Terror and Art

10.1057/9780230614130preview - Terror and the Arts, Edited by Lisa Muszynski

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Terror and the Arts

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Previous Edited Volumes by Matti Hyvärinen

Hyvärinen, Matti, Anu Korhonen, and Juri Mykkänen, eds. 2006. The trav-elling concept of narrative. Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies(COLLeGIUM) http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume_1/index.htm.

Carver, Terrell, and Matti Hyvärinen, eds. 1997. Interpreting the political:New methodologies. London and New York: Routledge.

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Terror and the ArtsArtistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of

Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib

Edited by Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski

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TERROR AND THE ARTS

Copyright © Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski, 2008.All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in anymanner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of briefquotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published in 2008 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN™175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 andHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.Companies and representatives throughout the world.

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the PalgraveMacmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdomand other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Unionand other countries.

ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60671-5ISBN-10: 0-230-60671-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hyvärinen, Matti and Muszynski, LisaTerror and the arts : artistic, literary, and political interpretations of violence

from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib / edited and with an introduction by MattiHyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-230-60671-7 (alk. paper)1. Terror in art. 2. Arts, Modern. I. Hyvärinen, Matti. II. Muszynski, Lisa.

NX650.T48T47 2008700'.4552—dc22 2007047880

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: August 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Contributors xi

Introduction: The Arts Investigating Terror 1Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski

Part 1: Visualizing Terror

1 The Implicated Spectator: From Manet to Botero 25Frank Möller

2 Art in the Age of Terror: The Israeli Case 41Dana Arieli-Horowitz

3 The Aura of Terror? 61Kia Lindroos

Part 2: Fictionalizing Terror

4 Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West 83Margaret Heller

5 To This Side of Good and Evil: Primo Levi as a Truth-teller 97Tuija Parvikko

6 Narrating the Trauma: Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance 113Kuisma Korhonen

7 Too Much Terror? J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello 129and the Circulation of TraumaMatti Hyvärinen

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vi ● Contents

Part 3: Governmental Terror

8 Dictators and Dictatorships: Art and Politics in Romania and Chile (1974–89) 147Caterina Preda

9 Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control: Chinese Propaganda Posters during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) 165Minna Valjakka

10 The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber: Discussing Community and Responsibility as Political-ethical Criteria 185Javier Franzé

Part 4: The Terror of Theory

11 The Violence of Lying 207Olivia Guaraldo

12 Terrorized by Sound? Foucault on Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art 225Lauri Siisiäinen

Index 243

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Figures and Tables

Figure 2.1 Miki Kratsman, “Om el Phaem,” 2002. 45

Figure 2.2 David Reeb, Where are the Soldiers? 2003. 45

Figure 2.3 Gal Weinstein, Uday, 2004. 47

Figure 2.4 Gal Weinstein, Qusay, 2004. 47

Figure 2.5 David Wackstein, Swastika, 2001. 51

Figure 2.6 Dganit Berest, The Wall, 2004 (detail). 53

Figure 2.7 David Tartakover, I’m Here, Tel Aviv, 19 October 1994,2003–2004. (Based on a photograph by Ziv Koren.) 54

Figure 3.1 Guy Raz, “Two Seconds,” 2004–2006. 76

Table 8.1 Comparative view of the two regimes 150

Table 8.2 Comparative view of artistic manifestations 155

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The idea for this book grew out of a small symposium, “Arts and Terror,” heldat the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in May 2006. The arrangement of thesymposium became possible thanks to the Academy of Finland, and its newCentre for Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. The cen-tre has three research teams; one of them is Politics and the Arts, the organizerof the symposium. We thank all of the participants of the symposium for theenduring discussions and enthusiasm that helped to launch the work for thisvolume. Moreover, the existence of the international Politics and the Artsgroup, now a standing group of the European Consortium for PoliticalResearch (ECPR), helped greatly in getting in touch with the people inter-ested in the hybrid area of terror and the arts.

