When disaster strikes, who do we turn to? At moments of collective calamity, the first people to speak are usually politicians — and we expect them to get it right.
It can be the making of them if they do. Ronald Reagan’s televised address after the Challenger explosion of 1986 — promising never to forget the astronauts who had ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to ‘touch the face of God†— elevated him into a kind of father of the nation. We may mock Tony Blair’s ‘people’s princess†reaction to the death of Diana now, but he caught the mood so perfectly that it established him as Britain’s leader rather than just its head of government. On September 11 2001 George W Bush did less well. His first statement, promising ‘to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this actâ€, left a gravitas gap that he had to fill later.
After the politicians have spoken, we look elsewhere, expecting others to guide us through the debris thrown up by catastrophe. Maybe that burden would once have fallen on priests and preachers, but now we call on artists and storytellers to do the job.
In the aftermath of the third anniversary of 9/11, it is worth asking how they’re doing. For, ever so slowly, writers, filmmakers and dramatists have begun to address the twin events that have dominated the start of the 21st century: the attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent Iraq war.
It did not come straight away. There were a few clunky shows in fringe theatres, a clutch of al-Qaeda-related insta-thrillers and a Neil Labute play (which imagined a survivor of the World Trade Centre using the collapse to fake his own death and start a new, adulterous life). Otherwise, not much.
Now, though, the trickle is thickening into a flow. Besides Fahrenheit 9/11, the year’s surprise movie blockbuster, the United Kingdom TV broadcaster Channel 4 this month screened The Hamburg Cell, a drama documentary about the 9/11 hijackers. Meanwhile, the National Theatre in London is selling 1 200 tickets a night for Stuff Happens, David Hare’s ‘history play†of the events and intrigues that led to the United States-British invasion of Iraq.
All these works have immediate power. The Hare play is riveting, if only because the episodes it recalls are themselves so astonishing. As the play’s prologue declares, ‘The real is what will strike you as really absurd … Unless you exclaim, ‘There must be some mistake!’, you must be mistaken.â€
Nevertheless, none of these post-9/11 works succeed in fully capturing the scale of the initial horror of that day or the fear, anger and bloodshed that followed. Perhaps none of them could. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote recently that, ‘Thus far, words alone have proved curiously inadequate as a means of testimonyâ€. Instead, it is photography that has produced ‘some of the most affecting and resonant of artworks … images that possess a stark and unsparing eloquenceâ€. It’s as if, three years after the event, we are still speechless: only pictures can tell the story.
In that context, we should welcome a new work like Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman is the ‘graphic novelist”, or comic-book artist, who dared enter an area fraught with dangers for art — the Holocaust — only to produce one of the finest works on the topic. His comic book Maus, in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats, somehow closed in on the essence of history’s darkest chapter.
The new book is less successful; it’s bitty and incomplete, suggesting that even the visual form needs time and distance from its subject before it can hope to get to grips with it. (Maus appeared nearly 50 years after the Holocaust.) But even its cover achieves what so many written efforts cannot: a black-on-black silhouette of the two towers, deathly before the fall.
Is the lesson, then, that writers should shut up, deferring — at least for the next few decades — to the wielders of camera lens and paintbrush? A magnificent new novel suggests otherwise, a book that lights a way for writers to tackle that which is near and dark.
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth is the newest triumph in what is surely the most prolific late blossoming in literary history. Now in his 70s, Roth is writing the best books of his life, chronicling the American century.
The latest might seem like a whimsy, a ‘what if?†story that imagines the Republicans nominating the anti-Semite and Nazi sympathising aviator Charles Lindbergh for president in 1940. Roth has Lindbergh ousting Roosevelt, reaching an accommodation with Hitler and unleashing a period of creeping ostracism of the US’s 4,5-million Jews. The descent towards an American Kristallnacht is seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old Roth, watching as his own family is gradually encircled by this new, homegrown menace.
The events of September 11, the Iraq war and the Bush administration are not so much as mentioned. The action is rooted in the 1940s, most of it centred on a single family. Yet, somehow, the shadow of 9/11 looms over every page. The title alone invokes the spirit of the times.
Not that Roth offers up any facile parallel; he does not give us a 1940s counterpart to al-Qaeda. Instead, the echoes are stirred by the actions of Washington, his imaginary one of 60 years ago and the real one of today.
Both move fast to erode civil liberties, telling Americans that there is a ‘grave internal danger that necessitated the curtailment of their constitutional rightsâ€. Lindbergh’s White House takes an axe to the liberties that the US was founded to protect. This, it emerges, is the real plot against the US — and one suspects Roth feels a similar threat is crackling today.
Even this may be too crude. For what lingers above all after reading Roth’s novel is the choking sense of fear — the fear stalking a family whose private world is fractured and then crushed by public calamities. This is what Roth captures better than anyone, the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores, of every individual alive.
Perhaps this is how artists need to approach the defining events of our time — obliquely, indirectly, around the back. The precedents are good. No doubt there were hundreds of agitprop dramas in the 1950s hammering Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting campaign. They are forgotten now; what endures is The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s parable of the McCarthyite witch-hunts in which the senator’s name is never mentioned.
One day Arthur Koestler and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s frontal assaults on Soviet totalitarianism will barely be remembered; but people will always read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It seems allegory, rather than the literal, has the power to endure.
When Shakespeare wanted to draw attention to the imperial ambitions of Queen Elizabeth I, he did not write a play about her and her advisers — he wrote Julius Caesar. Today’s artists need to tell us about our world, but maybe they need to do it in camouflage. Philip Roth, an old master, has shown the way. —