving like someone still in shock. ... We are going to war with Iraq because it doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Or not many. The surest way by far of finding out what Iraq has is to attack it. (Amis 23, 24)

The victory of terrorism, according to Baudrillard, lies precisely in the act of repression that has followed 9/11. Indeed, the event of September 11 was followed by a recession of the entire value system of the West: “We have reached the point that the idea of liberty ... is already in the process of fading from our consciences and our standards of morality, the point that neoliberal globalization is in the process of assuming the form of its opposite: that of a global police state, of a terror of security. (Baudrillard) Thus, if one compares Baudrillard’s warning with Amis’ views presented in his essay “The Wrong War”, one realizes that too much repression can lead to different types of extremisms, creating widespread mistrust, anxiety and a feeling of insecurity permeating all spheres of human life.

Nadir the Next vs. Muhammad Atta

The unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.

Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)

<9> Bearing in mind Baudrillard’s warnings against repression and the terror of security increasingly felt worldwide following the 9/11 attacks, I would like to propose a comparative reading of the short stories present in Amis’s The Second Plane; “In the Palace of the End”, published on March 2004, and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”, which came out on April 2006—both having first appeared in The New Yorker.

<10> These short stories can be better understood if placed in the context of Amis’s fictional work. The theme of (in)securities and anxiety in the urban space are 9 preoccupations that persist in Amis’s postmodern apocalyptic narratives, such as: Einstein’s Monsters (1987), London Fields (1989), to a certain extent Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence (1991) and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998), all of which show the persistence of certain social and political concerns on the writer’s part. Einstein’s Monsters, for instance, the first collection of short stories written by Amis, discusses the nuclear crisis of the 1980s and the growing concern about the threat of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Heavy Water and Other Stories, Amis’s second collection of short fiction, focuses on the critique of the capitalist society of the Western world. Martin Amis’s short stories also place great emphasis on character, particularly male characters, and on themes such as violence and death. (Fernandes 145-154) Judging by the content of his fiction, there is a thematic continuity when Amis affirms in his “Author’s Note” (London, August, 2007) to The Second Plane:

Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits, and medics’ smocks of the Islamic radical? (Amis x)

It is significant that Amis chose the short story to convey his point. Notwithstanding the narratives having been written for publication in a periodical, which certainly limited their length, it may also be argued that there were stylistic and aesthetic considerations taken into account during the process of composition. Indeed, the short story allows for a manipulation of structure, diction, imagery and tone different from the novel:

What the short story writer’s art tries to convey is the “point” of a story: that moment of understanding or cognition in which we grasp not so much “what the writer was getting at”, in the old phrase, as what the story may get at in its collaboration with the mind of the reader reading. (Scofield 6) [16]

In “In the Palace of the End” the narrator is one amongst the many doubles of the son of the dictator, Nadir the Next: “As one of the doubles of the son of the dictator, I am quite often to be found in the "Palace of the End.” (Amis 31) The title of the short story is a direct reference to Saddam Hussein’s former royal palace that housed torture chambers. The story was written after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the consequent beginning of the Iraq War. The short story may be understood as a dark parody of the atmosphere of paranoia triggered by war, especially when dealing with terrorist attacks.

<11> The work of a double is a full time job: “six days a week, to be precise: and twelve hours a day” (Amis 31)—the narrator explains. The description of the doubles’ tasks is highly ambiguous: the narrator, for instance, starts his work in the Interrogation Wings but eventually continues it in the Recreation Wing. Following the “cross-questioning” and the “torture preludial to death” (Amis 31, 33), which takes place in the morning, the day continues “with its conditioned air, its piped music, its picked beauties.” (Amis 37) The hell of the interrogations, the duty of the presidential double—who has to look like Nadir the Next and wound his body whenever necessary –, is replaced in the afternoon by the ultimate goal of a successful sexual performance: “nowadays, a double’s best possible result, in the Recreation Wing, is to bring about multiple orgasm.” (Amis 37) Random violence, therefore, seems to dictate the days of the doubles in the Palace of the End, leading the narrator to sombre thoughts on human nature:

The darkest moment of the day, I find (surprisingly, perhaps), is the change: the unlacing of the combat boots, the adoption of the pointed slippers. This is when I have to deal with my humanity... I am wondering as I always do at this time of the day, why the body’s genius [11] for pain so easily outsoars its fitful talent for pleasure; wondering why the pretty trillings of the bedroom are so easily silenced by the impossible vociferation of the Interrogation Wing; and wondering why the spasms and archings of orgasm are so easily rendered inert and insensible by the climactic epilepsy of torture. (Amis 40, 45)

In an environment of constant mistrust and surveillance, personality is lost, identity is subjected to the rule of a dictator, to an absolute power and ideology. The narrator of the short narrative understands that his ultimate challenge is depersonalization but he still struggles with it: “entering the double’s commissary is, as I say, a depersonalising experience. It is to enter a hall of mirrors. Who is that man by the window with his back turned to the room? He slowly swivels. Again, yes: it is I...” (Amis 35) The short story, therefore, raises questions about security and surveillance paranoia in general, and about masculinity and violence in particular. The gratuitous violent acts perpetrated in the "Palace of the End" contrast with the sex orgy that follows them. There is no space for individual freedom in such atmosphere: masculinity is questioned since the violence that sustains it is depicted as purposeless and apparently endless, inflicting physical, mental and emotional pain in both victims and perpetrators who happen to enter the "Palace of the End."

<12> Written in a completely different style, the short story entitled “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” is a third person narrative focusing on one of the perpetrators of the attacks to the World Trade Centre. Keeping in mind the idea of depersonalization, the narrative evolves in the opposite direction to the previous one. While “In the Palace of the End” the first person narrator struggles to find a way to embrace depersonalization, the main character in “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” suffers from this condition from the start. Hence, clues are slowly given in the narrative as to traces of humanity in Muhammad Atta. First, he is sceptical about religion: “Atta was not religious ... . If you took away all the rubbish about faith, then fundamentalism suited his character, and with an almost sinister precision.” (Amis 101) Second, he suffers from severe constipation and headaches: “he had not moved his bowels since May. ... There was a solemn mound where his abdominals used to be. ... His breath smelled like a blighted river. ... He had become something of a connoisseur of headaches.” (Amis 97, 106) Such a grotesque description can be read as an example of aesthetics of authenticity, often associated with scatology, as is the case, and confers a nightmarish status both to the narrative and to its central character. Third, although he has an urge to kill, he underestimates his will to live, as the narrative concerning Muhammad Atta’s presumably last thoughts reveal, emphasized by the repetition of structures and specific words (“value”; “joy”):

And then the argument assembled all by itself. The joy of killing was proportional to the value of what was destroyed. But that value was something a killer could never see and never gauge. And where was the joy he thought he had felt—where was that joy, that itch, that paltry tingle? Yes, how gravely he had underestimated it. How very gravely he had underestimated life. (Amis 124) (Emphasis mine).

The cyclical structure of the short story also confers a nightmarish dimension on it. The story begins and ends with the same apocalyptic sentence: “On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m., in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.” (Amis 95, 124) As Versluys suggests, even though the story describes only one day, it never ends: “the plural in the title and the recapitulation of the first sentence as the last sentence point to the impossibility of coming to a closure.” (Versluys 161)

<13> Undoubtedly due to the incommensurability of the event, the attempt to depict this particular character raises many problematic issues. Versluys explains: “As a pure projection of Amis’s own viewpoint, Atta is utterly ‘othered.’ Having no access to the private thoughts of the historical Muhammad Atta, Amis has created a character that is the incarnation of his idiosyncratic take on Islamic terrorism.” (Versluys 160) [16] Indeed, Amis’s depiction of Atta must be understood as an attempt to try to grasp the possibilities associated to such a fictional character. This effort does not exhaust itself and can be reinvented continuously in the realm of fiction.