As in every work of this nature, the editing process is one that owes manythanks to those individuals who enable it. We are particularly grateful to theresearch team coordinator Anitta Kananen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland),not only for practical arrangements of the event, but also for all kinds of helpduring the editorial process. Moreover, Professor Michael Shapiro (Universityof Hawaii, United States) was of great help at a decisive moment in the pub-lication process. Another key person is Peggy Heller (University of King’sCollege, Halifax, Canada), who jumped in to help as a coeditor, commenta-tor, and consultant whenever and wherever this was needed; Kati Thors at theCopyshop in Espoo has freely given of her time and expertise in all thingstechnical; Annikki Harris (University of Helsinki Language Services) hascooperated at the office, providing Lisa Muszynski with the requisite freedomto work on this project almost continuously, while our families have bornethe brunt of the systematic neglect that such focus entails. Special thanks tothose nearest and dearest who have the patience to endure us to the end:Tuula H. and Peter, Johann, and Annie M.

Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa MuszynskiTampere and Helsinki

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Contributors

Dana Arieli-Horowitz, PhD, is head of the History and Theory Unit atBezalel, Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. She has published exten-sively on arts under totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Amongher publications are: Romanticism of Steel: Art and Politics in NaziGermany (Jerusalem: Magness, Hebrew University Press, 1999); Creatorsin Overburden: Rabin’s Assassination, Art and Politics (Jerusalem: Magness/Hebrew University Press, 2005, and winner of the Israeli Prime MinisterAward); and The Totalitarian Ideal: Art and Politics Between the Wars(forthcoming, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press). She is currently work-ing on the relationship between art and politics in Israel, and in particularon art and terror.

Javier Franzé, PhD (political science), a lecturer at the UniversidadComplutense de Madrid. His field of research is the conceptual history ofpolitics in Western thought, on which he has published ¿Qué es la política?Tres respuestas: Aristótles, Weber, Schmitt (Madrid, Catarata, 2004), as wellas various other articles. He also researches the relation between violence,power, and politics, especially focused on its implications for the relation-ship between ethics and politics.

Olivia Guaraldo, PhD, is lecturer in political philosophy at the University ofVerona. Her main fields of research are political and feminist theory,where she has worked extensively on the thought of Hannah Arendt andits relationship with literature and history (Storylines, 2001; Politica e rac-conto, 2003). She has edited and introduced the Italian translation ofHannah Arendt, Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers (It.2006), as well as Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender (It. 2006) and PrecariousLife (It. 2004). She is currently working on the relationship between vio-lence and power in modern political thought. She is also a member of theresearch team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence inPolitical Thought and Conceptual Change.

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Margaret (Peggy) Heller, PhD, is assistant professor in humanities andsocial science at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. Sheregularly teaches in two interdisciplinary programs, Foundation Year andContemporary Studies, the first focusing on core texts of the Westernintellectual tradition and the second on contemporary theory. She hasrecently completed a doctorate specializing in intellectual and cultural his-tory at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati Ohio. The title ofher dissertation is “The Dawning of the West: On the Genesis of aConcept.” She is also a member of the research team Politics and the Artsat the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and ConceptualChange.

Matti Hyvärinen, PhD (political science), is an Academy of FinlandResearch Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Psychology,University of Tampere, Finland. His current research project is on theconceptual history of narrative, and he leads the research team Politicsand the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought andConceptual Change. Currently he is also a virtual fellow at the Centre forNarrative and Auto/Biographical Studies, University of Edinburgh. Hehas published earlier, for example, on Paul Auster (Partial Answers) and onold Finnish novels (Qualitative Inquiry).

Kuisma Korhonen, PhD, is currently docent and research fellow at theInstitute of Art Research, University of Helsinki. He is also the leader ofthe research project Encounters in Art and Philosophy, funded by theFinnish Academy. His latest publications include Textual Friendship: TheEssay as Impossible Encounter (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2006), ed.Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), and an article “Textual Communities”(Culture Machine 8, 2006). He will also be the guest editor for the e-jour-nal History and Theory: Protocols (February 2008), and a coeditor forChiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics (New York: Lexington Books,2008).

Kia Lindroos, PhD (political science), is senior assistant professor in theDepartment of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University ofJyväskylä, Finland. She is chair/convener of Politics and the Arts StandingGroup for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), aswell as chair of the Finnish Political Science Association.

Frank Möller, PhD, is research fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute,University of Tampere, Finland, and the coeditor of Cooperation andConflict. He is also a member of the research team Politics and the Arts atthe Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and ConceptualChange.

xii ● Contributors

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Lisa Muszynski holds a Master’s degree (history) from the University ofHelsinki and is currently working on her PhD thesis in the Department ofSocial Science History, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her field of inter-est is philosophy and theory of history, wherein she examines historians’attitudes/orientations and the ways in which these, in turn, help to shedlight on the dynamics of continuity and change over time. She is an asso-ciate member of Politics and the Arts research team.

