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Terror and the Arts

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Hyvrinen, Matti, Anu Korhonen, and Juri Mykknen, eds. 2006. The travelling 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 Hyvrinen, eds. 1997. Interpreting the political:
New methodologies. London and New York: Routledge.

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Previous Edited Volumes by Matti Hyvrinen

Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of


Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib
Edited by Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

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Terror and the Arts

TERROR AND THE ARTS

First published in 2008 by


PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martins Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union
and other countries.
ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60671-5
ISBN-10: 0-230-60671-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hyvrinen, Matti and Muszynski, Lisa
Terror and the arts : artistic, literary, and political interpretations of violence
from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib / edited and with an introduction by Matti
Hyvrinen 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. Hyvrinen, Matti. II. Muszynski, Lisa.
NX650.T48T47 2008
700'.4552dc22

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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Copyright Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski, 2008.


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Contributors

xi

Introduction: The Arts Investigating Terror


Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

Part 1: Visualizing Terror


1 The Implicated Spectator: From Manet to Botero
Frank Mller

25

2 Art in the Age of Terror: The Israeli Case


Dana Arieli-Horowitz

41

3 The Aura of Terror?


Kia Lindroos

61

Part 2: Fictionalizing Terror


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

83

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


Tuija Parvikko

97

6 Narrating the Trauma: Georges Perecs W ou le souvenir denfance


Kuisma Korhonen

113

7 Too Much Terror? J. M. Coetzees Elizabeth Costello


and the Circulation of Trauma
Matti Hyvrinen

129

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Contents

vi

Contents

Part 3: Governmental Terror

9 Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control:


Chinese Propaganda Posters during the Cultural Revolution
(196676)
Minna Valjakka
10 The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber: Discussing
Community and Responsibility as Political-ethical Criteria
Javier Franz

147

165

185

Part 4: The Terror of Theory


11 The Violence of Lying
Olivia Guaraldo

207

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

225

Index

243

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8 Dictators and Dictatorships:


Art and Politics in Romania and Chile (197489)
Caterina Preda

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, Im Here, Tel Aviv, 19 October 1994,


20032004. (Based on a photograph by Ziv Koren.)

54

Figure 3.1 Guy Raz, Two Seconds, 20042006.

76

Table 8.1

Comparative view of the two regimes

150

Table 8.2

Comparative view of artistic manifestations

155

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Figures and Tables

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The idea for this book grew out of a small symposium, Arts and Terror, held
at the University of Jyvskyl, Finland, in May 2006. The arrangement of the
symposium became possible thanks to the Academy of Finland, and its new
Centre for Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. The centre has three research teams; one of them is Politics and the Arts, the organizer
of the symposium. We thank all of the participants of the symposium for the
enduring discussions and enthusiasm that helped to launch the work for this
volume. Moreover, the existence of the international Politics and the Arts
group, now a standing group of the European Consortium for Political
Research (ECPR), helped greatly in getting in touch with the people interested in the hybrid area of terror and the arts.
As in every work of this nature, the editing process is one that owes many
thanks to those individuals who enable it. We are particularly grateful to the
research team coordinator Anitta Kananen (University of Jyvskyl, Finland),
not only for practical arrangements of the event, but also for all kinds of help
during the editorial process. Moreover, Professor Michael Shapiro (University
of Hawaii, United States) was of great help at a decisive moment in the publication process. Another key person is Peggy Heller (University of Kings
College, Halifax, Canada), who jumped in to help as a coeditor, commentator, and consultant whenever and wherever this was needed; Kati Thors at the
Copyshop in Espoo has freely given of her time and expertise in all things
technical; Annikki Harris (University of Helsinki Language Services) has
cooperated at the office, providing Lisa Muszynski with the requisite freedom
to work on this project almost continuously, while our families have borne
the brunt of the systematic neglect that such focus entails. Special thanks to
those nearest and dearest who have the patience to endure us to the end:
Tuula H. and Peter, Johann, and Annie M.
Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski
Tampere and Helsinki

