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A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11
Article in Partial Answers Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas · January 2009
DOI: 10.1353/pan.0.0057
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A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11 151
A World Neither Brave Nor New:

Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11
Efraim Sicher
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Natalia Skradol
Tel Aviv
Under the general demand for slackening and

for appeasement, we can hear the muttering of
the desire for a return of terror, for the realization
of the fantasy to seize reality.
Lyotard 1984: 82
On ne peut pas écrire sur ce sujet mais on ne

peut pas écrire sur autre chose non plus. Plus
rien ne nous atteint.
Beigbeder 2003: 18
The End without Ending: The Intrusion of the Real

9/11 has been imagined before in countless hijack or terminal disaster
films such as Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and Independence Day.
Slavoj Žižek presents the TV coverage of 9/11 as the Hitchcock moment
of horror that is actually happening; it is the intrusion of the real into
fiction. This is what made similar scenes in horror movies unscreenable
in the immediate weeks after 9/11 and sent the CIA scurrying after
Hollywood scriptwriters in order to try to understand the terrorists. It is
an intrusion, Žižek argues, that is the ultimate marker of the “passion
for the Real” (2002: 16–20). One instance of this intrusion occurs in the
film The Matrix (1999) when the hero awakens from what he thought
* This essay is dedicated to the memory of Philippa Tiger, who first suggested the
rereading of Auden. The authors are grateful to Dr Yael Ben-Zvi, who first pointed out to
us the reversal of reality and fiction in Matrix. Special thanks go to Peter Hutton and Joel
Meyerowitz for kind permission to use their work.
PARTIAL ANSWERS 4/1 (2006)

152 Efraim Sicher and Natalia Skradol
was “real” into the “real reality” and sees a desolate landscape littered
with the burned ruins of Chicago after a global war. The hero then
encounters resistance leader Morpheus, who utters the ironic greeting:
“Welcome to the desert of the real.”1
This essay explores how our imagining of future disaster in dystopian
literature is re-visioned and revised by the after-image of the disaster
that has actually happened. If there has been a change in our reading
of literature and film since 9/11, this change may not be quantifiable
(a measurement beyond the scope of this essay and possibly beyond
feasibility), but it may teach us something about the way in which the
afterimage of the disaster that has actually occurred affects our reading
in the would-be anterior future of imagined terminal catastrophe, the
imagined end of society, of time, of the story. A similar process of
reinterpretation happened after the 2004 tsunami disaster in Asia,
which seemed to outdo the scenes in the film The Day After Tomorrow
(2004) of a submerged New York. Each of these events challenged the
human ability to control history and the environment.
Both natural and man-made disasters leave deep impressions on
the imagination and on philosophy. For example, the 1755 Lisbon
earthquake destroyed an imperial capital equivalent to the size of
prewar London and made a laughing-stock of Leibnizian optimism in
Voltaireʼs Candide. Yet natural disasters do not usually have political,
military, and historical significance and, unlike 9/11, are rarely thought
of as marking the end of an era. 9/11 was an intrusion of the real that
made it impossible to un-imagine dystopia as nightmare or fantasy. It
is not a matter of whether or not utopian thought is still sustainable or
practical, but of what has happened in postmodern fiction under the
impact of a real collision of reality and imagination. This destruction
was not just another demonstration of a culture of after-images but a
singular event, perhaps an ur-event, which showed that the world was
in a permanent state of unending disasters.
What could looking backward from after 9/11 mean for our reading
of dystopian texts? We do not have in mind mere “foreshadowing” (cf.
Bernstein 1994), or Jacques Derridaʼs delineation of nuclear-holocaust
See Žižek 15. Art Spiegelmanʼs In the Shadow of No Towers makes a similar point
1
when he has a billboard for Arnold Schwarzeneggerʼs Collateral Damage displayed

against the background of the real terrorist scenario of the burning Towers (2004: 2). On
the delayed release of Collateral Damage and the post-9/11 reception of war films see
Lowenstein 2003.
discourse as an entirely fictional genre (since it had not happened and

could not happen without erasing all record, all archive, of its having
happened).2 Rather, the effect of reading any dystopian text post
factum, when history has given chilling new meaning to the original
context in which the disaster was imagined, reverses the relationship
between fiction and reality and raises unsettling postmodern suspicions
of the “real” as something that can be known otherwise than as an
aesthetic artefact. We are always, when reading narratives, looking
forward, in all senses, to the end, but in this case the “end” precedes
our reading of past narratives that imagine the future. Superimposed
on our interpretation is the disaster having already happened (quite
apart from any meaning the disasterʼs may have in itself as a discrete
historical, political, or physical event).
We shall see that a further stage has been reached when dystopian
fiction has become a fact, no longer a cautionary tale of the imagination.
But then destruction is embedded in Western culture. Satirized by Don
DeLillo, postwar America had become a site of catastrophe before
disaster struck; the destruction of New York must also be seen in terms
of postmodern aesthetic theory expounded by Jean Baudrillard and
Paul Virilio. Finally, Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan
Safran Foer respond to 9/11 in novels that grapple with what 9/11 and
its aftermath imply for representation and for the novel form.
What 9/11 has shown is that the relationship of the real and the
imagined in dystopian fiction has been reversed, since hypermediated
image has eclipsed the event and fiction has become lived experience.
There is an uncanny sense of an end that has been almost predestined,
like Winstonʼs feeling of déjà vu in Orwellʼs Nineteen Eighty-Four
when he enters the Golden Country and makes love with Julia in a
Miltonian Paradise, a scene he has dreamed. Indeed, the topos has been
reworked enough times in literature to be uncannily familiar. Read
in this context, T. S. Eliotʼs remark in “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” about the duty of any true artist to “live . . . in what is not
merely the present, but the present moment of the past” (1976: 22)
acquires a new and sinister meaning.
If the Christian promise of an apocalyptic end was repeatedly
disappointed, it could be argued that “the typological repetitions that
punctuate the more linear apocalyptic mythos entail a different sort of
2
See Derrida 1984, as well as Saint-Amour 2000.
negotiation of identity and difference, one . . . whose disconfirmation (or