Tuija Parvikko, PhD (political science), is Academy of Finland research fel-low at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University ofJyväskylä, Finland, and at the Centre of Excellence in Political Thoughtand Conceptual Change. She is the author of The Responsibility of thePariah: The Impact of Bernard Lazare on Arendt’s Conception of PoliticalAction and Judgement in Extreme Situations. Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 1996.Currently she is finishing a manuscript on Arendt, Eichmann and thePolitics of the Past. Her current research project is on the politics of the pastin the Finnish postwar context.

Caterina Preda is a PhD candidate in political science at the Faculty ofPolitical Sciences, University of Bucharest, with a thesis on “Dictators andDictatorships: Artistic Expressions of the Political in Chile and Romania(1974–1989)” to be submitted in October 2008. She holds a Master’sdegree in comparative politics and political theory in the Faculty ofPolitical Sciences, University of Bucharest, as well as a Diplôme d’EtudesApprofondies en Science Politique of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.She is teaching undergraduate classes on Contemporary Latin Americaand Art and Politics at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University ofBucharest.

Lauri Siisiäinen is a researcher and postgraduate student of political sciencein the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University ofJyväskylä, Finland. He is also a member of the research team Politics andthe Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought andConceptual Change and he is currently preparing his PhD thesis on thepolitical theory of audition and sonority.

Minna Valjakka, MA, Chinese art history researcher, is currently a postgrad-uate student of Art History in the University of Helsinki, Finland, and adoctoral student in the Graduate School of Contemporary Asian Studiesat the University of Turku, Finland. She is preparing her PhD thesis oncontemporary Chinese art. She won a scholarship to study in FudanUniversity, Shanghai, in 2001–2002, and in the Central Academy of FineArts, Beijing, in 2006–2007.

Contributors ● xiii

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INTRODUCTION

The Arts Investigating Terror

Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski

The idea of this volume is not merely to investigate the arts in order touncover new kinds of representations of terror, trauma, and violence.The argument and purpose of this book is a step more ambitious. Art

Spiegelman has cleverly outlined this dilemma in his In the Shadow of NoTowers (2004) by saying, “Leave me alone, Damn it! I’m just trying to com-fortably relive my September 11 trauma but you keep interrupting . . . Likethat mind-numbing 2002 ‘anniversary’ event, when you tried to wrap a flagaround my head and suffocate me!” Spiegelman works vigorously against thepolitical appropriation of the trauma of 9/11 by the Bush government, claim-ing for himself a proper space for working through and unpacking the traumawithout hasty, projective, and dubious political mobilizations. While he istrying to relive his trauma comfortably, as he says, he seems to reflect ironicallyhis need for distance from the political class.1 He is a participant in the polit-ical process by virtue of working with terror and trauma, and not just bydepicting it. This is one of the paradoxes of the political literature on terror,wherein the first moves seem often to consist in determined resistance topoliticization, and in a demand for an entirely personal experience of lossbefore wider conclusions are drawn.

Spiegelman’s ironic work also explains and justifies the scope of this bookfrom one important perspective. The topic of this book is not terrorism per se,enacted by a definite group of nongovernmental actors called “terrorists.”The author’s autobiographical character Mouse, asleep and obviously dream-ing about the innocent world of the erotic cartoon in his hand, is approachedby two ghastly figures, and according to the text, being “equally terrorized byAl-Qaeda and his own Government.” This thread of “equal” terror by gov-ernments is a recurrent theme in recent films (Alejandro Gonzáles In~árritu’s

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Babel being a good example of governmental violence launched by an assumed“terrorist” attack) and novels (for example, Auster 1987; Ondaatje 2001;Rushdie 2005). As the chapters in this volume by Tuija Parvikko, KuismaKorhonen, Caterina Preda, and Minna Valjakka indicate, the most horrificexamples of twentieth century terror have been imposed by totalitarian gov-ernments. Ondaatje’s (2001) novel on Sri Lanka and Rushdie’s (2005) workon Kashmir indicate an even murkier reality where terrorist attacks and gov-ernmental violence cohabit, feed each other, and sometimes lose the thin bor-der between one another altogether.

