Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 51, No. 1, doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqu066
Advance Access Publication 11 December 2014
G E O P O E T I C S O F T E R RO R ( I S M ) :
S PAT I A L I T Y A N D V I S UA L I T Y I N T WO
‘ P O S T- 9 / 1 1 ’ N OV E L S
DANA BÖNISCH
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I argue that Jarett Kobek’s ATTA (2011), portraying one of the terrorists of September 11th, and Nick Flynn’s The Ticking is the Bomb (2010), focusing
on the ensuing ‘War on Terror’, are the first texts responding directly to the global
effects of 9/11. Both do so by mapping and ‘producing’ urban and global space
through relationality, and by recomplicating and recontemplating the iconic
media images of the event. While analysing Flynn’s and Kobek’s novels with
the help of spatial and visual theory, this paper is also an attempt to redefine
the notion of geopoetics, drawing on de Certeau’s notion of space, Fredric
Jameson’s call for a ‘cognitive mapping’, and Michel Serres’s concept of topology.
Keywords: geopoetics; post-9/11 literature; spatial theory; visual theory; Iraq War
literature; architecture
SINCE THE INVENTION OF DYNAMITE which would allow an act of destruction from a
distance, the history of terrorism has been marked by extremes of visibility and
invisibility. As opposed to the facelessness of the nineteenth-century terrorist,
there is an intricate complicity between modern terrorism and visuality: the
German Red Army Faction, for example, generated a whole catalogue of canonical images (many actively circulated by the members themselves), followed by a
large number of novels and films that re-staged those icons. Unsurprisingly, the
events of September 11th are equally read through a set of theories that highlight
them as a visual spectacle, and as a kind of exemplification of the Visual Turn
claimed in the 1990s.
While the images of the burning towers, globally transmitted in real-time, were
almost instantly discussed as the black icons of a new era, the terrorists remained
invisible until the famous passport photo of Mohamed Atta turned up. This
photograph, along with the CCTV video still of him boarding the plane, is the
only circulating image of Atta to this day. Almost corresponding to the lack of
images on the terrorists’ side, early literary reactions focused invariably on the
victims’ perspective; similarly, Cultural and Literary Studies – if they did not concentrate on media aspects or the notion of the event completely – saw a new
beginning for memory and trauma theory. And while a lot of post-9/11 novels
used the catastrophic backdrop to tell yet another story about the dysfunctional
# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews.
All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.
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family or love life of white Manhattanites, they also half-heartedly reflected on the
real-time media spectacle, although avoiding simply re-telling its iconic core
images. Maybe unsurprisingly, the terrorists were either excluded from those
texts completely, or remained strikingly flat characters, as in Don DeLillo’s
Falling Man (2007).
In his novel, simply called ATTA (2011), the young Turkish-American author
Jarett Kobek adopts a different approach.1 Kobek both recomplicates the terrorist
figure and reads the event through the unfamiliar lens of the spatial and the architectural. His Atta character is not especially likeable, nor does the text deconstruct
the usual narrative of the fundamentalist lunatic completely, but it looks at a number of complicating layers that are absent from other texts: above all, Atta’s
political motivation and his relationship to the textures of a postcolonial city
space. ATTA draws on the fact that Mohamed Atta, often metaphorically referred
to as the ‘architect’ of the attacks, was in fact a trained architect and worked in an
urban planning agency in Hamburg; his MA thesis examines the impact of modernist architecture and colonial grid structures on inhabitants of old Islamic town
centres.2
Using Kobek’s novel and its implicit references to spatial theory as a vantage
point, I would like to open up a series of questions addressing the nexus between
the terroristic, the visual and the spatial, and between urban and global space in
narratives of terror.