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Preface and Acknowledgments

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Dana Arieli-Horowitz, PhD, is head of the History and Theory Unit at


Bezalel, Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. She has published extensively on arts under totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Among
her publications are: Romanticism of Steel: Art and Politics in Nazi
Germany (Jerusalem: Magness, Hebrew University Press, 1999); Creators
in Overburden: Rabins Assassination, Art and Politics (Jerusalem: Magness/
Hebrew University Press, 2005, and winner of the Israeli Prime Minister
Award); and The Totalitarian Ideal: Art and Politics Between the Wars
(forthcoming, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press). She is currently working on the relationship between art and politics in Israel, and in particular
on art and terror.
Javier Franz, PhD (political science), a lecturer at the Universidad
Complutense de Madrid. His field of research is the conceptual history of
politics in Western thought, on which he has published Qu es la poltica?
Tres respuestas: Aristtles, Weber, Schmitt (Madrid, Catarata, 2004), as well
as various other articles. He also researches the relation between violence,
power, and politics, especially focused on its implications for the relationship between ethics and politics.
Olivia Guaraldo, PhD, is lecturer in political philosophy at the University of
Verona. Her main fields of research are political and feminist theory,
where she has worked extensively on the thought of Hannah Arendt and
its relationship with literature and history (Storylines, 2001; Politica e racconto, 2003). She has edited and introduced the Italian translation of
Hannah Arendt, Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers (It.
2006), as well as Judith Butlers Undoing Gender (It. 2006) and Precarious
Life (It. 2004). She is currently working on the relationship between violence and power in modern political thought. She is also a member of the
research team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in
Political Thought and Conceptual Change.

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Contributors

Contributors

Margaret (Peggy) Heller, PhD, is assistant professor in humanities and


social science at the University of Kings College in Halifax, Canada. She
regularly teaches in two interdisciplinary programs, Foundation Year and
Contemporary Studies, the first focusing on core texts of the Western
intellectual tradition and the second on contemporary theory. She has
recently completed a doctorate specializing in intellectual and cultural history at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati Ohio. The title of
her dissertation is The Dawning of the West: On the Genesis of a
Concept. She is also a member of the research team Politics and the Arts
at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual
Change.
Matti Hyvrinen, PhD (political science), is an Academy of Finland
Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Psychology,
University of Tampere, Finland. His current research project is on the
conceptual history of narrative, and he leads the research team Politics
and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and
Conceptual Change. Currently he is also a virtual fellow at the Centre for
Narrative and Auto/Biographical Studies, University of Edinburgh. He
has published earlier, for example, on Paul Auster (Partial Answers) and on
old Finnish novels (Qualitative Inquiry).
Kuisma Korhonen, PhD, is currently docent and research fellow at the
Institute of Art Research, University of Helsinki. He is also the leader of
the research project Encounters in Art and Philosophy, funded by the
Finnish Academy. His latest publications include Textual Friendship: The
Essay 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-journal History and Theory: Protocols (February 2008), and a coeditor for
Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics (New York: Lexington Books,
2008).
Kia Lindroos, PhD (political science), is senior assistant professor in the
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of
Jyvskyl, Finland. She is chair/convener of Politics and the Arts Standing
Group for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), as
well as chair of the Finnish Political Science Association.
Frank Mller, PhD, is research fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute,
University of Tampere, Finland, and the coeditor of Cooperation and
Conflict. He is also a member of the research team Politics and the Arts at
the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual
Change.
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xii

