Abstract
This paper poses the question of what it means to be ‘inside’ the terrorist’s mind and explore the terrorist’s mentality by means of a narrative, such as the terrorist novel and the terrorist memoir. Consequently, the paper focuses on authorial strategies of empathy and sympathy in texts that privilege the terrorist character’s subjective viewpoint and experience. The discussion operates on the premise that narrative techniques have bearing on the readers’ response to the story, even if it there is no guaranteed correspondence between a certain technique and a certain effect. Thus, the paper asks how first-person narration, the interior representation of a person’s consciousness, and extended direct representation of speech, can contribute to empathic and sympathetic effects in specific ways. After a brief look on the ironic method, i.e. alternation between ironic distance and sympathy for the terrorist character, and the narrative of changing minds, i.e. a story where a character abandons his plot for destruction, the discussion moves into an extended analysis of three examples where the narrative as a whole suggests sympathy for terrorist cause and tactics. The examples include Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses (Honba 1969), Richard Jackson’s dialogue novel Confessions of a Terrorist (2014), and Omar Nasiri’s memoir Inside the Global Jihad (2006).
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Notes
By terrorism I refer to the basic U.S. Department of State [Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Sect. 2656f(d)] definition as ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.’ Richardson uses a similar working definition as she outlines the criteria for defining terrorism as a tactic (2006, 4–6). The legitimacy of the goals being sought through the terrorist act is irrelevant in this definition. I would like to thank Yves Clavaron, Blanka Grzegorczyk, and Florence Fix for their comments on an earlier version of this text.
Dostoyevsky’s Demons (1872), the Stevensons’ The Dynamiter (1885), James’s Princess Casamassima (1886), Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911).
Recent empirical research has shown that first-person narrative brings out the ambivalence of readers’ responses to characters in literature, especially when coupled with unreliable narrators (see Lissa et al. 2016).
See also Appelbaum and Paknabel (2008, 423), who point out that ‘the criminal mind, and sympathy with criminality, may not be as foreign to crime novels on the whole as the terrorist mind and sympathy with terrorism are to our sample of terrorism novels.’
As Taylor writes: ‘What seems to make terrorists essentially different from others is their ability to “switch off” their sense of empathy (the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective) in service to their beliefs and goals’ (2014). Also, a study concerning the moral cognition of 66 incarcerated ex-combatants from a Colombian paramilitary terrorist group has revealed that ‘terrorists judge others’ actions by focusing on the outcomes, suggesting that their moral code prioritizes ends over means’ (Baez et al 2017, 6). The novelist McEwan made a similar claim following 9/11: “If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed” (2001).
Conrad perceived the event as ‘a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes’ (1983, xxxiv).
Alice is aware of this resemblance herself, for instance, when she recognises her mother’s voice in her own words: ‘”I mean what a shitty lot, that is, if even half of what you read in the papers is true…” This last part of the sentence was her mother, straight; and Alice wondered what her mother should be speaking so authoritatively and naturally from Alice’s mouth. Not that Alice minded. Dorothy Mellings’ voice sounded quite appropriate, really, in this situation’ (1985, 301).
In Updike’s novel, similarly, empathy for strangers contributes to the would-be terrorist’s change of mind. In this case, the main character Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy feels a sudden rapport with two black children who are in a car in front of his truck, which he is planning to blow up in the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River.
Matsugae’s story was told in the first novel in Mishima’s cycle, Spring Snow. The other parts of the tetralogy relate stories of Honda’s encounters with Kiyoaki’s various reincarnations.
In Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s detective novel Terroristerna (The Terrorists 1975) we can find a similar strategy for evoking understanding for a politically motivated assassination. Here, the defense attorney hopes, at the end of his defense in the court, that the mental examination of Rebecca Lind, the assassin of the Swedish Prime Minister, will come to the conclusion that she is wiser and more righteous than most people. Also, the main character in this novel, police detective Martin Beck, expresses his sympathy for the assassin, whom he sees as a victim of a corrupt and oppressing society, during the interrogation.