the failure of the attainment of apocalyptic closure), far from discrediting
or invalidating the defining mythos or promise, serves to propel the
mythos forward, often in a redefined and expanded form” (Robson
1995: 62). In narrative terms, such repetition is built into an American
cultural discourse that can be traced back to the Pilgrim Fathers, who
believed they had arrived in the postapocalyptic promised land. In a
sense, the end was always there, since utopia presumes that something
(the rotten state of society, human corruption, gender difference, or life
on earth) must first come to an end. Seen this way, apocalyptic visions,
in the Christian scriptures or in revolutionary socialism, build terminal
disaster into eschatology, so that the repeated non-fulfillment of the
promised salvation implies a constant repetition of catastrophe. Worse,
when disaster is not followed by a brave new world, all that remains
is a permanent state of disaster. Dystopian fiction is thus implicitly
postapocalyptic.
At the same time, spatio-temporal repetition may be built into
cultural texts, such as music (see Lyotard 1988: 165), and Paul Ricoeur
reminds us that literary plot is in essence repetitive (1980: 178). It is a
familiar paradox, moreover, that when we begin to read a novel, the end
of the story has already been written, so that the future has already been
imagined as the past in narrative time; in history the story is always
retold when we know the ending, even if we cannot know its meaning.
Therefore the dystopian future is always past tense, retold and revised.
But if dystopia can no longer be imagined except in the already past
future, the story can only be repeated as a continual end, a disastrous
writing in Maurice Blanchotʼs terms. Speaking of Auschwitz (a disaster
incomparable, least of all to 9/11) in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot
remarks that we live after the unthinkable has been thought. Although
it does not actually touch us physically, we live everywhere under its
threat: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything
intact” (1986: 1). In any case, we can barely express the feeling of being
unable to write after the disaster. If all representation is inadequate, then
reading after disaster substitutes for an act of representation.
Some of the implications of reading literary dystopias after 9/11
may lie in the definition of dystopia and confirm what we have long
known, namely that there is no return to innocence because there was
none. Utopia and anti-utopia have always been two sides of the same
coin: “As nightmare is to dream . . . anti-utopia has stalked utopia
from the very beginning. . . . As in Freudʼs theory of the unconscious,

the very announcement of utopia has almost immediately provoked
the mocking, contrary, echo of anti-utopia” (Kumar 99–100). Dystopia
(which should be distinguished from anti-utopia) is not so much an
argument against utopia, as its obverse, a utopia that will inevitably go
wrong; it is utopia discovered to be the “bad place” (see Booker 1994;
Moylan 2000: 111–99). John Stuart Mill mocked his opponents as “dys-
topians” or “caco-topians” because, he declared, “What is commonly
called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they
appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.”3 Surely there has always
been a dystopian streak in utopian writing, especially if Moreʼs Utopia
is read ironically, as both u-topia and eu-topia, as a critique of what is
wrong with Englandʼs social and economic situation that is followed,
in the second book, by a demonstration, through the unreliable
narrator (a veritable “speaker of nonsense”), of a perfect society that
is impossibly “No-Where.” Nevertheless, the satires directed at ideal
societies by Swift, Johnson, or Voltaire did not deter utopian thinkers
in America or Europe from planning and occasionally building utopias
based on ideals of universal reason and happiness. Typically, these
utopian projects can be brought about only by transforming human
nature, whether by social and genetic engineering (Brave New World),
eugenics (The Coming Race), genocide (Mein Kampf), behavioral
conditioning (Walden 2), mind control (Nineteen Eighty-Four), or the
banning of literature (Fahrenheit 451). There is something inhuman
(and thus potentially dysfunctional or dystopian) in the idea of a utopia
which requires that human society as currently constituted be replaced
(whether through natural selection or coercion) by a social order based on
different (implicitly non-human) characteristics. These characteristics
are usually based on uniformity, conformity, and unanimity – the very
values that brought the downfall of the biblical Tower of Babel.
In his critique of the inhuman absolutism of utopian projects which
allowed only one possible solution to social ills, forced on people
dogmatically, Isaiah Berlin quoted Immanuel Kantʼs dictum that
“out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”4
Berlin detected the seeds of revolt against the utopian construction
3
Speech to the House of Commons, 12 March 1857; quoted in Kumar 447, note 2.
4
“[A]us so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz
Gerades gezimmert werden” (“Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte weltbürgischer
Absicht” [1784], quoted in Berlin 19).
of universal harmony in German romanticism and in Promethean

Byronic heroes (Berlin 44–45). Lewis Mumford, too, in his salutary
preface to the 1962 edition of The Story of Utopias, declares that the
eighteenth-century utopians were mistaken in thinking that human
nature was malleable and society perfectible (3). Like Berlin, Mumford
maintained his faith in the latent possibilities that could lead to a better
world if the warnings of utopian projects were heeded, despite the
dent that World War I made in those hopes when it “suddenly
reversed the currents of our life” (2). In a passage that reads quite
ironically now, Mumford dreamily looked out of his tenement window
over the rooftops of Manhattan, seeking inspiration for the utopian
potential of the present and relief from its ugliness in the “pale tower
with its golden pinnacle gleaming through the soft morning haze” (25).
Literary dystopia gives a negative appraisal of the here-and-now,
a satire of what is already possible but not desirable, as distinct from
fantastic science fiction set elsewhere, which may be desirable but not
realizable. In the century of communism and fascism, the revolutionary
utopian movements offered the implementation of ideals, while
dystopia mocked the tyranny of idea (see Kumar 125). The Russian
philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev predicted that utopia was only too
possible and intellectuals would have to fight to prevent it, a prophecy
Aldous Huxley used as the epigraph to his dystopian novel, Brave New
World (1932). Berdyaev, writing at the beginning of Soviet rule before
he was expelled by the Bolsheviks, saw that the border of reality had
been crossed when utopian theory had become totalitarian practice and
dystopians would have to imagine a resistance to this scourge out of
Dostoevskyʼs The Possessed before the West became infected too (see
Berdiaeff 262–66).5
The End in the Beginning: Disaster as a Cultural Norm