The first memory may be real, is possibly false. My father, a lawyer, brings our family on a
business trip to Cairo, to see el-Gizah. 1 2 3, the Sphinx. Hot sun warms my face, sets behind the Great Pyramid. There comes a rare feeling. The goodness of people overwhelms
me, the individual common person joins with other common persons to build a timeless
thing. (ATTA, p. 9)
We live in a squat apartment building, a British relic, one of the West’s hideous assaults on
Islamic culture. (ATTA, p. 11)
These are the first lines of Kobek’s novel; from the very beginning, Mohamed Atta
is narrated through his perspective on space and architecture. His first memory,
although marked by unreliable narration as it is ‘possibly false’, is, significantly,
the sight of the pyramids of Gizah: while the apartment block where he lives
with his family is clearly marked as colonialist, he sees the ancient monumental
structures as a sort of timeless working-class project. Indeed, as Timothy
Mitchell shows, Cairo is a prime example of a city being overwritten and transformed by a colonial-capitalist spatial order.3 But it is not only such easily
legible inscriptions of power that inform spatiality and architecture here.
While little Mohamed – or Amir, as he was called earlier on in life – lies on the
floor of his parents’ living room and draws, he hears for the first time what he calls
‘the humming’, the sound of buildings:
You ignore this humming all your life. The false souls of this world call it the mains, the
50-to-60 hertz waveform of electricity running through your home. Theirs is the great
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lie, a Zionist deception. The humming is found in Syrian villages and in Khalden, far away
from the glare of a lightbulb. [. . .] And in Germany, in Prague, in Spain and yes, even too in
my own Masr, my Egypt.
This is not the noise of electricity.
This is the sound of buildings talking. (ATTA, p. 10)
Amir is drawing the high-rise where he lives with his family, and under the influence of the hypnotic humming he keeps on drawing until the house he set out to
portray is gone and the page is completely black, a first obliteration in and by an
image that will later be re-enacted on different levels. And there are other themes
foreclosed in this little overture-like scene: for example Atta’s antisemitism and, in
conjunction with that, his almost comical belief in conspiracy; and, more importantly, a kind of mapping of global connectivity (‘In Syrian villages and in Khalden,
[. . .] in Germany, in Prague, in Spain’).
It is only when Atta, now grown up, flies a plane that the talking buildings fall
silent: ‘During my 3rd flight training I notice cessation of the humming. [. . .] In the
air, I escape from land. I am free of buildings, away from the haunting presence of
stone’ (ATTA, p. 13). It seems to be a simple equation that the text forms with regard to architecture: ‘The haunting presence of stone’ might be hastily ascribed to
a modern architecture coded by western, colonial coordinates; only flying is able
to neutralize its oppressive verticality and literally to obliterate it when the plane
becomes an instrument of destruction. But the mention of Syrian villages and ‘my
own Masr, my Egypt’ disrupts such a reading of architecture as a simple sign of
western oppression. The function of space and architecture in this novel is more
complex than this, and in the following discussion I would like to trace it with a
short venture into spatial theory.
Scholars working on urban space today usually roll their eyes at the mention of
Michel de Certeau, arguably one of the most quoted thinkers of space; his distinction
between lieu (place) and espace (space), first developed in The Practice of Everyday Life
(1984), has been so influential that some feel that there is no need to elaborate on
it any further.4 But since de Certeau can certainly help illuminate aspects of 9/11
and ATTA in a surprising way, a brief summary may be useful here. Places, for de
Certeau, are named and marked; they can be pinpointed on maps. Space is more
ambiguous, contradictory, fleeting; it is by no means some sort of static container in
which life is situated, but a dimension that is constantly produced by movement and
interaction. In short, ‘space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically
defined by urban planning is transformed into space by walkers.’5 Extended to a
political-philosophical realm, this notion of space then becomes a blueprint for complexity and relationality, exceeding neat categories of naming and exclusion.
Ironically, it is the view from the World Trade Center’s top floor that de
Certeau famously evokes to introduce his reflections on those different aspects
of space:
The gigantic mass [of the city] is immobilized [by the view from the top]. Is the immense
texturology spread out before one’s eyes more than a representation, an optical artefact? It is
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the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping aloof,
by the space planner urbanist, city planner or architect. [. . .] The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an
oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.6
The practices that he refers to are those of the pedestrians down on the ground,
spatializing the city through their complex trajectories. Besides the privileging of
movement, another aspect in this short paragraph is notable (and formative for
most of the spatial theories after de Certeau): the association of the reductive
and fixed ‘view from above’ with both an image and cartography. I will elaborate
on this later.