xiii

Lisa Muszynski holds a Masters degree (history) from the University of


Helsinki and is currently working on her PhD thesis in the Department of
Social Science History, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her field of interest is philosophy and theory of history, wherein she examines historians
attitudes/orientations and the ways in which these, in turn, help to shed
light on the dynamics of continuity and change over time. She is an associate member of Politics and the Arts research team.
Tuija Parvikko, PhD (political science), is Academy of Finland research fellow at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of
Jyvskyl, Finland, and at the Centre of Excellence in Political Thought
and Conceptual Change. She is the author of The Responsibility of the
Pariah: The Impact of Bernard Lazare on Arendts Conception of Political
Action and Judgement in Extreme Situations. Jyvskyl: SoPhi, 1996.
Currently she is finishing a manuscript on Arendt, Eichmann and the
Politics of the Past. Her current research project is on the politics of the past
in the Finnish postwar context.
Caterina Preda is a PhD candidate in political science at the Faculty of
Political Sciences, University of Bucharest, with a thesis on Dictators and
Dictatorships: Artistic Expressions of the Political in Chile and Romania
(19741989) to be submitted in October 2008. She holds a Masters
degree in comparative politics and political theory in the Faculty of
Political Sciences, University of Bucharest, as well as a Diplme dEtudes
Approfondies en Science Politique of the Universit Libre de Bruxelles.
She is teaching undergraduate classes on Contemporary Latin America
and Art and Politics at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of
Bucharest.
Lauri Siisiinen is a researcher and postgraduate student of political science
in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of
Jyvskyl, Finland. He is also a member of the research team Politics and
the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and
Conceptual Change and he is currently preparing his PhD thesis on the
political theory of audition and sonority.
Minna Valjakka, MA, Chinese art history researcher, is currently a postgraduate student of Art History in the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a
doctoral student in the Graduate School of Contemporary Asian Studies
at the University of Turku, Finland. She is preparing her PhD thesis on
contemporary Chinese art. She won a scholarship to study in Fudan
University, Shanghai, in 20012002, and in the Central Academy of Fine
Arts, Beijing, in 20062007.

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Contributors

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The Arts Investigating Terror


Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

he idea of this volume is not merely to investigate the arts in order to


uncover 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 No
Towers (2004) by saying, Leave me alone, Damn it! Im just trying to comfortably relive my September 11 trauma but you keep interrupting . . . Like
that mind-numbing 2002 anniversary event, when you tried to wrap a flag
around my head and suffocate me! Spiegelman works vigorously against the
political appropriation of the trauma of 9/11 by the Bush government, claiming for himself a proper space for working through and unpacking the trauma
without hasty, projective, and dubious political mobilizations. While he is
trying to relive his trauma comfortably, as he says, he seems to reflect ironically
his need for distance from the political class.1 He is a participant in the political process by virtue of working with terror and trauma, and not just by
depicting it. This is one of the paradoxes of the political literature on terror,
wherein the first moves seem often to consist in determined resistance to
politicization, and in a demand for an entirely personal experience of loss
before wider conclusions are drawn.
Spiegelmans ironic work also explains and justifies the scope of this book
from one important perspective. The topic of this book is not terrorism per se,
enacted by a definite group of nongovernmental actors called terrorists.
The authors autobiographical character Mouse, asleep and obviously dreaming about the innocent world of the erotic cartoon in his hand, is approached
by two ghastly figures, and according to the text, being equally terrorized by
Al-Qaeda and his own Government. This thread of equal terror by governments is a recurrent theme in recent films (Alejandro Gonzles In~rritus

