Plotting Terror

Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction

Margaret Scanlan

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780813921921
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Is literature dangerous? In the romantic view, writers were rebels--Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of mankind"--poised to change the world. In relation to twentieth-century literature, however, such a view becomes suspect. By looking at a range of novels about terrorism, Plotting Terror raises the possibility that the writer's relationship to actual politics may be considerably reduced in the age of television and the Internet.

Margaret Scanlan traces the figure of the writer as rival or double of the terrorist from its origins in the romantic conviction of the writer's originality and power through a century of political, social, and technological developments that undermine that belief. She argues that serious writers like Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Doris Lessing, and Don DeLillo imagine a contemporary writer's encounter with terrorists as a test of the old alliance between writer and revolutionary.

After considering the possibility that televised terrorism is replacing the novel, or that writing, as contemporary theory would have it, is itself a form of violence, Scanlan asks whether the revolutionary impulse itself is dying--in politics as much as in literature. Her analyses take the reader on a fascinating exploration of the relationship between actual bombs and stories about bombings, from the modern world to its electronic representation, and from the exercise of political power to the fiction writer's power in the world.

Part I

The Terrorist Rival

1

Don DeLillo's
Mao II and the Rushdie Affair

Terror, like a toxic airborne event, floats across the deceptively shiny surfaces of Don DeLillo's fiction, turning the reassuring rituals of even suburban life—filling up at the self-service pump or playing golf—into desperate acts. The intersecting planes of that world, even at its glossiest, always include nameless dread, the possibility that the banal will erupt into violence, the clichés of the tabloid come to life. Not surprisingly, terrorists, cult murderers, assassins, and hit men have always been at home in that world, but Mao II (1991) marks a new phase, DeLillo's first extended exploration of the relationship between terrorists and writers. More starkly than his predecessors in the genre, DeLillo displays a contemporary world in which terrorism's televised narrative has replaced the novel, transforming the writer into an anonymous and voiceless hostage.

Whatever other influences may be at play in Mao II, since 14 February 1989, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his fatwa, or decree, it has been impossible to think about terrorists and writers without thinking of the Rushdie affair, that enormous political and media event that threatens to swallow up the actual Salman Rushdie, the actual Satanic Verses. Although Mao II contains no direct references to it, the questions the affair raises about the enmeshment of contemporary writers with electronic journalism, fundamentalism, and terrorism provide DeLillo's novel with its most pressing themes. Rushdie's novel and the author's fate make an inescapable context for reading Mao II.¹

The Satanic Verses (SV) begins with Rushdie's characteristic mixture of documentary realism, literary allusion, and magic: two Indian actors, who will share the interchangeable identities of the angel Gabriel and Satan, fall into the English Channel from a jet exploding at precisely 29,002 feet, the height of Mount Everest. Victims of a terrorist bombing modeled on the blowing up of an Air India Boeing 747 off the coast of Ireland in 1985, they survive miraculously to undergo more fantastic sufferings: one metamorphoses into a horned and hoofed Beelzebub, while the other, increasingly haunted by nightmares and pathological jealousy, is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and commits suicide. To those familiar with postmodern art, the novel's subsequent juxtapositions of Othello allusions with advertising jingles, or of fantasies about medieval Arabia with quasi-journalistic exposes of police brutality in contemporary England, scarcely seem surprising. Blurring history and fiction to make the historical appear fantastic is the stock in trade of such books. The 1983 Hawkes Bay incident, for example, in which a Pakistani woman, Naseem Fatima, led thirty-eight Shiah pilgrims to their deaths in the sea out of the mistaken belief that it would part to allow them to pass safely to the holy city of Kerbala, needs little fictional transformation to fit into the phantasmagoric world of Gibreel Farishta's unwelcome dreams.²

Similarly, to imagine the possibility, which lurks in an apocryphal tradition, that the Qu'ran might be an edited text, that Muhammed might briefly have allowed into it a few verses of satanic origin, seems harmless enough; retelling stories in new registers is, to those schooled on Ulysses, unastonishing.³ If we could read the novel innocent of all knowledge about book burnings and murdered translators, we would turn to leisurely explications—of its debts to James Joyce and The Thousand and One Nights, or its diversion of Our Mutual Friend into a musical called Friend! or “The Chums, as it was known in the business” (421).

This perspective, however, has largely been denied us. Operating in the best postmodern manner, history has violated the boundaries of this fiction. The Ayatollah Khomeini, mentioned once by name in the text and travestied in an extended episode as an exiled imam who returns to his homeland to stop time and wreak apocalyptic damage on his people, seemed to rise from its pages to condemn the author to death. And as he did so, as the protestors screamed and fell under police gunfire, the text seemed to offer its own sardonic commentary: “Fiend, the Imam is wont to thunder. Apostate, blasphemer, fraud”; “Those who listen to the Devil's verses, spoken in the Devil's tongue…will go to the Devil”; “Burn the books and trust the Book”; “Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven” (SV 209, 484, 211, 374).