The Repetition of Trauma

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) offers a particularly helpful study on therelationships between the arts, terror, terrorism, and trauma. From the veryfirst sentence of the novel, we are set into a peacefully breathing, deliberaterhythm. He writes, beginning the novel immediately after the attack onManhattan, “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space offalling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mudand there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jacketsover their heads” (3). The voice is matter-of-fact, pensive, somber, and verycareful not to precipitate extraneous emotional arousals. It signals a seriousattempt to visit the past experience by carefully shifting through all the layersof political and media rubble that has accumulated over the last few years. Itis one answer to the critical, post-9/11 question of the psychologist andphilosopher Jens Brockmeier, who writes, “Is there a vocabulary, a style, agenre to articulate the tension between what the smell of bodies means to youas a human being and how you feel about the political claims and actions thattry to justify themselves by referring to the same bodies? . . . Is there a lan-guage to talk about such experiences at all?” (Brockmeier 2008).

DeLillo foregrounds his characters’ private experiences and their copingstrategies. The title of his novel already signals the possibility for multipleinterpretations. The main character, Keith, who escaped from one of theTwin Towers during the September 11 attacks, is somehow losing his grip onhis previous life, obviously tripping him up to make him fall. People fallingfrom the towers, some hand in hand, is of course one of the most poignantimages of 9/11. But then there is also the performance artist Falling Man,doing his act in public places right after the terrorist attacks. Keith’s wifeLianne is one who witnesses the perplexing act, insofar as, “a man was dan-gling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one legbent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from

2 ● Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski



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his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of theviaduct. . . . There was awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, thesingle falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down amongus all” (33).

The falling act may well be redescribed in terms suggested by DominickLaCapra (2001, 2004) as acting out, repeating the moment of terror. The act,in its “awful openness,” seems to be the exact opposite of DeLillo’s carefullymediated discourse; a highly disturbing and disturbed artistic way ofapproaching terror and trauma. The jumps were as painful to the artist,David Janiak, himself, and he died at age thirty-nine, “apparently of naturalcauses” (220). Because of his acts, he had “been arrested at various times forcriminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct” (220). Wehave here an artist taking high risks, transgressing many boundaries, but atthe same time reproducing the original scene of trauma with minimal dis-tance from it. Moreover, this is highly suggestive of the repetitive artworks ofcertain Israeli artists exposed to suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,recounted in this volume in Chapter 2 by Dana Arieli-Horowitz. DavidJaniak, as indeed some of the real-life Israeli artists as well, may be accused ofnot properly taking the reactions of the traumatized audience into account.But is this power of provocation not something that the arts are working withconstantly? There is a trace of Dadaism in the act, in the sense that KiaLindroos writes about in Chapter 3, Janiak ostensibly having a clear “inten-tion,” as Lindroos observes regarding Dada, “to create a scandal and inspirepublic indignation.”

Yet the figure of the Falling Man is only one element among many otheraspects of repetition in DeLillo’s novel. A group of children withdraw repeat-edly from the adults to a room with binoculars, in order to watch if andwhen the next plane will hit the towers, insisting that the towers were not yetentirely collapsed. Keith, the man who survived, delves more and more intothe repetitive and controlled world of professional poker after having lost afriend he used to play poker with, and so on. Yet paradoxically, Keith, whowas estranged from his wife Lianne and almost entirely incapable ofexpressing his inner concerns before the events of 9/11, now had occasionalmoments of closeness with Lianne between his poker playing sprees.

Perhaps the most compelling singular element of the novel is its ending.With regard to temporality, the novel resists conventional narrative progres-sion—the insistence on various forms of repetition being one form of thisresistance—and instead creates a loop by ending just a moment before every-thing began. At the end, Keith is back in Manhattan, at his office, right afterthe attack and working his way down through the corridor, seeing his dead

The Arts Investigating Terror ● 3



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friend. This ending may be read in at least two different, yet interconnectedways. Whatever life and vitality had returned to Keith’s life with Lianne andhis son, the traumatic moment of the collapsing towers and the smell ofdeath is there, and will always be there, whatever the cure. The experience isnot only in the past, but it persists in the present, and continues on into thefuture. The temporary loop, in this sense, protects the novel from an overlystraightforward closure and moral elevation. Nonetheless, the ending mayalso be seen, in all of its remaining horror, in a slightly more optimistic light.After all, Keith is now revisiting the traumatic scenery; he is at least capableof remembering, observing the details, seeing the man falling. The loopremains, there is no fixed meaning or resolution of the consequences of theevent, yet the beginning is no longer an invisible, untouchable darkness.

