Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The invention of dynamite in 1867 was also strategically crucial because the “infernal engine” could be easily concealed, even planted in advance, improving the odds that the user could escape undetected. 2. One might argue, however, that in the nuclear age warfare has become increasingly “symbolic.” Since regular wide-scale use of nuclear weapons is a practical impossibility, the cold war strategies of deterrence quickly developed into what anthropologists call ritual combat: “Setting aside obvious differences in scale and technology, as well as the fact that intimidation through nuclear deterrence is thought to be based on retaliatory anticipation alone, whereas the intimidation of terrorism springs from concrete acts of terror, it is the presence of similar premises in both kinds of terror (threat, simulation, bluffing, symbolic posturing) that is most instructive” (Zulaika and Douglass 80). 3. See Representative Thomas Luken’s charge in 1985 that “TV becom[es] . . . a coproducer of hostage drama, coproducer with the terrorists” (quoted in Weimann and Winn 264). 4. Miller notes that the term disorganization was initially intended to denote a more limited program of violence than was advocated by Nechaev’s “Catechism for Revolutionaries.” However, the more violent elements in the Land and Freedom movement rapidly took control. 5. Christopher Hitchens once publicly challenged Terrell E. Arnold, director of the Institute on Terrorism and Subnational Conflict, to produce a definition that was not “tautological or vacuous,” “a cliché . . . employed by all warring states . . . in denouncing their enemies,” or a “synonym . . . for ‘swarthy opponent of United States foreign policy.’” Arnold was unable to do so, perhaps because , as Alex Schmid discovered in 1983, experts use at least 109 definitions of terrorism (Zulaika and Douglass 97). 163 6. Several critics, readers of Foucault, remind us that literary realism arose at the same time as urban sociology and psychiatry, disciplines that also enact a “fantasy of surveillance” and stigmatize aberrations (Mehlman 124; Seltzer 52). See also the introduction to Armstrong and Tennenhouse, in which the editors claim that about half of the contributors to the volume accept the view that “writing is not so much about violence as a form of violence in its own right” (2). In their brief analysis of Jane Eyre the editors demonstrate how Jane’s power as a writer, reader, and speaker enables her to “build around herself a community that excludes those who do not think and feel and read and write as she does. . . . [Thus] the violence of an earlier political order maintained by overt forms of social control gives way to a more subtle kind of power that . . . works through the printed word upon mind and emotions rather than body and soul” (4). One might infer that the violence of writing might be used as a revolutionary tool, but Armstrong and Tennenhouse draw the familiar Foucauldian conclusion : “Successive phases of imperialism . . . have turned the violence of representation into the ubiquitous form of power that is the ultimate though elusive topic and target of this book” (9). For a passionate and reasoned critique of this tendency to collapse “what goes on in the interrogation cells of South Korea and South Africa with what happens . . . on a SoHo stage,” see Kubiak. “For no matter how irrational they may seem, terror and terrorism have their meanings, and those meanings, which become intelligible as difference, must be read before resistance can become possible. . . . Though certain kinds of theory may be violent as theory, to equate theory with shrapnel in the belly is to forget the real pain of the bodies upon which the theatrical performances of culture— whether as ‘art’ or as political violence—are founded” (157–59). 7. Crelinsten analyzed The New York Times Index, The London Times Index, the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, and the British Humanities Index. 1. Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the Rushdie Affair 1. In a telephone interview with Lorrie Moore, DeLillo confirmed “a connection between [Mao II] and the silencing” of Rushdie. “Mr. DeLillo said his planning and notes on the book preceded the Rushdie affair by a short time. He was one of the writers who read from Mr. Rushdie’s works in the tumultuous days just after Feb. 14, 1989. . . . By March 8, Mr. DeLillo had begun putting his own words on paper.” 2. For a fuller discussion of the Hawkes Bay incident see Ruthven, 45–47. Hawkes Bay is in Karachi; Fatima is the name of Muhammed’s daughter, the mother of the Shi’ites...