***

<14> Starting with the analysis of the literary journalism written by Amis in response to the events of 11 September and to the War on Terror and gathered in the volume significantly entitled The Second Plane, my aim was to articulate Amis’s fictional and non-fictional work within the larger literary production in the aftermath of 9/11. Such an approach eventually led to the questioning of conceptual frameworks regarding notions of insecurity. In his essays as well as in his short fiction dealing with the events of 9/11 and with the War on Terror, Amis comments on different kinds of insecurity. He focus on concerns about insecurity generated about fundamentalism, establishing a link between terrorism, globalization and capitalism. Simultaneously, he also shows a concern about insecurity created and propagated by the state itself (i.e. security culture), which is also irrational and to a certain extent immoral, creating the false impression of a divide between the West and the Middle East, the center and the periphery, just like Baudrillard has warned us. The analysis of the short stories evinced the novelist’s struggle to find a language that could effectively describe the horror of the attacks, simultaneously questioning Islam and the Western culture—as is the case with the short story entitled “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”, as well as the horror of torture and of living in a world dominated by fear, mistrust and continuous surveillance, as becomes evident in the narrative “In the Palace of the End.”

<15> Both Amis’s fictional and non-fictional production often engage in a dialogue with the power that images have in shaping collective memory. Amis recycles media images into his own writing, eventually commenting on U.S. policies and their impact not only on a British or European dimension, but also on the world’s geopolitical context. Although his views are polemic, Rachel Donadio does him justice when she affirms that he engages with different types of representation and ideology:

In England’s left-leaning intellectual culture, traditionally somewhat hostile toward Israel and the United States, Amis has emerged as sympathetic to the two countries’ situation. Although he opposed the Iraq war and is skeptical of American power, ‘The Second Plane’ draws admiringly on books often dismissed by some on the left: Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? and Mark Steyn’s America Alone. (He also draws on the neo-atheist Sam Harris.) (Donatio)

Amis’s work seems to differ from other 9/11 authors writing about 9/11 because he does not shy away from addressing difficult questions, such as those surrounding “religious fundamentalism”, or from engaging in polemic debates regarding multiculturalism, as became evident in the interview Amis granted to Ginny Dougary. In carefully preparing a collection of short fiction and non-fiction evoking 9/ 15 11, gathering various journalistic pieces written in the first decade of the 20th century (2001-2007), Martin Amis raises questions about the aesthetics of representing 9/11, launching a political critique in literature. Eventually, he negotiates between the dictates of a genre, such as the short story, his own literary output, notions of violence and masculinity, and the need to reach a wider public, raising awareness for important contemporary issues: (in)security, anxiety, terrorism, and war.

Notes

<1> See Jay McInerney, “Brightness Falls”, The Guardian 15 September 2001. Last accessed on April 20, 2012.

<2> See New Yorker, September 24, 2001. Last accessed April 20, 2012.

<3> The interviews were eventually published in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).

<4> Martin Amis, The Second Plane. September 11: 2001-2007 (London: Vintage, 2008) 12.

<5> Dougary, Ginny. “The Voice of Experience. Interview to Martin Amis” in Times Online (September 9, 2006). Last accessed April 20, 2012. In the interview Amis “gives frank views about love, terror, growing old and the tyranny of daughters.” Towards the end of the interview, Amis posits an array of very personal considerations on terrorism, suicide bombers, and Muslims. Although the interview is quite long, aiming at being a retrospective of Amis’s life and work, the section on terrorism is the most polemic section, as one of the quotations makes clear: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’”

<6> Rachel Donatio, “Amis and Islam.” New York Times Book Review (March 9, 2008). Last accessed April 20, 2012.

<7> Baudrillard, “‘The Spirit of Terrorism,’”, Le Monde, 2 November 2001. Last accessed April 20, 2012.

<8> Cf.: Ana Raquel Lourenço Fernandes, What about the Rogue? Survival and Metamorphosis in Contemporary British Literature and Culture. Followed by an interview with David Lodge (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011) 129-171. In the first section of chapter three I establish a link between postmodernism, the notion of “cultural logic of late capitalism”, as presented by Frederic Jameson, and Martin Amis’s fiction.

<9> Guy Debord, The Society of the Spctacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). The French original reads: “Le spectacle, compris dans sa totalité, est à la fois le résultat et le projet du mode de production existant. Il n’est pas un supplement au monde réel .... Il est le coeur de l’irréalisme de la société réelle. Sous toutes ses formes particulières ... le spectacle constitue le modèle présent de la vie socialement dominante. Il est l’affirmation omniprésente du choix déjà fait dans la production, et sa consommation corollaire.” Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967).

