Terrorism

Introduction

Terrorism as a form of war has gained popularity among rebels, anarchists, and radical religious groups in the past fifty years. Though hardly a new form of warfare, it has taken on a high profile in recent years. Perhaps most chilling about a terrorist act is not the carnage that is left behind—though that is truly terrible—but the rationale behind the acts: to control and intimidate through terror, and thereby to instill in others the uneasiness of knowing a terrorist attack can strike anywhere, anytime.

The short poem "The Terrorist, He Watches" (2003) captures the everyday life of a city street in the seconds before a bomb explodes. "The distance keeps him out of danger, / and what a view—just like the movies" writes Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Szymborska. The poem describes the nonchalant details of people coming and going in the moments leading up to a public bombing. The poem compares the utter lack of premonition among the victims with the cold impersonal gaze of the terrorist, freeze-framing the busy street as the moment approaches:

    This waiting, it's taking forever.
    Any second now.
    No, not yet.
    Yes, now.
    The bomb, it explodes.

Literature about terrorism ranges from a dismissal of the action as purely evil to investigations into the minds of terrorists. Some examine the terrorist events themselves and record how these fearful acts affect both individuals and societies. Terrorism literature compels the reader to look beyond surface details and see past the stereotypes and conventions of the image-based mass media that saturates modern society. The terrorists may be watching, but so are the writers.

Terrorism as Evil

Some novelists have emphasized terrorism's evil through portrayals of the perpetrators. They define evil in terms of disposition, malicious ideas, or corrupt social systems. Some, such as the postmodern novelist Don DeLillo, evoke terrorist evil as something that cannot be directly understood. In such authors' works, when the terrorist finally appears in the story, he or she explains nothing, only raising yet more questions.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Devils (1873) (also translated as Demons and The Possessed) levels a critique against the ideologies that were beginning to emerge in nineteenth-century Europe. The novel, like many that address terrorism, is based on a real-life event. In this case, the 1869 murder of one of its own by a five-man terrorist cell organized by Sergei Nechaev, a student revolutionary, provided the inspiration for the fictional character Pyotr Stepanovich. The novel is full of characters corrupted by ideas: liberalism (government with consent of the governed), atheism (the view that there is no divine being), anarchism (opposition to the state), socialism (shared ownership of property and goods by the people), and nihilism (the refusal of all creeds and belief systems). All of these concepts are shown to be satanic ideas that possess humans like demons, forcing them to commit evil. The terrorist cell disrupts a festive day of speeches and dancing, but their planned violence is overshadowed by murder and treachery within the group. They murder Shatov, one of their own members, and use another's suicide to cover up their guilt. Later writers that also hold ideologies responsible for human evil have seen The Devils as a prophetic work. To others, the novel seems to inaccurately describe the ideas that it demonizes and holds responsible for human evil, focusing on those ideas rather than on the people that profess them.

Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (1907) is based on the Greenwich Bomb Outrage of 1894, in which a man unintentionally blew himself up in Greenwich Park, London. Conrad resets the event in 1886 and attaches blame to a fictional group of lazy anarchists. The secret agent is Verloc, the owner of a pornography shop who works for an unspecified foreign agency that pressures his group to bomb the Observatory, an act that has "all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy." Verloc and his fellow anarchists are drawn as caricatures (that is, representations that exaggerate particular features to make a point). For example, Conrad puts the following words in the anarchist Michaelis's mouth:

I have always dreamed … of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and in the service of humanity.

Conrad's anarchists are so flawed that the novel does not condemn anarchism, but rather satirizes a particular type of person that preaches a radical doctrine for transparent personal reasons. According to Conrad, all social rebellion can be accounted for in terms of individuals' shortcomings. He dismisses the "poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries" that make up the revolutionary masses. However, Conrad's scorn for the anarchists does not hinder his ability to evoke the warring social views that lead to terrorist violence. Though Conrad disagrees with the limp radicalism of the terrorists, he notes that "the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence."