Cet événement a existé, et on ne peut pas le raconter.
Beigbeder 19
The reasons why 9/11 seemed to repeat a dystopian scenario have

to do with a paradigm in Western culture. Despite the conclusion of
the commission investigating 9/11 that there had been a failure of
5
See also Hoyles 120–21.
imagination in the intelligence community,6 in popular culture the all too

familiar scene of destruction seemed incredible because it was, indeed,
all too familiar. The common comparison with other disasters that
delivered a fundamental psychological shock and served as historical
or epistemological turning-points, such as the sinking of the Titanic or
the attack on Pearl Harbor, underscores the paradoxical unexpectedness
and predictability of the event. The more the catastrophic end becomes
mythologized in collective memory and popular culture, the less we
expect it to happen as a “real” event and the more predictable it seems
to be when it has happened. Susan Sontag once commented (1966:
209–25) that science fiction films and novels are invariably more about
disaster than science since they go back to the oldest plots of heroes
battling evil against all odds and reenact the destruction of great cities
(such as Babylon in D.W. Griffithʼs 1916 film Intolerance).
The “ruins of time” motif (a poetic tradition from Edmund Spenser
to Robert Lowell) helps keep in mind the seeds of destruction on which
Britain built its imperial project, as Rome had done before. Social critics
from Carlyle to Ruskin envisioned the future ruins of the capitalist
empire, the new Tower of Babel/Babylon. Gustave Doréʼs vivid 1872
etching of “The New Zealander” presents a vision of the ruins of London
150 years later, visited by an aborigine tourist. The collapse of temples
and towers is at the core of our cultural sensibilities – whether they
represent belief systems, military power, or global commerce – and it
was science, identified with progress and rationality, that has perfected
the means of efficient lethal destruction. Beginning with the American
Civil War7 and the Franco-German War, writers imagined the war to
end all wars. A memorable example is H. G. Wellsʼs War of the Worlds
(1897),8 which, in Orson Wellesʼs radio rendition on October 30, 1938,
caused panic in America. Toppling towers and alien invasions have long
6
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, August 21, 2004,
www.9-11commission.gov: 339–47.
7
In his 2004 discussion of the poverty of literary responses after 9/11, Christopher
Merrill notes that the American Civil War marked a loss of innocence which inspired
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to create a new poetics of grief (70–77). His point is
that Whitman and, in his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln were able to articulate a
future for the American nation in a way not matched by President George W. Bush after
9/11.
8
See Kumar 65. Kumar names Sir George Chesneyʼs The Battle of Dorking (1871)
as the first work of this kind.
been the staple of science fiction plots, though since World War II no
hero trying to save the world could be innocent about the global threat
under which we all live, a collective trauma of a global destruction which
has already happened (see Sontag 215, 225). So, to a Western public,
the targeting of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon might have seemed
(however falsely) a scenario already previewed, prescribed, pretexted…
We live in a continual disaster zone and therefore, in rereading the
modernists, we recognize that for them the apocalypse was present
tense, not an eschatological future. Sitting in “one of the dives / On
Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid,” W. H. Auden smelt the
“unmentionable odor of death” that “Offends the September night.”9
On that other September night, under the collective strength of the
skyscrapers of Manhattan, Auden despaired of the false hopes of a
“low dishonest decade,” yet put his faith in the individual affirmation of
fidelity. Auden could not see the coming end that T. S. Eliot described
in “Little Gidding.” He could not see what that poetic fire-watcher saw
in the Dantean inferno of the Blitz. However, Yeats, the ghost who
walks the dead patrol with T. S. Eliot, knew that after the war to end all
wars, the Great War of 1914–1918, the next war was coming, and that
if nothing “drastic” was done, airplanes and Zeppelins would flatten
the city.10 Written in July 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, a year
before Guernica provided Picasso with an image of modern war, “Lapis
Lazuli” is not so much a prediction of the coming global conflagration
amid hysterics and playacting, as an acknowledgment of the ancient
wisdom of the Chinese and the gaiety in their wrinkled eyes which
have seen and outlasted the fall of many empires.
Countless novels and films have assumed that disaster would lead
to the end of Americaʼs liberal democracy. In Margaret Atwoodʼs The
Handmaidʼs Tale (1989), for example, an ecological catastrophe has
taken place, the President and Congress have been gunned down (for
which “Islamic fanatics” are blamed), and the United States has been
transformed into a dystopian patriarchy based on a fundamentalist
Christian right-wing hierarchy that enslaves women. British dystopias
are no safer. In A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess imagines
the introduction of sadistic mind control based on Soviet techniques.
9
“1st September 1939” (Auden 1945: 57). These lines were often quoted after 9/11
(see Merrill 69–70).
10
“Lapis Lazuli” (Yeats 1958: 292).
In another novel, 1985 (1978), he imagines that an Islamic republic has

been proclaimed in the United Kingdom.
When the planes hit the Towers on September 11, 2001, despite
some tottering of stock markets, the global superpower, the United
States of America, did not collapse as was feared. Nevertheless, the
vision of the monuments of empire crumbling in a few moments
exceeds our capacity to imagine worst-case scenarios. At the same
time, the failure to confront the preexisting possibility of the disaster
and to find adequate cultural responses to 9/11 seems to say something
about a postapocalyptic culture which has already imagined the final
disaster. James Berger wrote his 1999 book After the End during the
millennial high alert before that moment when New York moved from
the list of cities of culture (Paris, Vienna, Prague) to cities of destruction
(Jerusalem, Nineveh, Babylon). Perhaps for this very reason, Bergerʼs
observation remains true: we are always writing after the end that
has been written into Western culture – from the Book of Revelation
through Vonnegut, Pynchon, and DeLillo.
After the worst has already happened (the Bhophal disaster in India,
Chernobyl, 9/11, or the SARS epidemic), the future can be imagined
as a replay of disaster scenarios, in which we compulsively repeat
past imagining of the future. This is a distinctly postmodernist marker
of an end to the Western tradition of looking forward to the terminal
transformation of the world either into a prelapsarian edenic state (a
regression to a primeval paradise) or into a radically new political
reality (a revision of history or rewriting the future). The occurrence of
the foreseen catastrophe lends an uncanny inevitability to history. Kurt
Vonnegut parodies this backward reading of history in Timequake (1997)
when he describes the “clambake” in February 2001 which reverses
time and returns the free will that has been lost to the inevitability of
historyʼs rerun. Airplanes on autopilot are crashing and the fact that
this unending disaster is dreamed up by a science fiction writer called
Kilgore Trout does not prevent us from realizating that this fantasy
of the future has happened before. In Vonnegutʼs Slaughterhouse Five
(1969), Billy Pilgrim, who is living a Kilgore Trout fantasy of visitors
from outer space, complains that he cannot change the past, present, or
future. There is no human freedom except to press the destroy button.
History is a series of destructions. The replay backwards of a movie of
the Allied firebombing of Dresden is a reprise of the point that there is
no why in history. Moreover, in the novel, the historian David Irvingʼs
revisionist account of this incident is taken more seriously than Billʼs