Jonathan Safran Foer (2005) does something analogous by foregroundingthe traumatic reactions and disturbed world of a nine-year-old boy who hadlost his father in the terrorist attack on Manhattan. The experimental narra-tion of the boy’s partly psychotic world is connected thematically to KuismaKorhonen’s discussion on Georges Perec’s work in Chapter 6. The boy’s worldis even more sanitized of public, political maneuverings, and hectic national-ism that followed the events than even Keith’s world in DeLillo’s novel,thereby creating space for the artistic processing of the experience. Both ofthese novels systematically reject the nationalistic frame of the events of 9/11,thus “interrupting the vicious circle of aggression and retaliation,” as OliviaGuaraldo observes in Chapter 11. In so doing, they, of course, simultane-ously bracket all such sweepingly broad, totalizing theories and explanationsof the attack that Peggy Heller discusses critically in Chapter 4.

Rushdie’s World of Terror

Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) chooses an entirely differentstrategy than either DeLillo or Foer, and approaches the political andnational aspects of terror, terrorism, and violence directly. But in order to dothis in a properly non-nationalist way, he locates his characters within a com-plex and changing, multinational setting, letting go of the nation-state as anaturalized frame for the novel. One of his key characters, Maximilian Ophuls(a name borrowed from the German Jewish film director, who emigrated tothe United States via France), begins his political career in the FrenchResistance during the Nazi occupation. After the war, he moves to the UnitedStates to become U.S. ambassador to India, but is forced to retire due to awomanizing scandal. Later he leads U.S. classified operations in Afghanistanand Pakistan and, because of this assignment, he is effective in the creation




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and funding of the Taliban as a counterforce to the Soviet occupation inAfghanistan. Finally, he is murdered in a personal-cum-terrorist attack in LosAngeles. As a victim, he, if anyone, is neither an innocent bystander norguilty in such a grave way that his murder could appear as ethically justified.The story has another beginning in Kashmir, in the paradisiacal time preced-ing the division between Indian and Pakistani nation-states, in the followingera of brutish Indian military presence, and the increasingly fundamental-ist guerrilla movements—terrorists—against Indian presence and the entireHindu population.

Shalimar the Clown is not one of the easiest novels to read and digest—farfrom it, in fact. The complex architecture of the novel endeavors nothing lessthan to capture the geopolitical complexity of the worlds of terror and ter-rorism in one book, and the novel might well be characterized as a literaryencyclopedia of contemporary terror, even including the discussion on thedehumanizing effects of death rows in the United States. It takes time to real-ize, for example, that Rushdie employs an entirely different language forevents in Europe and North America versus the magical realism and compli-cated language of Kashmiri events. He outlines the prenationalistic era ofKashmir, a time when Pandits and Muslims are able to live freely together, eatand cook similar fantastic banquets, and wear traditional garments withoutorthodox veiling. The marriage between Shalimar the Clown, a Muslim boy,and Boonyi, a Hindu girl, epitomizes the now long-gone spirit of peacefulcoexistence in the remote village of Pachigam. When Boonyi escapes withMax Ophuls, for a short-term affair with the wish for a more spectacular lifethan the village could offer, the embittered and unforgiving Shalimar beginshis career as a terrorist—soon to meet more orthodox fighters who originallywanted to kill him, simply because of his history as an entertainer. Hebecomes “a student, a scholar of rage” (272); and in due course he “became aperson of value and consequence, as assassins are” (275). Here, personal lossand hatred receives a political articulation in a way that DeLillo, Foer, andSpiegelman resist in the case of 9/11.

A number of Rushdie’s stylistic choices may, at first, be astounding. Oncethe narrator reports, almost in the style of journalistic critique or testimonial,how the fundamentalist groups come from Pakistan, force the Muslimwomen to wear burkhas against their will and tradition, and frighten theHindu families into escaping the country by randomly slaughtering a part oftheir population. At the same time, however, the province is full of Indiantroops, using similar terror tactics against suspicious civilians. All of a suddenthe author shifts from narration to political essay, and directly challenges theIndian authorities. He writes, “There were six hundred thousand Indian




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troops in Kashmir but the pogroms of the pandits was not prevented, whywas that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as dis-placed persons and for many months the government did not provide sheltersor relief or even register their names, why was that . . . The ministers of thegovernment made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wroteone another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrantswhose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that” (296; 1 lakh=100,000 in the Indian numbering system).

