Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 0367248972, 9780367248970

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UNSPEAKABLE

Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 explores the representation of terrorism in plays, novels, and films across the centuries. Time and time again, writers and filmmakers including William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Gillo Pontecorvo, Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Steven Spielberg refer to terrorist acts as beyond comprehension, “a deed without a name,” but they do not stop there. Instead of creating works that respond to terrorism by providing comforting narratives reassuring audiences and readers of their moral superiority and the perfidy of the terrorists, these writers and filmmakers confront the unspeakable by attempting to see the world from the terrorist’s perspective and by examining the roots of terrorist violence. Peter C. Herman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

UNSPEAKABLE Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11

Peter C. Herman

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Peter C. Herman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-24897-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-24900-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28500-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Robert Appelbaum il professore migliore

CONTENTS

List of Figures viii Acknowledgmentsxi Introduction: Speakable/Unspeakable: T   he Rhetoric of T   errorism 1 1 “A Deed Without a Name”: Macbeth, the Gunpowder Plot, and Terrorism

19

2 Terrorism in the Nineteenth Century: From the French Revolution to the Stevensons, Greer, James, Conrad, and the Rossetti Sisters

35

3 When Terrorism Becomes Speakable: Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and the Literature of the Troubles

65

4 Israel/Palestine: Unspeakability in John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and Mohammed Moulessehoul [Yasmina Khadra]’s The Attack

107

5 “Why Do They Hate Us?”: Updike, Hamid, DeLillo

146



Epilogue: Where Do We Go from Here? Nadeem Aslam, Amy Waldman, and Jodi Picoult

188

Index207

FIGURES

1.1 Raphael Holinshed 3.1 Google ngram, terrorist-guerilla-insurgent, 1945–1970 3.2 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Ben M’Hidi and Ali la Poinnte 3.3 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Mathieu and reporter 3.4 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Assistant Commissioner on phone 3.5 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, rue du Thèbes explosion 3.6 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, rue du Thèbes Child Casualty 3.7 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar (1) 3.8 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar (2) 3.9 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar (3) 3.10 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, victim headshot 3.11 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, child eating ice-cream 3.12 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, milk bar patrons

28 66 68 69 72 74 74 76 76 77 77 78 78

Figures 

3.13 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, milk bar headshot (1) 3.14 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, milk bar headshot (2) 3.15 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar victim (1) 3.16 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar victim (2) 3.17 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar victim (3)  3.18 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Col. Mathieu giving briefing 3.19 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, racetrack bombing (1) 3.20 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, racetrack bombing (2) 3.21 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, demonstration 3.22 (a) and (b) From Bloody Sunday, directed by Paul Greengrass, 1972, “Brits Out”  3.23 From Bloody Sunday, directed by Paul Greengrass, 1972, Cooper and IRA 4.1 Google ngram, terrorist-guerilla-insurgent, 1965–1980 4.2 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, terrorist headshot 4.3 From The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, terrorist headshot 4.4 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Wael Zwaiter 4.5 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Mahoud Hamshari 4.6 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Al-Chir 4.7 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Salameh, with dark glasses 4.8 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, without dark glasses 4.9 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, worried and anxious Israelis 4.10 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Palestinians shouting slogans

ix

79 79 80 80 81 81 83 83 85 89 97 108 121 122 122 123 123 124 124 125 126

x Figures

4.11 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Ali 4.12 From Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, view of lower Manhattan from Brooklyn  5.1 Richard Drew, “Falling Man” © 2001, with permission from AP Images

127 131 175

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been working on this book a very long time, and have accumulated a long list of people I owe for their help along the way. Some are friends and colleagues. My old college buddy, Nathan Greenfield, read, commented, and offered needed encouragement for various chapters along the way. Kristian Versluys gave me intellectual support and friendship, plus an excellent lunch in Ghent. Richard Jackson introduced me to Critical Terrorism Studies, and my only regret is that we haven’t yet had the opportunity to play some blues guitar together. I am also grateful to Dean Norma Bouchard (now at Drexel University) and the College of Arts and Letters at SDSU for approving a sabbatical that let me bring this book to its conclusion.Then there are the people whose names I do not know: the anonymous reader for Modern Philology who gave me a reading list to get through before I started revising my essay on John Updike, and the readers of this manuscript for Routledge, who offered advice and assurance when I needed it most. I also want to thank Jennifer Abbott for her patience and faith in this project, and of course, my family, who have lived with this book longer than they should have. I thank them all. I am especially grateful, however, to Robert Appelbaum, without whom I would never have started on this project, who gave me the idea of speakability and unspeakability, and who invited me to Uppsala to give a paper on terrorism. Bob and I have been friends since the beginning of our careers, and I have always followed behind, trying to emulate his example but inevitably falling short. To honor Bob, his achievements, and his example, I dedicate this book to him. I hope he likes what he reads. Parts of this book have appeared in the Journal for Cultural Research, Modern Philology, and Critical Terrorism Studies. I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint.

INTRODUCTION Speakable/Unspeakable: The Rhetoric of Terrorism

On the one hand, terrorism seems to be everywhere. A Google search on the term in August, 2019 yields over 323 million hits, and news sources provide a constant stream of stories about terrorist incidents.1 Nearly every conflict in the world, from the Gaza strip to the Ukraine to the wars in Africa, involves terrorism or accusations of terrorism. Terrorism permeates movies, television shows (e.g., 24, Fauda, and Homeland), and novels. Preventing terrorism takes up a tremendous amount of government resources. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration invented a cabinet-level office—The Department of Homeland Security, second only in size to the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs—whose primary purpose is “protecting the American people from terrorist threats,” and while the DHS has many other responsibilities, terrorism constitutes its “highest priority.”2 In 2015, President Obama signaled this department’s importance by requesting a budget of $38.2 billion.3 President Donald Trump’s 2019 budget request for DHS is $47.5 billion, a $3.5 billion or 7.8% increase from 2018.4 Similarly, the FBI’s website states that the Bureau’s “highest priority” is not domestic crime (as in the days of Elliot Ness), but protecting the nation against terrorism.5 Terrorism and the Herculean efforts to protect against it shapes nearly every aspect of modern life, from regulations governing bank accounts to how we travel to the privacy of our communications and web activity.6 As one might expect, academics and intellectuals have expended a tremendous amount of effort in exploring and understanding terrorism. Books, courses, and conferences on terrorism abound. As of this writing (July, 2019) Amazon.com offers “over 40,000” books on terrorism. Four years ago, the number was 35,643. Terrorism Studies now constitutes a separate field, with its own journals, and its own internal disputes.

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Introduction

And yet, for all the laws proscribing terrorism, the billions, if not trillions, spent defending against it, and all the ink spilled analyzing it, nobody quite knows what terrorism is other than to agree that terrorism is bad, and even that remains contested. Nobody has come up with a definition of terrorism that is widely, let alone universally, accepted. The League of Nations tried, and failed. The United Nations repeatedly tried, and it too failed.7 Many discussions of terrorism begin by admitting that it may be impossible to come up with a definition that satisfies everyone.8 Nonetheless, definitions abound. In the mid-1980s, Walter Laqueur found “109 different definitions of terrorism provided between 1936 and 1981,” and the ensuing years have not provided any more clarity.9 In 2002, the House Committee on Intelligence found that “practically every agency of the United States Government (USG) with a counterterrorism mission uses a different definition of terrorism,” perhaps helping explain why the US government sometimes seems to act at cross-purposes.10 The FBI, for example, begins the 2002–2005 report on terrorism by admitting that there “is no single, universally accepted, definition of terrorism,” and then goes on to provide their own version of what terrorism means: i.e., “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”11 The key term here is “unlawful”: the Agency stresses that they consider terrorists “to be criminals. Consequently, their goal is “the arrest and prosecution of potential perpetrators.”12 Terrorism, in other words, constitutes a violation of criminal or international law, with the obvious implication that the courts should handle terrorism cases. But the CIA takes a different approach. They define terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”13 This definition nudges terrorism into the realm of war and military responses (note that “unlawful” does not appear in their definition), thus making more comprehensible the CIA’s move into drone warfare in the battle against Al Qaeda and ISIS (as well as inoculating states in general and America in particular against being designated as “terrorists”).14 The Department of Defense uses yet another definition: for them, terrorism is “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear, intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious or ideological,” and in 2004, the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence added their own twist: “Terrorism is the illegitimate, premeditated violence or threat of violence by subnational groups against persons or property with the intent to coerce a government by installing fear amongst the populace.”15 For the Department of Defense, terrorism must be “calculated”; but the House adds that terrorism must be “illegitimate” as well as “premeditated,” suggesting the possibility that there may be a form of legitimate premeditated violence. Note also that for both, the threat alone suffices to count as terrorism, which raises the question of just how

Introduction 

3

specific, or unspecific, a group must be to be included under the definition. Both skirt the question of whether speech alone can or should constitute a crime. This fog equally extends to academic studies of terrorism, as perfectly illustrated by a 2004 analysis of the variety of definitions of terrorism used by different disciplines.16 Scrutinizing 55 articles drawn from such journals as Terrorism and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Leonard Weinberg, Ami Pedahzur, and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler discovered a total of 73 definitions (evidently, certain articles employed more than one definition), and another survey using a similar data set came up with the same number as Laqueur did: 109.17 Definitional elements shifted over time and discipline. For example, between 1977 and 1981, nobody thought that civilians were a constituent element of terrorism, but between 1992 and 1996, the percentage rose to 45.5%, then (oddly) dropped to 19% between 1997 and 2001. Among political scientists, 73% included violence in their definitions, but philosophers excluded it, and despite the common assertion that the point of terrorism is to terrorize, only 33% of historians included “fear” as an essential element, and even fewer political scientists (18%).18 Indeed, the inability to settle the definition of terrorism has become its own object of study, generating a cottage industry of articles and books.19 Faced with this Babylonical confusion, this welter of confused, confusing, and contradictory opinions on what constitutes terrorism, diplomats sometimes fall back on tautology. In a speech to the UN after 9/11, the British Ambassador, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, came up with a definition of admirable simplicity: “terrorism is terrorism … What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism.”20 Nor is Sir Jeremy alone. In 2008, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with the victims of a terrorist attack in Algiers, and told them: “Terrorism is terrorism. It is unacceptable. … It is a crime against humanity. It can never be justified under any circumstances.”21 As both cause and consequence of this lack of a clear, commonly accepted definition, “terrorism” has been indiscriminately used to cover all manner of violence, from political assassinations to medieval siege warfare to the Holocaust to cyberattacks that focus on computer networks and information. Some have traced the history of terrorism as far back as antiquity, and the term has been applied to incidents ranging from the death of one individual to mass casualties.22 How does one distinguish terrorism from other forms of political violence? Is there a difference between, say, the assassination of Julius Caesar and a Palestinian suicide bomber? Can the murder of a single person, albeit a person of considerable political importance, such as George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham in 1628 and Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, constitute terrorism? Or must the body count be higher, as in the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre or 9/11? What is the threshold for defining an incident as “terrorism” as opposed “assassination” or even “mass murder”?23 Further complicating matters, terrorism often occurs in already violent environments, and distinguishing between “terrorism” and criminal violence, guerilla

4 

Introduction

warfare, protest, or paramilitarism can be exceedingly difficult.24 “Which revolutionary or counterrevolutionary practices during the eight years of the Algerian war constituted terrorism?” asks Martha Crenshaw.25 Are the Shankill murders in 1970s Belfast, in which a Protestant gang kidnapped, tortured, and murdered over 30 Catholics, sectarian violence, terrorism, or the acts of psychotic serial killers?26 Is hacking into the website of a major corporation an act of vandalism, theft, or terrorism? What about using social media to spread false advertisements in order to disrupt an election? Even aspects of terrorism that seem uncontestable fall apart when put under pressure. For example, terrorism is supposed to be indiscriminate. But many attacks defined as terrorism focus on people who are anything but random victims. Those who died on 9/11, for example, according to Al Qaeda, deserve their fate because of where they worked: Targets such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon carried with them a very precisely chosen message regarding the attackers’ belligerence towards the economic, military, and symbolic power of their US enemy; in this sense the identity of the victims was far from incidental, even on 11 September.27 Or when the anarchist, Émille Henry, tossed a bomb into a Paris restaurant on February 12, 1894, his victims, in his eyes, were neither “innocent” nor “ordinary people”: they were the wealthy who were at best indifferent and at worst responsible for the miseries of the poor.28 If those unassociated or not complicit also died, then both perpetrators would say that they were, as today’s military puts it, “collateral damage.” This is, after all, war. Similarly, the insistence on terrorists as by definition “subnational” or “clandestine” actors gets complicated by how often terrorist groups receive support from states (e.g., Saudi Arabia has supported Al Qaeda as well as the Taliban, and Pakistan’s government supports a host of terrorist groups targeting both Westerners and India) and how states themselves have often engaged in violence that in many ways fits the definition of terrorism.29 The Targeting Committee for the war against Japan in World War II “stressed that the bomb should be used as a terror weapon—to produce ‘the greatest psychological effect against Japan’ and to make the world, and the U.S.S.R. in particular, aware that America possessed this new power.”30 If the point of terrorism is to terrify, then dropping the atomic bomb qualifies. While a precise definition remains elusive, there is general agreement that “terrorism” (however defined) has strongly negative connotations, but this common ground gets us no closer, as “terrorism” is now used so promiscuously and indiscriminately that the term loses all clarity and meaning.Thus Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, blames the uprising against him on “foreigners” and “terrorists,” and Hamas, itself labeled a terrorist organization by Israel, accuses Israel of “sponsoring terrorism in the region and in the world.”31 Indeed, it seems that the only

Introduction 

5

common denominator is that terrorism is always the work of another, never one’s own country or organization. “Terrorist” is a label that is applied, almost never a mantle that is assumed. Consequently, it seems the only viable definition of terrorism would be: “violence you don’t like by people you don’t like.” While I take the point that deciding which act merits the designation of “terrorism” will inevitably depend ”upon a series of social, cultural, legal and political processes of interpretation, categorization and labeling,” nonetheless, one can still detect a pattern that helps distinguish terrorism from other forms of political violence.32 I do not claim that unspeakability characterizes all examples of terrorism. As we will see in Chapter 4, from approximately 1945 through to the 1970s, military experts widely considered terrorism a rational tool used by rational people for rational ends. And the terrorism of the Troubles, no matter how extreme, did not occasion expressions of unspeakability. But the following pattern occurs often enough that it can help distinguish terrorism from other forms of political violence. I propose that terrorist violence usually combines two opposing principles: •• ••

Terrorism speaks33 Terrorism is unspeakable

Terrorism speaks: Experts generally agree that terrorism is neither random violence nor an insane act.34 The terrible massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut by a disturbed individual, sickening as it may be, or the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, cannot be rightly called “terrorism” because neither assailant intended to convey a larger point. On the other hand, terrorism’s perpetrators always mean to convey some sort of message. Terrorism, as nineteenth-century anarchists put it, constitutes “propaganda by deed” (“propagande par le fait”).35 The precise content will vary—the terrorist act may be a protest against political oppression, an act of vengeance, a blow supporting a national independence movement, an ideological statement, or any combination thereof—but there will always be a point. Suicide bombing, for example, may seem utterly senseless and self-defeating, but over 95% of such incidents between 1980 and 2004 had clear political objectives.36 The choice of targets also demonstrates that terrorism is violence with a message.They are “dramatic events intended to impress for their symbolic significance”; their deeds are not just violence, but “performance violence … designed to have an impact on the several audiences that they affect.”37 Consequently, terrorists often direct their attention toward targets that are deeply resonant. As Joseph Conrad’s Russian diplomat in The Secret Agent, M. Vladimir, notes in his lecture on “the philosophy of bomb throwing,” for maximum effect the violence should be directed against the ideological heart, or “sacrosanct fetish,” of the day; for Conrad, that “fetish” was “science,” hence M. Vladimir’s directing Verloc to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.38 Jumping ahead to 9/11, as Bruce Lincoln first pointed out, Osama bin Laden has been “quite concrete in identifying his chief

6 

Introduction

grievances.”39 Al Qaeda attacked America, as he said in a videotape dated October 7, 2001, because when Arabs or Palestinians are killed, “we hear no denunciation”; instead, the United States “backed the butcher against the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child,” and he wants American troops out of the “the land of Muhammad.”40 Therefore, he decided to strike at symbols of America’s economic power (The World Trade Center) and military strength (the Pentagon). It’s often assumed that the fourth plane would have crashed at either the White House or Congress. Thus much has often been said.41 But theorists of terrorism have not sufficiently noted that the message terrorism means to send often goes unheard because, to those on the receiving end, terrorism is unspeakable.42 To attract and to maintain attention, terrorists need to conceive of acts that reach beyond anything that has been previously accomplished, something that breaks all previous limits and conventions, thus rendering the audience speechless because they lack the terms to comprehend what has just happened. Because the effect of any act lessens with repetition, terrorism continuously seeks to outdo itself, and with each new iteration, the rhetoric of unspeakability returns. Granted, terrorism is not the only event that results in unspeakability (the Holocaust is often said to be beyond representation), and terrorism by anticolonial groups post World War II does not fit this paradigm. Nonetheless, terrorism and unspeakability are paired often enough that one can detect a pattern. The first act to illustrate this paradigm, and so, in my view, the first act that merits the term “terrorism,” would be the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a group of disaffected Catholics sought to blow up England’s parliament and royal family. Obviously, political violence, assassination, and mass murder were hardly unknown to the early modern period or before (e.g., the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre in Paris, in which thousands of Protestants were slaughtered). And that is the point: assassination of politically important individuals such as George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and religious massacres were already known quantities.The culture had already developed strategies and discourses for comprehending them. The plotters, however, wanted to come up with something new, an act so audacious and unprecedented that England would be shocked into recognizing the Catholic plight. Therefore, they conceived an idea that was, according to Father Henry Garnet, “a most horrible thing, the like of which was never heard of.”43 The Gunpowder Plot constitutes, as Robert Appelbaum has argued, “terrorism before the letter,” i.e., an act that fulfills the definition of terrorism before the term enters the language.44 The term, as is well known, gets coined as a response to the “Terror” of the French Revolution, and both underscore the “literature of terror” that is Gothic fiction, the “new literary fascination with fear and violence [arising] in the same decade that witnessed the Reign of Terror, and the consequent adoption of the words ’terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ into English.”45 Yet without meaning to diminish the horror or the novelty of the violence perpetrated by the highly organized and bureaucratic Jacobin government, or

Introduction 

7

the influence of the Terror on Gothic fiction, the French “Terror” was not experienced or interpreted at the time as the kind of “limit event” that calls for the rhetoric of unspeakability. That would return only in the late nineteenth century with the invention of dynamite and the subsequent bombing campaigns by Irish nationalists and anarchists. For example, the April 25, 1885 issue of All the Year Round (edited by Charles Dickens) included an anonymous article, “Detectives and Their Work,” that described the difficulties faced by law enforcement in apprehending this new form of criminal:46 [T]his monstrosity, until it sprang into existence, was a creature that the ordinary mind was incapable of even imagining. So abhorrent and antihuman a crime as dynamiting was undreamed of in the philosophy alike of those who organized our detective force and those who framed the laws by which its powers of action are limited. (136) The exception to this pattern comes after World War II, when various anticolonial movements adopted terrorism in their pursuit of national independence. During this period, terrorism was considered a rational tactic, and terrorists rational, perhaps even admirable, people. This exception came to an end in the early 1970s, largely because of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre.The rhetoric of unspeakability surged immediately after Al Qaeda crashed two planes into the World Trade Center, one plane into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania. Echoing the reactions to the Fenian bombing campaign and the Gunpowder Plot, a New York Times reporter described how: “For several panic-stricken hours yesterday morning, people in Lower Manhattan witnessed the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the unthinkable.”47 Even though (as noted previously) Osama bin Laden could not have been clearer about 9/11’s meaning, numerous Western critics and thinkers regularly asserted 9/11’s literal incomprehensibility. However, also starting in the 1970s, there is an additional twist to terrorism’s unspeakability: not only is the act itself incomprehensible, we are not allowed to understand it. Zulaika and Douglass have brilliantly observed that terrorism’s “frontal assault on any type of norm” makes investigating terrorism profoundly transgressive, and so “the very attempt to ‘know’ how the terrorist thinks or lives can be deemed an abomination.”48 Considering the terrorist point of view is literally “forbidden … There must be no common ground between terrorist Unreason and political reason.”49 Zulaika and Douglass offer the example of the Irish politician, diplomat, and writer, Conor Cruise O’Brien, rejecting any attempt at “understanding” the IRA because “‘know thine enemy’ may be a first stage in giving in to him,” and one can find many such examples arising from 9/11.50 Alan Dershowitz (as expert as one could imagine in presenting alternative views

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Introduction

of reality) also dismisses any notion of treating religiously inspired terrorists as thinking beings: instead, they are “cunning beasts of prey: we cannot reason with them, but we can … outsmart them, cage them, or kill them.”51 The paradigm of speakability/unspeakability continues beyond 9/11. Let me give two examples. First, in their introduction to their 2010 anthology of essays, Terror and the Postcolonial, Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, describe how a meeting to discuss two upcoming workshops on terrorism coincided with the terror attacks on London’s public transportation (7/7/2005, London’s 9/11). While these two critics understood that the bombings were not random, but symbolic, and carried a very specific message, yet they could not understand it. Instead, they witnessed an “unnamed (and unnamable) ‘event’”; moments of reverence slowly began “to mark this inconceivable and (for many) infinitely painful Thing [sic] that had happened”; to call the “Thing” “terror” was impossible because “for us, the word was so blatant, so raw, as to be close to unmentionable.”52 My second example is a seemingly unimportant exchange involving then Secretary of State, John Kerry, who discovered that the slightest gesture toward understanding ISIS, or radical Islam generally, is not allowed. On November 17, 2015, CNN reported that:53 Secretary of State John Kerry drew a distinction Tuesday between the two terror attacks in Paris this year, saying the terrorists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in January had a ‘rationale’ as opposed to Friday’s events which Kerry described as ‘indiscriminate’ violence. ‘There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, “OK, they’re really angry because of this and that,”’ Kerry said during remarks at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. One would think that Kerry’s remarks would be unexceptional, since he is hardly endorsing the Charlie Hebdo attack and condemns the subsequent one. But very quickly, Jeb Bush attacked Kerry for suggesting that the Hebdo attack had even a smidgeon of reason (“they are angry because of this and that”) behind it:54 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Tuesday slammed Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s comments that suggested that the terrorists who attacked a French satirical newspaper this year had ‘rationale.’ […] Campaigning in South Carolina a few hours later, Bush recited Kerry’s lines to about 300 college students and locals during a town hall meeting.

Introduction 

9

He also noted that Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has said that the U.S. should empathize with its enemies. ‘Really? There should be no empathy. And there’s no rationale for barbaric Islamic terrorists who want to destroy western civilization,’ he said to cheers. One could dismiss this exchange as part of the usual back and forth of American politics in which everything one side says gets vigorously condemned by the other, especially during a presidential campaign season. Except that Kerry almost immediately issued a “clarification”:55 A day after suggesting that there was a ‘rationale’ for the January terrorist attack at the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Secretary of State John Kerry was explicit on Wednesday in rejecting any grounds for a terrorist attack. ‘There are no grounds of history, religion, ideology, psychology, politics, economic disadvantage, or personal ambition that justify the slaughter of unarmed civilians, the bombing of public places or indiscriminate violence toward innocent men, women and children,’ he told the Overseas Security Advisory Council in Washington, adding that ‘such atrocities can never be rationalized, and we can never allow them to be rationalized. No excuse. They have to be stopped.’ (Emphasis added) Such is the force of the rhetoric of unspeakability combined with the taboo against understanding terrorism that Kerry not only retracts his earlier sense of the Charlie Hebdo murders as vaguely comprehensible, but adds that any attempt at “rationalizing” needs be policed as a forbidden act. We are not allowed, Kerry says, to find a rational cause behind terrorist acts; instead, they must remain irrational, un-understandable, the result of a diseased mind and so not amenable to reason. By way of contrast, nobody sane would call the Holocaust anything other than a monstrous atrocity, but equally, almost nobody would that say that “we can never allow” anyone to try to understand the Holocaust.56 *** The purpose of this book is to explore how this paradigm shapes the representation of terrorism in literature from 1605 through to 9/11, with a postscript on post-9/11 literature.57 While I am painfully aware of how many works in many different languages and how many geographical areas I am leaving out, to keep the book to a manageable size, I decided to focus primarily on literature written in English, with occasional forays into French, and on works that deal with terrorism as a profoundly unprecedented, “limit event.” As we will see, writers and

10  Introduction

filmmakers as various as William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Don DeLillo, John Updike, Stephen Spielberg, Mohammed Moulessehoul [Yasmina Khadra], and Nadeem Aslam usually understand terrorism as defined by the paradigm of speakability/unspeakability. Time and time again, they refer to terrorist acts as beyond comprehension, “a deed without a name,” but they do not stop there (as many have, such as John Kerry). Instead of creating works that respond to terrorism by providing comforting narratives reassuring audiences and readers of their moral superiority and the perfidy of the terrorists, these authors confront the unspeakable by attempting to try to see the world from the terrorist’s perspective and examining the roots of terrorist violence. In Chapter 1, “A Deed Without a Name: Macbeth, the Gunpowder Plot, and Terrorism” I propose that the Folio Macbeth intervenes in the post-Gunpowder Plot era by incorporating the rhetoric of unspeakability into the Folio version of the play. Like the Gunpowder Plot itself, the Captain “cannot tell” whether Macbeth and Banquo “meant to bathe in reeking wounds/Or memorize another Golgotha” (1.2.39–41), and the Weird Sisters engage in “A deed without a name” (4.1.49). Rather than mirroring the rhetoric surrounding the Plot in order to participate in the orgy of self-congratulation and anti-Catholicism following its discovery, Shakespeare uses the Plot as a ground for interrogating the fundamental myths of the Stuart dynasty. However, the only evidence available for a contemporary performance suggests that the King’s Men used a very different script when they performed the play in 1611, a version that endorses rather than questions Stuart absolutism Chapter 2, “Terrorism in the Nineteenth Century: From the French Revolution to the Stevensons, Greer, James, Conrad, and the Rossetti Sisters,” examines the literary representation of terrorism from the nineteenth through to the very early twentieth century. After first providing an archeology of “terrorism” from its original coinage as a dismissive adjective applying to the French Revolution to its contemporary usage, I examine the first fictional reactions to Fenian terrorism: Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson’s co-written novel, The Dynamiter (1885); Tom Greer’s, A Modern Daedalus (1885); and Henry James’, The Princess Casamassima (1886). Although these works approach terrorism from different angles, they set the pattern for subsequent treatments that, in Richard Jackson’s words, will “give primary voice to the perspective of the terrorist.”58 “Zero,” the hapless bomb-makers in The Dynamiter, is a surprisingly urbane, sympathetic figure; Greer illustrates both the necessity and the moral quandaries of terrorism; and James shows considerable sympathy for anarchism’s causes, even though terrorism threatens high art and culture. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the relationship between “Isabel Meredith” (Helen and Isabel Rossetti’s penname), A Girl Among Anarchists (1903), and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Chapter 3, “When Terror Becomes Speakable: Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and the Literature of the Troubles,” turns first to anti-colonial terrorism

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11

and Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. Between the end of anarchist/ Fenian bombing campaigns in the early twentieth century and 1945, political terrorism was largely subsumed by the atrocities of two world wars, including the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, once the anti-colonial, independence movements started after World War II, terrorism quickly returned to the fore as the tactic of choice by insurgents.Yet in a change from the earlier association of terrorism with unspeakability, many military analysts and political scientists, such as Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corporation and Thomas Perry Thornton of Princeton University, regarded terrorism as a “rational tool” used to achieve a comprehensible goal, specifically, political independence. I examine how Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers incorporates this new understanding of terrorism while at the same time graphically illustrating the human cost of political violence. In the second part of this chapter, I examine three different responses to the Troubles in Ireland: a selection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry; Eoin McNamee’s novel, Resurrection Man, and Paul Greengrass’s film, Bloody Sunday. Heaney may not endorse the IRA, but as a young Catholic subject to Protestant bias, he understands the ground from which terrorism arises. McNamee, on the other hand, examines Protestant sectarian terrorism, while Greengrass recreates the immediate cause for the Troubles: the British army opening fire on unarmed demonstrators. The film asks, will non-violence bring out political change? And the answer, unfortunately, is no. In Chapter 4, “Israel/Palestine: Unspeakability in John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl, Steven Spielberg, Munich, and Mohammed Moulessehou [Yasmina Khadra], The Attack,” I look at how the understanding of terrorism shifted back to unspeakability after the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, and how three works (two novels, one film) dealing with the Middle East reflect this shift. John le Carré’s 1983 novel, The Little Drummer Girl, focuses on how the conflict between Palestinians, Arabs, and Israelis is also a conflict over narratives, and whose narrative dominates. In The Little Drummer Girl, the “unspeakable” is less the terrorist act, and more the unresolvable nature of the conflict itself. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film, Munich, on the other hand, begins by assuming the “unspeakability” of terrorism. Spielberg, however, challenges this paradigm by paralleling Palestinian and Israeli perspectives, and by focusing on the moral cost of combatting terrorism through targeted assassination. This chapter concludes by examining the problem of suicide bombing, an act which remains “unspeakable” today. In Moulessehoul’s The Attack, the wife of a successful, Bedouin doctor blows herself up in a café where a child’s birthday party is taking place, and the novel follows the doctor’s unsuccessful quest to understand why someone would commit such a deed. Chapter 5, “‘Why Do They Hate Us?’,” deals with the literary response to 9/11. It has become a critical truism that American authors failed in their attempts at dealing with this event. Instead of investigating the deeper roots of terrorism and leading the reader to think hard about the difficult questions terrorism poses, most novelists instead focused on the domestic, on 9/11’s profound impact on the

12  Introduction

American family, with little to no attempt at placing terrorism in a larger context. Three authors, however, provide the exceptions that prove the rule: Mohsin Hamid, Don DeLillo, and John Updike. When asked by the New York Times why he would write a novel trying to understand rather than unreservedly denounce Islamic terrorism, Updike replied, “I think I felt could understand the animosity and hatred which an Islamic believer would have for our system. Nobody’s trying to see it from that point of view.”59 That is what all three novels do. Updike breaks the taboo against understanding terrorism by creating a narrative about a mixedrace American teenager, Ahmad Ashmawy Malloy, who self-converts to Islam, and whose teacher, Sheikh Rashid, lures him into joining a terrorist plot. Updike has his Muslim characters describe what the world looks like from their perspective, and their views partly overlap with Updike’s longstanding criticisms of American culture as materialistic and self-destructive. Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides a second alternative. Narrated from the perspective of a man who comes to resent “the manner in which America conducted itself in the world,” the novel implicitly explains why some people might smile, as the narrator does, when he hears about 9/11.60 But Hamid’s critique extends to the narrator himself, who is as much in the grip of nostalgia as America in the wake of 9/11. Like Updike, Hamid’s novel stresses the common ground between Islamic terror and American culture, but in a way that criticizes both. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man takes a different approach. Reflecting America’s psyche after 9/11, DeLillo creates a fractured, episodic narrative in which multiple storylines are split up into fragments that the reader must piece together, and DeLillo uses these fragments to explore the multiple responses to 9/11, ranging from the rhetoric of unspeakability to distanced analysis to performance art (David Janiak’s re-enactment of people falling from the Twin Towers). Like Updike, DeLillo includes narratives that try to see the world from the perspective of the 9/11 hijackers. Unlike Updike, DeLillo does not bring his novel to a conventional conclusion; instead, the book ends almost exactly where it begins, with Keith Neudecker (in many ways, the central character along with his ex-wife, Lianne), covered in dust and debris, walking away from the collapsed World Trade Center. This circularity simultaneously reflects America’s inability to get beyond the trauma of 9/11 while also containing the trauma within a perfect circle. Unspeakable concludes with an afterword analyzing three novels that confront the post 9/11 era. Amy Waldman’s subject in The Submission is the collapse of American political discourse in the wake of terrorism. In this novel, a Muslim, albeit a non-practicing one, wins a blind competition for a 9/11 memorial, and the narrative explores the ensuing controversy, how every argument is met with a counter-argument. The result is not debate, but cacophony. The unspeakable, in this case, is not the terrorist act, but compromise and the political center. At the novel’s conclusion, which takes place some 20 years after the competition, Claire Burwell, who first supported Khan and then decided to ask for his withdrawal, admits “I haven’t lost all of that confusion” (296).

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13

Nadeem Aslam, in The Blind Man’s Garden, writing from outside the United States, take a different approach. As we have seen, in much terrorist fiction, the deed itself remains beyond comprehension. But in this novel, it is the protagonists, Americans and Afghanis, who remain beyond each other’s understanding. “The Westerners,” a character says, “are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It’s like asking what the dead or the unborn know.”65 This book ends with examining how Jodi Picoult deals with domestic terrorism and white nationalism in Small Great Things.61 *** Overall, rather than endorsing the notion that the terrorist is by definition “Other,” someone apart whose motivations are by definition inscrutable, if not insane, the writers and filmmakers analyzed in this book attempt to undo the radical distinctions separating terrorists and their victims, to demonstrate the overlaps between the terrorist and the object of terrorism, and invite the reader to a more capacious understanding of what seems incomprehensible. In this way, fictions challenge the entrenched taboos against “rationalizing” terrorism. As such, the fictions explored in this book anticipate many of the insights promulgated by the treatment of terrorism by writers and thinkers associated with critical theory. When Jacques Derrida, for example, asserts that the West’s attempt to counter terrorism through repression “ends up producing, reproducing and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm,” (99), he is in fact repeating Michael Davitt’s claim in 1885 that “England manufactures its own enemies.”62 Similarly, Derrida’s sense that the terrorist is a kind of disease (an “autoimmune” disorder), echoes Joseph Conrad’s final description of the Professor as a “pest,” meaning, “A fatal, epidemic disease” (OED, def. 1a).63 The recent emphasis on undoing the distinction between state and non-state terrorism by such eminences as Richard Jackson and Noam Chomsky has its roots in Shakespeare’s (literal) deconstruction of the differences between licit and illicit violence in Macbeth.64 John Updike’s dissatisfaction with how the Arab world had been treated and his attempt in Terrorist to see the world from the perspective of Islamist terrorists prefigures Judith Butler’s observation that “[w]e judge a world we refuse to know, and our judgment becomes one means of refusing to know that world.”65 Fictions, in other words, have always offered us the tools for a better understanding of terrorism. We just need to pay attention. Which is why I have for the most part chosen to focus on plot-driven fictions and omit consideration of lyric poetry (with the exception of Seamus Heaney) because generally speaking, most lyrics focus expressing an individual’s sensibility, not the clash of opposing sensibilities. Juliana Spahr’s “Poem Written after September 11, 2001,” for example, expresses her connection with the atomized victims of the Twin Towers (“The space of everyone … mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized glass and concrete”), but there is no attempt to reach beyond her

14  Introduction

own mind, beyond her individual response to 9/11.66 Similarly, jihadist verse also expresses only their sensibility: “poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.”67 There is no dialogue, in a word, and dialogue is what interests me. Consequently, in this book, I have focused my attention on plays, films, and novels. Plot-driven literature provides the ideal vehicle for exploring terrorism because by definition, the playwright, the novelist, and the filmmaker create works predicated on dramatic conflict, which very easily maps onto providing multiple perspectives on terrorism. Fictions allow the audience or reader to see the world from someone else’s eyes. Christopher Ricks, in his book on Bob Dylan, states the matter in a way that begs to be applied to the problem of terrorism and radically different cultures: “One of the ways in which art is invaluable is by giving us sympathetic access to systems of belief that are not our own.”68 The point is not so much offering us information or data—the novel and the play are not intended as documentaries—but emotional involvement: “Stories about the ‘other’ induce us to see the other, and once we do so, we endeavor consistently to understand the world from within the other’s optic.”69 And yet, despite the good-faith efforts by the authors examined in this book, something about terrorism remains unsayable, beyond one’s grasp. Inhabiting the mind of the terrorist seems to reach the limits of the fictive imagination, and not always because we are not allowed to sympathetically imagine terrorism. For some of the authors studied, such as Conrad, Updike, and DeLillo, there is something ultimately unreachable about terrorism, something that remains literally incomprehensible. The narrator of Joseph Conrad’s short story, “The Informer” literally cannot comprehend the bomb-throwing terrorist: “anarchists in general were simply inconceivable to me mentally, morally, logically, sentimentally, and even physically.”70 Moving up in time, John Updike admits that his imagination would carry him only so far, and so he did not even “attempt to animate from inside a Palestinian terrorist or an Iraqi freedom-fighter.”71 For others, creating a terrorist who invites empathy means first sanitizing what they do, shifting the object of terrorist violence toward a more acceptable, less appalling target. For example, in Hany Abu-Assad’s film, Paradise Now (2005), the suicide bomber who chooses to go through with the deed opts to not blow up the bus with the small child; instead, he sets off his bomb in a bus filled with Israeli soldiers in uniform. Needless to say, the suicide bombers of the Second Intifada were not so discriminating. Terrorism thus brings us to the ethical, imaginative, and political limits of fiction. Along the same lines, Picoult renders her white supremacist amenable to empathy by setting limits on his violence: he will insult people, he will beat them, but he will not kill them.

Notes 1 Between June 28 and July 3, 2018, the Washington Post published 135 articles that mention “terrorism”; the New York Times published 95. 2 www.dhs.gov/preventing-terrorism.

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15

3 www.dhs.gov/publication/fy-2015-budget-brief. 4 Department Of Homeland Security Statement On The President’s Fiscal Year 2019 Budget.  https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/12/department-homeland-securitystatement-president-s-fiscal-year-2019-budget. 5 www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/terrorism. 6 Marie Breen Smyth, George Kassimeris, and Piers Robinson, “Critical Terrorism Studies—An Introduction,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1.1 (2008), 1. 7 Alex Schmid, “Terrorism: The Definitional Problem,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 36.2–3 (2004), 385–386. See also Conor Gearty, Liberty and Security (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 30–36. 8 E.g., the entry, “Terrorism, Definition and History of,” in The Encyclopedia of Terrorism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003) begins: “There are as many definitions for the word terrorism as there are methods of executing it; the term means different things to different people, and trying to define or classify terrorism to everyone’s satisfaction proves impossible” (359). See also Andrew Silke, “Contemporary Terrorism Studies: Issues in Research,” Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, ed. Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning (New York: Routledge, 2009), 36.The incertitude is such that Deaghan Ó Donghaile can write an excellent book on Victorian fiction and terrorism while declining to define the term: “The word is notoriously pejorative, and I will not enter the definitional debates surrounding it, other than to draw attention to its historical usage” (Blasted Literature:Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011], 19). 9 Laqueur, “Reflections on Terrorism,” The Terrorism Reader, rev. ed., ed. Walter Laqueur and Yonah Alexander (New York: New American Library, 1987), 380. 10 “A Report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Minority Leaderfrom the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” 17 July 2002 11 Terrorism 2002–2005 (Washington, DC: FBI, 2005), iv. 12 Ibid., iv. 13 CIA, Terrorism FAQs. 14 See, for example, Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife:The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 2012). 15 Quoted in Alex Schmid, “Terrorism—The Definitional Problem,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 36.2–3 (2004), 377. 16 Leonard Weinberg, Ami Pedahzur, and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, “The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16.4 (2004): 777–794. 17 Weinberg et al., 780. 18 Ibid., 786, 788. 19 E.g., Jean-Marc Sorel, “Some Questions about the Definition of Terrorism and the Fight Against its Financing,” European Journal of International Relations 14.2 (2003): 365–378; Schmid, “Terrorism—The Definitional Problem,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 36.2–3 (2004), 375–419; Ben Saul, Defining Terrorism in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alan Greene, “The Quest for a Satisfactory Definition of Terrorism: R v Gul,” The Modern Law Review 77.5 (2014): 780–807; and Rumyana Grozdanova, “Terrorism—Too Elusive a Term for an International Legal Definition?” Netherlands International Law Review 61.3 (2014): 305–334. 20 Quoted in John Collins, “Terrorism,” Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War, ed. John Collins and Ross Glover (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 375. 21 “Security Evaluation of Deadly Algiers Bombing submitted to Secretary-General,” UN New Centre, January 11, 2008 22 Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, “Zealots and Assassins,” The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda, ed. Chalian and Blin (Berkeley, CA: University of California

16  Introduction

Press, 2007), 55–78, and the Encyclopedia of World Terrorism (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997) generally. Terry Eagleton traces terrorism back to Dionysus (Holy Terror [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 2). 23 Robert Appelbaum begins Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland and France 1559–1602 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) by calling Buckingham’s murder terrorism because “the murder was political, intended to change the balance of power in England” (1). On the Archduke, see Appelbaum, 36. 24 Martha Crenshaw, “Thoughts on Relating Terrorism to Historical Contexts,” Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 12. 25 Crenshaw, “Thoughts,” 12. 26 The Shankill murders are fictionalized in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (New York: Picador, 1994). 27 Richard English, Terrorism: How to Respond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9–10. 28 John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 5. 29 English, 7. 30 Barton J. Bernstein, “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 74.1 (1995), 142. 31 Neil MacFarquhar, “Assad Condemn Houla Massacre, Blaming Terrorists,” New York Times, June 3, 2012; “Hamas Accuses Israel of Sudan blast,” Gulfnews.com, October 26, 2012. 32 Richard Jackson, Lee Jarvis, and Jeroen Gunning, Terrorism: A Critical Introduction (London: Red Globe, 1988), 35. 33 I owe this term to Appelbaum, “Milton, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Mythography of Terror,” Modern Language Quarterly 68.4 (2007): 468, and Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland, and France 1559–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 6–23. Cf. Graham Hammond’s rejoinder, “Terrorism and Culture: Macbeth, 9/11 and the Gunpowder Plot,” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [Online], 36 (2018). URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ shakespeare/4006. 34 English, Terrorism: How to Respond, 6–7; Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 36–38. 35 On this phrase’s origins, see Martin A. Miller, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Terrorism in Europe,” Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw, 42–43. 36 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007), 176. 37 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 123–124; emphases in the original. 38 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. John Lyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24. 39 Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 26. 40 Lincoln, 106–107 (author’s translation). 41 The “speakability” of terrorism also serves as an excuse for censorship. In 1974, for example, at the height of the Troubles, a British General justified Thatcher’s imposing media controls: “All terrorist organizations thrive on propaganda and without the exaggerated attention of the media the IRA would probably have languished and died” (quoted in Ed Moloney, “Closing Down the Airwaves: the Story of the Broadcasting Ban,” The Media and Northern Ireland: Covering the Troubles, ed. Bill Rolston [London: MacMillan, 1991], 13.) 42 David Simpson also notes that “terrorism” connotes “an unspeakable and unknowable antagonist” (9/11:The Culture of Commemoration [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Introduction 

17

Press, 2006], 52. See also Alex Houen, “Sacrifice and the Sublime since 11 September 2001,” The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012], 251–261.) 43 Quoted in Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason:The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 130. 44 See Appelbaum, Terrorism Before the Letter, 6–23. 45 Joseph Crawford, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism:The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ix. 46 https://archive.org/stream/allyearround14dickgoog#page/n156/mode/2up. 47 N.R. Kleinfeld, “Buildings Burn and Fall as Onlookers Search for Elusive Safety,” New York Times, September 12, 2001. 48 Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 155, 149. 49 Zulaika and Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 180; emphasis in the original. 50 Zulaika and Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 150. 51 Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2002), 182. See also Simpson, Culture of Commemoration, 141–142. 52 Boehmer and Morton, “Introduction,” Terror and the Postcolonial (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley, 2010), 2, 4, 5. 53 Tom Lobianco, “John Kerry Says Charlie Hebdo Attackers had ‘Rationale,’” CNN, November 18, 2015. 54 Ed O’Keefe, “Jeb Bush Slams John Kerry’s Claim That Charlie Hebdo Attackers had ‘Rationale,’” Washington Post, November 18, 2015. 55 Nick Gass, “Kerry, After Gaffe, Says Terrorist Attacks Can Never Be Rationalized,” Politico, November 18, 2015. 56 The exception being Claude Lanzmann, who thinks that not understanding is central to his conception of his mammoth documentary, Shoah (1985): “There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding [the Holocaust]. Not to understand was my iron law during all the elven years of the production of Shoah” (quoted in “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995], 204). 57 Before 9/11, terrorism had not attracted much attention from literary critics. See for example Barbara Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croon Helm, 1985); Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Alex Houen’s Terrorism and Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). As one might expect, after 9/11, interest in the topic grew exponentially, e.g., Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg: Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); Jeffory A. Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Robert Appelbaum, “Milton, The Gunpowder Plot, and the Mythography of Terror,” Modern Language Quarterly 68.4 (2007): 461–491; Literature after 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne F. Quinn (New York: Routledge, 2008); Sarah Cole, “Dynamite Violence and Literary Culture,” Modernism/modernity 16.2 (2009): 301–328; Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, “Dynamite, Interrupted,” in Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 149–222; Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Jeffrey Melnick, 9/11 Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Marc Redfrield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Ian Ward, Law, Text, Terror (Cambridge:

18  Introduction

Cambridge University Press, 2009); Peter Schneck and Phillipp Schweighauser, eds. Terrorism, the Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, ed (London: Continuum, 2010); Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature Since 911 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Deaglán Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Brigit Däwes, Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2011); Georgiana Banita, Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Alex Tickell, Terrorism, Insurgency, and IndianEnglish Literature, 1830–1947 (New York: Routledge, 2012); Literature, Migration and the “War on Terror,” ed. Fiona Tolan, Stephen Morton, Anastasia Valassopoulos, and Robert Spencer (New York: Routledge, 2013); Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism, ed. John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Appelbaum, Terrorism Before the Letter; and Liliana M. Naydan, Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016). See also the essays collected in Critical Contexts: Literature and Terrorism, ed. Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 58 Jackson, “Terrorism, Taboo and Discursive Resistance: The Agonistic Potential of the Terrorism Novel,” International Studies Review, 17.3 (2015), 404. 59 Updike, “An Interview with John Updike: In Terrorist, a Cautious Novelist Takes On a New Fear,” New York Times, interview by Charles McGrath. May 31, 2006. 60 Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (New York: Harcourt, 2007), 156. 61 Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man’s Garden (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 350. 62 Derrida, “Autoimmunity, Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 99; “Mr. Davitt on the Outrages,” Edinburgh Evening News, January 27, 1885, 3. 63 Derrida, 94; Conrad, 227. 64 See the essays collected in Weapon of the Strong: Conversations on US State Terrorism, Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes (London: Pluto Press, 2013). 65 Butler, Frames of War:When is Life Grievable (London:Verso, 2009), 156. 66 Juliana Spahr, thisconnectionofeveronewithlungs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 9–10. 67 Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel, “Battle Lines,” The New Yorker, June 8 and 15, 2015. 68 Ricks, Bob Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco, 2005), 377. Martha Nussbaum makes a similar point: The novel tells “an individualized, empathetic story” that promotes “identification and sympathy in the reader,” often about characters and worlds of which we have no experience (Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995], xvii, 5). See also Ian Ward, Terror, 24, 123–125. 69 Richard Weisberg, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 46. 70 Conrad, “The Informer: An Ironic Tale,” A Set of Six (London: J. M. Dent, 1954), 97. 71 Tom Ashbrook, “John Updike’s Terrorist: On Point (Audio),” June 13, 2008.

1 “A DEED WITHOUT A NAME” Macbeth, the Gunpowder Plot, and Terrorism

The Gunpowder Plot In 1605, a group of disaffected Catholics, horribly disappointed by King James’s rejection of his earlier promises of religious toleration (James never admitted that he gave them any such hopes), decided that they had no choice but to strike a blow against the source of their oppression, and so they plotted to blow up the English parliament on its opening day, thus destroying, as the Venetian ambassador, Nicolo Molin, puts it in his diplomatic report to his superior, “the King, Queen, Princes Clergy, Nobility and Judges … , and thus to purge the kingdom of perfidious heresies.”1 The plotters also intended to kidnap the King’s surviving children, and put on the throne someone who would return England to Catholicism. That is not how things worked out. The plot was discovered in time, some participants were killed trying to evade capture, others were apprehended, tried, and quickly executed. Even so, the plot’s discovery and the possibility that nearly the entire ruling class would be killed in one terrible conflagration (in a remarkable parallel to the panic following 9/11) thoroughly traumatized the king and London generally.2 If the object of terror is to terrorize, then Molin’s dispatch shows that the plot succeeded admirably even though the barrels never exploded:3 The King had let it be known that he wished to have the Scots about his person, as he has not much confidence in the English, who know this and are greatly annoyed. The King is in terror; he does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms, with only Scotchmen about him.The Lords of the Council also are alarmed and confused by the plot itself and the King’s suspicions; the city is in great uncertainty; Catholics fear heretics, and vice-versa; both are armed; foreigners

20  “A Deed Without a Name”

live in terror of their houses being sacked by the mob that is convinced that some, if not all, foreign Princes are at the bottom of the plot. The King and Council have very prudently thought it advisable to quiet the popular feeling by issuing a proclamation, in which they declare that no foreign Sovereign had any part of the conspiracy. God grant this be sufficient, but as it is everyone has his own share of alarm. The plotters unfortunate enough to be caught did not hide their motivations or what they intended to happen. The terrorists, in other words, spoke to their captors, and they spoke very clearly. In his written confession (after, it must be remembered, extensive torture to wring out of him the names of his fellow conspirators), Guy Fawkes told his interrogators that he and four others, “for reliefee of the Catholique cause” in England, decided to set “a Myne under the upper House of Parliament: which place wee made choice of the rather, because Religion having been universally suppressed there, it was fittest the Justice and punishment should be executed there.”4 Sir Edward Digby, declared at his trial that he joined this plot for:5 the cause of Religion, which alone, seeing (as hee sayd) it lay at the stake, hee entred into resolution to neglect in that behalfe, his estate, his life, his name, his memorie, his posterities, and all worldly and earthly felicitie whatsoever, though he did utterly extirpate, and extinguish all other hopes, for the restoring of the Catholike Religion in England. His third Motive was, that promises were broken with the Catholikes. And lastly, That they generally feared harder Lawes from this Parliament against Recusants, as that Recusants wives, and women should bee liable to the mulct as well as their husbands, and men. And further, that it was supposed, that it should be made a Praemunire [meaning, one is loyal to someone other than the English monarch, a capital crime in early modern England], onely to be a Catholike. A contemporary manuscript explaining and partly justifying the events by the Jesuit, Oswald Tesimond, probably intended for circulation among the English community in Rome, also provides a clear explanation for the reasons behind the plot:6 [Robert Catesby] decided after much reflection to gather together all the enemies of the catholic religion in England and get rid of them in one single blow. Liberty and religion would then be restored to catholics with no resistance. To carry out this resolve, the best way seemed to him to await the reassembly of parliament, when the three estates of the realm would all be together with the king, councillors, puritans and bishops. These were all of them determined that in that time and place they would give the final death blow to the catholic cause, as we have said. In that

“A Deed Without a Name”  21

same moment of time, the plotters hoped to bring upon their heads the evil they had designed for others. In addition, Tesimond’s manuscript demonstrates the plotters’ concern for what we would call today “spin.” The plotters were keenly aware that they, not their oppressors, needed to shape the interpretation of the event, and so they procured a ship which was to serve for no other purpose than to cross over to Flanders at the very moment of the explosion. This was to give news of the deed to the rulers of Christendom, to forestall adverse reports put out by enemies and to present the facts in the best light possible.7 When their deed “spoke,” as it were, they wanted to ensure that it reflected their perspective, not their enemy’s. But King James and the other intended victims of the plot would not or could not comprehend what they were hearing.To them, the plot was literally unspeakable, unthinkable, and indescribable. On November 9, 1605, four scant days after the plot was uncovered, James gave a speech before Parliament declaring that he had not the words to describe what the plotters intended. James had endured attempted assassination before, and he understood it. The Gunpowder Plot, however, was something else entirely:8 But in this, which did so lately fall out, and which was a destruction prepared not for me alone, but for you all that are here present, and wherein no ranke, age, nor sexe should have bene spared; This was not a crying sinne of blood, as the former [plot to assassinate James], but it may well be called a roaring, nay a thundring sinne of fire and brimstone, from the which GOD hath so miraculously delivered us all. What can I speak of it? And therefore I must for horror say with the Poet, Vox faucibus haeret [My voice sticks in my throat] … the like was never either heard or read. James was not alone in invoking the rhetoric of absolute originality leading to the failure of speech and language. The next day, November 10, the Bishop of Rochester, William Barlow, at the government’s behest, delivered a sermon at Paul’s Cross in which he also grasped for words beyond his reach. Barlow described the Plot as “a production without a match, … a Treason without Parallel; a slaughter beyonde comparison.”9 Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, uses nearly the same phrase in a letter dated November 14, 1605 to Sir Thomas Edmondes: “By my last letters you have received the particulars of that horrible attempt which hath no example in no ages.”10 Doubtless, James, Barlow, and Salisbury are right when they claim that the Gunpowder Plot represented a new form of political violence. Political assassinations were hardly unknown at the time. Both Elizabeth and James endured several

22  “A Deed Without a Name”

attempts on their lives; Henry III and Henry IV of France were assassinated; and the religious wars in France demonstrated for all to see how doctrinal fanaticism could lead to mass murder, the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre in 1572 being only the best known of many such events. Yet there was truly something new in the attempt to “decapitate” England, and consequently, the “unspeakability” of the plot became its defining rhetorical trope. In his indictment of the plotters, Sir Edward Phillips, “his Majesties Sergeant at Law,” begins his brief by admitting that the matter may be:11 Treason; but of such horror, and monstrous nature, that before now, The Tongue of man never delivered. The Ear of man never heard. The Heart of man never conceited. Nor the malice of hellish or earthly devil ever practiced. Attorney-General Coke began his prosecution by stressing how this treason is so novel and so terrible, that, to use Kristiaan Versluys’s phrase, the Plot constitutes “a limit event that shatters the symbolic resources of the culture”:12 Now touching the offences themselves, they are so exorbitant and transcendent, and aggregated of so many bloody and fearefull crimes, as they cannot be aggravated by any inference, argument or circumstance whatsoever, and that in three respects: First, because this offense is Prima impressionis, and therefore sine Nomine, without any name which might bee adaquatum sufficient to expresse it, given by any Legist, that ever made or writ of any Lawes. For the highest Treason that all they could imagine, they called it only Crimen lasae Majestatis, the violating of the Majesty of the Prince. But this Treason doth want an apt name. A year later, two neo-Latin epics would also describe the plot as something “unheard of ” (“inaudito”), a deed so nefarious that not even the most creatively evil nations the world has known could conceive of it: of which neither the Carthaginians infamous in the name of perfidy nor the cruel Scythian nor Turk or the dreaded Sarmatian, nor the Anthropophagi, nurslings of mad savagery, nor any nation as barbarous in the furthermost regions of the world has heard.13 This rhetoric would continue throughout James’ reign and beyond. In a 1626 sermon comparing The Dayes of Purim and that of the Powder Treason, the virulently anti-Catholic divine, George Hakewill, asks: “What then could we have called that act, by which they should have been all murthered and mangled at one clap? Sure as wee want an example to parallel it, so doe wee a name to expresse it.”14

“A Deed Without a Name”  23

John Milton’s Gunpowder Plot poems, written in 1626 when he was 17 and published in 1645, continues this tradition of describing the plot as “sine nomine,” wanting “an apt name.” In his first epigram, Milton writes that Fawkes dared an “unspeakable” (“infandum”) crime, and in his longer treatment of the topic, “In Quintum Novembris,” he describes the attempt as a “nova … caedes” (l. 203), variously translated as “innovative “ or “unprecedented murder.”15 To sum up so far, the rhetoric that surrounded the Gunpowder Plot from almost the moment of its discovery oscillated between “the given and the unthinkable” (to borrow a nice phrase from Michel Foucault).16 In one sense there was nothing mysterious about the Plot’s intentions or motivations: both the plotters and their apologists clearly and explicitly stated the reasons and intentions behind this deed. Terrorism thus speaks. But from King James’ speech to Parliament onward, the Gunpowder Plot was literally “unthinkable,” beyond human capacity to express it, and indeed, inexpressibility became its defining trope. In his analysis of how people made sense of the Gunpowder Plot, an event that defied all attempts at making sense, Paul Wake notes how often the “solution, if solution it is, to the aporetic demand” of having to narrate an event impossible to narrate “takes the form of an appeal to the literary,” and it is to the literary I now want to turn: Shakespeare’s Macbeth.17

Macbeth Macbeth criticism generally breaks down into two groups. With the major exceptions of Rebecca Lemon and Richard Wilson, the critics who have extensively explored relationships between Shakespeare’s tragedy and history, such as Gary Wills, H.N. Paul, and David Norbrook, tend to read the play as a straightforward endorsement of Jacobean absolutism,18 and whatever ideological or thematic problems the play contains should be attributed to recalcitrant source material: as Norbrook puts it, “[m]any of the anomalies and contradictions in Macbeth can be explained not as manifestations of Shakespeare’s desire to remain totally neutral but as difficulties inherent in the source material.”19 Curiously, the most trenchant analysis to date of the relationship between Macbeth and terrorism, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey’s “Shakespeare and Terror,” belongs to this group, arguing that Shakespeare reproduces the “official authorized response to the Plot,” i.e., there is no politics, just nihilistic will to power.20 Notwithstanding the Plotters’ explanation that they chose to blow up Parliament because Parliament constituted the source of their oppression, both James and, subsequently, Shakespeare, propose that “fear is the primary message of terrorism.”21 On the other hand, the critics most alive to how the play collapses opposites and transforms moral certainties into uncertainties, such as Harry Berger, Jr., Jonathan Goldberg, and David Scott Kastan, do not mention the Plot.22 I want to now bring these two strands together and demonstrate that the Folio Macbeth’s engagement (I will explain the adjective “Folio” later) with the terrorism

24  “A Deed Without a Name”

of the Gunpowder Plot overlaps with the play’s anti-absolutist critique of Stuart origins. Holderness and Loughry assert that “Macbeth is himself the Gunpowder Plot” (emphasis in the original),23 a statement I would broaden to cover the entire play: Macbeth, not just the title character, designedly recalls the Plot. But far from a royal compliment or endorsement of Stuart absolutism in the face of terrorism, the play undoes the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate violence by revising the origin myth of the Stuart dynasty. Throughout the play Shakespeare consistently reminds the audience of the Plot. The Porter’s reference to equivocation alludes to the Jesuit Henry Garnet’s equivocating under oath about his knowledge, and the idealization of “the gracious Duncan” (3.1.67), a king who “Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been/So clear in his great office/that his virtues/Will plead like angels, trumpettongued, against/The deep damnation of his taking-off ” (1.7.17–20) recalls the flattery laid on with a trowel for James after the Plot was discovered. For example, William Barlow asserts in his Paul’s Cross sermon that James has in him:24 all the partes that may concur either in a king, or in a good King … Whether we look unto the light of nature, of pregnant wit, of ready apprehension, of sound judgement of present dispatch, of impregnable memory … Or the light of government, an upright arbitrator in cases of Justice, a loving father to his subjects, a carefull guardian of his kingdoms, a wise manager of his State, an especial favourer of this Citty [London], an absolute Monarch both for Regiment & judgment: And yet these lights thus gloriouslie shining in this golden candlesticke … [the Plotters] would have at once blowne out. Both Wills and the writing team of Holderness and Loughry have demonstrated how frequently Shakespeare uses diction and imagery that echo the language commonly used to talk about the Plot. Take the word “blow,” for instance. Attorney-General Coke’s observation that the King’s divinely inspired perspicacity concerning the word “blow” in the Monteagle letter led to the plot’s discovery— How the King was Divinely illuminated by Almighty God, the only ruler of Princes, like an Angell of God to direct and point as it were to the very place, to cause a search to made there, out of those darke wordes of the Letter concerning a terrible Blow —finds its analogue in Macbeth’s wish that Duncan’s assassination might have no consequence beyond Duncan’s death: “that but this blow/Might be the be-all and end-all” (1.7.4–5).25 And Lennox’s invocation “Of dire combustion and confused events/New hatched to the woeful time” combines references to explosions and novelty (“new hatched”) that in all likelihood reminded the original audience of the Plot. As Wills puts it, a word such as “blow” “could no more be used

“A Deed Without a Name”  25

‘innocently in the aftermath of the Plot than could ‘sneak attack’ or ‘grassy knoll’ in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor or John Kennedy’s assassination.”26 Shakespeare also incorporates the rhetoric of utter destruction used to describe the avoided catastrophe. Lennox describes the night of Duncan’s murder in nearapocalyptic terms: Where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, Lamentings heard I’th’air, strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents terrible Of dire combustion and confused events New hatched to the woeful time. The obscure bird Clamoured the livelong night. Some say the earth Was feverous and did shake. (2.3.44–52) And Macbeth demands that the Weird Sisters answer him using similar language: Though you untie the winds and let them fight Against the churches, though the yeasty waves Confound and swallow navigation up, Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down, Though castles topple on their warders’ heads, Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations, though the treasure Of nature’s germens tumble all together, Even till destruction sicken. (4.1.52–60) One finds similarly lurid descriptions of the Plot’s potential devastation.The 1606 poem, The Divell of the Vault, invokes a scene of equal horror and devastation:27 Confusion with hels horride howles, Denounce grim deaths alarmes. While leane-fac’d Famine all ingirts, Betwixt her icye armes … Then should each heav’n-affecting soule, By deepe destruction fall: The Preacher Saint, religious man, Merchant, mechanicke, all.

