5 - Stark humanity

Summary

Writing in the New York Times in early 2004, the neo-conservative columnist David Brooks, despairing the apparent incompetence of US intelligence, advised that when it ‘comes to understanding the world's thugs and menaces’ his readers would be better advised to read a Dostoevsky novel. The statement echoes one made thirty years ago, when a US Congressional committee urgently advised that all police officers in America should be made to read Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. A similar injunction was placed on the FBI officers who sought the notorious Unabomber Theodor Kaczynski, between 1975 and 1998. Kaczynski was himself fascinated by Conrad's novel, and used it as something of a terrorist handbook. Of course, there is a pragmatic edge to such injunctions, and the idea that counter-terrorists might be able to brush up their skills by reading Conrad or Dostoevsky may seem to smack of a certain naivety.

But there is rather more to it than this. Writing as long ago as 1977, the doyenne of terrorist studies, Walter Lacqueur, suggested that ‘fiction holds more promise for the understanding of the terrorist phenomenon than political science’ ever can. More recently, Margaret Scanlon has attributed a vital shared affinity between the writer of novels and the terrorist, a common desire to destabilise and to deconstruct; and we shall encounter the same affinity in the next chapter when we engage Don DeLillo's novel Mao II. Exploring this canon, Margaret Scanlon describes a ‘paradoxical affiliation’ between literature and terrorism, between ‘actual killing’ and ‘fictional construct’, between what is apparently fictional and what seems to be chillingly real.