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Politics and the Terrorist Novel

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2008.0027

1934-421X

Francis Blesington,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

Politics And The Terorist Novel Francis Blesington (bio) "Which truth? Hers or yours? The truth of a woman who realized where her duty lay, or the truth of a man who believes you need only turn your back on a tragedy to wash your hands of it?" With these words the so-called commander confronts Dr. Amin Jaafari, the kidnapped and tortured hero of The Attack (2005), a terrorist novel written by the Algerian author Yasmina Khadra (Mohammed Moulessehoul). A Palestinian and an Israeli citizen, Dr. Jaafari has been trying to learn why his wife became a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv and killed nineteen people, including eleven children. Jaafari has succeeded materially in the Israeli world; but, unknown to him, his wife has turned jihadist. Outraged by Ariel Sharon's policy of bulldozing the ancestral houses of suicide bombers, Jaafari gradually shifts his sympathies toward his Arab roots and his wife's position. But he wavers a bit, and before he can keep another woman from setting off her Semtex vest, he is swept into the bloody maelstrom of the Mideast and destroyed—a bystander in a bomb attack on a sheik. As a doctor his mission is to preserve life, and as a jihadist his wife's mission is to take it away. His search for the truth leads him to the heart of the terrorist novel, which is a [End Page 116] tripartite choice: to inflict disaster on the world and perhaps on oneself for real or imagined humiliations; to accept a flawed and unjust world; or to escape the dilemma, usually through suicide, without destroying others. In the terrorist novel we find no absolute answers, but neither do we drift into absurdist existentialism or postmodernist claims of unknowability. The characters waver and decide, we see their fates, the authors present their cases, and we judge their validity. What we want most from the terrorist novel is to know and experience why someone chooses terror. We want to be inside the mind of the terrorist. The terrorist novel is related to the political novel. Fifty years ago Irving Howe (in Politics and the Novel) explored "what happens to the novel when it is subjected to the pressures of politics and political ideology." Howe developed the concept further. The political novel must drive its abstractions home to the heart. There must be some transcendence of the author's ideology and some buildup of the opposing view; otherwise the novel dwindles into propaganda. Usually the writer finds some common ground in suffering or martyrdom or fear rather than in some abstract idea of justice that resolves the conflict, for a novel is about private lives, not the triumph of an ideology. We must feel that the characters live the ideas. For this reason the authors do not argue political causes as much as represent them living in people. The terrorist novel shares these qualities but concentrates on the dilemma of a character who is trapped among often negative alternatives. The character needs to make a choice. In the political novel choices have often been made before the action starts, and we see them carried out. In André Malraux's Man's Fate, a novel analyzed by Howe, Chinese revolutionaries never waver and we experience their martyrdom. We don't know what causes them to revolt. By highlighting choice, the terrorist novel distinguishes itself from its cognate, the political novel. According to the OED, the English terms terrorism and terrorist were established in the 1790s during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution and then were used during the nineteenth century to describe the political explosions in Germany, Italy, and Russia. Originally they designated the Jacobin government's use of intimidation, though, of course, political or religious humiliation as a reason for random killing can take us back to massacres older than history. Since the Reign of Terror was conducted by an interim revolutionary government, the transfer of the terms to antigovernment forces was easy. The French bloodbaths haunted the imagination during the nineteenth century and charged the atmosphere of the terrorist novel with the fear of the unknown. In this way the novel may help us face our...