SOURCE: Scanlan, Margaret. “Literature Can Look Terror in the Eye and Measure its Human Consequences.” Chronicle of Higher Education 48, no. 17 (21 December 2001): B11-B13.

[In the following essay, Scanlan remarks on the convergence of literature and reality in numerous works of terrorist fiction, noting that such novels not only offer solace in times of grief, but also serve as a mirror that reflects modern society.]

In the wake of September 11, college professors struggling with their own shock and horror found themselves trying to explain the terrorist attacks to students—some of whom were in grade school when the last President Bush sent U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf—whose youth and vulnerability were suddenly and poignantly visible. Our own institutions also challenged us, as the president of my own university, Myles Brand, put it, “to retain a sense of purpose, to counter the terrorists' aims by holding firm to our principles and values.”

No easy task, this, when you are coping with your own paralysis and are wondering if your subject is still worth teaching. When Carolyn Foster Segal apologizes to a student for showing Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and agrees that “I hate the story, too” (as she recounted in The Chronicle), she speaks for many others. Can students who have just seen buildings in Manhattan containing upward of 25,000 people explode and burn on live television imagine the psychic anguish of a rich New Yorker, unhappily married, in 1876? Should they? Foster Segal is tempted to renounce irony along with Edith Wharton, as she searches for a “literature that not only acknowledges longing and loss but that offers solace.”

Much as I sympathize with Foster Segal, my own response was somewhat different, for I had recently published a book about the strange fascination terrorists and acts of terrorism have exercised over the imaginations of writers from Dostoyevsky and Henry James to DeLillo and Doris Lessing. Somewhere in the numbness of the first few days after September 11, when Tom Brokaw was still on the air 10 hours a day. I started wondering where I had gotten terrorism wrong. Every line I had written about the “construction” of the terrorist threat, with its accompanying suggestion that repressive states have exaggerated it to justify their own violence, loomed up in 24-point type. Yet as the guilt of the never-endangered scholar fades, with its ignoble self-importance, I recall that my own interest in terrorism began during the Vietnam War. Then, as now, the question of how or whether literature helps us face a catastrophic history was urgent.

Such questions scarcely occurred to me when I entered the University of Michigan as a graduate student in the fall of 1965. What was then still called the New Criticism was the official dogma. Its conservative assumptions about the superiority of art to the messes of the actual world would soon help discredit it. But the New Criticism was also strangely democratic, assuming, like the Protestant Reformers, that a sufficiently attentive intelligence, left alone with a text, paying enough attention to its language and structure, could understand what it meant. That one lacked an expensive private education in, say, classical languages or philology was no barrier. And, certainly, I benefited from that assumption.

As a graduate of a rural high school in Iowa, with a bachelor's degree from Iowa's least prestigious state university, my way paid by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, I, like the GI's of the previous generation, was part of a new scholarship class with the potential to revolutionize the university. It did not, however, feel like that. The graduate English department still retained its Anglophile masculine folkways; and I was as bewildered by the afternoon sherry hour as by the expectation of self-assured argument in the seminar room.

On I went, reading the formalist's Henry James and W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and Joseph Conrad, content with the noble truth that poetry makes nothing happen. Flaubert, said Virginia Woolf, does not ask us to write checks for the benefit of distressed provincial house-wives; that was proof enough for my professors of the artistic merits of Madame Bovary.

American bombing of Vietnam began shortly before I started graduate school, in March 1965. During my time in Ann Arbor and, later, in Iowa City teaching at the University of Iowa, I was observing, and to some extent participating in, a revolutionary cycle that the great 19th-century and fin de siècle novelists had written about: the evolution of nonviolent peace marches into protests marked by an increasingly militant rhetoric and then, eventually, by arson and the occasional murder. And although we were only partly aware of it at the time, the FBI's strategy, with its surveillance, informers, and even agents provocateurs, might have come directly from Dostoyevsky or Conrad.

What is harder to document is the sense of living through the collapse of a fundamental distinction that had allowed intellectual life to function: the belief that the aesthetic—part of a private life of the mind—was naturally aloof from politics and violence.

