Surrealpolitik: Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives

Like other academic disciplines that contribute to the current research on terrorism, the field of literary studies is still strongly marked by the impact of "9/11", an event that was immediately identified as constituting not only a historical and political, but also a cultural watershed. Before the fires at Ground Zero were extinguished, debates concerning the future of such diverse forms as action movies, satirical TV shows, and the novel appeared in the press.

More often than not, changes were demanded rather than foretold. Thus, on September 16, 2001, distinguished American writer and journalist Roger Rosenblatt triumphantly declared the "end of irony". By "irony", Rosenblatt understood a particular attitude to life according to which nothing "was to be believed in or taken seriously" because "Nothing was real". (page 1)

[From chapter: Introduction by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Politics & Art, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

In an essay written for The Guardian in early October 2001, influential literary critic James Wood called for a renewal of the American novel. The terrorist attacks, he hoped, would cause "casualties" among those types of fiction that he disliked on aesthetic grounds. Against the backdrop of the mass casualties of September 11, however, Wood's critique acquired an additional ethical dimension, implying a moral obligation for change. Programmatically entitled "Tell Me How Does It Feel", the article was aimed at three distinct targets: the "trivia and mediocrity" of New York writers Jay Mcinnerney and Bret Easton Ellis; Don DeLillo's "idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer" and the more general tendency among contemporary authors to use fictions for "displays of knowledge"; as well as the "hysterical realism" of Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, and others who pursue "vitality at all costs". Underlying this multiple polemic was Wood's discontent with the tradition of the sweeping "social novel" and its panoramic, all-encompassing pretensions. After 9/11, he asserted, writers should put the individual character back at the center of their plots, focusing on his or her personal experience and emotion. Apart from a new sincerity, then, critics expected -- or rather stipulated -- a stronger emphasis on feelings. (page 2)

[From chapter: Introduction by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

[T]he event's status as a "caesura" is still a matter of debate. In the Introduction to Literature after 9/11, [Keniston and Quinn] explain that the essays collected in their volume "refuse to interpret 9/11 either as a rupture with the past or as continuous with (and even anticipated by) earlier historical events", because the literature analyzed does not allow such an unequivocal interpretation; rather the literary negotiation of the question is itself marked by a shift: "while the initial experience of 9/11 seemed unprecedented and cataclysmic, the experience of incommensurability generated a culture-wide need for explanatory narratives, not simply as a means for countering the trauma, but as a means for refusing incommensurability, prompting attempts to place 9/11 into an historical framework." (page 3-4)

[From chapter: Introduction by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

Disregarding two calls for jihad against US citizens signed by Osama bin Laden (in August 1996 and February 1998 respectively), as well as the ensuing campaign against US embassies and military installations (with large-scale attacks in Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen in 1998 and 2000), the discontinuity tops relies -- at least to a certain extent -- on historical forgetting. (page 5)

[From chapter: Introduction by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic, Gaslighting]

It is worth remembering that the literary history of terrorism (to say nothing of the literary history of "terror" tout court) goes back at least 140 years. Originating with authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, the narrativization of terror began in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, when the social revolutionary, the political assassin, and the dynamiter entered the stage of political and literary history. (page 7)

[From chapter: Introduction by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

Kubiak's examples for the latter type of "terrorist writing" [that which "attempts to destabilize narrativity itself"] are the American authors Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Hunter S. Thompson, and William Burroughs, whose heterogeneous works do not thematically address terrorism...It is questionable, however, whether the category "terrorist" is really suited to describe a quality of fictional texts that are thematically unrelated to the phenomenon so described. What do we gain by choosing this adjective over, say, "deconstructive" or Kubiak's own "disruptive"? (page 8-9)

[From chapter: Introduction by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

Both Scanlan and Blessington develop their characterizations of terrorist fiction on the basis of a specific -- and limited -- corpus of exemplary texts. For that reason, their results are easily applicable to novels sharing the same thematic concerns, but less useful for an investigation of the full thematic range of terrorist fiction. The same applies to Anthony Kubiak's more general definition, according to which the main purpose of such fiction is "to explore the motives and ideas behind the sociopolitical and psychic act of terrorism". This definition excludes large parts of post-9/11 literature, which is mostly not concerned with the perpetrators and their agenda, but with the impact of the September 11 incidents (or other, imaginary suicide attacks) on both individual characters and American or Western society at large. For the purpose of the present volume, the phrase "literature about terrorism" is therefore meant to apply to fictional explorations of both, the causes and motivations as well as the aftermath of terrorist attacks. To be sure, several other thematic aspects could be added to the list: the planning and execution of the terrorist act, the confrontation and interaction between the terrorists and their victims, as well as -- not least -- the political response. (page 12)