The same values can also be found in the fictional account of the Shinpuren uprising (‘Yamao Tsunenori’) that is incorporated in an earlier part of the novel, and which serves as Iinuma’s inspiration, thus giving a historical justification for his actions.
Thus, the conclusion of Runaway Horses prompts the question of the novel’s polyvocality, or what Milan Kundera has called the wisdom of the novel in his Art of the Novel. This is the argument that great novels, such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, are always a bit more intelligent than the ideology of their writers. A great novel cannot by nature serve ideological certitudes, but is bound to contradict them since, Kundera claims, the novels must rely on the spirit of humour and the inspiration of God's laughter (2003, 160).
The Decay of the Angel (天人五衰) was released posthumously in February 1971.
This quote is from the original introduction to the novel, signed by the author in October 2013. However, the preface to the 2015 edition, signed in March 2015, addresses the somewhat different question of ‘why an individual would choose to join a terrorist group and launch attacks against the West’ in relation to the more recent concerns having to do with Western recruits fighting for the so-called Islamic State.
The IRSC 2016 report contends that many early studies of terrorism and radicalisation ‘have perpetuated the notion of terrorists as well-educated intellectuals’ (Basra et al. 2016, 11) from middle- or upper classes with no criminal pasts, even if the presence of former criminals has been significant in European jihadist groups. Some other Islamist militant groups, however, have attracted more educated members (Richardson 2006, 47).
Jackson raises the issue of authenticity on a number of occasions in the interview that accompanies the first edition of the novel.
The abbreviation stands for Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure.
In London, he infiltrated Islamist groups, and in Germany operated as an informant of Islamist activism at refugee camps and community centres.
Some key mysteries surround the writer and the book’s truth-value: What was or is Nasiri’s true identity, how much of the book is changed to protect his or other people’s identities, and what happened to the author after publishing this book?
Richardson refers to the ‘lethal cocktail that combines a disaffected individual, an enabling community, and a legitimizing ideology’ (2006, xxii). Horgan (2005, 80–106) has a useful general introduction to the ‘why’ question (why someone becomes a terrorist?) and the many challenges that are involved in asking that question.
More precisely, this is the dispute between the emphasis on the failure of cultural integration on one hand (Gilles Kepel), and generational conflict and youth revolt against society, articulated on an Islamic religious narrative of jihad, on the other (Olivier Roy). See Dakhli’s article (2016) on the four figures who have dominated the ‘islamological’ debate in France, François Burgat, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, and their controversies.
Appelbaum and Paknabel sketch out some of these options—identification with the terrorist, or the victims, or objecting to the terrorist character—as they argue that the ‘cultural work performed by fictions of terrorism is driven in large part by what the fictions want their readers to identify with and experience’ (2008, 392).
Zulaika and Douglass argue that one of the tenets of counterterrorism is that contact with terrorists is contaminating, and that dialogue with them is pointless since terrorists are outside the pale of reason (1996, x).
See also Frank and Gruber (2012, 12–15). Andrew Sodroski, the creator of ‘Manhunt: Unabomber’ Discovery Channel’s 2017 drama series about the terrorist Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski and the FBI profiler who pursued him, James ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, has explained that the series is based on ‘a radical empathy where we really enter into the shoes of each of the characters. To do that with Ted is very difficult because you have to always bear in mind that this is a guy who mails bombs to people he’s never met in the service of his philosophy, and that yet, at the same time, he himself is a victim, too, and that he was a little boy with a bright future ahead of him, and something happened.’http://m.timesunion.com/news/article/Unabomber-TV-series-fascinates-as-it-creeps-11723160.php. Accessed 20 August 2018.
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Mikkonen, K. What does a terrorist want? Empathising and sympathising with terrorist voices. Neohelicon 45, 553–574 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0449-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0449-6