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  • Alterity and the Radical Other in Post-9/11 Fiction:DeLillo's Falling Man and Walter's The Zero
  • Aaron Derosa (bio)

They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch and then close enough to see that it wasn't a flock of birds at all—it was paper. Burning scraps of paper. All the little birds were paper. . . . Behind the burning flock came a great wail and a moan as seething black unfurled, the world inside out, birds beating against a roiling sky and in that moment everything that wasn't smoke was paper.

Jess Walter, The Zero, 2006

On countless dust jackets and in numerous titles, a problematic rhetoric besets the discourse surrounding 9/11. From deep ceruleans to wispy azures, the serene skies depicted on the covers of Don DeLillo's Falling Man, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, and John Updike's Terrorist serve as a symbolic stamp of American innocence. The title of Kristiaan Versluys's recent work of literary criticism, Out of the Blue, declares textually what these covers imply visually: the image of an unexpected and violent irruption in an otherwise pristine sky. This notion is extended in Richard Gray's After the Fall that explicitly invokes the post-lapsarian motif. These two works are particularly interesting in that, as two early studies of literature after 9/11, both prescribe to varying degrees a particular type of literary strategy for the "successful" representation of 9/11: an engagement with alterity. But how does one successfully engage the other—namely [End Page 157] the "radical," "fundamentalist," "terrorist" other—if the subject position from which one operates invokes, from the start, the perception of American/Western innocence depicted in a cloudless blue sky? That is to say, how can one ethically evaluate the ideological beliefs of the other when the binary of innocent victim and violent aggressor is so firmly established in one's foundational imagery? The blue skies don't prompt the possibility of dialogue so much as reify the binarism of the West and the rest.

This is not to claim, as Jean Baudrillard did, that Americans were guilty of their own destruction, the "global superpower . . . destroying itself " (4). Rather it is to ask us, as the poignant narrator of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist does, to consider the subject position Westerners adopt in our rhetorical formulations of 9/11.1 Fredric Jameson reminds us the "history of the superstate is as bloody as anyone else's national history; and these observations about innocence and experience . . . have more to do with media innocence than with any personal kind" (299). Such considerations are particularly valuable in the highly racialized environment that has allowed three congressional hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America that recall the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of the 1940s and 1950s. By highlighting the other, critics propose a "counter-narrative," to borrow DeLillo's now-overused phrase, to the march of history in post-9/11 public discourse. As appealing as these studies have been, their narrative has developed an unhealthy reliance on the very binary they attempt to dismantle through a poethic—ethics through poetics—engagement of alterity, hybridity, and transnational spaces.2 At times, these writers fail to distinguish between the fundamentalist other and otherness in general, a conflation that has led to problematic equivalencies in post-9/11 discourse.

It is with this conflation that I begin my discussion of alterity in post-9/11 fiction, approaching this construction as what Arjun Appadurai identified as one of the crucibles "that produces recruits to global terrorism" (113). For Appadurai, one of the effects of globalization is to induce a fear of small numbers that allows for the treatment of internal minorities (such as Arab Americans) "as external majorities in disguise" (the global Islamic community) (112). One of the consequences of this process is radicalization and the production of a...

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