[From chapter: Introduction by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

When in 1898 the International Anti-Anarchist Conference was held in Rome to find new means of controlling the seemingly rising threat of anarchist terrorism, this threat had already been framed as a serious crisis of visibility. Rendered possible by the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel, a previously unknown concept of enmity evolved at the close of the nineteenth century, and with the emerging figure of the dynamiter, nothing less than the disappearance of the visible enemy seemed to have set in. (page 67)

[From chapter: Hendrik Blumentrath, Enmity and the Archive]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Conspiracy, Literary/Poetic, Ambiguity, Gaslighting, Crime/Noir]

The aesthetics observable in these texts [e.g. Conrad] -- aesthetics of indistinguishable figures, of enemies losing their shape, and of failing identification attempts -- point to more than what is often understood merely as features of an artistic modernism. They refer to a specific history of enmity, a history, one might argue, that is bound to the imaginary of dynamite and the infernal machine; to the notion of risk and the concept of the "dangerous individual" in criminal anthropology, and to the ever-expanding networks of communication that substitute any processed suspicion with a new one. Most notably, however -- and this is what the present article will focus on in what follows -- this history of enmity is also bound to its media. What the vanishing figures refer to is the rise of a new cultural technique, a shift in the mode of representation. (page 69)

[From chapter: Hendrik Blumentrath, Enmity and the Archive]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Media, Literary/Poetic]

It is these dynamics [rise of statistics and bureaucracy] that structure the discourses of identification at the end of the nineteenth century and accompany the emergence of the figure of an invisible enemy. The rise of statistical knowledge goes hand in hand with a decline of faith in the optical gaze: what is made evident by the production of the image is at the same time suspected of leaving space for further interpretation, or even -- a line of argument to be found both in aesthetic as well as in police discourse -- of systematically concealing some hidden truth underneath. (page 73-74)

[From chapter: Hendrik Blumentrath, Enmity and the Archive]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic, Bureaucracy, Ambiguity, Crime/Noir]

This epistemological shift in police work is not without effect on literary constructions of the corresponding enemy figure, the terrorist...The problematic status of the vanishing figure is not just a motif: it is a structural effect of literature engaging with the question of enmity under conditions of electronic tracing. Narrativizations of terror take place in the immediate vicinity of cultural techniques that operate strictly formally and syntactically, and in an epistemic space characterized not only by the mimetic effects of the sign but by a formation of series and syntactic operations. From the 1970s on, the precarious state of the terrorist figure points to a system of tracing and searching that rests upon a dissolving of mimetic effects into discrete sets of calculi, a system that consequently operates in the realm of the symbolic. (page 81,82)

[From chapter: Hendrik Blumentrath, Enmity and the Archive]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Rationality, Literary/Poetic, Bureaucracy, Ambiguity]

It is possible, however, for a writer to engage with the events of 9/11 in a novel freer of the conventions of literary realism, raising issues that outstrip our usual concern with representation and its ethical discontents. (page 143)

[From chapter: Margaret Scanlan, Novelists and Terrorists Since 9/11]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Lead Quote Candidate, Realism, Literary/Poetic]

When the novel's [i.e., Cormac McCarthy's The Road] last paragraph evokes the superb trout on whose "backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming", it takes us out of the story's time, into an undated past that we belatedly acknowledge as our own present. But it also evokes "an even more ancient time", the mythic time of creation. From this perspective the beautiful image offers the reassurance we have all experienced, however, briefly, on waking up from a nightmare. The story we have just read, however credible, makes no truth claims about politics, but it does make one about the trout, whose breed still swim in the cold waters of Montana, that they are more marvelous than we can understand and imaginatively transport us to a world perpetually fresh and mysterious. This is perhaps a vision of what it means for history to be "shot through with splinters of messianic time" [a Benjamin reference], a time belonging neither to the past or present but to a continuous reality. It is certainly part of what it means for a novel to respond to terrorism, or to a war on terrorism, without representing its key events or reproducing the rhetoric in which it is publicly debated. Perhaps it is also a model for how the novel can confront terrorism without giving in to the all too plausible despair it often engenders. (page 154)