In the summer of 1966, while I was teaching at the University of Iowa, I gave a D in a British poetry survey to a student from my tiny hometown. He had touched me by observing in one ill-written paper that Wordsworth's Michael seemed too kind for a father, and I was sorry, afterward, to hear that an accumulation of such grades had caused him to lose his student draft deferment. Some two years later, on his 21st birthday, he stepped on a land mine in Vietnam and was instantly killed. It would be melodramatic to speculate about whether a B would have delayed his draft notice just long enough to keep him from stumbling across that particular mine. But that D, at the time an exercise of independent academic judgment, had entered some monstrous machinery and contributed to a young man's death. Becoming, however unwittingly, an adjunct of the military draft makes you crave something stronger than the complacent assurance that poetry makes nothing happen.

My classroom would never again feel like a privileged space set apart from the actual world. But by 1970, the more basic question was whether I would ever be able to speak of “my classroom” again.

The massive expansion of graduate education that government and foundation money had financed after Sputnik was one cause of the sudden collapse of what had been, as recently as 1968, a booming market for new assistant professors of literature. Women like me, who should have been content to teach in the public schools, as their mothers had done before their marriages took them out of the job market forever, were another part of the problem. So, too, was the student draft deferment, which kept a whole generation of unhappy male graduate students locked in American universities. And so, too, was the public image of students and professors that four years of campus protest had created. If the public in time grew tired of the war, it was equally weary of us. Neither the alumni of the small private colleges nor the legislators who set budgets for state universities could be persuaded to spend more money on institutions that had turned their children into drug-and-sex-crazed hippies.

As a married woman with a baby, I found myself unemployable. In those last days before affirmative action, I sent out exactly 100 job applications and received only rejections. By August 1971, even the least promising men from my graduate department had jobs—not the jobs they had dreamed of, but jobs all the same. But, marooned in the small Minnesota town where my husband taught at a Catholic women's college, I had become the provincial housewife whose plight art may notice but not remedy.

As a graduate student grading papers, I may have identified with authority, then felt guilty about it. But in my basement apartment, with its brown couch and perpetual scent of diaper-pail disinfectant, I was far outside the academic institutions that keep the study of literature going; in a place where one must find one's own reasons for caring about literature.

And so I did. The local libraries were small, but brimming over with postwar British novels. I began reading Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble; the Angry Young Men; the war novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Those realistic novels, with their tall of rationing and class resentments, of scholarship boys only half-assimilated into their Oxford colleges, of a postwar life in which one was never really hungry but always hungry for something, real coffee or chocolate or eggs, spoke to my own dreariness.

Yet, when I turned back to the great 19th- and early-20th-century writers—to Dostoyevsky and Flaubert, to James and Conrad—I realized that they, too, had lived in revolutionary times. The struggles of 1848, and the explosions of terrorism that began in Russia in the late 1860s, spreading to London with the Fenian bombings of 1885 and to Paris with the anarchist bombings of 1896-97, were so many proofs that the most domestic of lives could end in political violence. Flaubert's account of the repressive June days of 1850 or Henry James's meditations on his fin de siècle tour of bomb-scarred France evoked a history that obliterated landscape and, as Flaubert said, “drove men of sense mad for the rest of their lives.”

Did writers in fact have anything to say to the terribly poor people for whom the revolutionaries offered hope? Did they have any alternative to complicity with the economic and social arrangements that made poverty inevitable? Were they themselves practicing some kind of violence? And even if they were not, would they or their work survive? Would ordinary people who could buy some yellow journalist's illustrated account of the latest dynamiting in Vienna have the attention span to read Madame Bovary, let alone The Ambassadors? The formalist's renunciation of history for the purer world of art became, in the face of such questions, an admission of radical doubt, a sense of limitation, perhaps failure.

Between 1871 and 1914, Dostoyevsky, James, and Conrad all wrote novels in which writers consorted with revolutionaries. All three authors saw writers and intellectuals as potential victims of revolution. In Demons, Dostoyevsky argued that intellectuals naively adulate the men of violence who, when they have the opportunity, will be as ready to kill them as to burn their books. In The Princess Casamassima, James undermined the romantic model of revolution, in which strong-willed individuals pit themselves against authority, suggesting that in the end, both writer and terrorist fail. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad was intrigued by the ease with which police states and terrorist cells recruit writers. The terrorist, like the writer, is a remnant of the romantic notion that human beings can assert their will against the collective.