Now, the fact that Mohamed Atta crashed a plane into the very building de
Certeau used to illustrate and critique the monistic view from above does not
necessarily make Atta his disciple. But a – more or less profound – influence
may be detectable in Mohamed Atta’s Master’s thesis in Urban Planning
(1999), part of which Kobek appended to ATTA. In his thesis, Atta examines the
impact of modernist architecture on the organic structures of old Islamic town
centres, his main example being Aleppo in Syria:
Organic growth [of the city] is smart growth, informed by the daily routines of the city’s
people. [. . .] The people become, effectively, de facto planners trained not by University
but through the wear of daily existence. Recent developments, political and architectural,
imperil this way of life. Family homes have been upended for the sake of multi-lane
roads and high-rises. [. . .] These decisions are made in secret, by clustered groups of
men who believe in arcane organizational systems. (El-Amir, ATTA, p. 165)
This juxtaposition of an organic city space shaped by the practices of everyday life
with an organized, capitalist planning from ‘above’ echoes the positions in The
Practice of Everyday Life. Atta’s proposed solution to this set of problems, though presented as decidedly fictitious, as utopian urban planning in reverse, gains a
somewhat uncanny quality when reviewed after 9/11: ‘In our plan, we call for
the destruction of modernity’s impositions. We destroy the high-rise, the multi-lane
road. We replace them with souks, mosques, courtyard homes and oddly-shaped
streets [. . .].’ The repetitive ‘we’ does not refer to a group of jihadists (although it is
actually similar to the rhetoric dominating their manifestoes), but to Atta and his
German colleague Volker Hauth. The two urban planning students had frequently travelled to Syria and Egypt together, conducting interviews with inhabitants of
old Islamic city centres. Those travels are part of Atta’s global itinerary traced in
Kobek’s novel. While the text does not refer to the Master’s thesis explicitly, it is
clearly configured by the thesis’s underlying notions of urban theory:
New York’s skyline rises in the distance. A unique horror. Direct in line of sight is the Empire
State Building, an Art Deco stab at the sky. To the right, smaller buildings surround the
Towers like acolytes encircle a false messiah. [. . .] Skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after [. . .]. (ATTA, p. 16)
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The last sentence, if it is one, goes on like this for another few lines. The vertical,
repetitive spatial pattern of the metropolis is thus mirrored on the level of the writing. At the same time, panoramic ‘views’ like this one, interspersed with
architectural terminology, appear throughout the book and mark every stop of
Atta’s global itinerary. It is with relief that Atta notes the near-absence of high
buildings in Hamburg – except for one: ‘Tele-Michel [. . .] instills fear’ (ATTA,
39). When he urges his ‘brothers’ in the Hamburg sleeper cell to let down the
blinds, it is not for fear of discovery, but because he cannot bear the oppressive
landmark outside. He also reflects on other spaces that ‘puncture’ the specific,
seemingly distinct, architectures of his journeys across the world – spaces that
function like one single global underside to the iconic panoramas: fast food restaurants and coffee shops or cheap neon-lit internet cafés, where unhappy immigrants
talk to their families in phone booths.
But the most striking example of spatial critique in the novel is probably the run
up to the inevitable endpoint of the plot: while in Don DeLillo’s novel, Mohamed
Atta’s last hours on the plane are filled with a long interior monologue, and the
text’s rhythm vaguely imitates the sound and style of the Qu’ran, Kobek’s Atta
thinks about architecture. Significantly, not about the Twin Towers, but about another building complex that was, like the World Trade Center, also designed by
Minoru Yamasaki, and that was also destroyed: 33 identical towerblocks in
St. Louis, Missouri, known as the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex and a classic
example of a spectacularly failed experiment in urban renewal – ‘[A]n attempt
to inflict a clean line orderliness not only on the buildings themselves, but on
the citizens within’ (ATTA, p. 152), as Mohamed Atta reflects. He carries on in
a sort of time-lapse technique:
[Yamasaki] attempts to control not only real estate but also the destiny of 1000s, individuals
he will never meet [. . .]. Their lives play out in accordance with principles [. . .] that he
shapes through the manipulation of concrete, steel and glass. [. . .] Crime, murder, rape,
abuse. Life inside these boxes, inside another person’s artwork, does not ennoble the spirit.