own personal memory of being there as a witness.
In Thomas Pynchonʼs Gravityʼs Rainbow (1973), the screaming
of the V-rockets repeats previous disasters and promises a spectacle
as great as the destruction of the Crystal Palace, the glass monument
to the triumph of the capitalist utopia at the center of the 1851 Great
Exhibition (it burnt down in 1936):
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but
there is nothing to compare it with now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but itʼs all theatre.
. . . Heʼs afraid of the way the glass will fall – soon – it will be
a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in
total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible
crashing.11
We start at Absolute Zero, where Wernher von Braunʼs rocketry links
Nazi total war with the NASA space program in an apocalyptic vision
of erotic fantasies of sadomasochistic ecstasy. This reminds us that
“ground zero” derives from the atomic testing grounds in Alamogordo
(see Davis 2003); the Manhattan Project is a code name for destruction
that, in a macabre twist, has, as it were, struck home. The endgame
dates from World War II, Vonnegut avers in Timequake, when the first
atom bomb was dropped on Japan.
Other literary dystopias show how much the imagined end in
American fiction has become an essential element of postmodernist
poetics. Don DeLilloʼs White Noise (1984) is about the imperceptible
presence of death which has been invisibly introduced into the lives
of ordinary Americans (as the Chernobyl fall-out would do a year or
two later, an unseen disaster whose damage could not be contained
by the habitual lies of the regime). The Airborne Toxic Event slides
imperceptibly, namelessly, into the daily emergency routine of the
crowd waiting anxiously to be told that the authorities know what is
happening – waiting to be transported, processed, evacuated. But the
difference between simulation and a real emergency has been eroded
Pynchon 1975: 3. Quoting this passage, Anustup Basu notes the proximity of event
11
and phenomenon; failure to distinguish between these two categories of thought has made
it possible to present 9/11 as a crisis situation without understanding “that which allows
the screaming to both recur in a calendar of disasters, and at the same time, have an
untimely and incomparable aspect to it” (2003: 11).
(a SIMUVAC official explains that they are using the real thing as an
exercise!). In White Noise, moreover, the afterimage makes us think
that we are seeing the real thing. This is as close as you can get, only
we need to get closer:
“Come on hurry up, plane crash footage.” Then he was out the
door, the girls were off the bed, all three of them running along
the hall to the TV set.
I sat in bed a little stunned. The swiftness and noise of their
leaving had put the room in a state of molecular agitation. In
the debris of invisible matter, the question seemed to be, What
is happening here? By the time I got to the room at the end of
the hall, there was only a puff of black smoke at the edge of the
screen. But the crash was shown two more times, once in stop-
action replay, as an analyst attempted to explain the reason for
the plunge. (DeLillo 1986: 64)
The event is no longer an event but its afterimage, like the clip, endlessly
replayed, of the second plane penetrating the World Trade Center. Žižek
sees the repeated shots of the second plane crashing into the WTC as
approximating the appeal of a snuff movie, the ultimate sadistic act
endlessly repeated and prolonged in virtual reality (5–6, 11). Every image
of disaster, even if broadcast live by satellite, becomes an afterimage
once it has happened. The afterimage of the disaster, Baudrillard
tells us, feeds an insatiable hunger for worse, for a Bataillean excess:
“Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander,
more sweeping” (Baudrillard 2002: 11). In much the same way, the
protagonist of Crash (1973) by J. G. Ballard, the science fiction author
of a number of terminal apocalypses, is constantly on the lookout for
victims of more and more atrocious car crashes.
That America and especially New York can be understood only as
images is the sustaining device of DeLilloʼs Mao II (1991), a work that
links international terrorism with the art of the novel in a metafictional
dystopian here and now. Even before the afterimage of their downfall
in real life, the Twin Towers exist only as an image, seen from the
studio of Brita, a professional photographer who is turning her mental
image of the writer Scott into publicity images:
Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the
night intensely massed and near. This is the word “loomed” in
all its prolonged and impending force. (DeLillo 1991: 87)
As in White Noise, the crowds are fixated by mass death. The mass
weddings of the Moon cult, Islamic fundamentalists greeting Khomeini,
and the funeral of Chairman Mao are televised images that reflect the
complete loss of individual human identity, as well as of community,
of emotional connection. Everything is done by remote access and
routine. A bomb explosion is something that really happens, but it can
only be perceived in a fragmented image of a shard of glass, or as
a press event. Freedom is a concept tied to the media announcement
of a hostageʼs release. So powerful is an image that the photo of a
corpse may be more important to the terrorists than any exchange or
deal. The Russian revolutionary slogan adopted by a German neo-Nazi
group, “the worse the better,” sums up the cynical state of affairs in
which only when you are killed are you noticed; prime-time ratings go
to mass killers and suicide bombers. While his hooded captors leave
the kidnapped poet only images to grasp, another protagonist, Karen,
discovers New Yorkʼs own Beirut, a tent city of disaffected homeless
drug addicts and illegals. DeLillo warned that hostage-taking was a
rehearsal for mass terror, but his scenario of midair explosions and
crumbling buildings, “the new tragic narrative” after Beckett (1991:
157), is, since 9/11, no longer a dystopia of the future.
In a 1986 essay on New York (1989a: 13–24), Baudrillard likewise
noticed the total isolation of the individual that makes relationships
outside gangs unthinkable. The worldʼs capital has reached a degree of
atomization and crowdedness that has outstripped the agglomeration
that baffled Friedrich Engels in the streets of London. The New York
Marathon, that “end of the world show,” brings a message not of
victory but of catastrophe because each of the 17,000 runners suffers
alone for the sake of the achievement of saying “I did it” (19–20).
“I did it” sums up the mystical decadence of a vibrant and totalized
city, its cold architecture, the animal attraction of skin color, and above
all the exhaustion of its utopian projects, such as the space program,
once they, too, have been implemented. Further, “America is neither
dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it
is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it
were already achieved.” America has, indeed, become the “perfect
simulacrum” (28).
The End before the End: Imagining the End of the World
Tout gratte-ciel est une utopie.