For the reader, this step from the grimly outlined story-world to authorialindictment appears emotionally and surprisingly well grounded, while theentire gravity of war crimes and terror had become so weighty that the opencharge feels almost like a relief: someone is out there to protest the cruelties,including the reader as a secondary witness. A bit later—after an accountingof the brutalities enacted by both parties, that is, the fundamentalists and theIndian army—the narrator stops for a moment to reflect upon the situationby observing, “There are things that must be looked at indirectly becausethey would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun”(309). This is one of the enduring concerns about how far the arts can, orany account for that matter, go in terms of describing—or performing, inJanik’s case—horror without becoming part of that same horror, a themewhich is addressed further in this volume, especially in Chapters 5, 6, and 7.Moreover, it can become an issue pivoting upon that of the dignity of the vic-tim, as Frank Möller writes in Chapter 1, “If victims are humiliated andabused in front of the camera for the purpose of the production of images,then the viewer, by watching these images, becomes an accomplice of theperpetrators.”

Rushdie’s well-trained, internationally experienced, callous and well-con-nected terrorists seem to render some of their predecessors of no more thantwo decades ago very amateurish indeed, as in Doris Lessing’s (1985) TheGood Terrorist and Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992). Lessing’s homespun, leftistterrorists remain nearly comically shabby figures, in spite of the tragic conse-quences of their operations. Perhaps we now tend to think that Lessing was abit too optimistic about the harmlessness of the terrorist drive, by not givingus access to their more professional endeavors. In any case, the strictly realis-tic mode of her novel is arguably more adequate for the narration of theyouth’s everyday activities than of the terror itself, which curiously becomesvirtually normalized by the conventional narrative form, becoming just oneoccasion among many others. Random deaths do not signify anything in par-ticular to the activists, at least nothing that a quote from Lenin and a compe-tent rationalization could not wipe away. In consequence, what we obviously




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witness is exactly the early days of killing idle emotions, in order to be able tokill without any emotions. Alice, the female protagonist, muses upon the sit-uation after the killings: “After all, if publicity was the aim, then they had cer-tainly achieved that! And Faye? But comrades knew their lives were at risk,the moment they undertook this sort of thing, decided to become terror-ists” (452).

Interestingly, Lessing points out that her activists’ way of life was not, inpoint of fact, oriented to achieve any recognizable political objectives.Instead, it was the good feelings of the narcissist-as-activist, spending brilliantdays in picketing and shouting at the police, getting kicks out of resisting andescaping the police, or even getting arrested, the excitement of transgressingthe borderlines between the permissible and the forbidden, the legal and theillegal. The sheer fact of escaping the police renders activists, in their ownimagination, as dangerous and important. Learning the allegedly sublimepleasures of transgression, even to the point of enjoying killing people was, ofcourse, essential for the education of Nazi officers as well as the globe-trottingterrorists of Rushdie’s novel. Crime fiction has for a long time investigatedsuch serial crimes as rape and murder from the perspective of the particularlyaddictive and subjectivity-creating excitement generated by the transgressionof these boundaries.

Imagining with a Terrorist?

Literature has its methods of bringing fictional characters closer to the readerthan we often are able to get in normal life. The point of view, or focalization(Genette 1980; Jahn 2007, for a more recent discussion), within a charactermay be one way; letting one of the characters narrate the story is another.Such a culturally and politically diverse, agonistic situation as the recent waveof fundamentalist terrorism, of course, inflicts difficult challenges uponauthors. Doris Lessing’s expert narration, if mainly ironic and sardonic, onthe thoughts, action, and speech of her activists is based on a shared culturalbackground and knowledge about leftist movements. As Manfred Jahnreminds us, the whole modernist literature needed the background of anemerging psychology to present the fictional streams of consciousness. Buthow does this understanding work across violent cultural boundaries? JohnUpdike (2006), Don DeLillo (2007), and Salman Rushdie (2005) face amuch larger challenge, of course. Their attempts to let us, the readers, imag-ine the thoughts and emotions of contemporary terrorists are, of course, astricky as they are politically relevant.



