6 - ‘Nothing Terroristic About Him’: The Figure of the Terrorist in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs

Summary

After 11 September 2001, a number of literary critics examined the figure of the terrorist in English literature, and they did not like what they found. Richard Gray fired the opening salvo with his 2008 article, ‘Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis’. Surveying the rash of novels attempting to deal with that terrible day, Gray observed that ‘a kind of imaginative paralysis’ had ‘set in’, suggesting that, ‘Perhaps it is too soon, perhaps it is impossible’ to deal with these events (135). In his response to Gray, Michael Rothberg is even harsher, accusing 9/11 fiction of ‘a failure of the imagination’ (2008, 153). Gray and Rothberg's primary complaint is that 9/11 fictions ‘retreat into domestic detail’, as Gray (2008, 134) puts it. Rothberg agrees, and using Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005) as his example, observes how ‘the novel retreats back into the reified world of domesticity and “emotional entanglements”’ (2008, 154). Consequently, both agree that most 9/11 fiction reduces the figure of the terrorist to a mere stick-figure, that most authors do not even gesture toward ‘witnessing or explanatory piecing together of personal or cultural motive’ (136). Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel (2008) broaden their focus to survey the representation of terrorism in novels from 1970–2001, and they conclude that Gray and Rothberg's criticisms of 9/11 fiction apply to a much wider range of literature. Most terrorist fiction, they argue, is all about the victim with little attention paid to the perpetrator: ‘the main focus of most terrorist fiction in our period is the target of terrorism and the injury it inflicts’ (Appelbaum and Paknadel 2008, 397). Richard Jackson (a co-founder of Critical Terrorism Studies) similarly finds that most terrorist fiction depicts terrorists ‘in largely derogatory, dehumanizing, and demonizing terms’ (2015b, 402), and he calls for a new approach to terrorism in fiction, one that gives ‘primary voice to the views of the terrorist’ (397).