Beigbeder 26
Another way of looking forward to the future end was to wait for the
barbarians. The Greek poet from Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy
(1863–1933), mused on what would happen if the long expected
barbarians did not arrive: “So now what will become of us, without
barbarians./ Those men were one sort of resolution.”12 But these
necessary barbarian Others are no good if they are already here. As
Morris Berman, author of The Twilight of American Culture, writes
in “Waiting for the Barbarians” (2001), the parallel between the fall
of Rome and America after 9/11 is impressive because the decay
caused by inner barbarism does not take account of the destruction
from without.13 The chronically bored hospital guard on duty in the
movie The Barbarian Invasions / Les Invasions Barbares (dir. Denys
Arcand, Rémy Girard, and Stéphane Rousseau, Canada, 2003) is not
particularly impressed by the repeated footage of the 9/11 catastrophe;
like T. S. Eliotʼs Tiresias, he probably feels he “has seen it all before,”
in the invasion of the civilized barbarians within his own society, in his
own hospital, right by his desk.
What in the title of his essay on 9/11 Don DeLillo calls the “Ruins
of the Future” is a continuing disaster, precisely in the utopian mass
circulation of virtual goods and information:
In the past decade the surge of capital markets has dominated
discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational
corporations have come to seem more vital and influential than
governments. The dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of
the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future,
in the utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory
there, and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment
potential has no limit.
According to DeLillo, this is a disaster that literally ruins the utopian
future and demolishes social constructions of technological progress
“Waiting for the Barbarians” (Cavafy 2001: 93).

12
Merrill cites Cavafyʼs poem to make an argument for the power of literature to bring
13
empathy (2004: 74–79).

and endless happiness, leaving us with nothing to look forward to, only
the memory of an end. The destruction from without is not the revolt
of the repressed and the needy against globalization but a force totally
Other and incomprehensible to the mind of the empire, untouched, as
DeLillo tells us in his essay, by the woman in the supermarket, yet
touching every aspect of the capitalist utopia, from its skyscrapers to
Palm Pilots.
It has been suggested (Abel 2003) that DeLilloʼs “The Ruins of the
Future” may question our capability to respond because its rhetoricity
determines the understanding of what 9/11 means. In other words,
the imaging of the event may defer, though not totally suspend, any
judgmental position, and the aesthetic statement of this dilemma
impedes getting at the essence of what happened. A good illustration
is the manipulation of the viewersʼ political stance through visual
interpretation in Michael Mooreʼs movie Fahrenheit 9/11 (2003).
Cinematic imaging prevents us from seeing the event itself, while
hypermediation shapes public belief.
DeLilloʼs real-time scenario of a Third-World country in which people
wander helplessly in dust masks, clutching photos and descriptions of
the disappeared, concludes with a surprising affirmation of a counter-
narrative to the Cold-War arms race or the Bush administrationʼs
declaration of a (fourth) world war on “the evil ones.” DeLillo speaks of
the power of American technology, its own “astonishments,” combined
with the multiethnicism of New York, to survive mindless attacks. Jean
Baudrillard sees it differently, as a millennial burst of terminal events
that began with the death of Princess Diana and culminated with the
mother of all events, 9/11.14
The fascination with images of destruction imparts a desire for
destruction embedded in the power structure itself, which enacts
our dreams of its happening (see Baudrillard 2002: 5–6). The twin
destruction rules out accident and goes beyond any ideology,
energizing the absolute and irrevocable event: a zero-death game that
14
In his 1989 essay “The Anorexic Ruins,” Baudrillard announced that in a sense
the year 2000 would not take place because there were no more events; the end had been
played out so many times that the postapocalyptic world was a rerun of a spectacle, while
history, culture, and truth were absorbed by the simulated image. In Baudrillardʼs America
this end of ends was located in the trajectory from the old culture of Europe to the utopia
of America, where everything speeded to a terminal end. This postapocalyptic topos itself
partakes of the apocalyptic myth of the Pilgrim Fathers (see Hefferman 171–72).
defies interpretation. The terrorists hijacked the media, in Baudrillardʼs

analysis, because the “image consumes the event, in the sense that it
absorbs it and offers it for consumption” as an “image event” (27). The
fixation on afterimages of the event blocks out interpretive strategies
that would “fit” this event into some historicizing, ideological, or ethical
pattern, perhaps even into Baudrillardʼs own postmodernist anti-
allegories of counter-meaning. The striving for rational progress, for
utopian happiness, would then have to be reread as a premonition of
an end that has already “happened” and is now being experienced in
what Baudrillard sees as a radical and violent reintroduction of a real
event into the proliferation of simulacra and banal images of pseudo-
events. It is in this sense that “[t]he structure of the spectacle . . .
ʻrevokesʼ the very utopian desires . . . that its images ʻprovoke.ʼ . . . It
is this contradiction that is expressed by postmodern mythʼs perpetual
oscillation between utopia and dystopia” (Durham 5).
The End of the End: The Postmodern Dystopia
En anglais, “end” ne signifie pas seulement la

fin mais aussi lʼextrémité.
Beigbeder 20
Rereading dystopian fiction must contend with the loss of favor

of utopianism in a consumerist mass-culture which values instant
gratification and fetishizes material objects of desire. The egocentric
meanness of “me-ness” stresses the individual at the expense of shared
ideological goals. Family ties, group identity, or the collective tend not
to be feelgood experiences in the global fastfood McDonaldʼs empire.
When power is in the hands of multinational corporations, Lyotard tells
us, an anything-goes eclecticism characterizes a zero degree of culture,
and “knowledge” is relegated to TV trivia games (1984: 76). Party or
organized socialism has been widely discredited, and with the fall of
the Berlin Wall many “isms” of all kinds have lost their hold, resulting
in the collapse of the myth of progress (see Jacoby 1999: 1–27).
In Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia
in East and West (2000), Susan Buck-Morss comments that Walter
Benjaminʼs Traumwelt (dreamworld) of early commodity capitalism
has been replaced by Adornoʼs diagnosis of “absolute reification of the
world” (see Adorno 1991, I: 40). Buck-Morssʼs reading of Benjaminʼs