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However, it is again a trap to see the world divided between the Western“us” and the “terrorists” and their supporters. As a matter of fact, John Updike’sTerrorist (2006) plays expertly with such expectations of the reader. In thebeginning, there is a sloppy Jew, an all-too-liberal white mother, seductiveand flirtatious American girls, and a widening Muslim front to support, edu-cate, and manipulate the dedicated fighter. A great deal of the pleasures ofreading the novel comes from the sudden realization, by the end of the novel,of an entirely different picture with nuances and a plurality of distinctions.Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is one of the bravestattempts to see the whole issue from a not-so-self-evident North Americanpoint of view. Hamid’s narrator, a young man coming from Pakistan to studyat Princeton (like Hamid himself ), succeeds in landing a job in a thrivingfinancial enterprise. It is in this line of work where economic “fundamentals”need to be taken into account, and other—human, ecological, and what-ever—lesser considerations to be ignored.

A politically oriented reader may still be slightly perplexed by parts ofHamid’s novel. His narrator lives in New York City and is entirely dedicatedto his work in the financial sector. As 9/11 is about to occur, he is finalizinghis first big business assignment in the Philippines, and watches the eventsunfold on television. He says, “I stared as one—and the other—of the twintowers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. . . .But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack—death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to char-acters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodes—no, Iwas caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visiblybrought America to her knees” (72, 73).This passage contains a few disquiet-ing contradictions. The narrator had never before announced any reserva-tions in his relationship with “America” (a term the Canadians, among manyother Americans, may find inconvenient in this context). On the other hand,between the dashes he presents himself as a relatively naïve and apoliticalreader of the media. Yet he immediately knows how to react to the figures ofdestruction exclusively on the symbolic level of the event. The reading of thesituation may differ from many hegemonic versions, but it certainly concurswith the Bush administration in one regard: by seeing the event within aclear-cut national frame. But within this chosen nationalistic frame, celebrat-ing America on her knees, this reading again appears helplessly naïve, whilenot seeing in the event itself the seeds for horrors to come as its natural con-sequence. Later, when the “big” America attacks “small” Afghanistan, the pre-viously light-hearted observer is full of moral rectitude. After allowinghimself a nationalistic reading of the event, the narrator becomes a puristafter returning to New York. He states, “Your country’s flag invaded New



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York after the attacks; it was everywhere. Small flags stuck on toothpicks fea-tured in the shrines; stickers of flags adorned windshields and windows; largeflags fluttered from buildings. They all seemed to proclaim: We are America—not New York, which, in my opinion, means something quite different” (79).

Hamid’s narrator here has different political and ethical standards for NewYorkers and himself. He can be exhilarated by the symbolic fall of “America,”but New Yorkers should not see the event happening to or in America. Infact, Siri Hustvedt (2006, 124) has offered quite a different reading of themeaning of the flags as well. Brockmeier (2008), in his study of actualresponses to the trauma of 9/11, notes that patriotic and nationalist reactions,so popular in the media and politics—and in the rest of the country—weretruly marginal among individual responses in New York City. WhereasDeLillo, Ondaatje, Rushdie, and Spiegelman, among many others, systemat-ically resist nationalist readings of terror and terrorism, Hamid’s positionremains problematic despite his criticism of America.

Hamid’s work is one of those that foreground the media representation asa real political event. Rather uncannily, Brett Easton Ellis (1998) obliteratedthe borderlines between film and the novel’s “real-life” events in his paranoidterrorist world of Glamorama to the ultimate extent possible. Film crews inthis novel are mysteriously already ever-present and shooting raw footagewhen bombs are delivered and exploded in Prada or Gucci bags. Is the narra-tor Victor Ward too strung out on a combination of drugs, always includingXanax, a medication for panic attacks, to make a difference between fiction,glamorous show life, and a vicious terrorist plan? Or do we witness a terroristnetwork of top models along with their assemblage of the best brand nameproducts—and nearly always in front of photographers and film crews—withits paranoid plans to create maximum havoc? Ellis’s terrorists combine theglamorous public presence in front of cameras, high-quality technical exper-tise in camouflage, and terrorist attacks with a renouncement of empathy forvictims and an obvious enjoyment of torture. All players have double or tripleagendas, leaving Victor Ward and the reader betrayed in their search for finalclarity and closure.

This cursory review on parts of the recent literature on terror is most of allmeant to emphasize the relevance of studying the arts in the context of terror.There are many other novels to consider, such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday(2005). In his The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee (1994) revisitsDostoyevsky’s classical crime scene, discussed more thoroughly by MargaretHeller in Chapter 4 of this volume, that naturally evokes the nineteenth-cen-tury genre of literature focused on St. Petersburg—originally brought to lifeby Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman of 1833.2 Thereare entire genres such as crime stories and science fiction to be examined, not




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to mention film and photography. The recent artistic interest in terror isengendering ideas, images, and dilemmas awaiting more thorough, interdis-ciplinary investigation, quite apart from its educational potential.