26  “A Deed Without a Name”

William Gager’s 1608 Latin poem commemorating the Fifth of November, Pyramis, presents an equally horrendous vision of the “government … topsy-turvey … the nation … overthrown,” “everything [going] to rack and ruin, to have land, sea and sky confounded.”28 The consistent echoes of Gunpowder Plot rhetoric and imagery give some credence to the view that Macbeth constitutes “a mystical and legitimist version of Scottish history.”29 This interpretation gains further traction through two instances in which Shakespeare quotes verbatim from two key instances of Gunpowder Plot discourse: James’ November 5 speech and the government’s case against the plotters. When Macbeth, after murdering Duncan, says that the word “‘Amen’/Stuck in my throat” (2.3.36–37), he echoes the King’s invocation of the Vergillian phrase: “What can I speake of this, I know not: Nay rather, what can I not speake of it? And therefore I must for horror say with the Poet, Vox faucibus haeret” (literally, “voice stuck in throat”).30 Macduff ’s reaction to discovering Duncan’s body—“O horror, horror, horror!/Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!” (2.3.54–55)— repeats Sir Edward Philips invocation at the start of the plotters’ trial: the matter is Treason; but of such horror and monstrous nature, that before now, The Tongue of man never delivered, The Ear of man never heard, The Heart of man never conceited, Nor the malice of hellish or earthly devil ever practiced.31 These allusions parallel Duncan’s murder with the Plot. Macbeth’s assassination of the “gracious” Duncan is as unjustified and horrific as the Plotters’ attempt to blow up James, his family, and everyone else in the building. Macbeth’s ultimate demise, therefore, at MacDuff ’s hands, and the reversion of the crown to Malcolm, who we should remember invaded Scotland with the aid of Edward the Confessor, has the air of restoring legitimacy to Scotland’s government. That is certainly how Malcolm sees the matter, who concludes the play with a general invitation “to see us crowned at Scone” (5.8.76). But that is not where Shakespeare leaves the matter. Critics have long noted that Shakespeare peppers his tragedy with phrases that “palter with us in a double sense” (5.8.20). The Weird Sisters will meet “when the battle’s lost and won” (1.1.4); Macbeth’s first line is “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.38); the Sisters’ prophecy, Macbeth says, “Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.132); Lady MacDuff describes her son as “Fathered … , and yet he’s fatherless” (4.2.27); and her husband concludes his interview with Malcolm, who has first claimed to be the worst person who ever existed and then asserted he is perfection itself, with this insolubiliis: “Such welcome and unwelcome things at once/‘Tis hard to reconcile” (4.3.139–40). My point is that Shakespeare does the same with the Gunpowder Plot.32 When Macbeth seeks out the Weird Sisters to discover his fate, he asks them, “what is’t you do?”, and the Sisters reply in unison: “A deed without

“A Deed Without a Name”  27

a name” (4.1.49). This phrase repeats Edward Coke’s description of the plot as “sine Nomine, without any name which might be adaquatum sufficient to expresse it … it is, Sine exemplo, beyond all examples, whether in fact or fiction” (sig. D4v). The Gunpowder Plot, in other words, is equally a “deed without a name.” But there is a crucial difference between this allusion and the previous incorporations of Gunpowder Plot rhetoric. Macduff ’s allusion to Philips (“Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!”/“The Tongue of man never delivered./The Ear of man never heard./The Heart of man never conceited”) and Macbeth’s repetition of a Vergillian phrase famously appropriated by James (“Stuck in my throat”/“Vox faucibus haeret”) clearly apply to an act of regicide, and thus seem to go entirely with expectation. They reinforce the parallel between Macbeth’s actions and the Gunpowder Plot, effectively inviting the audience to conflate the two. But the scene introduced by “a deed without a name” does not: to be sure, the “show of eight Kings and Banquo last with a glass in his hand,” seems to reproduce, as many critics have said, the absolutist fantasy of an unbroken line of succession stretching “out to th’crack of doom” (4.1.117).33 Kings, James wrote in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598; reprinted four times in 1603), “are called Gods,” and their rule is not subject to earthly judgment: “he that hath the only power to make him, hath the onley power to unmake, and ye onely to obey.”34 But describing the creation of this tableaux as “a deed without a name” means shading the origin story of the Stuart dynasty with the common tropes of the Gunpowder Plot, thus slightly but significantly blurring the distinctions between the two, just as the vision of universal destruction Macbeth summons for the Sisters to do his bidding edges into the vision of the Gunpowder Plot’s effects, had it succeeded, common among both preachers and poets. This “contamination” (Goldberg’s term) of Stuart origins and terrorism are of a piece with Shakespeare’s revision in the Folio Macbeth of the Sisters themselves.35 The story of Macbeth and Banquo happening upon three supernatural beings that prophesy the origin of the Stuart dynasty first appeared in Hector Boece’s 1526 history of Scotland. Francis Thynne included the story in the Historie of Scotlande included in the 1577 edition of Holinshed’s “Chronicles”, and this legend also formed the basis for Matthew Gwinne’s allegorical playlet, performed in both Latin and English, written to entertain the King when he visited Oxford University in August, 1605.36 The close verbal parallels between the two sources and Shakespeare’s play testify to Shakespeare’s use of both texts when he wrote Macbeth, while making one crucial change.37 In Holinshed, Banquo and Macbeth encounter “thre women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of elder world,” “elder” meaning “uncanny” or “elvish,” not “old.”38 The accompanying illustration—not repeated elsewhere in the Chronicles, and so a good indicator of how the reader is supposed to visualize this scene—depicts three well-dressed, well-coifed young women, with nothing frightening or horrific about them (see Figure 1.1).

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Holinshed. Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande. London, 1577, with permission from the Fogler Library.

FIGURE 1.1 Raphael

According to Nixon’s report, Gwinne expanded on Holinshed’s version, presenting the King with “three little Boyes, coming foorth of a Castle, made all of Ivie, drest like three Nimphes.”39 “The King did very much applaud” the conceit, Nixon continues, and for good reason,40 as the “Nimphes” begin their performance by repeating the prophecy that Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters dramatize: “Word is that prophetic sisters once sang of a never-ending [sine fine] reign for your race, renowned kin.”41 The “Nimphes” also emphasize that James descends from Banquo (not Malcolm): “the prophetic sisters … foretold ever-enduring scepters for your ever-enduring progeny, Banquo, so that you might rejoice as you removed from court to forest.”42 Obviously, Shakespeare retains the substance of the encounter: as in both the Chronicles and Gwinne, his Sisters hail Macbeth three times, and predict that the Stuart line will extend “out to th’crack of doom” (4.1.117). Yet if the content is the same, the creatures delivering the prophecy in the Folio Macbeth are not. Shakespeare transforms “resembling creatures of elder world” or pretty “Nimphes” into women “So withered and so wild in their attire,/That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth” (1.3.39–40).Very much unlike the attractive figures in the illustration and the “Nimphes” in Gwinne’s entertainment, Shakespeare’s trio is so ugly their sex is not really clear: “You should be women,/And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so” (1.3.45–47). They are, as Macbeth famously says, “secret, black and midnight hags” (4.1.49).To put the matter simply, Shakespeare taints the origin myth of the Stuart dynasty, and the prophecy that the Stuart dynasty will continue “sine fine,” until the crack of doom, by having it

“A Deed Without a Name”  29

delivered by three “juggling fiends” (5.8.19) not three “Nimphes” or “creatures of elder world.” The sibyls are now “midnight hags,” and the Satanic origins of the prophecy undermine rather than confirm Stuart ideology. Shakespeare’s treatment of the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth thus constitutes a model for future treatments of terrorism. In another parallel to the post-9/11 moment, literary treatments of the Gunpowder Plot tended toward mindless patriotism rather than intelligent complexity. Such works as Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, Barnabe Barnes’ The Devil’s Charter, and Milton’s Gunpowder Plot poems respond to the Plot by literally demonizing Catholicism and insisting on English rectitude. For the Folio Macbeth, however, Shakespeare chose a different path. In place of a jingoistic attack on England’s enemies (granted, enemies who tried to blow the Parliament and everyone in it), Shakespeare wrote a play critically examining the origins of the Stuart dynasty. In addition to having the prophecy delivered by “hags” rather than nymphs, Shakespeare ends the play with Malcolm rather than Banquo’s son, Fleance, on the throne, thus setting the stage for yet another rebellion.The play, as David Kastan puts it,“uncannily collapses the distinction” between legitimate and illegitimate violence, between kings who take the throne by force and those who are crowned at Scone.43 In the Folio Mabeth, the binary oppositions endemic to Gunpowder Plot discourse are “unnervingly unsettled by the text’s compelling strategies of repetition and resemblance.”44 Just as the more sophisticated treatments of 9/11 have taken a harder look at terrorism’s origins than shouting “sneak attack!”, Shakespeare reacts to the Gunpowder Plot by writing a play that examines the roots of the Stuart dynasty, and finds them compromised by moral hypocrisy and unremitting violence.45 Far from an unadulterated compliment, the Folio Macbeth brings the Gunpowder Plot and the Stuart origin myth into such close proximity that like “the night” that is “almost at odds with morning,” it is not clear “which is which.”

The Folio Macbeth and Simon Forman There is, however, another twist to this story. The reader will, I hope, have noticed that I restrict my analysis to the Folio Macbeth, implying that there are other versions. While no alternative versions of the play itself are extant, the one piece of first-hand evidence we have of a contemporary production of Macbeth strongly suggests that the performed version of the play differed radically from the one published in 1623. Simon Forman attended four performances of Shakespeare plays at the Globe in 1611, and his recollection of Macbeth is strikingly different from the copy Heminge and Condell used for their edition of Shakespeare’s complete plays. I want to focus on one: his version of the prophecy. In the Folio, as we have seen, Shakespeare alters his sources to uglify the supernatural beings who predict Macbeth’s and Banquo’s future, with significant ideological and thematic consequences. Forman, however, records a different version of this scene: “there was to be observed first how Macbeth and Banquo, two noblemen of Scotland, riding

30  “A Deed Without a Name”

through a wood, there stood before them three women fairies or nymphs, and saluted Macbeth” (emphasis added).46 Critics generally assume that it is Forman who is confused, that he mistakes Holinshed’s “Chronicles” for Shakespeare’s play.47 But I want to suggest another possibility: the performed version of Shakespeare’s play, at least, the one Foreman witnessed (and we have no record of any other performances) presented a version of this scene much more in line with the Chronicles and Gwinne—Foreman’s use of “nymphs” suggests a familiarity with Tres Sibyllae—than with the text Heminges and Condell used for the Folio edition. And while I recognize that arguing from absence is generally not a good idea, Macbeth’s second visit to the Weird Sisters and the show of monarchs culminating in James himself, either makes no impression on Foreman (unlikely) or was not present in the version that Foreman attended (likelier). In other words, the scene in which Shakespeare both predicts that the Stuart dynasty will have no end (sine fine) and undermines it by giving the prophecy a Satanic origin— as Macduff puts it, “such welcome and unwelcome things at once/‘Tis hard to reconcile” (4.3.139–40)—was not part of the Macbeth presented by the King’s Men in 1611. It seems, in other words, the Foreman’s Macbeth was much less ideologically contestatory, much more in line with Gwinne and the Chronicles, than the Folio version of the play. At this distance and with so little evidence, we cannot determine the matter with any degree of certainty.Yet it is worth speculating whether at some point, Shakespeare either revised Macbeth for public performance to make the play ideologically correct, or revised the performed version to enhance the play’s skepticism about the Stuart origin myth. At some point (and I tend toward later revision), Shakespeare transformed nymphs into hags, thus signaling a very different approach to the play’s politics and its relationship to the Gunpowder Plot. The Folio Macbeth demonstrates how Shakespeare pioneered a sophisticated approach to terrorism, one that suggested commonalities with terrorism rather than insisting on absolute difference. While not blaming the victim, the Folio Macbeth underscores the blurry distinction between legitimate and illegitimate state violence, implying that the violence offered to the Jacobean state by the Gunpowder Plot is not something foreign, but an integral if occluded aspect of the Stuart dynasty. The end forgets its violent beginnings, and Shakespeare’s play recovers it. Yet the admittedly scanty evidence in Forman’s diary suggests that Shakespeare’s company offered for public consumption a play that had much more in common with the other Gunpowder Plot plays and poetry, perhaps understanding that a tragedy less than entirely complimentary to James would not fare very well at the box office or possibly endanger the court’s patronage. In any event, the lack of quarto editions suggests that the first version of the play was not sufficiently popular to warrant selling the copy to a publisher, and perhaps with that in mind, Shakespeare revised the play to enhance its questioning of political orthodoxy. Even for Shakespeare, it seems, in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, discretion is the better part of valor, even if it results in inferior drama.

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Notes 1 Calendar of State Papers, Venice, ed. Horatio F. Brown (London: Public Record Office, 1900), vol. 10: 289 2 There are other parallels to 9/11 as well. First, a failure to heed intelligence.TheVenetian ambassador reported that “two months ago Lord Salisbury [Robert Devereux] received anonymous letters from France, warning him to be on his guard, for a great conspiracy was being hatched by priests and Jesuits,” but these reports were ignored, “attributed to the empty-headed vanity of person who wished to seem more conversant with affairs than became them” (Calendar of State Papers, Venice, 288). Second, there was also widespread suspicion that the Gunpowder Plot was an “inside job,” as it were, because “it seems impossible that so vast a plot should have been hatched unless some great Lord was interested in it” (ibid., 293). 3 Ibid., 293. The report is dated November 21. 4 A True and Perfect Relation of the Proceedings at the Severall Arraignments of the Late Most Barbarous Traitors (London, 1606), sig. H3v. The signature numbers of this book are confused. After sig. Fff3, they restart, with no break in the text itself, at sig. E2. Fawkes’s confession belongs to the latter set of signature numbers, not the one’s at the book’s start. I have silently modified the contemporary usage of i/j and u/v when quoting from early modern texts. 5 Ibid., sig. L2v. 6 Tesimond, The Gunpowder Plot: The Narrative of Oswald Tesimond alias Greenway, trans. Francis Edwards (London: Folio Society, 1973), 54–55. Edwards suggests that Tesimond’s Italian manuscript and an English narrative by the Jesuit, John Gerard, are translations of a third manuscript, now lost. All three formed part of the Jesuit concern “to produce a counter-narrative to some at least of the reports reaching the Vatican which were not notably favorable to the Jesuits” (“The Stonyhurst Narratives of the Gunpowder Plot: An Archival Examination of Two Unique Documents,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 4.2 [1970], 101, 108). 7 Ibid., 102–103. 8 Political Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville, 148–149. See also Paul Wake, “Plotting as Subversion: Narrative and the Gunpowder Plot,” Journal of Narrative Theory 38.3 (2008), 305–307. 9 The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of November, being the next Sunday after the Discoverie of this late Horrible Treason (London, 1606), sig. C4r. 10 Historical Manuscripts Commission: Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury preserved at Hatfield House, ed. M. S. Giuseppi (London: HMSO, 1938), vol. 17, 488. 11 A True and Perfect Relation, sig. C2r. Zachary Lesser pointed out to me in private correspondence that Phillips adapts and inverts 1 Cor.9, the unknowability of God morphing into the unknowability of the Gunpowder Plot. I gratefully acknowledge his help with this point. 12 Versluys, 1; A True and Perfect Relation, sig. D3-D4r. 13 Francis Herring, Pietas Pontificia (London, 1606), title page; Michael Valesius [Wallace], Carmen Epichartiko, trans. Estelle Haan, “Milton’s In Quintum Novembris and the Anglo-Latin Gunpowder Epic: Part II: Edition and Translation of M. Wallace’s Carmen Epichartikon,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 42 (1993), 371. 14 A Comparison Betweene the Dayes of Purim and that of the Powder Treason (Oxford, 1626), sig. B1r. 15 Roy Flannagan, ed., The Riverside Milton (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 20, 214;William Kerrigan, John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon, eds., The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 198, 212; Barbara K. Lewalski and Estelle Haan, The Complete Works of John Milton:Volume III,The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 156–157, 179. The Oxford editors,

32  “A Deed Without a Name”

however, chose to construe “nova” as “recent” rather “unprecedented” or “innovative.” See also Robert Appelbaum, “Milton, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Mythography of Terror.” 16 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 8. 17 Wake, 306. 18 H.N. Paul, The Royal Play of “Macbeth” (rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1971); Gary Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Norbrook, “Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,” Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 78–116. Wilson, however, is more concerned with “the recovery of Shakespeare’s Catholic contexts” (“‘Blood will have Blood’: Regime Change in Macbeth,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 143 [2007], 23) than with Shakespeare’s specific engagement with the Gunpowder Plot. Although Lemon and I come to similar conclusions, her chapter on Macbeth in Treason by Words: Literature, Law and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 79–106, focuses on the play’s scaffold speeches. I am also indebted to Robert Appelbaum’s article, “Shakespeare and Terrorism,” Criticism 57.1 (2015): 23–45, and thank him for allowing me to read his essay in advance of publication. Recent Macbeth criticism has become either implicitly or explicitly antihistorical, and so unconcerned with the historical conditions shaping the writing and performance of Shakespeare’s plays. See, for example, Michael Bristol, “Macbeth the Philosopher: Rethinking Context,” New Literary History 42.4 (2011): 641–662 and Bryan Lowrance, “‘Modern Ecstasy’: Macbeth and the Meaning of the Political,” ELH 79.4 (2012): 823–849. 19 Norbrook, 96. 20 Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, “Shakespeare and Terror,” Shakespeare After 9/11: How a Social Trauma Reshapes Interpretation, ed. Douglas A. Brooks. Shakespeare yearbook 20 (2011), 44. See also Graham Holderness’s trenchant response to both my work on Macbeth and Robert Appelbaum’s, “Terrorism and Culture: Macbeth, 9/11 and the Gunpowder Plot”; Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 36 (2018). http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/4111 ; DOI : 10.4000/shakespeare.4111 21 Ibid., 29. Holderness and Loughrey will repeat this point in slightly different terms (“the object of terrorism is to terrorise”) in “‘Rudely Interrupted’: Shakespeare and Terrorism,” Critical Survey 19.3 (2007), 120. 22 Harry Berger, Jr., “The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation,” Making Trifles of Terrors: Rethinking Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickston (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 70–97; Jonathan Goldberg, “Speculations: Macbeth and Source,” in Shakespeare Reproduced:The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 242–264; David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 165–182. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson situate Macbeth in the context of the debates over combining Scotland and England, but omit all mention of the Gunpowder Plot (“Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the Politics of the Union,” SEL 47.2 [2007]: 379–401). 23 Holderness and Loughrey, 43. 24 Barlow, A Sermon, sig. E3v-r. 25 A True and Perfect Relation, sig. K1v. 26 Wills, Jesuits and Witches, 27. 27 I.H., [John Heath?] The Divell of the Vault. Or,The Unmasking of Murther (London, 1606), sig. C4v, C4r.The EEBO database ascribes this poem to the epigrammatist, John Heath (b. c. 1585), but the ODNB says that it is “very doubtful” he was the author. N.D.F. Pearce, “Heath, John (b. c. 1585),” rev. Christopher Burlinson, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, see ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford

“A Deed Without a Name”  33

University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/12838 (accessed April 1, 2013). See also Wills, 17–18. 28 William Gager, Pyramis, William Gager:The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Dana F. Sutton (New York: Garland, 1994), vol. 4, 153, 155 29 Norbrook, 116. 30 James, “A Speach,” 149. The phrase can also be found in the Aeneid 3.48, 4.280, and 12.868 (Sommerville, 293). 31 A True and Perfect Relation, sig. C2r. 32 Shakespeare also questions the absolutist interpretation in many other ways. For example, Malcolm neglects to mention that Macbeth too was crowned at Scone, and therefore, however he got there, was nonetheless Scotland’s legitimate monarch. On the play’s complex relations with the various political discourses current in early modern England, see Peter C. Herman, “Macbeth: Absolutism, the Ancient Constitution, and the Aporia of Politics,” The Law in Shakespeare, ed. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 208–32. 33 See Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory, 168, and Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), 131. 34 James VI/I, The Trew Law of Free of Free Monarchies, in Sommerville, ed., Political Writings, 64, 68. 35 Goldberg, 249. 36 Iain Wright, “Gwinne, Matthew (1558–1627),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/11813, accessed 27 May, 2013]. On the play’s bilingual performance, see John Nichols, ed., The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, of King James the First (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1828), vol. 1, 545, and Anthony Nixon, Oxfords Triumph (London, 1605), who notes that Gwinne’s orations were delivered “first in Latine to the King, then in English to the Queene and the young Prince” (sig. B2v). 37 On Shakespeare’s nearly verbatim incorporation of the Chronicles into his play, see Herman, 223. On Gwinne and Shakespeare, see Iain Wright, “Gwinne, Matthew (1558–1627),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 (www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11813, accessed 29 May, 2013). 38 Carroll, 141. In Boece, the term is “ferly,” meaning, “a marvel.” See Herman, 216. 39 Nixon, sig. B1r. 40 Ibid., sig. B1r. 41 Matthew Gwinne, Tres Sibyllae (1605), ed. Dana F. Sutton, www.philological.bham. ac.uk/sibyls/poem.html 42 Ibid. 43 Kastan, 174. 44 Kastan, 166. 45 Macduff, for example, is willing to accept sexual rapaciousness and unlimited greed, both faults that he admits had previously resulted in “Th’untimely emptying of the happy throne / And fall of many kings” (4.3.69–70) rather than Macbeth. See Herman, 223–224. 46 Carroll, 154. 47 See, for example, Carroll, 154. Stephen Orgel allows that “the King’s Men in 1611 were presenting a radically different Macbeth from the one that has survived,” but this is not an option he endorses: “a possibility, certainly, but one that few editors will care to entertain” (“Acting Scripts, Performing Texts,” The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage [New York: Routledge, 2002], 34). See also Graham Holderness, “‘To be Observed’: Cue One Macbeth,” Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essay in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 165–188, and Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance

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Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 150–152. On the other hand, Ingrid Benecke, in a close analysis of the differences between the Folio Macbeth and Forman’s summary, also concludes that the Folio version constitutes a revised version of the play Forman saw performed, although she leaves open the possibility that someone other than Shakespeare rewrote the play (“The Shorter Stage Version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as Seen Through Simon Forman’s Eyes,” Notes and Queries 61.2 (2014): 246–253.

2 TERRORISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY From the French Revolution to the Stevensons, Greer, James, Conrad, and the Rossetti Sisters

An Archeology of “Terrorism” The Gunpowder Plot and Macbeth deal with, in Robert Appelbaum’s phrase, terrorism before the letter.1 Meaning, the Gunpowder Plot comprised of the sort of violence, and elicited the sort of reaction, usually associated with contemporary terrorism. But when the term was first coined in France, in 1794 (migrating to England the same year), neither “terrorist” nor “terrorism” denoted a concrete thing.2 Instead, “terrorist” is a derisive term for Jacobins or supporters of Robespierre’s use of terror as state policy. Hence Edmund Burke’s formulation (often taken to be the first use of the term in English): “Thousands of those Hellhounds called Terrorists … are let loose on the people.”3 As one might expect, the earliest uses of “terrorism” pointed to the French Revolution. For example, the index for the 1836 issue of the Encyclopaedia Americana has an entry for “Terrorism” directing the reader to look under “Terror, Reign of,” where they would find an article describing Marat and Robespierre’s “system of terror [imposed] under the pretext, that the condition of France left no other means to save her.”4 But within a few short years, “terrorism” started to reach well beyond Jacobin Terror. In 1810, a letter to the editor of the Cheltenham Chronicle protesting a local tax issue warns that “the system of terrorism is placed in array against the cause of manly independence”; and a letter on South American affairs describes how “a new chief … [publicly proclaimed] that terrorism was the most efficacious means to keep the people quiet.”5 Both uses refer to government oppression, but in the former, the term is negative and a threat to liberty; in the latter, “terrorism” is a legitimate means of political control. In 1813, “terrorism” broadens to include anti-colonial violence. An article on Panama in Saunders News Letter notes that “[t]he most obstinate are the rebels of Carthagena, who … by means of terrorism … have lately entered into Marta.”6

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Clearly, “terrorism” had become a sign without a precise signifier, and so, opposite sides could lob the term at each other. Perhaps the starkest example comes in the wake of the 1839 Chartist riots. A newspaper opposing the movement wrote: “Great fears prevailed in the neighborhood among the peaceably disposed workmen, in consequence of the terrorism practiced by the Chartists who pressed men into their ranks, without compunction, and by the most reckless violence.”7 The Chartists in turn accused their antagonists of exactly the same. The pro-Chartist newspaper, the Northern Liberator, reported that Chartist representatives, seeking to enlighten workers in England’s agricultural districts, “began to wonder if they were in England or no. The very atmosphere seemed tainted with aristocracy. Tyranny and terrorism spread their gloom on every side.”8 Two points put the early history of “terrorism” into context. First, the ubiquity of “terrorism” in contemporary discourse obscures its relative rarity in the very late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries. According to the Google Books search engine (accessed July 2018), between 1800 and 1810, only 11 items included the term “terrorism” (one is by Burke), and there are no uses between 1806 and 1810. Between 1810 and 1820, there are only six usages. Between 1820 and 1830, again, 20 usages, and none for 1830. Turning to the British Newspaper Archive (accessed July 2018), we see an increasing number of uses, but “terrorism” is hardly omnipresent: 1794–1799: 4 1800–1810: 17 1811–20: 35 1821–30: 140 Second, as the quotes above suggest, while “terrorism” is rarely used positively, the term does not imply something so horrible and novel that it escapes language. Instead, aside from the specific references of the French Terror, “terrorism” broadened into a synonym for any kind of oppression and intimidation, no matter how great or small.9 For example, in 1822, after a canal boat owner fired the “old hands” and took on a new crew, he was confronted with a mob demanding that he rehire the experienced workers: “The owner was required to procure a guard of police … From this and other transactions of which we have been apprised, it would appear a regular system of terrorism has been introduced on the canal.”10 Thuggery, yes; but an unprecedented evil meant to cause widespread panic? Hardly. So when and how did the early use of “terrorism” morph into its contemporary sense? The short answer is dynamite. Alfred Nobel’s invention in 1866 (patented in 1867) allowed for unprecedented destructive power in a very small package, and this disruptive (in every sense) potential was immediately evident to nineteenthcentury radicals. At last, they had before them a weapon that could change the balance of power.11 This invention, as O’Donovan Rossa stated in his newspaper,

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the Irish World, rendered conventional warfare obsolete: “dynamite makes armies and navies a useless encumbrance to England, and gives the oppressed access to the oppressor.”12 However, dynamite’s true potential as a weapon of terror was realized only when the Fenians decided to embark on a bombing campaign that focused on symbolic targets, as opposed to massive loss of life or the destruction of London, as an 1880 article in the Irish World once suggested.13 True, the Russian oppositionist group, Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Will”), adopted dynamite as their favored means of assassinating Czar Alexander II (they succeeded in 1881), and Nikolai Morozov referred to the campaign against the Czar as a “terroristic struggle [that] presents really a new form of struggle.”14 But while the means were different, the ends were not: killing the Czar, with all due respect to Morozov, is the same as any other instance of tyrannicide, the assassination of Czar Alexander II not differing qualitatively from the assassination of Julius Caesar or King Eglon (Judges 3:15–26).15 The Fenian decision, however, in the early 1880s to replace killing political figures with bombing symbolically important structures and buildings caused a nearly unprecedented reaction.16 Starting in 1883, the Fenians set off explosions at Victoria Station, Nelson’s Column, the Tower of London, Scotland Yard, the London Underground, and even the Houses of Parliament. By accident or design, very few people died in these incidents.17 But, proving M. Vladimir’s observation in The Secret Agent that terrorist outrages “need not be especially sanguinary” (23), the low mortality rate did not matter, as Victorians believed that a new form of warfare had entered the world.18 Recalling the reaction to the Gunpowder Plot, English newspapers were filled with denunciations of the perpetrators as evil, insane, beyond the pale, exhibiting a depravity never seen before in human history.19 Consequently, the usage of “terrorism” spiraled upward. Between 1860 and 1869, and 1870 and 1879, according to the British Newspaper Archive, the number of newspaper references to terrorism held steady at about 7,497 and 7,386 respectively, much more than in the earlier part of the century, but not advancing either. But between 1880 and 1889, the number triples to 22,374. More importantly, the rhetoric of the newspaper articles also shifts markedly from earlier usages.20 An editorial entitled “Dynamite” in the Pall Mall Gazette begins by noting sadly that the possibility of being blown to bits “has been added to the dangers of modern life,” and proceeds to state how dynamite terrorists are beyond reason:21 The men whom the Americans describe as ‘dynamite fiends’ and who have obtained across the Channel the sobriquet of ‘dynamitards’ are not amenable to political considerations. Nor is there any prospect that if Home Rule were granted to-morrow a similar class of criminals would not arise to prosecute a dynamite campaign in the heart of London in revenge of some grievance, real or imaginary, of the few against the many. … Terrorism by dynamite must therefore be regarded like cholera or the small-pox, and

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dealt with, like those epidemics, by whatever means may be available for the purpose. Similarly, an editorial in the Shields Daily Gazette denounced “The Outrages in London” as senseless (“the object of the perpetrators—if they have any object”), and called on Ireland’s leaders to dissociate themselves from “a course of scoundrelism for which barbarism has no parallel, and the English tongue no words strong enough to describe. This is no ordinary sort of criminality.”22 The Derby Mercury reported on a sermon delivered at St. Margaret’s (a church next to Westminster Abbey, where one of the bombs exploded) by Archdeacon Farrar. The clergyman repeated the charge that the attacks are not only senseless (“The attempts of these men are one of the most frightful signs of the times, in their aimless malignity”), but unprecedented in the annals of criminality:23 They are the crimes not of men but human fiends; their cold-blooded murders are the shame and abhorrence of mankind, and stigmatize such miscreants as the common enemy of all the human race. God had, however, overruled and frustrated the possible results of conspirators so devilish and vile, that some of the blackest crimes which the pages of history record look pale before such wickedness as this. Thanks to the invention of timed fuses, the bombs were put in place hours before they went off, and so catching the “human fiends” was no easy task. The Pall Mall Gazette editorialist put his trust in the “vigilance and intelligence of our police,” but by 1885, that trust had evidently turned to dismay as the police had failed to catch the bombers.24 An anonymous article in Charles Dickens’ journal, All the Year Round, came to their defense, arguing that “skirmishing,” to use Rossa’s term, constituted a new crime, one for which the police were entirely unprepared because nothing like it had happened before:25 Dynamiting is so far [un]like ordinary crimes that it is difficult of detection in proportion to its ease of commission, and how easy of commission it may be to any savage depraved enough of its consequences to others, a little reflection will make evident. But it is not an ordinary crime, and it is a new one. Assassination of individual rulers, or ministers, we have had from of old, but the modern dynamiter, the wholesale indiscriminate assassin, in comparison with whom the Thug was an embodiment of sweetness and light—this monstrosity, until it sprang into existence, was a creature that the ordinary mind was incapable of imagining. So abhorrent and antihuman a crime as dynamiting was undreamed of in the philosophy alike of those who organized our detective force and those who framed the laws by which its powers of action are limited. Any detective force might well be unable to immediately hunt down such abnormal criminals as dynamiters.

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The enormity and unprecedented nature of dynamite bombs led to the conflation of Irish nationalism and other forms of radicalism even before anarchists started using dynamite bombs for their own campaigns. Granted, some papers distinguished between the two, but only as a rhetorical ploy aimed at further demonizing the Fenians rather than a genuine attempt at understanding the distinctions.26 An untitled editorial in The Times asserted that anarchists, while they have to be condemned, at least committed acts consistent “with the elementary forms of civilization”; the assassination of ministers or sovereigns may be deplorable, “but such designs are at least intelligible.”27 The Irish bombers, however, are completely unintelligible. The Irish-American “dynamite fiend,” unlike the anarchist, no longer belongs to Western civilization; he targets: crowds of the laboring classes, of holiday-makers, of ordinary travellers, and sweeps them at random into the meshes of his murderous plot with as little concern for their personal merits or demerits as the Thug feels for those of the victims of his deadly cult.28 Anarchists “are subject to limits of their own,” but Irish nationalists have no limits.29 Indeed, “the worst acts of mediaeval tyrants and of savage tribes have now been surpassed by the blind, though calculating malignity” of these terrorists.30 Both Fenians and anarchists “are excited by possession of the new power, are using it, and still more, are threatening to use it, with results which positively intoxicate them till their consciences are paralyzed as by a strong drug.”31 A statement by a Russian official, reported by Reuters and then reprinted in numerous newspapers, called for a unified response to dynamite plots, regardless of the actor: “At present each Government has to fight singly against the common enemy— Anarchist, Fenian, Nihilist, whatever they call themselves.”32 Similarly, an untitled editorial in The Birmingham Daily Post finds no distinction between “the Anarchist, Fenian, Nihilist, or Invincible”; the “state of mind” of whoever funds these groups “is quite unintelligible, except on the supposition that he is affected by insanity.”33 The question I want to look at now is how the terrorist campaigns of the Victorian era were represented in fiction, focusing on the first responses—Robert Louis and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson, The Dynamiter; Tom Greer, A Modern Daedalus; Henry James, The Princess Casamassima; and then the last reactions to dynamite terror, “Isabel Meredith” (the pen name for Olivia and Helen Rossetti), and Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent. As we shall see, each complicates the dominant view in its own way.

The Dynamiter The Dynamiter brings together several interrelated stories about three young men who, in search of money and occupation, become detectives after learning that 200 pounds would be “paid to any person giving information as the identity and

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whereabouts of a man observed yesterday in the neighborhood of the Green Park” (324).34 After the protagonists, Paul Somerset, Harry Desborough, and Edward Challoner, go their separate ways, two (Chaloner and Desborough) meet the radical Clara Luxmore, while the third (Somerset) encounters Mrs. Luxmore, Clara’s mother. All of the book’s narratives concern terrorism in one way or another. Clara Luxmore twice weaves tales (the “Story of the Destroying Angel” and the “Story of the Fair Cuban”) intended to hide her true identity and suborn Challoner and Desborough into helping her Fenian colleagues. Mrs. Luxmore tells Somerset how she saved her tenant, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, from two anarchist assassins, and, on a whim, she gives Somerset the use of her mansion; Somerset then rents rooms to a mysterious stranger, “Mr. Jones,” who turns out to be “Zero,” the chief Fenian conspirator and bomb-maker, albeit one with a poor record of success. The Stevensons establish their revulsion against Fenian “skirmishing” by dedicating the novel to the two policemen, “Messrs. Cole and Cox,” injured in the January 24, 1885 Westminster Hall bombing. They are also horrified by the Irish leader and parliamentarian, Charles Parnell, for refusing to denounce Fenian terrorism.35 Yet, oddly, they also say that the dynamiters preserve “some features of nobility” (315). We will soon see what the Stevensons mean by that phrase. Moving into the narrative, Challoner allows Clara to induce him into delivering money to her fellow conspirators in Glasgow, even though Challoner understands that “[e]vil was certainly afoot; evil, secrecy, terror and falsehood were the conditions and the passions of the people among whom he had begun to move” (381). Similarly, “Mr. Jones” and his associates “weigh unpleasantly” on Somerset’s mind:“A sense of something evil, irregular, and underhand, haunted and depressed him” (427), leading him to suspect that he “dwelt under the same roof as secret malefactors” (430). And toward the novel’s end, after Clara confesses her love to Harry Desborough, she renounces her previous identity: “what I am I dare not even name to you in words. Indeed, until today, until the sleepless watches of last night, I never grasped the depth and foulness of my guilt” (512). So the Stevensons appear to have no sympathy at all with Irish nationalism or the means employed by the Fenians to achieve their goals.Yet the Stevensons also leave the door open to a more sympathetic understanding of terrorism. Mrs. Luxmore, for example, follows convention by not distinguishing between Irish nationalism and European movements: they are all equally contemptible. She tells Paul Somerset that her daughter, Clara, absconded from home because “some whim about oppressed nationalities—Ireland, Poland, and the like—has turned her brain” (401). But the ensuing encounter with two anarchist assassins and Prince Florizel shows a less dismissive attitude. Unable to carry out his oath to assassinate Lord Luxmore, an unnamed radical tries to take poison, and after he is revived, tells his story. He became a revolutionary because of his “passion for the lost” and because

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he is “a hater of injustice” (411). Since the powerful cannot reform themselves, he joins the resistance: I had observed the course of history; I knew the burgess, our ruler of today, to be base, cowardly and dull; I saw him, in every age, combine to pull down that which was immediately above and to prey upon those that were below … [therefore] I enrolled myself among the enemies of this unjust and doomed society. (411–412) The would-be assassin may have his doubts about terrorism but they in no way erase or excuse society’s failings: “Horrible was the society with which we warred, but our own means were not less horrible” (412). Both radicalism and “this unjust and doomed society” are repellant, which implicitly grants the legitimacy of the radical cause, if not its methods. Nor does the Prince recoil from his would-be killer as someone obviously mad or bad. Instead, he admires the man and his motivations. After the would-be assassin collapses, the Prince wonders if “a sympathy with ideas, surely not ignoble in themselves, [should] conduct a man to this dishonourable death” (408), and after the radical is revived, the Prince continues to see him and his politics as both right and tragic: “it was in no ungenerous spirit that you brought these burdens on yourself; and when I see you so nobly to blame, so tragically punished, I stand like one reproved” (414). Clara Luxmore’s two narratives are equally ambivalent. In “The Destroying Angel,” she casts herself as a woman whose parents were destroyed by Mormon perfidy. She recounts how an aged “Dr. Grierson” supposedly rescues her from becoming “the fiftieth bride of some ignoble elder” (357) by sending her to London, where she will meet a more appropriate groom. But the groom is in fact Dr. Grierson, who reveals that he will marry her after restoring himself to youth via a chemical potion that he has nearly perfected. Unfortunately, the potion explodes; she flees, and now must ask Challoner for his aid. All of this, of course, is pure moonshine, as Challoner knows: “It was an excellent story; and it might be true, but he believed it was not” (370). In addition to demonstrating that Clara is a liar (or an excellent creator of fictions), the Stevensons conflate Fenianism and Mormonisn, which was reviled in the nineteenth century as a murderous, sexually depraved cult whose members used occult powers to achieve their goals.36 While they seem to be entirely different, the Stevensons collapse them through one key change. Mormons, according to their lurid depictions, relied on mesmerism or violence.37 But Dr. Grierson, like the Fenians and the Anarchist bomb-makers, relies on science: “He had set up a laboratory in the back part of the house, where he toiled day and night at his elixir” (367). Grierson’s previous failures result from “the impurity” of the ingredients (367), and exactly like dynamite, unless the ingredients are precisely

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mixed, the result will be “singularly unstable” (367). Indeed, Clara explains away the “dull and jarring detonation” Challoner witnesses—in fact, another of Zero’s failed “infernal engines—as the “spontaneous … explosion” (369) of the potion in Grierson’s “large, round-bellied, crystal flask” (369). But if the first narrative rejects terrorism as identical to a demonic cult, Clara’s second narrative, “The Fair Cuban,” goes in a very different direction by reminding the reader of the British Empire’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade, and (recalling the political sentiments of the would-be assassin, which we should remember the Prince endorses) the oppression of the poor by the rich. In this story, Clara pretends to be “Teresa,” the daughter of a Spanish plantation owner and one of his slaves. Her father, who has been less than entirely honest in his business dealings, dies, and his estate comes into the hands of “Mr. Caulder.” Space does not allow for a full explication of the plot, which involves greed, slave rebellions, and a miraculous tornado. However, the key is that the narrative depends on the European, including English, complicity in the commodification of human beings.38 Teresa’s father may regret that he had “accepted and profited by this great crime of slavery” (473), but his regret comes only after slavery ceases to work to his benefit and threatens to ensnare his daughter. His anguish also makes explicit the reduction of humanity to the status of vendible things. He cannot free his daughter because she is “a chattel; a marketable thing; and worth—heavens, that I should say such words!—worth money” (473). One could interpret this scene as just desserts on the Spanish for their role in Cuban slavery. However, the Stevensons broaden their scope to include England (notwithstanding the empire’s role since the early 1800s in dismantling the slave trade). After Teresa entices Caulder into entering a jungle fatal to all Europeans, she muses on how “this oppressor, through the very arts and sophistries he had abused, to quiet the rebellion of his conscience and to convince himself that slavery was natural, fell like a child into the trap I laid for him” (480–481). England may eventually oppose the slave trade, but the English imported over 4,000 slaves to Cuba during their yearlong occupation of the island in 1762, expanding the planation system and strengthening “the chains of human bondage and racial slavery.”39 Teresa’s father tells her to escape by finding “an English yacht [that] has for some days been hovering” off Cuba’s coast and owned by “Sir George Greville, “whom I slightly know, to whom ere now I have rendered unusual services” (474). By “unusual services,” Teresa’s father means that he helped fence the jewels Sir George purloins from all over the world in his capacity as a pirate. But Sir George also plans, when he returns home, to enter “parliament, and place at the service of the nation, his experience of marine affairs” (499). When Teresa asks how he can square government service with such criminality, he responds with cheerful cynicism that there is little difference between the two: A yacht … is a chartered nuisance. Who smuggles? Who robs the salmon rivers of the west of Scotland? Who cruelly beats the keepers if they dare

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to intervene? The crews and the proprietors of yachts. All I have done is extend the line a trifle. (499) On this point, Sir George, the would-be assassin, and Prince Florizel agree. So, presumably, would the anarchists Johann Most, Sergei Nachaev, and Peter Kropotkin. The Stevensons’ treatment of Zero, the Fenian bomb-maker, encapsulates their ambivalence toward terrorism. To be sure, Somerset reacts to him with the same “unmingled horror and disgust” (452) we have seen in the press toward Irish dynamiters. Zero is a “madman” (515); his behavior “insane” (516); Somerset burns to see Zero “on the gallows” (520); and he regards Zero “as a reptile, whom I would rejoice, whom I long, to stamp under my heel” because he is an “incomparable monster” (458). But rather than depicting Zero as a subhuman cretin, as Irish nationalists often were in the 1880s, the Stevensons invent a civilized and urbane figure.40 After Zero finds Somerset in his room, where the landlord has discovered Zero’s many disguises, his bomb-making materials, and the newspaper with the reward for his capture circled, the terrorist does not respond with violence or vitriol, as one might expect. Instead, Zero calmly speaks to Somerset as a fellow member of England’s upper class: “And yet, sir, when I look upon your face, I feel certain that I can not be deceived: certain that in spite of all, I have the honor and pleasure of speaking to a gentleman” (436). Zero even sees himself as a figure from literature: “If you love romance (as artists do), few lives are more romantic than that of the obscure individual now addressing you. Obscure yet famous. Mine is an anonymous, infernal glory. By infamous means, I work toward my bright purpose” (437). Zero even regards himself as having “something of the poet in my nature” (440). As Deaglán Ó Donghaile astutely notes, Zero embodies “the artistic consciousness outlined by Walter Pater in his 1873 collection of essays on aesthetics, The Renaissance.”41 As one might expect, the contrast between Zero’s seemingly gentle, sophisticated demeanor, and his aims (“we await the fall of England, the massacre of thousands, the yell of fear and execration” [439]); indifference to mass casualties (“War, my dear sir, is indiscriminate. War spares not the child; it spares not the barrow of the harmless scavenger” [440]); and understanding of the fundamental nature of terrorism (“whatever may strike fear, whatever may confound or paralyze the activities of the guilty nation, barrow or child, imperial Parliament or excursion steamer, is welcome to my simple plans” [440–441]),42 leaves Somerset entirely baffled: “Somerset, glass in hand, contemplated the strange fanatic before him, and listened to his heated rhapsody with indescribable bewilderment. He looked him the face with curious particularity; saw there the marks of education; and wondered the more profoundly” (437). To be sure, the Stevensons satirize Zero and his artistic pretensions. Far from a master terrorist, he has “not once succeeded” in blowing up anything significant (440) except himself at the novel’s end: “of the Irish patriot or the Gladstone bag

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no adequate remains were to be found” (522). Yet, the Stevensons’ departure from the conventional view of dynamiters encourages the reader to grant, in Richard Jackson’s phrase,“the real humanity of the terrorist figure.”43 While one could dismiss Zero as purely delusional, his sophistication, his intelligence, his evident hurt feelings at Somerset’s refusal of friendship, make it very hard for the reader (this reader, at least) not to like him.44 And as the television critic, Alison C. Herman, puts it in a not dissimilar context: “Expanding our parameters for which characters deserve empathy also means expanding our ideas of which experiences deserve to be treated empathetically.”45 In other words, as much as the Stevensons despise terrorism and Irish nationalism, The Dynamiter also treats terrorist motivations sympathetically and Zero himself as something more than a villain engaging in “aimless malignity.”

A Modern Daedalus Tom Greer’s novel, A Modern Daedalus, also published in 1885, has a very simple plot.46 The narrator, Jack O’Halloran, invents a pair of wings that allow a man to fly. His father and brothers (the mother died some years earlier), radicalized by the Irish Land Wars, immediately see Jack’s invention as the perfect means to defeat the British forces in Ireland. Jack refuses, they banish him, and he flies to London, causing a sensation. The British government offers Jack up to a million pounds for his invention, and when Jack refuses, they imprison him. Freed by one of his brothers, Jack immediately joins the anti-British insurgency, creates a squad of flying dynamiters, and uses his invention to drop high explosives on the British forces occupying Ireland, thus gaining Irish independence.47 Like The Dynamiter, A Modern Daedalus begins with an introduction by the author denouncing terrorism: “Let no reader suppose that this book is the work of an enemy of England,” Greer declares, “for the objects, and still more for the methods of the so-called ‘dynamite party,’ I have the deepest abhorrence.”48 Yet the novel itself goes in a very different direction, as an early reviewer ruefully noted: “Although he professes himself in his preface not to be an enemy of England, Mr. Greer appears to entertain but little sympathy for her.”49 First, some background. Greer sets this novel in the context of the first “Land War” (1879–1883). A combination of bad weather and cheap imports ended the economic prosperity of the previous decade, resulting in small tenant farmers unable to pay their rent and a concomitant rise in evictions. But many refused to leave or pay rent, and the resistance turned into an insurgency with numerous agrarian “outrages” that ranged from assaults on land agents to threatening landlords with murder.The unrest quickly took on nationalist overtones, and the fight against landlords transformed into a fight against British rule. Peace was more or less achieved only when Gladstone’s government, with the help of Charles Parnell, passed the Irish Land Act of 1881, which, among other provisions, established a commission for adjudicating rents.50

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But in Greer’s fiction, all this progress has been wiped out. Setting his novel a year or two in the future (Jack’s introduction is dated February 30, 1887 [xvi]), Greer projects that Gladstone has lost power, much to Ireland’s sorrow: His successor belonged to the opposite political party, with which it was an article of faith that Ireland only needed ‘rest’ and the repression of agitation. He reversed at once the action of the land-courts, suppressed the ‘disloyal’ newspapers, and forbade public meetings, filling the country with police and soldiery, and preserving a tranquility to which he triumphantly pointed as a proof that nothing was needed but the strong hand. Rents rose above their old figure, evictions were of daily occurrence, capital was attracted in abundance, and the Tory millennium of wealthy landlords and a starving peasantry began to be realized. (8–9) Jack sees the bitter results of English land policies in Ireland on his flights around the countryside. He understands that the “altered aspect of the landscape” revealed “the influx of capital, and the conversion of small holdings into great sheep-farms and deer-forests” (13). But economic improvement for the few meant terrible hardship for many: The poverty and misery were to be found elsewhere … principally in the slums of such great towns as Belfast, Liverpool and Glasgow, to which they [the evicted] had drifted, to form the lowest, poorest and most turbulent stratum of the population. (13–14) From the sky, Jack sees “roofless cottages where I remembered to have seen happy families” (14), and on one occasion, he sees an eviction in progress: the smoke rising from the still smouldering thatch that had been stripped off by the ‘crowbar brigade,’ and saw the houseless wretches who had lived under it standing like statues of despair upon the roadside among their broken and worthless furniture. (14) Consequently, the O’Halloran family, once “staunch supporters of the English connection … now threw themselves with stern energy into the popular movement” (9), and this means armed resistance, including “dynamite bombs of New  York manufacture” (10). Far from exhibiting, as an 1883 editorialist puts it, “intellectual denseness and petrified conscience,”51 recourse to dynamite represents an appropriate reaction to English depredations.

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Furthermore, Jack becomes increasingly disenchanted with England. At first, he distinguishes between the party in power and the state. Jack tells his father, “I don’t hate the English; I love and admire them. … I hate their present government, but not the nation itself; it is the greatest nation under heaven, and the freest” (50). However, once Jack arrives in London and witnesses the panicked reaction to his wings, his opinion quickly changes. Jack is shocked to hear proposals in the House of Commons—“the bulwark of Freedom, and the Mother of Representative Institutions!” (104)—that his invention needs to be suppressed because of the danger it poses to England’s physical and economic security, concluding that this debate “presented England’s selfishness and tyranny, and cynical disregard of all interests but her own” (104–105).Wondering about the wisdom of dealing with a government “which would be compelled by their own supporters to try to establish some control over my action” (125), Jack starts to feel “all the old hatred with which in my Irish home I had learnt to regard them, rising strong within my breast” (126). And with good reason. The English public, as a newspaper editor says, is hardly thinking rationally: “‘Jingoism’ is greatly in the ascendant just now, especially in London, and three-fourths of the press will be down on you as a traitor and a public enemy” (133).52 Even worse, the government decides to imprison him unless Jack joins their side. As the Home Secretary says: “If you will not work in their service, they cannot allow you to work at all” (163–164), leading Jack to wonder, “Why did I ever come to this selfish and ungrateful country? I am justly punished for my own want of patriotism” (167). It should be clear by now that Greer’s A Modern Daedalus does exactly what so many contemporary critics say is missing from the terrorist novel. Far from depicting Irish nationalists in “derogatory, dehumanizing and demonizing terms,” Greer goes out of his way to show them as rational, even admirable.53 And far from portraying their acts as resulting from psychological derangement, A Modern Daedalus represents terrorist violence as a sane response to an intolerable situation.54 As Jack’s father says, “we can’t live with our present rents, God help us! And things are getting worse and worse … They leave us no other way” (29, 31). Arguing with his son over the propriety of killing a particularly nasty land agent, Tom Crawford, who had just finished evicting a family, an act Jack initially calls “a cowardly murder” and “unreasoning violence” (29, 30), his father delivers a fullthroated defense of the Irish taking up arms against English oppression: ‘Murder!’ he answered, sternly; ‘who talks of murder? Put the saddle on the right horse, boy. Was it murder to turn old Biddy Macarthy at eighty on the roadside, where she died within a week? Was it murder to turn out Pat Heraghty’s wife, with her baby a day old, to tramp twenty miles through the snow to Letterkenny last Christmas, and to drop with old and hunger on the road? Call such things as that by their right name, and that’s murder; but when the murderer gets the bullet he deserves, it’s God’s justice, if it isn’t man’s.’ (29–30)

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A reader in 1885 looking to this book for a confirmation that the Fenians are not “men but human fiends … the common enemy of all the human race” would be sorely disappointed.55 However, it should be equally clear that this novel does not concern placing dynamite bombs in London. Instead, Jack’s method of using a flying squadron to destroy the British forces in Ireland “is identified as open warfare, in explicit contrast to the clandestine terrorism of the Fenians.”56 So, does this novel function as a critique of terrorism, of the “methods of the so-called ‘dynamite party’”? (v). Does it distinguish between “the employment of dynamite in open war from its use as the instrument of secret murder and assassination”? (v). I would argue no to both questions. First, Greer (following convention, if not reality) carefully conflates Irish nationalism with other forms of bomb-throwing radicalism. When Jack returns home after college, he discovers his father and brothers filled with a literature of whose very existence I was previously unaware, but of which they were as keen students as I myself was of mathematical and physical science. The whole history of Russian Nihilism, of German Socialism, of the Italian Carbonari, or the French Commune, was at their fingers’ ends. (7) And the O’Halloran family includes “dynamite bombs of New York manufacture” in the “immense armoury of modern weapons” (10) they have amassed to fight the British.The O’Hallorans, in other words, belong to “the dynamite party,” and presumably, they have used these bombs or intend to use them. Which brings me to my second point. Dynamite bombs and dynamite outrages are now part of London’s mental landscape. After Jack lands on top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the newspapers immediately assume there is a “great dynamite plot to blow up St. Paul’s” (81). Jack wonders at the inventive genius of the writers who, without evidence, divine that he belongs to “a dynamite conspiracy, and the police were at that moment on the roof of St. Paul’s, searching for the infernal machine I had been seen to carry there” (82). In other words, infernal machines have become conventional. But as Michael Frank brilliantly observes, terrorism is as much about the future as the past: “To achieve its defining effect—collective fear of (more) violence to come—terrorism has always relied on the belief that the next attack is impending, and that it could happen anywhere, anytime.”57 I would add one more item to this list: terrorism, to achieve its full effect, must also use something new, something that “the ordinary mind was incapable of imagining.”58 By 1885, placing dynamite bombs in culturally significant places had become, alas, imaginable. But despite their initial reception, dynamite bombs are not enough to achieve Irish independence. The same applies to Dick O’Halloran’s adopting the Boer tactic of

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using hidden sharpshooters to engage the enemy from a great distance.59 That, too, is now “imaginable.” Dynamite bombs dropped from the air, on the other hand, represents something entirely new, entirely unprecedented, and in Greer’s fiction, they constitute the next iteration of terrorism. Dynamite was supposed to be a “revolutionary superweapon” that would “provide the humblest revolutionary with the means of violence to rival the rifles and cannons of the state.”60 It would, as O’Donovan Rossa said, render armies and navies obsolete, and allow the bombers to escape without risk to themselves.61 However, even though the O’Hallorans already have “dynamite bombs of New York manufacture” (10), they greet the news of Jack’s invention with the same rhetoric used initially for dynamite.This invention, his father says, “will ensure the triumph of Old Ireland” (35); and as dynamite promised, but has obviously has failed to do, the wings will erase England’s military advantage: “we are so weak and so few in comparison with the enemy. But give us a weapon like this, and we will soon put an end to it!” (36); slightly later, Jack’s father reiterates the point: this invention of yours will greatly advance matters. We can now look forward with hope to the issue of a conflict, for it will increase our strength a hundred-fold, and make a hundred men more than a match for ten thousand. It alters the aspect of the question entirely. (48) Adapting the common refrain of referring to dynamite bombs as “infernal machines,” Jack refers to bombs dropped from the sky as “infernal rain” (201). Jack’s father, of course, is right, and a flying squadron dropping bombs on the British forces and navy has exactly the effect he predicts: the enemy is completely destroyed, and what is more, the squadron, like Rossa’s skirmishers, remain an invisible, insurmountable force. A British soldier recounts: There was such a lot of dust and smoke that everyone was blinded by it.We couldn’t tell where it was coming from. We couldn’t see anything, or tell where to turn to, or what to do. If there had been any enemy before us we would have charged through it all and thought nothing of it; but you might was well have tried to fight an earthquake. (223) It could be argued that there is a fundamental difference between Greer’s aerial bombing and the terrorism practiced by the Fenians: the former attack only combatants, whereas the latter’s bombs threaten indiscriminate violence. However, Jack’s invention allows for the “wholesale destruction of human lives,” in the words of an 1885 editorial, that people feared Fenian terrorism would cause, but

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did not.62 Furthermore, the graphic descriptions of the terrible damage inflicted on the British (“As for the killed, they could not be counted. You came one a head here, and a leg there, and half a trunk somewhere else. It was ghastly” [214]) renders such a distinction meaningless. In other words, Jack’s invention allows for the realization of dynamite’s potential to cause the “wholesale indiscriminate” slaughter that the popular press ascribed to dynamite.63 And Jack knows it, as at the end of his tale, he reflects on his invention in exactly the same terms used by the author of “Detectives and Their Work” to talk about dynamite terrorism: his wings introduced “a new and unprecedentedly destructive method of warfare” (233), and he feels a little sick about it. Which brings me to my final point about A Modern Daedalus. On the one hand, Greer’s novel does something that remains very unusual: the book unequivocally “gives primary voice to the views of the terrorist” and allows “the violent subaltern”—in this case, the Irish subject—“to speak on an equal footing directly to the counterterrorist,” which would be the British reading public.64 Richard Jackson also proposes that “narrative can be an aid to the practice of reflexivity.”65 Once more, one can see this process at work in A Modern Daedalus in that the novel might allow the British reader, confronted with the Fenian bombing campaign in London and elsewhere, to put him- or herself in the mind of an Irish population subject to evictions and so, understand why they have taken such unprecedentedly violent acts. However, the novel also asks the Irish resistance to practice “reflexivity” by making explicit the horror aerial bombing unleashes. So long as the Irish insurgents use rifles, the violence remains controlled and precise. Even though three policemen accompany Tom Crawford, and all three are “returning from an eviction” (20) and thus equally culpable, Dan O’Halloran shoots only the agent, and he uses binoculars to “make sure that the right man had fallen” (22). In the next incident, more people die, but again, the violence is precisely directed: “three landlords were shot in rapid succession in different parts of the country. All were killed in the same way-by rifle shots from a distance so great that the assassins invariably succeeded in escaping without ever being seen” (60). When the insurgency moves from individual assassination to confronting a larger armed force, again, they do not engage in indiscriminate slaughter. Seeking to prevent an “extensive eviction” (136) that would be enforced by “an unusually large force—fifty mounted policemen and the same number of foot-soldiers” (136), plus the landlord and various resident magistrates, Dan first delivers a warning, and then kills only the person who defies the warning. Even when the battle starts in earnest, the insurgents first aim at the officers, and after they are killed, offer amnesty to the surviving soldiers, provided they swear to “not bear arms against Ireland” (142). But once the bombs start falling, the destruction beggars description. After the first bombing run on a British fort, Jack says that “it was perhaps well that the

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immediate effects were thus concealed from our eyes” (201) because when the smoke cleared, “a scene of desolation met our eyes” and he feels “sickened … at the spectacle” (202). Things only get worse, and they reach a climax when Jack’s squadron attacks a British encampment with a combination of dynamite and “watering cans of petrol,” creating a firestorm whose destructive effects surpass all description: I have not the imagination of Dante, and I cannot picture to my readers a scene such as even the author of the ‘Inferno’ could not have painted. … I still seem to see hurrying crowds of figures, some shining like red-hot metal under the fierce glare, others black like stage devils against a background of raging flame … I heard, thank Heaven! No human voice to haunt in the after years; every cry, if there were time to cry, was drowned in the crackling roar of the sudden conflagration. (237–238) A Modern Daedalus leaves us with an unresolved paradox. On the one hand, Jack comes to think of dropping dynamite bombs from the air as Satanic (“the wings [we] used were of the form attributed by superstition to devils, rather than to angels” [239]); he takes no “feelings of pride or satisfaction” (233) in the destruction he has wrought; (“One fellow was dug out with almost his whole face blown away—hardly the semblance of a feature left—and yet he was alive, and the doctors say will be likely to recover. What a recovery!” [214]). In sum, “the whole business is inexpressibly shocking and revolting to me” (214). He fully understands why the English press would describe him in exactly the terms used for the Fenian skirmishers: “one who had introduced a mode of warfare at which humanity shuddered; as, in short, a fiend in human shape and an enemy of the human race” (253). At the same time, however, Jack accepts the necessity of both war and introducing “a new and unprecedentedly destructive method of warfare” (232). Ireland’s President says that to achieve independence, they have to “utterly [destroy] the force opposed to us in the North” (226), and Jack, however regretfully, complies, even while rejecting the proposition, common in the newspapers, that dynamite constitutes an illegitimate form of warfare: I hate the necessity of war. I have no pride in victory. But when men do make war, they ought to be in earnest … To say that they may make war, indeed, but that they must not make it too effectively; that to kill a man with a solid bullet is legitimate, but to wound him with an explosive one is atrocious; that to blow your enemy to fragments with gunpowder is civilised warfare, but to employ dynamite for the same purpose is worthy only of savages; is a species of cant born of the idea that war is a magnificent game for kings and nobles, and must be carried on under rules that disguise

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its essentially revolting nature, and prevent it from being too dangerous or disagreeable to them. (247) Jack even expresses his gratitude for “the rare good fortune to be at the same time one of the most illustrious patriots and benefactors of my species” (253–254) A Modern Daedalus, in sum, confronts dynamite bombing by speaking from the perspective of the terrorist and instigating a critical reflection on terrorism—no small achievement, given that this novel is one of the first to deal with the topic, and Greer did not write another piece of fiction.

