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Epilogue Conrad and the Unabomber I n an apocryphal story, taught as fact to American schoolchildren for a century, Abraham Lincoln is introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe. “Ah,” remarks the melancholy president, “so this is the little woman who made the great war.” Tiresomely, Stowe’s biographer points out that Lincoln never met the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but we can recognize folkloric truth when we see it. It was once possible to believe that an American president attributed the terrible war over which he presided to the power of a pen wielded by a person who never was allowed to vote in a United States election. For perhaps two generations after the French Revolution, writers were the half-acknowledged legislators of mankind, claiming real power, the kind that changes human institutions forever, and real moral authority. Though it is hard to imagine that the average mill hand in Manchester or Lowell took them as seriously as they took themselves, the reading public seems to have faithfully acknowledged their claims. The vision of the writer as revolutionary, Byron in Greece or Lamartine on the barricades in 1848, is too compelling to be abandoned easily, even or especially when it is accompanied by the expectation that the writer in old age will be a hoary sage, a Victor Hugo living in the comfort a grateful nation bestows on its benefactors. Such grand and hopeful views of the writer’s authority are the lighted backdrop that accentuates the dark outlines of terrorist fiction, that most pessimistic of genres, and supplies it with its deeper ironies. From James to Coetzee, novelists who imagine a bond between terrorist and writer assume that both are isolated and marginal, incapable of gaining a hearing in the ordinary language of civic life. Estranged from those they hope to represent, they plot to revolutionize society from its 155 shadows. Our fictional terrorists, to a man (and the occasional woman) are failures: betrayed like Stone’s Hamas, inept like Lessing’s IRA rejects , hopelessly torn, like McCarthy’s Jeroen, between the claims of high culture and the needs of the proletariat. Only those writers, such as Dostoevsky and DeLillo, who imagine terrorists more as rivals than secret sharers, are willing to concede them some success. With few exceptions, the serious terrorist novel portrays writers as petty and pretentious, their occasionally noble speeches masking an innate violence or a surly jealousy of more active and powerful people. As early as Henry James, the genre has considered the view, so often attributed to poststructural theory, that the author’s conscious intentions count for nothing and that works of literature always end by supporting the dominant ideology—that is, if they are heeded at all. Meanwhile, the social world moves further and further away from the model of organized society that underlies both eighteenth-century notions of social contract and nineteenth-century visions of organic community. As it does so, the very notion of the writer addressing humanity, Wordsworth ’s “man speaking to other men,” loses credibility. A mass culture sustained by a global electronic media does not listen to the single voice; perhaps, suggests Volodine, we are seeing the death of revolution along with the death of the novel. Having watched so many of our major novelists come to these grim conclusions, we can take particular interest in a series of newspaper and television stories that began running in the United States after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995. True to form, the major networks first broadcast the story that a man of “Islamic appearance” had been seen lurking in the vicinity of the explosion. The arrest of Timothy McVeigh a few hours later forced Americans to confront the reality of a homegrown terrorism that could be blamed neither on the international Communist conspiracy, by 1995 safely dead, nor the ferocious Arabs. The quest to discover what could trigger violence in clean-shaven former GIs such as McVeigh and his coconspirator, Terry Nichols, led quickly to—a novel. “Evidence of McVeigh’s admiration for a novel called The Turner Diaries,” Time magazine reported solemnly, “will aid the prosecution’s effort to portray him as a hate-filled radical” (“McVeigh”). A photocopy of a page from the novel turned up, along with a passage from John Locke, in the trunk of the car McVeigh was driving when he was arrested after the bombing. 156 Plotting Terror [3.145.175.243] Project MUSE...

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