Don DeLillo compares writers and terrorists in his novel Mao II (1991), which tells the story of a reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, who emerges from seclusion to intervene on behalf of a Swiss poet taken hostage by a Lebanese terrorist group. The novel's namesake, Mao Zedong, the leader of Communist China from the 1940s through the 1970s, suggests the mass conformity that DeLillo characterizes as a threat to the individual. DeLillo's narrator warns: "The future belongs to crowds." The novel follows Gray's emergence, including a trip he takes to London to intervene for the hostage and then a further trip he takes to Beirut when the London meeting is canceled. During his trip to meet the terrorist Abu Rashid, who he expects will trade the poet for him, Gray dies, and Brita Nilsson, a photographer who earlier photographed Gray, finally interviews the terrorist. DeLillo's novel proposes that writers and terrorists share an intention to mold society:

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists…. Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

As the Western writer approaches the terrorist that he in some ways resembles, he realizes that violence is, in fact, an absence of language. As Anthony Kubiak writes in "Spelling It Out: Narrative Typologies of Terror," "the one who experiences terror in the body and mind … experiences time standing still. For the victim there is only terror and horror—no meaning." The sense of timelessness and loss of language is captured in the novel's descriptions of the Swiss hostage's deterioration in the dulling weeks of deprivation and torture.

The Terrorist In Context

Some novelists approach terrorism as a phenomenon that can be rationally understood, looking past the rhetoric of evil to examine the social and economic global inequalities that breed terrorism. Such novels humanize both terrorist and victim. Although they sometimes risk losing sight of the barbarism at the heart of terrorism, at their best they employ fiction's estimable power to tell the untold stories of those silenced by death, terror, or their own blinding hatred.

Raising Holy Hell (1995), Bruce Olds's novel about the violent abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859), explores the consciousness and historical conditions of an American terrorist. Olds mixes genres and styles to create a multidimensional portrait that includes slave conditions, newspaper accounts, chemical and medical background, the racist rhetoric of politicians, imagined interviews between the author and his subject, and short chapters from the points of view of various acquaintances and from Brown himself.

Olds narrates Brown's early years in Connecticut as the son of a sadistic Christian tanner. His stepmother tells the reader that, even as a boy, Brown was cold and hateful. Olds explores both internal and external influences to account for Brown's later actions. Readers witness his first attack in 1856 on five settlers in Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. Brown stalks through the rain, "a great, sombreroed, broadsword-wielding vulture." The novel is at its poetic best in the final account of the 1859 seizure of the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Brown saw two of his sons die there and was finally overpowered by General Robert E. Lee and a contingency of marines. Raising Holy Hell shows how the moral absolutism of nineteenth-century Christianity, combined with psychotic genius, created a figure that remains controversial in American history. Olds does not sugarcoat the harsh reality of Brown's life, but allows him to plead his case with the benefit of hindsight:

The unpleasant truth was, I was right, slavery was wrong, and no violence I ever committed, no blood I ever spilled, no madness I ever participated in can compare to the violence, bloodshed, and madness not only perpetrated against the millions of poor Negroes held in bondage, but visited upon the country in the years following my death.

Nicholas Shakespeare's novel The Dancer Upstairs (1995) is an account of a terror campaign in an unspecified third-world Latin American city, based on actual events in Lima, Peru. The novel's terrorist leader, Ezequiel, is based on the founder of the Shining Path (in Spanish, Sendero Luminoso) movement, Abimael Guzmán. This movement splintered from the Communist party of Peru in the late sixties and during subsequent decades terrorized Peru with bombings and sabotage. Guzmán's 1992 apprehension by Peruvian special forces and the investigator's search leading up to it are the focus of what Tony Gould, in the New Statesman & Society, calls a "very Conradian" novel, referring to The Secret Agent.

The novel tells the story of Agustín Rejas, a police colonel who worked undercover for twelve years trying to find Ezequiel, only to finally discover him living upstairs from the dance studio where Rejas's daughter takes ballet lessons. Shakespeare's terrorist is a product of the West, a philosophy professor who specializes in Immanuel Kant, the central Enlightenment figure of Western philosophy. Ezequiel's movement ominously hangs dead dogs from trees as a Maoist symbol—Chinese peasants revolting under Mao in the 1930s did the same—linking Ezequial with other rebellions that make their appeals to rural populations in opposition to modern urban elites. Like the dancer above whose studio he lives, this terrorist is both a product and critic of first-world culture. He is Westernized, and as a result understands that the wretched conditions of his exploited, impoverished country are caused by globalization and modernization, mostly perpetrated by the United States.