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima The Princess Casamassima (1886) does not concern Ireland, but the London anarchist underground.66 The book focuses on a young bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who comes from a mixed and unfortunate parentage; his mother, a lower-class French woman, killed his father, an English lord. The opposites in his past lead him to become “a strange mixture of contradictory impulses” (465).67 Initially, Hyacinth aligns himself with radicals and vows to kill a duke when given the order. Later, he realizes that the radicals would destroy “[t]he treasures, the felicities, the splendours, the successes, of the world” (445). Unable to reconcile these opposites, or to choose between them, he shoots himself at the novel’s end. Henry James, best known for highly complex novels about England’s upperclass, hardly seems the kind of person who would sympathize with terrorism, and most critics assume that the novel adopts a fundamentally conservative position.68 There are certainly good reasons for this view. In A Little Tour of France (1884), James describes how at Lyons he read all sorts of disagreeable things in certain radical newspapers which I had bought at the bookstall . … The tone of these organs is rarely edifying . … I wondered, as I looked through them whether I was losing all my radicalism; and then I wondered whether, after all, I had any to lose.69 Bomb-throwing anarchists and nihilists threaten, James thought, everything essential for the creation of the art he prized above all else. America, as he explains in his 1878 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, cannot produce anything on the scale and grandeur of St. Peter’s Basilica because it lacks the necessary hierarchical institutions: No sovereign, no court, … no aristocracy … no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manners, nor old-country houses … no great Universities nor public schools—No Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; [hence] no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures.70

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One does not have to look very hard to see these attitudes reflected in James’s novel. Echoing A Little Tour, the narrator clearly does not hold the intellectual acuity of the radical gatherings in high esteem: There was plenty of palaver at the ‘Sun and Moon’ [the café where they gather]; there were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place, and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much insistent ignorance and flat-faced vanity. (280) Writing to the Princess Casamassima (an aristocrat who has left her husband, taken up revolutionary causes, and uses Hyacinth as both an object of study and guide to London’s lower classes) after his sojourn in Paris (paid for by a small inheritance), Hyacinth expresses his disillusionment with radicalism and his horror at the “invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of redistribution” (397). So it would seem that James reacted to the explosions rocking London from 1881 to 1885 by writing a novel depicting terrorists as barbarians at the gate. However, such a view would miss James’s ability to endorse the radical critique of society even as he thinks their methods, as the unnamed radical in The Dynamiter puts it, “horrible.”71 In his 1884 essay, “The Art of Fiction,” James enjoined the future novelist to be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” and James describes Hyacinth Robinson in exactly these terms: he is a “youth on whom nothing was lost” (164).72 And what is not “lost” on “the little bookbinder” (James’s infuriatingly condescending phrase) is his exclusion from culture and the larger inequities of English society. His sense was vivid that he belonged to the class whom the upper ten thousand, as they passed, didn’t so much as rest their eyes upon for a quarter of a second . … [they] only reminded him of the high human walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege and dense layers of stupidity, which fenced him off from social recognition. (164–165) While Hyacinth yearns for all the fruits of high culture, he recognizes that they rest “on a hideous social inequity” (165). The Princess agrees with Hyacinth, and she goes even further, comparing England’s upper class to the French aristocracy before 1789: “It is the old regime again, the rottenness, and extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind” (312–313). Even more damning, she thinks that England’s elite resembles Rome at its most sybaritic and corrupt: they reproduce “Roman society in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and

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scepticism and waiting for the onset of the barbarians” (313). One could dismiss this passage as evidencing the characters’ blinkered vision, especially since the Princess will return to her unhappy marriage after her husband threatens to cut off her allowance and plunge her into real poverty. But James will use almost the same language in a letter written late 1886: the condition of that body [the English upper-class] seems to me to be in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy before the revolution—minus the cleverness and conversation. Or perhaps it’s more like the heavy, congested and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down.73 At the time James wrote The Princess Casamassima, he thought that English society was in steep decline, and that the glorious art and exclusive institutions he so loved rested on a foundation of “hideous inequality.” He is not happy about it. In a letter written at the start of 1885 (when James was formulating this novel), James describes how the “malheurs, reverses, dangers, embarrassments, the ‘decline,’ in a word, of old England, go to my heart.”74 Even so, James tells his correspondent how he is “attached to this country, and, on the whole to its sometimes exasperating people,” who are ultimately “the greatest race.”75 James invests his character, Hyacinth Robinson, with these contradictions, which is why I think critics miss the point when they insist on the novel’s conservatism. For James, both sides present equally valid, equally compelling arguments that do not cancel each other out: the gloriousness of art does not excuse or erase the corruption of English society, yet the “imbecility” of much radicalism has its roots in envy and would destroy much that makes civilization worthwhile. Unable to choose between the two, between, to use the terms first employed by the Princess and later by James himself, a depraved Roman and a barbarian, Hyacinth kills himself. James, obviously, did not, but perhaps stung by the negative reviews (the Morning Post said, inter alia, that the author “plays with fire, without once succeeding in being effective”76), he decided that controversial topics were not for him, and so he focused on writing novels that explored the psychology of his characters for the rest of his career. But that should not disguise the fact that James responded to the dynamite wars by writing a novel giving significant credence to terrorist motivations.

“Isabel Meredith” (Helen and Olivia Rossetti), A Girl Among the Anarchists and Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent Between 1885 and 1903, any number of fictions were published featuring anarchists and terrorism, almost all portraying them in the most negative light possible. As Antony Taylor puts it, generally, “anarchism was perceived as an embodiment of social decay and national dissolution.”77 The few novels that evinced some

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sympathy for the terrorist cause (e.g., Donald Mackay, The Dynamite Ship [1888], George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution [1893], and E. Douglas Fawcett, Hartmann, the Anarchist [1894]) belong more to the nascent genre of science fiction, and the authors are more interested in exploring the fantastic nature of their plots—Mackay’s book focuses on the invention of a phenomenally powerful gun, Griffith and Fawcett imagine the military use of airplanes—than in parsing terrorist motivations. But by the early 1900s, a different approach became possible.The bombings and the assassinations had largely ceased, and so anarchist terrorism no longer seemed as dangerous as it once did. The fading threat seems to have allowed Helen and Olivia Rossetti (daughters of William Michael Rossetti, cousins of Ford Madox Ford, and nieces of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and Joseph Conrad to adopt a more dispassionate approach to their subject.78 Terrorism, in other words, in the early 1900s became an object amenable to analysis, explication, and, as Conrad realized, appropriation. Both Conrad and the Rossetti sisters incorporate the common sentiment that anarchists bomb-throwers defy comprehension into their narratives. The Victorian novelist, Morley Roberts, makes this point in his preface to A Girl Among the Anarchists: “there is no doubt that those of the dynamite section are practically insane. They are ‘impulsives’; they were outraged and they revolted before birth” (i), and the Rossetti sisters concur: It is “impossible for the normal man really to understand or judge fanatics. He cannot grasp their motive, their point of view ” (89).79 The Secret Agent’s Inspector Heat is equally mystified by anarchist motivations:80 You may be sure our side will win in the end. It may yet be necessary to make people believe that some of you ought to be shot on sight like mad dogs. Then that will be the game. But I’ll be damned if I know what yours is. I don’t believe you know yourselves. (70) But that is not where these novels end. A Girl Among the Anarchists charts Isabel Meredith’s involvement with anarchism, her editing a radical newspaper, The Tocsin, and her gradual disillusionment with the movement and with idealism generally. Along the way she meets a crosssection of London’s anarchist community, both native and foreign. The authors are not blind to how many in radical circles are drunks, malingers, or just plain cranks, such Dr. Armitage, who descends from a respected to “a homeless and wandering lunatic” (130) who walks “twenty or thirty miles a day” in “sandals of a peculiar make” (116, 115) while subsisting on a diet of “raw oatmeal and fresh fruit” (116). As for the “rank and file” of English anarchists, they are fools who “used long words they barely understood, considered that equality justified presumption, [filled with] contempt or envy of everything they felt to be superior to

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themselves. Communism, as they conceived it, amounted pretty much to living at other’s people’s expense” (128). Yet the authors are never condescending or contemptuous of anarchist ideals, nor do they dismiss the reasons why people find anarchism compelling. The underlying point of the Rossettis’ novel is to explain anarchists, to categorize their different motivations, thus making them comprehensible to the reader.81 This is why Morley concludes his preface by quoting Spinoza: “I determined not to laugh or weep over the actions men but simply to understand them” (ii). The Rossetti sisters observe that different people come to anarchism for different reasons: With some it was an act of personal revolt, the outcome of personal sufferings and wrongs endured by the rebel himself, by his family or his class. In others violence was rather the offspring of ideas, the logical result of speculation upon the social evil and the causes thereof. These Anarchists referred to their actions as Propaganda by Deed. At no time do the authors dispute the reality of the “sufferings and wrongs” endured or the existence of “social evil.” Just as James recognized in The Princess Casamassima that English society rests “on a hideous social inequity” (165), the narrator and her brother, Raymond (who becomes a doctor) understand “[t]he frightful havoc of life and happiness necessitated by the economic conditions of nineteenth century society” (5). The taxonomy in Chapter IX, “Some Anarchist Personalities,” begins with the most difficult, least sympathetic case: Émile Henry, who in 1894 threw a bomb into a crowded restaurant, killing one person and injuring twenty.82 Rather than dismissing him as a “moral monstrosity,” as one newspaper report has it,83 the Rossettis argue that his “terrible acts were the outcome of long and earnest thought; they were born of his mental analysis of the social canker” (89). Crucially, the Rossettis do not defend the deed itself, which they say “sent a thrill of horror through the world” (90). Rather, they argue that Henry “was performing his duty according to his own light just as much as a soldier when he obeys orders and fires on the enemy” (90). He committed terrorism not because of insanity or incomprehensible evil, but to “strike a blow against this indifference [toward the prevailing vices and injustices of society] on behalf of all the weaker and more unfortunate members of society” (90). Furthermore, they conclude their section on Henry with the astute observation that Henry’s indifference to human carnage results from theory overtaking reality: “To Anarchists of this order, abstract ideas and opinions replaced all the ordinary forces of life” (90). He did not see his victims, who were innocently dining and listening to music, as individuals, but as examples of “the prevailing vices and injustices of Society” (90). The fictional Giacomo Giannoli, on the other hand, who attempted to assassinate the Spanish Prime Minister and would, the narrator assumes, be “garroted”

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for his crime (135), is genuinely insane. His “almost maniacal prejudice against plots and conspiracies of any kind” (100), expressed as initially a preference for “individual activity” (100), quickly segues into paranoia, with Giannoli seeing conspiracies against him everywhere. He is, he thinks, “watched by unseen treacherous eyes,” his “every breath noted by [his] enemies” (105). The narrator watches Giannoli’s decline into psychosis with deep concern, and before she learns of his deed, Isabel Meredith thinks how sad it is “to rush all over the world, wrecked in health, driven from place to place by his wild suspicions, the offspring of a diseased imagination, deprived of friends, for his mania of persecution drove them off ” (133). By portraying Giannoli as genuinely gripped by mental illness, the Rossetti sisters invite the reader to view him with pity and compassion. A Girl Among the Anarchists ends with the narrator leaving anarchism because of an overwhelming sense of futility: “I now realized that the great mass of toiling humanity ignored our existence, and that the slow, patient work of the ages was hardly likely to be helped or hindered by our efforts” (127). The Rossetti sisters acknowledge that “the people” may not be all that attractive or worth saving (perhaps explaining their later turn to fascism).84 The “quivering shapeless mass of gin-drenched humanity” (141) that is the narrator’s landlady hardly seems worth the sacrifice of one’s treasure, health, and life. The authors also strongly imply at the book’s end that the narrator’s brother Raymond’s medical practice among the “poor patients in the crowded slums around King’s Cross” (129) does more good than any amount of anarchist theorizing. Yet Isabel Meredith never quite gives up on anarchism’s sense of justice or the basic rightness of its diagnosis of  Victorian/Edwardian capitalism. In the end, the narrator retains her admiration for Ivan Kosinski, a man who “never hesitated between his interests and his convictions” and who “played a leading part in most of the revolutionary movements of recent years” (12), even though “I cannot exactly sympathise with him” (130). The narrator sums up the book’s complex attitude toward anarchism with her last words to Kosinski: “I can understand … and admire, even if I deplore” (126). *** “Deplore” is how most readers would describe Joseph Conrad’s attitude toward anarchists and terrorists in The Secret Agent (1907), along with “contempt” and “disgust.”85 As Frederick Karl wrote in 1983, Conrad thinks that terrorists are “fools victimized by ideas they cannot possibly believe. … While they mouth slogans or even practice anarchist beliefs, their motives are the result of self-display, power plays, class confusion, acting out roles.”86 Certainly, Karl and others follow Conrad’s lead in arguing that The Secret Agent uncompromisingly mocks its radicals. In a letter to a friend penned on November 8, 1906, Conrad described his novel as comprised of “half a dozen anarchists, two women, and an idiot. They’re all imbeciles,” including Vladimir, Inspector Heat, and Sir Ethelred.87 Nearly a

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year later, he told another correspondent that he wasn’t “satirizing the revolutionary world. All these people are not revolutionaries—they are shams.”88 The novel itself, however, tells a different, more complex story. While Conrad could not be accused of admiring terrorists, The Secret Agent shows that Conrad understood them, and like Henry James in The Princess Casamassima, he acknowledged the conditions leading to anarchist sympathies. In his letters Conrad tried to put as much distance as he could between himself and his characters, but in the “Author’s Note” he wrote in 1920, he admitted that “there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist” (232). Doubtless, Conrad had in mind Stevie, who cannot “stand the notion of any cruelty” (45), who is tricked into setting off fireworks in his employer’s office “by tales of injustice and oppression” (7), and who pithily observes: “Bad world for poor people” (126). Stevie’s innocence leads to an even sharper insight when he naively asks his mother, Winnie, if perhaps they should turn to the police for help in remedying the cabman’s poverty (126). Winnie responds: “The police aren’t for that” (127), leading Stevie to ask the obvious question: “What are they for then, Winn? What are they for? Tell me” (127). Her response, while grammatically challenged, demonstrates Conrad’s understanding that the police are there to enforce, in Hyacinth Robinson’s words, “a hideous social inequity” (165): “Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have” (127). The anarchists in The Secret Agent may be grotesque, hypocritical, or insane, but, at a basic level, their view of society as fundamentally unfair and corrupt is not entirely wrong.89 Conrad, however, goes beyond James in his analysis of the different sorts of anarchist terror, and like the Rossettis, he gives a more precise taxonomy, implicitly dividing terrorists into three categories. The first consists of Michaelis, “the ticket-of-leave apostle” (31) who has left prison “round like a tub” (31) and “has lost the habit of consecutive thinking” (57); Alexander Ossipon, “ex-medical student without a degree” (34), lecturer upon “the socialistic aspects of hygiene” (34), and the man who at the novel’s end robs Winnie Verloc of her savings (219); and Karl Yundt, whose decrepitude belies his nihilist posturing (“No pity for anything on earth” [32]). Crucially, this group belongs to the past. Yundt may call himself a “terrorist” (31), but to the narrator, he is “[t]he old terrorist” (32; my emphasis), a “veteran of dynamite wars” (36). The implication is that those wars (presumably, the bombing campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s) are long since done, explaining why Sir Ethelred, the “great personage,” worries that the Greenwich bombing marks “the beginning of another dynamite campaign” (100). And because they are done, dynamite terrorism is now amenable to analysis and appropriation, bringing us to the second category: M. Vladimir. He wants Verloc to commit an act of terrorism that will be so horrible that the English public, assuming the anarchists were responsible, would rise up and demand their immediate removal or incarceration. In describing the nature of the desired

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outrage,Vladimir demonstrates his understanding that terrorist violence, again, as distinct from garden-variety political violence, depends upon the combination of speakability and unspeakability when he delivers a lecture to Verloc on “the philosophy of bomb throwing” (24). Before going further, it’s worth pausing for a second to stress just how unusual it must have seemed to Conrad’s first readers that bomb-throwing had a philosophy, i.e., a deeper rationale, behind it. As noted at the chapter’s start, the popular press considered bomb-throwing an act of pure, senseless evil, “a course of scoundrelism for which barbarism has no parallel, and the English tongue no words strong enough to describe.”90 A contemporary report on the Greenwich bombing (Conrad’s inspiration for The Secret Agent) condemns dynamite terrorism in exactly these terms: “Senseless violence of this kind is a blasphemy against the sacred name of humanity.”91 The simple fact that Conrad applies the term “philosophy” to bomb-throwing hints that he has a less dismissive and more respectful (as one respects something extremely dangerous) understanding of the topic than his letters indicate. The Russian attaché wants Verloc to commit a deed that would be unspeakable, that is to say, he wants “an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable” (25). All previous forms of political violence will not be “sufficiently startling” (23) because the public either has become inured to it or the act can be explained away. Political assassinations, “an attempt upon a crowned head or on a president” (23), the primary goal of Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Will,” the group that assassinated Czar Alexander II) and many subsequent anarchists, such has the hapless Giannoli in A Girl Among the Anarchists, might have worked once, but now such acts have “entered into the general conception of the existence of all chiefs of state” (23). So many presidents have been assassinated that “it’s almost conventional” (23). Dynamiting a church comes closer to achieving the desired effect, but because “there would be fools enough to give such an outrage the character of a religious manifestation” (23), i.e., a means of making the violence explicable, that too will not work because the act must appear inexplicable. As for what Émile Henry and Santiago Salvador (the man who in 1893 threw two bombs into the Liceo Theatre in Barcelona92) did, “a murderous attempt at a restaurant or a theatre” (23), that too fails because it has already been done: “All this is used up” (23). Blowing up the National Gallery also won’t work because “art has never been [the bourgeoisie’s] fetish” (24), and besides, nobody cares about artists and art critics (“people of no account. Nobody minds what they say” [24]). Even the massacre “of a whole street—or a theatre” would fail because it has also been done, and besides, the deed can always be explained away as “class hatred” (25). Showing once more that Conrad paid close attention to the “philosophy” of the Fenian skirmishers, even though his terrorists are all anarchists of one stripe or another, he understands that achieving the desired effect does not depend on the amount of blood spilled. These “outrages,” Vladimir says, “need not be

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especially sanguinary” (23). He would never dream, Vladimir continues, “of directing [Verloc] to organize a mere butchery,” partly because he is “a civilized man” (25), but mainly because killing lots of people “wouldn’t [achieve] the result I want” (25). To achieve the desired effect of unthinkability and unspeakability, the violence must be directed not against bodies, but against ideas. It must be directed against “the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie recognise” (23). In the 1880s and 1890s, that would have been symbols of England and English authority, e.g., the Tower of London, the Underground, Scotland Yard. But that has been done before, and in addition, in Conrad’s view, the target has changed: it is now “[t]he sacrosanct fetish of today is science” (23). And so, M. Vladimir says to the Verloc: “What do you think of having a go at astronomy?” (25). Hence, the attempted attack on the Greenwich Observatory. One might think that Verloc would not have the slightest comprehension of M. Vladimir’s lecture, but he understands enough to know that the attaché’s conception of terrorism is new, that it represents an understanding of violence that goes beyond Michaelis et al.’s capabilities. They are stuck in the past, impotently, or hypocritically, mouthing anarchist blather. Therefore, Verloc realizes, his usual associates are not fit for the task Vladimir assigns him: “He was not satisfied with his friends. In the light of M.Vladimir’s philosophy of bomb throwing they appeared hopelessly futile” (38).They represent the old terrorism;Vladimir, on the other hand, takes the deeper aims of Fenian terrorism, renders them explicit, and updates them. The cynical irony, of course, is that Vladimir does this to undermine anarchist terrorism by having them thrown out of England. The Greenwich Observatory outrage, in Conrad’s hands, becomes terrorism against terrorism. The third category of terrorist is, of course, the nameless Professor. Significantly, Conrad separates the Professor from the other “old” terrorists. The difference is not physical. The Professor is as repulsive and grotesque as the others: he is a “dingy little man” with “flat large ears [that] departed widely from the sides of his skull” and possessed “of a greasy, unhealthy complexion” (46). Nor is the difference ideological. Just as the “old terrorist” dreams “of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers. … No pity for anything on earth, including themselves” (32), so does the Professor dream of “a world like a shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter destruction” (222). Certainly, to Inspector Heat, there’s no difference between the Professor and the other anarchists. Coming upon the Professor by accident at the corner of Tottenham Court Road, the Inspector “gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves—sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair” (69). Thieves and the police “understand each other” (68), whereas to Heat, all anarchists are equally incomprehensible. Yet the Professor considers himself a man apart. To him, the “terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution,

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legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical” (52). At first glance, this statement makes little sense, as both the Professor and Yundt et al. seem to have the same dream—the merciless eradication of the weak to build a new social order, and so Conrad might be underscoring the Professor’s monstrous self-regard.93 But there is a key difference between the Professor and the other anarchists, and this difference shows how Conrad, with uncanny prescience, predicts the next iteration of terrorism. When Sergei Nachaev stated in his 1869 “Catechism of the Revolutionist” that “the revolutionary is a doomed man” who “must be prepared [to die] for the cause,” he did not mean that the revolutionary should kill himself to avoid capture.94 Nikolai Morozov is even more explicit in “The Terrorist Struggle.” The point, he says, of “contemporary terrorist struggle” is that “those who carry it out remain alive.”95 But the Professor, anticipating the 9/11 hijackers and the ideology of suicide bombing, is willing to die before he is captured.96 Everyone else’s character, the Professor says to Ossipon, “is built upon conventionality morality. It leans on the social order” (51). The crucial difference is “they depend on life … whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked” (51).While Ossipon notes that Karl Yundt has said “much the same thing not very long ago” (51), the “old terrorist” does not carry around a bomb that he will detonate, killing himself “and everything within sixty yards” (49), should the police try to arrest him. It is this privileging of death over life that puts the Professor into a new, entirely unprecedented category, and why Conrad ends The Secret Agent with the Professor wandering the streets of London unnoticed, “unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men” (227). The Professor represents terrorism’s future.

Notes 1 Robert Appelbaum, Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in English, Scotland and France 1559–1642 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–3. 2 OED, def. 1A. See also Marc Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflection on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 72–73. 3 OED, def. 1A. 4 Encyclopaedia Americana (Philadelphia: Silver, Thomas, 1836), vol. 12, 606, 204. 5 Cheltenham Chronicle, March 29, 1810, 3; Evening Mail, December 10, 1810, 3. 6 Saunders News Letter, August 30, 1813, 2. 7 The Scotsman, November 30, 1839, 2. 8 Northern Liberator, November 9, 1839, 7. 9 John Brewer, “‘This monstrous tragi-comic scene’: British Reactions to the French Revolution,” in David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum, 1989), 11–25; Joseph Crawford, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 10 Morning Chronicle, October 18, 1822, 4. 11 Paul Averich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 166; and Sarah Cole, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85.

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12 Birmingham Daily Post, April 2, 1883, 8. 13 “When the night for action came … this little band [of Irish skirmishers] would deploy … and at the same instant strike with lightning the enemy of their land and race … In two hours from the word of command London would be in flames, shooting up to the heavens in fifty different places” (“O Donovan Rossa’s Dynamiters,” The Terrorism Reader, ed.Walter Laqueur and Yonah Alexander [New York: Meridian, 1987],113 (emphasis in the original). See also Lindsay Clutterbuck, “The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans?”, Terrorism and Political Violence 16.1 (2004), 154–181. 14 Nikolai Morozov, “The Terrorist Struggle,” in Laqueur and Alexander, The Terrorism Reader, 73. 15 Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 6–11. 16 Deaglán Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 4, and Niall Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 17 For example, the “London Underground bombings of 1883–5 were carried out late in the evening when carriages were empty” (Whelehan, 98). See also K.R.M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1979), 240–241. 18 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. John Lyon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). All references will be to this edition and cited parenthetically. 19 See the previous chapter. 20 On newspapers as a barometer for Victorian public opinion, see Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880–1914,” Victorian Studies 31.4 (1988), 494–495. 21 The Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1883, 1. 22 The Shields Daily Gazette, January 26, 1885, 2. 23 The Derby Mercury, January 28, 1885, 6. 24 The Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1883, 1. 25 “Detectives and Their Work,” All the Year Round, April 25, 1885, 136. 26 Whelehan, 27–69. 27 Times of London, January 26, 1885, 9. 28 Ibid., 9. 29 Ibid., 9. 30 Ibid., 9. 31 The Western Daily Press (Bristol), March 26, 1883, 7. 32 London Evening Standard, March 8, 1884, 54; Western Daily Press, March 10, 1884, 8; and the Hull Packet, March 14, 1884, 7. 33 The Birmingham Daily Post, February 28, 1883, 4. 34 The Dynamiter, in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Charles Curtis Bigelow and Temple Scott (New York: Perkins, 1906), vol. 1, 324. All further references will be to this edition, and cited parenthetically. See Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature, 27–40; Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 214–222; and Michael Frank, “Plots on London: Terrorism in Turn-of-the-Century British Fiction,” Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Michael Frank and Eva Gruber (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 51–57. 35 Parnell’s refusal to answer accusations of complicity in the Phoenix Park murders was widely noted and condemned in the press. For example, Parnell “has wrapped himself hitherto in a contemptuous silence, and only allowed his subordinates, Mr. O’Brien and Mr. O’Donnell, to meet the demands of public opinion for frank and full explanations with an insulting refusal” (Times of London, February 23, 1883, 9); F.S.L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (Collins: London, 1977), 242–243.

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36 Terry L. Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 118. See especially the illustrations reproduced on pages 120a–f in the ebrary version of this book. 37 Ibid., 120c. 38 On Stevenson’s skepticism toward colonialism, see Katherine Bailey Linehan, “Taking Up with Kinekas: Stevenson’s Complex Social Criticism in “The Beach of Falesá,” English Literature in Transition 33.4 (1990): 407–422; and Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 19. 39 Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 24. 40 See Amy E. Martin, Alter-Nations: Nationalism,Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britian and Ireland (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 130–150. 41 Ó Donghaile, 36. 42 “Barrow” and “child” refer to what Zero calls the Red Lion Court Outrage in which the only victims were “a scavenger’s barrow” and an injured child (440). 43 Richard Jackson, “Terrorism,Taboo and Discursive Resistance:The Agonistic Potential of the Terrorism Novel.” International Studies Review 17 (2015), 403. 44 The Stevensons’ portrayal of Zero seems to have invented a convention: “In popular dynamite novels, anarchists were often surprisingly likeable, their motives laudable, even as they tapped into (and helped to refill) a reservoir of anxiety about revolutionary violence” (Cole, “Dynamite Violence and Literary Culture,” 94). 45 Alison Herman, “2015: The Year Television Figured Out How to Talk About Mental Illness,” Flavorwire December 18, 2015. http://flavorwire. com/552144/2015-the-year-television-figured-out-how-to-talk-about-mental-illness 46 Thomas Greer (1846–1904) was an Irish doctor who practiced in Cambridge, England. He ran unsuccessfully for the North Derry seat as Liberal Home Ruler. A Modern Daedalus is his sole venture into fiction (Stephen J. Brown, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels,Tales, Romances, and Folk-Lore (Dublin: Maunsel, 1916), 98. 47 Greer’s novel is one of a series of books in this period imagining the terrorist or anarchist use of air power to bomb the enemy into submission. See also George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution (1893; rpt. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2006) and E. Douglass Fawcett, Hartmann the Anarchist (1893; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974). The topic was widely discussed in this period, e.g., “War v. Annihilation,” an unsigned article in Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, May 23, 1885, 2. 48 Tom Greer, A Modern Daedalus (London: Griffith et al., 1885). All further references will be to this text and cited parenthetically. 49 Morning Post, April 8, 1885, 3. 50 L. Perry Curtis Jr., The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland 1845–1910 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2011), 81–107; Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland 1858–82 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979); Samuel Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 51 “Irish Ruffianism,” Leeds Times, March 24, 1883, 4. 52 Oxford English Dictionary, definition II.3. 53 Jackson, “Terrorism,” 402. 54 Ibid., 403. 55 The Derby Mercury, 6. 56 Frank, “Plots on London,” 59. 57 Ibid., 45. 58 “Detectives and Their Work,” All the Year Round, April 25, 1885, 136. 59 As Jack’s father says, “The Boers taught us a lesson at Majuba Hill that hasn’t been thrown away, and there are a thousand lads in Ireland who could hit an officer between the eyes at a thousand yards” (31–32).

Terrorism in the Nineteenth Century  63

60 Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2006), 40. 61 Birmingham Daily Post, April 2, 1883, 8: “Our Irish skirmishers would be well disguised. They would enter London unknown and unnoticed. [After the explosions reduce London to ashes], the blazing spectacle would attract all eyes, and leave the skirmishers to operate with impunity in the darkness,” Irish World, 28 August 1880, quoted in The Terrorism Reader, ed. Walter Laqueur and Yonah Alexander (New York: Meridian, 1987), 113–114. 62 The Star, January 27, 1885, 2. 63 “Detectives and Their Work,” 136. 64 Jackson, “Taboo,” 397. 65 Ibid., 401. 66 James clearly knew about the Fenian bombings. In a letter dated January 24, 1885, he noted that the country was “gloomy, anxious, and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters” (“To Grace Norton,” Henry James: Letters ed. Leon Edel [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1980], vol. 3, 64). 67 Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, ed. Derek Brewer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). All further references will be to this text and cited parenthetically. 68 E.g., Ó Donghaile, 40; Christopher Stuart, “‘[Bloom[ing] on a Dog’s Allowance’: Hyacinth Robinson and the Redemption of the Working Class in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima,” American Literary Realism 36.1 (2003), 26, and Margaret Scanlan, “Terrorism and the Realistic Novel: Henry James and The Princess Casamassima,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34.3 (1992), 382. For a view of this novel closer to my own, see John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison,WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 169–176. 69 Henry James, A Little Tour in France (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1885), 260, 261. 70 Quoted in Stuart, 28. 71 The idea of a disillusioned radical who commits suicide may have come from The Dynamiter, which James admired. In 1887 article on Stevenson, James singled out The Dynamiter as the best part of New Arabian Nights (Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism, ed. Janet A. Smith [London: Hart-Davis, 1948], 152–153). 72 James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Smith, 67. 73 James, “To Charles Eliot Norton,” December 6, 1886, vol. 3, 62 (emphasis in the original); Tilley, 10. 74 “To Grace Norton,” January 24, 1885, Letters, vol. 3, 67. 75 Ibid., vol. 3, 67. 76 The Morning Post, December 25, 1886, 3. For a similarly negative reaction, see Irving Howe, “Henry James: The Political Vocation,” in Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon, 1957), 139–156. 77 Antony Taylor, London’s Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture (New York: Continuum, 2012), 56. 78 On Conrad and the Rossettis, see David Mulry, “Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing and Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 54.2 (2000), 52–61, and Ian Watt, “The Political and Social Background of The Secret Agent,” Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 116–117. 79 “Isabel Meredith,” A Girl Among the Anarchists (rpt. Miami, FL: HardPress Publishing, 2010). All further references are to this edition and given parenthetically. 80 The aesthete narrator of Conrad’s 1906 short story “The Informer” says that “anarchists in general were simply inconceivable to me mentally, morally, logically, sentimentally, and even physically” (A Set of Six [New York: Doubleday, 1925], 97).

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81 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 210. 82 On Henry and his milieu, see John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 83 “Emile Henry,” Glasgow Herald, May 1, 1894, 4. 84 Miller, 207, 250n.31. 85 Key works on The Secret Agent include Irving Howe, “Conrad: Order and Anarchy,” in Politics and the Novel, 76–113; Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 185–214; Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, 74–82; Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 34–54; Miller, Framed, 149–185; and Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature, 113–129. 86 Karl, “Introduction,” The Secret Agent (New York and London: Penguin, 1983), 12; Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, 74. 87 The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), vol. 3, 372–373. 88 To R.B. Cunningham-Graham, October 7, 1907, in Letters, vol. 3, 491. 89 See also Miller, 176. 90 The Shields Daily Gazette, January 26, 1885, 2. 91 Illustrated Police News, February 24, 1894, 3. On the background to Conrad’s novel, see Sherry, Conrad’s Western World, 205–334; Watt, “The Political and Social Background of The Secret Agent,” Essays on Conrad, 112–126; and Mulry, “Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing and Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” 43–64. 92 Carr, The Infernal Machine, 47. 93 Yundt: “I have always dreamed … of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means … No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity: (32); the Professor: “I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination” (222). 94 Sergey Nechaev, “Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869),” in Laqueur and Alexander, The Terrorism Reader, 68. 69. 95 Morozov, “The Terrorist Struggle,” The Terrorism Reader, 75. 96 In “Why We are Fighting You” (originally posted on the web in 2002), bin Laden writes that “the umma of Martyrdom … desires death more than you desire life” (The Al Qaeda Reader, ed. And trans. Raymond Ibrahim [New York: Doubleday, 2007], 207).

3 WHEN TERRORISM BECOMES SPEAKABLE Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and the Literature of the Troubles

Between the end of anarchist/Fenian bombing campaigns in the early twentieth century and 1945, political terrorism was largely subsumed by the atrocities of two world wars, including the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Which is not to say that the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” disappeared. They did not. “Declares Terrorism Reigns in Russia” is the headline for a November 11, 1918 New York Times article about how a group of refugees described conditions in Russia.1 The resistance to the Nazi occupation of the area from Norway to Greece “recently flared into a wave of terrorism and violence,” referring to the Nazi policy of “shooting hostages each time a member of the German army or Gestapo was murdered.”2 On the other side, the propagandists of the Third Reich were not above claiming that they were the victims of “organized terrorism” when the British starting bombing Berlin.3 However, after World War II ended, numerous independence movements adopted terrorism as their tactic of choice. Yet despite the earlier association of terrorism with unspeakability, post-colonial terrorism seemed to many a sane military tactic intended to achieve a comprehensible goal (political independence). As Thomas Perry Thornton puts it in his highly influential essay, published in 1964, “Terror as a Weapon of Political Agitation”: “We shall treat terror as a tool to be used rationally.”4 This is not to say that the victims celebrated terrorism, or ignored it. Or that the rhetoric of unspeakability disappeared altogether.5 But terrorism was no longer universally considered a barbaric act performed by criminals outside the pale of humanity. Terrorism was not yet taboo, to adapt Zulaika and Douglass’s terms.6 Essentially, when terrorism was associated with insurgency, it became speakable. The chapter will chart the movement away from the rhetoric of unspeakability, and I will then examine Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966)

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as an example of the type of critical discourse that can happen when terrorism becomes speakable. I will then turn to Ireland and look at how a poet, a novelist, and a film-maker adopt three different approaches to the Troubles.

Terrorism Becomes Speakable Between 1945 and the early 1970s, terrorism and insurgency were more or less used synonymously, as this Google Ngram demonstrates (see Figure 3.1). To give a few examples from counterinsurgency writers, the British military history, Julian Paget, writes that insurgencies use “both guerilla warfare and terrorism among its methods”; similarly, the diplomat and once head of the Voice of America, Charles W. Thayer, conflates the two when he calls those who resisted British rule in Cyprus “terrorist-guerillas.”7 David Galula, whose career in the French army includes fighting in World War II, China, Greece, and Algeria, also notes that insurgencies in their initial stages will resort “to terrorism and guerilla warfare.”8 To get a sense of how the rhetoric surrounding terrorism shifted, and what the rough equivalence between “terrorist,” “guerilla,” and “insurgent” means, I want to look more closely Thornton’s essay, “Terror as a Weapon of Political Agitation.” In what seems like an echo of M. Vladimir’s “philosophy of bomb throwing” in The Secret Agent, Thornton says that terrorism differs from other forms of political

FIGURE 3.1  Google

ngram, terrorist-guerilla-insurgent, 1945–1970, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science (published online ahead of print: December 16, 2010).

When Terrorism Becomes Speakable  67

violence “by its extranormal quality; that is terror lies beyond the norms of violent political agitation that are accepted by a given society,” and the deed is not so much fearsome as “disorienting.”9 To achieve this effect, “the terroristic act is intended and perceived as a symbol. The observer realizes that the act implies a meaning broader than its own component parts.”10 So far, Thornton does not sound significantly different than either Conrad’s spymaster-provocateur or the anonymous author of “Detectives and their Work,” who deemed dynamite bomb terrorism “not an ordinary crime, [but] a new one.”11 But Thornton adds three contributions to the study of terrorism. First, terrorism is not something new, strange, and incomprehensible, but a tactic that has occurred often enough for it to be subject to analysis and taxonomy. Second, terrorism’s goal is simple and knowable: “to disrupt the existing order and achieve power.”12 Third, and perhaps the most important, Thornton proposes that terrorism is not restricted to insurgents, but can be employed by:13 incumbents who wish to suppress a challenge to their authority … It is, however, by no means inevitable that the insurgents will initiate terrorism; in some instance, they may be counterterrorists reacting to the terror of the incumbents. … We must, regretfully, use new terms: enforcement terror to describe terror (or counterterror) launched by those in power and agitational terror to describe terroristic acts by those aspiring to power. Nor is Thornton alone in his assessment of terrorism as rational and therefore subject to analysis and comprehension. Julian Paget observes that to defeat an insurgency, one must “understand their minds, their mentality and their motives.”14 A 1962 Rand Corporation symposium on terrorism began with the proposition that the “insurgent starts off with nothing but a cause and grows to strength, while the counterinsurgent often starts off with everything but a cause and gradually declines in strength to the point of weakness.”15 Robert Taber, who covered the Cuban Revolution for CBS and accompanied the rebels as they marched from the Sierra Maestra to Havana, observes in The War of the Flea that “it will not do to consider guerrillas, terrorists, political assassins as deviants or agents somehow apart from the social fabric.”16 While terroristic movements may very well attract their fair share of “criminals and psychopaths,” that does not mean that the movement itself is psychopathic and criminal: instead, terrorism and insurgency reflect “the distortions of an imperfect society.”17 One also finds widespread recognition that terror can be used by both insurgents and counterinsurgents. In his influential analysis of post-World-War-II insurrections, BBC and Reuters foreign affairs journalist and eventual founder of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Brian Crozier states bluntly that terrorism “may be wielded by rebels or by their opponents.”18 (He also coined the phrase, “Terrorism is a weapon of the weak.”) Not only, in other words, do non-state actors not have a monopoly on terrorism, but one of the goals of terrorism “is to

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induce a counterterrorism that serves the rebel cause better than any stratagem the rebels themselves could devise.”19 The question I want to turn to now is how did the fictive imagination represent terrorism during the pendulum swing away from unspeakability toward speakability? And to help answer that question, I want to look at a film that has been called the greatest political film made so far, one that has been shown by both terrorists and the Pentagon to learn about terrorism: Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers Critics have universally assumed that Pontecorvo’s movie unqualifiedly approves of the FLN’s terrorism, and for good reason.20 Pontecorvo said that “[t]he writings of Frantz Fanon”—who famously claimed that anti-colonial violence constituted a liberating, cleansing force that restored the colonized self-respect—were “very important for Franco Solinas, the screenwriter, and myself.”21 For his part, Solinas said that his purpose was “didactic,” that he wanted to use “spectacle to teach the guerilla.”22 However, critics have missed that in addition to Fanon (whose influence on this film cannot be denied or underestimated), The Battle of Algiers also incorporates the understanding of terrorism developing among the counterinsurgency writers of the early 1960s. Pontecorvo pairs two scenes, separated by only a few minutes, in which the antagonists, Ben M’Hidi and Colonel Mathieu, discuss the place of terrorism in the anticolonial movement.23 In the first, Ben M’Hidi talks with Ali La Pointe, who objects to the general strike because “we were ordered not to use arms” (see Figure 3.2).

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Ben M’Hidi and Ali la Poinnte.

FIGURE 3.2 From

When Terrorism Becomes Speakable  69

Ben M’Hidi tells Ali that terrorism has a particular place in the struggle, and not the most important: “Acts of violence don’t win wars. Neither wars nor revolutions. Terrorism is useful as a start. But then, the people themselves must act.” In other words, terrorism has a place at the beginning of a revolution, but it will not determine the outcome. There follow a few scenes illustrating the French paratroopers forcing the Casbah’s inhabitants to break the general strike,24 after which Pontecorvo moves to Colonel Mathieu holding an impromptu discussion with a few journalists (see Figure 3.3). In this scene, Mathieu exhibits the same understanding of terrorism’s place as Ben M’hidi. Asked what armed insurrection means at this point, Mathieu answers: “What it always means: an inevitable phase in revolutionary warfare. After terrorism comes armed insurrection. Just as guerilla warfare leads to warfare proper.”25 Both Mathieu and M’Hidi, perhaps unsurprisingly for the former, definitely surprising for the latter, echo Brian Crozier’s analysis of the pattern insurrections usually follow: “The pattern of insurrection is, in fact, strangely consistent. Whatever the country or the circumstances, insurrection tends to follow a sequence of three phases: terrorism, guerilla warfare, and full-scale war.”26 Thomas Perry Thornton then adapts, with a few qualifications, Crozier’s model for his own analysis of terrorism: “The most serviceable internal war model is that which Crozier presents, postulating terror as the first stage of a three-step development, which then progresses onward through guerrilla warfare to conventional warfare.”27 Crozier’s analysis also seems to inform Ben M’Hidi’s news conference after his capture by the French authorities. The first question, asked by a journalist who is having some difficulty keeping his emotions in check, assumes that terrorism is an

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Mathieu and reporter.

FIGURE 3.3 From

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illicit form of warfare: “Mr. Ben M’Hidi … isn’t it cowardly to use your women’s baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives?”28 Ben M’Hidi responds by denying the implied distinction between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence: “Isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.” Crozier raises and dismisses exactly the objection raised by Pontecorvo’s journalist, even using the same example that Ben M’Hidi uses:29 All acts of violence are open to criticism on moral grounds. The violence of the strong may express itself in high explosive or napalm bombs. These weapons are no less discriminate than a hand-grenade tossed from a rooftop; indeed, they will make more innocent victims. Yet they arouse less moral indignation around Western firesides. The terrorist is an outlaw and—except when he deposits a time-bomb—he is physically close to his victims. The airman is an agent of established order and may be thousands of feet above the roof-tops of those to be blasted by high explosive or seared by fire. Often enough, the victims of terrorism are ‘us’, whereas the victims of bombing are ‘them.’ The surprising overlaps between counterinsurgency analyses (including Crozier’s recognition of the tendency toward dividing terrorists and their targets into “us” and “them”) and Pontecorvo’s film suggests that the Battle of Algiers might have a more dispassionate, more skeptical attitude toward terrorism than previously supposed, even as the film wholeheartedly supports the FLN and its goal of Algerian independence. Both Ben M’Hidi and Colonel Mathieu also agree with Thornton’s observation that “terror by itself cannot be the final determinant of the outcome of an internal war. It can only be regarded as a means to an end.”30 For Ben M’Hidi, as we have seen, it is “the people” who will ultimately decide the revolution’s fate. If their cause has popular support, they will win; but if not, then not. Violence without the people’s support, Ben M’Hidi implies, will not work. As for Mathieu, he agrees that terrorism can at times be effective, but he adds that counterterrorism also cannot work without popular support. After Mathieu gives his analysis of terrorism’s place in an insurrection, the journalists ask about Dien Bien Phu, the 1954 battle in which the Vietminh communist-nationalist forces surrounded and then soundly defeated the French, leading ultimately to France’s withdrawal from French Indochina and the division of Vietnam into a communist North and a Western-leaning South. The Colonel responds: “Exactly. But in Indochina, they won.” Then, Mathieu continues, French success in keeping Algeria as a colony also depends on popular opinion, meaning, in this case, on the perspective of the popular press: “Just do your reporting and do it well,” the Colonel tells the journalists, “It’s not warriors which we need.” “What then?” asks a reporter. “Political

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will,” responds Mathieu, “which is sometimes there and sometimes isn’t.” Julian Paget observed that a successful insurgency requires that “the cause must be convincing to the local populace as well as to the guerillas.”31 The same, it seems, applies to counterinsurgency, which is why Colonel Mathieu is so unhappy that Jean-Paul Sartre writes in favor of the Algerian rebellion. “Why are the Sartres,” he ruefully asks, “always born on the other side?”32 However, the most important lesson that Pontecorvo and Solinas seem to have drawn from their discussions with French colonels and the FLN leadership is that terrorism is not so much a wondrous, cleansing tactic (as Fanon thinks) as a deeply problematic aspect of the struggle for independence. Like Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus, The Battle of Algiers instigates a critical examination of terrorism even as the film thoroughly endorses ending French colonialism.33 Many have examined the film’s unsparing depiction of torture and have noted that in the film, the FLN bombing campaign begins as a reaction to the bombing of rue du Thèbes, which destroyed several buildings and killed many women and children.34 Both the FLN bombings, however, and the French response to the bombings, belong to a pattern of escalating violence that ends up inviting the viewer (many, if not most critics, choose not to take that invitation) to view both sides with equal queasiness. The Battle of Algiers does not start violently.35 Instead, the flashback to 1954 begins with a communiqué from the FLN announcing their goal and explicitly trying to keep things peaceful: People of Algeria, our combat is directed against colonialism. Our aim: independence and restoration of the Algerian state, in accordance with Islamic principles and the respect of basic liberties, regardless of race or religion. To avoid bloodshed, we propose that the French authorities negotiate with us our right to self-determination. Nonetheless, France draws first blood with the execution of a political prisoner that has the effect of radicalizing Ali La Pointe. Two points. First, Pontecorvo does not tell us anything about why the prisoner needs to be executed. All we see is a man shouting “Long live Algeria!” and “Al Akhbar!” (God is great!) as he is led to the guillotine. Second, the man’s death results from a judicial process. This is violence sanctioned by law, and we may assume that the man did something to merit a death sentence.36 Nonetheless, in terms of the film’s narrative, the French answer the FLN’s call for non-violent negotiations with an execution.Things will only get worse from here. The FLN does not answer the execution with an attack on a symbol or representative of French colonialism (true, Ali tries to execute a policeman, but this mission is a test, and the gun isn’t loaded). Instead, the FLN targets the Arab malefactors in the Casbah. Their second communiqué announces the FLN’s intention to clean up vice, but as we know from the previous scene (when Djafar explains to Ali why

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he gave him an empty pistol), the point of getting rid of sinners is not morality, but political strategy: “The organization’s getting stronger,” Djafar says, “but there are still too many drunks, whores, junkies, people who talk too much, ready to sell us out. We must win them over, or eliminate them.” So the FLN directs its first violence against its own people in order to shore up its position.37 A horde of children mob a drunk, tossing him down a flight of stone stairs; Ali takes an opium cigarette away from a drug addict, telling him to stop using drugs; and Ali finally gets to fire a loaded gun, not against a Frenchman, but at an Algerian pimp. Presumably, the campaign to clean up the Casbah worked, as shortly thereafter, the terrorist campaign against the French begins in earnest. Brian Crozier observed that one purpose of terrorism “is to make life unendurable for the enemy,” and that is exactly what the FLN does.38 To emphasize the cascading nature of the attacks, Pontecorvo picks a date: June 20, 1956, and then presents four attacks, with date stamps, over the course of the day (10:32 a.m., 11:40 a.m., 3:30 p.m., and 4:15 p.m.). Significantly, the level of violence rises with each terrorist assault. In the first attack, a man stabs a policeman and steals his gun. In the next, a group marches into a police station pretending to ask for help, and they shoot at least two people and take more guns. By the third attack, their armament stock now includes a machine gun (as opposed to pistols), which the FLN uses to mow people down from a moving car, and the last attack is a shoot-out on a street with multiple deaths. The police are clearly overwhelmed, as demonstrated by the scene following the FLN’s first ambushes.The Assistant Commissioner leafs through photos of the dead while on the phone with his superiors, who have no intention or ability to offer any help (“But I don’t have enough men. I understand. But if you could … ? The Prefect can’t. But couldn’t you … ? Okay”) (see Figure 3.4).

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Assistant Commissioner on phone.

FIGURE 3.4 From

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After he hangs up, the Assistant Commissioner says with deep frustration,“They can slaughter all of us!” Even more ominously, the Assistant Commissioner says that while Paris wants to put Algiers under tighter police control, “I don’t agree.” But he does not say what he would do. Not yet, at least. The next scenes illustrate the official response: police behind barbed wire, further restrictions on the Arab residents, sealing off the Casbah with checkpoints, all Arabs must have their papers checked on exiting, but not Europeans. Yet despite the French ratcheting up the pressure, the attacks continue unabated, as shown by the three successive shootings on July 20, 1956 (11:20 a.m., 11:50 a.m., and 3:30 p.m.). And the attacks succeed in demonstrating the government’s inability to control the violence. Immediately following the shooting deaths of multiple policemen, Pontecorvo illustrates the growing anger and frustration of the French populace. With the camera focused on an increasingly frightened Algerian road worker, we hear one person yell (in French): “Same old story! It’s the government’s fault.What do they care?” Another responds: “Murder all the bastards! Then we’ll have some peace.” And a woman shouts “Assassin! Assassin!” Although the police will eventually arrest or rescue (it’s not clear which) this poor man, the scene overall demonstrates how the FLN’s terrorist campaign demonstrates “not only their own strength and the weakness of the incumbents but also the inability of the society to provide support for its members in a time of crisis.”39 We then return to the Assistant Commissioner, who continues dictating his report on the day’s events (“Seven attacks. Three dead”). After his assistant gives his boss the finished report in quadruplicate (“One copy for the Prefect, the press, the archives, and for you”), the Assistant Commissioner asks a fateful question.The scene begins with the Assistant Commissioner stating that the culprit of an attack is a man named Laknan Abdullah, a “laborer, married with 3 children. Address: 8, rue de Thèbes,” and it ends with “Say, Corbière, where’s rue de Thèbes?” The Assistant Commissioner’s decision to place a bomb at this man’s residence not only significantly ups the ante by targeting non-combatants—up until this point, the FLN (in the film) had restricted itself to shooting only policeman and soldiers—but results from the increasing level of violence and the government’s inability to stop it.40 Clearly, the normal methods for repressing the insurgency are not working, so, to continue using Thornton as our guide, the incumbent government must then resort to “extraordinary repressive measures … that affect not only the terrorist but also his environment, the society as a whole”41—in this case, placing a bomb where the terrorist lives.The thinking seems to be that if the FLN realizes that the cost of their assassination campaign is much greater than they had assumed, and that the French will target the FLN and their families as mercilessly as the FLN targets French policemen, then perhaps the FLN will reconsider. Pontecorvo evidently went to considerable effort to render the aftermath of the rue de Thèbes bombing as harrowing as possible (unlike the FLN’s shootings, which are bloodless, the victims slumping over as if going to sleep).42 We see massive destruction (see Figure 3.5).

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The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, rue du Thèbes explosion.

FIGURE 3.5 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, rue du Thèbes Child Casualty.

FIGURE 3.6 From

We see dead, bloodied bodies of children being taken out of the rubble (see Figure 3.6). Yet as numerous counterterrorism writers have noted, extraordinary repressive measures, including inflicting terrorism upon the terrorists, may very well backfire, making the situation considerably worse, and that, along with illustrating the continuing upward spiral of violence, is exactly what happens in The Battle of

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Algiers.43 Just as the FLN responded to French oppression with a terrorist campaign against symbols of French authority, and in turn the French (at least, the Assistant Commissioner) responded by bombing the Casbah, thus widening the field of potential victims to non-combatants, the FLN responds with its own campaign that specifically targets the innocent. But while the French place one bomb, the FLN will plant three, and they send three women, disguised as French, to place bombs in a café, a milk bar frequented by teenagers, and the Air France terminal. In their influential reading of The Battle of Algiers, Shohat and Stam propose that in the “three women, three bombs” sequence, Pontecorvo enlists the viewer’s sympathy by utilizing all “the mechanisms of cinematic identification: scale (close-up shots individualize the women); off-screen sound (we hear the sexist comments of the French soldiers as if from the women’s aural perspective); and especially point-of-view editing.”44 Even more, they propose that the viewer so identifies with these terrorists that “the film makes us want the women to complete their task.”45 I vehemently disagree. Pontecorvo balances, even undermines, the viewer’s “spectatorial complicity” (Shohat and Stam’s phrase) with numerous headshots of the future victims, including a small child eating ice cream. Some have argued that Pontecorvo constructed the gallery of faces “to suggest the picture of a parasitic and careless French society.”46 Again, I strongly disagree. I do not see anything parasitic or careless about these people. Instead, I see people either at the start or in the prime of life about to destroyed. We see the rue de Thèbes victims only after they have died. But in these scenes, we see the victims minutes and seconds before the bombs go off, and it would take a very cold person not to quail as Pontecorvo’s camera dwells on each face, as if underlining the cost of what is about to happen. After Hasiba enters the cafeteria and sits at the bar, she surveys the scene and the camera pans around the room. First, we see tables of patrons from her perspective (Figures 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9). We then switch to two headshots of the patrons, a woman enjoying a conversation with her friends, and then, the infamous shot of the small child eating ice cream47 (see Figures 3.10 and 3.11). Pontecorvo gives the viewer a similar procession of close-ups of the milk bar’s patrons (see Figures 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14). I cannot see how the viewer is meant to be anything other than horrified and repulsed at the thought of these young people about to be blown to bits. The bombing’s aftermath is just as shocking, if not more so, than rue de Thèbes. After another series of headshots, including the child once more and a smiling bartender, the first bomb goes off, resulting in dead bodies and a bloodied man staggering out, collapsing among other mangled bodies. Finally, we see a close-up of his face (see Figures 3.15, 3.16 and 3.17).

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The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar (1).

FIGURE 3.7 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar (2).

FIGURE 3.8 From

The scenes at the milk bar are equally appalling, especially since this sequence begins with the teens hearing the explosion, seeing fire trucks, hearing sirens, and then (in a move perhaps borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock) assuming “it must have been a propane tank,” they head back inside. In other words, they first move away from danger, then back into danger. Pontecorvo augments his visuals with two aural elements not present in the earlier scene: screams, and the same musical

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The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar (3).

FIGURE 3.9 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, victim headshot.