[. . .] Less than 20 years after opening, destruction begins. [. . .] On the site stand schools
and trees. There is no remnant, no legacy of Yamasaki. (ATTA, pp. 152–53)
This shift from one set of towers to the other, from the WTC to the Pruitt-Igoe
housing complex, displays once more how the text understands the 9/11 attacks
not merely as religious fundamentalism or as a ‘clash of civilizations’, but as political terror and – arguably quite emphatically – as architectural critique. The
novel works with a two-fold narrative of destruction and spatial contestation that
is about both violent architecture and violence against architecture. Atta narrates a
compressed history of Aleppo, Syria, time-lapsed in a similar way to the passage on
the Pruitt-Igoe project, but with a much wider scope, both temporally and
spatially:
The city sees the rise of every major civilization. It falls to the [. . .] Persians, the Greeks, the
Romans, goes to the Abbasid [. . .]. The city, like a seething tangle of green, erupts into
being. (ATTA, p. 53)
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Crooking streets and natural growth disappear. A French grid emerges [. . .]. You watch
filthy taxis drive over graves and do not know the corpses [. . .]. (ATTA, p. 55)
There is certainly much that could be said about this long passage, of which I
quote only a fraction here, but I will focus on the obvious binarism that is set
up between the unruly ‘natural’ space on the one hand and its being overwritten
by a colonialist spatial order on the other. Again and again, it is the straight
Cartesian grid that Kobek’s Atta thinks about (not only concerning Aleppo, but
globally – for example with respect to Manhattan, the most iconic grid structure
in the world), setting it against the rhizomatic paths and dead ends of the old
Islamic town. He reads this rectangular system of city planning as verticality’s accomplice, and as decidedly infused with power: ‘The government happily ignores
its problems. Like any dictatorship, it prefers the high-rise and the street grid,
manifest tools of control, plans of domination’ (ATTA, p. 63).
In his book The Image of the City (1960), urban theorist Kevin Lynch also claims
that the modern city space is defined by the domain of the grid, overwriting, at
times, but also interrupted by, different forms of subjective way-finding that he
calls ‘cognitive mapping’.7 A process of disalienation, in Fredric Jameson’s reading
of Lynch, involves ‘the reconquest of an ensemble which the individual subject can
map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories’.8 Jameson
now transfers this idea of mapping – which also seems to echo de Certeau, being
more of a practice than a representation – from the urban to the global:
The truth of [the] limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or
Hong Kong; it is bound up with this whole colonial system of the British Empire [. . .].
Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience
and are not even conceptualizable for most people. [. . .] The conception of cognitive mapping proposed here therefore involves an extrapolation of Lynch’s spatial analysis to the
realm of social structure [. . .] on a global scale.9
Here, he refers to a ( post)colonial space, but of course the same set of problematics
still applies to globalization in general. Jameson calls upon art to realize this political and aesthetic project of a global cognitive mapping, although he admits that
he has no idea what this art would look like.
Concerning ATTA, it could be argued that Kobek’s novel structurally mirrors
Jameson’s argument by turning permanently from urban space to global mappings and from named place to lived space. In the text, there is a constant
movement from the urban to the global on different levels: one of them is, of
course, simply the terrorists’ global itinerary (Cairo, Hamburg, Aleppo,
Afghanistan, the USA), with those named places being punctured by the complex
spaces ‘contained’ within their skylines. But the novel also carries out, to an extent,
one of the main tasks Jameson saw for cognitive mapping: visualizing or textualizing one’s own implicatedness in the complex structures of globalization. I would
not go as far as to say that Kobek’s novel is what Jameson terms cognitive mapping,
but it is certainly an attempt to destabilize a hegemonic narrative that ignores
complex global processes, or in de Certeau’s words, to ‘destabilize a picture
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whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices’10 – just as the widely circulated media narrative of a purely religious,
completely anachronistic terror over-simplifies the intricate conditions of
Islamism as a political ideology.11
As I have argued, the novel is in no way apologetic, nor does it turn Atta into a
likeable character. Yet it does offer a reading of Atta’s radicalization which, rather
than linking it simply to a broad anti-western and religious fundamentalism, contextualizes it within global politics:
I live in comfort a few hundred miles from the sufferance of Muslims. [. . .] In July comes the
name. Srebrenica. Knowledge of genocide, of rapes, of torture, of horror. It washes over me.
