Previous article FreeBook ReviewNarrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Edited by John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Pp. vi+322. Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity. Susan Araújo. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Pp. ix+217.Peter C. HermanPeter C. HermanSan Diego State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe idea behind Narrating 9/11 is both fascinating and timely. Originally a special 2011 issue of Modern Fiction Studies addressing the widespread “failure to imagine the terrorist attacks as part of a history of unequal relations” (2), for the volume the editors have added six more essays and shifted the focus toward the nexus of fantasy and government policy: “One of the ways in which the globalization of terror comes into being … is through the globalization of America’s security state with the resulting fantasy that increased security prevents future terrorism” (2). The editors propose that after 9/11, the Bush administration expanded the “security state” to the point where it entered what they call, borrowing language from Giorgio Agamben, a “‘state of exception’ that positions the United States at the ‘limit between politics and law,’ a position in which ‘juridical measures cannot be understood in legal terms’” (4), which is a fancy way of saying that the civil rights supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution no longer apply. The “fantasy” is that the “homeland” now encompasses the entire world, thus granting the United States the right to fight whoever the government deems terrorists over there so that they do not have to fight them over here.Since the response to terrorism, in their view, is driven by fantasy, what better way to analyze these developments than through fiction? And so, in their essays, the contributors examine how literature (broadly construed) addresses “the erasure of the worldly affiliations that make possible the fantasies of exceptionalism; the globalization of the ‘Homeland’; the normalizing of security as the necessary basis of existence; the erasure of the public sphere; the discarded possibility of establishing vulnerability with others; the reification of Iraq as the center of terrorism; and the feeling of loss that arises after the collapse of neoliberal democracy’s iconic powerhouses” (6). The authors studied range from the canonical (Philip Roth, John Updike) to the popular (Jonathan Safran Foer, William Gibson, and Jess Walter) to the obscure (Jarrett Kobek, Mohja Kahf). We have essays on high culture (Ian McEwan) and low (the television show Lost).To state the obvious, 9/11 remains a shaping force in American culture, if not the world, and the study of terrorism generally has grown exponentially since 9/11, encompassing nearly every discipline one could imagine (political science, anthropology, religious studies, etc.). Duvall and Marzec’s project represents a chance to engage in genuinely interdisciplinary work and to reach a broad audience. Alas, far too often the contributors decline to take advantage of the opportunity, and they write in ways that will likely repel many readers.First, too many of the essays descend into political correctness. The editors, for example, are upset that the memorial for those who died on 9/11 “erases the events of the next ten years” (6), that is, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone attacks in Pakistan, and the extraterritorial prison at Guantánamo; and a contributor denounces Ian McEwan’s novel Solar (2010) for not hewing to orthodoxy: “Nowhere in this narrative do we see a sense either of the ecocritical concern for the exploitation of nature or of the postcolonial concern for the historical exploitation of the marginalized peoples of Western imperial development” (91). Others write in theory-speak so dense the prose nears self-parody. For example, “post-9/11 Arab-American fiction ultimately plays a destabilizing role in polemical constructions of US national belonging by imagining counter-hegemonic and heterogeneous enactments of non-formulaic, non-binaristic types of US citizenship” (209). And sometimes they get things flat wrong. “President George II’s underlings” did not unearth “Saddam Hussein with his face buried in a bush” (120–21); he was found in an underground crawl space in a farmhouse.Most disappointing of all, Narrating 9/11 almost never breaks out of its disciplinary silo. The contributors do not cite any of the canonical works on the discourse of terrorism, such as Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (1996); Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-terrorism (2005); and Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” (2013). Most of the contributors show no interest at all in asking how terrorism studies outside literature departments might inform their work. Instead, they rely on each other. The editors, as we have seen, cite an Italian critical theorist on the legal consequences of the Patriot Act, and a literary critic, Donald Pease, on the nature of “homeland security state” (5); Pease, in turn, cites another literary critic, Jacqueline Rose, on the question of political obedience (309). And so on. Agamben may be very smart (he’s certainly the theorist du jour), but he is not Ronald Dworkin or Richard Posner. If you want to criticize the legal depredations of the Bush administration, fine. God knows, they deserve criticism. But first you should read a few of the vast number of political scientists and legal scholars