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INTRODUCTION

Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

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, Kuisma
Korhonen, Caterina Preda, and Minna Valjakka indicate, the most horrific
examples of twentieth century terror have been imposed by totalitarian governments. Ondaatjes (2001) novel on Sri Lanka and Rushdies (2005) work
on Kashmir indicate an even murkier reality where terrorist attacks and governmental violence cohabit, feed each other, and sometimes lose the thin border between one another altogether.
The Repetition of Trauma
Don DeLillos Falling Man (2007) offers a particularly helpful study on the
relationships between the arts, terror, terrorism, and trauma. From the very
first sentence of the novel, we are set into a peacefully breathing, deliberate
rhythm. He writes, beginning the novel immediately after the attack on
Manhattan, It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of
falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud
and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets
over their heads (3). The voice is matter-of-fact, pensive, somber, and very
careful not to precipitate extraneous emotional arousals. It signals a serious
attempt to visit the past experience by carefully shifting through all the layers
of political and media rubble that has accumulated over the last few years. It
is one answer to the critical, post-9/11 question of the psychologist and
philosopher Jens Brockmeier, who writes, Is there a vocabulary, a style, a
genre to articulate the tension between what the smell of bodies means to you
as a human being and how you feel about the political claims and actions that
try to justify themselves by referring to the same bodies? . . . Is there a language to talk about such experiences at all? (Brockmeier 2008).
DeLillo foregrounds his characters private experiences and their coping
strategies. The title of his novel already signals the possibility for multiple
interpretations. The main character, Keith, who escaped from one of the
Twin Towers during the September 11 attacks, is somehow losing his grip on
his previous life, obviously tripping him up to make him fall. People falling
from the towers, some hand in hand, is of course one of the most poignant
images of 9/11. But then there is also the performance artist Falling Man,
doing his act in public places right after the terrorist attacks. Keiths wife
Lianne is one who witnesses the perplexing act, insofar as, a man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg
bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from

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his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the
viaduct. . . . There was awful openness of it, something wed not seen, the
single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among
us all (33).
The falling act may well be redescribed in terms suggested by Dominick
LaCapra (2001, 2004) as acting out, repeating the moment of terror. The act,
in its awful openness, seems to be the exact opposite of DeLillos carefully
mediated discourse; a highly disturbing and disturbed artistic way of
approaching terror and trauma. The jumps were as painful to the artist,
David Janiak, himself, and he died at age thirty-nine, apparently of natural
causes (220). Because of his acts, he had been arrested at various times for
criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct (220). We
have here an artist taking high risks, transgressing many boundaries, but at
the same time reproducing the original scene of trauma with minimal distance from it. Moreover, this is highly suggestive of the repetitive artworks of
certain Israeli artists exposed to suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,
recounted in this volume in Chapter 2 by Dana Arieli-Horowitz. David
Janiak, as indeed some of the real-life Israeli artists as well, may be accused of
not properly taking the reactions of the traumatized audience into account.
But is this power of provocation not something that the arts are working with
constantly? There is a trace of Dadaism in the act, in the sense that Kia
Lindroos writes about in Chapter 3, Janiak ostensibly having a clear intention, as Lindroos observes regarding Dada, to create a scandal and inspire
public indignation.
Yet the figure of the Falling Man is only one element among many other
aspects of repetition in DeLillos novel. A group of children withdraw repeatedly from the adults to a room with binoculars, in order to watch if and
when the next plane will hit the towers, insisting that the towers were not yet
entirely collapsed. Keith, the man who survived, delves more and more into
the repetitive and controlled world of professional poker after having lost a
friend he used to play poker with, and so on. Yet paradoxically, Keith, who
was estranged from his wife Lianne and almost entirely incapable of
expressing his inner concerns before the events of 9/11, now had occasional
moments 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 progressionthe insistence on various forms of repetition being one form of this
resistanceand instead creates a loop by ending just a moment before everything began. At the end, Keith is back in Manhattan, at his office, right after
the attack and working his way down through the corridor, seeing his dead

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The Arts Investigating Terror

Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

friend. This ending may be read in at least two different, yet interconnected
ways. Whatever life and vitality had returned to Keiths life with Lianne and
his son, the traumatic moment of the collapsing towers and the smell of
death is there, and will always be there, whatever the cure. The experience is
not only in the past, but it persists in the present, and continues on into the
future. The temporary loop, in this sense, protects the novel from an overly
straightforward closure and moral elevation. Nonetheless, the ending may
also 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 capable
of remembering, observing the details, seeing the man falling. The loop
remains, there is no fixed meaning or resolution of the consequences of the
event, yet the beginning is no longer an invisible, untouchable darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer (2005) does something analogous by foregrounding
the traumatic reactions and disturbed world of a nine-year-old boy who had
lost his father in the terrorist attack on Manhattan. The experimental narration of the boys partly psychotic world is connected thematically to Kuisma
Korhonens discussion on Georges Perecs work in Chapter 6. The boys world
is even more sanitized of public, political maneuverings, and hectic nationalism that followed the events than even Keiths world in DeLillos novel,
thereby creating space for the artistic processing of the experience. Both of
these novels systematically reject the nationalistic frame of the events of 9/11,
thus interrupting the vicious circle of aggression and retaliation, as Olivia
Guaraldo observes in Chapter 11. In so doing, they, of course, simultaneously bracket all such sweepingly broad, totalizing theories and explanations
of the attack that Peggy Heller discusses critically in Chapter 4.
Rushdies World of Terror
Salman Rushdies Shalimar the Clown (2005) chooses an entirely different
strategy than either DeLillo or Foer, and approaches the political and
national aspects of terror, terrorism, and violence directly. But in order to do
this in a properly non-nationalist way, he locates his characters within a complex and changing, multinational setting, letting go of the nation-state as a
naturalized frame for the novel. One of his key characters, Maximilian Ophuls
(a name borrowed from the German Jewish film director, who emigrated to
the United States via France), begins his political career in the French
Resistance during the Nazi occupation. After the war, he moves to the United
States to become U.S. ambassador to India, but is forced to retire due to a
womanizing scandal. Later he leads U.S. classified operations in Afghanistan
and 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 in


Afghanistan. Finally, he is murdered in a personal-cum-terrorist attack in Los
Angeles. As a victim, he, if anyone, is neither an innocent bystander nor
guilty in such a grave way that his murder could appear as ethically justified.
The story has another beginning in Kashmir, in the paradisiacal time preceding the division between Indian and Pakistani nation-states, in the following
era of brutish Indian military presence, and the increasingly fundamentalist guerrilla movementsterroristsagainst Indian presence and the entire
Hindu population.
Shalimar the Clown is not one of the easiest novels to read and digestfar
from it, in fact. The complex architecture of the novel endeavors nothing less
than to capture the geopolitical complexity of the worlds of terror and terrorism in one book, and the novel might well be characterized as a literary
encyclopedia of contemporary terror, even including the discussion on the
dehumanizing effects of death rows in the United States. It takes time to realize, for example, that Rushdie employs an entirely different language for
events in Europe and North America versus the magical realism and complicated language of Kashmiri events. He outlines the prenationalistic era of
Kashmir, a time when Pandits and Muslims are able to live freely together, eat
and cook similar fantastic banquets, and wear traditional garments without
orthodox veiling. The marriage between Shalimar the Clown, a Muslim boy,
and Boonyi, a Hindu girl, epitomizes the now long-gone spirit of peaceful
coexistence in the remote village of Pachigam. When Boonyi escapes with
Max Ophuls, for a short-term affair with the wish for a more spectacular life
than the village could offer, the embittered and unforgiving Shalimar begins
his career as a terroristsoon to meet more orthodox fighters who originally
wanted to kill him, simply because of his history as an entertainer. He
becomes a student, a scholar of rage (272); and in due course he became a
person of value and consequence, as assassins are (275). Here, personal loss
and hatred receives a political articulation in a way that DeLillo, Foer, and
Spiegelman resist in the case of 9/11.
A number of Rushdies stylistic choices may, at first, be astounding. Once
the narrator reports, almost in the style of journalistic critique or testimonial,
how the fundamentalist groups come from Pakistan, force the Muslim
women to wear burkhas against their will and tradition, and frighten the
Hindu families into escaping the country by randomly slaughtering a part of
their population. At the same time, however, the province is full of Indian
troops, using similar terror tactics against suspicious civilians. All of a sudden
the author shifts from narration to political essay, and directly challenges the
Indian authorities. He writes, There were six hundred thousand Indian

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The Arts Investigating Terror

Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

troops in Kashmir but the pogroms of the pandits was not prevented, why
was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters
or relief or even register their names, why was that . . . The ministers of the
government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote
one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants
whose 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 authorial
indictment appears emotionally and surprisingly well grounded, while the
entire gravity of war crimes and terror had become so weighty that the open
charge feels almost like a relief: someone is out there to protest the cruelties,
including the reader as a secondary witness. A bit laterafter an accounting
of the brutalities enacted by both parties, that is, the fundamentalists and the
Indian armythe narrator stops for a moment to reflect upon the situation
by observing, There are things that must be looked at indirectly because
they 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, or
any account for that matter, go in terms of describingor performing, in
Janiks casehorror without becoming part of that same horror, a theme
which 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 victim, as Frank Mller writes in Chapter 1, If victims are humiliated and
abused in front of the camera for the purpose of the production of images,
then the viewer, by watching these images, becomes an accomplice of the
perpetrators.
Rushdies well-trained, internationally experienced, callous and well-connected terrorists seem to render some of their predecessors of no more than
two decades ago very amateurish indeed, as in Doris Lessings (1985) The
Good Terrorist and Paul Austers Leviathan (1992). Lessings homespun, leftist
terrorists remain nearly comically shabby figures, in spite of the tragic consequences of their operations. Perhaps we now tend to think that Lessing was a
bit too optimistic about the harmlessness of the terrorist drive, by not giving
us access to their more professional endeavors. In any case, the strictly realistic mode of her novel is arguably more adequate for the narration of the
youths everyday activities than of the terror itself, which curiously becomes
virtually normalized by the conventional narrative form, becoming just one
occasion among many others. Random deaths do not signify anything in particular to the activists, at least nothing that a quote from Lenin and a competent 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 to
kill without any emotions. Alice, the female protagonist, muses upon the situation after the killings: After all, if publicity was the aim, then they had certainly achieved that! And Faye? But comrades knew their lives were at risk,
the moment they undertook this sort of thing, decided to become terrorists (452).
Interestingly, Lessing points out that her activists way of life was not, in
point of fact, oriented to achieve any recognizable political objectives.
Instead, it was the good feelings of the narcissist-as-activist, spending brilliant
days in picketing and shouting at the police, getting kicks out of resisting and
escaping the police, or even getting arrested, the excitement of transgressing
the borderlines between the permissible and the forbidden, the legal and the
illegal. The sheer fact of escaping the police renders activists, in their own
imagination, as dangerous and important. Learning the allegedly sublime
pleasures of transgression, even to the point of enjoying killing people was, of
course, essential for the education of Nazi officers as well as the globe-trotting
terrorists of Rushdies novel. Crime fiction has for a long time investigated
such serial crimes as rape and murder from the perspective of the particularly
addictive and subjectivity-creating excitement generated by the transgression
of these boundaries.
Imagining with a Terrorist?
Literature has its methods of bringing fictional characters closer to the reader
than 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 character
may be one way; letting one of the characters narrate the story is another.
Such a culturally and politically diverse, agonistic situation as the recent wave
of fundamentalist terrorism, of course, inflicts difficult challenges upon
authors. Doris Lessings expert narration, if mainly ironic and sardonic, on
the thoughts, action, and speech of her activists is based on a shared cultural
background and knowledge about leftist movements. As Manfred Jahn
reminds us, the whole modernist literature needed the background of an
emerging psychology to present the fictional streams of consciousness. But
how does this understanding work across violent cultural boundaries? John
Updike (2006), Don DeLillo (2007), and Salman Rushdie (2005) face a
much larger challenge, of course. Their attempts to let us, the readers, imagine the thoughts and emotions of contemporary terrorists are, of course, as
tricky as they are politically relevant.