True horror. I listen to BBC World News. [. . .] So the myth demolishes, the story implodes.
Europe is Hell, its liberalities and reforms are nothing. [. . .] The crusades run 1000 years.
Do I need to see the poor suffer? (ATTA, pp. 83 –84)
While working with the contradictory logics of urban space, ATTA keeps pointing
to the inextricable links between religious codes and political motivation in
Islamist terror – something that, for example, most journalistic texts fail to do.
In short, then, I see two kinds of recomplication at work in this text: firstly, a
situated, micrological view from within the contradictory and layered textures of
the city; and secondly, a relational, topological mapping of the complexities of globalization, stressing the political motivation for the attacks. This double movement
is both an exploration of space in de Certeau’s sense and an act of recomplicating
narratives that are constantly over-simplified elsewhere.
I suggest framing those practices as a geopoetical writing. This notion of geopoetics is rooted not so much in literature studies as in critical cartography and art
theory. In literature studies, the term has been used somewhat arbitrarily for almost everything relating to topography and geography in literary texts. For
example, the Scottish poet Kenneth White advocates a nomadic, ecological,
planetary form of writing and living that he calls geopoetics; for German scholar
Erika Schellenberger-Diederich, geopoetics is merely a matter of geological
imagery (as in poems about rocks and stones).12 Rather surprisingly, most definitions of the geopoetical within literature studies do not link it to narratives of the
global, but remain within the frameworks of the local or the ecological. In opposition to this, I see geopoetics as a notion which, once further elaborated, could
provide a key to a different understanding of textual spatiality precisely in relation
to global relationality. Firstly, if we stress the poiesis in geopoetics, instead of reading
it in a representational way, we could understand geopoetics as an active production, a practice that undoes the binaries of named place. And if we think about
geopoetics as related to de Certeau’s notion of space, couldn’t we understand geopoetics – now focusing on the prefix ‘geo’ – as a way of looking at and producing
globality (against the exclusive logics of borders and nations), as a poetics of recomplication and relationality?
The term has also surfaced outside of literary studies, and with a more fruitful
result. For example, art theorist Alfredo Cramerotti has used it to describe the work
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of Swiss video artist Ursula Biemann.13 Biemann works at the intersections of
documentary filmmaking and art, creating multi-screen installations that question
the seeming simplicity of ‘place’ through situated knowledges of space, and show
seemingly clear and readable infrastructures in their complexity and ambiguity.
Biemann’s work Sahara Chronicle, for example, follows the Trans-Saharan migration
trails towards Europe and all the interdependent, informal economies around
them, thus – literally along the way – undoing the dominant media image of
the African asylum seeker, the overloaded boat, by replacing it with complicated
stories and itineraries. The geopoetical, here, operates through irreducible situatedness and through what Deleuze and Guattari might call a micrological ‘vision
rapprochée’, a ‘near vision’.14 The ‘human trajectories on the ground’ cannot be
represented in the ‘view from above’ – to reconnect with de Certeau – of say, a
traditional, seemingly neutral cartography.
Cartography, in turn, is the buzzword that appears whenever the intersections
of the spatial, the textual and the visual are discussed, because it serves as a neat
paradigm not only of eurocentrism, colonialism and meta-narratives in general,
but also of representation itself – or rather, of its impossibility. Critical cartography
theory frequently points out that the map is incapable of relationality. A traditional
world map shows borders (it goes without saying that these are arbitrary in themselves), but it does not show relations and processes. Other forms of mapping,
namely topological forms, do: where a topographical map supposedly is an objective representation, a topological one is distorted, deformed; it does not claim
to represent territory, but looks at relationality.15 The philosopher Michel Serres
calls topology ‘la science de voisinages et déchirures’,16 the science of nearness
and rifts. It seems to me that this form of spatial thinking is much more apt to
conceptualize geopoetics than a simple topographical approach. Neither interchangeable nor easily divisible, both a topological and a micrological narrative
can be thought of as functions of the geopoetical.