who have real expertise on the topic.Donald Pease concludes his afterword by proclaiming that “Narrating 9/11 performs indispensable cultural work” (311). But to perform cultural work, you have to speak to the culture rather than to the charmed circle of like-minded critics. That rarely happens in this book.Still, there are three shining exceptions. Margaret Scanlan gives us a brilliant analysis of how the alternative histories in Roth’s The Plot against America (2004) and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2006) refract the post-9/11 moment: “With its mix of the unthinkable and the familiar, Roth’s fictional 1942 evokes emotions liberal Americans will long associate with Bush” (179). Anna Hartnell examines how John Updike’s much abused novel, Terrorist (2006), “refuses the national triumphalism that underpins much post-9/11 reflection in the United States” (218). The jewel in the crown, however, is Samuel Thomas’s “Outtakes and Outrage: The Means and Ends of Suicide Terror,” which looks at how Updike’s novel and Hany Abu-Assad’s 2005 film, Paradise Now, “explore the terrain of the apparently unthinkable—to empathize with the would-be martyr and murderer, to provide a comprehensive map of the conscious and unconscious processes that might lead a given individual onto an unstoppable, death-dealing path” (287–88). Thomas invites the reader to confront one of the most difficult questions imaginable—How does someone strap on a bomb and blow up a bus?—without providing reassuring answers. One thinks differently after reading this essay.Susana Araújo’s Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11, a poorly produced (lots of typos and items missing from the Works Cited) but interesting book, has three purposes: to move the analysis of 9/11 novels beyond trauma theory, to broaden the study of 9/11 literature to include “international and transnational perspectives” (1), and to focus the study of 9/11’s impact on “the relations between fictionality, visuality, and politicization” (1). Item 3, of course, has been massively studied already, and, frankly, Araújo does not add much that we did not already know to the topic. The book has other problems. Frankly, I did not find the connections between 9/11 literature and captivity narratives convincing, and at times the analyses can be way off, such as the forced parallel between the expectant Lyndie England (who was put on trial for her role in the Abu Ghraib travesty) and the pregnant daughter attacked by Baxter—a criminal who invades Dr. Henry Perowne’s house and assaults his family—in Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday (58). Nor is Perowne’s decision to operate on Baxter an attempt to literally get into his head and “understand the mind of ‘the terrorist’” (60). Perowne opens Baxter’s skull to remove a clot, not to understand motivations. Also, at one point, Araújo confuses Don Delillo’s Falling Man (2007) with Mao II (1991). The earlier novel examines the portrayal of terrorism “through the mass media,” not the later one (124).Still, the great value of this book lies in its attention to the European context. A quick glance at the indexes of such books as Narrating 9/11 and other works on 9/11 literature shows that most of the analyses unsurprisingly center on American authors. We North Americans tend to neglect literary reactions to terrorism from Europe and the local contexts shaping these fictions. I did not know, for example, that Frédéric Beigbeder’s 2003 novel Windows on the World reacts against the “dominant images of the United States in France in the aftermath of 9/11” (45). It is disappointing that Araújo does not go beyond this one sentence, as the topic deserves more in-depth investigation. Nor did I know anything about the Spanish and Portuguese novels (mostly untranslated) that Araújo says “offer poignant critiques to current notions of terror, articulated from a specific geopolitical location—the so-called European periphery” (113).For the Spanish writer Ricardo Menéndez Salmón and the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, 9/11 is not primary referent, but “11M,” that is, the Madrid train bombings in March 2003. The latter’s 2004 novel Seeing explores “the lack of trust in the political system and the mechanisms of terror which persist at the heart of western democracies” (126); the former’s El corrector (The proofreader) (2009) differs from other examples of terrorist-themed fiction by “uncovering the political and ideological layers that shape our view of the attacks” (116), but these layers are not the same as they would be for an American audience. A letter sent to the Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al-Arabi justifies the 11M attacks as a way of settling “old accounts with Spain, a crusader and an American ally in its war against Islam” (125), and the novel ends with its protagonists watching a news report about how the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq fell precipitously “because of the investors’ anxieties,” and how the financial chaos across the ocean will ultimately affect the periphery (125). Both novels remind us that the terrorist attack in Spain may have only a superficial resemblance to the one in New York, and we should be grateful to Susan Araújo for expanding the list of novels we need to read. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 2November 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687045HistoryPublished online August 31, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.