"September 11 was only one of many, many incidents in which innocents have been deliberately slaughtered. A few others spring to mind: year zero in Cambodia, the rape of Nanking, the Holocaust. They all dwarf September 11 in number of innocents killed."
You missed off the Armenian genocide in your apparently limitless weeping for the world. As it happens, Adorno wrote that poetry had become impossible after Auschwitz; nor was the comment entirely specious either. The large body of literature regarding the first world war (Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Graves; I could go on for a long time) was not replicated after the second world war (though obviously some literature does exist; Heller, Levi) and probably for much the same reason that Adorno indicated. It hardly seems unreasonable for Amis to make the same observation regarding September 11th. Both Adorno and Amis were certainly guilty of hyperbole; however, that hardly seems the worst sin for a writer.
Even in an age of almost totally immersive media coverage, I am afraid that the possibilities for endless empathy remain limited (a death, I believe Stalin observed is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic). I would not dare pretend that Spetember 11th could have the same significance for me that IRA bombings in London did; conversely if Amis had requested for Cambodia and the rape of Nanking to be taken into account, I would certainly have regarded him as a fraud.
Given that writers are typically speaking with reference to their immediate surroundings (Amis is after all resident in the US, even if he comes from Britain) it hardly seems unreasonable for Amis to seek to do that.
"Unless, of course, its only dead Americans that count."
It might be only Americian writers who count though, unless Andy regularly reads literature from Cambodia or Rwanda. Somehow I doubt it.
---- This message was posted by kharin to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25745>
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