Another novel frequently filed under the label ‘post 9/11’ could serve as an example for what the concept of topology, understood as the realm of connectivity,
might have to add to a notion of geopoetics, and for how it could be related to a
specific way of ‘unpacking’ global iconic images. According to its subtitle, Nick
Flynn’s The Ticking is the Bomb claims to be a memoir; it is a book about becoming
a father, and it is also a book about photography, in a similarly personal way to
Barthes’s Chambre claire.17 Flynn engages not so much with the ubiquitous images
of 9/11 – although he does do so occasionally – as, rather, with the set of iconic
images emerging from the so-called ‘war on terror’: the images of Abu Ghraib.
These images have certainly been a favourite with cultural theorists since they
were published. Most visual theorists from Susan Sontag to W. J. T. Mitchell have
constructed chains of iconological connections around the photographs, trying to
link them to earlier bodies of violent images via formal similarities. So, for example, Sontag reads them with a specific US-American history of lynching
photographs and the patterns of web pornography, and Mitchell frames the
‘hooded man on the box’ with Christian iconography.18 While this might help
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one to understand the ubiquitous circulation and ‘power’ of the iconic images, it
certainly forecloses other points of entry and carelessly overwrites the situationality
and singularity of the detainee. The ‘Hooded Man’ gets, so to speak, doubly
hooded – as a faceless entity he is not only easier to torture, but also easier to
reduce to a nomadic visual formula. Flynn’s novel, I will argue, indirectly works
against such simplification, ‘unhooding’ the Hooded Man in a recomplicating narrative. By this I do not simply mean that The Ticking is the Bomb tells ‘the story
behind the images’ or ‘gives a voice’ to the detainees (although it certainly
does), but that it sets up connections and topological wormholes between the
safe, US-American cityscape and the ‘other’ sphere of Iraq, collapsing Bush’s
binary ‘us’ and ‘them’. This happens on different levels, its most obvious variation
being Flynn’s actual encounter with some of the Abu Ghraib detainees. Along
with an artist, Flynn was invited when former detainees were interviewed by
Human Rights lawyers:
In Istanbul, while collecting testimonies, we asked each ex-detainee to describe the room
where his torture took place. Each man looked around him – it looked like this room,
each responded. There was a table, there was a computer, someone was always behind
me. What did the person who tortured you look like, was the next question, and the detainee
would look at me, then look at the artist, the only two white men in the room, and either
point to him, or to me – he looked like him, was the answer. (TB [ p. 95])
Relationality constitutes itself in different registers here. The room, also described
as ‘well-lit, carpeted, a hotel room that one could find in any major city’ (TB, 82),
is not only a classic example of global sameness, but also becomes a specific topological operator, folding the lawless space of the camp into the safe place of
corporate hospitality. The laptop, running counter to our expectations of a typical
setting for torture, is another topological nodal point creating an effect of ‘voisinage’, as is the statement about physical likeness.
Concerning visuality, the text carries out at least two forms of recomplication.
Firstly, it ‘completes the picture’ by, so to speak, uncompleting the picture; it speaks
about what could not be seen in the photographs of Abu Ghraib. About Flynn’s
first encounter with the ‘man on the leash’, as he was called by the media, it is
simply said: ‘And then he tells us the story, he tells about his body being dragged
from room to room, cell to cell’ (TB, p. 85). The story is the story we think we know
on the basis of the photograph, and it remains untold at this point. But bit by bit, in
between longer passages situated in Flynn’s own ‘home sphere’ again, a new connecting narrative of the images fragmentarily unfolds, uncovering the degrading
pose as the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as a frozen moment, taken out of a
whole day of rape and torture that completely surpasses the iconic scene in its
brutality.
