Texturizing 9/11 in the Flat World: Screen Culture, Endless War, and the Literature of Terror

In the memorable words of John Updike, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks from a Brooklyn high-rise, 9/11 "had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception."1 But twenty years later, the once endlessly replayed footage of planes hitting the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center has grown increasingly grainy in the American imagination. Perhaps in part because of the ongoing COVID crisis and the endlessness of the War on Terror, which Alex Lubin in Never-Ending War on Terror calls "something of an American pastime,"2 Americans are left to contemplate the degree to which the United States is still in the midst of what Don DeLillo once termed the "Age of Terror."3 Did 9/11 result in terror becoming "the world narrative, unquestionably," as DeLillo speculates in an interview with David L. Ulin?4 Or did the screens on which most of us viewed the attacks instead give shape to American and global history, forming what Thomas L. Friedman in The World is Flat idealizes as Globalization 3.0, a new phase in American and world history shaped by digital devices and media that pervade our everyday lives?

If there is truth in Friedman's assertion, there is also complexity that Friedman ignores, as evidenced by the fact that screen culture hasn't merely "leveled" the "global competitive playing field" and generated utopian post-9/11 conditions, as Friedman says it has.5 Instead, screens have exhibited power to flatten historical events such as 9/11. Like the endless wars they have dramatized in news media footage, among them the Cold War, the war on drugs, and the War on Terror (each of which Lubin discusses), screens show the rhetorical sameness of these so-called distinctive wars that all happen to target non-white or non-American enemies. In the flat world of the screen, one war fluidly bleeds into the next, reifying Lubin's characterization of the War on Terror as a war that "is staged within a new epoch in American imperial culture" but "is continuous with a long history of American national development."6 Along the same lines, in the flat world of the screen, one circumscribed image fluidly bleeds into the next. Television news footage of the falling towers in New York comes to replace and be replaced by sitcoms, action movies, or reality television at the top of the hour. The traumatic real and the fictionalized fake all become flattened into the same screenable genre of entertainment.

Many of the earliest examples of the literature of 9/11 in large part failed to fully capture the scope and texture of the unsettling problems that the mass screening of 9/11 created. Hard-to-read works such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005) and DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) portray stark domestic scenarios amid international conflict, a point that Richard Gray makes in After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11: "The crisis is, in every sense of the term, domesticated" in these works.7 Indeed, these works seemed to be crafted not out of inspiration, but out of a painful sense of needing to address the atrocity. As Zadie Smith remembers it, there were unsettling cultural calls for novels about 9/11 even though events comparable in scale—for instance the sinking of the Lusitania or the Bhopal disaster—resulted in no such appeals.8 "In 1985, was the Bhopal novel keenly anticipated?," Smith jokes.9 And these calls notably demanded a break with the postmodern literary past. As Roger Rosenblatt proclaimed in Time magazine, "One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony."10

More recent examples of the literature of 9/11 manage to break free of Rosenblatt's unreasonable demand for all things to be stark and serious. And notably, they address the flattening effect of the screen, which has fashioned American understandings of concepts such as fundamentalism, terrorism, and fanaticism, all three of which have come to bleed into one another much like conflicts do in our modern world of endless war and all three of which are repeatedly associated with Islam. For example, as I have argued in Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction, in telling the story of an unreliable Pakistani narrator who may or may not be a terrorist, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) invites readers to texturize their understandings of fundamentalism, to deepen and complicate their sense of a term that is not born in the Muslim world and that should not be conflated with or flattened into terrorism or fanaticism. (The term, in fact, is born in the United States in 1910 with the publication of the first of The Fundamentals, pamphlets published in Los Angeles that outline the tenets of real Christianity amid the rise of so-called un-Christian features of modernity, many of which have been disseminated through Hollywood movies.) In the novel, Hamid's protagonist, Changez, exists as a market fundamentalist who venerates capitalism, which has given rise to screen culture. At the aptly named Underwood Samson corporation, a symbol of the United States, he adheres to the guiding principle of focusing "on the fundamentals."11 But he breaks with his market fundamentalist devotion when he memorably smiles at the screen on 9/11 at the collapse of the twin towers, great beacons of American capitalism and the American Century.12 Changez smiles at "the symbolism of it all" as though he is watching an entertaining American action film such as Top Gun or Terminator, both of which he references over the course of the novel.13 And his smile plants the seed, particularly for bigoted readers who conflate Islam with terrorism, that he may well be a fundamentalist of an Islamist variety and thus a reluctant market fundamentalist. He thereby invites readers to consider the ways in which 9/11 transcended a conflict between progressive American modernity and perceived old-world fundamentalism. Perhaps 9/11 involved what Tariq Ali terms a clash of fundamentalisms, namely a clash between "American imperialism" and "Islamic terrorism."14