FIGURE 3.10 From

theme that accompanied the rue de Thèbes sequence.48 We hear, but do not see, the Air France explosion. Far from turning the viewer into a “revolutionary accomplice,” far from eliciting the viewer’s unqualified enthusiasm for the revolutionaries and their terrorism, Pontecorvo wants us to be sickened by the violence, and he rubs our nose, as it were, in the effect of high explosives on the human body.49 But if Pontecorvo asks the viewer to look at FLN terrorism skeptically, he equally distances us from

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The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, child eating ice-cream.

FIGURE 3.11 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, milk bar patrons.

FIGURE 3.12 From

the French, who respond to the three terrorist bombings with a further escalation of their own: sending in Colonel Mathieu and his paratroopers. Many have noted, often with surprise and dismay, how Pontecorvo and Solinas, portray Colonel Mathieu so positively, since he is the character in this film responsible for the use of torture against FLN members.50 Saadi Yacef stated that he specifically told Pontecorvo that he did not want to make a “good guy vs. bad guy” film: “We wanted to show that the enemy were people who were

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The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, milk bar headshot (1).

FIGURE 3.13 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, milk bar headshot (2).

FIGURE 3.14 From

very intelligent,” and so, Colonel Mathieu approaches counterinsurgency calmly, analytically, and rationally, and he has clearly absorbed the lessons of the counterinsurgency writers of the early 1960s.51 Colonel Mathieu begins his address to the French officers by summarizing the situation: So now we average 4.2 attacks a day. We must distinguish between attacks on individuals and bombings. As usual, the problem involves: first, the adversary,

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and second, the means to destroy him.There are 400,000 Arabs in Algiers. Are they all our enemies? We know they’re not. But a small minority holds sway by means of terror and violence.We must deal with this minority in order to isolate and destroy it. It’s a dangerous enemy that works in the open and underground, using tried and true revolutionary methods as well as original tactics. Like Thornton, Colonel Mathieu proposes to treat terrorism “rationally.”52 The scene opens with the Colonel pointing to a graph plotting how many attacks per month as he observes, “we average 4.2 attacks a day” (see Figure 3.18).

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar victim (1).

FIGURE 3.15 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar victim (2).

FIGURE 3.16 From

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The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, cafeteria bar victim (3).

FIGURE 3.17 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Col. Mathieu giving briefing.

FIGURE 3.18 From

Far from a new, strange, unprecedented phenomenon, terrorism is a wellknown tactic that the Colonel himself probably used against Nazis. Then, again following Thornton, the Colonel distinguishes between “sabotage” and “assassination,” or between what Galula calls “blind” and “selective terrorism.”53 Colonel Mathieu also assumes that the FLN does not enjoy the support of the majority, which again tracks with counterinsurgency thinking. Galula posits as a basic tenet of any insurgency that “there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral

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majority, and an active minority against the cause.”54 Crozier concurs, noting this was in fact the case in Algeria, where the “Moslem mass of the population, whether Arab or Berber, though not necessarily pro-French, had no part in the rebellion. Its main concern appears to have been the desire to be left in peace.”55 However, the most resonant aspect of the overlap between Colonel Mathieu and counterinsurgency writers concerns intelligence. After showing the surveillance footage taken hours before the “three women, three bombs” attack, Colonel Mathieu tells his officers that their methods have been useless, they need a better way. Military solutions, i.e., force and repression, are “secondary”; much more important, the colonel continues, is “the policing aspect,” by which he means gathering information. Because the FLN organized itself in a pyramid structure, so that each member knows only two other members, “We must investigate to reconstruct the pyramid and identify the Executive Bureau. The basis of our job is intelligence.” Julian Paget, in Counter-Insurgency Operations, could not agree more: “[Intelligence] is so vital to any study of counter-insurgency techniques that it cannot be omitted … Good intelligence is undoubtedly one of the greatest battle-winning factors in counter-insurgency warfare.”56 The question becomes how one obtains intelligence, and that leads to the most controversial aspect of The Battle of Algiers. Or, as Colonel Mathieu puts it: “The method: interrogation. Conducted in such a way to ensure we always get an answer. In our situation, humane considerations can only lead to despair and confusion.” In a word: torture. Pontecorvo’s montage of the various methods the French used to break FLN members is brutal, harrowing, and deeply shocking. As many have pointed out, Mathieu’s use of torture fundamentally discredits France’s claim to represent “the ideals of civilization.”57 One critic, for example, writes: “Pontecorvo provides a strong critique of the military mindset that makes it possible for people to carry out unspeakable acts in the name of national security.”58 But the film asks whether torture is any more or any less despicable than placing bombs that blow up children.59 If, as many have argued, torture makes the French fundamentally evil, what about killing a child eating ice cream? If one is repulsed at Colonel Mathieu’s coldly rational justification for getting information “by any means necessary,” should the viewer be equally repulsed by the FLN’s murderous impulses, even if we favor Algerian independence and disapprove of French colonialism? During the final press conference toward the end of the movie, a journalist challenges Colonel Mathieu’s justification for torture—“Legality can be inconvenient”— and Mathieu responds, “Is it legal to set off bombs in public places?” The movie asks us to take that question very seriously. The last instances of this tactic in The Battle of Algiers emphasize both the increasing violence and the moral insanity of terrorism. While Djafar and Ali are hiding from the French, Djafar admits that French pressure has decimated their ranks, but one group remains, and that is “enough to start over with.” We understand immediately what he means in the next scene, when two bombs go off at

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a horse race. The FLN sets off one explosion outside the stands, and immediately people gather to see what has happened (see Figure 3.19). Then another goes off, exactly where they are standing, maximizing the carnage (see Figure 3.20). As with the other bombing scenes, Pontecorvo’s camera lingers over shots of the bombing’s victims. Significantly, Pontecorvo balances the bombing with an example of both French rage and French decency. A mob attacks a child vendor,

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, racetrack bombing (1).

FIGURE 3.19 From

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, racetrack bombing (2).

FIGURE 3.20 From

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yelling that he will pay for the attack, even though he obviously had nothing to do with it. But the police surround the child and, with considerable difficulty, rescue him.The final terrorist event immediately follows the torture montage, suggesting that the former constitutes a reaction to the latter, but also implies an equivalency. The brutality and cruelty of torture results in the FLN upping the ante even more: in a move that seems today frighteningly prescient today, two young men hijack an ambulance, stab the doctor, then drive down a crowded street firing a machine gun, randomly killing an untold number of people. When the machine gun runs out of bullets, they crash the ambulance into a group of people waiting for a bus. As with the “three women, three bombs” sequence, Pontecorvo alternates between the terrorists’ perspective (we see the shooting as if we were actually pulling the trigger), and an objective one. The audience response should also be the same: nausea at heartless, mass slaughter. The Battle of Algiers is decidedly ambivalent about terrorism. On the one hand, the film incorporates the more sophisticated thinking about terrorism by various military writers in the early 1960s. Following their analyses, the film treats terrorism as a “rational” tool, and probably more importantly, treats terrorists as rational people whose ultimate goal—Algerian independence from France and an end to colonialism—is both knowable and laudable.Yet at the same time, both Pontecorvo and Saadi Yacef have said that they did not intend in any way to glamorize terrorism.60 In a 1992 interview included in the Criterion DVD release, Pontecorvo clearly states that while the terrorists’ goal must be applauded, he wanted to recognize the cost in blood and lives on both sides:61 The French dead and the Algerian dead have the same music, a religious theme inspired by Bach. This was appropriate because it conveyed the idea that blood shed on either side merits the same grief and deserves to be given the same emotional treatment. Furthermore, the film also shows that terrorism and counterterrorism are locked in an upward spiral of violence. Bombings beget repression, which begets more bombings, which beget torture, which begets even more bombings. As Colonel Mathieu himself observes, both sides are caught up “in a vicious circle.” The only way out, it seems, is through mass demonstrations, through what Pontecorvo terms a “choral character.”62 In the film’s coda, two years after Colonel Mathieu’s successful repression of the FLN, massive demonstrations break out, seemingly out of the blue, in favor of Algerian independence. The scene begins with a voice-over by a journalist (the same one who pointedly asked Colonel Mathieu about torture) describing the uncanny way the final uprising started: “For some unknown reason, due to some obscure motive, after two years of relative quiet, with the war contained mostly in the mountains, disturbances broke out again without warning, and nobody knows why or how.” There are no identifiable characters in this scene. Instead, we hear voices that

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seem to emanate not from a particular person, but from the crowd itself. In a shot of the police forcing back the crowd, we hear, “We’re marching for freedom!” But we do not know who exactly speaks. Instead, the cry seems to come from the entire undifferentiated mass of people.63 Further exemplifying the choral nature of the uprising (and we should remember that in a chorus, no one voice stands out; rather, all blend together in harmony), on the last day of the demonstration, a French policeman shouts into a megaphone “What do you want?”64 But the viewer cannot see whom he addresses. Instead, he seems to be speaking to a fog bank (see Figure 3.21). The camera then edges closer and closer to the fog bank, but instead of revealing individuals, we hear a disembodied voice, “Independence! Our pride! We want our freedom!” By the time we hear the last phrase, the screen has gone almost completely blank. But then, the fog dissipates, revealing a shouting, chanting, ululating crowd. In an interview with Edward Said, Pontecorvo says that he tried to portray how “a long-suppressed people’s struggle for freedom emerged ‘like a great stream,’ inevitable, irreversible, triumphant.”65 But that better describes the film’s coda than the FLN terrorist campaign detailed in the rest of The Battle of Algiers. The film suggests that Algerian independence does not result from individual acts by particular actors (e.g., Ben M’Hidi, Ali Le Pointe, Saadi Yacef), but from a collective, undifferentiated body that overwhelms the French through massive, non-violent demonstrations. It is not terrorism (or the use of torture) that engages the French to change their minds. Instead, as the voice-over tells us, “[t]he surprising unity of these demonstrations has made a deep impression on French public opinion. According to Paris, a significant segment of the political class is in favor of seeking a new relationship with Algeria.” In the end, both Ben M’Hidi and Colonel Mathieu are right: terrorism has its place at the start of a

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, demonstration.

FIGURE 3.21 From

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revolution, but not at the end. But the fact that terrorism, and the ensuing carnage, was nonetheless necessary to begin with is part of the reason why Pontecorvo would refer to his film as a “tragedy.”66

Terrorism, Speakability, and the Literature of Northern Ireland “The Troubles” conventionally refers to the period from approximately 1968 (the beginning of civil rights protests that would lead the next year to British troops being called in to quell the rioting in Belfast) to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, in which England and Ireland agreed on Northern Ireland’s status.67 Arguably, the Troubles’ origin stretches far back into the mists of time. At a meeting in 1920 between Sir James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and Eamon de Valera, President of the Irish Republic, de Valera treated his partner to a lecture on “the grievances of Ireland for the last 700 years”; after half an hour, de Valera “reached the era of Brian Boru” (tenth century), at which point Craig decided that he had heard enough.68 More precisely, the Troubles could be said to have their beginning in the plantation of Ulster by Protestant England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both James and Elizabeth gave land in Northern Ireland to English and Scots “undertakers” in exchange for their building a Protestant society, thereby creating a Protestant enclave in an otherwise Catholic country and ruthlessly crushing dissent. Consequently, starting in the early modern period, the minority Protestant elite treated the majority Catholic population as second-class citizens, subject to massacres and razed-earth tactics in response to the inevitable rebellions (e.g., Cromwell’s mass murder of Irish rebels at Drogheda on September 11, 1649). There followed several centuries of Protestant depredations against the Northern Irish Catholics and several centuries worth of grievances. Catholics were increasingly denied political rights while Protestants celebrated their ascendancy, especially the July 12th marches commemorating the Protestant William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic army supporting King James II on June 1, 1690. As noted in the previous chapter, agitation (and terrorism) for Irish independence increased over the course of the nineteenth century, eventually resulting the Home Rule act of 1913 (and, it should be noted, extreme violence contributed to the formation of the Republic of Ireland). But Northern Ireland Protestants refused to accept Home Rule because independence from Great Britain meant losing their superior status, and opposition was voiced in explicitly anti-Catholic terms. Home rule, according to the 1912 Ulster Covenant, “would be … subversive of our civil and religious freedom,” meaning that Protestants feared they would be ruled by the Pope.69 In 1920, the various parties arrived at a compromise solution: most of Ireland would enjoy independence, but six predominantly Protestant counties in the north would remain part of the United Kingdom. This arrangement may have pleased the Protestant minority, but the Catholic majority

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remained outraged, resulting in a civil war between those supporting partition (the Unionist party) and those opposing it. The Catholic side lost, badly. While Northern Ireland remained relatively calm for the next 40 years or so, Catholics were treated as a subaltern class, enduring electoral, economic, educational, and housing discrimination. The anti-Catholic laws passed in the nineteenth century remained in effect, and they were buttressed by the Special Powers Act (1922), which allowed security forces in Northern Ireland to, inter alia, arrest, detain, and search without warrants, prohibit meetings, and even whip offenders.70 As Gerry Adams puts it, “Catholics in the north of Ireland were ghettoised, marginalised, treated as inferior.”71 The precipitating spark for the Troubles was the mob violence committed by Protestant loyalists in August, 1969 against Catholic civil rights marchers and then, against Catholic communities. Unable to maintain order, Stormont brought in the British army as nominal peacekeepers, but as the army clearly sided with the loyalists, Catholics regarded them as a hostile, occupying force. As a result, the Irish Republican Army revived, and the Provisional wing (known as the “Provos”) responded to Catholic attacks with its own violent campaigns.72 The early 1970s witnessed an escalating cycle of bombings, assassinations, and massacres, including Bloody Sunday, when the British army shot at unarmed civil rights demonstrators, killing 13 (the subject of Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, see later).The IRA responded to Protestant violence with its own attacks, and starting in 1973, the IRA began exporting the war to England, notably, bombing a pub in Guildford on October 5, 1974 (killing 5 and injuring 44) and an even more lethal attack on two Birmingham pubs in November (19 dead and 182 wounded).73 As time went on, the IRA moved to even more “spectacular” operations,74 such as blowing up Lord Mountbatten’s yacht in August, 1979 (see later for more details), and in 1984, blowing up a hotel in Brighton that killed five but missed its main target, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. By the time the Troubles were (largely) halted by the Good Friday Agreement in December, 1999, more than 3,600 people had died, with the IRA claiming slightly more than half the fatalities, and the Protestant paramilitaries responsible for 990 deaths, the majority (708) being Catholic civilians.75 Turning to the response to the Troubles, we see glimmers of unspeakability and the taboo against understanding terrorism. Margaret Scanlan, for example, says that Northern Ireland has the dubious honor of joining “Lebanon, Afghanistan, and El Salvador as a place in which the frequency of violent events has rendered them unassimilable, incomprehensible.”76 Similarly, Richard Kirkland begins his trenchant analysis of Alan Clarke’s film, Elephant (1989) by observing that terrorism [in Northern Ireland] has consistently been perceived as an act that defies the realm of civic discourse. … What, so the argument runs, can words offer in the face of such violence? Understood as such, every terrorist outrage becomes unspeakable.77

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Tom Clancy, in his thriller, Patriot Games (1987), returns to the trope of the terrorist as beyond the pale, inhuman, incomprehensible:78 What sort of person, Jack had wondered for weeks, could plan and execute such a crime? What was missing in him, or what terrible thing lived in him that most civilized people had the good fortunate to lack? The thin, acnescarred face was entirely normal … Then he looked at Miller’s eyes. He looked for … something, a spark of life, humanity, something that would say this was indeed another human being. … [But] as he looked into those pale gray eyes, [he] saw … nothing. Nothing at all. And yet, these examples are more the exception than the rule. For the most part, reactions to the various terrorist atrocities marking the Troubles do not claim that the event broke all the rules, or that they represented a new sort of criminality, something never before seen, therefore no words fail and so the event is unspeakable. Take, for example, the response to one of the most spectacular and deadly of republican attacks: on August 28, 1979, the IRA blew up Lord Mountbatten’s yacht, killing him, his grandson, and a teenage crewmember; four other people were critically injured, including Mountbatten’s mother (who died the next day), his daughter, and her husband. Five hours later, in coordinated attacks, 18 British soldiers died by remote-controlled bombs. But while political leaders unequivocally registered their horror and disgust—e.g., Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stated: By their actions today, the terrorists have added yet another infamous page to their catalog of atrocity and cowardice. If reports of their involvement in the death of Lord Mountbatten prove true, they will earn the condemnation and contempt of people of goodwill everywhere nobody said that the attacks were unprecedented, or that the IRA’s aims were incomprehensible.79 Nobody said that language failed or that this was an act, to use Edward Coke’s phrase, “sine nomine.”80 There are several reasons for the “speakability” of the Troubles.81 First, unlike the anarchist aims that totally gravel Joseph Conrad’s Inspector Heat, there is no doubt whatsoever about the IRA’s goal. Toward the beginning of Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, the camera pans across a wall emblazoned with this graffiti (see Figures 3.22a and b). The British soldiers patrolling Derry (and the audience) cannot but know precisely exactly what their opposition wants, and Greengrass underlines the point by having youths constantly shouting this phrase throughout the movie. The second reason is history.82 This conflict has been going on for centuries, and the literature of the Troubles regularly alludes to that fact. In The Rough Field, John Montague juxtaposes his poems about Northern Irish culture with

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and (b) From Bloody Sunday, directed by Paul Greengrass, 1972, “Brits Out.”

FIGURE 3.22  (a)

illustrations adapted from the woodcuts in John Derricke, The Image of Irelande with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581), such as one depicting English soldiers with Irish heads impaled on their swords.83 Through these pictures, along with the prose extracts from seventeenth-century British writings on Ireland, Montague “points to the relationship between past and present violence in Ireland.”84 In Benedict Keily’s “Proxopera” (first published in 1977 and the first fictive treatment of the Troubles), the IRA force a family at gunpoint to deliver a bomb, and the father reflects on how violent events from centuries past continue to shape the present: “The Apprentice Boys of Protestant Derry, the Maiden City, close the gate before Tyrconnel and the troops of James Stuart.The long memory lives on.”85 Similarly, in one of his early poems, “Requiem for the Croppies,” Seamus Heaney turns to the massacre of Catholic rebels in 1796, and in memorializing how the barley seeds in the pockets of the slaughtered dead, buried without “shroud or coffin,” took root—“And in August the barley grew up out of the grave”—affirms how their centuries-old cause continues into the present.86 Heaney goes back even further in “The Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” which uses Sir Walter Raleigh as a figure for England’s rape of Ireland, and recalls the 1580 Smerwick Massacre:87 Those are the plashy spots where he would lay His cape before her. In London, his name Will rise on water, and on these dark seepings: Smerwick sowed with the mouthing corpses Of six hundred papists, ‘as gallant and good Personages as ever were beheld.’ Heaney’s source for this quote is Sir John Pope-Hennessey’s Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland, who asserts that Raleigh and Lord Grey decided to slaughter the Spanish and Italian common soldiers inhabiting the Catholic garrison at Smerwick (the officers were ransomed), along with a few pregnant wives and a priest, so as to “read a severe lesson to Catholic sympathizers in Ireland.”88 For Heaney, the

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murderous anti-Catholicism that sparked the Troubles reaches back to the sixteenth century, and in fact, continues into the present. Finally, intimacy. In most other instances of terrorism, the perpetrators are considered “Other,” foreign, a breed apart. But in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, Republicans and Unionists, have been neighbors for centuries, even if they hate each other. Consequently, fictional and poetic treatments of the Troubles often stress the close connections between the two sides.To return to Keily’s “Proxopera,” the father repeatedly thinks that he recognizes one of the gunmen, even though the terrorists all wear masks: “There’s something familiar looking about his feet” (342). Eventually, he realizes “what’s familiar about his feet, his father’s feet, poor civil shambling sod” (351), and then calls the masked terrorist by his name, Bertie, revealing that he knows his identity because Bertie has his “father’s feet” and that “I’d know them anywhere” (358). The terrorists and their targets live in such close proximity that putting on a mask doesn’t confer anonymity, since everyone knows practically every detail about one another, including the shape of one’s extremities.We see the same point made in a different way in Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness, when a man thinking of moving to Belfast is given a tour that emphasizes both sectarian division and how close the two sides live to each other:89 On the Saturday he took him back over to West Belfast, took him through the narrow web of streets, showed him the Republican murals on the gable walls around the lower Falls, then took him over to the Shankill and showed him the Loyalist murals. The ‘peace Line, an ugly structure of corrugated iron and barbed wire, which separated the two communities, apparently shocked Steve more than anything else he saw. The connections are even closer in Ciaran Carson’s prose poem, “Question Time.” Carson describes how his father forbade him from coming from school walking down Cupar Street because it “was one of those areas where the Falls and Shankill joined together as unhappy Siamese twins.”90 Catholics and Protests may be separated by deep enmity, but they live at opposite ends of the same street. I want to now look in more depth at three very different approaches to the Troubles in a selection of Heaney’s poetry; Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man; and Greengrass’s film, Bloody Sunday.

Seamus Heaney In 1996, one year after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Heaney included in his book, The Spirit Level,“The Flight Path,” a poem that recounts a 1979 meeting on a train between Heaney and Sinn Féin spokesman, Danny Morrison:91 So he enters and sits down Opposite and goes for me head on. ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write

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Something for us?’ ‘If I do write something, Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’ And that was that. Or words to that effect. In this passage, Heaney adopts the position expected of a Nobel Prize Laureate, standing up for the independence of the artist while rejecting Morrison’s “presumption of entitlement.”92 But Heaney was not always so independent from sectarian claims. In some of his earlier poems, Heaney was very much the “aggravated young Catholic male” he rejects in “The Flight Path.”93 To be clear, these poems do not endorse terrorism. At no point does the young Heaney advocate bombing pubs or murdering Protestants. But these poems illustrate the ground from which terrorism rises. In “Intimidation,” Heaney takes on the persona of a Catholic victim of arson after an Orangeman July 12th bonfire, sitting in his house, refusing to budge, and contemplating just retribution:94 Each year this reek Of their midsummer madness Troubles him, a nest of pismires At his drystone walls. Ghetto rats! Are they the ones To do the smoking out? They’ll come streaming past To taste their ashes yet. Heaney did not include this poem in any of his subsequent books, but he added “Docker,” a highly unflattering portrait of a Unionist (the kind of people who attended bonfires and did the “smoking out”), to Death of a Naturalist:95 That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic— Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again; The only Roman collar he tolerates Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter. […] He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker’s cough in the hall. The threatened sectarian violence spills over in the final stanza into potential domestic violence. In these poems, Heaney answers hate with hate, and while he does not advocate taking arms against the Protestant arsonists or the Unionist

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docker who would dearly love to “drop a hammer on a Catholic,” it is easy to see that retributory violence is going to be the next step. That violence began with the Troubles in 1969, and in his 1974 essay, “Feeling into Words,” Heaney famously describes how he realized the insufficiency of his previous efforts and how poetry itself needed to change: “the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.”96 Heaney means that he wanted his verse to go beyond the expected “liberal lamentation that citizens should feel compelled to murder one another” or “public celebrations or execrations of resistance or atrocity”; rather, he wanted to find a poetic means of encompassing “the perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity.”97 He found his “images and symbols” in P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, which included graphic photographs of “preserved bodies of men and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times.”98 In these works, Heaney discovers, as Neil Corcoran puts it, “an interconnectedness, a family resemblance, between contemporary sectarian atrocity in the North of Ireland, the behavior of Viking invaders, and the ritual murders of Iron Age Jutland.”99 For example, in “The Grauballe Man,” who died from having his throat cut “practically from ear to ear, so deep that the gullet was completely severed,” the preserved corpse lies:100 hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped. (29) However, Heaney’s achievement is not so much that he found an objective correlative, as it were, sufficient to encompass the Troubles. In a famous passage, Derek Mahon defines good political poetry as exemplifying and enacting civilized discourse: “A good poem is a paradigm of good politics—of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level.”101 The poet, in other words, as honest broker. Ciaran Carson (who wrote a famously harsh review of North) takes a similar approach, writing as an un-implicated bystander and potential victim.102 Heaney, however, uses the bog poems to implicate himself in the sectarian violence. He cannot bring himself to engage in a “liberal lamentation” because he understands, accedes, and partly approves of the violence.

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In the first of these poems (published in Wintering Out [1972]), “The Tollund Man,” Heaney imagines himself: “Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home” (emphasis mine).103 Their culture of blood feuds and vengeance is also his culture. And in “Punishment,” Heaney includes himself in those who stand by and “connive / in civilized outrage” at killing the adulteress. But he also admits that the impulse for vengeance,“the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge” (31), also lies within himself.104 Heaney, in other words, may not join the IRA in their bombing and assassination campaigns, but he fully understands, and sympathizes with, the reasons for their terrorism.105 The key term here is “tribal,” and it will recur in “Casualty” (published in Field Work). This poem concerns the death of an older friend of Heaney’s, a Catholic who defied the IRA’s warnings after Bloody Sunday to stay away from a pub frequented by, presumably, Protestants, or possibly British soldiers.The IRA bombed that pub, killing Heaney’s friend. But rather than “[conniving] in civilized outrage,” as Heaney puts it in “Punishment,” or engaging in a “liberal lamentation” over this terrorist act, Heaney wonders if his friend brought his murder on himself: “How culpable was he / That last night when he broke / Our tribe’s complicity?”106 The word, “tribe,” has negative connotations going well beyond the term’s rather bloodless definition in the OED as: “A group of people forming a community and claiming descent from a common ancestor.” To belong to a “tribe” means elevating group identity above all other concerns. As the contemporary political scientist, Amy Chua, puts it, members of a tribe “will penalize outsiders, seemingly gratuitously. They will sacrifice, and even kill and die, for their groups.”107 There is inevitably a whiff of savagery, of something atavistic and primitive, in the term, a sense that “tribe” is inimical to civilization. E.O. Wilson, for example, argues that tribalism is “the principle driving force of mass murders” resulting from “insurgencies, civil wars, and terrorism.”108 Heaney, in “Casualty” and in “Punishment,” recognizes that Northern Irish Catholics constitute, not simply a religious identity, but a tribe, and he belongs to it.The tribe’s enemies are therefore his own enemies, and he is bound by the tribe’s rules. Heaney’s friend, on the other hand, “would not be held / At home by his own crowd / Whatever threats were phoned, / Whatever black flags waved.”109 Consequently, Heaney not only declines to connive in civilized outrage over the IRA’s bombing the pub in response to Bloody Sunday, but leaves unanswered the question of his friend’s culpability, since the man refused to heed his tribe’s warnings. Note that Heaney does not question the IRA’s culpability.

Resurrection Man Eion McNamee takes a different approach to the Troubles in Resurrection Man, a novel exploring a particularly brutal campaign of Protestant sectarian terrorism against Catholics.110 The extreme violence committed by Victor Kelly and his gang against random Catholics comes very close to the rhetoric of unspeakability.

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“There was someone out there operating in a new context,” Coppinger (a journalist) says about the autopsy report on the first knife killing; they “were being lifted into unknown areas, deep pathologies. … They would have to rethink procedures. The root of the tongue had been severed. New languages would have to be invented” (16).111 Later in the novel, Coppinger returns to the same theme. Conrad’s M.Vladimer tells Verloc that the usual avenues for terrorism have “entered the general conception” of existence and are therefore “[all] … used up,” meaning, “[e]very newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away.”112 The same applies in Resurrection Man: Coppinger understands that conventional terrorism (“Another bomb, another dead UDR man”) has led to “cultivated boredom,” and people have learned “to switch channels when they hear it” (156). This is where Victor Kelly and his gang come in. They go beyond anything that has been done before: the previous violence in Belfast is “being ordered, contrived even. The Resurrection Men don’t belong in it. Too unpredictable. There’s a frontier air about them. Like a boomtown madness. Things that happen in lawless towns on the edge of the wilderness” (156). But a new kind of violence, requiring a new language, does not mean that the violence is, as M. Vladimir would say, a mere butchery, that the knife murders do not arise from a rational, comprehensible cause. We are told that after school, the young Victor would “go down to the Cornmarket to listen to the preachers and their recital of sectarian histories” (9), absorbing the Protestant view of history and their virulent hatred of Catholics: “Victor listened to their talk of Catholics. The whore of Rome.There were barbarous rites, martyrs racked in pain.The Pope’s cells were plastered with the gore of delicate Protestant women. Catholics were plotters heretics, casual betrayers” (9). Later,Victor turns to extreme violence as a necessary response to what he perceives as Catholic perfidy and to assert Protestant agency. He tells his mother, Dorcas: “I got a job to finish. The Catholics in this town think they can just take over, the IRA and all.Walk all over you if you let them” (73). Billy McLure, another member of the Resurrection Men, who has shadowy ties to the British government, reveals the sense of grievance underlying the Unionist cause when he tells Ryan (another journalist, and Coppinger’s friend): Let me tell you something … but the Protestant people have had enough so they have. Enough talk about rights and all.There’s a question of a birthright being sold out here. Put that in your newspaper. We’re the boys built the Empire and got a kick in the arse for it. Write about that. Ulster loyal and true. (151) And “Ulster,” McLure tells Victor later in the novel, “needs men like you. Leaders. The struggle’s going to be long and hard” (204). Consequently, Dorcas truly believes that “Victor was involved in the protection of Protestants” (143), and she is not alone. As the tightening of security

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led to a decrease in bombings, the sectarian murders (presumably Catholic also, but McNamee does not specify) rose, and so did Victor and his gang’s reputation, as evidenced by graffiti: “it was a rumour of approval in the narrow streets: Resurrection Men 1. Taigs 0.” (133). And a little later, the narrator observes: “This was a good time for the Resurrection Men. They were seen as favoured and visionary. Defenders of the faith” (145). That is exactly how Willie Lambe, one of the gang members, feels after Victor decides to give him his own “mission” (i.e., murder a Catholic): he could see the looks of respect on the faces of men in the bar. A person of standing which was what he always wished. Perhaps even his deeds seen in the light of history along with other defenders of the faith. (161) To be sure, this perspective is neither pleasant nor likely to garner sympathy, especially since McNamee blurs the distinction between political difference and extreme religious prejudice (the prison guard who helps Victor murder a witness against him justifies himself thus: “Fucking Catholics. Equal fucking housing, equal votes. Fuckers looking for Protestants out of their jobs, out of their houses. Breeding like rabbits and living off the dole” [98]). But, repulsive as these sentiments may be, they reflect the “feelings of frustration and despair” endemic in the Protestant population of Northern Ireland, and they constitute the basis for the Resurrection Men’s terrorist campaign.113 Victor Kelly believes that he is waging a justified war against a dangerous enemy on behalf of Northern Irish Protestants, who despite all their seeming advantages, consider themselves at genuine risk, and as the graffiti demonstrates, at least some Protestants approve of his murderous campaign. Nonetheless, for all the novel’s emphasis on sectarian division, McNamee, like Ciaran Carson, Benedict Keily, and Dierdre Madden, also emphasizes the intimacy that Catholics and Protestants inhabit. Victor, for example, takes his girlfriend, Heather, for a drive around Belfast, and at first she assumes that Victor was driving at random; then she saw the pattern. He was driving carefully along the edges of Catholic west Belfast. She had never been this close before although she had seen these places on television. Ballymurphy, Andersontown. The Falls. Names resonant with exclusion. Now they were circling the boundaries, close enough to set foot in them (45) Separate neighborhoods, but in the same city. Certainly, one’s address could be a death sentence: “Sectarian killers worked on that basis, picking up their victims according to the street they lived in” (85). But at the same time, proximity grants a kind of unity. McLure makes exactly this point to Margaret, Ryan’s estranged

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wife: “But most of all he talked about you. How he liked your journalism even though you’re a Catholic. ‘From the other side of the house’ was the way he put it” (179). Catholic and Protestant, “Prods” and “Taigs,” may inhabit separate rooms, or neighborhoods, but they are enclosed within the same domicile. In other words, they live together, whether they like it or not. And if they live in the same house, they are going to mix.114 When Victor and his gang invade the Shamrock bar in response to an IRA attack on a Protestant gas station that left two dead and three wounded, they immediately separate the patrons: “One of the men waved his gun vaguely in the direction of the drinkers. ‘Prods on one end of the bar. Taigs on the other.’ Half of the people rose immediately and began to move towards the bar” (139). Despite living in separate neighborhoods, or separate rooms, at this establishment, at least, the two religions, equally represented, drink together (albeit at the risk of their lives). Perhaps, however, the most disturbing aspect of Resurrection Man is the intimation, never fully spelled out, that Victor’s terror campaign has the unofficial sanction of the British government.115 Billy McLure, we are told, protects Victor by blackmailing the “well-spoken Englishmen in suits, off-duty policemen, senior figures in the UDA and faces [recognizable] from the television” (31) by filming them in bed with boys, some of whom are mentally challenged (64, 81). But even without blackmail, the Resurrection Men operate with the seeming approval of officialdom: “Detectives hinted at threads of sympathy of the killers in the lower ranks. There seemed be a dark current of approval in the political sphere” (146). When Victor finally goes too far, Coppinger tells Ryan, “I think a decision’s been took somewhere to get rid of them” (156), and, later, he speculates, “Maybe the Brits will take him out. He’s no fucking use to man or beast now” (193). Certainly, Victor’s killing by three men armed with rifles, firing behind parked cars (230), has all the appearance of an organized, professional, state sanctioned assassination.

Bloody Sunday In several important ways, Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday takes its cue, both cinematically and thematically, from Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.116 Like Pontecorvo, Greengrass uses grainy film stock (as well as hand-held cameras) to create the illusion that the audience is inside the film’s action, rather than spectating from a safe distance. Greengrass also uses “Derry residents, many of whom had been present on the day, to recreate the march,” and “real soldiers, people who’d actually served in Northern Ireland, and had their own memories of the conflict and it gave the whole piece an edge.”117 And like Pontecorvo’s movie, Greengrass examines the origin of an extended terrorism campaign that will, for the most part, achieve its goal. As we will see, Greengrass will also invite a complicated perspective on the origins of terrorism. The immediate conflict is over Ivan Cooper’s (James Nesbitt) plan for a peaceful march protesting internment and lack of civil rights, which conflicts with the

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British army’s ban on marches, due to civil unrest (Greengrass stages the conflict through alternating scenes at the movie’s start between dueling press conferences).118 Cooper states forthrightly his reasons for the march: “We are marching because ever since the partition of Ireland Catholics here in the North have suffered discrimination in a Protestant dominated land.” To which Major-General Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith) responds: “In view of the continuing adverse security situation in the Province, all parades, processions, and marches will be banned until further notice.” As Greengrass says in the director’s commentary, he wanted to portray the impending collision [between] the civil rights movement … and the determination of the senior military commanders to stop the march. … The irresistible force of Catholic protest, nationalist protest, meeting the immoveable object of Unionist intransigence, British government intransigence[.] Before the march begins, Cooper goes to talk with the local Provo O/C (David Pearse) sitting in a car. “Just checking you’re keeping the guns away,” he tells him (see Figure 3.23). But the O/C (who does not make eye contact) tells Cooper: “That’s no concern of yours.” Cooper then brings the discussion to a more fundamental level: what is the best way to achieve political change? “We just want a peaceful march. This is our day. People are fed up with the shootings and the [he is interrupted at this point by a report on British troop activity].” But the O/C is having none of it: “Ivan, it’s all very well for you with your wee Westminster paycheck. But marching’s not going to solve this thing.” To which Cooper responds with a firm,

FIGURE 3.23 From

IRA.

Bloody Sunday, directed by Paul Greengrass, 1972, Cooper and

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“Watch us.” At the start of the march, Cooper addresses the crowd, and he tells them that the question is about means, not ends: It’s been a difficult day, but a glorious one here in Derry. All of us wending our way down the hill together. Men, women, and children marching. … But, ah, let’s not forget in all this confusion, that we face a choice as a society. Not about what we want. We all know what we want: Radical change, the dismantling of Stormont, and an end to Unionist domination. … The choice is about how we achieve it. Between violence and non-violence. If we are going to give a future to the children of this city—the young lads up there, there they are, we all know they’re rioting away there. They do it every day. If we are gonna give those boys there a future, we have to show them non-violence works. To paraphrase John Lennon, the central question in the film is: does peace have a chance? The answer, alas, is no. Greengrass frequently cuts away from Cooper’s speech with scenes illustrating British headquarters losing control of the paratroopers (Brigadier Patrick MacLellan [Nicholas Farrell] keeps telling Para 1 to stay put, but they defy his orders), and paratroopers ginning themselves up to take on the “yobbos,” as they frequently call the teens shouting insults at them. However, Greengrass also gives a more complicated picture of the massacre’s cause than mere savagery. Para 1’s stated mission is not murder, but imposing order: As one their commanders says: The Bogside is a fucking mess. We’ve got to go in there, get a grip of it. We’ve got to teach these people a lesson. So let’s make sure the guys know who the leaders of these fuckers are. And let’s go and get’em. Their initial goal is to capture the riot’s leaders, period. But crucially, we’re told, “it’s the end of our tour. Let’s teach’em a fucking lesson.” And even more crucially, just as the French Assistant Commissioner in The Battle of Algiers resorts to terrorism due to the increasing body count and the sense of abandonment by his superiors, so are the British under intense pressure due to the increasingly lethal violence directed against British troops. Brigadier Patrick MacLellan (Nicholas Farrell) tells the police chief, Lagan (Gerard McSorely), who is begging MacLellan to let the march happen, “It’s a war, Frank. We’re taking casualties every week. We’ve lost 43 British soldiers. I’m having to write too many letters, Frank. I’m sorry, we have to draw the line.” That is the view from the top. The soldiers themselves, we find out in the next scene, are “sick of being shot at, spat on, and all the other shit that goes on in this place.” They are fed up, and they ready to strike back: “It’s about time we

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go out there and show these fuckers what it’s all about. … You’ve got go in, and you got to hit them hard.” Greengrass shows us that the soldiers, exhausted, under extreme duress, deeply angry with the hostility they face, are primed to over-react, especially since they consider the marchers “terrorists,” not peaceful demonstrators. We have therefore all the ingredients for a loss of military discipline, gross misjudgment, and an army firing on unarmed civilians—and that is exactly what happens.119 But if Greengrass invites the audience to understand how the massacre happened due to multiple, overlapping causes, he is unambiguous about how the soldiers came up with a story to cover up their errors, even as one of them expresses horror at what happened: Private Lomas: “What the fuck did you do?” Unidentified Solder: “ … adrenalin was pumping our nerves.” Lomas: “I saw it. I saw you shoot civvies.” Unidentified Solider: “You was there, Lom—you see what we done. All civvies are terrorists, mate.” Private Lomas: “Terrorists? I never even saw a gunman.” The private’s scruples, however, do not last long. When asked by the inquiry if all the shots fired “were in accordance with the yellow card [the rules of engagement, which state that one can open fire only after positively identifying a firearm],” Private Lomas responds, after briefly wrestling with his conscience, “yes,” making him entirely complicit in the cover-up. In the penultimate scene, we see young men lining up to join the IRA, “the payoff,” as Greengrass says in the director’s commentary, and the film ends with Cooper admitting that the IRA man is right. Marching is not going to solve this thing. At the news conference following the massacre, Cooper sums up the day’s events, and its consequences: Uh, this afternoon, 27 people were shot in this city. 13 of them lie dead tonight. They were innocent. We were there. This is our Sharpeville. This is our Amritsa Massacre. A moment of truth, and a moment of shame. And, uh, I just want to say this to the British government: you know what you’ve just done, don’t you? You’ve destroyed the Civil Rights Movement. And you’ve given the IRA the biggest victory it will ever have. All over this city tonight young men, boys … will be joining the IRA and you will reap a whirlwind. As the line of young men predicts, and the subsequent history of the Troubles demonstrates, that is exactly what happened. But unlike The Battle of Algiers, Greengrass’s film strongly implies that terrorism, in this case, is not only speakable; terrorism is entirely justified.

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Notes 1 “Persons are shot down by Bolshevist guards without any pretext or warning … and a state of terrorism exists where the Bolshevists are in control” (New York Times, November 11, 1918, 4). 2 “Reign of Terrorism,” New York Times, September 28, 1941, 16. 3 “Organized Terrorism,” New York Times, October 23, 1940, 22. 4 Thomas Perry Thornton, “Terror as a Weapon of Political Agitation,” Internal War: Problems and Approaches, ed. Harry Eckstein (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 71. This article has been called “the single most seminal article on terrorism” (Albert J. Jongman and Alex Schmid, Political Terrorism: A New Guide To Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, And Literature [New York: Transaction Publishers, 1988), 50. The following paragraphs are deeply indebted to Lisa Stampnitzky’s chapter, “From Insurgents to Terrorists,” in Disciplining Terror: How experts Invented “Terrorism” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 49–82. 5 For example, in a statement to Parliament after the bombing of the King David Hotel on July 23, 1946, Prime Minister Clement Attlee called the act “insane” and said that “[o]f all the outrages in Palestine—and they have been many and horrible in the last few months—this is the worst” (“Insane Terrorism—Premier on the Outrage,” The Scotsman July 24, 1946, 5. 6 Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 6–7. 7 Paget, 16; Charles W. Thayer, Guerilla (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 117. 8 David Galula, Counter-Insurgency:Theory and Practice (New York: Praeter, 1964), 11. 9 Thornton, 75, 76. On Conrad, see Chapter 3, pp. 56–60. 10 Ibid., 77. 11 “Detectives and Their Work,” All the Year Round, April 25, 1885, 136. 12 Thornton, 71. 13 Ibid., 72 (emphases in the original). 14 Julian, Counter-Insurgency Operations: Techniques of Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Walker, 1967), 162. 15 Counter-Insurgency: A Symposium, April 16–20, 1962, ed. Stephen T. Hosmer and Sibylle O. Crane (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1963; rpt. 2006), 5. 16 Robert Taber, The War of the Flea (New York: Stuart, 1965; rpt. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002), 109 17 Ibid., 109. 18 Brian Crozier, The Rebels: A Study of Post-War Insurrections (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), 159. 19 Taber, 100. 20 See, for example, Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 251–255; Nicholas Harrison, “Pontecorvo’s ‘Documentary Aesthetics,’” Interventions 9.3 (2007): 389–404; Michael F. O’Riley, Cinema in an Age of Terror: North Africa, Victimization, and Colonial History (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 22–48; and Nancy Virtue, “Poaching with the System: Gillo Pontecorvo’s Tactical Aesthetics in The Battle of Algiers, Screen 55.3 (2014): 317–337. 21 Edward Said, “The Dictatorship of Truth: An Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo,” Cineaste 25.2 (2000), 24; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1963), 94. See also Haidar Eid and Khaled Ghazel, “Footprints of Fanon in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Sembene Ousamne’s Xala,” English in Africa 35.2 (2008): 151–161 and Tony Shaw, Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 87. 22 Franco Solinas, “An Interview with Franco Solinas,” Criterion DVD booklet (2004), 14.

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23 The Battle of Algiers (Criterion Collection), dir. Gillo Pontecorvo (2004). For the quotations, I have relied on the subtitles for this release.While the FLN characters are based on real people—Saadi Yacef even plays himself!—“Colonel Mathieu” is an amalgam of “three or four colonels who actually existed” (Solinas, “Interview,” 15). 24 Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers: A Film Written by Franco Solinas, ed. Piernico Solinas (New York: Scribner’s, 1973). 25 The published screenplay gives a more detailed response: ““It is an inevitable stage in revolutionary war; from terrorism, one passes to insurrection … as from open guerrilla warfare, one passes to real war, the latter being the determining factor” (109). 26 Crozier, The Rebels, 127. 27 Thornton, 90. In his interview for the DVD booklet accompanying the Criterion release, Solinas says he consulted “the theories of the French colonels,” which might explain how Crozier’s theory of insurrection’s progression ended up informing both Ben M’Hidi and Mathieu’s views of terrorism (14). However, when the interviewer tries to probe further (“What theories?”), Solinas refers to their absorbing the lessons of “Mao’s writing on guerrilla warfare and General Giap’s techniques and strategies” (15). 28 Battle of Algiers, 121 (Scene 111). The published screenplay gives a slightly different translation: “Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use your women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?” 29 Crozier, 159. 30 Thornton, 88. 31 Paget, Counter-Insurgency Operations, 23. 32 See, for example, “We Are All Murderers” (first published in Les Temps Modernes, March 1958) and “A Victory” (first published in L’Express, March 6, 1958). Both are republished in Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001), 62–64, 65–77. 33 Shaw, 94. Joan Mellen posits that Pontecorvo disagreed with Fanon’s belief that terrorism can be restorative, but does not give a source or a quote (Filmguide to The Battle of Algiers [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997], 24. For Greer, see the previous chapter, pp. 44–50. Michael Ignatieff also observes that Pontecorvo’s movie serves “at once [as] a justification for acts of terror and an unsparing account of terror’s cost” (“The Terrorist as Auteur,” The New York Times Magazine, November 14, 2004. See also Paul Haspel, “Algeria Revisited: Opposing Commanders as Warring Doubles in The Battle of Algiers,” Journal of Film and Video 58.3 (2006): 33–42. 34 David Forgacss, “Italians in Algiers,” Interventions 9.3 (2007), 357; Shaw, Cinematic Terror, 92. 35 Pontecorvo would later claim that his film was guided by the “dictatorship of truth” (Said, “The Dictatorship of Truth,” Cineaste 25.2 [2000], 25), but the film omits important facts.While The Battle of Algiers does not start with violence, a long series of atrocities preceded the events chronicled in the film. For example, on August 20, 1955, Algerian rebels butchered entire French families in the mining town of Ain-Abid; the French responded with their own indiscriminate massacre. See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 119–122; David Galula, Pacification in Algeria 1956–58 (rpt. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2006), 12; and Carlo Celli, From Resistance to Terrorism (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 53, 55–56. 36 In actuality, there were two executions that day. One man killed a gamekeeper, and the second was condemned for ambushing eight civilians, including a woman and a child (Horne, A Savage Peace, 183). 37 While The Battle of Algiers makes it seem that the moral improvement of the Casbah and shoring up their political position overlapped, the film leaves out the FLN’s terrorism against their own people, such as the threats of death, rape, and dismemberment

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to extort money and ensure allegiance to the cause (Crozier, The Rebels, 170–172; Horne, A Savage Peace, 134–138). 38 Crozier, The Rebels, 160. 39 Thornton, “Terror as a Weapon,” 77. Robert Taber also argues that terrorism’s purpose “is not to conquer, or to terrorize, but to create an intolerable situation for the occupying power or its puppet government” (War of the Flea, 88, emphasis in the original). 40 By having the FLN attack only soldiers and policeman, Pontecorvo and Solinas make the FLN seem more discerning in their targets than was the case.The FLN leadership ordered Saadi Yacef to “kill any European between the ages of eighteen and fiftyfour. But no women, no children, no old people” (quoted in Horne, 183–184). In a 2004 interview, Saadi Yacef says that “ultracolonialists” were responsible for the rue du Thèbes bombing, and that the FLN “had to arm ourselves in a way that was equal to that of our adversaries” (Gary Crowdus and Saadi Yacef, “Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers: An Interview with Saadi Yacef,” Cineaste 29.3 [2004], 35). 41 Taber, 87. 42 According to Tony Shaw, The Battle of Algiers “helped set a new benchmark when it came to the depiction of terrorism, and one of the main comments by critics about TBOA on its release was the unusually graphic depiction of violence” (private email correspondence, September 27, 2017). I am grateful to Prof. Shaw for his help with this point. 43 E.g., Thornton, “Terror as a Weapon,” 87; Thornton, War of the Flea, 100–107. 44 Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 253. 45 Ibid., 253. Nancy Virtue takes a similar position: “Just as the FLN synchronizes the bombings to heighten their terrorist value, Pontecorvo positions our viewing of the bombing sequence in a way that aligns our own perspective with that of the Algerians, thereby enhancing its subversive power” (“Poaching Within the System,” 328). 46 Francesco Caviglia, “A Child Eating Ice-Cream Before the Explosion: Notes on a Controversial Scene in The Battle of Algiers,” P.O.V. A Danish Journal of Film Studies 20 (2005), 15. http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_20/section_1/artc1A.html. See also Shaw, Cinematic Terror, 93; Jacques Lezra, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 173–201; and Matthew Evangelista, Gender, Nationalism, and War: Conflict on the Movie Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 39–58. 47 The Algerians begged Pontecorvo to drop the pictures of the child because “it makes us look like monsters” (Forgacs, “Italians in Algiers,” 359). 48 Ibid., 359. 49 Virtue, “Poaching with the System,” 331. 50 See, for example, Haspel, “Algeria Revisited,” 33; Solinas, “Interview,” 15–16; and Shaw, Cinematic Terror, 91. 51 Gary Crowdus and Saadi Yacef, “Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers: An Interview with Saadi Yacef,” Cineaste 29.3 (2004), 33. 52 Thornton, “Terror as a Weapon,” 71. 53 Ibid., 77; Galula, Counter-Insurgency Warfare, 58–59. 54 Galula, Counterinsurgency, 75. 55 Crozier, The Rebels, 170. 56 Paget, Counter-Insurgency Operations, 162, 163–164. 57 Shaw, Cinematic Terror, 91; Crowdus, “Terror and Terrorism,” 30. See also Solinas’ comments in “Interview,” 16–17. 58 Haspel, “Algeria Revisited,” 38. 59 Pontecorvo’s refusal to privilege either the French or the FLN also leads him to include small moments of decency among the French even as they engage in brutal acts. In the opening scene, for example, Colonel Mathieu and his accomplices treat an FLN captive, whom they have just tortured to reveal Ali La Pointe’s hideout,

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compassionately. Rather than just leaving him on the floor, broken and bleeding, they dry him off and give him coffee. Later in the film, when the French soldiers invade an apartment building to break the general strike, a soldier helps up a small child who has been knocked down and gently keeps him out of the way. And when a soldier tries to pat down an Algerian woman (who is carrying a gun), he’s told, in a moment of cultural sensitivity, by a superior, “never touch their women!” 60 Crowdus, “Terror and Terrorism,” 31. 61 “Gillo Pontecorvo:The Dictatorship of Truth,” The Battle of Algiers, disc 2, 28:39–29:10. 62 Said, “Dictatorship of Truth,” 24. 63 Evangelista, 59. 64 In “The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo,” Said translates “personnage choral” as “collective subject” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 285. But given Pontecorvo’s love of music, and the careful use of music in his films, I think the perhaps literal translation of “choral” as referring to music is appropriate. 65 Said, “Quest,” 284. 66 Harrison, “Pontecorvo’s ‘Documentary Aesthetics,’” 400. 67 This section largely relies on Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). I have also consulted Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland: 1920–1996 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), and Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 68 Quoted in Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 17–18. 69 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Covenant. 70 Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 26, 37–41. 71 Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn: An Autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1996), 44. 72 While both Protestants and Catholics resorted to terrorism, in the popular imagination, Protestant terrorism is clearly subordinated to the IRA, even though “[l]oyalist violence seemed to glory in its barbarity” (Mulholland, 89; Ian S. Wood, Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006], 109– 110). For example, a Google search of “terrorism IRA” yields well over 7 million hits; “terrorism UDF” yields only 88,300. Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (New York: Picador, 1994) is one of the very few books to address Protestant terrorism. 73 Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 100. 74 The term is Mulholland’s (128). 75 Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 76. 76 Scanlan, “The Unbearable Present: Northern Ireland in Four Contemporary Novels,” Études irlandaises 10 (1985), 146. 77 Kirkland, “The Spectacle of Terrorism in Northern Irish Culture,” Critical Survey 15.1 (2003), 77. 78 Tom Clancy, Patriot Games (London: Collins, 1987), 121–122. See also Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (De-) constructing the North (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 59. 79 Leonard Downie, Jr., “IRA Bomb Kills Lord Mountbatten,” Washington Post, August 28, 1979 80 Anon, A True and Perfect Relation, sig. D3–D4r. 81 The literature on the Troubles is vast, but for general overviews, see KennedyAndrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003); Michael Parker’s encyclopedic Northern Irish Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and Michael L. Storey, Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004). 82 Scanlan also notes that history is a “[familiar feature] of Northern Ireland’s cultural landscape. … In this view, Northern Ireland today is in, but not of, the twenty-first

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century, and the most relevant context for explaining its conflicts is in the distant past” (Plotting Terror, 38). 83 Montague, The Rough Field 1961–1971 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972), 27. 84 Heather Clark, “Befitting Emblems: The Early 1970s,” The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 376 85 “Proxopera,” in The State of Ireland: A Novella & Seventeen Stories (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1980), 354. 86 Heaney,“Requiem for the Croppies,” Door into the Dark (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1969), 24. 87 Heaney, “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975; rpt. 1996), 40. 88 Sir John Pope-Hennessey, Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland (London: Kegan Paul, 1883), 11. See also “Atrocity and History: Grey, Spenser and the Slaughter at Smerwick (1580), Age of Atrocity:Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 79–94. 89 Madden, One by One in the Darkness (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 57–58. 90 Carson, “Question Time,” Belfast Confetti (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1989), 59. 91 Heaney, “The Flight Path,” The Spirit Level (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1996), 29. Heaney describes the incident in Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 257–258. Morrison, it should be noted, has a very different recollection. See www.bobbysandstrust.com/archives/867. 92 O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones 257. 93 Seamus Deane, “‘Unhappy and at Home’: Interview with Seamus Heaney,” The Crane Bag 1.1 (1977), 61; Edna Longley, “North: ‘Inner Emigre” or ‘Artful Voyeur,’?” The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. Tony Curtis (Brigend: Poetry Wales Press, 1985), 66. 94 Heaney, “Intimidation,” The Malahat Review 17 (1971), 34. On Heaney and the Troubles, see Philip Mahoney, “Seamus Heaney and the Violence in Northern Ireland,” Journal of Irish Literature 11.3 (1982): 20–30; Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 117–151; Michael R. Molino, Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994); and Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce: Readings in Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 140–146. On the divided critical response to North, see The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed. Elmer Andrews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 80–119. 95 Heaney, “Docker,” Death of a Naturalist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 41. 96 Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” Preoccupations: Selected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980), 56. 97 Ibid., 56–57. 98 Ibid., 57. 99 Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 106. 100 P. V. Glob, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, trans. Rupert Bruce-Mittford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969; rpt. 1975), 48; Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975; rpt. 2001), 29. 101 Derek Mahon, “Poetry in Northern Ireland,” Twentieth Century Studies 4 (1970), 93. 102 Carson, “Escaped from the Massacre?, The Honest Ulsterman 50 (1975): 183–186. On Carson’s poetic approach to the Troubles, see, for example, “Night Out”: “At the bar, we get the once-over once again. / Seven whiskeys later, the band is launching into Four Green Fields. / From somewhere out beyond the breeze-block walls we get a broken rhythm / Of machine-gun fire. A ragged chorus. So the sentence of the night /

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Is punctuated through and through by rounds of drink, of bullets, of applause” (Belfast Confetti, 77), and the poem, “Belfast Confetti” (confusingly, not included in the book of the same name), in which the poet is interrogated by a British patrol: “What is/ My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? / A fusillade of question marks” (The Irish for No [Winston-Salem, NC:Wake Forest University Press, 1987), 31. On Carson’s Belfast poems, see Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 259–268. Another option is rage, as exemplified by Thomas Kinsella’s furious response to the Widgery report, Butcher’s Dozen (Dublin: Peppercanister, 1972). 103 Heaney, “The Tollund Man,” Selected Poems 1965–1975 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 79. 104 Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975; rpt. 2001), 37. 105 Other poems in North, are more conventionally angry. In, for example, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” Heaney “[connives] in civilized outrage” (“‘Oh, it’s disgraceful, sure, I agree.’ / ‘Where’s it going to end?’ ‘It’s getting worse’” [53]), and admits his helplessness at the escalating violence: “Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up / In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, / Coherent miseries, a bit and sup: / We hug our little destiny again” (55). 106 Field Work (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976), 23. 107 Amy Chua, Political Tribes (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 1. 108 E. O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (New York: Liveright, 2014), 154. 109 Heaney, Field Work, 23. 110 Most critics focus on Resurrection Man’s relationship to language and postmodernism. See, for example, Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror, 37–56; Dermot McCarthy, “Belfast’s Babel: Postmodern Lingo in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man,” Irish University review 30.1 (2000): 132–148; Eric Reimer, “Ulsterisation and the Troubles Thriller: Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man,” Irish Studies Review 20.1: 65–76; J. Edward Mallot “‘There’s No Good Riot Footage Anymore’: Waging Northern Ireland’s Media War in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man,” New Hibernia Review 17.3 (2013): 34–55; and Billy Gray, “‘A Thrilling Beauty’? Violence, Transcendence and the Shankill Butchers in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man,” Estudios Irlandeses 9 (2014): 54–66. 111 All references to Resurrection Man will be parenthetical. 112 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 23, 24. 113 Martin Dillon, The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder (London: Arrow Books, 1990), 13–14. For a fuller explorations of the Protestant cause, see Geoffrey Bell, The Protestants of Ulster (London: Pluto Press, 1976); Alan F. Parkinson, Ulster Loyalism and the British Media (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998); Ian Wood, Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and Mallot, “Media War,” 51. 114 Kennedy-Andrews argues that Kelly’s motivation is psychological, not political (Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 122; “The Novel and the Northern Troubles,” The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, ed. John Wilson Foster [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 250). However, the two are not easily separable. Victor’s father, James, bears the name “Kelly,” which “meant that he was always suspected of being a Catholic” (4), and throughout the book, Victor is haunted by the taunt, “Your ma must of rid a Taig” (6; see also pp. 18, 42, 105, 137, and 201), which he takes as a mortal insult. While Victor will kill Protestants, he dispatches them with a single gunshot, as he does with the supposed traitor, Flaps McArthur (166). Victor reserves his greatest, most sadistic violence for Darkie Larche, the leader of a rival gang who announces that “he himself did not personally believe rumours to the effect that Victor’s father was a Catholic” (41). Darkie recognizes that he made a fatal mistake (171), and he is Victor’s final victim, dismembered while alive (213). Aaron Kelly, on

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the other hand, proposes that Victor’s last name “is itself a displacement, a hybrid, unsettled signification, which contradicts the sectarian and linguistic absolutes that he presents in the text” (“Terror-torial Imperatives: Belfast and Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man,” The Cities of Belfast, ed. Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003], 174). 115 “There is evidence of collaboration between legal and illegal forces through the Troubles,” with hundreds of Protestant members of the UDF (Ulster Defence Force) convicted of collusion with the Protestant paramilitaries (Mulholland, 89). 116 Joseph, Moser, “Bloody Sunday as Documentary and Discourse,” Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Translationalism, ed. Brian McIlory (New York: Routledge, 2011), 254. 117 Jennifer Beckett proposes that the film’s goal “is reconciliation” (“Bloody Sunday: National Trauma and National Cinema,” Sydney Studies in English 37 [2011], 51; Paul Greengrass, “Director’s Commentary,” Bloody Sunday [Paramount DVD. 2003]) See also Aileen Blaney, “Remembering Historical Trauma in Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday,” History & Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 19.2 (2007). 128–130. 118 Bloody Sunday, Paul Greengrass, dir (Paramount DVD, 2003). 119 Whenever I teach this film, the veterans in the class are always astonished at the breakdown of military discipline.