Secondly, the text finally ‘unhoods’ the detainees, turning the ‘man on the leash’
back into Amir, the air conditioning specialist, a man who tells Flynn proudly
about his daughter and smiles shyly in response to a compliment from the artist
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portraying him. Being oblivious to this biographical complexity is what Flynn sees
as his own guilt:
What surprised me the most about meeting the ex-detainees in Istanbul wasn’t their descriptions of the torments that had been inflicted on them [. . .]. What surprised me was that
before I met them I had somehow created an image in my mind of what an ex-detainee
from Abu Ghraib would be like – I pictured someone angry, damaged, maybe tipping toward fundamentalism. And yet each of these men [. . .] seemed to have taken in what
happened in a completely different way, and it still surprises me that this surprised me.
What surprised me is that I forgot that each would be fully human, fully complex. (TB,
p. 232)
‘The goal of the camps,’ writes visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff on the extra-legal
detention sites in the ‘war on terror’, ‘is to render the inhabitants into the undead,
people with no social existence.’19 It is this kind of ‘social existence’ that is suppressed not only by a pre-Istanbul Flynn, but also by a certain type of visual
theory discourse when it short-circuits the ‘man on the leash’ with a Tintoretto
painting of Jesus carrying the cross, as W. J. T. Mitchell does.20 To an extent, it
could certainly be argued that the literary text restitutes what this pre-eminent discourse ignores.
Thirdly, in a mise en abyme of all this, there is a re-translation of the photograph
into movement:
There is a moment in Amir’s story [. . .] when words are not enough, when the only way to
tell us what happened is to show us what they did to his body. At this moment he pushes
back from the table and stands – They hang me this way, he says, and raises his arms out to
his side as if crucified in the air. Something about him standing [. . .] completely unhinges
me. [. . .] At this moment I get it: these words are about his body, it was his body this happened to, the body that is right here beside me, in this room I could barely even imagine
just yesterday, his body that is now filling the air above our heads, our eyes upturned to see
him. (TB [ p. 88])
Apart from those quite obvious techniques of linking and un-othering, connectivity in this novel works through other means as well. For example, the text’s
structure is made up of fragmentary micro-chapters, neither chronologically nor
topographically ordered; we move from the USA to Italy to Vietnam, to any year
between the 1960s and now, so even the simple spatial proximity in the text suggests relationality. Also, there are direct cross-fadings between the separate spheres
of the Iraq war and American urban cityscapes, for example when Flynn first
learns about the photographs on the car radio:
The man on the radio says the words abu ghraib, words I’ve never heard before – at this point
I don’t know if abu ghraib is one word or two, a building or a city, a place or an idea. [. . .]
Houston is seemingly endless – I hear about the photographs again and again even before I
make it to the city limits. [. . .] Many of the prisoners are not wearing clothes [the man on the radio]
says. The reason for this, he says, is that there seems to be a sexual element to what’s happening, as I float
past a church the size of a shopping mall. (TB, p. 26)
S PAT I A L I T Y A N D V I S UA L I T Y I N T WO ‘ P O S T- 9 / 1 1 ’ N OV E L S
25
By projecting the images of Abu Ghraib ‘back’ into an American cityspace, a logic
of othering is destabilized. The Bush administration’s ‘bad apples’ tactics –
portraying the torture images as an exceptional case, thought up by a few low-ranking
soldiers on the night shift – is replaced by thinking oneself as implicated in different,
complex ways, just as the two separate spatial spheres become intertwined.
On the level of imagery, the text also weaves lines of reappearing words and
micro-narratives that connect the narrator’s domestic space to the other sphere
of the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib images, but in a more subtle way. When
he sees ultrasound images of his unborn daughter, they are ‘folded one upon
the other like a tiny accordion’ (TB [ p. 1]), and so is the sketch pad of the artist
portraying the detainees; as a boy, we learn, he was fascinated with the exiled
Nebuchadnezzar and liked pretending to be a spidermonkey, while his description
of the Babylonian king reminds us of Saddam Hussein after being found in what
was called a ‘spiderhole’ by the media; and, of course, Babylon was what today is
Iraq. Those chains of constantly linking signifiers may be compared to what
Michel Serres calls ‘spatial operators’.21 In Flynn’s text, we have seen those connecting operators at work on different levels: on the micrological level of lexicality,
as in this last example; on the level of objects that function like ‘wormholes’, folding spaces that are thought as separate into one another; and on the obvious level
of direct encounters.