Dostoyevsky, James, and Conrad put pressure on the common-sense distinction between writers and terrorists, stories and violence, without entirely seeing them as indistinguishable. Their novels anticipate many of the questions about representing violence that late-20th-century theorists have pressed—the alliance between storytelling and power, the tendency of art to convert violence into an enthralling spectacle, and even, in the case of Conrad's Peter Mikulin, the way that the distortions of the victim's narrative become a best seller. They invite us to see in insurgent terrorism the violence of intellectuals—to explore the romantic idea of the individual rebelling against the state, or against powerful social conventions. The more extreme romantics—Shelley, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine—believed that they really could transform society, bringing to life the better world they imagined in their texts. For the authors of those first terrorist novels, such an optimistic view of the artist's power and insight was no longer credible.

After the Great War, with notable exceptions such as Malraux's La Condition humaine, terrorist novels and incidents had declined; in fact, in 1933, Jacob Hardman declared in The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences that terrorism had become “out-moded as a revolutionary method.” Hardman was not arguing that political terror and violence had ended in 1933, of all years, but that the labor movement had learned that sustained strikes were more effective than sporadic violence.

Much more recently, in Terrorism in Context (edited by Martha Crenshaw, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), the historian Martin A. Miller argues that the increasing numbers of socialists elected to British and Continental parliaments in the 1920s suggest that many old revolutionaries found they could work within the increasingly democratic postwar regimes. However, he notes, both Communist and Fascist governments might be seen as extensions of older terrorist movements whose leaders, once in power, introduced state terrorism on an unprecedented scale. By 1939, a massive world war between well-armed states once more swallowed up any thought of small insurgent movements' threatening large governments.

But in the early 1970s, insurgent terrorism reappeared, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, using sophisticated modern technology. Skyjackings began in earnest and radical groups around the world seized hostages and triggered car bombs. Television, even more useful to terrorists than mass-circulation newspapers, became the primary medium for the terrorist story and intensified the anxieties generated by terrorist acts.

It was only three years from the world's first live global television broadcast—the moon landing of 1969—to the first global terrorist broadcast. In the summer of 1972, some 800 million viewers around the world tuned in to the Olympics but saw instead a daylong hostage drama that ended with Black September's killing 11 Israeli athletes just off camera.

As terrorists grew more savvy about television, they threatened to take control away from broadcasters. A German television journalist noted that during the Baader-Meinhof organization's kidnapping of Peter Lorenz in 1975, “We lost control of the medium. We shifted shows to meet their timetable. They demanded that our cameras be in a position to record each of the prisoners … and our … coverage had to include prepared statements of their demands.”

Not surprisingly, many serious novelists of terrorism of the last two decades are intrigued by the nature of the television medium. In an interview, Don DeLillo, for example, mused that television coverage of terrorism and other news was superseding the novel, becoming itself a form of fiction. As a character in Mao II puts it, “Beckett was the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions.”

While some terrorist novels emphasize the role of the state or the electronic media in constructing terrorism, others emphasize the affinities between men in small rooms—as DeLillo styles them—the ones who write novels and those who plot terror. Along with the older romantic notion of the writer as revolutionary comes a sense of writing as liberation from political or emotional repression, and for this reason the terrorist in these novels often becomes the writer's doppelgänger. As a Lebanese intellectual tells DeLillo's novelist Bill Gray, “It's the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You're half murderers, most of you.” In J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, an encounter with son Pavel's murderer, the terrorist Nechaev, persuades the fictional Dostoyevsky that he himself is guilty of terror for having plundered Pavel's life for novelistic material, and will plunder him as mercilessly again in death.

For Doris Lessing and Mary McCarthy, the guilt that accompanied belated recognition of the horrors of the Gulag or the re-education camp produced a conviction that writers and intellectuals are particularly susceptible to the totalitarian propaganda of left-wing regimes, which they had come to doubt. To both, the militant splinter groups of the late 1960s and early '70s—the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction—suggested that even the most admirable causes, civil rights and peace, could degenerate into useless violence. The skyjacking and bombings of the 1970s and '80s, which are the immediate subjects of McCarthy's Cannibals and Missionaries and Lessing's The Good Terrorist, prompt a searching look at the failures of utopian politics earlier in the century. McCarthy and Lessing present terrorist acts as intractable events, almost natural disasters.

