Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction

Introduction

Introduction I n the wake of the Second World War, as our Japanese and West German enemies turned into model citizens working economic miracles, the fear and loathing that fascism had so recently inspired were channeled into Communism. Some forty years later, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the evil empire called for a “new public enemy number one,” and terrorism stepped into that role (Said 149). Now it is terrorists who lurk in every shadow, images of terrorist attacks that fill our television screens, and fears of new varieties—nuclear, biological, cyberterrorism —that drive calls for increased surveillance and larger defense budgets. If such Orwellian transformations in the identity of the enemy do not make us skeptical, an element of construction in political and journalistic rhetoric about terrorism, even in terrorist acts themselves, seems inescapable. Bombings and hijackings begin with a few people plotting violence for maximum exposure, come to us on television, where distinctions between news and entertainment are ever more tortuous , and quickly pass into the popular imagination, into blockbuster movies and paperback thrillers. Yet however mediated and manipulated it may be, the terrorist story chronicles actual deaths; however low its casualties in comparison with those exacted by terrorizing states, they are real enough; they have historical and social origins and consequences . This paradoxical affiliation between our violence and our fictions lies at the heart of those complex novels about terrorism sometimes called “literary thrillers,” as vital to them as gore and mayhem are to the blockbuster. Plotting Terror is a study of contemporary novels in which terrorist themes lead to questions about writing and violence. In each of these novels, writers and terrorists encounter each other, resuming a motif of 1 the writer as terrorist’s victim, rival, or double, which first appears in Dostoevsky’s Demons, James’s The Princess Casamassima, and Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. I ask why so many writers have been drawn to terrorists and what affinities they find between literary and terrorist plots, between literature and violence. I see both writers and terrorists in these novels as remnants of a romantic belief in the power of marginalized persons to transform history. I argue that serious terrorist fiction develops an increasingly pessimistic account of the novel’s social power, a pessimism that some recent novelists extend to the revolutionary impulse itself. All the same, and because, as a Don DeLillo character puts it, “Writers know how reality is created,” such fictions elucidate the process that allows militants, journalists, and politicians to construct terrorism as a political reality. The theoretical conception of my topic—that terrorism is both actual killing and a fictional construct, that fiction embodies an acute critique of the power of discourse as opposed to the power of the individual’s self-assertion—owes a great deal to deconstruction and neo-Marxism and will be familiar to readers with a grounding in the New Historicism and cultural studies. In contrast both to a New Criticism that once dismissed history and politics as “themes” or “background” irrelevant to the literariness of the literary text, and to an old-fashioned Marxism that insisted that an economic base determines the superstructure of the literary text, New Historicists assert a “reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history” (Montrose 20). This conception of the historicity of texts owes much to neo-Marxists such as Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, who argued that literary texts generate rather than simply reflect an ideology. Althusser called attention to the “displacements and substitutions” in texts and Macherey to their silences. Although deconstruction often seemed ahistorical, even Paul de Man emphasized, as did the neo-Marxists, that what we take for history or reality is often fictional: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality . . . the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence” (363). Eight years later, Jacques Derrida argued even more strongly that deconstruction introduced into literary studies a new “multidisciplinarity” and was “set into motion by a concern with history, even if it leads to destabilizing certain concepts of history” (376). 2 Plotting Terror No theorist, however, is more central to understanding the relations of terrorists and novelists than Michel Foucault, who thoroughly destabilizes conventional accounts of political history. Discounting such traditional staples...