Three novels of terrorism: explorations in the politics of literature

ABSTRACT

This article explores the political role of literature through the medium of three novels of terrorism: Francesca Marciano’s Casa Rossa, Nicholas Shakespeare’s The Dancer Upstairs and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. The literary features of these novels, set in the Italy of the Red Brigades and the Peru of Shining Path and Tupac Amaru, foster a political perspective that is a de facto endorsement of the status quo in each society. They hinder a comprehensive understanding of the underpinnings of terrorism that is essential to the formation of counterterrorism strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• Shining Path
• Red Brigades
• literary theory
• cultural sociology

Acknowledgement

Revised version of a paper presented at the International Sociological Association Research Forum, Barcelona, 7 September 2008. Thanks to the Research Triangle at University of Nebraska Omaha for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Mary Ann Lamanna (PhD) is Professor Emerita of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, U.S.A. Her primary research and publishing has been in sociology of the family, including Marriages, families, and relationships: Making choices in a diverse society (13^th edn) and Emile Durkheim on the family. Sociology of literature is a lifelong interest, but a recent topic of research.

Notes

1 Scholars have noted over 100 definitions of terrorism and the difficulty of defining terrorism (Bockstette, 2008, p. 8; Ganor, 2002; Hoffman, 2006, Ch. 1; Schmid & Jongman, 2005; Weinberg, Pedahzur, & Hirsch-Hoefler, 2004).

2 Interestingly, in his novel The Little Drummer Girl (LeCarre’ 1983) ‘which portrays the failure of an anti-Israeli terrorist plan as the happy ending, so to speak, John Le Carré ‘permits the Palestinian point to be made with rare and convincing eloquence,’ in a terrorism novel which ‘transcends its genre’ (Buckley, 1983).

3 Histories of terrorism vary in their accounts and periodization. Rapoport (2013) offers a four ‘wave’ account of eras and types of terrorism: (1) ‘the Anarchist Wave’ (1880–1920); ‘the Anti-Colonial Wave’ (1920s onward about 40 years); ‘the New Left Wave’ (1960s onward, declining by the end of the century); and ‘the religious wave’ (1979 onward). Law (2016) and Hoffman (2006) cover much the same ground in a more complex fashion. The movements portrayed in the three novels of this paper would be part of the New Left Wave, although it is important to note that right-wing terrorism co-existed with leftist in Italy and the Peruvian and Italian movements had a primarily domestic rather than international focus while Rapoport spends more time on more internationalist movements of the era.

4 Philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán based Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) on a marxist ideology of liberation of the indigenous peoples of the Andes. Around 1980, Sendero adopted violence as a strategy that ultimately resulted in almost 70,000 deaths. The violent and indiscriminate tactics employed by military counterterrorism units – mass arrests, trials, imprisonment without due process – were also destructive of Peruvian society. The capture of Guzmán in 1992 ended the movement as a major threat (Brooke, 1992, 1996; Forero, 2003a; Gorriti, 1999; Nash, 1992a; Peru: Shining Path founder, 2006).

5 Formed in 1970, the Red Brigades’s actions included bombs, kidnappings, assaults, and assassinations. At this time, neo-fascists and other right-wing groups were at work to create a ‘strategy of tension’ to undermine political reform by staging such violent acts as the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing and the later bombing of the Bologna train station, which they attributed to the left. Leftist violence was justified as a response to this right-wing violence, alleged by some to be state sponsored (Glynn et al., 2012, pp. 13–15). Many idealistic students and workers thought it futile to seek social reform through the political process and they turned to violence.

The government struck back at the Red Brigades and similar groups with excessive force and mass trials that violated human rights. The Red Brigades were broken up in the 1980s primarily due to the creation of informers through amnesty offers Allen, 1997; della Porta, 1995; Glynn et al., 2012; Manconi, 1991; Meade, 1990; Richardson, 2006; Willan, 1991/2002).

6 Active from the early 1980s to around 1997, Revolutionary Movement Túpac Amaru (M.R.T.A.) was a communist movement that followed the Cuban model. While violent, its scope was more limited than Sendero’s (Forero, 2003a; Macko, 1996; Preston, 1997).