A more experimental strain of literary thrillers argues, as does the anthropologist Mick Taussig, that terrorism is itself a “phantasmagoric … construction of the state.” Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novella in 24 sentences, The Assignment, or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, traces a terrorist plot conceived in a government office and suggests the difficulties of sorting out victims and perpetrators.

Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession provides a rich historical context for exploring the way one government uses such threats. While not questioning the real suffering of victims like Leon Klinghoffer, Roth notes how the Israeli government makes use of terrorism when it raises money in the United States, finding in that example how an even more intractable reality, the Holocaust, can be fictionalized, even translated into the idiom of marketing.

In a more apocalyptic vein, Robert Stone's Damascus Gate introduces an Israel where a bureaucrat plots with right-wing Israelis to bomb the Temple Mount while Mossad provides covert assistance to Hamas. In Stone's novel, terrorist acts continue and people die, but an insurgent terrorism that opposes the state has ceased to exist.

Though writers of terrorist fiction criticize terrorist plots and how the state and media manipulate them, they are pessimistic about the fate of literature. Novels, they suggest, do not necessarily liberate us. The documentary impulse rests on a fantasy of surveillance, whether in realistic novels or psychiatric case histories, that Dürrenmatt found as fundamentally repressive as did Foucault and his disciples. And even those literary thrillers that continue within the conventions of realism also suggest the great difficulty of discovering the actual origins and motivations of terrorist acts, which today usually come to us on television or via the Internet.

Going beyond Stone's cynicism about the links between terrorists and the state, Antoine Volodine, in Lisbonne dernière marge, spells out the philosophical basis for pessimism about novelists and terrorists. In this dystopian story about a killer from a group modeled after the Red Army Faction who yearns to publish a novel, writer and terrorist merge. Writers work in underground cells and are hunted by the police. Both terrorists and writers, we understand, are relics of the Western humanistic self, a casualty of postmodernism. Their guilt is less deplorable than their futility. In a world where anonymous networks, camouflaged by the state, wield an influence so vast as to implicate all of us, a critique of power is impossible. The revolutionary impulse, which has underlain our literature and our politics for two centuries, has, at last, disappeared.

Do these most recent writers speak to the events of September 11? Certainly not, if we demand that they be more prescient about terrorist tactics than the CIA and the FBI. But yes, if what we look for is an attentive reading of our own time. Readers of Damascus Gate who trace the affiliations of Osama bin Laden to our own country's intelligence activities during the Soviet-Afghan war will find themselves in a familiar moral landscape. Contemporary terrorism is often anonymous; we are not entirely sure whether the Swiss Air jet that crashed into Peggy's Cove fell victim to mechanical failure, some North Atlantic equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, or a catastrophic politics. Osama bin Laden rejoices that Allah and a “group of vanguard Muslims” have struck America, and his spokesmen warn us to avoid tall buildings and jet travel; but he still refuses to claim direct responsibility for the terror attacks in the United States. Anthrax sent through the mail kills, but the letters accompanying it are unsigned and make no political arguments. The Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, hired by bin Laden to write his biography, reports that they quarreled over its title. Osama bin Laden's choice, which Mir rejected, was I Am Not a Terrorist. Doubtless the alternative that bin Laden had in mind was Holy Warrior, but a novelist like Antoine Volodine suggests a bleaker interpretation, that even those who trigger the most destructive events do not imagine that they control their outcomes.

As for solace, our novels have little to offer. Conrad, so eloquent on so many occasions, remarks almost off-handedly in Under Western Eyes, in a paragraph about the “bombs and gallows” of Czarist Russia, that “the anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience.” But what these novels offer instead is also crucial: a confirmation that literature speaks to the major issues of our time, looks terror in the eye, measures its human consequences, rejects the simplicities of public rhetoric, and refuses to be consoled. To “cast a cold eye” on a world that is never what we wish for is one accomplishment of the novel. When we have time to reflect on the courage it takes to face even the most domestic truths—about our marriages, for example—we may even find time for that perennially lost illusion, The Age of Innocence.