Compelled to focus on its political and religious themes, and on the episode of the satanic verses especially, the well-trained Western reader has no difficulty agreeing with Rushdie's remarks in Imaginary Homelands (IH) that his novel “dissents…from imposed orthodoxies of all types…from the end of debate, of dispute, of dissent” (IH 396, emphasis in original). Rushdie's political aim is familiar: through modestly experimental devices—multiple narrators, time shifts, the violation of realistic decorum by improbable coincidences, magical events—to liberate the reader from the tyranny of an inerrant text. As in DeLillo's Libra, Robert Coover's Public Burning, or J. G. Farrell's Empire trilogy, storytelling in The Satanic Verses is meant to act on a world already saturated by narratives, urging the reader to consider an alternative perspective, hoping to free up some space in the real world for another interpretation of the patriotic myth, the official version, the sacred text. Though familiar to those of us who actually read such works, and for whom their views are already congenial—the Rosenbergs should not have been electrocuted, the Warren Commission Report is untrustworthy—the assumption that postmodern or experimental texts can transform the world is seldom tested in the world of actual politics. It is oddly touching, then, to read Ziaddin Sardar's observation that “since The Satanic Verses…we have had a long line of bearded academics telling us that magical realism is a new and liberating form of literature that benefits Third World folk” (305).

The Rushdie affair has become the exemplary instance of the postmodernist political novel encountering actual politics, actual violence. The deaths of Rushdie's Japanese translator and of at least fifteen protesters, and the miserable life imposed on the author, are elements that do not usually figure in reception studies. Nor is any Western branch of criticism prepared to read a text on the terms Muslim tradition regards as appropriate for the Qu'ran. According to believers, it is the perfect transcription of the voice of God; “as an ‘uncreated’ part of the godhead [it] cannot be translated” (Ruthven 55). Thus even the strictly verbal responses to Rushdie disorient one trained in the pieties of academic criticism. In the stream of outrage, the most fundamental assumption of literary discourse, that one actually reads the text one criticizes, was repeatedly flouted because, as the member of parliament who led the fight to ban the book in India, Syed Shahabuddin, pointed out, one “does not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is” (153).

Context, and the whole series of Western conventions surrounding parody and satire, fell by the wayside. Quite typical is the complaint of one Islamic critic quoting another's article in India Today: “Ayesha, the youngest wife of the Prophet…is shown, in the words of Madhu Jain…‘clad only in butterflies’ leading ‘an entire village, lemming-like into the Arabian Sea” (Dixit et al. 83), a view that conflates Rushdie's contemporary holy woman with the Prophet's wife because both are called Ayesha. The perception that Rushdie “portrays [the wives of the Prophet] as prostitutes” because he describes a brothel where twelve women assume the roles and names of the Prophet's wives was commonplace (Mustapha 38; see IH 397X⁴ Polemicists unfamiliar with the Jamesian injunction to grant the writer his donnee claimed that The Satanic Verses is blasphemous because Rushdie deliberately ignores such facts as the “mathematical proof that the Quran came directly from the Supreme Being because it is the only book in the world with an intricate mathematical interlocking formula” (Mustapha 56). In the United States, where the separation of church and state makes blasphemy laws unconstitutional, two men equally unpracticed in the folkways of literary criticism, Jimmy Carter and the late archbishop John James O'Connor, entered the lists to express their solidarity with militant Islam against what the former called “an insult to the sacred beliefs of our Muslim friends” (Appignanesi and Maitland 236–38; Dooley 127). Evidently a threat to one orthodoxy threatens them all.

But it was not only that the Rushdie affair made visible the yawning gulf that separates postmodernist fiction and the well-schooled critic from the struggling immigrant Muslim in Bradford or a Baptist former president of the United States. It also revealed, as Islamic spokespersons were quick to point out, the extent to which some of those practiced Western attitudes had themselves become orthodoxies.⁵ In an essay responding to the blasphemy charges, Rushdie quoted Western writers and intellectuals from Joyce and Beckett to Foucault and Lyotard. His arguments, reasonable and indeed moving as they are to those who share his assumptions, recall the suras of the Qu'ran his critics cite to defend their positions, authorities whose authority is not universally conceded. In language that later seemed naive, Rushdie expressed a sense of outrage that must have been shared by many literary scholars: “It has been bewildering to learn that people do not care about art” (IH 397, emphasis in original). Although often measured and gracious about Islamic tradition, at times he seemed patronizing; his plaintive remark that he had been rejected “by [his] own characters” has a proprietary ring (IH 395). Many earnest defenses of Rushdie's right to publish seemed considerably less aware of Islamic sensibilities than the author was; the most notorious remarks, the comments of the novelist Fay Weldon, called the Qu'ran “food for no-thought” and characterized the Bradford Muslims as “primitive folk…mad fundamentalists” (Weldon 6, 8).⁶