4 ISRAEL/PALESTINE Unspeakability in John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and Mohammed Moulessehoul [Yasmina Khadra]’s The Attack

From Speakability to Unspeakability Starting in the late 1960s, early 1970s, the usage of “terrorist,” guerilla,” and “insurgent” starts to diverge, with the incidence of “terrorist” rocketing while the other two terms decline in tandem (see Figure 4.1).1 The marked increase in the use of “terrorist” not only indicates the rise of studies devoted exclusively to terrorism as a subject distinct from guerilla or insurgent warfare, but also a shift back to the paradigm of unspeakability.2 Whereas earlier counterterrorism and counterinsurgency analyses considered terrorism a rational tactic with knowable goals, starting roughly in the 1970s, terrorists were increasingly considered “evil, pathological, irrational actors, fundamentally different from ‘us.’”3 The Munich Olympics Massacre is often taken as “the spectacular event that inaugurated the era of modern terrorism,” and it also marked a return to the rhetoric of unspeakability.4 A New York Times editorialist asserted that “yesterday’s murderous assault in Munich plumbed new depths of criminality,” and the next day, described the attack as “the depredations of … fanatical madmen.”5 World leaders condemned the Black September terrorists as “fanatical madmen,” “sick minds who do not belong to humanity,” and “[o]utlaws who will stop at nothing to accomplish goals.”6 Congress passed resolutions asserting that “the civilized world may cut off from contact with civilized mankind any peoples or any nation giving sanctuary, support, sympathy aid or comfort to acts of murder and barbarism as those just witnessed in Munich.”7 To be sure, the 60s-era counterinsurgency understanding of terrorism as a “rational tool” does not immediately vanish, but when it appeared, this view was challenged by those believing that terrorism constituted an unprecedented horror,

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FIGURE 4.1  Google

ngram, terrorist-guerilla-insurgent, 1965–1980, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science (published online ahead of print: December 16, 2010).

a new phenomenon to be stamped out, not understood. We can see the tense competition between these two approaches in a 1974 hearing on international terrorism before a congressional subcommittee. The chairman, Lee Hamilton (Indiana), began with a statement exhibiting the same understanding of terrorism articulated by Thomas Perry Thornton, Brian Crozier, and The Battle of Algiers’ Colonel Mathieu:8 It remains a constant in the context of the Middle East that no settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict will be achieved or can endure if the legitimate rights of the Palestinians are not addressed and if terrorist acts in the Middle East and elsewhere related to the Palestinian problems do not cease. Terrorism must cease and so must counter-terrorism: One feeds on the other and the cycle can only escalate if we do not seek to end it. Terrorism, in Hamilton’s view, has a rational cause (Palestinian grievances) and counterterrorism only exacerbates the violence. But John H. Buchanan (Alabama) disagrees. On April 11, 1974, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attacked the small village of Kiryat Shmona, killing 18 people (half were children), and Israel responded by bombing terrorist sites in Lebanon. The UN Security council issued a resolution condemning Israel specifically and attacks on civilians generally, and Buchanan wanted to

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know why the US supported a resolution that left out specifying the reason for Israel’s action:9 I think there must be a way that we can establish an international climate in which barbaric acts of terrorism against innocent people will be treated by the world community as barbaric and as something that is simply an unspeakable policy in a civilized setting. Like many in the late nineteenth century, Buchanan considers terrorism a “monstrosity … the ordinary mind was incapable of imagining.”10 Similarly, another witness, Bert B. Lockwood, Jr. (New York University), proposed that “we have to ask [if] there is a justification to violence,” and sometimes, not always but sometimes, the answer is yes, such as a “black South African, who by law has no legitimate participation in the decisionmaking [sic] of his country.”11 But Benjamin A. Gilman (New York) refused to accept Lockwood’s point, arguing instead that Lockwood and other witnesses “neglect the need for punishment of the crime,” that they focus “more on the grievances than the crime. I think there is something a little bit wrong in that statement.”12 Gilman also rejected Brian Jenkins’ (Rand Corporation) contention that terrorism is not limited to nongovernment groups: if one could total up, Jenkins tells the committee, “all the victims of totalitarian regimes in recent years, I am sure that state terror would be far ahead of revolutionary or nongovernmental terror.”13 Jonathan Bingham (New York) responds by questioning whether Jenkins made a “valid comparison or whether these things are really quite a different order of magnitude.” The key, as Jenkins points out, is that he wants to work with a “dispassionate definition of terrorism,” whereas Bingham uses the word strictly “in a pejorative sense.”14 Jenkins, drawing on 60s insurgency theory, denies that “terrorism is limited to nongovernment groups”; Bingham, drawing on the rhetoric of unspeakability, claims that only nongovernment groups can be terrorists, that we “need a different word”—not “terrorism”—to describe governmental violence.15 Bingham’s and Gilman’s views are not outliers, as they represent the new norm in terrorism studies. For example, the introduction to a 1976 symposium on terrorism declares that terrorism constitutes “a new barbarism” and “terrorists can never be depended on to act rationally” because they are “fanatics incapable of accommodation.”16 It is a very short step from declaring that terrorists cannot be understood to saying that they should not be understood. While the discussion (as recorded) in the 1974 hearings seems entirely civil, one can sense the growing anger in Rep. Bingham’s response to the papers presented by Lockwood and Richard Falk (Princeton University). The witnesses, in Bingham’s view, are too even-handed in their approaches:17 I am troubled by some extent by both of these papers. I think one thing that I find missing in your presentation, Dr. Falk, is the kind of indignation

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against the killing of innocent people that I recall you expressing very vividly in connection with Vietnam. I don’t find a distinction between violence on the one hand directed at the opposition, and terrorism, which I would define as trying to use innocent people in a way to influence the political situation. Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass exaggerate only slightly when they argue that by the 1970s, “the unspeakable act of terrorism” had become “taboo,” giving as their example Conor Cruise O’Brien’s observation that “‘know thine enemy’ may be a first stage in giving in to him.”18 Still, beginning roughly in the late 60s and early 1970s, trying to provide the kind of “dispassionate” analysis of terrorism offered by Jenkins risked public condemnation and accusations of giving comfort to the enemy. In this chapter, I will look at three works exploring terrorism in the Middle East: John le Carré’s, The Little Drummer Girl (1983); Stephen Spielberg’s film, Munich (2005); and Yasmina Khadra’s (pen-name for Mohammed Moulessehoul) The Attack (2005, translated in English 2006).19 These works address the shifts in terrorist tactics, from bombs directed against Israeli targets in Europe by a secretive group (The Little Drummer Girl) to an attack designed to take advantage of worldwide media coverage (the Munich Olympics Massacre) to suicide bombing (The Attack). Each challenges the rhetoric of unspeakability by seeking to understand the roots of terrorism, to see it as explicable rather than inexplicable. But because each presents incompatible narratives of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, and because the conflict itself continues, all three end on a suspended note.

John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl In a 1983 BBC interview on the publication of The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré reveals that he knows about all these developments, but chose to write the book anyway. Le Carré declares that he loathes terrorism because, invoking the rhetoric of unspeakability, “wanton acts against civilian people … are appalling and unthinkable, and that is part of the awfulness of my story.”20 But he proceeded because, again contra the current thinking about terrorism, “I don’t think anybody’s written with anything like compassion about the Palestinians. The fact of the matter is, by exploring the roots of Palestinian anger one gets closer to understanding the acts of violence.”21 Le Carré also agrees with the 60s-era counterinsurgency writers who say that both state and non-state actors can engage in terrorism: I do not know what terror is. I mean, is it an act of terror to send Israeli aeroplanes over a camp, to drop a cluster bomb, kill two or three hundred people, or is terror already legitimized by the fact that you have an air force?22

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To be sure, 1983 was not an auspicious time in England and America for writing with “compassion about the Palestinians” or about terrorism generally. Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, Palestinian terrorists committed one atrocity after the other, the most famous perhaps being the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, and they were not the only groups engaging in terrorism.23 To give a few admittedly random examples, the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), bombed the Montreal stock exchange on February 13, 1969; on December 29, 1975, a bomb went off in New York’s LaGuardia airport, killing 11 people and seriously injuring 74 (the crime remains unsolved); and on September 10, 1976, a group of Croatian nationalists hijacked a plane and planted a bomb in New York’s Grand Central Station. Terrorism, it seems, was everywhere. Consequently, Le Carré recognized that his book would make some people very angry—“As the Germans say, I would be dancing on eggshells and a lot of people would be very cross”—because he admits to committing “a great heresy” in this novel—raising the “Palestinians to the point where their claim is made clear. I think that that—particularly in the United States—is liable to upset a great number of people and I don’t think it’s been done before.”24 Le Carré was right: his novel did occasion a fair amount of opprobrium from the right, who accused The Little Drummer Girl of moral equivalency and siding with terrorists.25 The book, however, also met with considerable disapproval from those siding with the Palestinians, who considered le Carré’s treatment of Israel equally heretical.26 In a sense, both sides correctly read the book. Much to the dismay of those sympathizing with Israel’s right to exist, le Carré most certainly depicts the Palestinians as “human beings with a legitimate case” (xix). But the novel also presents the Israeli side much more approvingly than le Carré’s antagonists allow and his subsequent interviews suggest. In The Little Drummer Girl, the incomprehensible has moved from the terrorist act itself to the larger conflict. The novel follows an Israeli counterterrorism team led by Kurtz (aka “Schulmann,” “Marty,” and “Mr. Spielberg from the Ministry of the Interior”) and the agent-runner, Gadi Becker, also known as “Joseph,” as they track down a Palestinian master terrorist, Khalil, and his cell, who are responsible for a series of bombings in Europe. Kurtz and Becker convince an English actress, Charlie (short for “Charmian”) to pretend to be the lover of Khalil’s younger brother, Salim. In the fiction Kurtz devises, Salim calls himself “Michel,” and the counterterrorism group refer to him as “Yanuka,” Arabic for a small goat, referring to both his youth and the adage, “to catch a lion, you must first tether a goat” (44). The terrorists take the bait, believe that Charlie was indeed Salim’s lover, bring her to Lebanon for training, and then send her back to Europe where she will deliver a bomb for them. Charlie then leads the Israelis to Khalil, and they kill him. The Little Drummer Girl can be divided into three overarching perspectives: the Israeli view, represented mainly by Kurtz, whose history encapsulates the recent history of the Jews; the Palestinian view, as delivered by Captain Tayeh and Khalil; and the middle ground, in the person of the agent-runner Gadi Becker.27

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The action starts with what must have seemed like a paradox at a time when the rhetoric of unspeakability had returned. Terrorism, as Brian Jenkins points out, by 1980 had started to suffer from its own success. So many incidents had occurred, each breathlessly reported by the media, that terrorism had become “almost routine.”28 The response to the bombing of the Israeli labor attaché’s house, resulting in the death of his child and his wife losing a leg, illustrates Jenkins’s point. Le Carré narrates the explosion itself not as an unspeakable outrage, but as a dispassionate confirmation of expert suspicions: the high quality of the planning, as against the poor quality of the bomb, turned the suspicion into a certainty. Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name. The vexation lies in the waiting. (3) Everyone has been down this road before, and by now a standard set of responses had formed. There is the “miracle,” in this case “supplied by the American school bus, which had just come and gone again with most of the community’s younger children” (5). Next, the idealization of the victim, a “troubled, hyperactive child who till now had been regarded as a discordant element in the street,” but now that he is gone,“no one in the street could remember a child they had loved more” (7). The press reacts, as they always do, by immediately publishing highly inaccurate reports of fatalities and responsibility that require correction, then re-correction. Finally, the traditional editorial excusing terrorism as the result of Israeli provocation: “as long as the Israelis persisted in their indiscriminate bombings of Palestinian camps and villages—killing not one child but dozens at a time—they must reckon on this type of barbaric reprisal” (9), followed by the equally traditional “white-hot, if slightly muddled, retort from the Israeli Embassy’s Press Officer” pointing out that since 1961, Israel had been under constant attack and they “would not kill a single Palestinian anywhere if only they could be left in peace.” He added that the labor attaché’s child died for the sole reason that he was Jewish, and “the Germans might possibly remember that Gabriel was not alone in this” (9). Tired of the argument, “[t]he editor closed the correspondence and took a day off ” (9). Despite the opening’s detached, ruefully ironic tone, there is no doubt that the Israelis in this novel take this matter extremely seriously, and a group arrives, led by Kurtz, to investigate the bombing. Alexis, the German intelligence officer who Kurtz chooses as an ally, realizes that despite the Israeli’s seemingly offhand attitude toward Palestinian violence (“The second time [they attacked] a school, then some settlements, then another shop, till it became monotonous” [29]), Kurtz is “possessed by a deep and awesome hatred” (30). Le Carré does not specify the hatred’s object, but it is clear he has in mind the recent history of the Jews. Kurtz chooses to situate his team in Munich, near the Olympic Village, for both practical and symbolic reasons:

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Northward the windows gave a grimy view of the road to Dachau, where a great many Jews had died in the concentration camp, and the irony escaped none of those present. … Near at hand, they could point out to Kurtz the very spot where in more recent history, Palestinian commandos had burst into the living quarters of the Israeli athletes, killing some immediately, and taking the rest to the military airport, where they killed them too. (39–40) When the group visits the memorial tablet, Kurtz makes the point explicit: “‘So remember that,’ Kurtz ordered needlessly as they returned to the van” (41). For Kurtz and his team, a direct line connects the Palestinians who blew up the labor attaché’s house and the Nazis who slaughtered Jews in ghettos and concentration camps. Kurtz knows this history intimately because it is his history. On a plane from Munich to Berlin, he stares out the window, and sees his past reflected: Somewhere in that blackness was the railway line which had brought the goods train on its slow journey from the East; somewhere the very siding where it parked for five nights and six days in dead of winter to make way for the military transports that mattered so much more while Kurtz and his mother, and the hundred and eighteen other Jews who were crammed into their truck, ate the snow and froze, most of them to death. … Somewhere in that blackness his mother had later filed passively to her death; somewhere in its fields the Sudeten boy who was himself had starved and stolen and killed, waiting without illusion for another hostile world to find him. (46) From the displaced person camps, he found his way to Palestine, where “Kurtz’s war had just begun” (46), meaning, the 1948 war following the creation of Israel, but more generally, Kurtz’s war against anyone who murders Jews. His name, at least, the primary one, constantly reminds Kurtz of the victimization he has dedicated his life to eradicating: His name, if he had one, was Kurtz. … Others made laborious comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s hero. Whereas the bald truth was that the name was Moravian and was originally Kurz, till a British police officer of the Mandate, in his wisdom, had added a ‘t’—and Kurtz, in his, had kept it, a sharp little dagger jabbed into the bulk of his identity, and left there as some kind of goad. (33) Kurtz, or Kurz, keeps the “t” to continually remind him of the danger Jews faced and continue to face along with the necessity of taking action. As his assistant,

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Shimon Litvack, puts it, Kurtz dreams “[o]f the day when the whole world finally learns the risks of spilling Jewish blood” (283). Kurtz’s entire being constitutes a powerful rejection of how his mother, and millions of other Jews, filed “passively” (46) to their deaths. Therefore, he would be the opposite: “Kurtz cut the impossible path, Kurtz made the desert bloom. Kurtz wheeled and dealed and lied even in his prayers, but he forced more good luck than the Jews had had for two thousand years” (33). Of course, there is another side to this story: the Palestinian side, and as the Bragg interview attests, le Carré sympathizes with them at least as much as he does with the Jews. Gadi Becker tells Charlie that the Palestinians are “an easy people to love” (406), and that is indeed the case. When she first arrives in Lebanon, Charlie spends time with a group of boys whom she adores “singly and collectively” (406), and the more time Charlie spends with them, “she loved them more and more” (409). When Charlie learns more about the agonies inflicted on the Palestinians in the camps (one tells her that his entire family died at Tal al-Zataar when a coalition of Syrian and Lebanese forces shelled the refugee camp, killing thousands [417]), Charlie understands that she is “being educated to tragedy” (418) and that she now lives “among the world’s real victims” (427). Her first and last image of Khalil and Salim’s sister, Fatmeh, is a picture of compassion, “swabbing a baby’s eyes with cotton wool” (420, 424). And the reason for all this misery, as Khalil says before the Israelis literally blow his face off, is that Europe created Israel on land stolen from its rightful owners: “And you are the same English who gave away my country” (521). Khalil and Kurtz, along with their respective teams, are polar opposites who cannot conceive that the other side might have some legitimacy. One side endured genocide; the other fears that “[t]he Zionists will genocide us to death, you will use to see” (418). Each sees the other as a mortal enemy. Therefore, Kurtz turns to Gadi Becker, “the man who fought the battle for the Golan from behind the Syrian lines” (441), now an agent-runner for Mossad and living in partial retirement, for a deeply resonant reason: “Because he is the middle ground. … Because he has the reluctance that can make the bridge. Because he ponders” (48). Le Carré does not specify what Becker can do to make the bridge, but it gradually becomes clear that Le Carré does not mean a bridge to Charlie, but to the Palestinian side.29 Unlike Kurtz, Becker “ponders,” meaning, he considers the situation in a deeper, more complex way than Kurtz or the other Israelis. They consider the Palestinian terrorists the enemy because they seek to kill Jews. But Becker understands the Palestinian side, and in an extraordinary scene, he carefully, and more importantly, empathetically narrates Salim’s story, including the justification for Palestinian terrorism, in Salim’s own voice, to the point where Becker merges seamlessly into the role. He shifts from using the third person (“However, with your customary persistence you again press him and he speaks the name Palestine. With passion.

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You hear it at once in his voice—Palestine, like a challenge. Like a war-cry— Palestine” [219]) to the first person. “He” has turned to “I”: [Becker] leaned forward and grasped [Charlie’s] wrist. ‘There is not a Western liberal who will hesitate to speak out again the injustice of Chile, South Africa, Poland, Argentina, Cambodia, Iran, Northern Ireland, and other fashionable spots.’ His grasp tightened. ‘Yet who has the simple courage to tell out the cruelest joke in history: that thirty years of Israel have turned the Palestinians into the new Jews of the earth? You know how the Zionists described my country before they seized it? “A land without a people for a people without land.” We did not exist! In their minds, the Zionists had already committed genocide; all that remained for them was the fact. And you, the British, were the architects of this great vision. You know how Israel was born? A European power made a present of an Arab territory to a Jewish lobby. And did not consult a single inhabitant of the territory concerned. And that power was Britain. Shall I describe to you how Israel was born?’ (223) Adopting the Palestinian narrative also means adopting the Palestinian view of history. Israelis refer to the 1948 war as “the War of Independence,” but the Palestinians call it something else. Once more in Salim’s voice, Becker says: “‘I refer to the war of ’48 as ‘the Catastrophe.’ Never the war—the Catastrophe. In the Catastrophe of ’48, I tell you, the fatal weaknesses of a peaceable society were revealed’” (225). Becker says that the Zionists are terrorists. Speaking of Menachim Begin, Becker/Salim asks Charlie: Can you tell me how it happened, please, that a Pole came to be the ruler of my country, Palestine, a Pole who exists only because he fights? Can you explain to me, please, by what principle of English justice of English impartiality, and fair play, that this man rules over my country? And calls us terrorists? (228; emphasis in the original) For Le Carré, the Palestinian–Israeli conflict means a clash between two allencompassing, mutually authoritative, mutually exclusive narratives. One cannot be an Israeli, let alone a Mossad agent, and see the war of 1948 as a “catastrophe”; one cannot be a Palestinian, let alone a Palestinian terrorist (or freedom fighter), and see the war of 1948 as a war of “independence.” One has to choose between them. Yet much to Charlie’s confusion, Becker somehow seems to contain both. After she asks Becker if a story about Salim’s father is true, he responds, “‘Of course.’ But she could not tell whether Joseph or Michel was replying, and she

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knew he did not mean her to” (225). She wonders “at the paradoxes of a man who could dance with so many of his own conflicting shadows, and still stand up” (223), and she marvels at his “seemingly effortless ability to put on Arab clothes” (258), meaning, to adopt a Palestinian persona and views. But Charlie is not entirely right in her assessment of Becker’s ability to contain contradictory narratives without somehow exploding. Becker’s ability to convincingly envoice the Palestinian view seems to have eroded to a certain degree his sense of Israel’s absolute rightness. When Charlie asks him if he fought in the 1967 “war that drove Michel across the Jordan” (269), Becker immediately answers yes, but as Charlie continues with her questions, Becker finds it harder and harder to recall the reasons why he fought: ‘And in the war before? The one I can’t remember the date of?’ ‘’56.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And in the war after? ’73?’ ‘Probably.’ ‘What did you fight for?’ Wait again. ‘In ’56 because I wanted to be a hero, in ’67 for peace. And in ‘73’—he seemed to find it harder to remember—’for Israel,’ he said. ‘And now? What are you fighting for this time?’ (269) In her mind, Charlie supplies several answers (“Because it is there, she thought. To save lives. Because they asked me to. So that my villagers can dance the dabke, and listen to the tales of travellers at the well” [269–270]), but Becker does not respond to this question. Becker, it seems, no longer knows why he fights. He no longer has Kurtz’s certitude. These doubts resurface while Charlie trains in Lebanon, and Becker goes on “a kind of journey of self-appraisal regarding the basic assumptions of his life” (440). Appropriately, given his fusion of Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, Becker’s itinerary encompasses both his own landmarks and Salim’s. “From Tel Aviv [Becker] headed south-east to Hebron, or, as Michel would have called it, El Khalil” (441). From there, Becker heads to the village “where Michel’s family had lived until ’67 when his father had seen fit to flee” (441), and then, to the Lebanon–Israel border, where Le Carré reminds us that while the Palestinians accuse the Israelis of stealing their land, at least some of the Lebanese accuse the Palestinians of the same. On one side, Becker sees Israelis, but “on the other, the Lebanese Christian militia drove up and down in all manner of transport, receiving their Israel supplies for the interminable blood feud against the Palestinian usurper” (442). Finally, Becker

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arrives at a kibbutz, where his hosts ask Becker the fundamental questions about what sort of country Israel will become: We came here to work, to fight for our identity, to turn Jews into Israelis, Gadi! Are we to be a country finally—or are we to be a showcase for international Jewry What is our future, Gadi? Tell us! (443) But Gadi Becker has no answers. Instead, the issues are “insoluble” (443). So he returns to Jerusalem, where he wanders about, listening to tourists complain about trivialities, and spends “a whole afternoon in the Holocaust Museum, worrying over the photographs of children who would have been his age if they had lived” (444). Becker’s journey of “self-appraisal” ends at the fundamental reason for Israel’s creation—the destruction of European Jewry and their culture, as if to say, “here is the reason for all the wars you fought in, and why you must continue to fight for Israel’s existence.” But at the same time, le Carré balances the Holocaust with Salim’s claims—largely valid—of Palestinian victimization. It would certainly appear that le Carré is trying to establish an equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian claims. Both sides assert that they want “justice.” Kurtz tells Alexis that he is looking for “justice” (249); similarly, Khalil tells Charlie that Palestinians kill “for love and justice” (494). Le Carré will also often point to how the two sides mirror each other. When Kurtz addresses Salim, “[h]e might have been talking to his own erring son” (293), and when Captain Tayeh tells Charlie, “To doubt is to betray” (468; emphasis in the original), Charlie realizes that “Joseph had said much the same” (468). Yet it would be a mistake to assume that le Carré unqualifiedly supports Palestinian terrorism. Like Pontecorvo, le Carré may sympathize with the goal of Palestinian statehood, but The Little Drummer Girl demonstrates that Khalil and Salim’s tactics should repulse the reader. When Kurtz and Becker show Charlie a very drugged Salim (to render the fiction that they are lovers believable, she must see him naked), Kurtz warns her that while he looks innocent, appearances deceive: “If you get seasick, just remember he killed a lot of innocent human beings. … Everybody has a human face and this boy is no exception” (293). Salim might look “beautiful” (295), he might even seem “trivial—a little peasant boy fallen out of an olive tree” (295), but make no mistake, Kurtz reminds both Charlie and the reader, this gorgeous, seemingly innocent young man has done terrible deeds: ‘You get your girls to do the work for you, don’t you, little fellow? One girl, he actually used her as a bomb,’ he explained to Charlie. ‘Put her on a plane with some nice-looking luggage, the plane blew up. I guess she never even knew she’d done it.’ (296)

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Twice, le Carré explains what Palestinian terrorism entails. First, Charlie asks Becker/Salim “what form exactly—in this case—does our struggle take, would you say?” The agent-runner does not hesitate, and his answer is chilling: “Killing the Jews of the diaspora. As they have dispersed the people of Palestine, so we punish them in their diaspora and declare our agony to the ears and eyes of the world” (266–267). Becker/Salim makes no distinction between combatants and non-combatants; being Jewish (like five-year-old Gabriel) suffices to make one a target. Charlie makes exactly this point to Captain Tayeh (the leader of the terrorist training camp in Lebanon) and Fatmeh. Michel, Charlie tells him, said it was time to attack the Jewish entity. Everywhere. There was to be no distinction any more between Jew and Israeli. He said the whole Jewish race was a Zionist power base and that the Zionists would never rest until they had destroyed our people. Our only chance was to lift the world up by the ears and make it listen. Again and again. If innocent life was to be wasted, why should it always be Palestinian? The Palestinians were not going to imitate the Jews and wait two thousand years to get back their homeland. (424) Captain Tayeh does not dispute Charlie’s account, and Fatmeh confirms it when she says, “her small brother had a big mouth, and that God was wise to close it when he did” (424). Le Carré underscores the unreasoning murderousness of this in several ways. First, in constructing Khalil’s backstory, le Carré reveals that the Israelis are not the only people who tortured him. Kurtz tells Alexis at their first meeting: “We heard the Syrians had given him a rough time” (30), and toward the book’s end, Khalil details what the Syrians did to him and Captain Tayeh: First, they beat us … In the course of beating us they make themselves very angry, so they decide to break all our bones. First fingers, then arms, then legs.Then they break our ribs with rifles. … When they finish with us, they leave us in the desert. (497) In addition to the Syrians, Khalil admits that other nations have victimized the Palestinians: “our brother Arabs kill us, the Zionists kill us, the Falangists kill us, and those of us who remain alive go into their diaspora” (497). And yet, he chooses to fight “the real enemy and not my brother Arabs” (498), meaning, Jews everywhere, not just in Israel. And by “fight,” Khalil means “make a few bombs—kill a few people—make a slaughterhouse, just for two minutes of history” (497–498). Khalil may be a highly attractive, intelligent man with an ironic sense of humor about himself (“‘I need spectacles,’ he explained with a smile, and shook his head

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like an old man. ‘But where should I go for them—a man like me?’” [498]). But he is also a monster. Le Carré also asks us to compare Khalil’s “slaughterhouse” with the deliberation and reluctance the Mossad agents display before taking a life. Kurtz tells Charlie that they choose their targets very carefully, and only in response to severe provocation: “in our view somebody has to be very guilty indeed before he needs to die” (131), and by “guilty,” Kurtz means “only those who break completely the human bond. … They deserve to die” (131; emphasis in the original). In other words, people like Salim, who tricked a girl into bringing a bomb on an airplane, and Khalil, who wants to create a “slaughterhouse” of Jews in the diaspora. Kurtz and the others carefully debate whether they need to kill the Dutch girl Salim used to deliver the Godesburg bomb at the novel’s start, along with several others. On the one hand, the Mossad agents need her to die to ensure the success of Charlie’s mission. But they come to this conclusion because they do not see any alternative: “They [the Palestinians] have to have the evidence that nobody has got her except God and Yanuka.They have to know she’s as dead as Yanuka” (309). Kurtz is clearly reluctant. “How old is she?” he asks, and he’s told: “Twenty-one last week. Is that a reason?” Even then, Kurtz offers everyone a way out: “‘Ask each kid individually, Shimon,’ he ordered. ‘Does he or she wish to stand down? No explanations needed, no mark against anyone’s name who does. A free vote, right across the board’” (310). Litvak responds that he has already done so, and Kurtz says, “Ask them again” (310). While he waits for the blast that will kill both the girl and Salim, Becker wonders about “how much human life is worth, even to those who dishonor the human bond completely. And to those who do not” (313). The purpose of the Mossad’s “theatre of the real” is not vengeance, but as Becker tells Charlie, to “save lives … you will give mothers back their children and help to bring peace to peaceful people” (169). Finally, there is Prof. Minkel, Khalil’s final target. Like many, Prof. Minkel thinks that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza will eventually ruin Israel as a democratic state embodying Jewish values: As long as we have a small Jewish state, we may advance democratically, as Jews, towards our Jewish self-realisation. But once we have a larger state, incorporating many Arabs, we have to choose. … On this side, democracy without Jewish self-realisation. On that side, Jewish self-realisation without democracy. (461) The solution Prof. Minkel proposes is not to toss out the Arab population, but to “[m]ove out of the Gaza and the West Bank before we lose our values” (461). Prof Minkel is, in other words, no enemy of the Palestinian people, and he realizes the fundamental danger the occupation poses to Israel’s soul. However, his

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moderation is exactly the reason Khalil targets him. As Kurtz tells him, if a certain group of Palestinians have their way, you will make no speech at all on the twenty-fourth of this month in Freiburg. In fact, Professor, you will never make a speech again. … According to information now available to us, it is evident that one of their less academic groups has singled you out as a dangerous moderate, capable of watering the pure wine of their cause. … A proponent of the Bantustan solution for Palestinians. As a false light, leading the weak-brained into one more fatal concession to the Zionist jackboot. (463) While le Carré no doubt depicts the Palestinians as “human beings with a legitimate case” (xix), he also asks us to look very skeptically at Palestinian terrorism.

Stephen Spielberg, Munich While the Munich Massacre may or may not have caused the split between “terrorism” and “insurgency,” there’s no doubt that the events at the 1972 Olympics sparked a resurgence in the rhetoric of unspeakability. For Secretary of State William P. Rogers, “there are no words” to describe “this appalling and senseless deed.”30 A New York Times editorial asserted, “yesterday’s murderous assault in Munich plumbed new depths of criminality”; and King Hussein of Jordan said that the people who committed this “abhorrent crime” were “sick minds who do not belong to humanity.”31 Golda Meir called the attack “insane”; President Nixon described the terrorists as “international outlaws of the worst sort, who stop at nothing to accomplish their goals.”32 Like le Carré, Spielberg and his screenwriters, Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, know about these developments, and they incorporated them into Munich (2006), which follows a Mossad team charged with assassinating the people responsible for planning the Munich Massacre. Avner is the team leader; Steve, a hardcharging South African who, like Kurtz, has an “awesome hatred” for anyone who sheds Jewish blood; Robert, a toy-maker turned bomb-maker; Hans, a specialist in document forgery; and Carl, the “sweeper” who ensures the team leaves behind nothing incriminating. When Avner meets with “the chief of Mossad, two generals, and the Prime Minister,” General Yariv describes the Munich Massacre as an unparalleled event, exactly as the politicians and pundits did: “This is something new.What happened in Munich changes everything.The rules, everything.”33 The terrorists are also unspeakable, irrational, incomprehensible. Spielberg incorporates a clip of Jim McKay, the sportscaster, observing a terrorist who has come out to negotiate; he has “a stocking mask over his face … Weird … What’s going on inside that head and his mind?” Golda Meir (the character, not the historical figure) also considers the terrorists as beyond the pale. After drawing a parallel

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with the Holocaust (“It’s the same as Eichmann”), Meir states that she cannot understand people who would commit such acts: “These people … they’ve sworn to destroy us … But I don’t know who these maniacs are or where they come from. Palestinians, they’re not recognizable.”34 The historical Golda Meir denied that the Palestinians have any legitimate claim to statehood. But the film shifts the focus away from Meir’s actual views on the relative merits of Palestinian nationhood (i.e., none) toward the character Meir’s incomprehension at what kind of person, or maniac, would commit such acts as the Munich Massacre. When Spielberg’s Golda Meir says, “they’re not recognizable,” she means that they are not “recognizable” as people. Like King Hussein, Meir means that they are “maniacs”—insane, acting in a senseless frenzy— who do not belong to humanity, and whose origin (“where they come from”) and motivations are as opaque to her as to Jim McKay. But rather than continuing the literal demonization of the terrorists, Spielberg starts Munich in a manner that challenges the understanding of terrorism as unspeakable and terrorists as unknowable psychopaths. Granted, the movie opens as a conventional thriller, with throbbing drum music, distant shots of the terrorists changing clothes, and close-ups of disembodied hands assembling machine guns. But just before the terrorists begin their “operation,” they go into a huddle and Spielberg focuses on their faces (see Figure 4.2). This shot recalls the image toward the start of The Battle of Algiers of Ali la Pointe and the remaining FLN terrorists in their hideout (see Figure 4.3). In both cases, the close focus on faces encourages viewer identification with these characters. Of course, the films start from opposite positions: Pontecorvo, and likely also his intended audience, already considered these people heroes, whereas Spielberg knows that his audience and as we have seen, world leaders, most likely considered the Munich terrorists as monsters, not martyrs. But Spielberg, instead of portraying the Munich terrorists at the start as cold-blooded

FIGURE 4.2 From

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, terrorist headshot.

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The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, terrorist headshot.

FIGURE 4.3 From

FIGURE 4.4 From

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Wael Zwaiter.

killers, undeserving of the slightest sympathy or respect, forces the viewer to confront their humanity, even as they are about to commit one of the worst terrorist acts to date. Nor is this scene anomalous. Spielberg depicts most of the team’s intended targets as likeable people.35 The first target, Wael Zwaiter, is a grandfatherly man who has translated “The Arabian Nights” into Italian (see Figure 4.4). The second, Mahmoud Hamshari, is an elegantly dressed, articulate sophisticate (see Figure 4.5). Avner has a very pleasant conversation with the third target, Hussein Abad Al-Chir, on the balcony of a hotel in Nicosia, chatting about Al-Chir teaching foreign languages in Sweden and the difficulty of sleeping thanks to the erotic

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FIGURE 4.5 From

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Mahoud Hamshari.

FIGURE 4.6 From

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Al-Chir.

uproar emanating from the newly married couple next door. Demonstrating oldworld courtesy, Al-Chir bows slightly as he wishes Avner a pleasant night (see Figure 4.6). The most sinister, and sinister looking, of the terrorists, Ali Hassan Salameh, wears dark glasses even at night (see Figure 4.7). But just before Steve and Avner try to assassinate him at a party, Salameh takes off his glasses as he embraces a guest, making him seem friendly and vulnerable (see Figure 4.8). These people do not look like “international outlaws of the worst sort,” to use President Nixon’s phrase. One of the Mossad agents in The Little Drummer Girl says about Yanuka/Salim, “it’s hard to believe in this other side to him” (42), and the same applies to the planners of the Munich Massacre. The three terrorists Spielberg spends screen time on appear as friendly, intelligent, charming people.

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Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Salameh, with dark glasses.

FIGURE 4.7 From

FIGURE 4.8 From

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, without dark glasses.

Yet, notwithstanding their innocent appearance and politesse, Spielberg continually reminds the viewer that each of them most certainly has an “other side.” In their final argument, Ephraim, the case-manager, reminds Avner that “Professor Hamshari with the beautiful wife and child? He was implicated in a failed assassination attempt on Ben-Gurion, he was recruiting for Fatah France, enlisting sympathetic non-Arab fanatics eager to destroy the international Zionist conspiracy”; as for Zwaiter, “your harmless little writer in Rome? He was behind the bomb on El Al Flight 76 in 1968, he worked on another bomb last August”; and Salameh “invented Black September,” which, in addition to Munich and among other terrorist acts, assassinated numerous people, both Arab and Jewish, and in September 1972, sent letter bombs all over the world.

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While Avner demands evidence from Ephraim to substantiate these charges, evidence that Ephraim refuses to give (unless Avner returns to Israel), the film gives us no reason to doubt Ephraim’s word, leaving the audience wondering how such amiable, even charismatic, people could be involved in such horrific deeds.36 However, Spielberg’s depicting the terrorists as human, even endearing, goes beyond the cliché of appearance versus reality, beyond the paradox of how really nice people in one context can commit really horrific, unforgivable deeds in another. Like le Carré, Spielberg takes the Palestinian perspective seriously, and at the film’s start, he carefully braids together the Israeli point of view with the Palestinian one. Immediately after Jim McKay announces that the “peace of the … serene Olympics was shattered this morning at just about five o’clock,” the scene shifts to a group of Israelis rushing toward an outdoor bar/restaurant to watch television coverage of the event. The camera zooms in on the worried, intense faces (see Figure 4.9). But rather than focusing exclusively on Israeli reactions, the next scene provides a near mirror image: Palestinians in what is presumably a refugee camp rushing toward their own outdoor bar/restaurant to watch Jim McKay’s coverage of the event. Instead of worry, we see a group of young men chanting slogans in support of the terrorists (see Figure 4.10). Similarly, as the Munich attack explodes into violence, we see Palestinian and Israeli families reacting in polar opposite ways as the news unfolds. When the television says that the hostages are safe, an Israeli family weeps in relief; when the reports come in that all the Arab terrorists are dead, a Palestinian family collapses in grief. Again, the point goes beyond illustrating that the same event will elicit opposite responses, depending on your point of view. Knowing that his audience will largely be hostile to the Palestinian cause, Spielberg, like le Carré, includes, in ways

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, worried and anxious Israelis.

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Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Palestinians shouting slogans.

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that are impossible to dismiss, the Palestinian view of how they have been unjustly dispossessed of their land, and how the world just does not care. The first proponent of the Palestinian narrative is Hamshari. When Robert pretends to interview him (he’s really there to measure Hamshari’s phone for a bomb), Hamshari says: “We are the word’s largest refugee population, our homes taken from us, living in camps, no future, no food, nothing decent for our children.” He adds that “for twenty-four years [i.e., since 1948] our civilians have been attacked by the Israelis” while his wife says, simultaneously, “Tell your newspaper that, about, about all the years and years of Palestinian blood, spilled by Israel, and who mourns for us?” The ensuing minor spat (“please, Marie-Claude, whose interview is this?”) should not distract us from the reality of what the Hamsharis are saying; neither should Hamshari’s hypocritical assertion that “[t]he PLO condemns attacks on civilians.”37 While the Hamsharis deliver a cogent, heartfelt account of the Palestinian position, the most powerful exposition of their cause arrives in the debate between Avner and Ali, a Palestinian bodyguard for Zaid Muchassi, Al-Chir’s replacement as the Black September contact with the KGB. After the Israeli team find themselves sharing a safe house with Ali’s group, Ali tells Avner how he thinks the Middle East situation will develop, and clearly, the two-state solution does not interest him: Eventually the Arab states will rise against Israel—they don’t like Palestinians, but they hate the Jews more. It won’t be like 1967, the rest of the world will see by then what the Israelis do to us, and they won’t help when Egypt and Syria attack. Even Jordan. Israel will cease to exist. Avner responds by telling Ali that he’s dreaming, that “you can’t take back a country you never had.”To which Ali responds (in a chilling echo of Khalil in The Little

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Drummer Girl), “if we need to, we can make the whole planet unsafe for Jews.” Avner points out that terrorism only discredits the Palestinian cause: “You kill Jews, and the world feels bad them, and thinks you’re animals.” But Ali responds that terrorism works, because “then the world will see how they’ve made us into animals.They’ll start to ask questions about the conditions in our cages.” Much of what Ali says, especially his conflation of Jews and Israelis, along with his desire for Israel’s erasure, likely serves to make him repellent. But Ali also makes the trenchant point that the Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust, the primary reason for Israel’s creation: “My father didn’t gas any Jews.”38 Therefore, the Palestinians should not have to pay for a crime they did not commit. Furthermore, the Palestinian desire to reclaim their homeland is at least as powerful as the Jewish desire for a safe haven from European anti-Semitism: You don’t know what it is not to have a home. That’s why you European reds don’t get it.You say it’s nothing, but you have a home to come back to. ETA, ANC, IRA, PLO—we all pretend we care about your ‘international revolution.’ But we don’t care. We want to be nations. Home is everything. It’s not just the words in this scene that give weight and heft to the Palestinian side. The actor (Omar Metwally) who plays Ali is young and handsome, and so, before he says a word, Ali attracts the viewer’s sympathetic attention. Also, Spielberg positions Ali so that he stands above Avner, and the camera shifts between filming Avner from Ali’s point of view, and Ali from Avner’s. When Avner speaks, we see what Ali sees. Literally, we look down on Avner. When Ali speaks, the audience looks up at him in a way that seems to increase his authority (see Figure 4.11). Spielberg’s direction also serves to underscore the validity of Ali’s position. Ali speaks slowly, emphatically, in a voice brimming with emotion, his eyes glistening with tears. When Ali says “home is everything,” all of Spielberg’s movie-making art combines to entice the audience to side with him.

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Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, Ali.

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The balance between Palestinian and Israeli perspectives also applies to the respective goals of terrorism and counterterrorism. After Palestinian terrorists hijack a Lufthansa jet in order to free the three surviving terrorists who participated in Munich, they are flown to Libya and hold a press conference after they arrive. In a clip incorporated into Munich from the actual interview (we watch it on a grainy, black-and-white television), a reporter asks Adnan al-Gashey whether he thought they had achieved anything in “the Munich operation” (the interviewer’s phrase); the interpreter immediately responds: “we have made our voice heard by the world.”39 A reporter asks if these are al-Gashey’s words or the interpreter’s, and after a brief dialogue with al-Gashey in Arabic, the interpreter says (in grammatically challenged English), “I’ll say it again. They have made their voice heard by the universe of the world who has not been hearing them before.” In the next scene, Mahmoud Hamshari clarifies: “Well, I believe what he meant by this is that now the world will begin hearing us.” “Hearing us” also describes the goal of the Israeli response. In the debate scene, a minister tells Golda Meir that Israel has “responded [to the attack]. We sent seventy fighter jets.” But the problem, as “Another Minister” (as he is called in the screenplay) says, is that the world has not received the message. Sending jets constitutes “[a] response no one has heard.” The first minister responds, somewhat incredulously, “Air strikes on guerilla training centers. That’s a response.” After all, “Sixty Arabs dead, at least, who knows how many wounded?” But the degree of bloodshed is irrelevant, as General Eytan Nadav says, because “[n]o one notices what happens in the border camps.” They have to do something else, he continues, because, as both the actual al-Gashey and the fictional Hamshari agree, “[t]his is about fixing the world’s attention.” So the Israeli Cabinet and Golda Meir decide on a plan of targeted assassinations: 11 names, 1 for each murdered Israeli athlete.40 Spielberg underscores how the assassinations recall “an eye for an eye” by alternating television footage of the Israeli athletes at the airport with photos of each Black September target: three Israeli names, then three Palestinian names; three more Israelis, then three more Palestinians; then once more, another two groups of three; then finally, two names each. However, Avner’s charge is not just to kill an equal number of Palestinian terrorists; he has to kill them in a way that ensures each death fixes “the world’s attention.” As Ephraim tells Avner while walking by the sea in Tel Aviv:“Use guns if you have to, but bombs are preferable … We want everyone to read in Le Monde some famous Arab terrorist is dead, who knows who blew him up?” Which is not to say that Munich sympathizes exclusively with the Palestinians. The counterweight to Ali’s “home is everything” comes from Avner’s mother, who reminds her son of the Holocaust and the necessity of a Jewish homeland. Toward the end of the film, when Avner is tortured by doubts, his mother tries to assuage his guilt by reminding him that: Everyone in Europe died. Most of my family, a huge family … Every one of the ones who died—died wanting this (she gestures to the space around

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her [meaning, Israel]).What we’ve had to take because no one will ever give us. A place to be a Jew among Jews. Subject to no one … We have a place on earth. At last. This perspective also cannot be denied. Spielberg also carefully differentiates the degree of responsibility and accountability that the Israelis and the Palestinians take for their actions. At the film’s start, Mike Harari (head of Mossad’s Central Operational Group, according to the script) says “Give us the order and we begin,” i.e., begin the assassinations. But Golda Meir (again, the character, not the actual Meir) does not simply say, “kill them.” Instead, like le Carré’s Gadi Becker, she “ponders,” and worries about the morality of what she is about to order. At first, the justification seems simple: “It’s the same as Eichmann. We say to these butchers, ‘You don’t want to share this world with us, then we don’t have to share this world with you.’” But that is not where she ends. Instead, Meir asks the Attorney-General: “There’s legitimacy for this, am I correct?” However, the Attorney-General does not answer Meir. While he seems to be nodding in agreement as Meir speaks, when she asks for confirmation, he looks at her for a second, expressionless, then averts his eyes. While it is hard to argue from silence and facial expressions, especially in a scene that lasts for about five seconds, nonetheless, Spielberg seems to have directed the Attorney-General to not respond, thereby putting the responsibility squarely on Meir’s shoulders. After General Zamir reminds the Israeli leadership that avenging murdered athletes in a way that gets the world’s attention is “not just a publicity stunt,” Meir comes to a frightening decision: These people … They’re sworn to destroy us. Forget peace for now. We have to show them we’re strong [a beat]. We have laws, we represent civilization. Some people say we can’t afford to be civilized. I’ve always resisted such people. … You tell me, what law protects people like these? Today I’m hearing with new ears. Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. I have made a decision.The responsibility is entirely mine. On the one hand, negotiating compromises with your civilization’s values can lead to some very ugly places, such as imprisoning people without trial at Guantanamo Bay. On the other hand, if one is confronted with an implacable enemy who has “sworn to destroy” Israel, one that murders Jewish athletes “while the rest of the world is playing games … And the world couldn’t care less,” one who breaks all the conventional rules governing warfare, then the decision becomes more understandable. Whatever one thinks about Meir’s decision, the viewer sees her making it openly and then taking full responsibility for it. Meir’s embracing the full weight of her decision stands in stark contrast to the actual participants in the Munich Massacre. In the clip incorporated into Munich, a British journalist asks,

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“Did you shoot any of the Israeli hostages?” but al-Gashay avoids answering the question: “It’s not important to say if I killed Israelis or not.”41 Golda Meir’s overt worrying about the legitimacy of targeted assassination establishes a pattern for the rest of Munich. After the team eliminates their first target, they retire to an outdoor café to, as Avner says, celebrate. But Carl reminds Avner of the “old Pesach story” in which God asks the angels celebrating after He drowns the Egyptians in the Red Sea, “Why are you celebrating? I’ve just killed a multitude of my children.”42 For Steve, the moral of the story is simple: “Don’t fuck with the Jews.” For Avner and the others, the moral seems to be that celebrating a murder is wrong. Nonetheless, the next scene features television footage of the three surviving terrorists being wildly cheered as they arrive in Libya. “No qualms about rejoicing on their side, eh,” Steve observes, the point being that it is only the Jews who “ponder” the morality of their actions.43 As the film progresses, the debates over the rightness of the team’s mission intensify. While in London preparing to attack Salameh, Carl asks the group: “Do you have any ideas how many laws we have broken?” Steve of course does not want to hear it, and his position (echoing Golda Meir’s) is: “Unless we learn to act like them, we’ll never defeat them”). Carl, however, reminds Steve that Israel’s hands are not entirely clean and that Ali’s views are not entirely wrong: “We act like them all the time.You think they invented bloodshed? How do you think we got control of the land? By being nice?” Robert and Avner approach the question in two different ways. Just before the team gets on a train to Hoorne to kill the woman who shot Carl, Robert balks:“All this blood, it comes back to us,” and Avner responds (echoing Ali): “Eventually, it will work. Even if it takes years, we’ll beat them.” But the issue for Robert is how their mission contradicts the fundamental premises of Judaism: “We’re Jews, Avner. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong.” Ironically, having echoed Ali, Avner then recalls Golda Meir’s justification for the mission at the film’s start: “We can’t afford to be that decent anymore.” But for Robert, the killing cannot be reconciled with the Judaism he knows and loves: “We’re supposed to be righteous. That’s a beautiful thing.That’s Jewish.That’s what I knew.That’s what I was taught. And I’m losing it. … I lose that, that’s, that’s … everything. That’s my soul.” A few scenes later, Robert kills himself. Despite his assurances to Robert, Avner has his own doubts about their mission. But they have less to do with morality than with utility. In the penultimate scene, Avner debates the point with Ephraim: “Did we accomplish anything at all? Every man we killed has been replaced by worse. … Did we kill to replace the terrorist leadership or the Palestinian leadership? You tell me what we’ve done!” Ephraim answers Avner’s doubts with the simple proposition that: “If these guys live, Israelis die.” As for why Avner killed seven men: “You killed them for the sake of a country you now choose to abandon. The country your mother and father built. That you were born into.You killed them for Munich, for the future. For peace.” But Avner is not convinced, and he repeats Marie-Claude Hamshari’s unanswered question to Robert. “It did not begin in Munich. And where does

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it end? How will it ever end?” asks Mrs. Hamshari; “There’s no peace at the end of this. Whatever you believe, you know that’s true,” Avner tells Ephraim. The movie leaves the questions unanswered, but the movie does not end with Avner and Ephraim parting ways. The final image consists of a long shot with the Twin Towers in the background, although in the screen’s center (see Figure 4.12). The image conflates the Munich Massacre with 9/11, but to what end, remains unclear, as Spielberg provides no clues in the film itself. For that, we must look to Spielberg’s public statements. After Munich previewed in late 2005, the reaction was immediate and vociferous.44 Recalling Rep. Bingham’s 1974 charge that the expert witnesses on terrorism were insufficiently Manichean in their condemnations, Spielberg was repeatedly accused of breaking the taboo against trying to understand terrorist motivations. Over and over again, Spielberg’s antagonists accuse him of “humanizing” the inhuman. George Jonas (no doubt irked by the significant departures in the film from his book, Vengeance) complained that Spielberg erred badly by “treating terrorists as people … in their effort not to demonise humans, Spielberg and Kushner [Tony Kushner, the chief screenplay writer] end up humanising demons.”45 Leon Wieseltier, writing in The New Republic, asserted that the analogies between the Israelis and the Palestinians “look ominously like the sin of equivalence,” and “[t]here are two kinds of Israelis in Munich: cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse.”46 A statement from the Zionist Organization of America similarly attacked the film for contravening the unspeakability of terrorism: Munich, in their view, is “a film that libels Israel and humanizes terrorist murderers committed to destroying her.”47 Rather than shrugging off these attacks, Spielberg answered them. In an interview with The Guardian, Spielberg rejected the notion that he was in any way excusing the Munich Massacre.These people committed “unforgivable actions.”48 But then, Spielberg challenges the unspeakability of terrorism. In a contemporaneous interview with Richard Schickel of Time Magazine, Spielberg stated that he

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2005, view of lower Manhattan from Brooklyn.

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used the Ali–Avner scene to illustrate the larger context for the violence:“Without that exchange, ‘I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie—good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context. And I was never going to make that picture.’”49 We need, Spielberg continues, to not stop at condemnation, and Spielberg then explains the presence of the Twin Towers at Munich’s end: “but until we begin to ask question about who these terrorists are and why terrorism happens, we’re never going to get to the truth of why 9/11 happened.”50 Spielberg expands his comments to The Guardian in an interview included in the DVD release of Munich that goes into greater detail about how he, like John le Carré, wants to explore the problem of counterterrorism as much as terrorism itself:51 This film is an attempt to look at policies Israel shares with the rest of the world and to understand why a country feels its best defense against a certain kind of violence is counter-violence. And we try and understand this as film-makers through empathy, because that’s what you do: you extend empathy in every single direction because you can’t understand human motivation without empathy. Spielberg does not say that we should not fight back against terrorism, but that we should act in a way that achieves our goals in the long term: “This movie is not an argument for non-response, and on the contrary [sic], what this movie is showing is that a response that may be the right response is still one that confronts you with some very difficult issues.”52 Spielberg then explains why he chose to end the film with an image of the World Trade Center: And when we have to respond to terror today [i.e., in 2006], what’s relevant is the need to go through a careful process, not to paralyze ourselves, not to prevent ourselves from acting, but to try and ensure that the results we produce are the ones we really intend. It’s the unintended results that are probably the worst, and that ultimately are really going to bedevil us. Munich’s final image before the credits implies that Avner’s sense of futility (“you tell me what we’ve done”) will be borne out after 9/11: killing terrorist masterminds does not stop terrorism. It will only evolve and metastasize, which is in fact exactly what happened. The United States may have killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, but after Al Qaeda comes ISIS. Spielberg’s aim, in sum, is not to say that Israel was wrong in killing those who planned the Munich Massacre, but that such an approach raises important issues that need to be discussed, not silenced:53 What you see in this movie is not an attempt to answer whether there should be targeted killings or not.What I’m doing in this movie is highlighting some of the dilemmas and some of the issues that need to be discussed.

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I’m not trying to answer them. But the movie … hopefully will stir that discussion. Spielberg was only partially successful, in that Munich has largely dropped out of critical discussions about terrorism in literature and film.54 Nonetheless, Munich’s steadfast refusal to provide answers to hard questions argues that perhaps we should pay more attention to Spielberg’s film.