Much as Hamid texturizes notions of fundamentalism that Americans largely attained through televised demonizations of al-Qaeda terrorists, Thomas Pynchon invites readers of Bleeding Edge to texturize their notions of terrorism. As Pynchon points out in the novel, which addresses the rise of the internet and digital screen culture around the time of the attacks, there is a shadowy 9/11 that lurks beneath the surface of the well-known 9/11—a neoliberal American terrorist attack on Chile on 11 September 1973, during which a U.S.-supported coup d'état deposed and killed Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president, in order to remove him from office.15 And this shadowy 9/11 renders questionable the prevailing notion of the unequivocal victimhood of the United States on the dominant 9/11. It draws attention to the problem of the on-screen American news media narrative as opposed to the figuratively screened narrative—the so-called radical or socialist or communist (or even terrorist) narrative of history that is hidden beneath the surface, just as conspiracy hides from Maxine Tarnow, the protagonist of Bleeding Edge. In the world of Bleeding Edge, al-Qaeda terrorists may attack New York, Washington, D.C., and a plane flying over Pennsylvania. They may take real victims and create real loss and pain and grief. But both before and after 9/11, the United States as Pynchon sees it, too, commits terrorist actions, a point that politicians beyond the United States' borders and scholars alike acknowledge. For instance, in March 2015, the controversial Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro identified former American President George W. Bush as a terrorist.16 And, more recently, Lubin makes a similar claim. In Lubin's words, "War on Terror rhetoric frames the United States as a perpetual victim of violence rather than as the single most influential perpetrator, and it justifies its prosecution of warfare as defensive, justified, and indispensable."17

Complementing Pynchon's reconsideration of what counts as terrorism, Zadie Smith writes fiction about 9/11 that deconstructs dominant notions of fanaticism, which post-9/11 news media have predominantly associated with typically non-white and international enemies of the United States. In "Escape from New York" (2015), a short story that notably echoes the title of John Carpenter's apocalyptic 1981 action movie starring Kurt Russell, Smith creates a work of literature from the rumor that Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor fled Manhattan together by car on 9/11 in what the fictionalized Elizabeth repeatedly refers to as "a state of terror," an ambiguous phrase because a state is both a psychological condition and a political body or territory.18 Screen culture pervades the satirical apocalyptic narrative because the protagonists are icons of the American entertainment industry who generate fanatics through their presence on different kinds of screens, namely the Hollywood big screen and jumbotrons, the latter of which Michael romanticizes. As he explains, the jumbotron creates a "strange doubling sensation" for him when he stands on stage and looks at it.19 And hence it is notably analogous to 9/11, which manifested a doubling sensation when one and then the other tower was struck and then when one and then the other tower collapsed. Moreover, Smith's narrative about icons of big screens of different kinds suggests that 9/11 has had a flattening and enlarging effect that is evocative of the jumbotron, which flattens and enlarges the performer at an in-person concert for mass audience consumption. The 11 September attack made fanatics of Americans, which Smith seems to suggest by virtue of the fact that "every soul" in the IHOP that the fictional Marlon, Michael, and Elizabeth visit in Pennsylvania during their escape from New York is "watching television."20 In turn, it made icons of everyday people—first responders who were deified, as Jess Walter suggests in The Zero (2006). And it also made rich and famous icons ordinary. As the fictional Michael, undisguised yet unrecognized in the IHOP, puts it to his famous friends, "'Whatever this shit is'—he gestured toward the air in front of them, to the molecules within the air, to time itself—'we're stuck in it, just like everybody.'"21