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The Arts Investigating Terror

Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

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 Updikes
Terrorist (2006) plays expertly with such expectations of the reader. In the
beginning, there is a sloppy Jew, an all-too-liberal white mother, seductive
and flirtatious American girls, and a widening Muslim front to support, educate, and manipulate the dedicated fighter. A great deal of the pleasures of
reading 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 Hamids The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is one of the bravest
attempts to see the whole issue from a not-so-self-evident North American
point of view. Hamids narrator, a young man coming from Pakistan to study
at Princeton (like Hamid himself ), succeeds in landing a job in a thriving
financial enterprise. It is in this line of work where economic fundamentals
need to be taken into account, and otherhuman, ecological, and whateverlesser considerations to be ignored.
A politically oriented reader may still be slightly perplexed by parts of
Hamids novel. His narrator lives in New York City and is entirely dedicated
to his work in the financial sector. As 9/11 is about to occur, he is finalizing
his first big business assignment in the Philippines, and watches the events
unfold on television. He says, I stared as oneand the otherof the twin
towers of New Yorks 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 characters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodesno, I
was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly
brought America to her knees (72, 73).This passage contains a few disquieting contradictions. The narrator had never before announced any reservations in his relationship with America (a term the Canadians, among many
other Americans, may find inconvenient in this context). On the other hand,
between the dashes he presents himself as a relatively nave and apolitical
reader of the media. Yet he immediately knows how to react to the figures of
destruction exclusively on the symbolic level of the event. The reading of the
situation may differ from many hegemonic versions, but it certainly concurs
with the Bush administration in one regard: by seeing the event within a
clear-cut national frame. But within this chosen nationalistic frame, celebrating America on her knees, this reading again appears helplessly nave, while
not seeing in the event itself the seeds for horrors to come as its natural consequence. Later, when the big America attacks small Afghanistan, the previously light-hearted observer is full of moral rectitude. After allowing
himself a nationalistic reading of the event, the narrator becomes a purist
after returning to New York. He states, Your countrys flag invaded New

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York after the attacks; it was everywhere. Small flags stuck on toothpicks featured in the shrines; stickers of flags adorned windshields and windows; large
flags fluttered from buildings. They all seemed to proclaim: We are America
not New York, which, in my opinion, means something quite different (79).
Hamids narrator here has different political and ethical standards for New
Yorkers 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. In
fact, Siri Hustvedt (2006, 124) has offered quite a different reading of the
meaning of the flags as well. Brockmeier (2008), in his study of actual
responses to the trauma of 9/11, notes that patriotic and nationalist reactions,
so popular in the media and politicsand in the rest of the countrywere
truly marginal among individual responses in New York City. Whereas
DeLillo, Ondaatje, Rushdie, and Spiegelman, among many others, systematically resist nationalist readings of terror and terrorism, Hamids position
remains problematic despite his criticism of America.
Hamids work is one of those that foreground the media representation as
a real political event. Rather uncannily, Brett Easton Ellis (1998) obliterated
the borderlines between film and the novels real-life events in his paranoid
terrorist world of Glamorama to the ultimate extent possible. Film crews in
this novel are mysteriously already ever-present and shooting raw footage
when bombs are delivered and exploded in Prada or Gucci bags. Is the narrator Victor Ward too strung out on a combination of drugs, always including
Xanax, a medication for panic attacks, to make a difference between fiction,
glamorous show life, and a vicious terrorist plan? Or do we witness a terrorist
network of top models along with their assemblage of the best brand name
productsand nearly always in front of photographers and film crewswith
its paranoid plans to create maximum havoc? Elliss terrorists combine the
glamorous public presence in front of cameras, high-quality technical expertise in camouflage, and terrorist attacks with a renouncement of empathy for
victims and an obvious enjoyment of torture. All players have double or triple
agendas, leaving Victor Ward and the reader betrayed in their search for final
clarity and closure.
This cursory review on parts of the recent literature on terror is most of all
meant to emphasize the relevance of studying the arts in the context of terror.
There are many other novels to consider, such as Ian McEwans Saturday
(2005). In his The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee (1994) revisits
Dostoyevskys classical crime scene, discussed more thoroughly by Margaret
Heller in Chapter 4 of this volume, that naturally evokes the nineteenth-century genre of literature focused on St. Petersburgoriginally brought to life
by Alexander Pushkins narrative poem The Bronze Horseman of 1833.2 There
are entire genres such as crime stories and science fiction to be examined, not

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The Arts Investigating Terror

10

Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski

to mention film and photography. The recent artistic interest in terror is


engendering ideas, images, and dilemmas awaiting more thorough, interdisciplinary investigation, quite apart from its educational potential.