I hope it has become clear that I am not simply trying to ‘apply’ spatial theory to
literary texts, but that I was led to spatial theory and specifically topology by certain configurations and connectivities within the fictional texts. ATTA and The
Ticking is the Bomb are indeed the first ‘post-9/11’ novels that respond to the intricate relationality of the event and its truly global effects. Both texts, though
arguably in very different ways, do so by exceeding the pre-eminence of the visual
and the traumatic and shifting their attentions to the complexities of the spatial.22
With that said, I do not think it is too grandiose a claim to think of literature as a
way of ‘mapping’ the world in an age of globalization – not in the sense of geocartographical representation, and not in the sense of making sense, but in the
sense of recomplicating its textures and looking at a multitude of connections.
These, of course, are so complex that they tend towards the unrepresentable –
and, in order to be seen, demand a freezing of some sort. This is why a geopoetical
narrative – as I understand it – cannot be framed simply in terms of resistance
against some sort of master narrative or of incompleteness versus closure; it is always shuttling between the irreducibly complex and the ‘view from above’, just as
topology sometimes necessarily collapses into topography and space intersects with
and turns into place.
Institut für Germanistik, Vergleichende Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft
Am Hof 1d
53113 Bonn
Germany
[email protected]
26
DA N A B Ö N I S C H
NOTES
1
Jarett Kobek, ATTA (London/New York: Semiotext(e), 2011). Further references will be given in
the text as ATTA followed by the page number.
2
Mohamed El-Amir, ‘Khareg Bab-en-Nasr: Ein gefährdeter Altstadtteil in Aleppo.
Stadtteilentwicklung in einer islamisch-orientalischen Stadt’. Masterarbeit in Städtebau/
Stadtplanung, vorgelegt der TU Hamburg-Harburg im August 1999, quoted in Kobek, ATTA,
p. 165 ( part of the Master’s thesis is reproduced as an appendix to the novel). Mohamed El-Amir
took on the name Atta only later on in life. Further quotations from the thesis are referenced in the
text as El-Amir followed by ATTA and the page number.
3
Timothy Mitchell: Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
‘Un lieu [. . .] est une configuration instantanée de positions. Il implique une indication de
stabilité;’ Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien I. Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 173.
4
5
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1984), p. 117.
6
Ibid., p. 92.
7
See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).
8
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991), p. 89.
9
Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in: Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by C. Nelson
and L. Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 394.
10
de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien I, p. 92.
11
See Michael J. Watts, ‘Revolutionary Islam: A Geography of Modern Terror’, in: Violent
Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, ed. by Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (London/New York:
Routledge, 2006), pp. 175 –205.
12
See Kenneth White, Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World (Glasgow: Alba, 2004); Erika SchellenbergerDiederich, Geopoetik. Studien zur Metaphorik des Gesteins in der Lyrik von Hölderlin bis Celan (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006).
13
In the opening talk for the exhibition where Sahara Chronicle was first shown, ‘The Geopolitical Turn:
Art and the Contest of Globalisation’, 8 May 2010 at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK.
14
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980),
p. 615.
15
The London tube map would be a classic example of a topological map because it sacrifices distance
in favour of connectivity. But current topology discourse has moved on from that agenda of simplifying to
mappings that engage with the complexity of globalization and its new mobilities and dependencies. A good
example is the Migmap project ,http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap.. See Simon Harvey, ‘Twisted
Logics: A Topological Turn in Counter-Cartography and Some Artistic Antecedents’, talk given at the
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft conference ‘Figuren des
Globalen. Weltbezug und Welterzeugung in Literatur, Kunst und Medien’, Bonn, June 2011.
16
Michel Serres, Éclaircissements: Cinq entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), p. 93.
17
Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb. A Memoir (New York/London: W. W. Norton, 2010). Further
references will be given in the text as TB followed by the page number.
18
See Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, The New York Times, 23 May 2004; W. J. T.
Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
19
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (London/New York:
Routledge, 2004).
20
W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, p. 156.
21
Michel Serres: Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. by David Bell and Josué V. Harari
(London/Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 52.
22
It goes without saying that both spatiality and visuality can never be thought of as completely
separate.