7 Cultural sociologists have begun to speak of intellectual ‘trading zones’ (Jacobs & Spillman, 2005; Spillman, 2008, pp. 2–3) where those trained in one discipline use the ideas of another in their work. A French study of 88 sociological works by such eminent scholars as Bourdieu, Maffesoli, and Touraine reveals that they ‘use literary references as sources for documentation, models, observation procedures, and as an aid to interpret the social world’ (Ellena, 1998, p. 33). See also Smith (2004) for a detailed analysis of Proust and Bourdieu that illustrates the interplay of literature and sociology.

8 First use is usually attributed to Gerald Seymour in Harry’s Game (1975, p. 62), although Rapoport (2013, p. 258) notes that Irgun’s leader Begin used the term to describe that movement. Some analyses of terrorism explore this theme, as well as the related theme of the validity, necessity, and effectiveness of terrorism in the achievement of political goals (Ganor, 2002; Hoffman, 2016; Jenkins, 2003, Chs 2, 8; Sharon, 2015; Weinberg et al., 2004).

9 Sendero had women in leadership positions including the leadership of violent actions (Shakespeare, 1988, pp. 180–181). What seems an unusual practice in a patriarchal society is attributed to: (1) Guzmán’s theoretical perspective, targeting women as a group to be liberated; (2) recruitment in the education department of Guzmán’s Andean university, where many indigenous women were training to be teachers; and (3) the fit between traditional Andean women’s roles and an active militancy (Nash, 1992b). Italian left wing revolutionary groups also had a strong presence of women, attributed to their ideology of gender equality (Jamieson, 2002; Richardson, 2006; Weinberg & Eubank, 1987a), as did the Red Army Faction (Melzer, 2015). Melzer’s (2015, p. 128) book explores the relationship of gender, feminism and motherhood to political violence, noting that in 1981, ‘the face of West German terrorism was female’.

Some Palestinian women terrorists were recruited to the intifada through the opportunity to escape family supervision and have romantic liasons (Berko & Erez, 2007), As gender roles evolved over time and young Palestinian women became freer, they simply responded to the same propaganda appeals to martyrdom as their male cohorts or wished to avenge the killing of a family member (Hadid & Nazzal, 2015). Bloom (2011) covers a wide historical and geographic swath of women terrorists, examining motivation and method.

10 Weinberg and Eubank (1987b, p. 81, Table 5.1) found that 320 of the 2500 Italian terrorists they studied were related to other terrorists. ‘Over the years, observers of Italian society have emphasized the importance of the family. In this light, the family appears to have played a role in the decision to become a terrorist’ (p. 83). Similarly, ‘70 percent of recruits [to the Red Brigades] had at least one good friend in the organization’ (Gladwell, 2010, p. 44). Recruits to other terrorist groups such as the German Baader Meinhof group, Palestinian terrorist groups, the I.R.A., and the recent I.S.I.S. and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups were often brothers, sisters, and cousins of members or their friends, spouses, employees, lovers (Bennhold, 2015; Berger, 2016, pp. 45–55; Bloom & Horgan, 2013; Cronin, 2009, p. 97; ‘The outsize role of brothers in terrorist plots’, 2016).

11 Bel Canto, which won the Orange Prize for Ann Patchett, sold over a million copies in the U.S., and was translated into 30 languages (‘Ann Patchett/bestbestselling author’, n.d.; Tonkin, 2002). It was turned into an opera in 2015 by the Lyric Opera of Chicago and received significant media attention (E.H.B, 2015; Senior, 2016; Tommasini, 2015). A movie version will soon be released (Bel Canto, 2018). Recent publicity around the retirement of Metropolitan Opera diva Renee Fleming has included comments from Ann Patchett, who became a friend as she created the diva character based on Fleming (McGrath, 2017).

Francesca Marciano is from an Italian family prominent in the arts. She has written numerous screenplays, novels, and stories, which are regularly reviewed in the New York Times. She was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2014 (Francesca Marciano, n.d.; Kellogg, 2015; Tarquinio, 2002).

Nicholas Shakespeare won the American Library Association award for The Dancer Upstairs, which was made into a movie directed by John Malkovitch. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been literary editor of several London papers (‘Nicholas Shakespeare’, 2009).