In a book penned over a quarter of a century ago, Marshall Berman eloquently and passionately defended The Communist Manifesto by Marx and
Engels as the first great modernist work of art (1983, 102). And like all
great books, Bermans All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of
Modernity is possibly even more compelling today than when it was first published. It is especially relevant now, when the cold war era has given way to
something that it perhaps helped to spawn in its own wake, which has now
taken its place on a global scale. Indeed, the idea of terror in our midst is
certainly not new; what is new about it is its seeming all-pervasiveness. It has
come out into the open, followed closely in its wake by a global media that
amplifies it, making it into something that is no longer occurring only on
the shabby back streets of a distant region, where it was ignored: unseen and
unheard.
Terror has, in any case, moved to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Indeed, since the dawn of the twenty-first century, it has spread to
the downtown streets of Jerusalem, Moscow, London, and New York. As
Berman observed nearly three decades ago, the thrust of modernism(s) and
the process of modernization has carried us along the crest of a wave in time
where modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and
emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of
possibilities. . . . It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give
us 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 backor
something resembling a circle of timewhat the chapters of this collection
do not attempt to do with the theme of terror and the arts is to plumb the
depths of an originating despair and emptiness that may have motivated acts
of terror, whether 150 years ago on the streets of St. Petersburg or during the
last few years on the streets of London or New York. And likewise, the
authors of this volume are not interested in examining what art and terror
may share intimately in common with one another below the surface of any
work of art. Perhaps it is DeLillos figure of David Janiak in Falling Man that
explores just such a tension, given that Janiak is not only an artist, but that he

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Terror in our Midst

11

is also arrested at various times, which both complicates and overshadows


his art with the illicit flavor of the terror/trauma he repeats through his horrifying 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 readings of terror and trauma, readings that do not celebrate the violence inherent in much of art, but politically motivated readings that endeavor to resist
the exploitation and persistence of violence by confronting it with courage
and the desire to work through itto look it in the face and see beyond the
shattered present. The method is thus one in which going back can be a way
to go forwardin a circular fashion that attempts to go beyond the meanings culled from the surface of linear time and chronological events.
In short, the method at hand is not about going back in linear fashion
at all, for as Eelco Runia observes, Being moved by the past comes . . . in two
modalities: a regressive and a revolutionary one. In both the regressive and
the revolutionary mode linearity is adjourned and exposed and a primordial
circularity reclaims its rights in an existence where time is not a line but a
knot, not a river but a whirlpool, not progression but circulation (2007a, 1;
Runia 2006, esp. 67).
At a glance, then, this volume begins with an exploration of the visual arts
in Part 1: Visualizing Terror, where each of the three chapters of this section
offer three different dimensions of the problematic relationship between terror and the visual arts, ranging from the aestheticization of violence to the
aura of the resulting images. The main message here is about coming to
grips with, in some cases, quite disturbing images, whereas the third chapter
offers Walter Benjamins aesthetic theory as a way in which to capture and
anchor the phenomenon from a theoretical standpoint.
There is, in any case, a long-standing relationship between literature and
terror, a phenomenon well known in the West since at least the mid-nineteenth century, represented in Part 2: Fictionalizing Terror. It is in this second
section, moreover, that the relationship between literature and terror faces
possible reevaluation in light of the manifold and the heterogeneous provenance of events within their own times and places that have inspired novelists
on themes of violence and terror, both past and present, in an effortas
Runia remarksto capture something that is absent from our own mythology, the past that is withheld verbally, the past . . . that waits to be made sense
of (2006, 8).
This second section of the volume is then followed by the perspective of
governmental terror, in Part 3, regarding policies regulating the arts not only
in Maos China during the Cultural Revolution, but also seen in a comparative

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