Yasmina Khadra [Mohammed Moulessehoul], The Attack Suicide bombing did not begin in the Middle East, nor is the tactic restricted to this region (terrorist suicide bombings have occurred in Sri Lanka, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Panama, and Tanzania, among other places).55 However, once the Second Intifada (also known as the al-Aqsa Intifada) began after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s ill-considered visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on September 28, 2000, various Palestinian groups sent wave after wave of suicide bombers into Israel.56 Between 1989 and 2000, Israel endured a small number of such incidents every year. But starting in 2001, the number rocketed from between 1 and 5 annually to 40 in 2001 and 47 in 2002. With increasing Israeli pressure and security measures, the numbers started dropping: 23 in 2003; 17 in 2004, and 9 in 2005, and 3 in 2006.57 As one might expect, the rhetoric of unspeakability came to be applied to this development. On December 1, 2001, 2 suicide bombers, each standing at opposite ends of a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, blew themselves up, killing at least 10 people and wounding at least 150, and Defense Minister Shimon Peres said that the attack was “unprecedented in terms of its method and casualties.”58 When the father of a victim of the August 9, 2001 suicide bombing at the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem was asked if Palestinians did not have some legitimacy for their hatred, he responded: What happened in that restaurant, I cannot see it as a political act. It has no connection to politics. It’s an act of barbarism. There are some things that are so far outside the pale, they can’t be discussed without giving them a degree of legitimacy.59 It is precisely this sense of suicide bombing as “unthinkable,” as Samuel Thomas puts it, that the former Algerian army officer, now novelist living in France, Mohammed Moulessehoul [pen-name, Yasmina Khadra], addresses in The Attack, one of a trilogy of novels “that aim to make Middle Eastern terrorism, writ large, comprehensible to Western audiences.”60 In this book, a Bedouin, Dr. Amin Jaafari, must confront the incomprehensible: why did his Palestinian wife, Sihem, put on a suicide vest and blow herself up at a restaurant hosting a child’s birthday party?61

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“Barbarism,” “unthinkable,” and “outside the pale” perfectly describe how Dr. Jaafari and the Israelis react to suicide bombing. The chief investigator, Captain Moshé, finds such an action beyond rationality: “I’m trying to understand, but there are some things I’ll never understand. It’s so absurd, so stupid” (36); during his interrogation of Dr. Jaafari, Captain Moshé repeats his incomprehension at how anybody, but especially someone as “thoroughly assimilated” and as popular as Sihem, could commit such a deed: I absolutely have to know … how such a woman could get up one day and load herself with explosives and go to a public place and do something that calls into question all the trust the state of Israel has placed in the Arabs it has welcomed as citizens? Jaafari is equally graveled: How can a person, just like that—how can a person just strap on a load of explosives and go blow herself up in the middle of party? … How the hell is it possible for an ordinary human being, sound in body and mind, to make that choice. (92–93) Answering that question is the burden of this novel, which follows Dr. Jaafari as he embarks on a quest to find out why and how Sihem turned into a terrorist who targeted both adults and children. Jaafari’s education, in other words, his gradual discovery of why his wife, Sihem, became a suicide bomber, doubles as the reader’s education. However, while Moulessehoul intends to render the incomprehensible comprehensible, in the process, he also questions both the possibility of mutual understanding and the Western ideal of multiculturalism. Crucially, Moulessehoul does not make Dr. Amin Jaafari a Palestinian Arab. Rather, Jaafari belongs to the Bedouin, who, according to the Israeli government, constitute “a subgroup within the Arab minority in the State of Israel, with cultural, historical, social and political uniqueness.”62 Whereas Palestinian Arabs were originally sedentary, the Bedouin were nomadic, and to state the obvious, their ability to wander as they did traditionally came to an end with the establishment of the state of Israel. Since then, they have not fared well, occupying “the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in Israel.”63 They suffer from a very high unemployment rate, and a lower literacy rate than the national average.64 Therefore, Amin Jaafari, faces a double burden, as both “an Arab who stood out from the rest” and “the son of a Bedouin, stumbling under the weight of the prejudices his ancestry entailed” (97). Jaafari tells us that he faced any amount of racism during his early years: I lugged the caricature of that ancestry around with me like a convict’s ball and chain; it frequently exposed me to general human meanness, sometimes

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turned me into an object; at other times, it demonized me, and most often, it disqualified me. (97) Jaafari’s father worked incredibly hard “so he could offer the tribe its first physician” (98). And that, Jaafari decides at a young age, is exactly what would happen: “I realized that sitting between two chairs made no sense: I had to choose a side, and fast. I chose to be on the side of my ability” (97). Despite the racism (“it was hard for a son of Bedouins to join the brotherhood of the highly educated elite without provoking a sort of reflexive disgust” [7]), Jaafari succeeded because his father believed “that the greatest of all vocations was healing” (98; emphasis in the original). Jaafari’s father also bequeathed two more gifts: to avoid at all costs those who try “to sow hatred in your heart,” and the belief that: “There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than your life. And your life isn’t more important than other people’s lives” (100). Consequently, Jaafari ignores all the obstacles his background puts in his path, all the anti-Arab prejudice, and becomes a brilliantly successful surgeon, respected by (most) of his colleagues, and beloved by his patients. In sum, Moulessehoul constructs his character as a Western, liberal ideal: a man who rises from poverty by dint of talent and hard work, and who both ignores and disproves racial bias. While Jaafari recognizes the war between Israel and the Arabs, he chooses to rise above the fighting: I don’t remember ever applauding the combatants on one side or condemning the combatants on the other; I have never felt implicated in any way at all in this bloody conflict, which is in reality just a slugfest at close quarters between the punching bags and scapegoats of history, villainous as it is, and always ready to repeat itself. (166) Jaafaari grounds his refusal to take part in “these dramas of redemptive violence that turn upon themselves like endlessly long screws and haul entire generations through the same murderous absurdities” in his vocation: “I’m a surgeon: In my view, there’s enough suffering inherent in human flesh, and no need for healthy people to inflict more on one another every chance they get” (167). Jaafari’s refusal to take sides also allows him to appreciate opposing cultures without choosing between them: I loved Jerusalem when I was a boy. Standing in front of the Wailing Wall, I felt the same thrill as I did before the Dome of the Rock, and I couldn’t remain unmoved by the serenity emanating from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I moved from one part of the city to another as though turning from an Ashkenazi fable to a Bedouin tale, with equal delight, and I didn’t

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need to be a conscientious objector to distrust policies requiring armed struggle and sermons based on hatred. (142) He and Sihem have a room in their house they call their “ivory tower,” and this space realizes the multicultural ideal: Sometimes we’d come here to commune with our silence and reactivate our senses, dulled and blunted by the noises of every day. We’d bring a book or put on some music, and then we were off. We read Kafka as well as Kahlil Gibran, and listened to Oum Kalthoum and Pavarotti with the same gratitude. (174–175) Common humanity, in other words, trumps political and cultural difference.65 Given his background, given his refusal to engage politically, and given his privileging of life and medicine above all, it is no wonder that Dr. Jaafari cannot comprehend how his wife, or anybody for that matter, could choose to turn themselves into a weapon of mass destruction. After he receives Sihem’s letter admitting her deed, Jaafari cannot sleep: “All night long, I try to understand how Sihem arrived at the point she reached. What was the moment when she started to get away from me?” (75; emphasis in the original). So, he decides he will travel to the West Bank to resolve his incomprehension: I want to know who indoctrinated my wife, who strapped explosives on her and sent her to her target. There’s no way I’m going to fold my arms or turn the page on something I can’t get my mind around. (102) But when Jaafari arrives in Bethlehem, he discovers a very different world from the one he remembered, one that now operates by values the opposite of his own. When a taxi driver plays a sermon by Sheikh Marwan ending with an antiIsrael diatribe, Jaafari responds with his skeptical, above-the-fray secularism. He turns the tape off because “I don’t like sermons” (118). Outraged, the driver kicks him out of the cab. When Jaafari finally gets to his relative’s house, he calls his wife’s suicide bombing a “disaster” (113), but his cousin,Yasser, says “We’re all very proud of her” (120). In fact,Yasser continues, far from an abomination, Sihem has “become something of a local icon. Some people are even swearing they spoke to her and kissed her forehead. Reactions of that sort are common among us. A martyr is an open door to all sorts of tale telling” (130). When Jaafari finally meets Sheikh Marwan, whose blessing Sihem ostensibly sought, Jaafari discovers that his choices have made him a pariah in Marwan’s eyes. By privileging life and

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subordinating his ethnicity to his medical career, thereby succeeding in Israeli society, Jaafari has, according to Marwan, abandoned his faith and culture: And we know that you’re a recalcitrant believer—practically a renegade— that you don’t follow the path of your ancestors nor conform to their principles, and that you have long since dissociated yourself from their Cause by opting for another nationality. … To me, you’re nothing but a poor orphan, without faith and without salvation, wandering around like a sleepwalker in broad daylight. Even if you could walk on water, you couldn’t erase the insult that you represent. For the real bastard isn’t the man who doesn’t know his father; it’s the man who doesn’t know his tradition. Of all the black sheep, he’s the most to be pitied and the least to be lamented. (149–150) The next day, Jaafari returns to the mosque, where he is taken to see a representative of the Palestinian resistance (the man’s precise affiliation remains unclear). This person tries to educate Jaafari as well as the reader about the different shades of Palestinian opinion. Implicitly recalling Captain Moshé’s earlier blanket statement—“as far as I’m concerned, all these assholes are the same. Whether they’re Islamic Jihad, or Hamas, they’re all part of the same pack of degenerates” (38)—he elucidates the differences: “An Islamist is a political activist. He has but one ambition: to establish a theocratic state … A fundamentalist is an extremist jihadi. He believes neither in the sovereignty of Muslim states nor in their autonomy” (157). Neither this man nor Sihem belong to these movements. Instead, they are secular nationalists: “We’re not Islamists, Dr. Jaafari, and we’re not fundamentalists either. We are only the children of a ragged, despised people, fighting with whatever means we can to recover our homeland and our dignity” (158). Jaafari’s multiculturalism, his desire to transcend cultural difference and ignore the Arab–Israeli conflict, no longer works in this context.66 The doctor tells this man the reason for his presence in Bethlehem: “I want to know why … I want to know everything. I want to know the whole truth” (158–159; emphasis in the original), meaning, Jaafari wants to understand the reason for Sihem’s becoming a suicide bomber, to understand the unspeakable. But the representative responds by calling into question Jaafari’s assumption that someone with his background and ideology can understand what happened. There is no one truth, he says: Which truth? Hers or yours? The truth of a woman who realized where her duty lay, or the truth of a man who believes you need only turn your back on a tragedy to wash your hand of it? Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of the serviceable Arab par excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy

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parties by people who want to show how tolerant and considerate they are? The truth of someone who thinks he can change sides like changing a shirt, with no trace left behind? Is that the truth you’re looking for or is it the one you’re running away from? (159) There is no transcending cultural difference when Palestinians live “in a world where people tear one another to pieces every day that God sends. We spend our evenings gathering our dead and our mornings burying them” (159). Jaafari responds by defending himself and his ideals: “You have chosen to kill; I have chosen to save.Where you see an enemy, I see a patient” (160).67 As for recovering the Palestinian homeland, it doesn’t matter because “no earth belongs to you, not really. Neither the homeland you talk about nor the grave where you’ll be dust among the dust” (161). Unsurprisingly, the dialogue ends with neither side hearing the other, a fact made depressingly clear when the Palestinian “commander” (again, of what exactly remains unspecified), tells Jaafari that there’s no point in talking further: We could spend months and years striving for mutual understanding, and neither of us would ever be willing to listen to the other. So there’s no point in continuing. Go back home. We have no more to say to each other, you and I. (162) Before going further, let me reiterate that Moulessehoul does not in any way romanticize or soft-focus what exactly Sihem did. She walked into a fast-food restaurant where a child’s birthday party was taking place and set off the bomb.68 Moulessehoul then delivers a graphic description of the aftermath in the hospital. The death toll “stands at nineteen, among them eleven schoolchildren … We’ve performed four amputations, and thirty-three people have been admitted in critical condition” (18). So the reader knows full well exactly what the intentionally vague phrase, “whatever means,” entails, and as Jaafari says when viewing his wife’s shredded remains, “This is horror in its most absolute ugliness” (29). Even though Jaafari seems to agree that his mission ended in “failure” and that he is no closer to understanding the “moral dilemma” of suicide bombing than before, that the “trapdoor I wore myself out trying to wrest open didn’t yield any of its secrets” (163), he shifts to resolving whether Sihem was cheating on him with his cousin, Adel. After hearing that Adel was last seen in Jenin, Jaafari ventures there, and he quickly realizes just how one-sided his perspective has been: When I was in Tel Aviv, I was on another planet. My blinders shielded me from taking in much of the tragedy devastating my country; the honors

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I received hid the real level of the horrors that were all around me, turning the Holy Land into a shambles. (201)69 The Palestinian leader he meets tells Jaafari exactly why Sihem became a suicide bomber: The good doctor lives next door to a war, but he doesn’t want to hear a word about it. And he thinks that his wife shouldn’t worry about it, either. Ah well, the good doctor is wrong. … We’re at war. Some people take up arms; others twiddle their thumbs. And still others make a killing in the name of the Cause. That’s life. … Your wife chose her side. The happiness you offered her smelled of decay. It repulsed her, you get it? She didn’t want your happiness. She couldn’t work on her suntan while her people were bent under the Zionist yoke. Do I have to draw you a picture to make you understand, or do you refuse to look reality in the face? (212–213; emphasis in the original) But verbal explanations are not enough. The Palestinian leader imprisons Jaafari, first subjecting him to mock executions, then throwing him for six days and nights into a “pestilential rat hole” (216). After “a commander” (again, we are not told of what) frees Jaafari, the man explains why he subjected the doctor to such treatment. The previous explanations focused on rational politics: Sihem chose to side with the Palestinians, not the Israelis. But as the commander tells Jaafari, and the reader, political affiliation alone does not explain suicide bombing. Instead, there’s another factor that clarifies: why we’ve taken up arms … why our teenagers throw themselves on tanks as though they were candy boxes, why our cemeteries are filled to overflowing, why I want to die with my weapons in my hand, and why your wife went and blew herself up in a restaurant. There’s no worse cataclysm than humiliation. (219) As the commander says: “Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I’ve known since I came into the world” (218). Once a man recognizes his “impotence, with no means of restoring his dignity,” then “death becomes the ultimate salvation. Sihem understood this, Doctor” (218–220). Hence, her decision to become a suicide bomber. Even “Imam Marwan was unable to dissuade her” (221).

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While the reader perhaps now has a greater understanding of the “unthinkable,” Jaafari does not. Adel explains to Jaafari (for the third time) that while the two: lived under the same roof and enjoyed the same privileges, [you] weren’t looking in the same direction. … It was as if you were firing up a barbecue in a burned-out yard.You saw only the barbecue; she saw the rest, the desolation all around, spoiling all delight. It wasn’t your fault; all the same, she couldn’t bear sharing your blindness anymore. (227) Yet Jaafari remains not just unconvinced, but incapable of comprehending Sihem’s decision: “I come up against the clarity of his logic like a fly striking a windowpane; I see his message plainly, but I can’t possibly absorb it. When I ponder what Sihem did, I find it unconscionable and inexcusable” (228). Suicide terrorism remains for Jaafari unthinkable, beyond the pale, unspeakable, just as Jaafari remains a black hole to the Palestinians. Thus, as Anne-Marie McManus puts it, The Attack insists “on a borderline of absolute incomprehension between liberal and terrorist.”70 Nonetheless, when Jaafari discovers that another relative, a young woman named Faten, has gone to Jenin to meet with Sheikh Marwan and likely become another suicide bomber, he returns to Jenin and waits by Marwan’s mosque, hoping to find and dissuade her. But the Israelis strike Marwan’s motorcade with a missile, killing the Sheikh, Jaafari, and a host of others, although Jaafari somehow remains sentient after death. The final question is whether Moulessehoul sides with either Jaafari or the Palestinians. Does The Attack ultimately condemn or condone Sihem’s act? The answer, I suggest, is that the novel does neither. Instead, Moulessehoul presents both sides of the argument persuasively without deciding between them. On the one hand, Moulessehoul clearly understands the desperation of Palestinians caught up in a situation where they have no hope and no future, and he is far from blind to the anti-Arab racism present in Israeli society. Moulessehoul recognizes the unspeakability of suicide bombing, but he responds with a narrative that provides the reasons why people would be driven to such an end. On the other hand, the novel demonstrates that Israeli society is not exclusively racist. Jaafari’s friends, Kim and Navid, never abandon him because of his wife’s actions, and while some at his hospital want him ejected, scores of patients write to the government defending him. Also, The Attack characterizes suicide bombing as fundamentally indefensible and unforgivable, and Moulessehoul qualifies Amin’s humanism by portraying him as a deeply flawed character who cannot comprehend that Sihem might have had something else on her mind other than desire. In sum, the novel’s opposing perspectives are perfectly balanced, which helps explain The Attack’s circular structure: by beginning where it ends, and ending where it begins, the novel never comes to any sort of closure. Neither does Munich

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or The Little Drummer Girl, as both end by gesturing toward an uncertain future; which is entirely appropriate, as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict remains equally unresolved.

Notes 1 https://books.google.com/ngrams. 2 Causation is, frankly, hard to determine. Both Stampnitzky and Matthew Carr trace the shift to the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre (Disciplining Terror, 20–23; The Infernal Machine [New York: New Press, 2006], 201–203), but as the ngrams demonstrate, the separation of terrorism from insurgency seems to have started in the late 1960s. Bruce Hoffman, on the other hand, credits the hijacking of an El Al jet in July 1968 as the key moment when terrorism entered a new phase (Hoffman, Inside Terrorism: Revised and Expanded Edition [New York: Columbia University Press, 2006], 63; see also Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98.1 [2011], 90). In a paper delivered in 1980, Brian Jenkins summarized the 1970s as the “decade of the terrorist,” thanks to the proliferation of murders, kidnappings, and attacks on both corporate and diplomatic facilities, not the least being the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran (“Terrorism in the 80s,” Rand Corporation, 1980), 1. 3 Stampnitzky, 50. 4 Ibid., 21, emphasis in the original. 5 New York Times, September 6, 1972, 44; September 7, 1972, 42. 6 Quoted in Stampnitzky, 22. 7 Ibid., 22. 8 International Terrorism: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia of the Committee on Foreign Affairs House of Representatives (US Government Printing Office, 1974), 1. 9 Ibid., 11. On the attack, see “Arab Guerrillas Kill in Israeli Town, Then Die in Blast at Apartment House,” New York Times April 12, 1974, A3. 10 “Detectives and Their Work,” All the Year Round, April 25, 1885, 136. 11 International Terrorism, 125. 12 Ibid., 126. 13 Ibid., 151. 14 Ibid., 150. 15 Ibid., 151. 16 Marius Livingstone, Lee Bruce Kress, and Marie G.Wanek, eds. International Terrorism in the Contemporary World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 19–20. 17 International Terrorism, 132. 18 Zulaika and Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 6, 149–150. Zulaika and Douglass’s taboo for a short while became a matter of law when the Thatcher government forbade all news organizations from speaking with any terrorist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland (Ed Moloney, “Closing Down the Airwaves: The Story of the Broadcasting Ban,” The Media and Northern Ireland, ed. Bill Rolston [London: MacMillan, 1991], 8–50). 19 I decided to examine works created by people outside the Middle East for several reasons. Aside from my not having sufficient expertise in Hebrew and Arabic, first, the works I have read by Israeli authors (in translation) rarely confront terrorism directly. While they will deal with the Palestinian issue (e.g., David Grossman, The Smile of the Lamb, trans. Betsy Rosenberg [1983; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990]), to my knowledge, the only novel that tries to see the world from the perspective of a Palestinian terrorist is Assaf Gavron’s Almost Dead, trans. Assaf Gavron and James

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Lever (2006; New York: HarperCollins, 2010). But as Gavron informs me in a private email, Almost Dead was coldly received in Israel; his editor asked him on receiving the manuscript, “Why would you write such a book?”The Palestinian novelists I have read (again, in translation), simply put, do not see the PLO or Black September as engaging in terrorism. Rather, they regard indiscriminate violence against Israeli and Jewish targets as legitimate resistance. For example, Elias Khoury, in The Gate of the Sun, trans. Humphrey Davies (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006), refers to the Munich Olympics massacre as “the Munich operation” (181) and a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv is also an “operation” (321). 20 Melvyn Bragg, “The Little Drummer Girl: An Interview with John le Carré,” The Quest for Le Carré, ed. Alan Bold (New York: St. Martin’s; London:Vision Press, 1988), 142. 21 Ibid., 134. 22 Ibid., 142. 23 For a list of terrorist events, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of _the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#1974.E2.80.931980s:_Palestinian _insurgency_in_South_Lebanon. 24 Bragg, 137. 25 For example, Walter Laqueur, “Le Carré’s Fantasies,” Commentary June 1983: 62–67 and David Pryce-Jones, “A Demonological Fiction,” The New Republic April 18, 1983: 27–30. 26 Lee O’Brien, “Review: The Little Drummer Girl,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13.2 (1984): 110–113. Le Carré noted that “[a] leading Arab-American dismissed it as ‘the usual stuff about Arabs as terrorists’” (“Introduction,” The Little Drummer Girl [New York: Knopf, 1983; rpt. New York: Penguin, 2011], xix.) All further references will be to this edition and cited parenthetically. 27 Critics have come to opposite conclusions about the novel’s politics. David Monaghan finds the novel virulently anti-Israel (The Novels of John le Carré: The Art of Survival [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985],182). Toine Van Teeffelen, on the hand, finds that le Carré has no sympathy for Palestinians (“(Ex)Communicating Palestine: From BestSelling Terrorist Fiction to Real-Life Personal Accounts,” Studies in the Novel 36.3 [2004], 447). 28 Jenkins, “Terrorism in the 1980s,” 6. 29 Brenda R. Silver, “Woman as Agent: The Case of le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl,” Contemporary Literature 28.1 (1987), 37. 30 Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1972, A11. 31 New York Times, September 6, 1972, 44; Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1972, A11. 32 Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1972, A11. See also Stampnitzky, 22. 33 Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, “Munich,” (unpublished screenplay, 2005), 22. 34 The screenplay has Meir say:“Palestinians.Who are Palestinians? There’s no such people. They’re not … recognizable” (20–21). 35 James Schamus, “Munich: Zionism, Masculinty, and Disaspora in Spielberg’s Epic,” Representations #100 (Fall, 2007), 59; Maurice Yaccowar, “Munich of Fact and Fiction,” Queen’s Quarterly 113.1 (2006), 125. 36 There is some controversy over Zwaiter’s involvement in terrorism. Simon Reeve says yes (One Day in September [New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000], 164). But Aaron J. Klein says no (Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response New York: Random House, 2005], 123). Kushner and Roth draw their list of Zwaiter’s terrorist involvements from their source, George Jonas, Vengeance:The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1984), 117–118. 37 On Arafat’s knowledge of Munich, see Reeve, One Day, 45, and Klein, Striking Back, 32. 38 The most comprehensive treatment of Israel’s creation remains Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2008), 1–36. On the importance of the Holocaust, see Morris, 23–25.

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39 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHbXkk3qHbk&list=PLPAWzqYS4Wt9SnwtVl27TB 1qOn4zrBAEI&index=3. 40 The actual number is probably between 20 and 35 targets (Reeve, One Day, 162). 41 After Al-Gashay finishes, the British journalist continues to press, asking once more if he shot any unarmed hostages. Al-Gashay responds: “They are unarmed, but we have to know that Israel is our enemy … so we have to kill the Israeli, because …” At this point, another person, unidentified, says: “Israelis kill our people who are unarmed also in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.” He then says: “This question is not supposed to be asked our friend.” See note 39 for the interview’s URL. 42 Babylonian Talmud,Tractate Sanhedrin, Folio 39b. I am grateful to Jeffrey Shoulson for providing this reference. 43 The debates over the morality of their mission are Spielberg’s invention. In Vengeance, Jonas says that Avner and the team had no qualms about what they were doing (229). 44 On the controversy, see Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Stephen Spielberg: Empire of Light (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 360–361, and Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 508–511. While some criticized Spielberg for “humanizing terrorists,” those aligned with the Palestinian cause find the movie far too sympathetic to Israel.Yosefa Loskitzky goes so far as to criticize the film’s liberal critics for not acknowledging “the moral superiority of the Palestinian cause” (“The Post-Holocaust Jew in the Age of ‘The War on Terror’: Steven Spielberg’s Munich,” Journal of Palestine Studies 40.2 [2011], 78). 45 George Jonas, quoted in Robert Fisk, “My Challenge for Steven Spielberg,” The Independent (January 21, 2006). 46 Leon Wieseltier, “Hits,” The New Republic (December 19, 2005), 38. 47 Zionist Organization of America, “ZOA: Don’t See Spielberg’s ‘Munich’ Unless You Like Humanizing Terrorists & Dehumanizing Israelis” (December 27, 2005). 48 Andrew Anthony, “The Eye of the Storm,” The Guardian (January 22, 2006). 49 Richard Schickel, “Spielberg Takes on Terror,” Time Magazine, December 12, 2005, pp. 64–68 (accessed through Ebgscohost Academic Search Premier). 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. For a sensitive reading of Munich and the problem of retributive violence, see Joseph J. Foy, “Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and ‘The Story of What Happens Next’ in Munich,” Steven Spielberg and Philosophy:We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Book, ed. Dean A. Kowalski (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 170–190. See also Nigel Morris, “Munich: A Bitter Fruit on the Olive Branch,” The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema, ed. Lawrence Baron (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 349–357. 54 For example, Tony Shaw leaves Munich out of his otherwise encyclopedic Cinematic Terror. As of this writing (July, 2018), the most recent article on this film came out in 2011. 55 See Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005); Christoph Reuter, My Life as a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Assaf Moghadam, “Palestinian Suicide Terrorism in the Second Intifada: Motivations and Organizational Aspects,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 26 (2003), 65. 56 Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman, and Khalil Shikaki, Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 361–396; James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 245–257; Mark Tessler, A History of the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 807–827;

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and Jeremy Pressman, “The Second Intifada: Background and Causes of the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Studies, 23.2 (2006), 57 “List of Palestinian Suicide Attacks,” Wikipedia. For defenses of this tactic, Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 45–63, and Matthew Abraham,“The Fanonian Specter in Palestine: Suicide Bombing and the Final Colonial War,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112.1 (2013): 99–114. 58 James Bennet and Joel Greenberg, “Two Suicide Bombers Strike Jerusalem, Killing at Least 10,” The New York Times, December 2, 2001. 59 Lee Hockstader, “The Suicide Bomber Took Malki’s Life, But Not Our Convictions,” Washington Post, August 19, 2001, B1. In her review of two books on suicide bombing, Jaqueline Rose observes: “Suicide bombing is most often considered a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman aberration that cannot – or must not – be understood” (“Deadly Embrace,” London Review of Books, November 4, 2001, 21). 60 Samuel Thomas, “Outtakes and Outrage: The Means and Ends of Suicide Terror,” Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism, ed. John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 287. The other novels are The Swallows of Kabul (2004) and The Sirens of Baghdad (2007). I will be quoting from Mohammed Moulessehoul [Yasmina Khadra], The Attack, trans. John Cullen (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). All further references will be parenthetical. I will also refer to the author by his actual, not his pen name. 61 Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (New York: Rodale, 2003); Yoram Schweitzer, “Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers: Virtuous Heroines or Damaged Goods?” Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency Utility, and Organization, ed. Cindy D. Ness (New York: Routledge, 2008), 131–145; Anat Berko and Edna Erez, “Martyrs or Murderers? Victims or Victimizers? The Voices of Would-be Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers,” Female Terrorism and Militancy, ed. Ness, 146–166; and Anat Berko, The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers, trans. Elizabeth Yuval (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007). Sihem is unique in that she was fully integrated into Israeli society. All the other suicide bombers studied by Victor and Schweitzer lived in either the West Bank or Gaza, and had nothing to do with Israeli society. 62 “Bedouins in the State of Israel,” The Knesset, www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/end/ bedouim_eng.htm. 63 Ibid. 64 Lawrence Rubin,“Islamic Political Activism among Israel’s Negev Bedouin Population,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 44.3 (2017), 434. 65 Toward the end of the novel, Moulessehoul introduces a character named “Zeev the Hermit” (240), who also believes in the easy reconciliation of opposites: “Every Jew in Palestine is a bit of an Arab, and no Arab in Israel can deny that he’s a little Jewish” (242). However, Zeev is a marginal figure, incidental to the overall arc of the novel’s plot, and “a kind of outcast saint” (245). 66 Cf. Robert Spencer, who argues that The Attack “is an injunction to surmount destructive fundamentalisms with visions of equality” (“Reading Lolita in Tel Aviv: Terrorism, Fundamentalism, and the Novel,” Textual Practice 27.3 [2013], 412). 67 Spencer, “Reading,” 410. 68 While Sihem’s choice may seem particularly shocking, targeting Jewish children was far from unprecedented.The women interviewed by Berko and Erez “considered their primary role [in life] as creating a family and raising children, they proudly noted how they were capable of killing Jewish Israeli children” (“Martyrs or Murderers,” 156). See also Berko’s chapter, “Double Standard: ‘Sure, I’d Attack a Kindergarten! I am Able to Look at Your Children—and Explode!’” in The Path to Paradise, 125–136.

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69 Jenin was known as the “capital of suicide attackers,” and at least 28 attacks originated from that city since the start of the second Intifada two years earlier. On April 1, 2002, Israeli forces entered Jenin, and a vicious, ten-day battle ensued. See Gelvin, The IsraelPalestine Conflict, 248;Tessler, History, 824; and Eric Gartman, Return to Zion:The History of Modern Israel (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 310–311. 70 Anne-Marie McManus, “Sentimental Terror Narratives: Gendering Violence, Dividing Sympathy,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 9.2 (2013), 95.

5 “WHY DO THEY HATE US?” Updike, Hamid, DeLillo

The Unspeakability of 9/11 On September 11, 2001, four airplanes took off from Boston, Dulles, and Newark airports between 7:59 and 8:42 in the morning. Shortly afterward, each was hijacked by groups of Al Qaeda terrorists. At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center; at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower; and at 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. United Airlines Flight 93, the only flight in which the passengers tried to stop the hijacking, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. The target is unknown, but assumed to be either the White House or the Capitol.1 Historically, as we have seen, terrorism has been accompanied by expressions of unspeakability and incomprehension. Just as in 1605, Attorney-General Edward Coke described the Gunpower Plot as an event “sine nomine,” without a name, and a nineteenth-century newspaper described the Fenian dynamite outrages as “a course of scoundrelism for which barbarism has no parallel,” so did the New York Times describe New Yorkers in Lower Manhattan as witnessing “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the unthinkable.”2 On October 7, the Times published a series of responses to 9/11 under the headline, “Making Sense of the Senseless.” Nor were these reactions restricted to the United States. The British newspaper, The Guardian, also described the attacks as “simply unparalleled,” and literally beyond understanding: “A chief part of the horror of yesterday’s truly appalling, awesome events was the lack of a face or a name, the lack of meaning – the lack of reason”; contra Thomas Perry Thornton and the other terrorism theorists of the early 1960s, The Guardian asserted that “terrorism has never been a rational activity.”3

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However, several aspects of the response to 9/11 bear specific notice. First, it is remarkable how intellectuals embraced the rhetoric of unspeakability.4 Jacques Derrida: “what is terrible about ‘September 11,’ what remains ‘infinite’ in this wound, is that we do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it”; Slavoj Žižek: “[we hear] how the attacks were a totally unexpected shock, how the unimaginable Impossible happened”; and Jean Baudrillard underscores the impossibility of anyone understanding 9/11: “We try retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it, to find some kind of interpretation. But there is none.”5 Literary critics followed suit. Kristiaan Versluys, for example, writes that 9/11 “is a limit event that shatters the symbolic resources of the culture and defeats the normal processes of meaning making and semiosis. … [9/11 involves] the total breakdown of all meaning making systems”; and James Berger, unconsciously repeating and expanding on Edward Coke, admitted that “[n]othing adequate, nothing corresponding in language could stand for [the attacks on 9/11].”6 This sense of 9/11 as an interpretive black hole extended to the visual. For example, Art Spiegelman’s cover of that week’s The New Yorker depicted the twin towers as black-on-black, signifying that as we mourned, they cast a long shadow, or that they will remain a dark presence in the world’s collective memory.7 Michael Arad’s 9/11 memorial features water endlessly pouring into a square black hole, as if into the void. The unspeakable and unparalleled nature of 9/11 has become so ingrained, so conventional, that David Simpson could write the following and not provide any substantiating notes:8 The events of September 11, 2001 … [have] been widely presented as an interruption of the deep rhythms of cultural time, a cataclysm simply erasing what was there rather than evolving from anything already in place, and threatening a yet more monstrous future. It appeared as an unforeseen eruption across the path of a history commonly deemed rooted in a complacent steady-state progressivism. The “disruptive power of 9/11” and its “exceptionality” are now taken for granted. Taken for granted, and policed. To use Zulaika and Douglass’s phrase, “the tabooing of knowledge in the interest of moral indignation” was vigorously enforced after 9/11.9 After the novelist, Barbara Kingsolver suggested in the Washington Post that one lesson from 9/11 might be learning “honest truths from wrongful deaths,” Jonathan Alter responded in Newsweek with an editorial entitled, “Blame America at Your Peril,” excoriating Kingsolver’s “mindless moral equivalency.”10 Alter’s title did not exaggerate. Almost anybody who considered the 9/11 hijackers as anything other diabolical monsters found themselves subject to vitriolic abuse and professional sanctions. For the crime of asking: “Where is the acknowledgement that this [9/11] was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s

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self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”, Susan Sontag found herself denounced as “deranged,” suffering from “moral idiocy,” and fated to “occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell,” where Dante places Judas Iscariot and Cain, among other traitors.11 Bill Maher made a similar comment to Sontag’s, and as a consequence, FedEx and Sears pulled advertising from his show, a dozen affiliates suspended broadcast, and ultimately, ABC cancelled Politically Incorrect. HBO picked up his show a year later, but not before Maher made the rounds apologizing to various conservative pundits.12 A decade later, the singer Tony Bennett discovered that the taboo remained in force. After stating on Howard Stern’s radio show that the United States bore some responsibility for 9/11 (“They [the terrorists] flew the plane in, but we caused it”), he was forced to retract his statement and issue an apology: There is simply no excuse for terrorism and the murder of the nearly 3,000 innocent victims of the 9/11 attacks on our country … I am sorry if my statements suggested anything other than an expression of my love for my country, my hope for humanity and my desire for peace throughout the world.13 Over and over again, 9/11’s consequences are described in terms of trauma, which helps explain some of the characteristics of post-9/11 American literature and popular culture.14 Many noted how after 9/11, American culture seemed to go backward, embracing atavistic notions of masculinity, promoting an unquestioning patriotism for the “homeland,” and wallowing in nostalgia for a bygone era of American supremacy.15 It is not an accident that the frequently reproduced image of firemen raising the flag at the destroyed World Trade Center echoes the famous image of American marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. This desire for comforting images also extended to narratives. In their taxonomy of terrorism novels, Robert Applebaum and Alexis Paknadel propose that:16 the cultural work of the terrorism novel from 1970 to 2001 has been by and large to legitimate the position of innocence occupied by terrorism’s victims and the political society to which they belong. … These novels tell us that terrorism is the violence of an Other; it is illegitimate violence perpetrated from an illegitimate position. Many, if not most, 9/11 fictions fit this description perfectly, so much so that nearly the entire genre has been dismissed as suffering from a “failure of imagination.”17 Such novels as Jay McInerney, The Good Life; Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall; Reynolds Price, The Good Priest’s Son; and Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close focus on the domestic trauma caused by 9/11, and rarely, if ever, try to situate terrorism in a larger context, let alone attempt to portray the perpetrators as empathetically as the victims.

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But as we have seen in the previous chapters, not every fictional or cinematic work follows this route. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, Pontecorco’s The Battle of Algiers, and John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, among other works, separated as they may be by time, place, subject, genre, and ideological orientation, undo any easy distinction between “Us” and “Them” while narrating the justifications for terrorism in ways that invite, if not sympathy, then understanding. In this chapter, I want to explore how a trio of 9/11 novels—John Updike, Terrorist; Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist; and Don DeLillo, Falling Man, break with convention and invite a broader, more informed, and more troubling understanding of Islamic terrorism and our responses to 9/11.

John Updike, Terrorist When John Updike embarked on a novel that portrays a potential suicide bomber “as sympathetically” as he could, he was fully aware that many would not be pleased by his approach.18 “I guess I have stuck my neck out here in a number of ways,” Updike told the New York Times. “I sometimes think, ‘Why did I do this?’ I’m delving into what can be a very sore subject for some people.”19 And as the disdainful reaction to his novel shows, Updike rightly anticipated a harsh response.20 For instance, the review in The Wall Street Journal singled out Updike’s attempt to see the terrorist as anything other than a monster, because to be a terrorist is to be monster: “Mr. Updike cannot quite make the turn from this confused boy to the life-destroyer that a terrorist must be.”21 The reasons, however, Updike chose to embark on this project are crucially important and have not been sufficiently noted. Consequently, Updike has not— with the exceptions of Anna Hartnell and Liliana M. Naydan—been given sufficient credit (or any credit at all): Updike conceived Terrorist as both an exploration of the roots of Islamic terrorism and as a critique of post-9/11 discourse.22 In his interview with Bookpage, Updike explains: “I think there are enough people complaining about the Arab menace that I can be allowed to try to show this young man as sympathetically as I can.”23 Even more pointedly, Updike says to the New York Times: “I think I felt could understand the animosity and hatred which an Islamic believer would have for our system. Nobody’s trying to see it from that point of view” (emphasis added).24 Seeing it from “that point of view,” of course, is exactly what we are not supposed to do, as Tony Bennett and Susan Sontag, among others, discovered. Updike, however, thinks that is the wrong approach, and since “nobody” will break the taboo and try to “see it from that point of view,” that will be his project. Consequently, Updike has his Muslim characters describe what the world looks like from their perspective, and their views partly overlap with Updike’s longstanding criticisms of American culture as materialistic and self-destructive (the book does not endorse their view that America consciously seeks Islam’s

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destruction).25 As Hartnell rightly puts it, “the Islamist critique of American society is in many ways Updike’s own.”26 Throughout the novel, Ahmad reiterates his critique of America as vapid and godless, indeed, vapid because it is godless. The rampant sexuality of his fellow students disgusts him: “All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see?” (3; emphasis in the original). So does the equally rampant materialism of his teachers (“they are men and women like any others, full of lust and fear and infatuation with things that can be bought” [4]), and the secular values embedded in the high school curriculum: The values [his teachers] believe in are godless: biology and chemistry and physics. On the facts and formulas of these their false voices firmly rest, ringing out into the classroom … Only what we can measure and deduce from measurement is true. The rest is the passing dream that we call our selves. (4) Defending his decision not to continue his education, Ahmad (echoing his imam, Shaikh Rashid) says that “Western culture is Godless … And because it has no God, it is obsessed with sex and luxury goods” (38); and he tells his friend (and future prostitute) Joyrleen that Islam provides what contemporary American culture does not because it cannot: The mosque and its teachers give them what the Christian U.S. disdains to—respect, and a challenge that asks something of them. It asks austerity. It asks restraint. All America wants of its citizens, your President has said, is for us to buy—to spend money we cannot afford and thus propel the economy forward for himself and other rich men. (72) When Joryleen protests that George W. Bush “ain’t my President,”Ahmad responds that it does not matter because all American presidents are the same: “They all want Americans to be selfish and materialistic, to play their part in consumerism” (72). He considers his mother, Terry, a typical American, lacking strong convictions and the courage and comfort they bring. She is a victim of the American religion of freedom, freedom above all, though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air. Bombs bursting in air—empty air is the perfect symbol of American freedom. (167)

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And Ahamd feels entirely superior to America. Driving through New Jersey while delivering furniture, “he takes interest less in its pockets of a diluted Middle East than in the American reality all around, a sprawling ferment for which he feels the mild pity owed a failed experiment” (177). But even though Islam has “rendered him immune” to the allurements of materialism (151), Ahmad’s perspective is not so much threatening as threatened: “Devils,” Ahmad thinks at the novel’s start. “These devils seek to take away my God” (3), and a little later, Ahmad is more specific about what he means: “America wants to take away my God” (39; emphases in the original). Ahmad cannot simply dismiss “the American way” as heading, as he says, “for a terrible doom” (39) because (in his view) American culture deliberately and maliciously seeks “to disrupt that primal union [Ahmad feels with his God] and take the All-Merciful and Life-Giving One from him” (40). But while Ahmad sees America as a threat to his personal faith, others see a more broad-based assault and it is with these characters that we see Updike paying attention to how terrorism speaks and what it has to say. Shaikh Rashid believes that America has embarked on a “crusade against Islam” (183), and the Islamic television “channels beamed from Manhattan and Jersey City [broadcast] solemn panels of bespectacled professors and mullahs discussing the anti-Islamic fury that has perversely possessed the present-day West” (197). When Charlie (to whom we will return later), in his role as CIA mole, entices Ahmad to join his terrorist cell, he only grudgingly agrees with Ahmad’s belief that the West wants “to take our God” (188); rather, for Charlie, America’s threat is either imperialistic (“The Western powers steal our oil, they take our land”) or a fundamental denial of human dignity: “They take from Muslims their traditions and a sense of themselves, the pride in themselves that all men are entitled to” (188). At the novel’s start, Ahmad tells his high school counselor, Jack Levy, that after rampaging throughout the world, America “is coming after Islam, with everything in Washington run by the Jews to keep themselves in Palestine” (38). In sum, Updike’s Muslim characters think of themselves as a beleaguered minority confronting a vastly superior power that desires their psychic and spiritual destruction while stealing their wealth and land. Why should the reader take any of this seriously? Because Updike uses these characters to channel the actual view of America among radical Islamists. While one does not need an Islamist critique to understand that American high schools are filled with hormonally charged teenagers, Ahmad’s hyper-awareness of the steamy sensuality of his classmates, Joryleen in particular (she wears “a ribbed magenta shorty top both lower and higher than it should be” [8]), echoes the works of Sayyid Qutb, the ideological father of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and of radical Islam generally (and hardly a household name at the time Updike wrote Terrorist).27 Toward the book’s end, Ahmad tells Jack Levy that Qutb “came to the United States fifty years ago and was struck by … the open wantonness between the sexes” (302). In Qutb’s essay on his experiences in

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America to which Ahmad and Updike refer (translated into English in 2000), he describes American women as the embodiment of sex:28 The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs, and she shows all this and does not hide it. She knows it lies in clothes: in bright colors that awaken primal sensations, and in designs that reveal the temptations of the body—and in American girls these are sometimes live, screaming temptations. Similarly, Shaikh Rashid, Charlie, and the bespectacled imams channel Osama bin Laden’s claim that the 9/11 attacks were not unprovoked aggression, but a response to America’s longstanding treatment of the Arab world: “What America is tasting today is but a fraction of what we have been tasting for decades,” and, he further claims, the American troops invading Afghanistan are not there to fight terrorism, but “to fight Islam.”29 Bin Laden, in other words, sees himself and Islam as victims, not victimizers. Ahmad’s condemnation of the American “religion of freedom” and its consequences also echoes bin Laden’s views of the same: “You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of ‘personal freedom,’” as does Charlie’s statement that the West steals Arab oil: “You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”30 Finally, the redolent anti-Semitism of Shaikh Rashid’s charge, repeated by Ahmad, that Washington is run by the Jews echoes bin Laden’s accusation that behind America’s politicians “stand the Jews, who control your policies, media, and economy.”31 If Updike uses Ahmad, Rashid, and Charlie as conduits for Islamic radicalism, other characters reflect how many Americans remain stubbornly deaf to these voices. Terrorism is genuinely unspeakable to the novel’s Secretary of Homeland Security. With no ability to read or understand Arabic, he must rely on what his “Arabists” tell him, and what they report seems entirely “alien and repellent to the Secretary” (47). To be sure, the narrator also tells us that “sleepless geeks, even those of Caucasian blood and Christian upbringing,” equally mystify the Secretary, but they do not concern him. Charged with defending America against its Islamist enemies, he cannot understand them. What Ahmad sees as “exalted submission” (168), he regards as “an ascetic and dogmatic tyranny” (47), and as he admits to his assistant, Hermione, he has no idea why anybody would attack the United States: “Why do they want to do these horrible things? Why do they hate us?” (48). The Secretary’s question, of course, echoes much of the rhetoric, both governmental and popular, after 9/11. In his address to a joint session of Congress immediately after 9/11, President George Bush said that “Americans are asking, why

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do they hate us?”32 Hermione answers the Secretary’s query in literally blackand-white terms: “They hate the light … Like cockroaches. Like bats,” and she quotes John 1:15: “The light shone in darkness … and the darkness comprehended it not” (48). Her answer is not only self-serving and self-righteous, it reinforces “the tabooing of knowledge in the interest of moral indignation,” to quote once more Zulaika and Douglass.33 To cast oneself as “the light” and to depict the Other as “the darkness” not only serves to reinforce one’s own sense of virtue, but undoes any impulse toward trying to understand the larger causes of Islamic terrorism, let alone the humanity of one’s adversaries. While the Secretary channels the incomprehension of many politicians and pundits after 9/11, Hermione, the Secretary’s secretary, and her sister, Beth, represent another regrettable aspect of American culture after the attacks—the fall into nostalgia. In her analysis of post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi demonstrates how [t]hroughout the fall of 2001, the media attempted to position the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a reprise of Pearl Harbor, a new ‘day of infamy’ that would reinvigorate our World War II ethic of national unity and sacrifice.34 To give two examples, Newsweek columnist Robert Alter asserted that “most Americans view history through a ‘Greatest Generation’ World War II prism,”35 and a photo mash-up of Thomas E. Franklin’s image of firefighters at Ground Zero raising the American flag and the iconic shot of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima that circulated widely on the web. “We reacted to our trauma,” Faludi continues, “not by interrogating it but by cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom’s childhood.”36 Updike has three characters represent America’s retreat into the past. Beth likes talking with her sister, Hermione, because her blunt manner of speaking “reminds Beth of home, of northwest Philadelphia with all its humid greenery and trolley cars and corner grocery stores stacked with Maier’s and Freihofer’s bread” (128), and the Secretary recalls that he and his wife once loved going to the movies: “Judy Garland, Kirk Douglas—they gave good honest value, every performance one hundred ten percent. Now all you hear about these kid movie actors … is drunk driving and who’s pregnant out of wedlock” (260–261). More poignantly, Hermione bemoans the loss of feeling secure, horrified by the thought of what “a few men with assault rifles [could do] in a mall anywhere in America,” and she compares America’s present sense of vulnerability with the past: Remember the old Wanamaker’s? How we used to go there as children with such happy hearts? It seemed a paradise, especially the escalators and the toy departments on the top floor. All that’s gone.We can never be happy again—we Americans. (132)37

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Updike no more approves of the Secretary, Beth, and Hermione’s self-reinforcing ignorance and their nostalgia for an idealized past than he endorses Ahmad’s, Shaikh Rashid’s, and the bespectacled mullahs’ wilder opinions about America’s foreign conduct or its hostile intentions toward Islam. Both represent equally blinkered perspectives.Yet if Updike rejects the extremes, he also sympathizes with both sides. Updike may satirize the Bush administration’s willful ignorance in the Secretary’s incomprehension of America’s enemies or his country’s faults, yet he understands that the Secretary is charged with an essential yet nearly impossible task: to “protect in spite of itself a nation of nearly three hundred million anarchic souls … the clashing claims of privacy and security, convenience and safety, are his daily diet” (44, 46). And if it is easy to mock Hermione’s nostalgia for a lost American Eden, her sense of America’s vulnerability to a devastating attack is far from wrong: “Capitalism has been so open—that’s how it has to be, to make it work. … An open society is so defenseless. Everything the modern free world has achieved is so fragile” (132; emphases in the original). Similarly, while Updike does not believe that America is engaging in a war against Islam, he recognizes that Muslims occupy an uncomfortable place in American society, especially after 9/11. Ahmad’s mother, Terry, had to change their phone number because “[w]e were getting hate calls. Anti-Muslim” (79). During the high school graduation ceremony, Jack Levy thinks that the imam (who may be Shaikh Rashid, although never identified as such) “twangs out a twist of Arabic as if sticking a dagger into the silent audience” (111) and embodies “a belief system that not many years ago managed the deaths of, among others, hundreds of commuters from northern New Jersey” (112); and the Secretary of Homeland Security advises Hermione to tell her sister that “[s]he should get out [of New Prospect]. It’s full of Arabs—Arab-Americans, so called” (26). However, Updike’s point goes well beyond sympathetically looking at post– 9/11 America from a variety of perspectives, since he seems to fully endorse the Islamic critique of America’s exhausted consumer culture. Ahmad and Jack Levy may be inverted images of each other (Jack lost his faith and Ahmad found his at the same age, 11), yet they agree in their disgust at America’s obsession with consumption. Jack Levy sees himself helplessly shouting advice to the young “as they slide into the fatal morass of the world—its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertisements geared to a preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer and impossibly thin and fit young females” (23), an image entirely at odds with the obesity surrounding both Ahmad and Jack. America, as Jack sees it, “is paved solid with fat and tar” (27). Levy’s assessment reflects his disillusionment, but his description of America recalls, deliberately, I think, a key moment in another of Updike’s works that critically examines the idea of America: the ending of the Rabbit tetralogy. Confronted with his adulterous liaison with his daughter-in-law, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom decides, like Huck Finn, to light out for the territories and drive back to his Florida condo rather than attempting to make things right. Along with detailing the route, Updike

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chronicles how Rabbit, ignoring common sense and medical advice, continuously “succumbs to the temptation” and has one outrageously caloric, cholesterolridden meal after another, ultimately dying of a massive heart attack at age 56.38 Critics have noted how throughout the tetralogy, Rabbit functions as a “mirror” for America, and Rabbit’s inability to control his fat intake, which kills him, reflects Updike’s worry that the uncontrolled consumerism of American culture will also prove fatal.39 The common trope of obesity as exemplifying America’s decline, also present in The Coup (1978),40 suggests how in all three works, Updike “sees a fallen, morally exhausted world intoxicated by sex and consumerism and enslaved to its own images.”41 To be sure, Updike does not think of America solely as a country lost in a fog of sex and consumption. The bravura sermon Ahmad hears at Joryleen’s church (52–61) surely answers Ahmad’s frequent denunciations of America as a purely atheistic culture, so much so that even Ahmad is forced into a fleeting moment of religious toleration: “[The preacher] has been in his kafir way wrestling with devils, wrestling even with Ahmad’s devils” (61). But the allusion to Rabbit’s ending reinforces how Ahmad, Charlie, and Jack have, for the most part, accurately taken contemporary America’s measure. The physical structure of Central High School, once exemplifying the promise of an ascendant country, now represents the decay of America’s original promise: When constructed in the last century, the twentieth by Christian reckoning and the fourteenth after the Prophet’s Hegira from Mecca to Medina, the high school on its little rise hung above the city like a castle, a palace of learning for the children of millworkers and of their managers alike, with pillars and ornate cornices and a motto carved in granite, KNOWLEDGE IS FREEDOM. Now the building, rich in scars and crumbling asbestos, its leaded paint hard and shiny and its tall windows caged, sits on the edge of a wide lake of rubble that was once part of a downtown veined with trolley-car tracks. (11) The school’s physical decrepitude, its decline from a “palace of learning” to a toxic structure standing amid “rubble,” symbolizes the larger failure that has led people such as Ahmad to look elsewhere for guidance or inspiration, with Islam providing what America cannot. “All I’m saying,” Levy says to Ahmad’s mother, Terry, is that kids like Ahmad need to have something they don’t get from society anymore. Society doesn’t let them be innocent any more. The crazy Arabs are right—hedonism, nihilism, that’s all we offer. Listen to the lyrics of these rock and rap stars … Kids have to make more decisions than they used to, because adults can’t tell them what to do. We don’t know what to do, we don’t have the answers we used to; we just futz along, trying not to think. (205–206)

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If American culture will no longer “tell them what worth is,” kids like Ahmad will turn to something or someone that does: in this case, radical Islam, and Shaikh Rashid. But by the novel’s end, it is not clear if any sort of religion can provide answers in contemporary America. After having an epiphany, based on the fifty-sixth sura, “The Event,” that “God does not want to destroy: it was He who made the world” (306), Ahmad abandons his plan to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel (an insight Updike doubtless intended to answer the charge that the Koran is exclusively violent).Yet Ahmad’s final thoughts admit defeat. Emerging from the tunnel, Ahmad and Jack find themselves on Eighth Avenue, where Ahmad’s religion dies: All around them … the great city crawls with people [hugging to themselves] their reason for living another day, each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and selfpreservation. That, and only that. These devils, Ahmad think, have taken away my God. (311; emphasis in the original) Surveying New Yorkers going about their business, they seem to confirm Qutb’s sense of Americans as a people far from God, but Islam is no longer a consolation for Ahmad, as the novel’s final words reveal that he is now alienated from the God he has repeatedly said was “closer to him than his neck-vein” (145; also 152 and 184). Thus the book ends with a lapsed Muslim joining the lapsed Catholic (Terry Molloy) and the lapsed Jew (Jack Levy). In what may be the novel’s sourest insight, it seems that selfish, materialistic America affords no place for any religion other than the “born-again” (32) Christianity practiced by the Secretary of Homeland Security.42 Ahmad and Jack Levy, however, are not the only important characters in Terrorist, and while they have been the object (for good reasons) of much attention, critics have left alone the complex role played by Charlie Chehab in Updike’s treatment of terrorism. Charlie, of course, is a CIA “asset” (259), a mole charged with uncovering the terrorist cell that he entices Ahmad into joining. Charlie therefore occupies a fascinating, liminal position. As an American agent, his job is to defeat the forces that would harm his country, and Updike drops occasional hints that Charlie is more American than jihadist. His obsession with sex, culminating with his hiring Joryleen to “devirginate” (217) Ahmad, seems out of character for a dedicated Islamist, and his lapse into American exceptionalism—“You don’t hold Iraq to the same standard as the U.S. Bigger, you better be better” (157)—seems, Ahmad realizes “strange, slightly out of tune” (157). Charlie is also surprisingly critical of the black-and-white terms in which his fellow plotters see the world. Hearing the various Arab leaders categorized as either “tool” or “hero,” Charlie observes to Ahmad: “Interesting to see their minds work. Tools, hero: no shades in between. As if Mubarak and Arafat and the Saudis don’t all have their special

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situations and their own intricate games to play” (249, 250), an insight that also strikes Ahmad as “slightly false” (250). Yet Charlie, very much unlike the Secretary, fully understands America’s limitations. His father praises the United States as a welcome contrast to the vicious civil wars of his native Lebanon: America, I don’t understand this hatred. I came here as a young man, married but my wife had to be left behind, just me and my brother, and nowhere was there the hatred and shooting of my own country, everybody in tribes. Christian, Jew, Arab, indifferent, black, white, in between—everybody get along … I say to Maurice, ‘This is honest and friendly country.We will have no problems.’ (146–147) But Charlie reminds his father that this rosy view of America omits a great deal, such as the history of oppression endured by African-Americans: Papa, … There are problems. The zanj weren’t given any rights, they had to fight for them. They were being lynched and not allowed in restaurants, they even had separate drinking fountains, they had to go to the Supreme Court to be considered human beings. In America, nothing is free, everything is a fight. (147) Charlie’s father responds that whatever America’s problems, the United States cannot be compared to the tyrannies of the Middle East and Eastern Europe: “Your friend Saddam Hussein, he knows prisons. The Communists, they knew prisons.The average man [in America] knows nothing about prisons” (148). Again, Charlie’s father is mainly right. For the most part, Americans enjoy vastly greater freedoms and legal protections than those who lived and died under Hussein or communist dictatorships. But Charlie reminds his father that in America too, a man can now be jailed in perpetuity without trial and, until the election of Barack Obama, subject to torture: “Papa, what about our little concentration camp down at Guantanamo Bay? Those poor bastards can’t even have lawyers” (149). America, Charlie points out, does not always live up to its ideals. Updike uses Charlie, however, to make an extraordinary argument that directly contradicts the vast majority of post-9/11 discourse on the relationship between America and Al Qaeda. For President Bush and so many others, the two have virtually nothing in common. Al Qaeda’s sole goal, according to President Bush, is to “plot evil and destruction”; they are “enemies of freedom,” and they attacked the United States because “[t]hey hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”43 As Hermione puts it, we are the light and they are the darkness: there is no overlap, no commonality.

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But to Charlie, revolutionary America is actually Al Qaeda’s original. First, George Washington inaugurated the tactics now used by contemporary resistance movements: “He learned to take what came, to fight guerilla-style: hit and hide, hit and hide. He retreated but he never gave up” (181). But more surprisingly, Charlie asserts that Washington is the direct ancestor of America’s contemporary antagonists: “He was the Ho Chi Minh of his day. We were like Hamas. We were Al-Qaida [sic]” (181). This is a shocking comparison (one can only imagine the reaction of the novel’s Secretary of Homeland Security if he heard it, or Jonathan Alter). Charlie means that Washington and his band of “soldiers in rags” (179) demonstrated the value of asymmetric warfare: like 9/11, the American Revolution showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed—and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in—that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. (181) Taking the comparison even further, if the jihadis are the legitimate heirs of Washington and his army, America, Charlie argues, is now the equivalent of George III and England, whose bullying on the Continent and in the Colonies made them universally hated: “All of Europe was out to cut England down to size. Like the U.S. now” (182). America has now become what it originally fought against, and the colonial response to George III anticipates and justifies the Islamic jihad against the US. Far from having nothing in common, “[t]hese old revolutions,” as Charlie tells Ahmad, “have much to teach our jihad” (183). The most misunderstood aspect of Updike’s novel, however, is his treatment of Ahmad Ashmawy, the 18-year-old product of his Irish-American mother’s brief marriage to an Egyptian exchange student. Critics have been especially harsh on Updike’s creation. One reviewer called him “a completely unbelievable individual,” while another found Ahmad “a solemn robot,” attributing Updike’s artistic failure to the author’s inability to “imaginatively comprehend the roots and character of Islamist jihad against the West.”44 These criticisms, as we shall see, miss the point. Granted, Updike initially ascribes Ahmad’s radicalization to the absence of his Egyptian father, Omar Ashmawy, who “decamped” when Ahmad was three years old. This man’s abandonment of his family, Jack Levy believes, causes Ahmad to drift: “If his father was around,” he asks Terry, “do you think Ahmad’d be settling for driving a truck for a job after graduation, with his SAT scores?” (90). Ahmad consequently reaches out for father figures, such as Shaikh Rashid and Charlie, whose sexual banter, Ahmad thinks, “his father might have provided in measured and less obscene fashion, had Omar Ashmawy waited to play a father’s role” (172). With their guidance, he becomes a jihadist. As Terry puts it, “I guess a boy needs

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a father, and if he doesn’t have one he’ll invent one. … How’s that for cut-rate Freud?” (117). As Terry acknowledges, this theory is reductive and unconvincing. A better and deeper explanation lies in the alienation resulting from Ahmad’s mixed ethnicity. Americans sense that he is not one of them. Ahmad has to remind Jack Levy, “I am not a foreigner. I have never been abroad” (35), and while Joryleen’s boyfriend and future pimp, Tylenol, frequently refers to Ahmad as “Arab” (e.g., 15, 97), he also taunts him with not really belonging to any category: “Black Muslims I don’t diss, but you not black, you not anything but a poor shithead. You no raghead, you a shithead” (16). Tylenol is more perceptive than he knows. The narrator tells us that “though [Ahmad] was not the only Muslim believer at Central High, there were no others quite like him—of mixed parentage and still fervent in the faith” (177). On the other hand, to the Yemeni Shaikh Rashid, “Ahmad is American” (145), and Ahmad understands the qualification. While he has “chosen” to be a Muslim (177), his identification with Arabs extends only to adopting the religion: For four or so blocks to the west, the so-called Arab section, begun with the Turks and Syrians who worked as tanners and dyers in the old mills, stretches along this part of Main Street, but Ahmad never ventures there; his exploration of his Islamic identity ends at the mosque. (99) Ahmad no more fits in with the immigrant Arab communities in New Jersey than he does with white Americans or African-Americans.45 On his way with Charlie to meet their fellow conspirators, they pass through the areas of New Prospect where “emigrants from the Middle East, Turks and Syrians and Kurds” settled, the store signs combining “Arabic script and Roman alphabet, Al Madena Grocery, Turkiyen Beauty,” but instead of kinship, Ahmad senses that he “would not fit in here … To Ahmad these blocks feel like an underworld he is timidly visiting, an outsider among outsiders” (244). While Ahmad’s disgust with America’s consumer culture is genuine, the primary reason he decides to become a suicide bomber is not outrage at America’s foreign policy, but a desire to belong. After Shaikh Rashid asks Ahmad if he is willing to become “a shahīd,” a martyr, Ahmad is overjoyed because finally, the outsider, the marginalized, the person who is neither one identity nor another, becomes unambiguously part of a larger group: “After a life of barely belonging, he is on the shaky verge of a radiant centrality” (234; emphasis added).46 Updike has been accused of inventing a character that shares nothing with the actual 9/11 terrorists, who did not come from broken homes and are all Arabic, and therefore the novel provides no insights into actual terrorists.47 This charge is only superficially correct. While Ahmad and the 9/11 hijackers have different ethnic backgrounds and domestic situations, they both decided to become suicide

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bombers for the same reason: alienation. According to Lawrence Wright, the 9/11 hijackers never felt like they belonged anywhere: Despite their accomplishments, they had little standing in the host societies where they lived. … The Pakistani in London found that he was neither authentically British nor authentically Pakistani; and this feeling of marginality was just as true for Lebanese in Kuwait as it was for Egyptians in Brooklyn.48 The same applies to Ahmad, who has little standing at his high school, and who feels neither authentically American nor authentically Arab. Both Ahmad and the hijackers, alone, alienated, “turned to the mosque,” where both found in radical Islam the answers and the sense of belonging that eluded them elsewhere.49 *** Like Conrad in The Secret Agent, Updike gives us “the philosophy of bomb throwing” from [the radical Islamic] point of view;50 and like Le Carré’s use of Gadi Becker in The Little Drummer Girl to envoice the Palestinian perspective in a way that shows considerable sympathy, Updike uses the CIA mole, Charlie Chehab, to bridge the divide separating America and the Islamic terrorist.51 But there is a limit to how far Updike’s imagination can go. In a 2006 interview with Tom Ashbrook, Updike makes a fascinating admission. Asked: “Is there anywhere that a 74-year-old novelist cannot go, even into the mind of an 18-year old Arab-American terrorist?”, Updike responds that Ahmad “is American, and that’s the key. I would not attempt to animate from inside a Palestinian terrorist or an Iraqi freedom-fighter or whatever, but I did think I could handle an American who was self-converted at the age of 11” (my emphasis).52 While he can “animate,” as he says, American characters, bringing us over the novel’s course into the minds of Ahmad, Charlie, Jack Levy,Terry, Beth, Hermione, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, he cannot bring himself to invent what might go on inside the head of a genuine Islamic terrorist, and that person would be Shaikh Rashid, who remains, as Conrad’s Inspector Heat says of the Professor (69), “inaccessible.” And like Conrad’s Professor, Shaikh Rashid remains free at the end of Terrorist. “For now,” Jack Levy tells Ahmad, “he’s vanished” (300). Having shaved his beard and traded “his usual shimmering embroidered caftan [for] a gray Western-style suit” (266), the Shaikh passes, as did Conrad’s Professor, “unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men” (227). Perhaps he will be caught—Levy adds “he won’t make it back to Yemen, I can promise you” (300), but Updike leaves the matter unresolved. Still, by breaking the taboo against investigating the terrorist’s motivations and perspectives, Updike invites his readers to think hard about the connections between America’s consumer culture, how America acts in the world, and terrorism.