[From chapter: Margaret Scanlan, Novelists and Terrorists Since 9/11]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

Whereas fiction written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and explicitly addressing the attacks tends to consider the latter as an aesthetic and poetic caesura, more recent texts move beyond 9/11, thus opening the door for broader discussions about the social and cultural implications of terrorism -- such as the increasing surveillance of the public sphere or the possibilities of a counterculture established by a violent revolt against state control. (page 155)

[From chapter: Michael Konig, Literary Accounts of Terrorism in Recent German Literature]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

In these more recent texts, which were published with a greater temporal distance to the attacks, the events of September 11, 2001 are still an important and integral part of the narration: while the attacks persist as a functional biographical turning point or plot trigger, 9/11 is just one part of a larger narrative construction and no longer its principal thematic focus. The notable deep rupture found in earlier works is replaced by an attempt to functionalize the events within the narrative. (page 161)

[From chapter: Michael Konig, Literary Accounts of Terrorism in Recent German Literature]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

Not a single author [of early post-9/11 ficiton] asserts his or her own aesthetic autonomy against the heteronomy of the events, or in other words, sets his or her poetic will against the independence of the real. (page 165)

[From chapter: Michael Konig, Literary Accounts of Terrorism in Recent German Literature]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Lead Quote Candidate, Literary/Poetic]

It really seems...that Western cultures contain an inability to provide a meaningful account of the issues at stake. The intellectual, scientific and moral heritage of Western culture seems to arouse more and more suspicion about itself....It would perhaps be too much to demand a politically engaged literature, but in this context literature has become contentious again. Complex events require equally complex aesthetic and poetic approaches and call for a complex and deep analysis. (page 170,171)

[From chapter: Michael Konig, Literary Accounts of Terrorism in Recent German Literature]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

Literature reveals much about a nation's self-conception. Most recent German "terror" texts do not deal with non-Western cultures; they neither seek to understand the differences between "us" and "them" nor do they ask for the reasons for the increasing number of terrorist attacks. In my view, such inquiries are missing as much from recent German literature as they are from politics...Where early 9/11 texts had to deal with the impossible depiction of the unbelievable events of September 11 and the ensuing trauma, recent "terror" texts broaden the scope, but at the same time still remain caught within their own cultural sphere and therefore disregard the complexity of the terrorist threat as a cross-cultural problem -- and that truly is an attempt at marginalization. (page 171-172)

[From chapter: Michael Konig, Literary Accounts of Terrorism in Recent German Literature]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Literary/Poetic]

Any effort to reintegrate the "Disappeared" into realistic modes of representation is tinged with the uncanny, an effect described by Sigmund Freud in his etymological-psychoanalytical analysis of "Das Unheimliche": "an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on."...

I would like to cast Freud's uncanny as both an aesthetic effect and simultaneous precondition of terror. The fantastic would then constitute the field between the real and the fictive that is marked by the effect of the uncanny. It is impossible to draw a line between fiction and reality under conditions of terror, because terror lives on fiction as a category of the real. (page 195,197)

[From chapter: Kirsten Mahlke: A Fantastic Tale of Terror]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Lead Quote Candidate, Literary/Poetic, Ambiguity]

Cortazar's narrative fell victim to the censor of the Argentine military in 1977 because it addresses the theme of "forced disappearance". It is, however, free of characteristics of a political reportage, for neither places, nor persons, nor time are named. By including this narrative in a collection of short stories with the explicit subtitle Fantastic Stories, the genre is clearly defined through its pretext. The question is: what happens to the definition of the fantastic when it is very clearly mimetic, and to be sure, not only with respect to the representation of the properly common sense world of bureaucracy that is depicted here, but also with respect to the irruption of inexplicable events? Does the literary fiction represent the experience of terror?

The analysis of these questions is predicated on three assumptions that urgently have to be tested: first, the fantastic is a narrative mode of spreading terror; second, terror constitutes itself on the basis of the fantastic; third, the fantastic is a suitable form of representation, that is, it can best represent terror. (page 201)

[From chapter: Kirsten Mahlke: A Fantastic Tale of Terror]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Surrealism & Politics, Terror, Lead Quote Candidate, Literary/Poetic, Ambiguity]