Finally, the screen mediation of 9/11 informs literary works that aren't explicitly about 9/11. Works such as Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012), Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), and Ling Ma's Severance (2018) all make brief mention of the 11 September attack, Ground Zero, or some feature of post-9/11 life. They pointedly and perhaps purposefully stay at the surface, avoiding in-depth explorations of the event that flattened lower Manhattan while fixating to different degrees on the digital age of flat screens and screen culture. For instance, Egan portrays digital "parrots" (her fictionalized version of Twitter tweets) that spread word of the unsettling rock concert at the site formerly known as Ground Zero.22 And Ma makes mention of George W. Bush telling "us all to go shopping" after 9/11 while portraying, through the lens of an arguably fevered blogger, the collapse of the webbed, corporate, and consumerist world at the hands of Shen Fever, a fictionalized global pandemic that leads the fevered to express a zombie-like and nostalgic commitment to routines of old, much like Bush wanted Americans to express them.23 The authors of these and other similar works of fiction portray 9/11 as an organic part of the landscape of American time, as a tragedy that subtly hangs over or even haunts our media as well as American and global history, to reference Shelley Manis's discussion of haunting in "Music Videos and Locker Room Humor: Rescue Me Reckons with Post-9/11 Hero Worship."24 With rhetorical purpose, they avoid sustained explorations of terror much like the United States government avoids definitive declarations or conclusions of war, instead skipping from war to war as viewers of televisions or users of computers and smartphones skip between content. In this new literature about 9/11, which seems to manifest as a counternarrative to the so-called (and, dare I say, tired) 9/11 novel of old, 9/11 leaves the spotlight. It exits stage left much like the United States does or should, at least from a self-reflexive twenty-first century American perspective that rejects American exceptionalism and grand narratives of America.

Yet this literature provides evidence that 9/11 lingers in the depths of the American psyche, and it remains there because the flat screens that brought the atrocity into our living rooms and lives have the power to reach deep into human consciousness. Despite a felt but faulty sense that the age of terror has perhaps passed, the attack of 11 September 2001 will likewise find its place in literature of the time of COVID-19. Indeed, much as American wars persist for decades and bleed into one another, the affect of terror remains steadfast, suggesting that the age of terror never really had a distinctive beginning on that fateful day, and it has not experienced (and will not experience) a distinctive end, despite Ben Rhodes's suggestion in "The 9/11 Era is Over" that we have concluded a chapter in our national and global history and must "move past our post-9/11 mindset."25 Instead, the affect of terror mutates like a virus as the object of terror mutates, a point toward which Stephen Erlanger gestures in The New York Times when he observes that the "coronavirus has created its own form of terror."26 On conspicuously anonymous dates that have never been branded as signifiers of doom, COVID-19 has killed far more Americans than al-Qaeda terrorists did on 9/11. It has, as Erlanger continues, "upended daily life, paralyzed the economy and divided people one from another. It has engendered fear of the stranger, of the unknown and unseen. It has emptied streets, restaurants and cafes. It has instilled a nearly universal agoraphobia. It has stopped air travel and closed borders."27 It has essentially done since 2019 what 9/11 did at the start of the third millennium. And, when we come to one day talk about the purported end of the age of COVID, we will do so only as new objects of terror are rising up in COVID's wake, each inviting poetic and rhetorical dramatization. Each object will star in novels, novellas, stories, poems, and digital objects on the internet. And at best, each of these literary works will expose in high definition the ways in which American national identity is rooted in fundamentalisms and fanaticisms that will screen us from one another and terrorize us enduringly in the absence of subversive solidarity and organized opposition.

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Liliana M. Naydan (@lnaydan) is an associate professor of English at Penn State Abington. She is the author of Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First Century America (forthcoming with the U of Georgia P, December 2021) and Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror (Bucknell UP, 2016). She is also the co-editor of Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles (Utah State UP, 2018) and Terror in Global Narrative: Representations of 9/11 in the Age of Late-Late Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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