Terror in our Midst

In a book penned over a quarter of a century ago, Marshall Berman elo-quently and passionately defended The Communist Manifesto by Marx andEngels as “the first great modernist work of art” (1983, 102). And like allgreat books, Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience ofModernity is possibly even more compelling today than when it was first pub-lished. It is especially relevant now, when the cold war era has given way tosomething that it perhaps helped to spawn in its own wake, which has nowtaken its place on a global scale. Indeed, the idea of “terror in our midst” iscertainly not new; what is new about it is its seeming all-pervasiveness. It hascome out into the open, followed closely in its wake by a global media thatamplifies it, making it into something that is no longer occurring only onthe shabby back streets of a distant region, where it was ignored: unseen andunheard.

Terror has, in any case, moved to the forefront of our collective con-sciousness. Indeed, since the dawn of the twenty-first century, it has spread tothe downtown streets of Jerusalem, Moscow, London, and New York. AsBerman observed nearly three decades ago, the thrust of modernism(s) andthe process of modernization has carried us along the crest of a wave in timewhere “modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence andemptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance ofpossibilities. . . . It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go for-ward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can giveus the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first”(1983, 21, 36).

In the spirit of such an outlook, looking forward by looking back—orsomething resembling a “circle” of time—what the chapters of this collectiondo not attempt to do with the theme of terror and the arts is to plumb thedepths of an originating despair and emptiness that may have motivated actsof terror, whether 150 years ago on the streets of St. Petersburg or during thelast few years on the streets of London or New York. And likewise, theauthors of this volume are not interested in examining what art and terrormay share intimately in common with one another below the surface of anywork of art. Perhaps it is DeLillo’s figure of David Janiak in Falling Man thatexplores just such a tension, given that Janiak is not only an artist, but that he




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is also “arrested at various times,” which both complicates and overshadowshis “art” with the illicit flavor of the terror/trauma he repeats through his hor-rifying jumps.

Rather, from the starting points of painting, photography, literature, film,and so on, we will explore what the arts may offer by way of different read-ings of terror and trauma, readings that do not celebrate the violence inher-ent in much of art, but politically motivated readings that endeavor to resistthe exploitation and persistence of violence by confronting it with courageand the desire to “work through” it—to look it in the face and see beyond theshattered present. The method is thus one in which “going back can be a wayto go forward”—in a circular fashion that attempts to go beyond the “mean-ings” culled from the surface of linear time and chronological events.

In short, the method at hand is not about going “back” in linear fashionat all, for as Eelco Runia observes, “Being moved by the past comes . . . in twomodalities: a ‘regressive’ and a ‘revolutionary’ one. In both the ‘regressive’ andthe ‘revolutionary’ mode linearity is adjourned and exposed and a primordial‘circularity’ reclaims its rights” in an existence where “time is not a line but aknot, not a river but a whirlpool, not progression but circulation” (2007a, 1;Runia 2006, esp. 6–7).

At a glance, then, this volume begins with an exploration of the visual artsin Part 1: Visualizing Terror, where each of the three chapters of this sectionoffer three different dimensions of the problematic relationship between ter-ror and the visual arts, ranging from the aestheticization of violence to the“aura” of the resulting images. The main message here is about coming togrips with, in some cases, quite disturbing images, whereas the third chapteroffers Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic theory as a way in which to capture andanchor the phenomenon from a theoretical standpoint.

There is, in any case, a long-standing relationship between literature andterror, a phenomenon well known in the West since at least the mid-nine-teenth century, represented in Part 2: Fictionalizing Terror. It is in this secondsection, moreover, that the relationship between literature and terror facespossible reevaluation in light of the “manifold and the heterogeneous” prove-nance of events within their own times and places that have inspired novelistson themes of violence and terror, both past and present, in an effort—asRunia remarks—to capture something “that is absent from our own mythol-ogy, the past that is withheld verbally, the past . . . that waits to be made senseof” (2006, 8).

This second section of the volume is then followed by the perspective ofgovernmental terror, in Part 3, regarding policies regulating the arts not onlyin Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution, but also seen in a comparative




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Terror and Art