The Event

Some novels that attempt to place terrorism in context make use of the drama provided by the terror event (or events). Such matter lends itself well to suspenseful storytelling. The challenge for works that focus on the terrorist event itself is creating suspense in what are, in reality, usually dull periods of negotiation, isolation, and anticipation. In order to give such stories life, authors often rewrite the reality of terrorist events such as bombings, hostage takings, and assassinations.

The Irish writer Frank O'Connor describes terrorism as a personal encounter with a human face. His short story "Guests of the Nation" (1931) recounts the last days of two English soldiers taken hostage during the Irish civil war (1922–1923), in which O'Connor fought as an Irish Republican Army soldier. The story is based on a conversation he overheard about two hostages who befriended their guards. The first-person perspective allows the reader, like Bonaparte, the Irish guard who narrates the story, to imagine the Englishmen from a personal point of view, playing cards and arguing politics. Bonaparte is then told by his superior officer that the men are hostages, and that they must immediately kill them. The shock and inhumanity that Bonaparte feels is shared by the reader. The narrator's sense of emptiness, after killing the two soldiers point blank in a vividly violent scene, ends the story on a bleak note:

Noble says he saw everything ten times the size, as though there were nothing in the whole world but that little patch of bog with the Englishmen stiffening into it, but with me it was as if the patch of bog where the English were was a million miles away.

John le Carré dramatizes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his novel The Little Drummer Girl (1983), in which a young English actress, Charlie, is recruited by Kurtz, an Israeli intelligence agent, to infiltrate a group of Palestinian terrorists that have been terrorizing Western Europe. The Israelis put Charlie through rigorous brainwashing and role-playing so she will understand and sympathize with the Palestinian perspective. The Israelis assassinate the brother of the Palestinian terrorist leader, Khalil, allowing Charlie to infiltrate their group posing as the girlfriend of the dead brother. Charlie then undergoes another indoctrination, this time from the Palestinians. Charlie stays with Khalil and his sister Fatmeh, and grows attached to them, only to betray them when she sleeps with Khalil in a plan that allows the Israelis to kill him. Well-regarded as a spy thriller, the novel begs the question of whether the romantic thriller genre is capable of addressing the brutal reality of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. In a sense, The Little Drummer Girl's use of a sexy heroine and the sympathetic portrayal of both sides functions as a form of ideological substitution, interpreting complex politics in a psychological romance plot. Perhaps the dissatisfaction of readers on both sides of the conflict is, paradoxically, an affirmation of the novel's balanced approach, which depicts both sides of the conflict using terrorist tactics.

Robert Cormier's young adult novel After the First Death (1979) imagines vaguely Middle Eastern terrorists taking a school bus of preschoolers hostage on the outskirts of a New England town. The children are drugged and their lives are threatened by a group that wants the U.S. government to dismantle a secret agency, Inner Delta. The terrorists are led by the callous Artkin, and include Miro, a sixteen-year-old terrorist whose seduction by Kate, the bus driver, will lead to Kate's death. Deaths on both sides accumulate as a government sniper accidentally fires on the bus and the situation escalates. This book frames terrorism within adolescent interests, bringing together opposing sides of the conflict using sexuality and emphasizing the shortcomings of adult solutions.

Like The Dancer Upstairs, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (2001) is based on a Peruvian terrorist incident. In December 1996, the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru, was taken over by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a Marxist insurgent group. Fourteen terrorists held seventy-two hostages for over four months. The crisis ended in April 1997, when President Fujimori ordered the embassy stormed. Patchett's novel is set in a similar home in an unnamed country that throws a lavish birthday party for a prominent Japanese businessman. The hosts have paid the world's greatest soprano, Roxane Coss, to sing for the businessman, an opera aficionado. The terrorists that take the party hostage are sympathetically drawn in a story about the relationships, some of them romantic, that develop between the terrorists and their captives. Patchett's terrorists are mostly underprivileged third-world teenagers who never kill or hurt their charges. Her portrait is humanizing—some would say distortingly so—but also allegorically suggestive of the global economic imbalances and corrupt government regimes that create insurgent resistance and lead to terrorist acts.

Victims

Another way to place terror in context is to focus on the victims of terrorist acts. Rather than exploit the innate drama of evil villains, these novels examine the lingering effects of terrorism, as well as its self-perpetuating nature.

Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping (1997) is a nonfiction account of the kidnapping of ten people in Márquez's home country of Colombia. The book covers events that took place during 1990–1991, as the United States was attempting to extradite Pablo Escobar, head of a massive drug cartel. Then a fugitive, Escobar took hostages in order to pressure Colombia's government not to permit his extradition. This strategy worked; Escobar turned himself in for domestic imprisonment in 1991. Márquez, a writer better known for his novels, returns to his earlier craft of journalism for this work, which draws on survivor interviews. The result is an account that provides the details of the hostage-taking and subsequent negotiations that led to two of the hostages' deaths and the liberation of the others.

The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mafouz portrays terrorism as a media event that resonates in the personal lives of a cluster of characters in Cairo in his novella The Day the Leader Was Killed (1985). The novel is set in the days before the October 6, 1981, assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Rather than focusing on the terrorists themselves, or rewriting real-life events to suit his themes, Mafouz sketches the perspectives of a trio of characters to tell the story of a grandfather, Muhtashimi Zayed, his grandson Elwan, and Elwan's fiancée Randa. Al-Sadat's assassination comes abruptly in the concluding pages of the story as the televised parade broadcast goes dead. The characters know something bad has happened when announcers start reading the Quran on television. Pondering the president's death, Muhtashimi thinks:

He doesn't deserve this end, whatever his misdeeds. On his day of glory? A plot. Surely there's a conspiracy. No doubt. The hell with him!… It was the inevitable end. He was a curse on us. He who kills will ultimately be killed. In a split second, an empire has collapsed. The empire of robbers.

The fight between tradition and modernity that the novel's three main characters struggle with is underscored by the assassination. Old Muhtashimi's apocalyptic thoughts lead to the novel's conclusion that suggests that he himself may be on the verge of making a commitment to religious militarism. Such characterizations of Muslims by Mafouz have led to the issuing of a fatwa (Islamic religious proclamation) calling for his death, and a subsequent 1994 stabbing attack by two extremists, which he survived.

Jonathan Saffran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) approaches the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center from the perspective of a precocious nine-year-old, Oskar Schell, who attempts to understand why his father died in one of the towers. After the attack, Oskar finds a key in his father's room marked with the word "Black." He begins interviewing every person with that last name in New York City. Joined by a 103-year-old former war journalist, Oskar travels the city, meeting diverse characters. Oskar's story is interspersed with those of his grandfather, who survived the World War II bombing of Dresden, and with stories from the bombing of Hiroshima. The inclusion of these acts of massive military violence broaden terrorism's definition from its typical meaning of acts by insurgent groups and balance Oskar's limited understanding of why the attack occurred.

Conclusion

In these works, terrorism appears as, among other things, an incomprehensible horror, a mournful loss, a suspenseful mystery, a rival discourse, a psychotic religious fundamentalism, and a political fable. Taken as a whole, these novels reveal the human cost and annihilation of meaning accomplished by terrorist violence. Just as there is little consensus regarding the best way to address terrorism, so do novels on the subject take diverse stances on its causes, although they all confirm its bloody destructiveness. Despite their richness, one can only hope that the future calls for fewer stories of terrorism.

SOURCES

Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, edited and introduced by Martin Seymour-Smith, Penguin Books, 1984, pp. 67, 74, 82, 102.

DeLillo, Don, Mao II, Viking, 1991, pp. 16, 41.

Foer, Jonathan Saffran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p. 244.

Gould, Tony, Review of "The Dancer Upstairs," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 8, No. 371, September 22, 1995, p. 33.

Kubiak, Anthony, "Spelling It Out: Narrative Typologies of Terror," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 294-302.

Mahfouz, Naguib, The Day the Leader Was Killed, translated by Malak Mashem, Anchor Books, 2000, p. 96.

O'Connor, Frank, "Guests of the Nation," in A Frank O'Connor Reader, edited by Michael Steinman, Syracuse University Press, 1994, pp. 3-14.

Olds, Bruce, Raising Holy Hell, Henry Holt and Co., 1995, pp. 153, 209.

Shakespeare, Nicholas, The Dancer Upstairs, Doubleday, 1997, p. 48.

Szymborska, Wislawa, "The Terrorist, He Watches," in View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt Brace, 1995, pp. 108-09.