It is surprisingly difficult to find a middle ground between Islamic orthodoxy, as represented by the protesters if not by the fatwa, and the Western literary orthodoxy represented by Norman Mailer's heroic declaration that “maybe we are even willing, ultimately, to die for the idea that serious literature…is the absolute we will defend” (Appignanesi and Maitland 164). One could, of course, simply concede to the protestors, as the editors of Public Culture did, when they challenged “the post- Enlightenment assumption…that all intelligent criticism must follow the individualized act of reading” and defended “the rights of people to resist reading” (iv, emphasis in original). If Westerners continued to find reading books before burning them desirable, they could not deny their own inability to master the history and culture that shape other people's unwillingness to do so. Although Edward Said, a friend of Rushdie's, defended “the brilliance” of his “deliberately transgressive” novel, his conception of “Orientalism” was frequently used to brand the book and those who defended it as heirs to a thousand years of Western stereotypes about the fiendish Turk (Appignanesi and Maitland 166, 164).⁷ Western readers’ probable ignorance, not only of Islam, but of everything from Urdu to Indian cinema, was evoked as the only possible explanation of sympathy for the satanic novelist.⁸

Indeed, Western readers, unable to pin down the facts and thus incessantly told that they do not understand, may hesitate to speak at all.⁹ In this case they can defer to those readers with more knowledge of the cultural context who encourage Westerners to look for Islamic diversity. Rushdie himself persuasively argues that the book burners represent only one strand of Islamic tradition, which “contains ribaldry as well as solemnity, irreverence as well as absolutism” (IH 409). Even more compelling is Gayatri Spivak's troubled evocation of the suppressed voices of Islamic women in India with its warning that cultural relativism not become an excuse for abetting their suppression. Sara Suleri's brilliant reading notes Rushdie's “profound cultural fidelity” even though The Satanic Verses represents “specific acts of religious betrayal” (60). Each urges us to consider the multiple perspectives of Indian, or Islamic, people, to understand their traditions of dissent and self-division, and to distrust official spokespersons.

Yet if Western readers do well to exhibit some diffidence about their expertise in Islamic theology and to consider the history of colonialism and racism that fuels the resistance of many Muslims to Western cultural innovations like postmodern fiction, they are on safer ground when they ask what the Rushdie affair says about the fate of the novel. For really two distinct, yet oddly complementary, features of contemporary life worked against The Satanic Verses: the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and the explosion of the electronic media.¹⁰ On the one hand, we note the extreme literalism of Rushdie's opponents, their unwillingness to accept “the fictionality of fiction” (Rushdie IH 393). The “death of the author,” in the West a philosophical proposition, became in Iranian hands a large cash incentive, and a promise of paradise, for the assassination of a Booker Prize winner. Yet in a sense the literalism of the British Muslims who burned the book in the streets of Bradford was a tribute to the printed page that is rare indeed in the West; they did not regard the novel as an inconsequential imaginative exercise but as a powerful expression of ideas deeply engaged with reality.¹¹

On the other hand, the familiar enemy of the print text, the electronic media, arouses Baudrillardian anxieties. As Daniel Pipes points out, the 14 February fatwa has all the marks of a media event; had the ayatollah simply wanted Rushdie dead he could have dispatched a hit squad months earlier, when British Muslims began their protests.¹² “Broadcasting his intentions allowed Rushdie to take cover, so Khomeini's real goal must…have been…something quite different” (97).¹³ An apocalyptic vision of all solid ground disappearing, to be replaced by a vertiginous mass of images, attaches itself to the phenomenon of the writer who disappears into the spy fiction world of safe houses and Secret Service protection. Surely the text of The Satanic Verses also seems to disappear, in spite of phenomenal sales, into televised images created by angry men who pride themselves on not having read it.¹⁴ Surely, too, the claims of political fiction to act on the world seem overwhelmed by the world's evident ability, especially when kept instantly up-to-date by satellite, to act on novel and novelist.

Of course, it is possible to say that Rushdie's rejection by Muslim immigrants resembles Joyce's rejection by the Irish and to hope “a rising generation of British Asians” will discover “that Rushdie has been writing to their own interests” (Murray 51). One can assert that “words go deep, that stories last.” But as one critic and practitioner of postmodern political fiction goes on to say, in our day “such propositions are frankly theological” (Pfeil 38). A real virtue of Don DeLillo's Mao II is that it moves beyond such testimonials to imagine the implications of the Rushdie affair for novels and novelists.