dreamworld and catastrophe as two “extremes of mass utopia” (2000:
xi) disregards an essential aspect of Benjaminʼs concept of historical
dynamics. For Benjamin, catastrophe is not opposed to dreamworld
but is present already at the moment of the appearance of dreamworld
images, since “every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow
but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself.
. . . we begin to recognize the monuments . . . as ruins even before they
have crumbled” (Benjamin 1999: 13). What Benjamin said of bourgeois
collective fantasies can be extended to the modern Western culture of
consumerism. Dreamworld carries the catastrophe within itself. But
the formula can also be reversed: the catastrophe is an announcement
of a dreamworld of the future, if dreamworld is to be understood as
an assemblage of collective fantasies. Buck-Morss considers there to
be little difference between Soviet Russia and America in this respect
and points to a parallel vision and disillusionment in Russia and
America in the twentieth century: King Kong straddling the Empire
State building is contemporary with Stalinist monumental architecture
(Buck-Morss 174–88). Tatlinʼs vision of mechanization of the body,
as in his Letatlin flying machine (1929–1932) or his constructivist
design for the never built Monument to the Third International (1920),
conveyed the futuristic dimension of technological utopianism that
remained, however, no more than a dream for the masses (see Stites
1989). But Stalinist towers and palaces, symbols of totalitarian power,
cannot be compared with the prominence skyscrapers in the American
dream, which consigned those excluded from them to the poverty of
the ghetto: no expression of opposition to Stalinism in any form was
tolerated – and the day of avant-garde futurism in the Soviet Union was
all too short.
Seen from after 9/11, the twentieth century marks the twilight
of utopia. Dystopia has finally arrived because, on the one hand,
the reconstitution of society seems impossible while, on the other,
technology threatens basic concepts of individual freedom and of
human life. It may be that modernity is simply a state of fatigue, as
it was for Nietzsche, and that the world is slipping into idleness – the
perpetual leisure that makes any other form of utopia unthinkable.
Writing in 1888, Nietzsche asked: “Where does our modern world
belong – to exhaustion or ascent?” His characterization of the epoch by
the metaphor of fatigue was symptomatic of a general fear shared by the
European middle classes that humanity was depleting its “accumulated

energy” and falling into that sleep, which was “only a symbol of a
much deeper and longer compulsion to rest.”15 Against the background
of the pessimism that grew out of the wholesale slaughter of World War
I, Oscar Spenglerʼs Decline of the West (1918) and Freudʼs Civilization
and its Discontents (1930) can be seen as strong anti-utopian key texts.
As for the more futuristic projects of modernism, their inebriating
utopian spirit generated an expectancy curtailed by the trench warfare
of World War I and paradoxically suggested a future that would cancel
both the present and modernism itself.16 It is hardly surprising that,
following the liberation of Europe in 1945, which revealed the Nazi
concentration camps, and under the perceived threat of communist
invasion, there was a marked increase in new horror tales that depicted
impending, terminal disaster overtaking the mightiest nation in the
world (see Kumar 380–88).
Utopia was, of course, far from dead. Yet, despite renewed hopes of
scientific redemption, ecotopias, feminist utopias, suicidal millennial
cults, and New Age ashrams, America continues to be the final dystopia
in DeLilloʼs White Noise, while in Martin Amisʼ Timeʼs Arrow (1991),
which borrows Vonnegutʼs reversal of time to trace absolute evil to
the black hole of Auschwitz, postmodern America has developed into
a commodity-fetish culture producing garbage – a dystopian vision
approaching Adornoʼs vision in Negative Dialectics of total reification
in his critique of a society that constructs death factories.
Postmodernism comes after, and it comes after disaster. Narrative
time can no longer maintain the fallacy of linear progress toward
a future-oriented better world. Benjaminʼs angel of history, as he
read Paul Kleeʼs Angelus Novus (1920), has its back to the future
and its face to the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The Angel would like to
stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them” (1973:
15
The Will to Power quoted in Rabinbach 1990: 19.
16
On the constructs of the future in modernism see Kern 89–102. Jean-François
Lyotard has written of a similar paradox in a postmodern “rewriting” of modernity (1984:
33–45).
259–60).17 In this revision of progress, a single disaster always faces the

angel of history as he is propelled backwards into the future; therefore,
apocalypse should be seen not as the eternal return of a mythical end
that will always happen, but as the postapocalypse which has always
already happened and in whose ruins we live (cf. Robson 1995).
Reread from this side of 9/11, Orwellʼs Nineteen Eighty-Four
cannot explain an act of total violence for its own sake. OʼBrien
nevertheless convinces us that all totalizing systems may ultimately
be invincible, or at least unbeatable by conventional means such as
persuasion, diplomacy, negotiation, and military force. We recall that
in “Shooting an Elephant” (1970, I: 265–72), Orwell tells us how,
as a British policeman in Burma, he smelled the pure hatred of the
crowd and knew that what would come after imperialist rule would be
something worse than colonialism. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, terror and
fear are means and objects of power. Orwell, who held the common
post-World War II belief that an atomic war was about to begin, may
also have sensed correctly that the superpower conflict would develop
into an endless series of wars over disputed territories. He could not
have predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the
Berlin Wall, though it has been suggested that the Truman Doctrine of
endless global conflict was revived in the war on terrorism (Merrill 83).
Nor does Orwellʼs dystopian world model foresee that the challenge to
global capitalism might come from dormant cells of armed Islamic
fundamentalist insurgents. Huxley, for his part, did not suspect that
the Pleasure Dome might itself carry the seeds of its destruction in the
liberty and individual freedom that DeLillo parodied in White Noise.
Margaret Atwood has come to more hopeful conclusions. Tracing
her own interest in English fantasy romances, such as Hudsonʼs The
Crystal Age (1867), she states (2004) that her dystopian fiction, The
Handmaidʼs Tale, was begun in 1984 and was very much influenced by
Orwellʼs novel (though written from the point of view of a character who
corresponds to the seductive woman in Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell).
Atwood (mis)reads Orwell optimistically, because the epilogue (the
essay on Newspeak) leaves the retrospective impression that the regime
is a thing of the past and we can now speak of what went wrong. From a
17
Lyotard distinguishes between Benjaminʼs view of the Angel, who sees only disaster
in the past, and a Hegelian approach, in which it is the “re-view” that “dis-asters” the past
(1993: 146).
different cultural and historical perspective, Raffaella Baccolini (2004)

has pointed to political and generic shifts, not least the rise of feminism,
which marked the transition, in the nineties, from utopia to dystopia in
critical discourse. Baccolini cites Atwoodʼs The Handmaidʼs Tale among
other dystopian texts that give hope for the future. However, it should
be remembered that futuristic fictions tend to reflect cultural anxieties
of the present (for example, American fears of the monstrous and the
savage in modernity projected in King Kong, urban fears of sexual
identity and violation in stories of extraterrestrial encounters, or fears of
death by radiation in Cold War science fiction fantasies of the fifties).
A Beautiful Ending: The Aesthetics of Destruction