<10> The term has been examined by Amis in his essay “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd”: “Desolate: giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness... utterly wretched... from L. desolat-, desolare ‘abandon’, from de- ‘thoroughly’ + solus ‘alone.’” (TSP 20)

<11> Jenny Edkins, “The Absence of Meaning: Trauma and the Events of 11 September” (5 October 2001), The Information Technology, War and Peace Project, The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. Last accessed April 20, 2012.

<12> According to Jenny Edkins the unspeakable is the unbelievable becoming real in front of the witnesses of the attack to the WTC: “For me one photograph stands out insistently from the coverage of 11 September. That image is not the aircraft slicing into the towers, nor the collapsing buildings themselves. It is the picture of witnesses to the collapse standing with their hands over their mouths in the face of the unspeakable. They watch with their mouths covered as the impossible, the unbelievable becomes real in front of their eyes.” (“The Absence of Meaning: Trauma and the Events of 11 September.” 5 October 2001).

<13> “The traumatic event is one that exceeds experience. ... To describe it as ‘atrocities’, or as ‘attacks’, or even as ‘a declaration of war on America’ is to begin to put what happened into a framework.” (“The Absence of Meaning: Trauma and the Events of 11 September.” 5 October 2001).

<14> Cf.: Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

<15> Some of the ideas presented in Amis’s “The Wrong War” find a parallel in the essay “Iran and the Lord of Time”, published in The New York Times Syndicate, June 2006 (TSP 125-130).

<16> Versluys 160. He further explains: “To a large extent, the persona of Atta—as evoked in the story—is modelled on the dour figure of Sayyid Qutb, and in this sense, too, the story is but the fictionalized version of the ideas set out in the magazine article on horrorism [“Terror and Boredom: The Dependant Mind”, The Observer, September 17 2006). The radicalism of both Atta (as imagined by Amis) and that of Sayyid Qutb are the outcome of wide-ranging frustration (sexual and otherwise) and the utter inability to find any delight in the ordinary things of life” (162).

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. The Second Plane. September 11: 2001-2007. London: Vintage, 2008.

Araújo, Susana. ‘Images of Terror, Narratives of Captivity: The Visual Spectacle of 9/11 and its Transatlantic Projections.’ Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 11.2. October 2007: 27-46.

Edkins, Jenny. ‘The Absence of Meaning: Trauma and the Events of 11 September.’ 5 October 2001. The Information Technology, War and Peace Project. The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. Last accessed Aprol 20, 2012.

DeLillo, Don. ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.’ Harper's Magazine. Dec. 2001: 33-40. Repr. The Guardian (Manchester), 22 Dec. 2001. Last accessed April 20, 2012.

Donatio, Rachel. ‘Amis and Islam.’ New York Times Book Review. March 9, 2008. Last accessed April 20, 2012.

Dougary, Ginny. ‘The Voice of Experience. Interview to Martin Amis.’ Times Online. September 9, 2006. Last accessed April 20, 2012.

Baudrillard, Jean. ‘The Spirit of Terrorism.’ Le Monde. 2 November 2001. Translated by Donovan Hohn and repr. Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 2002. Last accessed April 20, 2012: 18. Also Available at The European Graduate School (EGS), translated by Dr. Rachel Bloul.

Berger, James. ‘There’s No Backhand to This.’ Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 52-59.

Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003.

Fernandes, Ana Raquel Lourenço. What about the Rogue? Survival and Metamorphosis in Contemporary British Literature and Culture. Followed by an interview with David Lodge. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011.

Keniston, Ann and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. Eds. Literature after 9/11. New York, London: Routledge, 2008.

Kinnell, Galway. Poetry: ‘When the Towers Fell,’ The New Yorker, September 16, 2002: 52.

McInerney, Jay. “‘Brightness Falls”’, The Guardian 15 September 2001. Last accessed on April 20, 2012.

Morrison, Toni. ‘The Dead of September 11.’ Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 1-2.

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