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Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist Like Updike, Mohsin Hamid sensed that after 9/11, few people were trying to understand Islamic terrorism, as opposed to mindlessly condemning it. So, Hamid decided to revise a novel he had been working on for five years into an illustration of that missing perspective. As Hamid said in a promotional interview: By taking readers inside a man who both loves and is angered by America, and hopefully by allowing readers to feel what that man feels, I hope to show that the world is more complicated than politicians and newspapers usually have time for.53 More specifically, Hamid decided that he would transform his novel into a vehicle for delivering a lesson to post-9/11 America on what the US looks like from a non-American perspective. Hamid, again like Updike, recognized that his lesson would be “controversial,” that The Reluctant Fundamentalist would “deliver something not entirely palatable.”54 Still, he persisted, and in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, “Why Do They Hate Us?”, Hamid explains why: “Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad.”55 Most Americans, Hamid proposes, do not know much about America’s foreign policy actions and how “America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.”56 Most critics read Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in this light, i.e., as an attempt to school American readers in the realities of America’s conduct abroad, the Islamophobia and civil rights abuses that ensued in 9/11’s wake, and the less happy effects of neoliberalism and globalization.57 And for good reason. Even though Changez, the novel’s narrator, tries to reassure the American he has accosted at the novel’s start, by saying, “I am a lover of America” (1), and even though Hamid told the New York Times that the book “is a love song to America as much as a critique,” The Reluctant Fundamentalist, as Deborah Solomon puts it, does not seem “so loving.”58 In this novel, to be an American, it seems, means to act like a jerk. On a trip to Greece with college friends after graduation, Changez is appalled at their sense of entitlement, and he wonders: by what quirk of human history my companions—many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they—were in in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class. (21) Changez is equally bothered by how Erica’s father (a wealthy financier) talks about Pakistan’s issues with the economy, corruption, and fundamentalism.

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It’s not that the father errs, “But his tone—with, if you will forgive me, its typically American undercurrent of condescension—struck a negative chord with me” (55). Even so, on his first trip as an Underwood Samson analyst, Changez realizes that to be effective, he must “act and speak, as much as my dignity would permit, more like an American”; meaning, telling “executives my father’s age, ‘I need it now’; I learned to cut to the front of the lines with an extraterritorial smile” (65). Americans, particularly the elite, continuously act “entitled and unsympathetic” (124). After 9/11, Changez finds American arrogance turned against him. Returning to the United States, he realizes his appearance makes him suspicious to American authorities. At the airport in Manila, he “was escorted by armed guards into a room where I was made to strip down to my boxer shorts” (74); an immigration agent asks, “What is the purpose of your trip to the United States?” Changez responds, “I live here” (presumably showing her his visa), but that means nothing to this woman: “That is not what I asked you, sir,’ she said. “What is the purpose of your trip to the United States” (75). After going back and forth several times in this vein, Changez is again “dispatched for a secondary inspection,” where he gets to sit next to genuine criminals (75). Adding insult to injury, his team does not wait for him, so he has to return to Manhattan alone. Changez’s troubles, however, go beyond obstreperous border agents. At Changez’s next assignment (a failing cable company in New Jersey), he faces overt racism. A man comes up to him and makes “a series of unintelligible noises” clearly intended to mock Arabic: “‘akhala-malakhala,’ perhaps, or ‘khalapal-khalapla’—and pressed his face alarmingly close to mine”; another man tries to lead this guy away, calling Changez a “Fucking Arab” (117). Changez’s personal difficulties post 9/11 represent in small, America’s arrogance toward the rest of the planet and how America, until 9/11, remained remarkably unaffected by its foreign-policy decisions. The United States can “wreak havoc in the world,” they can orchestrate “an entire war in Afghanistan,” and yet, Changez is amazed at how they can do so “with so few apparent consequences at home” (130). No wonder that when Changez watches on television the destruction of the Twin Towers, his reaction is not one of unalloyed horror, but pleasure: “I stared as one—and then the other—of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased” (72). Deborah Eisenberg, in her short story about 9/11, “Twilight of the Superheroes,” describes 9/11 as “tearing through the curtain” of American obliviousness to “the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.”59 In an interview with the New York Times, Hamid explains his narrator’s reaction in the same terms: “In much of the world, there is resentment toward America, and the notion that the superpower could be humiliated or humbled or damaged in this way is something that gives satisfaction.”60

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On his flight back to the United States from Chile, Changez thinks about why he decided to quit Underwood Samson (whose initials allude to the United States), combining resentment over America’s foreign ventures with his newfound sense of economics as a tool of empire: I reflected that I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country’s constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable … Moreover I knew from experience as a Pakistani—of alternating periods of American aid and sanctions—that finance was a primary means by which the American empire exercised its power. It was right for me to refuse to participate any longer in facilitating this project of domination. (156) Toward the end of the book, Changez delivers a lecture to both the unnamed American and the reader on America’s sins: As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own. (168) If Americans want to know why the world seems to hate us and why Changez smiles as he watches the destruction of the Twin Towers (72–73), the book implicitly says, look in a mirror. And yet, while The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides a litany of how the United States has acted very badly both inside and beyond its borders, the novel also asks the reader to not assume that Changez’s perspective constitutes the whole story. First, Changez is a snob, and his offense at how his Princeton friends act in Europe stems as much from their being nouveau-riche (“I would have regarded [them] as upstarts in my own country” [21]) as their arrogance toward their elders. More telling, while much of Hamid/Changez’s critique of America is entirely valid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist also nuances Changez’s newfound distaste for capitalism by providing a balancing argument, and Hamid also implies that post-9/11 America and the narrator are not as far apart as they may seem. Finally, the novel asks us to look at Changez’s entire narrative skeptically. This ambivalence should not be all that surprising. In various interviews, Mohsin Hamid stressed that he regarded writing this novel as a way of reconnecting “my American and Muslim worlds” through a “conversation with myself,” and

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a conversation can only take place if both sides have valid arguments or perspectives.61 Let’s start with economics. As we are told at the novel’s start, Changez takes a job with Underwood Samson, “a valuation firm,” meaning, “they told their clients how much their business was worth” (5). What clients do with that information is up to them. Perhaps, as Changez says about his first assignment, a CD manufacturing and distribution firm, their report would lead some workers to be fired, perhaps “these CDs would be made elsewhere” (66).62 “Indirectly,” Samson Underwood “would help decide” (66) but the final word is up to someone else. The human cost to economic change is not something that concerns Samson Underwood. Instead, its analysts devote their full attention to “teasing out the true nature of those drivers that determine an asset’s value” (98). If, as in the case of the failing cable company in New Jersey, the “mandate was to determine how much fat could be cut” (95), that is what Changez needs to focus on, regardless of what happens afterward. When Changez goes to his final assignment, the publishing house in Valparaiso, Chile, the conflict between economic necessity and humanity becomes stark, with the balance sheet on one hand, and literature on the other: “the owners wanted to sell, and the prospective buyer—our client—was unlikely to continue to subsidize the loss-making trade division with income from the profitable educational and professional publishing arms” (142). By this point, Changez is deeply unsettled by doubts. Still, when the editor, Juan-Bautista, asks the one question Underwood Samson will not ask: “does it trouble you … to make your living by disrupting the lives of others?” (151), Changez gives the conventional response: “We do not decide whether to buy or to sell, or indeed what happens to a company after we value it” (151). But then, Juan-Bautista raises the issue of the janissaries, leading to Changez’s epiphany: I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson, with the officers of the empire, when all along I was pre-disposed to feel compassion for those, like Juan-Bautista, whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain. (152) Because, as Changez says a few pages later, “finance was a primary means by which the American empire exercised its power [it] was right for me to refuse to participate any longer in facilitating this project of domination” (156). Most, if not all, of Hamid’s readers cheer this decision, regarding it as evidence for Hamid’s unsparing critique of neoliberal capitalism.63 But there is another side here, delivered by Changez’s immediate superior at Underwood Samson, Jim, a character almost universally ignored by Hamid’s critics, even though he provides a crucial counter-balance to the novel’s tirades

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against capitalism.64 First, crucially, Jim represents the best side of America’s and Princeton’s meritocracy. He does not come from America’s elite, the 1%. Instead, Jim “was the first guy from my family to go to college. I worked a night shift in Trenton to pay my way” (9), and Jim admits (twice) that he too felt he “didn’t belong to this world” (43, 70). When Changez asks him why, Jim gives this unsparing response: Because I grew up on the other side. For half of my life, I was outside the candy store looking in, kid. And in America, no matter how poor you are, TV gives you a good view. But I was dirt poor. My dad died of gangrene. (70) Yet, despite his poverty, Jim won admission to Princeton University, graduated summa cum laude, and now makes a fortune in finance. Jim, in other words, shows that in America, one can cross from one side of the social divide to the other through hard work and talent. Jim thus represents the fulfillment of the American Dream. Furthermore, Hamid carefully bolsters Jim’s credibility by depicting him as a caring, loyal individual who consistently seeks the best for his protégé. When Changez decides to quit, Jim turns the janissary image on its head by reminding Changez that he is letting down his friends and colleagues: I know you have stuff on your mind. But if you walk out on this now you undermine our firm. You hurt your team. In wartime soldiers don’t really fight for their flags, Changez. They fight for their friends, their buddies. Their team. Well, right now your team is asking you to stay. Afterwards, if you need a break, it’s yours. (153) After Jim and Changez find that the cable company’s employees sabotage them (their tires slashed; telephones would stop working; security badges would disappear), Jim puts their resistance in a larger context. Do not let them affect you, because they are on the wrong side of history: Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change. … When I was in college … the economy was in bad shape. It was the seventies. Stagflation. But you could just smell the opportunity. America was shifting from manufacturing to services, a huge shift, bigger than anything we’d ever seen. My father had lived and died making things with his hands, so I knew from up close that time was past. … The economy’s an animal … It evolves. First it needed muscle. Now all the blood it could spare was rushing to its brain.That’s where I wanted to be. In finance. … Most people don’t recognize that, kid. … They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change. (96–97)

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Jim does not represent so much the face of heartless capitalism as the recognition that times will change, the economy will alter, and what was precious in one age might very well be discarded as irrelevant in the next. Jim has a point, and while Juan-Bautista plays on the reader’s heartstrings, the fact remains, his publishing company loses money. The question facing Underwood Samson is not whether finance outweighs art but whether Juan-Bautista runs a viable business. I am confident that Hamid, who worked as a management consultant, would say no. Capitalism may be heartless, and, doubtless, one must recognize the human cost of economic and technological change. But Jim’s assessment is not wrong. If Hamid asks the reader to empathize as much with Jim as Juan-Bautista, they still remain on opposite sides. But on the crucial question of Changez’s fundamental critique of post-9/11 America, Hamid closes the gap between Changez and the United States. After 9/11, Erica, Changez’s love interest, disappears into her memories of Chris, and reality fades away. She disappears, Changez realizes, “into a powerful nostalgia, one from which only she could choose whether or not to return” (113), and that is exactly what happened to America post 9/11: America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time. There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about the generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honor. I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me—a time of unquestioned dominance? Of safety? Of moral certainty? I did not know—but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent. (114–115) So far, Hamid puts into fictional terms the cultural regression noted by such cultural critics as Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream.65 But while Hamid’s readers have often noted the parallel between Erica’s fall into nostalgia and America’s post 9/11, they have left out how Hamid extends the same criticism to Changez, who, in Hamid’s words, “suffers from a kind of nostalgic attachment to this Pakistan he can’t really leave behind.”66 “Some of my relatives,” Changez tells his interlocutor, “held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold on to lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction” (71). But Changez is also gripped by a nostalgia for an age when Pakistan was “not always burdened by debt, dependent on foreign aid and handouts” (102).We were once, Changez continues, “saints and poets and … conquering kings”; we built great cities with great structures, such

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as the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens, and “we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent” (102). Changez is more upset at Pakistan’s decline, it seems, than America’s rise. Nostalgia also leads to skewed perceptions. When he returns to his home in Pakistan, Changez: is struck at first by how shabby our house appeared, with cracks running through its ceilings and dry bubbles of paint flaking off where dampness had entered its walls. … our furniture appeared dated and in urgent need of reupholstery and repair … this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness. (124) But Changez rejects what he sees as evidence of “the Americanness of my own gaze” (124), which in this case might also mean the “accuracy” of his gaze, and so, he determines to observe differently. Impoverishment magically becomes “rich with history” (125). Faded carpets and the walls in need of painting signify “enduring grandeur” (125). Like the United States post-9/11, like Erica, Changez has retreated into his own myths of lost greatness. When Changez arrives at Underwood Samson on his first day of work, he resents the disparity between Pakistan’s decline and America’s rise, demonstrating again that his resentment has less to do with American foreign policy and more with how Pakistan has not kept up with modernity. “Four thousand years ago,” cities “were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education,” and the disparity makes Changez “ashamed” (34). But at least he recognized reality. Now, he ignores reality through a trick of the imagination. The point, however, is not simply to undermine or qualify Changez’s reliability as a narrator, but to suggest that America, Changez, Erica, and Islamic terrorists all suffer from the same condition. As Hamid says:67 To the extent that there is a possibility of victory in this impossible love triangle [between Chris, Erica, and Changez], the victory is Chris’s. I agree with you that this is sad: the victory of the past over the future does feel sad. It is also about the feeling of nostalgia that I was talking about earlier, about the past pressing on the present. In political terms, whether it’s an Osama bin Laden-type claim that we should return to something modeled on a thousand year-old Caliphate, or a George Bush-type claim that we should return to the generation that fought World War II these are all claims that are nostalgic and are manifestation of the past trying to destroy the present.

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Again, like Updike, Hamid asks the reader to understand the commonalities between America and its terrorist enemies, and that the criticisms of America apply equally well to Changez. Finally, Hamid undercuts Changez’s reliability as a narrator, and therefore, as a political guide. Changez posits that when telling a story, “it is the gist that matters … the thrust of one’s narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one’s details” (118).68 But this admission means that we cannot trust anything he says. Was he really attacked by racist goons in New Jersey? Did Juan-Bautista really tell him about the janissaries? Does he really have no inside knowledge of the plot by one of his students to assassinate a coordinator for American “development assistance to our rural poor”? (181). We do not know. But we do know that Changez’s mother thinks that her son is “in the grip of an unhealthy melancholy” (175), and that Changez evinces delusions of grandeur, as he tells the silent American that he feels, alluding to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “rather like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlowe” (183). Ultimately, as Hamid has said, The Reluctant Fundamentalist does not respond to 9/11 by articulating a certain point of view, but by complicating all points of view: “I wanted the novel to be a kind of antidote to the certainty that was being bandied about so disastrously in the first few years of this century.”69

Don DeLillo, Falling Man Terrorism is hardly a new topic for Don DeLillo. As many have pointed out, terrorists have appeared in DeLillo’s books since Players (1977), a satirical portrait of a young, professional couple in which the husband gets involved with a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange, and the wife works at something called the Grief Management Council, based, as luck would have it, in the World Trade Center. Dellilo’s most extensive treatment of terrorism (before Falling Man) is Mao II (1991), which follows an iconic, if artistically exhausted and reclusive writer, Bill Gray, as he tries to help free a poet captured by Middle Eastern terrorists, and then travels to Lebanon, where he dies en route after a car hits him in Cyprus. There are two aspects of DeLillo’s treatment of terrorism in this novel that bear notice. First, terrorism is not something particularly terrible, let alone antithetical to all civilization. As Bill Gray tells the photographer, Brita, the terrorist and the novelist not only have much in common, they seem to have traded places:70 There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. … 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. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (41)

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To be sure, Bill Gray is not happy about this switch. Terrorism’s ability to alter the culture’s inner life signifies both his decline and the increasingly ineffectual place of art in post-industrial America. But his attitude toward terrorism is a far cry from the sort of horror that followed, say, the Munich Olympics Massacre by the Palestinian terror group, Black September. Second, even though the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for supposedly defaming Islam in The Satanic Verses, which led to the murder of one of the book’s translators plus the bombing of several bookstores, lies in the background of the poet’s kidnapping, terrorism in Mao II remains a distinctly post-modern phenomenon.71 Terror, as Bill says, gives way “to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras” (42). Everything is “twice over or once removed,” as shown by a man in Chile who was charged with “assassinating the image” of General Pinochet (44). The kidnapped poet enters “the system of world terror [as] a digital mosaic in the processing grid, lines of ghostly type on microfilm” (112). Beirut, Brita says, “is a millennial image mill” (229). When she arrives, she sees “a pair of local militias are firing at portraits of each other’s leader” (227). And the terrorist leader tells Brita that his followers gain their sense of self through his reflection:“The image of Rashid is their identity” (233). As Leonard Wilcox puts it, the characters in Mao II “inhabit a strikingly Baudrillardian universe” in which terrorism “is related precisely to a media-saturated culture in which informational events stand in for the real.”72 With all due respect to DeLillo’s integrity and the serious points DeLillo makes in Mao II about the fate of art in a corporatized world, his treatment of terrorism as a postmodern phenomenon could only be written by someone for whom terrorism is largely a theoretical phenomenon, someone who has not experienced terrorism first hand.That changed with 9/11.73 DeLillo, born in the Bronx, educated at Fordham University, lived in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, at the time of the attacks (he now lives in Manhattan), and visited Ground Zero with his editor a few days afterward.What he saw stunned him:“It was a gray landscape, virtually empty … I had a sense of an old city—an old, partly ruined city in another culture, somewhere under siege.”74 At the time, DeLillo was working on Cosmopolis, and, as he reported in a 2007 interview, 9/11 made him “just [stop] dead for some time, and [he] decided to work on the essay instead.”75 DeLillo means the essay that would appear in the December 2001 Harper’s, “In the Ruins of the Future,” which marks a significant turn in DeLillo’s understanding of terrorism. No longer Baudrillardian or postmodern, terrorism is now unspeakable:76 We need [the detritus of the World Trade Center], even the common tools of the terrorists, to set against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practiced response. […] The events of September 11 were covered unstintingly. There was no confusion of roles on TV. The raw event was one thing, the coverage another.

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The event dominated the medium It was bright and totalizing, and some of us said it was unreal. When we say a thing is unreal, we mean it is too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions. First the planes struck the towers. After a time it became possible for us to absorb this, barely. But when the towers fell. When the rolling smoke began moving downward, floor to floor. This was so vast and terrible that it was outside imagining even as it happened. Just as the Gunpowder Plot, the Irish dynamite campaign against London’s cultural monuments in the late nineteenth century, the Munich Olympics Massacre, and suicide bombing against Israel, Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon triggered the rhetoric of unspeakability, of assertions that the event has no precedent, and remains beyond imagining. For three years, DeLillo told an interviewer, he did not think “of the attacks in terms of fiction at all.”77 But when he did, sparked as he says by the image of “a man in suit and tie, carrying a briefcase, walking through a storm of smoke and ash,” the novel would include but not stop with the unspeakability of terrorism.78 Instead, DeLillo said that he “wanted to be in the towers and in the planes”;79 meaning, he would not only create a story about the victims, but would also try to get into the head of the terrorists. As he says: “I wanted to trace the evolution of an individual’s passage from an uninvolved life to one that becomes so deeply committed to a grave act of terror.”80 The result, Falling Man, comprises of an encyclopedia of responses to the trauma of 9/11, including trying to understand how and why someone could hijack an airplane and crash it into one of the Twin Towers.81 The novel begins with Keith Neudecker walking out of the Towers just before they collapsed, and his perceptions illustrate what DeLillo meant when he wrote that 9/11 constitutes “a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions.”82 The event itself is not named. Instead, DeLillo has Keith approach 9/11 obliquely: “The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall” (3),83 yet we are not told explicitly what caused the roar, or what is falling. Instead, we read: “It happened everywhere around him” (3). The event is so overwhelming, “so unaccountable,” that the narrator can only allude to it indirectly. Even when Keith does unambiguously name something, in particular, the people jumping from the Towers to escape immolation (“The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space” [4]), he quickly retreats into a distancing synecdoche:“He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river” (4).84 Because the sight of people jumping to their death is so horrible, it cannot be tilted “to the slant of our perceptions,” so Keith shifts the image to something less searing, more approachable: a shirt drifting down.

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Lianne’s Alzheimer’s group also registers the unspeakability of 9/11. Lianne, a freelance editor of academic books, volunteers to lead this group as they write about themselves before their minds decline (perhaps because her father killed himself rather than endure the ravages of this disease).The group explores all sorts of memories and events from their lives, but after 9/11, “there was one subject the members wanted to write about. … They wanted to write about the planes” (31). Yet the group writes about everything but the planes: “They wrote about where they were when it happened. They wrote about people they knew who were in the towers, or nearby, and they wrote about God” (60). In other words, they focus on the domestic.Which is not to say that they agree or their reactions are uniform. The responses run the gamut, and often contradict each other: How could God let this happen? Where was God when this happened? Benny T. was glad he was not a man of faith because he would lose it after this. I am closer to God than ever, Rosellen wrote. This is the devil. This is hell. All that fire and pain. Never mind God. This is hell. […] ‘What about the people God saved? Are they better people than the ones who died?’ ‘It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.’ ‘A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.’ (61–62) While the group debates the question of God’s responsibility for evil and raises the question of survivor guilt, one topic is notably missing: “No one wrote a word about the terrorists” (63). Lianne pushes them: “There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men come here to kill us” (64), and Anna, who has been “slightly apart,” participating only occasionally, finally joins the conversation, and she echoes “In the Ruins of the Future”: If he has a heart attack, we blame him. Eats, overeats, no exercise, no common sense. That’s what I told the wife. Or he dies of cancer. Smoked and couldn’t stop.That was Mike. If it’s cancer, then it’s lung cancer and we blame him. But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world.You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper … [When someone dies in a car crash] you could see it in your mind and get some trade-off from that. But here, with these people, you can’t even think it. You don’t know what to do. Because they’re a million miles outside your life. Which, besides, they’re dead. (64)

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Both the 9/11 hijackers and the event itself are literally unspeakable, ungraspable, unrepresentable. When Anna says, “Do I know what to call these people?” she means that their names mean nothing because what they have done puts them outside humanity and outside comprehension. However, as much as DeLillo invokes the rhetoric of unspeakability in “In the Ruins of the Future” and uses the Alzheimer’s group as a vehicle for this approach, he also provides alternatives.85 Martin Ridnour, otherwise known as Ernst Hechinger, an art dealer with a shadowy past, responds to 9/11 by explicitly rejecting the rhetoric of unspeakability as well as the retreat into escapism or unreason. Lianne tells Martin that some people responded to 9/11 by reading “poetry to ease the shock and pain” (42), while she goes in the opposite direction and reads newspapers: “I put my head in the pages and get angry and crazy” (42). For Martin, however, “There’s another approach, which is to study the matter. Stand apart and think about the elements … Coldly, clearly if you’re able to. Do not let it tear you down. See it, measure it” (42). When his lover, Lianne’s mother, Nina Bartos, retired professor of art history (“the So-and-So Professor of Such-and-Such, as Keith once said” [9]), argues that the attacks stemmed from “sheer panic” (46), assuming that the attackers have “no goals they can hope to achieve” (46), Martin answers by trying to understand Al Qaeda’s reasoning from Al Qaeda’s point of view: “Because they think the world is a disease. This world, this society, ours. A disease that’s spreading” (46), adding that we must look, not at religion, but at the larger sweep of events to find the cause: “Forget God. These are matters of history. This is politics and economics” (47).86 Later, Nina and Martin return to this debate. Nina believes that while Al Qaeda invokes “God constantly,” religion for them is a vehicle to justify blood lust, a convenient way to justify “these feelings and these killings” (112). But Martin returns to his original position: “Don’t you see what you’re denying? You’re denying all human grievance against others, every force of history that places people in conflict” (112). For Nina, however, understanding is impossible, and what is more, the attackers don’t deserve the effort because they are unreasoning murderers: “First they kill you, then you try to understand them. Maybe, eventually, you’ll learn their names. But they have to kill you first” (113). For Nina, Al Qaeda, not the West, is “a viral infection. A virus reproduces itself outside history” (113). One cannot reason with a virus; one can only destroy it. Martin, however, views such an approach as nonsense.The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon needs to put in the context of “lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West” (113). And like the analysts of the early 1960s, Martin believes that Al Qaeda’s aims are comprehensible: “They want their place in the world, their own global union, not ours. It’s an old dead war, you say. But it’s everywhere and it’s rational” (116).87 Martin can take a broader view of 9/11 for three reasons. First, Martin is European, and therefore does not regard 9/11 as directed at him personally.88

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Second, Martin shares with the Al Qaeda hijackers a distaste for how America has conducted itself, and he sees 9/11 as evidence of America’s displacement: “For all the careless power of this country, let me say this, for all the danger it makes in the world, America is going to become irrelevant” (191). Third, Martin’s past allows him to understand that Al Qaeda is not as “Other” as Nina and Lianne might think. Nina tells her daughter that Martin in his youth “was a member of a collective in the late nineteen sixties. Kommune One” (146), which was better known for Dada-ist acts of social satire, including the attempted “Pudding Assassination” of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (they wanted to attack him with pudding, yogurt, and flour).89 Since Kommune One never really posed a danger to anyone other than themselves, Martin is not included in the wanted poster of German terrorists that he keeps in his Berlin apartment. But according to Nina, his earlier involvement with radical politics allows him to see the connections between Al Qaeda and those movements: He thinks these people, these jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern. They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood. (147) Just as Updike’s Charlie Chehab sees revolutionary America as Al Qaeda’s ideological and tactical ancestor, Martin sees the overlap between Al Qaeda and the resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As for Nina, because she considers 9/11 equivalent to a virus, she responds by turning for solace (as one might expect for a retired professor of art history) to the great achievements of the past. Nina goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art “and looked at what was unfailing. She liked the big rooms, the old masters, what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and identity” (11). After arguing with Martin about 9/11, Nina wants “to sit in my armchair and read my Europeans” (34), meaning, she wants to read classic European novelists (maybe Conrad and James). In other words, Nina responds to 9/11 by immersing herself in Europe’s grand aesthetic achievements, both as a means of escape, but also, doubtless, as an implied counter to Al Qaeda’s and Martin’s criticisms of Western culture. Keith and Lianne’s son, Justin (we are not told his age, but he seems to be about six) and his friends, a brother and sister known as “the Siblings,” confront 9/11 in their own way. Instead of retreating into incoherent rage, as their mother does, or the comforts of art, like their grandmother, they use play and fantasy to master the overwhelming fear and anxiety around them. Lianne tells the Siblings’ mother that she’s noticed the kids “at the window … sort of huddled together … endlessly whisperings in this semi-gibberish” (17). They “sort of mumble back and forth” a name (17), which we later find out is “Bill Lawton,” their version of

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“bin Laden,” and they have developed a mythology for this figure. As reported by Keith: Bill Lawton “has a long beard. He wears a long robe … He flies jet planes and speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives. What else? He has the power to poison what we eat but only certain foods. They’re working on the list” (74). While the children’s response demonstrates how they take the actions of adults and the news reports Lianne obsessively reads and master them through play, Justin takes the game one step further. The Towers, Justin tells his mother, “did not collapse” (72); she responds (referring to both Justin and the Siblings) with understandable exasperation: “Damn kids with their goddam twisted powers of imagination” (72).90 A little later, we find out that Justin’s denial of reality is more than just an example of magical thinking. No doubt as a way of combatting their sense of powerlessness at the turmoil swirling around them, Justin and his friends assert that they have secret knowledge. Bill Lawton “says things that nobody knows but the Siblings and me” (102). When his parents insist that he tell them more, Justin responds: “he says things about the planes. We know they’re coming because he says they are. But that’s all I’m allowed to say. He says this time the towers will fall” (102). But this approach to 9/11 is not viable.91 At least, not for adults: “She couldn’t locate the menace she felt, listening to him. His repositioning of events frightened her in an unaccountable way. He was making something better than it really was, the towers still standing” (102). Lianne hears in her son’s “repositioning of events … a failed fairy tale, eerie enough but without coherence” (102). Unsurprisingly, the next time Justin and Katie go over to the Siblings’ apartment to spend an afternoon playing video games, Lianne takes the opportunity to end the game: “Maybe just maybe. This is what I think. Maybe it’s time for him [Bill Lawton] to disappear. The man whose name we all know” (153). While the Alzheimer group, Martin Ridnour, Nina Bartos, and the book’s children all provide different ways of responding to 9/11, three characters—Keith Neudecker, his wife, Lianne Glenn, and the performance artist known as the “Falling Man,” David Janiak—explicitly deal with the question of how one confronts and resolves the trauma resulting from that day.92 The contemporary understanding of trauma begins with Freud’s analysis at the start of Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the “traumatic neuroses” suffered by World War I veterans, which Freud defines as a “fixation [on] on the experience which started the illness”; the experience is so powerful that it extends even to the victim’s dreams, which “repeatedly [bring] the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.”93 While Freud and others focused on patients who had directly encountered traumatic events, people not directly involved may also suffer trauma symptoms, and New York after 9/11 provided a textbook example of this phenomenon. In E. Ann Kaplan’s words: Partly because of the experience of having one’s entire world shaken at its very foundations, New Yorkers struggled to find ways to make meaning of

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what had happened, to work it through on many levels (personal, political, intellectual), so as to continue with life in the city and as citizens of the world in the wake of the attacks.94 David Janiak embodies exactly this understanding of trauma. Artistic representations explicitly depicting the victims of 9/11 were banished from public view, and the same happened to AP photographer Richard Drew’s photo of a person falling from the North Tower (from which DeLillo got the title of his novel; see Figure 5.1). The photograph ran once, and then had to be withdrawn due to a “hue and cry from newspaper readers on the grounds that this image was immoral, a voyeuristic invasion of the privacy of a man just moments before his death.”95 Drew’s photo became a paradox: at once “iconic and impermissible.”96 Literally, it had become taboo, as had all discussion, let alone images, of those who had jumped to their deaths. Cathy Caruth’s pithy definition of trauma—“a response sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or set of events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event”— perfectly describes David Janiak’s performances.97 Shortly after the planes hit, and

FIGURE 5.1 Richard

Drew, “Falling Man” © 2001, with permission from AP Images.

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presumably, after Drew’s photograph appeared and then disappeared from public view,“a performance artist known as Falling Man” would appear “suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie, and dress shoes” (33). He is literally the return of the repressed, repeatedly appearing like an intrusive hallucination or dream.98 Echoing Freud, DeLillo writes that Janiak “brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump” (33). He forces his audience to remember what it most wants to forget: “There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all” (33). The second time Lianne sees him, lowering himself to the maintenance platform outside the subway station at 125th Street (which is above ground), she thinks that he wants to time his jump so that people in the incoming train would see him, that he would have “an audience in motion” (164), and she wonders “if this was his intention, to spread the word this way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes” (165). He wants, in Caruth’s words, his performance to repeat a “behavior stemming from the event.” While Janiak’s performance stuns Lianne (after his fall from the subway platform, “she could have spoken to him but that was another plane of being, beyond reach” [168]), others are far less charitable and forgiving in their response. After Lianne learns that Janiak has died, she does some research and finds that he had been beaten “by a group of men outside a bar in Queens” and that there was a panel discussion at the New School entitled “Falling Man as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror” (220).While Lianne also discovers some controversy over whether Janiak intended to mimic Drew’s photograph, she has no doubt, and “this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific” (222). Lianne responds to the trauma of 9/11, as she says toward the novel’s end, by going “berserk” (215). She does not mean this literally, of course, but 9/11 obsesses her to an unhealthy degree: “She read stories in the newspapers until she had to force herself to stop” (67), and later: She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need she did not try to interpret. (106) The footage she watches of the second plane “entered [her] body, … seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers” (134).The trauma of 9/11 also causes Lianne’s insomnia (“‘I wake up at some point every night. Mind running non-stop. Can’t stop it … can’t go back to sleep. Takes forever. Then it’s

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morning, she said’” [124–125) and to lash out violently against a woman in her building who plays Middle Eastern music loudly (119–120). One would expect that Keith Neudecker would be similarly impacted by trauma, since, to use Caruth’s terms, he has confronted death, but incomprehensibly, survived.99 After Keith’s friend and poker-mate, Rumsey, died in his arms, he walked out of the Twin Towers, covered in dust and blood, making his way, without really being conscious of it, to his wife’s apartment, where he appears, “a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag” (87), looking like he is already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: “He looked immense, in the doorway, with a gaze that had no focus in it” (87). As Freud might have predicted, his mind returns to the traumatic moment of Rumsey’s death. When Keith has an outpatient procedure for his wrist, before the anesthesia takes effect, he sees “Rumsey in his chair by the window, which meant the memory was not suppressed or the substance hadn’t taken effect yet, a dream, a waking image, what it was, Rumsey in the smoke, things coming down” (22). And yet, as the novel continues, it becomes evident that he is not in the grip of “pure melancholia without the possibility of mourning,” endlessly reenacting the trauma of 9/11 with “no accommodation or resolution,” as Kristiaan Versluys writes.100 Instead, Keith’s initial response to the trauma of 9/11 recalls Freud’s discussion of the fort/ da game played by his grandson. In the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud leaves “the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis” suffered by World War I veterans and train wreck victims to discuss how children master the more quotidian trauma of their mother’s departure. Freud recounts how he noticed his grandson first throwing away a wooden spool on a string, giving “vent to a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o’”; then pulling the toy back and hailing “its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’.”101 Freud realized that his grandson was saying “fort” (the German word for “gone”), and then “da,” or “there.” He understood that his grandson mastered the trauma of his mother’s departure by first transforming her leaving and eventual return into a game in which he controlled both, and then repeating the game over and over again.102 Freud’s observations of his grandson’s play almost perfectly describe how Keith initially deals with the trauma of surviving 9/11. Keith uses his post-op exercises, his physical therapy, exactly as Freud’s grandson uses his toy: He found these sessions restorative, four times a day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true countermeasures to the damage he’d suffered in the tower, in the descending chaos. It was not the MRI and the surgery that brought him closer to well-being. It was this modest home program, the counting of seconds, the counting of repetitions, the times of day he reserved for the exercises, the ice he applied following each set of exercises.

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There were the dead and maimed. His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. (40) Just as Freud’s grandson deals with his mother’s departure by turning his toy into a symbol and then exerting control over it, so does Keith use his post-op routine to master the trauma inflicted by living through the attack on the towers. Consequently, he continues the exercises long after his wrist heals (106). However, unlike the other characters in Falling Man, Keith’s and Lianne’s approaches to trauma shift as the book goes on. Keith at first responds by embracing domesticity, reuniting with his wife, and acting as a father to Justin. As Lianne puts it, before, Keith never acted as a husband:“He was something else somewhere else. But now she uses the term. She believes he is growing into it, a husbandman” (70). Or as Keith says after Lianne asks him why he came to her apartment and if he’s planning on staying: “We’re ready to sink into our little lives” (75), putting 9/11 behind him. But Keith is not that ready to just forget about 9/11 and get on with his life. First, he has an affair with Florence Givens, a fellow 9/11 survivor whose briefcase Keith accidentally took as he left the tower. Initially, they need each other because only they can understand what they have been through: They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest detail, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he’d lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they’d shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women. (90–91) Inevitably, the relationship becomes physical, but sex is not the point: “They took erotic pleasure from each other, but this is not what sent him back there. It was what they knew together, in the timeless drift of the long spiral down” (137).103 Yet it’s not adultery that helps Keith finally resolve the trauma of 9/11: it’s poker.104 Before 9/11, Keith hosted a regular game that included Terry Cheng and his friend, Rumsey. But the game was no more than a game to the six participants, and after they start making up all sorts of silly rules, Terry Cheng says (presumably in mock desperation), “You are not serious people … Get serious or die” (99). Obviously, after 9/11, the poker parties end, but not Keith’s attraction to the game, which takes on another level of meaning. Keith realizes that after 9/11, he no longer desired the kind of life he had before: “Keith used to want more of the world than there was time and means to acquire. He didn’t want this anymore, whatever it was he’d wanted” (128). Instead, he is increasingly drawn to

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poker. Participating in a tournament, Keith “began to sense a life in all this” (189). However, it is crucial to realize what sort of life he has in mind. It’s not that he has tired of domesticity, of fatherhood and a life with Lianne, or that he wants to go back to the carefree male-bonding he enjoyed with Rumsey and Terry Cheng. Rather, Keith now wants to embrace the self-enclosed world of the game: “This was never over.That was the point.There was nothing outside the game but faded space” (189). And he wants this kind of world because it replicates pure contingency of who lived and who died on 9/11:“The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice. Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were” (212). But if Keith wants to live in an unchanging present, governed by pure chance, Lianne “lived in the spirit of what is ever impending” (212).105 In other words, she lives in the spirit of the future, which is where we all, generally speaking, live, i.e., worrying about our children’s future, saving for retirement, putting off pleasure to take care of present obligations, etc. As DeLillo puts it at the end of this crucial chapter, Lianne “wanted to be safe in the world and he [Keith] did not” (216). In sum, Keith largely resolves the trauma of 9/11 by embracing the danger of living in a world of pure contingency; Lianne resolves her trauma by relegating 9/11 to the past and living for the future; consequently, “she was ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue” (236). However, Lianne is not merely sinking back to her pre-9/11 life, as if the attacks never happened. Her resolving the trauma of 9/11 is predicated on Lianne’s directly answering the most daring aspect of Falling Man: DeLillo’s narrating three sections of this book from the perspective of Hammad, a fictional 9/11 hijacker.106 Richard Jackson has argued that in most fictional treatments of terrorists, they are depicted as “caricatures and stereotypical human ‘monsters.’”107 As we have seen, there is a long tradition of books and movies presenting terrorists as rational and understandable. But DeLillo takes this approach one step further by imagining what the world looks like from a 9/11 hijacker’s perspective without any authorial indications that Hammad is insane or purely evil.108 DeLillo leaves the political explanations for 9/11 to Martin Ridnour. In Hammad, DeLillo tries to imagine how the world appears from a radically different cultural perspective with radically different values.109 The chapter, “On Marienstrasse,” begins with Hammad listening to an “older man” who “was a rifleman at the Shatt al Arab” (77) tell his story.110 Hammad is deeply impressed when the “older man” tells him about the boy soldiers sent by Iran, how the man heard in them: the cry of history, the story of ancient Shia defeat and the allegiance of the living to those who were dead and defeated. That cry is still close to me, he said. Not like something happening yesterday but something always happening, over a thousand years happening, always in the air. (78)111

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DeLillo’s Hammad realizes that Islam embraces everything, not just history: “It was all Islam, the rivers and streams. Pick up a stone and hold it in your fist, this is Islam. God’s name on every tongue throughout the countryside. There was no feeling like this ever in his life” (172). Back in Germany, Islam and jihad lead Hammad to become one with his fellow-hijackers and his religion: His life had structure. Things were clearly defined. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad. He prayed with them to be with them. They were becoming total brothers. (83) However, becoming one with Islam, with jihad, also means that other human beings no longer matter. While in Germany, Hammad has a physical relationship with a woman named Leyla. He tells her that “he was going away for a time,” but he knows that after a short while, “she would begin to exist as an unreliable memory, then finally not at all” (83). More frightening, their potential victims, the people they intend to kill on 9/11, also have no meaning or value. When Hammad asks Amir (DeLillo’s fictionalization of Mohammed Atta), “What about the lives of the others” who will die as a result of their mission (176), Amir responds, simply there are no others. The others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. This is their function as others. Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying. (176) The fact that Hammad would even raise the question suggests that he may not be as fervently committed as the others. He at least considers the death of innocents as a question to be asked, unlike Amir. Nonetheless, Hammad is easily convinced.112 Amir’s impresses him because “[i]t sounded like philosophy” (176). Caught up in this vision of “heaven and hell, revenge and devastation” (178), there is no room for doubt, no room for anything other than Islam and jihad. Which brings us back to Lianne, who answers this perspective by privileging doubt. When Lianne first addresses the topic, in response to her therapy group’s turn to religion, she turns doubt into the generating principle of Western thought and art: There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’d doubted and then believed, and was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. (65)

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Lianne decides, however, to privilege doubt over belief.113 In direct contrast to Hammad, she realizes that “God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much her of life” (65). What Hammad and Amir embrace, Lianne rejects. DeLillo makes the contrast between the two explicit toward the end of Falling Man. Lianne observes: “People were reading the Koran … trying earnestly to learn something, find something that might help them think more deeply into the question of Islam” (231). For Lianne, the central difference comes down to the question of doubt. The first line of the Koran is “This book is not to be doubted” (231), and in the Hammad sections, DeLillo illustrates the consequences of extirpating doubt. Lianne implicitly agrees: “She doubted things, she had her doubts” (231). She realizes that this makes her “an infidel in current geopolitical parlance” (232), but she does not care, and DeLillo once more pairs the first line of the Koran with Lianne’s preference for the opposite: “This Book is not be doubted. She was stuck with her doubts” (233).Which is not say that Lianne entirely rejects religion. She is not quite a believer, not quite a non-believer: [Lianne] liked sitting in church. She went early, before mass began, to be alone for a while, to feel the calm that marks a presence outside the nonstop riffs of the waking mind. It was not something godlike she felt but only a sense of others. Others bring us closer. (233–234) While Lianne enjoys both the solitude and calm that come from sitting in a church, she rejects God for the same reasons that Hammad embraces Allah: the commitment is all-encompassing and overwhelming. It leads to the erasure of the self: God would consume her. God would de-create her and she was too small and tame to resist. That’s why she was resisting now. Because think about it. Because once you believe such a thing, God is, then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be. (235) Doubt leads to philosophy and art; God leads to the erasure of doubt, the erasure of individuality, and to 9/11. Falling Man’s form is a paradox: one the one hand, DeLillo does not present the reader with a conventional narrative. Instead, we have fragments. It’s almost as if he wrote out several narrative streams, cut them up with scissors and randomly interspersed them, leaving the reader to piece them back together. The overall impression, at least on first reading, is of incoherence, and it is not hard to see these fragments as collectively representing the shattering of the American psyche following 9/11. On the other hand, the novel’s ending overlaps with its beginning.

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Falling Man starts with Keith walking north “through rubble and mud” (3) just after the North Tower collapses; the last section of the book details his harrowing walk down the stairs, and the beginning of his walk north. Not coincidentally, Falling Man’s last sentence returns to the rhetoric of unspeakability and an indirect image of people jumping from the towers: “Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life” (246).114 There are two ways (at least) of interpreting this structure. The circularity may function analogously to Keith’s repetitions and Freud’s fort/da game: by repeatedly reading and rereading the many responses to 9/11 encompassed by this novel, the reader will eventually master the trauma and move on, sadder but one hopes, wiser. But, likelier, the circularity represents the ongoing, never to be resolved nature of 9/11’s trauma.There is, and will be, no closure, no end. Instead, American culture will, like the reader, keep circling, as Martin Ridnour puts it, the “empty space where America used to be” (193).115 DeLillo’s Falling Man is not a happy book. There is no comforting ending, either through a retreat into domesticity (as in Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall) or a deus ex machina prevention of a terrorist plot (as in Updike’s Terrorist). The novel offers no easy solution or reassuring balm for the trauma of 9/11. Instead, Falling Man acts as a kind of mirror, encompassing the full range of responses to 9/11, leaving the final resolution to the reader.

Notes 1 The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004), 32–33. 2 A true and perfect relation of the proceedings at the severall arraignments of the late most barbarous traitors (London, 1606), sig. D4v; The Shields Daily Gazette, January 26, 1885, 2; N. R. Kleinfeld, “U.S. ATTACKED; HIJACKED JETS DESTROY TWIN TOWERS AND HIT PENTAGON IN DAY OF TERROR,” New York Times, September 12, 2001. 3 “America under Attack,” The Guardian, September 12, 2001. On Thornton, see Chapter 3, pp. 66–67. 4 Margarita Estévez-Saá and Noemí Pereira-Ares also note how “different theorists have been concurrent in noting the ungraspable and unprecedented nature of September 11” (“Trauma and Transculturalism in Contemporary Fictional Memories of 9/11,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57:3 [2016], 270). 5 Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 94; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (New York and London: Verso, 2002), 14; Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and other Essays (New York and London: Verso, 2002), 30. 6 Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009),1, 2; James Berger, “There’s No Backhand to This,” Trauma at Hone: After 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 54. 7 I am grateful to Linda Kauffman for this point. 8 David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4. 9 Zulaika and Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 150.

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10 Barbara, Kingsolver, “Reflections on Wartime,” Washington Post, November 23, 2001, A24; Jonathan Alter, “Blame America at Your Peril,” Newsweek, October 15, 2001, 41. 11 Susan Sontag, “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2001, 32. The criticisms of Sontag are quoted in Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in Insecure America (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 24, 35. 12 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 34–35. 13 CBS News,“Tony Bennett Apologizes for 9/11 Remark,” September 21, 2011.Which is not to say that the taboo went unchallenged. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, 9–11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), and Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11, ed. Frank Lentriccia and Stanley Hauerwas, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 14 The literature on the trauma of 9/11 is vast. In addition to Margarita Estévez-Saá and Noemí Pereira-Ares, “Trauma and Transculturalism in Contemporary Fictional Memories of 9/11,” see the essays collected in Trauma at Home, ed. Judith Greenberg; E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 1–23, 136–147; Marc Redfield, “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11,” Diacritics 37.1 (2007): 55–80; Kristiaan Versluys, “Art Spiegleman’s In the Shadow of No Towers: The Politics of Trauma,” in Out of the Blue, 49–77; Mitchum Huels, “Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas,” Literature After 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne F. Quinn (New York: Routledge, 2008), 42–59; Richard Glezjer, “Witnessing 9/11: Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma,” Literature after 9/11, ed. Keniston and Quinn, 99–122. 15 Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in Insecure America (New York: Henry Holt, 2007); Stuart Croft, Culture, Crisis and America’s War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy became a Commodity, ed. Dana Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 16 Appelbaum and Paknadel, “Terrorism and the Novel,” 427. 17 Michael Rothberg,“A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.” American Literary History 29.1 (2009): 153, and Gray, After the Fall, 16–17. 18 John Updike,“Holy Terror: Updike goes Inside the Mind of a Muslim Teen,” BookPage, interview by Alden Mudge. June 2006 (the link no longer works). 19 Updike, “An Interview with John Updike: In Terrorist, a Cautious Novelist Takes On a New Fear,” New York Times, interview by Charles McGrath. May 31, 2006. 20 Some critics believed that a white American has no right “to pontificate on anything outside the Western Hemisphere” (Versluys, Out of the Blue, 159), such as Salman Rushdie, who opined that Updike “should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do” (James Campbell, “A Translated Man,” The Guardian, September 29, 2006. 21 Joseph Bottum, “A Jihadist Grows in Jersey,” The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2006. 22 Anna Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful in Post-9/11 America: Updike’s Terrorist, Islam, and the Specter of Exceptionalism” Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 477– 501; Liliana M. Naydan, Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016), 127–143. 23 Updike, “Holy Terror.” See also Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 55. 24 Updike, “An Interview.” Updike exaggerates, as many tried to understand 9/11 “from that point view.” For example, Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalism: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London: Verso, 2003); and Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left [London:Verso, 2003], 3). 25 Updike’s distaste for contemporary American culture also informs In the Beauty of Lilies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). When a member of a radical Christian

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sect delivers a jeremiad on America that could have come from Shaikh Rashid or Ahmad—“The public schools of this country … are cesspits of thievery, bullying, cigarette-smoking, glue-sniffing, pill-taking, instruction contrary to fact, and free condoms”—the representative of officialdom, a social worker, responds: “I was raised a Mormon, I can’t disagree with a lot of what you say” (421). 26 Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful,” 484. 27 Partly due to Updike’s describing his “homework” as looking at newspapers and reading “a few books, such as [Ahmed Akbar’s] Islam Today [London: Tauris Publishers, 1999]” (“John Updike’s Terrorist”), critics dismissed his research as “scant” and “superficial” (Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful,” 479; Pankaj Mishra, “End of Innocence,” The Guardian, May 18, 2007). But the knowledgeable references to Qutb (not mentioned in Akbar’s book) in Terrorist show that Updike read more deeply than he allowed in interviews. 28 “‘The America I have Seen’: In the Scale of Human Values (1951),” America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature: An Anthology 1895–1995, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 22. 29 Bin Laden, “Oath to America,” 193. 30 Bin Laden, “Why We Are Fighting You,” The Al Qaeda Reader, ed. Ibrahim, 203, 199. 31 Bin Laden, “Why We Are Fighting You,” The Al Qaeda Reader, ed. Ibrahim, 204. 32 President George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress Following 9/11 Attacks.” 33 Zulaika and Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 150. 34 Faludi, Terror Dream, 4. 35 Alter, “Peril,” 41. 36 Faludi, Terror Dream, 5. 37 Rabbit Angstrom also pines for a lost world: “Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll’s, Kroll’s that had stood in the center of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than the courthouse” (Rabbit at Rest; The Rabbit Novels, Volume 2 [New York: Ballantine, 2003], 419). 38 Updike, Rabbit at Rest, 401, 403. 39 Donald J. Greiner, “Updike, Rabbit, and the Myth of American Exceptionalism,” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 155; James A. Schiff, John Updike Revisited (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1998), 59–60. 40 For example, Americans have just awakened, Ezana says to Colonel Ellelllou, to the fact that “they as a race are morbidly obese,” and the Colonel describes American economic imperialism thus: “These people are pirates.Without the use of a single soldier their economy sucks wealth from the world, in the service of a rapacious, wholly trivial and wasteful consumerism” (John Updike, The Coup [New York: Knopf, 1978], 85, 114). 41 Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful,” 485. 42 Cf. Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful,” 487–488. 43 Bush, “Address.” 44 Michiko Kakutani, “John Updike’s Terrorist Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security,” NewYork Times, June 6, 2006; James Wood,“Jihad and the Novel,” The New Republic, July 3, 2006. 45 I owe this point to my student, Ben Nahoum. 46 Updike’s Ahmad thus illustrates the “dangerous intersection between the personal and the political,” “the local and the global,” that Samuel Thomas argues “enframes the act of suicide terror” (“Outtakes and Outrage,” 429, 438). 47 Kakutani, “John Updike’s Terrorist.”

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48 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 304. 49 Wright, The Looming Tower, 304–305. 50 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 24. 51 John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl, 195–214. 52 Updike, “John Updike’s Terrorist: On Point (Audio),” interview by Tom Ashbrook, June 13, 2008; emphasis added. 53 Hamid, “Harcourt Interview with Mohsin Hamid” (www.mohsinhamid.com/ interviewharcourt2007.html). 54 “Hamish Hamilton Interview with Mohsin Hamid” (http://www.mohsinhamid. com/interviewhh2007.html). While Hamid avoided the rain of opprobrium directed at Updike, one reviewer at least accused him of anti-Americanism: Ann Marlowe, “Buying Anti-American,” The National Review, May 14, 2007. 55 Hamid, “Hamish Hamilton Interview.” 56 “Why Do They Hate Us?” Washington Post July 20, 2007. 57 E.g., Lindsay Balfour, “Risky Cosmopolitanism: Intimacy and Autoimmunity in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58.3 (2017), 215; Peter Morey, “‘The rules of the game have changed’: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and post-9/11 fiction,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (2011): 136; and Anna Hartnell, “Moving through America: Race, Place and Resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” The Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.3–4 (2010), 336–348. 58 Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (New York: Harcourt, 2007). All further references will be to this edition and cited parenthetically; unless otherwise noted, all emphases are in the original. Deborah Solomon,“The Stranger: Questions for Mohsin Hamid,” The New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007. 59 Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes (New York: Picador, 2006), 33. 60 Solomon, “The Stranger.” 61 Ibid. 62 Hamid clearly wrote this passage before the digitization of music. 63 See for example Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, “Post-9⁄11 Literary Masculinities in Kalfus, DeLillo, and Hamid,” Orbis Litterarum 67.3 (2012), 262; Margarita Estévez-Saá and Noemí Pereira-Ares, “Trauma and Transculturalism in Contemporary Fictional Memories of 9/11,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57.3 (2016). 273; and Jago Morrison, “Jihadi Fiction: Radicalisation Narratives in the Contemporary Novel,” Textual Practice 31.3 (2017), 572. 64 Anna Hartnell, “Moving through America: Race, Place and Resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Literature, Migration and the “War on Terror”, ed. Fiona Tolan et al. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 87. 65 Faludi, The Terror Dream, 5. 66 E.g., Morey, “‘The rules of the game have changed,’” 140. 67 Mohsin Hamid, “Slaying Dragons: Mohsin Hamid Discusses The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Psychoanalysis and History 11.2 (2009), 233. 68 Morey, 139. 69 Hamid,“Slaying Dragons: Mohsin Hamid Discusses The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” 236. 70 Mao II (rpt. New York: Penguin, 1991). All further references will be to this edition and parenthetical. 71 I’m grateful to Linda Kauffman for this point. 72 Wilcox, “Terrorism and Art: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism,” Mosaic 39.2 (2006), 91. 73 Cf. Kauffman, “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man,” Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008): 353–377, who argues for the continuities between all three texts.

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74 DeLillo, “Intensity of a Plot,” Guernica, July 17, 2007, 75 Ibid. 76 “In the Ruins of the Future,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2001, 35, 38–39. 77 DeLillo, “Intensity.” 78 Ibid. While DeLillo claims that the image “just came out of nowhere,” there is a famous photograph of a man, Ed Fine, with a briefcase covered in ash. See Rik Kirkland, “September 11: A Survivor’s Tale,” Fortune Magazine, October 15, 2011. 79 “DeLillo, “Intensity.” 80 Ibid. 81 Birgit Däwes takes a similar approach (Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel ) [Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH, 2011], 273–275. Cf. Richard Jackson, “Terrorism, Taboo, and Discursive Resistance: The Agonistic Potential of the Terrorism Novel,” International Studies Review 17 (2015), 397. While DeLillo avoided the personal attacks Updike faced, Falling Man got many poor reviews after it was published. Michiko Kakutani, for example, called it a “spindly novel [that] feels tired and brittle” (“A Man, A Woman, and a Day of Terror,” New York Times, May 9, 2007). See also Andrew O’Hagan, “Racing against Reality,” New York Review of Books, June 28, 2007, and Toby Litt, “The Trembling Air”.The Guardian, May 25, 2007. See also Henry Veggian, Understanding Don DeLillo (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015), 97. 82 DeLillo, “In the Ruins,” 39. 83 DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner’s, 2007). All further references will be to this edition, and cited parenthetically. 84 Hamilton Carroll, “‘Like Nothing in the Life’: September 11 and the Limits of Representation in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man,” Studies in American Fiction 40.1 (2013), 111. See also Aimee Pozorski, Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 88–89. 85 Cf. Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 162–169. 86 Linda Kauffman, “The Wake of Terror,” 362. 87 See Chapter 3, pp. 66–68. 88 Martin Ridnour’s position on America echoes the views taken by many European intellectuals, who “saw the international policies of the United States as leading to hatred intense enough to bring about such terrorism” (E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005], 16). 89 John Carlos Rowe, “Global Horizons in Falling Man,” Don DeLillo: “Mao II,” “Underworld,” “Falling Man”, ed. Stacey Olster (London: Continuum, 2011), 127. 90 At the end of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2006), Foer places 15 photos (unpaginated) in reverse order of somebody falling to their death from the Towers, creating the illusion that this person is falling upward, and so did not die. 91 Paul Petrovic, “Children, Terrorists, and Cultural Resistance in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.5 (2014), 601. 92 Cf.Versluys, Out of the Blue, 19–48; Pozorski, Falling, 83. 93 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955; rpt. 1981), 13. For a history of trauma theory, see Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 24–41. 94 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 137. 95 John Duvall, “Witnessing Trauma: Falling Man and Performance Art,” Don DeLillo, ed. Stacey Olster, 159–164. 96 Tom Junod, “The Falling Man: An Unforgettable Story,” Esquire, September 9, 2016. 97 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4–5; see also 57–58.

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98 Cf. Georgiana Banita, Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics & Literary Culture after 9/11 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 72, and Charlie Lee-Potter, Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 94–95. 99 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 64. 100 Versluys, Out of the Blue, 20. 101 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 14, 15. 102 Ibid., 16–17. 103 Rowe, “Global Horizons,” 125; Linda Kauffman, “Bodies in Rest and Motion in Falling Man,” Don DeLillo, ed. Stacey Olster, 137–139. 104 Cf. Christine Cavedon, Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015), 337; Arin Keebler, “Marriage, Relationships, and 9/11: The Seismographic Narratives of Falling Man, The Good Life, and The Emperor’s Children,” Modern Language Review 106 (2011), 365), and Linda Kauffman, “The Wake of Terror,” 369. All regard poker negatively. 105 On the differences between Keith and Lianne, see Kauffman, “Bodies in Rest,” 141– 143, 150–151. 106 Joseph M. Conte, “Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror,” Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011), 565. 107 Jackson, “Terrorism, Taboo, and Discursive Resistance,” 402. 108 Peter Boxall observes that Falling Man “produces an extraordinarily intimate and unboundaried coming together of them and us, of self and other” (Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism [London: Continuum, 2009], 186). 109 Cf. Rowe, “Global Horizons,” 123. 110 Saddam Hussein tried to capture this river at the Iran–Iraq War’s start. While initially successful, in May 1982 Iran regained some of the positions by launching human-wave attacks against entrenched Iraqi positions. See “Iran-Iraq War 1980–88,” Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations (Westport, CT: ABC-Clio/Greenwood, 2002). 111 Hammad refers to the Shia defeat at Karbala October 10, 680 A.D., an event which continues to define the geopolitics of the Middle East (present-day Iran belongs to the Shia branch; Saudi Arabia is Sunni). See Christopher M. Blanchard, “Islam: Sunni and Shiites,” Congressional Research Service, January 28, 2009, Syed Akbar Hyder, Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–4; and The 9/11 Commission Report, 49–50. 112 Kauffman, “The Wake of Terror,” 355. 113 Cf. Rowe, 130. 114 Conte, “Age of Terror,” 568. 115 Fredric Jameson recalled how heard a psychologist on the radio say that all Americans, not just the bereaved families, needed therapy for the trauma of 9/11 (“The Dialectics of Disaster,” Dissent from the Homeland, 57).