Plus la science progresse, plus les accidents
sont violents, plus les destructions sont belles.
Beigbeder 163
Susan Sontag wrote of the thrill that movie viewers feel at the spectacle
of the elaborate destruction of London, New York, and Tokyo and
their shudder as the last vestiges of human life disappear (1966: 214).
Destruction has an aesthetic appeal. The banality of evil rarely touches
except on a grand scale and when the effects are visually spectacular,
as in the collapse of a familiar landmark (particularly when it is a fixed
cultural image); hence the attention given to imaginative drawings
of the Tower of Babel and the shots of the collapsing Twin Towers,
while less attention was paid to Five Mile Island or the Pentagon,
as Paul Virilio has suggested in his 2002 multimedia show at the
Cartier Foundation in Paris, Ce qui arrive. The show made a post-
Nietzschean statement about the postmodern city, the era of disasters
in a world of risk, the overwhelming rapidity of events, and the danger
of technology. The realness of what happened was further removed
because the Twin Towers were cinematically photogenic before they
were targeted.18
Because they can call upon images engraved in cultural memory,
photographs, films, and videos of natural and man-made disasters are
18
See the exhibition on http://www.paris-art.com/modules-modload-lieux-travail-588.
html (November 15, 2004). Paul Virilioʼs essay of the same title, Ce qui arrive (Paris,
2002), was published in English as Ground Zero (2002). See also Smith 38–39.
commonly presented as postmodernist works of art that can fire the

imagination with visions of destruction; for example, a Zeppelin in the
New York sky evokes World War I aerial bombing and the burning to
death of passengers on the Hindenburg in 1937 (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Peter Hutton, New York Portrait: Chapter Two, 1980–1981, black and
white 16mm. film (from Ce qui arrive) © Peter Hutton
Destruction can be beautiful, as in Baudrillardʼs lyrical description

of the demolition of a New York skyscraper:
Modern demolition is truly wonderful. As a spectacle it is the
opposite of a rocket launch. The twenty-storey block remains
perfectly vertical as it slides toward the center of the earth. It falls
straight, with no loss of its upright bearing, like a tailorʼs dummy
falling through a trap-door, and its own surface area absorbs the
rubble. What a marvelous modern art form this is, a match for the
firework displays of our childhood. (1989a: 17)
For Virilio and Žižek, the spectacular deliberateness of the planned
spectacle of the 9/11 attack demonstrates the truth in Karl-Heinz
Stockhausenʼs provocative statement that the image of the planes

hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art.19
Large-scale destruction is represented as an afterimage which
refuses judgmental valuation. At the same time, such representations
draw attention to their problematic status as aesthetic artefacts detached
from mimetic representation, which display the unbelievable aftermath
as a reality that will always be with us (see Rubinstein 15–25). The
2002 exhibition of photographs by Joel Meyerowitz, After September
11: Images from Ground Zero (Fig. 2), belies the real-time effect in the
eerily spectral, irreversible after-ness of destruction. In “Smoke Rising
Through Sunlight,” the limp mechanical arm of a bulldozer hangs
helplessly. The human figures are dwarfed by the scale of destruction,
set in perspective by the ghostly sheen of skyscrapers silhouetted against
the skyline, as if they were the unreal objects, not the unbelievable
wreckage where there should be towers.
At the End, an Ending: The End of the “End-of-the-World”

Novels
Lʼécriture de ce roman hyperréaliste est rendue

difficile par la réalité elle-même. Depuis le
11 septembre 2001, non seulement la réalité
dépasse la fiction mais elle la détruit.
Beigbeder 18
None of this is new, least of all the crisis of art caught between artefact
and artifice. That the novel is caught in the same crisis, a product of
the very commodity culture which it satirizes, is illustrated by Frédéric
Beigbederʼs novel 99 Francs (2000) which takes its epigraph from
Huxleyʼs 1946 Foreword to Brave New World and its title from its
price tag (with the introduction of a unified European currency it was
reissued in 2002 as 14,99 Euros).
The aesthetic effect of the revenant in our dystopian rereading of
literature is parodied in Beigbederʼs metafictional novel that looks at
9/11, Windows on the World (2003). This novel records the last one
and three-quarter hours before the mass death that brought together
19
See Žižek 11; Virilio 45. Neither quote Stockhausen directly or in context.
Fig. 2: “Smoke Rising Through Sunlight” ©Joel Meyerowitz, 2002

the people breakfasting in the restaurant called Windows on the

World at the top of the north tower of the WTC. This stretch of time
represents, Tristram Shandy fashion, a sequence of DVD images and
the length of the novel (see p. 16). The end is already known to the
reader at the beginning, and all those in the Windows on the World
will be present at the end. As a cynical ex-copywriter, the narrator feels
the restaurant should have been named differently, for it was both at
the end of the world and the end of the story, but Americans prefer
euphemism for the same superstitious reason that they do not have
a thirteenth floor in their apartment blocks: “il y aurait eu un nom
magnifique pour cet endroit, une marque sublime, humble et poétique.
ʻEND OF THE WORLDʼ” (20; “there should have been a magnificent
name for this location, a sublime sign, humble and poetic. ʻEND OF
THE WORLDʼ”).The puzzling question whether Carthew will die in
the narrative future or is already dead, having ended his life before
he tells it as one of the victims in the narrative present, is clearly a
parody of diarists such as D-503 and Winston Smith, who have been
brainwashed and/or eliminated and therefore do not exist as conscious
characters at the time of the narrative act. And, as if to press home
the impossibility of describing this event or of documenting any event
fully, we are given information available only later and unknown to
the victims in the restaurant: the reader, the narrator teases, is robbed
of suspense (74). Beigbederʼs narrative collapses, like the Towers, into
sick jokes, comparisons with countless other disasters and with the
Tower of Pisa, alongside readings from the Tower of Babel passage in
the Bible, Baudelaireʼs Spleen de Paris, and Huysmansʼs A Rebours.
To keep them calm during the shaking caused by the impact and the
smoke from the explosion, Carthew tells his children this is a special
effect in an amusement park game (in imitation of Benigni), but it feels
like a scene from J. G. Ballard. Metafictional devices and references
in this novel to Baudrillard and Fukuyama on terrorism show just how
derivative and inadequate any discourse on 9/11 as an event may be.
9/11 has become hyper-reality and hypertext. Beigbeder apparently
wants to demonstrate that more has come to an end than the restaurant
at the end of the world. It is the end of a world. Just as the fall of
the Berlin wall ended the communist utopia, 9/11 ended the capitalist
utopia (203). It is also the end of “end of the world” novels. This is an
anti-novel in which there is no “happy end.” The emergency number
9–11 does not answer.
We have imagined this happening before. However, this time the

