Terror and the Liberal Conscience: Political Fiction and Jihad—The Novel Response to 9/11

Abstract

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C. in 2001 the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication devised a new classification. The category, September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001-Fiction, responds to a distinct genre of political novels. In the light of the philosopher Richard Rorty's contention that the Western novel can clarify the moral and political options that confront the West, the article examines what insight, if any, into the motive for violence, and the capacity to recuperate a sense of liberal progressive purpose, the novels of 11 September afford?

The authors particularly thank one of the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and observations.

Notes

1. André Malraux, Man's Estate (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1989), p. 4.

2. From a different perspective Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (London: Macmillan, 1941), Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister (New York: H. Holt, 1947), and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1949) investigated the arbitrary terror of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, capturing, via their fictional dystopias, what all too frequently eluded political and social science.

3. Richard Rorty, “Heidgger, Kundera and Dickens,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 68.

4. Richard Rorty, “Introduction,” in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: University Press, 1989), p. xvii.

5. Richard Rorty, “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty,” in Contingency Irony and Solidarity, p. 173.

6. Richard Rorty, “A Queasy Agnosticism,” Dissent Magazine, Fall 2005, p. 304.

7. Social scientists, following Emil Durkheim, have argued that the conditions of modernity require a shared sense of solidarity in a political community. See, inter alia, Anthony Giddens, Durkheim (London: Fontana, 1986) and Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1982).

8. John Updike, Terrorist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 20.

9. Jay McInerney, The Good Life (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 4.

10. Ibid., p. 180.

11. Ibid., p. 355.

12. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005).

13. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), p. 34.

14. Ibid., p. 215.

15. Ibid., p. 230.

16. An event, of course, which actually took place.

17. Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 55.

18. Ibid., p. 33.

19. Rorty, “A Queasy Agnosticism,” p. 2.

20. McEwan, Saturday, p. 33.

21. Ibid., p. 81.

22. Ibid., p. 73.

23. Ibid., p. 121.

24. Ibid., p. 126.

25. See Aristotle, Politics (London: Penguin, 1976), where he argues that the polis is more than a tribe but not a city of strangers and constituted through recognition of fellow citizens.

26. Michel Houellebecq, Platform (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 163.

27. Ibid., p. 164.

28. Ibid., p. 163.

29. Ibid., p. 164.

30. Ibid., p. 166.

31. Ibid., p. 166.

32. McInerney, The Good Life, p. 162.

33. Updike, Terrorist, p. 12.

34. Ibid., p. 260.

35. Ibid., p. 12.

36. McInerney, The Good Life, p. 124.

37. Ibid., pp. 123–124.

38. McEwan, Saturday, pp. 276–277.

39. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), pp. 31–32.

40. Ibid., p. 72.

41. Ibid., p. 73.

42. Ibid., p. 152.

43. Ibid., p.171.

44. Richard Flanagan quoted in Stephen Moss, “The Art of Darkness,” The Guardian 20 April 2007.

45. Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist (London: Picador, 2006), p. 142.

46. Ibid., p. 2.

47. DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 80. Hatta was of course the leading light in the planning and execution of the attack on the World Trade Center.

48. Ibid., p. 81.

49. Ibid., p. 170.

50. Ibid., p. 80.

51. Ibid., p. 176.

52. Ibid., p. 177.

53. Ibid., p. 231.

54. Updike, Terrorist, p. 90.

55. Ibid., p. 76.

56. Ibid., p. 77.

57. See Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Batt, Radicalization in the West: The Home Grown Threat (New York: New York City Police Department 2007), and Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

58. Updike, Terrorist, p. 3.

59. Ibid., p. 234.

60. Ibid., p. 306.

61. Rorty, “A Queasy Agnosticism,” p. 1.

62. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 154.

63. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 1.

64. Ibid., p. 41.

65. Ibid., The City and Man, p. 6.

66. Moss, “The Art of Darkness.”

67. Animah Kosai “The Booker Books,” The Star (Malaysia), 21 October 2007.

68. Original italics, Updike, Terrorist, p. 310.

69. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 283.

70. Thus, Nikita Necator, in Under Western Eyes, regards himself a celebrity of the militant revolution and only succumbs to petit bourgeois emotions when Razumov, the unknown, putative assassin of a Czarist minister, outdoes his feats of violence. On meeting Razumov, Necator performs “his horrible squeaky burlesque of professional jealousy exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the attention attracted to the performance of an obscure amateur.” Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: The Modern Library, 2001) p. 198.

71. Rorty, Contingency, p. 171.

72. Strauss, The City and Man, p. 11.