The fi gure of the “child”

The fi gure of the “child” belongs to that highly plastic category which lends itself to too many shapes to represent only its own referent. The American linguist George Lakoff has thus described how a “state is conceptualized as a person” in “Metaphor and War:

The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf”:

Maturity for the person-state is industrialization. Unindustrialized nations are

‘underdeveloped,’ with industrialization as a natural state to be reached. Third-world nations are thus immature children, to be taught how to develop properly or disciplined if they get out of line. Nations that fail to industrialize at a rate considered normal are seen as akin to retarded children and judged as ‘backward’ nations.

Ten years after this observation was made it acquired a surprising twist in the dawning of yet another war in the same region: the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA. Much symbolism has been read from the image of George W. Bush fi rst hearing the tragic news. That particular Tuesday morning the president was visiting a school in Florida: the cameras captured forever how the Commander in Chief’s countenance darkened, after a man whispered something in his ear and how he, nonetheless, continued to silently listen to a children’s story (“The Pet Goat”) read by seven-year-olds. From the point of view of America’s opponents, at that moment, it was the world’s superpower that was being “taught how to develop properly” and

“disciplined” – reduced to the state of mute infancy, so poignantly embodied by the country’s leader, appropriately sent back to school.¹³⁰

Speaking metaphorically of the global power relations at that moment, the world as we used to know it was thus turned upside-down: the role of the teacher was taken over by

130 It was also there, at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida, that George W. Bush gave his fi rst speech after the attacks.

an organisation harboured by the Taliban (in Pashto meaning “students”) regime based in countries which the West deems underdeveloped. Due to the incomprehension and sheer shock of this happening, the Western world, as Baudrillard puts it in The Spirit of Terrorism, reverted to the childish inability to distinguish between reality and fi ction, which became “inextricable” (28). And it is from this, as well as the striking resemblance to “special effects or computer graphics” (Jameson, 297), that the “fascination with the image” (Baudrillard 2002, 29) arises, rather in accordance with Aristotle’s observations on the human nature and its inclination to the aesthetic expressed in The Poetics:

“objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fi delity” (qtd. in Lentricchia and McAuliffe, 8).

A dangerous corollary of this perception is a “dissociation of sensibility,” which Fredric Jameson saw as a prevalent reaction to September 11 (297), and which the unrelenting media coverage of the events provoked, if not imposed. The blurring of the reality/fi ction division and the corresponding detachment, admittedly playing a useful role in the self-defence mechanism, must be corruptive from the point of view of morality, as it reduces the true tragic event to a fl at visual effect. To show the human side of what otherwise might have remained merely a “disaster movie” with supersized bonuses for gaping puerile audiences, several authors have taken upon themselves the task of using their own – and stimulating our – imagination, thus building empathy in place of detachment. Since their subject is a traumatic globally historical event and its repercussions, this clearly is a challenging endeavour. Due to the gravity of this subject, the post-9/11 novel shares a common feature: fear of trivialisation, which is literally vocalised in the works addressing the subject most directly. As I will suggest more fully later, what may fend off this potential charge of not living up to the subject is the very motif of childhood, which appears to be used perhaps unconsciously but strikingly often in the early post-9/11 novel. This consists not only in portraying child characters but also in presenting infantilism as a characteristic of today’s Western culture.

“Kant famously wrote that the ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another,’” as we read in Borradori’s introduction to Philosophy in a Time of Terror (14). “Enlightenment describes (…) the affi rmation of democracy and the separation of political power from religious belief” and thus “marks a break with the past, which becomes available only on the basis of the individual’s independence in the face of authority,” we also read there (ibid.). However, in Amis’s words, “September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment” (13, italics mine). What follows it is a regression to the past, or at any rate a mix of the past, the present and the future:

The confl icts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad on the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam, the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East. (ibid.)

As for Western democratic countries, in particular the chief democracy, the US, so keen on exporting its system of government to other as yet “unenlightened” countries,

the principle of “the separation of political power from religious belief” and of “the individual’s independence in the face of authority” became very problematic in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. If maturity is the ability “to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another,” then in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks it was immaturity that was fostered in the US citizens by their own authorities. As we learn from Amis’s review of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, in some comments, the US citizens were “often referred to” as “an abused child,” “a traumatized child” (148). Accordingly, in Lakoff’s words from “Metaphors of Terror,” “The reaction of the Bush administration [was] just what you would expect a conservative reaction would be – pure Strict Father morality” (italics mine). The role of the “Father” was impressed by offi cial messages in which “the public [was] not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality” (Sontag 2001). “The burden of reality” is not for the child to bear. As Susan Sontag put it less than two weeks after the attacks, “The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public” (ibid., italics mine). Later in the comment that sparked so much controversy, she said: “Those in public offi ce have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confi dence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy – which entails disagreement, which promotes candor – has been replaced by psychotherapy” (ibid.). Consequently, she concluded, “The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American offi cials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy” (ibid.).

Re-incurred immaturity means some unassimilated knowledge, some failed test – means going back to school. “Terrorism is political communication by other means.

The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated” (Amis, 3). It is time we all learned something. The need to learn is emphasised often in the context of the (post-)9/11 terror. “[W]e are still learning how to feel and think about September 11” (ibid., 196), but “we concede that September 11 will perhaps never be wholly assimilable” (ibid., 139). This is how McEwan described his own need to learn from history and other non-fi ction books:

For a while I did fi nd it wearisome to confront invented characters. (…) I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes, and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn. (qtd. in Donadio 2005a)

The German philosopher Odo Marquard puts learning in a broader context and provides a more general observation – in fact, a diagnosis of Western societies today, which can be connected with the increasing role of, and our reliance on mass media:

(...) more and more often, because of the loss of direct experiences, we are forced during our whole lives to live through experiences indirectly; in short, we are forced to learn: in the end the whole reality becomes literally our school. An individual, fully and in every aspect, consciously becomes a learner, and consequently every adult, also consciously, becomes a child – who lives in every learner no matter how old s/he is. No one grows up any more.

(qtd. in Cataluccio, 275)

As I will propose later, early post-9/11 novels also “go back to school” and, in a way,

“never grow up” trying to learn how to speak about the “great changes” that have taken place. But just as writers and the literary forms they use must “learn,” the readers are learners as well. They are learners who are consumers used to instant satisfaction of their hunger for news. This need for “information” mentioned by McEwan is to some extent satisfi ed in early post-9/11 novels by their frequently (semi-)documentary aspect. Likewise, the “limitations” of pure fi ction appear to be “compensated” by these novels’ factual side or by blurring the borderlines between fact and fi ction. In some cases, even though this blurring does not occur on the structural level, it happens in the minds of narrators and characters. This is because literary narrators and characters, just like us, non-literary characters, are inclined to magical thinking.