EPILOGUE Where Do We Go from Here? Nadeem Aslam, Amy Waldman, and Jodi Picoult

Dissatisfaction with the fictional response to 9/11 terrorism tends to break down into two main avenues of complaint: either the authors exhibit a shallow understanding of Islamic terrorism, or the books focus exclusively on domestic trauma, with little interest in delving into terrorism’s roots. Occasionally, as in the case of Updike’s Terrorist, the two coincide. In 2011 and 2013, however, two novels appeared that implicitly answered these criticisms, albeit in different ways, and push the literary imagination of terrorism in new directions: Amy Waldman, The Submission (2011) and Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man’s Garden (2013).1 Aslam’s tale takes place during the American invasion of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and find Osama bin Laden. Two foster brothers, Mikal and Jeo, attempt to travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan to help provide medical aid to the forces fighting the Americans, but instead, they are sent to fight with the Taliban; Jeo dies, and Mikal, is captured by a warlord who then sells him to the Americans. About half the novel is taken up with Mikal’s epic quest to return home, while the other half narrates the events befalling his family, including a terrorist attack on a non-sectarian school with a Western curriculum. Waldman’s novel, on the other hand, is not about terrorism per se, but the aftermath of terrorism. Waldman’s The Submission revolves around the following question: what if a blind submission contest were held for a 9/11 memorial, and a garden designed by a man named Mohammad Khan wins? The ensuing controversy puts into stark relief the decline of American political culture into factional chaos and xenophobia as a result of terrorism.While their settings and purposes differ, in their own way, both novelists answer the criticisms leveled at most 9/11 fiction. Like Don DeLillo and John Updike, Aslam “wanted to enter the terrorist mindset,”2 but unlike them, Aslam’s background insulates him from charges of cultural appropriation and Western bias. As a Pakistani emigrant to the United

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Kingdom, as someone whose mother is a devout Muslim who “believes in the literal word of the Koran,” and as someone who has “been to the so-called terrorist training camps, [and talked] to the people who are there,” Aslam has first-hand knowledge of this culture, and so cannot be accused of Orientalism or anti-Muslim prejudice when he imagines the world of radical Islam.3 The “terrorist” Aslam has in mind is Major Kyra, an ex-military man (“He resigned from the army the day before yesterday, unable to accept the alliance that the Pakistani government has formed with the United States and the West” [27]), who has also inherited Ardent Spirit, the secular school that Mikal’s father, Rohan, created.4 His terrorist act is to take over the school with a group of radicals and start murdering students and teachers. Major Kyra’s motivation for this deed combines two principles: a deep hatred of the West, and an equally deep religious faith. In fact, the two are only artificially separable. In his message justifying taking over the school, Major Kyra combines a fundamentalist approach to Islam with resentment over how the United States deals with Pakistan and Afghanistan: This is a message from the warriors of Islam to all the world’s Infidels, Crusaders, Jews, and their operatives in the Muslim Kinhood. We are the followers of Allah’s mission and let it be known that that mission is the spreading of the truth, not killing people. Peace not war. We ourselves are the victims of murder, massacre and incarceration. The West’s invasion of Afghanistan—the only true Islamic country in the world—is an unprecedented global crime, and our brothers and sisters and children are being killed as we write this, abducted and taken away to be tortured. Jihad is obligatory under these circumstances, as it is for taking back Spain, Sicily, Hungary, Cyprus, Ethiopia and Russia, and for the restoration of Islamic rule over all parts of India. (255; emphasis in the original) Major Kyra’s justification for murder and his hatred of the West repeats Osama bin Laden’s simple and blunt answer to the question of why Al Qaeda is fighting the Americans: “Because you attack us and continue to attack us.”5 The motivation, however, is not exclusively political. Kyra also firmly believes that Islam, and only Islam, should be allowed. He objects, for example, to a dictionary that lists “the seventeen words Urdu has for rain, and they are a blasphemy because they do not refer to Allah anywhere” (255). Aslam does not portray Major Kyra as an outlier whose beliefs are not shared by significant number, if not the vast majority, of Pakistanis. Over and over again, we hear people asserting that “[i]nfidels are attacking Muslim countries with impunity” (84) and “[w]e, our very souls, are being attacked by the West from many directions” (155). In other words, what most in the West call terrorism, many Muslims in this novel regard as a legitimate response to what they perceive as Western aggression. When, for example, a mob sets fire to a church, “those claiming responsibility had said that since Western Christians were bombing and

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destroying mosques in Afghanistan, they were beginning a campaign to annihilate churches in Pakistan” (74). Remarkably, the crowd around the destroyed church is “delighted.To them this isn’t madness but, on the contrary, is beauty” (75; emphasis in the original). How, Aslam seems to be asking, are we to deal with that? However, Aslam forestalls the Western reader dismissing claims that the West has declared war against Islam as paranoid nonsense by implicitly providing some evidence as to why people might think this way. After an English journalist is attacked by a mob, the narrator reports that he “keeps saying he holds no grudge, that if he were someone from these lands he too would be unable to stop himself from venting his anger against the first Western person he saw” (32). America, from the perspective of those who live in this part of the world, is not a benign force, but a bully, as exemplified by their shoes. Walking through a mountain pass, “Mikal notices that the soles of several boots have left deep imprints on the muddy ground of the bend. America is everywhere. The boots are large as if saying, ‘This is how you make an impression the world’” (129). Furthermore, Aslam provides several instances for how American politicians inadvertently fuel the notion that they hate Islam. Shortly after 9/11, President Bush told reporters:6 This is a new kind of—a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand.This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient. Aside from invoking the rhetoric of unspeakability (“A new kind of evil”), by using the term “crusade,” Bush cast the fight against Al Qaeda in terms that substantiated suspicions that the West wants to destroy Islam, which is exactly how Kyra understands the phrase: “The US president used the word ‘crusade’ in the first speech he gave after the terrorist attacks. … And they said if Pakistan did not help them in fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, they would bomb us back to the Stone Age. These were their exact words.” (183) Also, toward the book’s end, a warlord asks if Mikel has heard: of a lady called Madeleine. No? In 1996, this lady named Albright Madeleine, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on television how she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. Do you know what she said? She said that it was a ‘very hard choice’ but ‘we think the price is worth it.’ These are her exact words.

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The unnamed warlord refers to Albright’s May 12, 1966 interview on “60 Minutes,” and he quotes her accurately (even if he has her name backwards).7 The price may be “worth it” to America, but I cannot imagine that the Iraqis and their co-religionists who had to pay such a high price would agree, or think about the country responsible for the deaths of their children with anything other than pure hatred. Third, after the American forces capture Mikal, Aslam gives us the first description (to my knowledge) in fiction of what exactly “enhanced interrogation” entails. In other words, Aslam has Mikal subjected to various forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, and sensory deprivation (160–171). It’s hard to not laugh bitterly when one of the interrogators tells Mikal that the United States doesn’t torture “because we believe it is wrong and uncivilized” (164). None of which is to say that Aslam in any way endorses Kyra’s murderousness or sentimentalizes this world. The Afghani warlords are vicious men who sell innocent people to the Americans as terrorists just to collect the not inconsiderable ransom, and who practice child gang rape with impunity (107). After the ruby Rohan brings to ransom Mikal turns out to be glass, the warlord crushes it, then rubs the shards into Rohan’s eyes, blinding him (118).This is also a world in which anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories run rampant: arriving in Peshawar, Rohan sees a demonstration with someone carrying a sign asking: “Why didn’t three thousand Jews turn up for work at the World Trade Center on 11 September?” (41). A little later, a woman asks Kyra for a favor, and she excuses herself on these grounds: “I am an illiterate woman, so you [Kyra] know better than I what is occurring in the world ever since the Jews carried out the terrorist attacks in America” (154). Needless to say, Major Kyra does not correct her. However, Aslam’s great contribution to the literature of terrorism is to reverse the unspeakability of terrorism. He does not simply explain jihadi ideology; many authors, including Updike and DeLillo, have done that. Rather, Aslam demonstrates that if terrorists are a black hole of incomprehensibility to many in the West (e.g., a member of the Alzheimer’s group in DeLillo’s Falling Man stating “they’re a million miles outside your life” [64]), the West is equally foreign, equally incomprehensible, equally “Other,” to the inhabitants of Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a man whose son is being held for ransom by a warlord says to Rohan: “what does Heer [the small town he lives in] know about New York, or New York about Heer? They are two different worlds” (105). So different that many Pakistanis know nothing at all about America. When, for example, Tara (Rohan’s sister) is asked to sew an American flag for a demonstration, with the proviso that it’s made “of a material that doesn’t burn too fast or too slowly[.] The flames have to look inspiring and fearsome in the photographs (99), she wonders: What the various elements of the flag signify. Are the white and red stripes rivers of milk and wine … Or are they paths soaked with blood, alternating

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with paths strews with bleached white bones? Perhaps the blue in the flag means that the Americans own all the blue in the world. (100) In other words, Tara knows as little about the West as most Western readers likely know about hers. The culmination of this reverse incomprehensibility/unspeakability comes when Mikal rescues an injured American Special Forces soldier. After bringing him to a mosque for help, the cleric admits, “I have never seen a real white person” (317), and both Mikal and the cleric are profoundly shocked when they discover that the soldier has a large tattoo on his skin: the Arabic word, “Infidel” (319; the word appears on the page in very large font). They understand the tattoo as a taunt, a boast announcing, “I am proud to be an infidel, to be this thing you hate” (319). But the tattoo goes beyond a dare: the cleric simply cannot understand why anyone would do such a thing, and so even though he tells Mikal, “Get that beast away from here … They want to not only wound our flesh but our very souls” (319), he does not look at him with contempt and hatred, but with “confused pity … Why has the white man condemned himself in such a manner, daring to mark himself with the sign of His disapproval?” (319). For the cleric, the solider represents something incomprehensible to this culture: “The West has dared to ask itself the question, what begins after God?” (319; emphasis in the original). As for Mikal, he looks at the soldier, and he understands that “[t]he white man’s eyes are a doorway to another world, to a mind shaped by different rules, a different way of life” (333). But in place of a bridge between radically different cultures, the novel argues that the gap is too great for any sort of comprehension. After yet another warlord captures both Mikal and his soldier, the following colloquy ensues: ‘We can’t know what the Westerners want,’ the old man says. ‘To know what they want you have to eat what they eat, wear what they wear, breathe the air they breathe.You have to born where they are born.’ ‘I am not sure.You mentioned books. We can learn things from books.’ ‘No one from here can know what the Westerners know,’ the man says. ‘The Westerners are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It’s like asking what the dead or the unborn know.’ (349–350) As I hope I have shown throughout this book, there is a long tradition of depicting terrorism as incomprehensible, unspeakable, beyond understanding. Aslam’s contribution is to demonstrate that for many, the West is equally beyond understanding, and the gap between the two worlds is so great that there can be no bridge between them.

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While Amy Waldman’s The Submission does not leave the island of Manhattan, there is no more understanding between her characters than between West and East in Aslam’s book.8 The Submission proceeds from this central question: is it appropriate for a Muslim, practicing or not, to design a 9/11 memorial, and the answer leaves no room for compromise or common ground. Everyone is set against everyone else: liberal vs. conservative; Christian vs. Muslim; immigrant vs. citizen; documented vs. undocumented immigrant; upper class vs. working class, etc. Waldman’s achievement, however, is to show how this debate quickly deteriorates into chaos and cacophony. Unlike many 9/11 fictions, which, as Richard Gray has said, succumb to “the seductive pieties of home, hearth and family,” Waldman portrays a New York, indeed, an America, without any center, any common ground.9 Any and all statements are met by a contrary statement, and there is no reconciliation or transcendence. Ultimately,Waldman portrays a country made smaller and meaner by 9/11. The novel begins with the jury charged with picking a winning design (the membership consists of Manhattan’s artistic and financial elite) wrangling over two opposing choices: a garden, which “speaks to a longing we have for healing” (5), or “The Void” described as “visceral, angry, dark, raw, because there was no joy on that day” (5). But “the conversation had turned ragged, snappish repetitive” (4). Claire Burwell, widow of a wealthy financier who died in the Twin Towers, wants the garden; Ariana Montague, an artist, wants “The Void,” and “their opposed sureties clash[ed] like electric fields” (6). While ultimately the group decides, by a single vote, to opt for the garden, the opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the book, which Waldman constructs as a series of increasingly acrimonious arguments among multiple participants. Immediately after they discover that the winning design is by an architect named Mohammad Khan, the harmony achieved by reaching a decision quickly dissolves. “It could be a healing gesture,” suggests a “university president of sonorous voice and Pavarottian girth” (17), which draws this response: “That’s not the gesture that comes to mind. … The families will be very offended. This is no time for multicultural pandering” (17). The Governor of New York’s representative offers this view: “I’m not sure I want it with the name Mohammad attached to it. It doesn’t matter who he is.They’ll feel like they’ve won. All over the Muslim world they’ll be jumping up and down at our stupidity, our stupid tolerance” (18), which draws this response from Claire: “Tolerance isn’t stupid. … Prejudice is” (18). So it goes for eight pages. Another example, Khan’s first meeting with the “Muslim American Coordinating Council” (MACC), “an umbrella organization for assorted Muslim groups, some political, some theological, others legal” (79), quickly devolves into bickering over competing agendas. One person says that Khan has done a good thing “for the ummah, to show that Muslims want to live in peace in America,” which is countered by another person asking, “But does America want to live in peace with Muslims?” who then asks why there are no memorials “to the half

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million Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions” (79). Laila Fathi, who becomes Khan’s first lawyer, observes that if “his opponents pressure [the committee] into taking [the commission] away, the message is that we’re lesser Americans,” which elicits this support from “a man in a djellaba”: “We are lesser Americans. … Eid is not a school holiday” (80), to which Issam Malik, MACC’s executive director, plaintively responds: “Do you have to bring that up at every meeting?” (80). A meeting with New York’s mayor ends with everyone “yelling and interrupting one another so that their words seemed to be layered like the complicated, somewhat mystifying Middle Eastern dip the Gracie Mansion chef had put out on the buffet table” (196). Waldman’s point is that in post-9/11 America, reasoned debate no longer obtains. Paul Rubin, distinguished retired banker and the committee’s chairman, privately tries to solve the dilemma by doing what has served him best in the past: taking out “a yellow legal pad, his favorite reasoning tool,” and creating two columns, “For Khan” and “Against Khan” (49): For Khan:

Against Khan

Principle—he won! Statement of tolerance Appeal of design Jurors—resistance: Claire Reporter has—story out?

Backlash Distraction families: divided raising $$$ harder Governor/politics

(49–50) This approach, mapping out the pros and cons, then making a rational decision no longer works, however. Faced with a House minority leader labeling “the jury Islamist sympathizers and [vowing] to sponsor legislation to block the construction of Khan’s design,” the governor of New York (who has presidential ambitions) asserting that “[t]he danger to America isn’t just from jihadists. … It’s from the naïve impulse to privilege tolerance over all other values, including national security” (167), Paul’s deliberate approach gets no traction: “The cacophony drowned out his repeated, and reasonable, attempts to point out that the jury had selected from anonymous entries” (167). The yellow pad simply cannot compete against “the endless blare of news” and the “dark advertisements against the Garden. One showed frothing Iranians chanting ‘Death to America,’ stone-throwing Palestinians, burka-wearing women, RPG-toting Taliban … and of course Mohammad Khan, glowering beneath the words ‘Save the Memorial’” (168). The fact that a Muslim designed a garden quickly gets turned into the charge that the “the memorial design may actually be a martyrs’ paradise” (116), and Claire Burwell believes, naively as it turns out, that “[o]nce Khan explained his garden, answered his accusations, the fearmongering would lose its power” (117).

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But that is not what happens. Instead, the public sphere has descended into a phantasmagoria of “alternative facts”: Mo began to put psychological distance between himself and the Mohammad Khan who was written and talked about, as if that were another man, altogether. It often was. Facts were not found but made, and once made, alive, defying anyone to tell them truth. Strangers analyzed, judged, and invented him. Mo read that he was Pakistani, Saudi, and Qatari, that he was not an American citizen; that he had donated to organizations backing terrorism; that he had dated half the female architects in New York; that as a Muslim he didn’t date at all; that his father ran a shady Islamic charity; that his brother—how badly Mo, as an only child, had wanted a brother!—had started a radical Muslim students’ association at his university. He was called, besides decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant, and typical. (126) Unsurprisingly, hateful rhetoric results in hateful acts. At a demonstration organized by Debbie Dawson’s group, SAFI (“Save America From Islam”)—Dawson sports a t-shirt reading “Kafir and Proud” (149)—, Sean Gallagher, Frank’s son and whose brother died on 9/11, pulls the headscarf off a Columbia University student protesting their bigotry. The moment is caught on video, shown on the news, and inspires much more of the same: “More men copied him, and copycats copied the copycats, so within a week there had been more than a dozen incidents around the country” (164). As one might expect, “The New York Times called Sean representative of ‘a new, ominous strain of intolerance in the land’” (164). But nobody listens to the editorial, the incidents continue to pile up, and anti-Muslim violence not only expands nationally, it increases tensions abroad and invites violent retaliation from Muslim radicals: Fourteen headscarf pullings across the country; twenty-five Muslim selfdefense squads patrolling in response. Eleven mosque desecrations in eight states, not counting a protest pig roast organized outside a mosque in Tennessee but including the dog feces left at the door of a mosque in Massachusetts. Twenty-two Muslim countries expressing concern about America’s treatment of Muslims and its media’s portrayal of Islam. Six serious threats to American interests abroad by Islamic extremists vowing retaliation for the persecution of Khan. And, most worrying for a country previously free of indigenous jihadist terrorism, three thwarted plots at home. (207) However, it would be a mistake to read Waldman’s novel as exclusively satirizing to satirize the anti-garden position.

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As I noted at the start of this book, fiction has the uncanny ability to allow readers to empathize with people and characters far different from themselves, including people one would otherwise dismiss as fundamentally evil.10 The challenge for the literary representation of terrorism is to invite the reader to empathize with terrorists, and so allow us the opportunity to understand why people would commit such deeds. Waldman’s innovation is to direct that empathy toward Debbie Dawson, the talk radio host, Lou Sarge, and Sean Gallagher, people Waldman’s readership likely consider as unspeakable as the terrorists themselves. Dawson may very well be a rabble-rousing xenophobe, but she is also a single mother raising two teenagers, and she asks for donations to help defray the costs of housing Sean because she has to consider other expenses; as she says, “someone’s got to put these girls through college” (165). When one daughter responds, “Daddy’s going to put us through college,” “Debbie cut her eyes at her eldest. ‘Women need to be financially independent’” (165). Suddenly, Dawson’s activities take on another dimension entirely. Waldman also has Dawson helping with her daughter’s college applications, supporting her decision to write an application essay entitled “My Mother the Firebrand” expressing both admiration—“Two years ago she was just a housewife who spent most of her time watching soap operas”—and disagreement—“Sometimes I think she tries too hard to be provocative. I believe in dialogue” (178). For her part, Dawson is “totally on board with this strategy,” asking only that “watching soap operas” be replaced with “taking care of my sisters and me” (178). Similarly, Lou Sarge (who bears a remarkable resemblance to Rush Limbaugh) is actually quite thoughtful about what he does. He tells Mohammad Khan before skewering him on air: “You have to attune yourself to the historical moment, sense the current of time, where it is … and then adapt to it. Spoon with it” (188). Then there is Sean Gallagher, who knows he is a failure in life, “a handyman living with his parents” (58). After 9/11, Sean gains some notoriety giving speeches about his loss, but his fame, or infamy, rockets after he pulls the scarf incident. It would be very easy for Waldman to depict Sean as an ignorant idiot. Instead, Sean Gallagher is almost a tragic figure. At the conclusion of a meeting arranged by MACC to apologize to the woman whose scarf he pulled, Sean comes right to the edge of redeeming himself. He tells the group (with cameras running and reporters taking notes): “What I did was wrong. If anyone else does it, it’s wrong” (183). But then, he invokes his brother Patrick, and the possibility vanishes: Maybe it was Patrick’s name that spirited Sean to his parents’ living room, where, lacking a home of his own, he would soon return. Seeing himself framed in their television, sandwiched by Muslims, he tried to reconstruct how he had wandered there, to the other side, and he tried to scramble back. ‘But Patrick also died trying to save people from Islamic terrorists,’ he

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said, ‘and we will never apologize for not wanting anything Islamic connected to this memorial.’ (183–184) Later, Waldman explains that Sean’s inability to empathize has its origins in Patrick’s attempting to turn “too-small, too-distractible Sean into a high-school football player” (232): Pitying the other team, Patrick instructed, would erode Sean’s will to crush them, would worm deep within him, even into his hands, so that he would start giving away plays without meaning to. Sean had to stamp out these glimmerings of sympathy. To lend his heart to the other side would weaken his own. (232) Unfortunately, Sean never learned to restrict this lesson to football. Waldman’s insistence on inviting the reader to see the anti-Garden forces as three-dimensional human beings, even when we condemn their actions, extends to the arguments against Khan building his garden, not all of which are specious. Elliott, the art critic on the jury, makes a valid point when he notes that: [t]he backlash to this could deal a real setback to their [Muslims] quest for acceptance. So while it may be in this particular Muslim’s interest to win, it may not be in the interest of all the other Muslims. We can’t privilege the desires of the one over the good of the many. (22) Nor is another committee member entirely wrong when he points out that “people are afraid”—a point that is made repeatedly throughout the novel—and they must be practical: “our job is to get the memorial built [and so we] must consider the public reaction, the possibility of an uproar” (20–21). While Waldman may intend a certain amount of criticism against liberal smugness when she invents an editorial in The New Yorker expressing ambivalence and criticizing Khan for not explaining his design further on the grounds that no other architect would be asked such questions, Khan himself recognizes that The New Yorker is not a hostile family member, a conservative politician, or an opportunistic politician. Consequently, when we read this fictional editorial, the reader must take its arguments seriously: We should judge him only by his design. But this where matters get tricky. In venturing into public space, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs. The memorial is not an exercise in self-expression, nor should it be a display

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of religious symbolism, however benign. … Khan has refused to say, on the grounds that such a question would never be asked of a non-Muslim, whether he has created a martyrs’ paradise. But to insist that any questions about his influences or motives are offensive is to answer the anguish of the victims’ families with coyness. (125) Khan of course feels betrayed because “[t]he Comment had made ambivalence respectable” (125). But the Comment’s main point remains valid, and that point remains a constant throughout the novel: opposition to a Muslim, even a non-practicing Muslim, building a 9/11 memorial may very well proceed from ignorance and anti-Muslim prejudice, but it may also proceed from real, undeniable pain. The book begins with the recognition that the committee is haunted by loss: “They’d all lost, of course—lost the sense that their nation was invulnerable; lost their city’s most recognizable icons; maybe lost friends or acquaintances. [Claire Burwell] had lost her husband” (4). And people, legitimately or not, even two years after 9/11, are scared. The governor, Geraldine Bittman, tells Paul Rubin that even two years later, “[t]he fear is there … The fear is real” (103), a point reiterated by Claire Burwell, who tells the jury, “Americans, many of them, are afraid” (237). But most of all, Waldman emphasizes the overwhelming grief of some of the Garden’s most determined opponents. Shortly after the winner’s religion (but not yet the name) becomes public knowledge, a reporter calls Frank Gallagher, whose firefighter son died when the Towers collapsed, and we hear only one side of the conversation. Frank tells the reporter that “we plan to fight this until our last breath”; the reporter presumably asks if he’s not exhibiting religious prejudice, and Frank answers: “this is not Islamophobia. Because phobia means fear, and I’m not afraid of them” (56). So, the reporter asks, why the opposition, and the answer is: “They killed my son” (56). Toward the novel’s end, Waldman stages a public forum for Khan to explain himself, and he tries to point out that his design combines many elements, including “[t]he gardens we now call Islamic … though they predate Islam by at least a millennium” (218). The response encompasses many voices that collectively illustrate the full range and complexity of the issue. The outrageous Islamophobes have their say, as does one insane person, but so do others whose voices carry more weight. The first speaker, like Frank Gallagher also lost a son, says: I don’t find the prospect of a Muslim designing this memorial, or even that it has Islamic elements, insulting. I find it insensitive, which is different. … We, who have carried the weight of loss, are now being asked to carry the weight of proving America’s tolerance, and it … well, it’s a lot to ask. (219)

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Another family member (he lost his wife) objects to the garden, but on maintenance, not religious grounds: It’s inherently a fragile form, a risk, and I’m not sure we want to take a risk here. … Put up a stone or granite memorial and you can neglect it all you want. But what if we run out of money for maintenance, or climate change gets so bad that everything planted goes awry? The symbolism of a garden, destroyed, returned to nature, by man’s heedlessness or neglect would be devastating. (221) A third speaker, a man who did not lose anybody on 9/11 but is ex-CIA, speaks Arabic, and is now a consultant on jihadism, notes that Islamist extremists don’t care about the garden, instead: “They’re tracking the reaction to the Garden, the treatment of Mohammad Khan, and all of that is proof to them of the West’s hostility to Islam” (222).Yet another speaker tries to point out that the Twin Towers themselves “had Islamic elements … The arches at the bases of the buildings are clearly influenced by Islam, and so is the geometric filigree that covered them,” and she asks: “Are the towers less missed because of it? If your rebuilt them, as so many people want to do, would you purge these aspects? (222–223). The penultimate speaker, however, is Frank Gallagher, who reminds us again of the terrible loss driving his resistance to a Muslim designer: ‘I have nothing against anyone personally,’ Frank Gallagher said. Then his face crumpled, and Alyssa [Spier, a journalist] thought, against her will, of the buildings falling in on themselves. He paused. ‘But … all I want to say is … I lost my son. I lost my son.’ (224) I am not arguing that Waldman thinks that Gallagher is right. But she is asking the reader to empathize with him, and to understand the enormity of what drives his opposition. It would seem that Frank Gallagher has the last word, and his agony will carry the day. But after Paul Rubin says, “It looks like there are no more speakers” (225), a woman stands up and announces that she has something to say: Asma, the Bangladeshi wife of an undocumented worker in the Twin Towers who died alongside the bankers, lawyers, and hedge fund managers. Her voice is essential because, as Maria, the jury’s “public art maven” puts it, while we hear a great deal from other people, e.g., Lou Sarge, Debbie Dawson, Frank Gallagher, etc., we “never hear from people like this woman” (236)—meaning, the voice of the undocumented worker whose job, as she says, “was to sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms” (230). On the one hand, Asma is not entirely right. While initially, after her husband’s death, the subcontractor who employed

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him tried to deny his existence, and the Bangladeshi consulate insisted that “the undocumented also had to be uncounted” (70), that is not what the US government thinks, and she is awarded “$1.05 million for the lifetime loss of her husband’s earnings” (75). And yet, while New York’s mayor insisted that “all of the dead, illegal or not, should be listed” on the memorial (77), “history had only narrowly made room for him” (77). We see what she means in Chapter 13, which describes “a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan for the victims’ families” (140). But Asma finds out about the cruise only by accident: “Flipping television channels one night, Asma came upon a news story about a boat trip for the families of the dead” (144). Nobody thought to invite her. Asma tells the Garden’s opponents, the ones who think that the Garden is a martyrs’ paradise, that they have made a fundamental mistake: You have mixed up these bad Muslims, these bad people, and Islam. Millions of people all over the world have done good things because Islam tells them to. There are so many more Muslims who would never think of taking a life. You talk about paradise as a place for bad people. But that is not what we believe.That is not who the garden is for.The gardens of paradise are for men like my husband, who never hurt anyone. … We do not tell you what it means to be Christian, or what the rules of your Heaven are. … I think a garden is right … because that is what America is—all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together. How can you pretend we and our traditions are not part of this place? Does my husband matter less than all of your relatives? (230–231) And yet, powerful as this speech may be, Waldman qualifies its impact in two crucial ways. First, while the reader has access to the full speech, including her outraged conclusion of “You should be ashamed!” (231), the audience does not. Asma does not speak English. Her words have to be translated by Nasruddin, “the ‘mayor’ of Little Dhaka, as their Brooklyn neighborhood was called” (70), and he edits her. When Asma tells the audience what her husband did, Nasruddin “left out the bathroom cleaning” (230). When she praises America as a place where “[p]eople helped you. Even the Jewish people” (230), he leaves that out too (probably wisely).11 And when she ends by telling the anti-Islamists that they should be ashamed, “Nasruddin did not translate that” either (231). But even more important is the answer to the question of what Asma should tell her son: “he is Muslim, but he is also American. Or isn’t he?” (231). Mohammad Khan’s father also wonders “about whether this country has a place for us” (195). Waylaid by the journalist, Alyssa Speir, after the forum, he demands that she print, “I, Mohammad Khan, am an American, and I have the same rights as every other American” (261). But the answer, tragically, to all these questions is in the negative.

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After her speech, Asma briefly becomes a media sensation, with an invitation to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show and t-shirts printed “showing a raised hand and the words ‘Let her speak’” (243). But with notoriety comes media scrutiny, and it quickly comes out that she is in the country illegally, and so, she must leave. America has no place for her. But before she is deported, Asma is murdered, stabbed on the street, but by who, Waldman does not say, even though there are no end of possibilities (258). The Submission ends with an epilogue that takes place 20 years later. Claire Burwell’s son, William, and his girlfriend, Molly, “hoped to make [a documentary] to mark the twentieth anniversary of the memorial competition” (286).We learn that Mohammad Khan has enjoyed such a brilliant career that the Museum of New Architecture in New York put on a retrospective called “Mohammad Khan American Architect” (286). The title seems inappropriate, as Khan does not live in the United States, and most of his work is “in the Middle East, India, or China” (286). Molly’s first question is “Why did you leave America?” (292), and Khan responds that his father was right: America does not have a place for him. So, Khan decided that he “might as well work somewhere where the name Mohammad wouldn’t be a liability” (292). America, post 9/11, has no place Muslims.12 In his analysis of 9/11 fiction, Richard Gray praises fiction that emphasizes “the heterogeneous character of the United States,” fiction that tries “to reimagine disaster by presenting us with an America situated between cultures.”13 Waldman’s novel is much more pessimistic, as she focuses on the intellectual and cultural reduction of the United States and the impossibility of a “transnational” United States. It would be comforting to dismiss the events of this novel as temporary, the result of an America “in the grip of some frenzy, possessed almost, at that time” (295), but the election of Donald Trump, the repeated attempts at banning Muslims from entering the United States, and the proliferation and mainstreaming of “fake news” and conspiracy theories collectively demonstrate how Waldman’s anatomy of post-9/11 America remains relevant, and frighteningly prescient. ***

Jodi Picoult and Domestic Terrorism Most of the terrorist events in this book fall under the rubric of international terrorism, that is to say, people of one place crossing borders to commit violence against people of another state, usually because the terrorists see their targets as oppressing them somehow. Even when the two inhabit the same space, as in Israel, Algiers, and Ireland, the object is the same: the terrorists consider their victims occupiers, and want them gone. Nationalism or religious grievance in one guise or another motivates the violence, and both sides agree that there is no

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commonality between them. The victims see the terrorists as “Other”; the terrorists see their targets as an undifferentiated mass of oppressors. Neither sees the other as fully human. But over the course of this book’s writing, in the United States, domestic terrorism inspired by white nationalism has eclipsed international terrorism as the primary worry.14 At a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee in May, 2019, the FBI’s Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division, Michael McGarrity, testified that “there have been more arrests and deaths caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years.”15 At another hearing a month later (June, 2019), Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan reiterated this view, calling “white supremacist extremist violence” a “huge issue” and “an evolving and increasingly concerning threat.”16 The shift began under Barack Obama, and it “has surged since President Trump took office,” thanks to his refusal to categorically condemn white nationalists and his use of inflammatory, racist rhetoric.17 But while the source and the ideology of the violence has shifted, the rhetoric of unspeakability has remained constant. For example, after Robert Bowers invaded the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, killing eleven elderly worshippers, the responses frequently referred to how the act, as Edward Coke put it, is “sine Nomine, without any name which might bee adaquatum sufficient to expresse it.”18 A rabbi at a vigil for the victims said “There are no words to describe what took place at The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last Shabbat”; in a letter to the editor to the IndyStar, the correspondent writes, “‘Words cannot convey how heartbroken we are, as we send condolences to the families and friends of those murdered in this unspeakable act of terrorism’; and the President of Mt. Holyoke College, Sonya Stephens, called this deed an “unspeakable act of hatred.”19 Similarly, after a white nationalist killed twenty people in an El Paso Walmart, Senator Ted Cruz issued a statement calling the event an “unspeakable evil,” and after the mass shooting in Dayton, OH (Rep. John Yarmuth [Kentucky]), which left nine people dead and 27 injured, tweeted “Unspeakable acts of terror and violence in Ohio and Texas” (August 4, 2019, 7:48 a.m.). To my knowledge, the only novelist (so far) to confront this new form of terrorism is Jodi Picoult, with her 2016 novel, Small Great Things. Picoult’s book tells the story of an African-American nurse accused of murdering a newborn whose parents are white nationalists and vicious racists. Significantly, Picoult writes each chapter from the perspective of a particular character: Ruth Jefferson, the nurse; Kennedy Mcquarrie, her public defender; and Turk Bauer, the neo-Nazi whose child has died. Writing from Ruth Jefferson’s perspective, i.e., a White person imagining what it must be like to be a Black person in America, leads Picoult to do something she had not done before, that is, consider “what it might mean to be a person of color; what historical and current struggles are faced; what it means to not find representation in everything from literature to television to publishing contracts

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203

to police departments.”20 But imagining the African-American experience sympathetically is not the nearly insurmountable artistic challenge Picoult must overcome, as there are innumerable books and articles detailing the overt racism and lesser slights that African-Americans must face every day. Imagining the mind and world of Turk Bauer in a way that enlists the reader’s empathy, however, is a different story. Richard Jackson and others have powerfully argued that novelists should not depict terrorists as “caricatures and stereotypical human ‘monsters,’” but instead, present the reader with “understandable, rational human beings.”21 But that works only when the author or film-maker has some degree of sympathy or agreement with the terrorists’ perspective, which is the case for almost all of the works previously discussed in the previous chapters. But is this possible with Turk Bauer? The man is an avowed racist; he drops the n-word at every opportunity; he joined a racist gang that beat up African-Americans, Jews, and homosexuals; he beat his father to a pulp because his father was gay; his father-in-law, Francis Mitchum, is white supremacist legend; his wife, Brittany, is an even more vicious racist than he is; Bauer runs a white power web site; he has a swastika tattooed to his head; and he demanded that Ruth stay away from his newborn son because she is Black, then has her charged with murder when the infant dies. Turk Bauer, in other words, distills the ideology and worldview of Patrick W. Crusius (the El Paso shooter), Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers, and John T. Earnest (who shot up a synagogue in Poway, California in April, 2019). Picoult adopts four strategies for enlisting the reader’s sympathy and making this character understandable. First, and in a sense, foremost, there is no denying the pain both Turk and his wife, Brittany, feel at the loss of their newborn. Even though the reader (presumably) is repulsed by their ideology, they are also grieving parents, and so we feel compassion for them, just as we feel compassion for Frank Gallagher’s loss. Second, while Turk Bauer runs a white power website that allows people to rant and rave anonymously, while he makes any number of deeply offensive statements, and commits any number of assaults, including against his own father, he (like Updike’s jihadist in Terrorist) does not do anything that would truly put him beyond the pale. Unlike the racists mentioned previously,Turk Bauer kills nobody. When he tries to organize “a day of vengeance to honor my son” (246), the goal is the same as the Israelis’ and Black September’s in Spielberg’s Munich:“something visible that gets us noticed” (247). But, crucially, he draws the line at murder: “I’m talking vandalism. Good old-fashioned fights. Firebombs. Anything short of a casualty” (246; my emphasis). Just as Hany Abu-Assad made suicide bombers more acceptable by making them more selective in their targets than they actually were in reality, Picoult makes Turk Bauer tolerable by dropping white nationalism’s murderousness. Third, unlike Pontecorvo, Updike, and Spielberg, among others, Picoult does not try to justify or understand the terrorist’s ideology or sense of grievance. Unlike, DeLillo’s Martin Ridnour, who puts 9/11 into a larger, historical contest

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that makes this event comprehensible, or even Henry James, who understands that radicalism stems from the “hideous social inequality” (The Princess Casamassima, 165) of Victorian society, Picoult never gives the slightest hint that white nationalism has the slightest legitimacy. Instead, Picoult tries to explain how Turk Bauer became susceptible to these toxic beliefs. Picoult traces the origin of Bauer’s racism to his broken, dysfunctional family. After Turk’s brother dies in a collision with an African-American, “everything fell apart” (24). His parents split up, with his father going “to live in a condo where everything was green” and his “mother started drinking” to the point where she passes out on her job minding a child with Down’s Syndrome, leading to her dismissal (24). With both parents unavailable, young Turk has to move in with his grandfather, who introduces Turk to the values of toxic masculinity. After his grandfather abandons Turk at a gas station, forcing him to put into practice the tracking skills his grandfather imparted, Turk learns that anger “is a renewable source” (25). After he finds his grandfather and tries to punch him, his grandfather imparts another lesson: that fighting will “make a man out of you” (25). But then, his grandfather dies suddenly, leaving Turk Bauer alone, without any adult guidance, and he “reacted the way I reacted to everything those days—by getting into trouble” (29). His mother has no presence in his life (“sometimes she blended into the walls and I walked right part her without realizing she was in the room” [29]), and neither does his father. Enter Raine Tesco, who works at the same coffee house as Turk, and who initiates Turk into the white nationalist universe. Picoult emphasizes that it is not so much the ideology that attracts Turk, but the sense of belonging. “Raine,” Turk says, “was the first person who really got me” (29; emphasis in the original), and when Raine invites Turk to a white supremacist meet-up, he tells Turk that he “told everyone you’re coming. They’re psyched to meet you” (30). Turk is overjoyed because “No one was ever psyched to meet me” (30; emphasis in the original). Toward the end of the book, after Turk has renounced white supremacy, he explains his violence in these terms: “I used to beat people up because I was hurting so bad, and either I was going to hurt them, or I was going to hurt myself ” (456). But Turk Bauer joins the white supremacist movement in the first place for the same reason Updike’s Ahmad Ashmawy joins radical Islam: “After a life of barely belonging, he is on the shaky verge of a radiant centrality” (Terrorist, 234; my emphasis). Lonely, adrift, without proper role models to guide him, furious at how his life is turning out, not knowing who to blame, white nationalists give Turk Bauer a home, a family, and a purpose. This does not excuse him, but it helps explain why someone would find white nationalism attractive and compelling.22 But if Picoult reassures by giving Turk Bauer a backstory that (one hopes) does not apply to most of her readers, she undoes any sense of security by shading the visual and cultural distinctions between Turk’s world and the rest of white America.When Turk is summoned to meet Francis Mitchum at his house, a child’s birthday party is in progress which combines the ordinary with the horrific.

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On the one hand,Turk hears people in the kitchen “exploding one at a time with commands: Get the plates! Don’t forget the ice cream!” (99; emphasis in the original), and he is nearly run down by a mob of little kids, all about five years old, rushing to the piñata. All very charming, and no different than any other kid’s birthday party in America. Then the reader discover that the piñata is “a papier-mâché [n----r] hanging from a noose” (98). Even more frightening is how white nationalists are indistinguishable from everyone else. As we have seen, generally speaking, terrorists are considered a breed apart from the common run of humanity. As Anna in Falling Man puts it, “they’re a million miles outside your life” (64). But Frank Mitchum’s great insight is that to be truly effective, you have to erase the distinctions. So, Bauer reports, “he told us to grow our hair out. To go to college. To join the military. To blend in” (83; my emphasis). Bauer says, “it was even more terrifying to people to know we walked and lived among them unseen” (83), and he’s right. After Kennedy McQuarrie tells her husband that there were “skinheads in the gallery” at Ruth’s arraignment, he wants to know, “Like, with suspenders and flight jackets and the boots and everything?” (152). But Kennedy says no. In fact, “they looked just like us,” and that’s what makes them “pretty terrifying. I mean, what if your next-door neighbor was a white supremacist and you didn’t know it” (153). Picoult’s point is not so much that they walk among us, disguised, like Conrad’s Professor. Rather, she wants to emphasize how the distinctions between white supremacists and the book’s white, liberal readers are not as distinct, as firm, as absolute as we might like to think. But Picoult’s point goes beyond how white nationalists do not look any different than other people of a similar complexion. Rather, her point is that white nationalism is not extrinsic to American culture, but a virus that lives deep within it.White nationalism and racism are part of the very fabric of American culture. Just as Shakespeare breaks down the barrier between legitimate and illegitimate violence in Macbeth, so does Picoult blue the absolute distinction between the extremes of white nationalism and the rest of American culture.The book asks the reader to look into a mirror, and in a corner, almost hidden, we will see Turk Bauer. To conclude, Picoult’s treatment of white nationalism parallels the other treatments of terrorism in this book by inviting the reader to ask hard questions of ourselves and our world. Picoult says in an interview included at the end of the book that writing Small Great Things “made me take a good hard look at myself and not find a very flattering portrait” (507), and that is the point. We would like to think that terrorists are wholly “Other.” But they are not.

Notes 1 Amy Waldman, The Submission (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013); Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man’s Garden (New York: Knopf, 2013). All further references will be to these editions, and cited parenthetically. 2 “Interview: Mystery Is All There Is,” Guernica, August 15, 2013. www.guernicamag. com/mystery-is-all-there-is/.

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3 Ibid. For DeLillo and Orientalism, see Pöhlmann, “Collapsing Identities,” 51; on Updike and Islamophobia, see Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful,” 487–488. 4 Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man’s Garden (New York: Knopf, 2013). All further references will be to this edition and cited parenthetically. 5 “‘Why We Are Fighting You,’” The Al Qaeda Reader, 197. 6 “Remarks by the President Upon Arrival [at the South Lawn],” September 16, 2001. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2. html. 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE. 8 Arin Keeble, “The Multidirectional Memorialization of 9/11 in Amy Waldman’s The Submission,” in The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 165–187; Catherine Morley, “The Architecture of Memory and Memorialization in Amy Waldman’s The Submission,” in 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature, ed. Catherine Morley (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 185–200; Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 131–144. 9 Gray, After the Fall, 17. 10 See the Introduction, 14. 11 Like Aslam, Waldman does not gloss over the anti-Semitic strain within Islam. 12 Cf. Matthew Leggatt “Deflecting Absence: 9/11 Fiction and the Memorialization of Change,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 18.2 (2016), 217. 13 Gray, After the Fall, 17. 14 I do not mean to suggest that international terrorism has disappeared. ISIS, for example, despite being wiped out as a territorial unit, remains a potent and ongoing threat. See, for example, “Mossad Foiled 50 ISIS Terror Attacks in 20 Countries,” 12 in Turkey alone, The Jerusalem Post, July 9, 2019. www.jpost.com/Israel-News/ Mossad-prevented-50-terror-attacks-in-20-countries-including-Turkey-595122. 15 “Confronting the Rise of Domestic Terrorism in the Homeland,” www.fbi.gov/news/ testimony/confronting-the-rise-of-domestic-terrorism-in-the-homeland. 16 Evan Perez, “FBI Has Seen Significant Rise in White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism in Recent Months,” CNN, June 28, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/politics/fbiwhite-supremacist-domestic-terror/index.html. 17 Wesley Lowry, Kimberly Kindy, and Andrew Ba Tran, “In the United States, Right-Wing Violence is on the Rise,” Washington Post, November 25, 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-the-united-states-right-wing-violenceis-on-the-r ise/2018/11/25/61f7f24a-deb4-11e8-85df-7a6b4d25cfbb_story. html?utm_term=.6a0e83a89d1d. 18 A True and Perfect Relation, sig. D3-D4r. 19 Quoted in Karl Grossman, “There Are No Words,” Times of Israel, November 4, 2018, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/there-are-no-words/; “Letters: An Unspeakable Act of Terrorism in Pittsburgh,” IndyStar, November 1, 2018, www.indystar.com/story/ opinion/readers/2018/11/01/letters-editor/1779231002/; Sonya Stephens, “In Sorry at the Hateful Act in Pittsburgh,” October 27, 2018, www.mtholyoke.edu/president/ sorrow-hateful-act-pittsburgh. 20 Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things (New York: Ballantine Books, 2016; rpt. 2018), 507. All references will be to this edition, and cited parenthetically. 21 Richard Jackson, “Terrorism,Taboo, and Discursive Resistance:The Agonistic Potential of the Terrorism Novel,” 402. 22 Nonetheless, Picoult, like Moulesssehoul, also outlines the distinctions between the various strands of white nationalism. See pp. 250–251. Picoult also recognizes the importance of the web in disseminating white nationalist ideology (156–158).

INDEX

9/11 3–7, 14, 19, 60, 131–132, 170, 193; and literature 146–187; and trauma 148; and unspeakability 146–149 Abu-Assad, Hany: Paradise Now 14 Adams, Gerry 87 Afghanistan 188 Ain-Abid Massacre 101n35 Albright, Madeleine 190–191 al-Chir, Hussein Abad 122–123 al-Gashey, Adnan 128–130, 143n41 Algiers 201 Al Qaeda 2, 4, 132, 146, 157–158, 172; revolutionary America model for 157–158, 173 Alter, Jonathan 147, 153, 158 “Alternative facts” 195 amazon.com 1 Anarchists 7, 53–54, 88; conflated with Fenians 39, 40, 47; and Henry James 51–52 anti-Semitism 127; and Islam 152, 191, 206n11 Appelbaum, Robert 6, 16n23, 16n33, 18n57, 32n18; 32n20, 35; and Alexis Packnadel 148 Arad, Michael 147 Asad, Talal 144n57 Aslam, Nadeen: The Blind Man’s Garden 188–192; reasons for writing 188–189 Assad, Bashar 4

Atta, Mohammed 180 Attlee, Prime Minister Clement 100n5 Barlow, William 21, 24 Baudrillard, Jean 147, 169 Bedouin 134 Begin, Menachim 115 Benecke, Ingrid 34n47 Bennett, Tony 148–149 Berger, James 147 Berger, Harry Jr. 23 Bernstein, Barton J. 4 bin Laden, Osama 5–7, 64, 96, 152, 188–189 Bingham, Jonathan B. 109, 131 Black September 107, 124, 169 Bloody Sunday 87, 93 Boece, Hector 27 Boehmer, Elleke: and Stephen Morton 8 Bowers, Robert 202–203 Boxall, Peter 187n107 British Newspaper Archive 36–37 Buchanan, John H. 108–109 Burke, Edmund 35–36 Bush, Jeb 8–9 Bush, President George W. 152–153, 190 Butler, Judith 13 Carr, Matthew 48, 141n2 Carson, Ciaran 90, 92, 95, 104n102 Caruth, Cathy 175–177

208 Index

Cecil, Robert (Earl of Salisbury) 21 Charlie Hebdo attack 8–9 Chomsky, Noam 13, 183n24 Chua, Amy 93 CIA 2 Clancy, Tom: Patriot Games 88 Clutterbuck, Lindsay 61n13 Coke, Edward 24, 27, 88, 146–147, 202 Cole, Sarah 17n57 Conrad, Joseph 173; Heart of Darkness 168; “The Informer” 63n80; the Professor anticipating Al Qaeda 60; The Secret Agent 5, 37, 54, 56–60, 66–67, 88, 94, 160; and sympathy for terrorist motivations 57; and unspeakability 58–59 Craig, Sir James 86 Crawford, Joseph 6 Crenshaw, Martha 4 Cromwell, Oliver 86 Crozier, Brian 67–70, 82, 108 Crusius, Patrick W. 203 cyberwarfare 4 Davitt, Michael 13 Dayton, OH 202 De Valera, Eamon 86 DeLillo, Don 14, 188; and 9/11, 169; Cosmopolis 169; and doubt 180–182; Falling Man 168–182, 191, 205; Mao II 168–169; Players 168; reception 186n80; “In the Ruins of the Future” 169–172; and trauma 174–179, 182 Department of Homeland Security 1 Derricke, John 89 Derrida Jacques 13, 147 Dershowitz, Alan 7 “Detectives and their Work” 7, 38–39, 67, 109 Dickens, Charles 7, 38 Dien Bien Phu 70 Digby, Sir Edward 20 Divell of the Vault, The 25 domestic terrorism 202 Drew, Richard 175–176 Dylan, Bob 14 dynamite 36–37, 48 Earnest, John T. 203 Eisenberg, Deborah: “Twilight of the Superheroes” 162 Elizabeth I 86 El Paso, TX 202

English, Richard 4 enhanced interrogation 191 Falk, Richard 109–110 Faludi, Susan 153, 166 Fanon, Frantz 68, 71 Fawcett, E. Douglas 54 Fawkes, Guy 20 FBI 1–2 Fenian Bombing Campaign 7, 36–39, 45, 58, 146, 170 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 3 Foucault, Michel 23 Foer, Jonathan Safran 148, 186n89 Foreman, Simon: and Macbeth 29–30 Frank, Michael C. 47 Franklin, Thomas E. 153 French Revolution 506 Freud, Sigmund 174–176; “fort/da game” 177–178, 182 Front de libération nationale (FLN) 68, 70–71, 101n37, 102n40 Gager, William: Pyramis 25 Galula, David 66, 81 Garnet, Henry 6, 24 Gavron, Assaf 142n19 George III, King of England 158 Gilman, Benjamin A. 109 Gladstone, William 43, 45 Glob, P.V.: The Bog People 92 Goldberg, Jonathan 23, 27 Good Friday Agreement (1988) 86, 87 Gray, Richard 18n57, 148, 183n17, 193, 201 Greengrass, Paul 97; Bloody Sunday 87–89, 96–99 Greenstock, Sir Jeremy 3 Greer, Tom 62n46; A Modern Daedalus 44–51, 71 Griffith, George 54 Guantanamo Bay 129, 157 Gunpowder Plot 6, 19–23, 37, 170; and 9/11, 19–20, 31n2, 35; and Macbeth 24–33 Gwinne, Matthew 27–30 Hakewill, George 22 Hamas 4 Hamid, Mohsin: reasons for writing 161–164; The Reluctant Fundamentalist 161–168; “Why Do They Hate Us” 161 Hamilton, Lee 108

Index 

Hammond, Graham 16n33 Hamshari, Mahmoud 122, 124, 126 Hartnell, Anna 149–150 Haspel, Paul 82 Heaney, Seamus 13, 89–93; Bog poems 92–93; “Docker” 91–92; “Feeling into Words” 92; “The Flight Path” 90–91; “Intimidation” 91 Henry III, King of France 22 Henry IV, King of France 22 Henry, Émile 4, 55, 58 Herman, Alison 44 Herman, Peter C. 33n32 Herring, Francis: Pietas Pontificia 22 Hitchcock, Alfred 76 Hoffman, Bruce 141n2 Holderness, Graham: and Bryan Loughrey 23–24 Holinshed’s Chronicles 27–28, 30 Holocaust 3, 6, 9, 17, 113, 117, 127–129 Horne, Alistair 101n35 Houen, Alex 16, 17n57 Hussein, King of Jordan 120–121 Hussein, Saddam 157 Ignatieff, Michael 101n33 International Terrorism: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on the Near East 108–110 Ireland: Home Rule Act (1913) 86; Land War 44–45; the Troubles 5, 86–90, 201; Unionist terrorism 93, 103n72 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 7, 88, 93; and terrorism in England 87 ISIS 2, 132 Israel 108–109, 201; 1948 War 113; as “the Catastrophe” 115 Iwo Jima: and 9/11 firefighters 148, 153 Jackson, Richard 10, 44, 46, 49, 179, 203; Lee Jarvis and Jeroen Gunning 5 James VI/I 19, 21, 26–27, 86 James, Henry 173; “The Art of Fiction” 52; Hawthorne 51–52; A Little Tour of France 51–52; The Princess Casamassima 51–53, 55, 57, 149, 203; and sympathy for terrorist motivations 52–53 Jameson, Fredric 187n114 Jenkins, Brian 109, 112, 141n2 jihadi verse 14 Jonas, George 131, 142n36 Juergensmeyer, Mark 5 Julius Caesar 3

209

Kaplan, E. Ann 174–175, 186n87 Karl, Frederick 56 Kastan, David Scott 23, 29 Kauffman, Linda 182n7, 185n70 Keily, Benedict: “Proxopera” 89, 90, 95 Kelly, Aaron 105n114 Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer 103n78, 105n114 Kenniston, Ann: and Jeanne F. Quinn 183n14 Kerry, Secretary of State John 8–9 Khadra,Yasmina see Moulessehoul, Mohammed Ki-moon, Secretary General Ban 3 Kingsolver, Barbara 147 Kirkland, Richard 87 Kiryat Shmona 108 Koran 156, 181 Kushner, Tony 120, 131 Lanzmann, Claude 17 Laqueur, Walter 2 le Carrè, John 110–111, 114, 117, 120, 125, 132, 149; controversy over 111; The Little Drummer Girl 110–120, 126, 129, 140, 160 League of Nations 2 Lesser, Zachary 31n11 Lemon, Rebecca 23, 32n18 Lennon, John 98 Limbaugh, Rush 196 Lincoln, Bruce 5 Lockwood, Bert B. Jr. 109 Mackay, Donald 54 Madden, Deirdre 90, 95 Maher, Bill 148 Mahon, Derek 92 McAleenan, Kevin 202 McGarrity, Michael 202 McInerney, Jay 148 McKay, Jim 120–121, 125 McNamee, Eion: Resurrection Man 93–96 Meir, Prime Minister Golda 120, 121 Melchiori, Barbara A. 17n57 Mellen, Joan 101n101 Meredith, Isabel see Rossetti, Helen: and Olivia Miller, Elizabeth C. 17n57 Milton, John: “In Quintum Novembris” 22–23, 29 Molin, Nicolo 19–20 Montague, John 88–89

210 Index

Mormonism 41–42 Morozov, Nikolai 37, 60 Morrison, Danny 90, 104n91 Moulessehoul, Mohammed [Yasmina Khadra]: The Attack 133–141, 206n22 Mountbatten, Louis (Lord Mountbatten) 88 Mullholland, Marc 103n67 Mulry, David 63n78 Munich Olympics Massacre 7, 107–111, 120–121, 132–133, 169–170; and Yassir Arafat 142n37 Nachaev, Sergei 60 Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Will”) 37, 58 Naydan, Liliana M. 149 Nixon, President Richard 120, 123 Nobel, Alfred 36 Norbrook, David 23 nostalgia: and Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist 166–168; post-9/11 148; and Updike: Terrorist 153–154 Nussbaum, Martha 18n68 Ó Donghail, Deaglán 15n8, 18n57, 43 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 7, 110 Obama, President Barack 1, 157, 202 Orgel, Stephen 33n47 Paget, Julian 66–67, 71, 82 Pape, Robert 143n55 Parker, Michael 103n81 Parnell, Charles 40, 44, 61n35 Pater, Walter 43 Paul, H. N. 23 Peres, Shimon 133 Phillips, Sir Edward 26 Picoult, Jodi: Small Great Things 201–206 Pontecorvo, Gillo 68, 71, 73, 75–76, 78, 84–85, 117, 121, 203; The Battle of Algiers 65, 68–86, 96, 98–99, 108, 121, 149; and counterterrorism theory 68–71; “three women, three bombs sequence” 75–80, 84; and torture 82 Price, Reynolds 148 Qutb, Sayyid 151–152, 156, 184n27 Raleigh, Sir Walter 89 Rand Corporation 67 Redfield, Marc 17n57, 60n2, 183n14 Ricks, Christopher 14

Roberts, Morley 54–55 Rogers, Secretary of State William P. 120 Roof, Dylann 203 Rossa, O’Donovan 36–38, 48, 61n13 Rossetti, Helen and Olivia: A Girl Among the Anarchists 53–56, 58 Roth, Eric 120 Rothberg, Michael 183n17 Rowe, John Carlos 186n88 Rushdie, Salman 169, 183n20 Said, Edward 85, 103n64 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 3, 6, 22 Salameh, Ali Hassan 123–124 Salvador, Santiago 58 Sandy Hook Elementary School 5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 71 Scanlan, Margaret 17n57, 63n68, 87, 103n82 Schickel, Richard 131–132 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon 148, 182 Second Intifada 133 Shakespeare, William: Macbeth 23–34, 149; and Simon Foreman’s report 29–30 Shankill murders 4 Sharon, Prime Minister Ariel 133 Shaw, Tony 102n42, 143n54 Sherry, Norman 64n91 Shohat, Robert and Ella Stam 75 Shpayer-Makov, Haia 61n20 Simpson, David 16n42, 147 slave trade 42 Solinas, Franco 68, 71, 78, 101n27 Solomon, Deborah 161 Sontag, Susan 148–149 Spahr, Juliana 13 Special Powers Act (1922) 87 Spiegelman, Art 147 Spielberg, Stephen: Munich 120–133, 140, 203; and response to controversy 131–133; and the World Trade Center 131–133 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 3, 6, 22 Stampnizky, Lisa 100n4, 107, 141n2 state terrorism 67–68 Stern, Howard 148 Stevenson, Robert Louis and Fanny Van de Grift: The Dynamiter 39–44, 52 Storey, Michael L. 103n81 suicide bombing 5, 133–134, 170; and targeting Jewish children 144n68; and women 144n61

Index 

Taber, Robert 67, 102n39 Tal al-Zataar 114 Taliban 4, 188 Taylor, Antony 53 terrorism: and 9/11 146–149; and the atomic bomb 4, 65; and Conrad 58–59; definitions of 2–5; early uses of the term 35–37; and critical theory 13; and literary criticism 17n57; and Palestinians 107–110; and speakability 65–68, 88–90, 172; by the state 67–68, 96; taboo against understanding 7–9, 13–14, 65, 109–110, 131, 141n18, 147–149, 153, 160; ubiquity 1; and unspeakability 5–9, 13, 37–39, 107–110, 190–192; and white nationalism 202; after World War II 65 Tesimond, Oswald 20–21 Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret 87–88 Thayer, Charles W. 66 Thomas, Samuel 133, 184n46 Thornton, Thomas Perry 65–67, 69–70, 73, 81, 108, 146 Thynne, Francis 27 trauma: and 9/11, 148, 174–175 Tree of Life Synagogue Massacre 202 Trump, President Donald 201–202 United Nations 2 unspeakability: and 9/11 146–149; and Aslam: The Blind Man’s Garden 190–192; and DeLillo: “In the Ruins of the Future” 169–171; and dynamite 37–39; Falling Man 170–172, 182, 191, 205; and A Girl Among Anarchists 54–55; and the Gunpowder Plot 21–23; and Joseph Conrad 57–59; and the King David Hotel bombing 65, 100n5; and the Munich Olympics Massacre

211

107–110, 120–121; and suicide bombing 133–134; and terrorism 5–9, 49, 54; and the Troubles 87–88, 93–94; and Waldman: The Submission 196; and white nationalist terrorism 202 Updike, John: In the Beauty of the Lillies 183n25; The Coup 155, 184n40; The Rabbit Novels 154–155, 184n37; reasons for writing 149–150, 160; reception of 149, 158; Terrorist 13–14, 149–161, 168, 173, 182, 188, 203–204 Versluys, Kristiaan 17n57, 147, 177, 183n14 Villiers, George (Duke of Buckingham) 3, 6 Wake, Paul 23 Waldman, Amy: The Submission 188, 193–201 Ward, Ian 18n68 Washington, George 158 Watt, Ian 63n78, 64n91 white nationalism 202, 206n22 Wienberg, Leonard: Ami Pedahzur and Sivan H. Hoeffer 3 Wieseltier, Leon 131 Wilcox, Leonard 169 Wills, Gary 23–25 Wilson, E. O. 93 Wilson, Richard 23 Wright, Lawrence 160 Yacef, Saadi 78, 84, 102n40 Žižek, Slavoj 147 Zulaika, Joseba: and William Douglass 7–8, 65, 110, 141n18, 147–148, 153 Zwaiter, Wael 122, 124, 142n36