From Self-fictionalization to Self-(dis)engagement: Autofiction in Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World

Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder is the first literary work to explore the attacks of 11 September 2001—before Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The book won the 2003 Prix Interallié and was translated from French into English the following year by Frank Wynne (winning the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2005). In this novel, Beigbeder recreates the indelible events of that fatal day, minute by minute, between 8:30 a.m. and 10:29 a.m., from the first impact to the destruction of the second tower.

In his books, Beigbeder often uses reality as an inspiration and a starting point to illustrate, confess, analyze, and criticize. His first bestseller, the 2000 novel 99 F, satirizes the advertising world—the title refers to the price of the book in francs, a strategy that was also used for the English versions (£9.99 and $9.99). Shortly thereafter, he was dismissed from his job at the Y&R advertising agency for “serious misconduct,” although unofficially, his book might have been deemed too disruptive for his employer.¹ This novel contributed to his image as a cocaine-snorting, binge-drinking party boy (as did his 2008 arrest for sniffing the white substance off the hood of a car in Paris). Windows on the World sets itself apart from the rest of his oeuvre by the seriousness of the subject, the approach, and the posture adopted by Beigbeder. This novel nevertheless shares many postmodern characteristics with his other works, with its autobiographical references, its dark humour and irony, its self-critical posture, and its potential capacity for disruption.

Instead of developing one main thread of the plot, the novelist deploys two narratives in parallel: one story tells the events from inside the Twin Towers (a work of pure fiction, obviously), while the other reflects on the possibility of retelling the first story. In the odd-numbered chapters (all labeled in relation to their time on that day), we follow a divorced father, Carthew Yorston, who, the morning of the attacks, has breakfast with his two young sons at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center (hence the title of the book, identical in French). In the even-numbered chapters, Beigbeder (a Frenchman who never hid his Americophilia) uses autofiction to think overtly about his vision of the New York events, while reflecting on his personal life in general. More importantly, those autofictional chapters develop a metareflection on writing and a realization about the (im)possibility of fictionalizing the terrorist attacks and their aftermath (a reflection that is extended to similar radical events).

My aim is to demonstrate how both aspects of this novel are antithetic yet complementary. Inside the fictional chapters, Beigbeder spectacularizes the events by using hyperrealist literary techniques—with a plethora of trademarks and other American cultural markers—which leave less and less room for the plausible. Those techniques enable him to “invent” the events, as recreation is “the only way to know what took place in the restaurant on the 107^th Floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, between 8:30 a.m. and 10:29 a.m.,”² as noted on the back cover of the French edition (a remark that was not kept for the English version). The attention to detail is already present in that short excerpt (signed F. B., as opposed to the common assumption that the paratext is penned by the publisher), announcing an emphatic realism that is, at times, overly precise, the better to hide its weaknesses and shortcomings.

Juggling with realism and caricature, seriousness and jocularity, Beigbeder creates a literary work that he intrinsically criticizes and undermines from within, producing a historiographic metafiction that corresponds to Linda Hutcheon’s description of postmodern novels as works that “problematize narrative representation, even as they invoke it” (“A Poetics of Postmodernism” 40). In doing so, the French novelist exploits...