“If I were a writer,” remarks a character in Don DeLillo's 1982 novel The Names, “how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating, to work in the margins” (77). How hopeful this remark seems, assuming that the death of the novel is only a cliché, perhaps even an opportunity. In Mao II, as in the Rushdie affair, worn-out metaphors have a way of becoming ominous. In this 1991 novel, the old literary system seems thoroughly dead; writers are blocked, taken hostage, lose their identities, die. A new information technology creates the desire for, then enables, the features of contemporary life most hostile to the novel: terrorism, a resurgence of fundamentalism, a crowd psychology characterized by longing for authority.

Though Mao II contains no direct allusions to The Satanic Verses, it shares many of its themes and motifs. Like Rushdie, DeLillo continually displays the objects and effects of the electronic revolution: television is omnipresent, Muzak plays in the bookstore, terrorists watch a VCR in their hideout near Beirut. Key characters in both books make their living in the post-Gutenberg world: DeLillo has his photojournalist, Rushdie his cinema star and his television actor, the voice of the talking ketchup bottle and the garlic-flavored potato crisp. Benign technologies reveal a sinister side: Rushdie's voice-over actor drives his cinema star mad by doing impersonations over the telephone whereas DeLillo's writer worries about the role of answering machines in terrorist bombings: “You enter your code in Brussels and blow up a building in Madrid” (91). National boundaries are frequently crossed in these books where international jet travel is a tedious reality, not an adventure; both writers contemplate the in-flight movie as an emergent genre. Characters in both speak the global or Third World English of those who come to it with an imperfect education gained far from English-speaking countries; both note the saturation of Third World countries by First World advertising, itself a new language, the “esperanto of jet lag” (DeLillo 23). Both books portray the desire for fundamentalism, for purity of doctrine and strong authorities who override the fragmented contradictory self; and although they criticize mass movements bitterly, they convey the intensity of that desire, as it is experienced by the believer, sympathetically.

Similarly, although DeLillo avoids dates and never mentions the Rushdie affair directly, Mao II is set in 1989, the year of the fatwa. Three public events from that year flit across television screens: the deaths of ninety-three people in Sheffield, suffocated or trampled at the soccer stadium; the funeral of the ayatollah; and the Tiananmen massacre. To underscore this point, part 1 is introduced by a photograph taken at Sheffield, part 2 by a photograph of the Khomeini funeral. These events and photographs, which associate large crowds with death and mass hysteria, seem to evoke a missing fourth, the famous book burning.¹⁵ And if there is no fictionalized Rushdie, DeLillo's protagonist is a novelist who dies on his way to Beirut, where he had hoped to exchange himself for a poet held hostage by terrorists.

If the Rushdie affair dramatizes the conflict between postmodern conceptions of political fiction and current political realities, DeLillo's novel provides a larger context in the by-now familiar conflict between actual late-twentieth-century life and romantic notions about the writer. “Born under the old tutelage,” to use a phrase he admires, Bill Gray seems part J. D. Salinger, part Thomas Pynchon, and perhaps part Don DeLillo as well (215).¹⁶ Grown rich and famous from two early novels, Bill has spent twenty-three years writing and rewriting a third, “struggl[ing] for every word” (52). To reduce the pain of this struggle, he has, of course, taken to drink, and to a whole rainbow of prescription drugs as well. As if to parody the romantic role, he freely chooses the elaborately policed seclusion into which the ayatollah drove the sociable Salman Rushdie: guests are driven to see him at night, on back roads without signposts. His isolation reinforces radical individuality; all but literally a self-made man, he conceals his unpoetic real name, Willard Skansey, even from his best friends. His individuality is deeply connected to his claims about the novel itself, which expresses a unique personal vision. Writers, in his view, have a high calling, are supposed to transform “the inner life of the culture,” tell us stories that “absorb our terror” (41, 140). Novels, perhaps especially when they do not take politics as their theme, implicitly support a liberal political system: “the novel…[is] a democratic shout” (159).

The old romantic view of novelists and novels always risked declining into self-pity and self-indulgence; as Bill's daughter puts it, “writing was never the burden and sorrow you made it out to be but…your convenient alibi for every possible failure to be decent” (114). Worse yet, the romantic role could simply become a “lifestyle.” Reemerging into New York, finding himself lost in the new talk of audiocassettes and miniseries, Bill reminisces about parties held in the 1950s and pleads for the old system: “Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Terrorist Rival
• Part II. Displaced Causes
• Part III. Novelist as Terrorist: Terrorism as Fiction
• Part IV. Is Terrorism Dead?
• Epilogue: Conrad and the Unabomber
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index