end has happened not as a science fiction fantasy but as dystopian
fact. As Marleen Barr (2004) has suggested, 9/11 put an end to the
distinction between speculation and reality in dismissive definitions of
science fiction as a genre. This time, the real intrudes with a shock into
the imagined disaster movie, yet the fascination with the afterimage
produces the effect of moving from virtual reality to the loss of a
reality principle, a loss that Baudrillard (2002: 27–29) compares with
J. G. Ballardʼs reinvention of the real (following Borges). As Ballard
famously explained, it is like being left in an amusement arcade that
has no past, present, or future:
To some extent the future has been annexed in the present, for
most of us, and the notion of the future as an alternative scheme, as
an alternative world, to which we are moving, no longer exists.20
The liberal humanism with which Isaiah Berlin countered the excesses
of revolutionary utopianism sounds anachronistic in an age of
terrorism and continual disaster, after the collapse of an Enlightenment
metadiscourse of knowledge which worked toward a “good” ending of
universal peace and happiness (see Lyotard 1984: xxiii–xiv). In his post-
9/11 novel Saturday (2005), Ian McEwan has a neurosurgeon, Henry
Perowne, musing at a bedroom window overlooking a wintry night in
central London, in the days leading up to the American invasion of Iraq
in 2003, as disaster in the form of a burning plane lights the sky (the
novel appeared before the bombing of central London in July 2005).
A thug has been deterred from raping Perowneʼs daughter by hearing
his naked and pregnant victim recite Matthew Arnoldʼs lines in “Dover
Beach,”
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (ll. 34–37)
The rereading of Arnoldʼs all too topical lines summons an unlikely
empathy in a particularly brutish thug and holds out the possibility that
20
BBC Radio 3 interview, November 9, 1971 (quoted in Kumar 404). Cf. Jamesonʼs
remarks on the ideological and generic implications of the “cancelled future” for the
utopian imagination.
literature may still have something to say after 9/11, yet it captures
(again, in uncanny re-vision) the real violence of an endless dystopia that
surpasses any fiction. Amid the unceasing private and public disasters,
there seems to be little to hold onto save a moment of intimacy, of
feeling happy to be alive.
To Perowne the utopian dreams of an Edwardian doctor standing
at the same window one hundred years previously now seem quite
mistaken. Utopian dreaming (which, according to Karl Mannheimʼs
1936 Ideology and Utopia, is a safeguard of understanding and
controlling history) has given way to a neo-Darwinian survival of the
luckiest in a random series of events that, as Perowne sees it, could turn
out, like Schrödingerʼs Cat, to be equally terrorist attacks and unfounded
suspicions. Since 9/11, knowledge based on belief or disbelief can no
longer hold against the worst possible eventuality. There are no more
possible worlds or alternate histories as in a Philip C. Dick novel or
McEwanʼs own playfully metafictional Atonement; there is only the
nightmare of a real nowness in a cosmic uncertainty. The world has
stopped feeling safe, and in Jonathan Safran Foerʼs Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close (2005), nine-year old Oskar Schell tells us what that
is like in a stream of consciousness that blends the styles of Salinger
and Sebald. Oskar lost his father in the collapse of the WTC, and he has
stored the unanswered phone messages from his father trapped in the
towers, as unanswerable as the messages on which Beigbeder based
his novel. This is a testimony of private pain and total loss, of a hole at
the center of the self, which links 9/11 with the Dresden fire-bombing
and Hiroshima. Oskar has found a key which, he thinks, will unlock
the secrets of his fatherʼs legacy but which actually opens only random
lives of strangers in Manhattan.
We might conclude with Stephen Hawkingʼs reply to the boyʼs
fan letters in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In his novel Foer
imagines that Steven Hawking composes a letter to the boy in which
he has Einstein say that our view of the Universe is like standing in
front of a closed box which we cannot open. Given this principle of
uncertainty, the present becomes an endless sequence of moments of
destruction. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the citizens
of Western countries seemed to be transfixed by the afterimages of
continual disaster, while powerless to avert a future that had already
happened. Dystopia may have, in the end, no future and no end.
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Postmodern Love: Negotiating Jewish Identities and Spaces View project

Holocaust Poetics View project

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A World Neither Brave Nor New:

Under the general demand for slackening and

On ne peut pas écrire sur ce sujet mais on ne

The End without Ending: The Intrusion of the Real

PARTIAL ANSWERS 4/1 (2006)

when he has a billboard for Arnold Schwarzeneggerʼs Collateral Damage displayed

discourse as an entirely ﬁctional genre (since it had not happened and

negotiation of identity and difference, one . . . whose disconﬁrmation (or

from the very beginning. . . . As in Freudʼs theory of the unconscious,

of universal harmony in German romanticism and in Promethean

The End in the Beginning: Disaster as a Cultural Norm

The reasons why 9/11 seemed to repeat a dystopian scenario have

imagination in the intelligence community,6 in popular culture the all too

In another novel, 1985 (1978), he imagines that an Islamic republic has

revisionist account of this incident is taken more seriously than Billʼs

Tout gratte-ciel est une utopie.

“Waiting for the Barbarians” (Cavafy 2001: 93).

empathy (2004: 74–79).

deﬁes interpretation. The terrorists hijacked the media, in Baudrillardʼs

The End of the End: The Postmodern Dystopia

En anglais, “end” ne signiﬁe pas seulement la

Rereading dystopian ﬁction must contend with the loss of favor

world” (see Adorno 1991, I: 40). Buck-Morssʼs reading of Benjaminʼs

European middle classes that humanity was depleting its “accumulated

259–60).17 In this revision of progress, a single disaster always faces the

different cultural and historical perspective, Raffaella Baccolini (2004)

A Beautiful Ending: The Aesthetics of Destruction

commonly presented as postmodernist works of art that can ﬁre the

Destruction can be beautiful, as in Baudrillardʼs lyrical description

Stockhausenʼs provocative statement that the image of the planes

At the End, an Ending: The End of the “End-of-the-World”

Lʼécriture de ce roman hyperréaliste est rendue

Fig. 2: “Smoke Rising Through Sunlight” ©Joel Meyerowitz, 2002

the people breakfasting in the restaurant called Windows on the

We have imagined this happening before. However, this time the

Bernstein, Michael André. 1994. Foregone Conclusions: Against

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Iconotypes Between Clashing Cultures.” Critical Quarterly 45/1:

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