Universiteit Gent
Academiejaar 2006-2007
In search of a terrorist.
Terrorism and terrorists in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, Paul Auster’s
Leviathan and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown.
Verhandeling voorgelegd aan de Faculteit
der Letteren en Wijsbegeerte voor het
verkrijgen van de graad van licentiaat in
de taal- en letterkunde: Germaanse talen, door
Elien Loncke.
Promotor: Prof. Dr. Kristiaan Versluys
Acknowledgements
In would like to thank Prof. Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, for his guidance, advice and patience.
My gratitude also goes out to my friends and in particular to my two roommates and my
boyfriend. They were always there for me and kept me motivated.
I am also very grateful towards my parents and brother, for their support and financial
assistance.
Finally, I would like to thank Nancy Fankhanel for her help and useful remarks.
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................... 1
Table of contents ................................................................................................... 2
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 5
1.
2.
Defining terrorism ......................................................................................... 7
1.1.
History of terrorism................................................................................ 7
1.2.
Definition of terrorism ........................................................................... 7
1.3.
Terrorism in literature .......................................................................... 10
Don DeLillo’s Mao II .................................................................................. 13
2.1.
Theme .................................................................................................. 13
2.2.
Different views on terror and terrorists................................................. 14
2.2.1.
Depiction of the terrorist ................................................................. 14
2.2.2.
Vision of terrorism .......................................................................... 18
2.3.
3.
Characters and their link to terrorism ................................................... 20
2.3.1.
Bill Gray ......................................................................................... 20
2.3.2.
Brita ................................................................................................ 24
2.3.3.
Karen .............................................................................................. 26
2.3.4.
Scott Martineau ............................................................................... 27
2.3.5.
George Haddad ............................................................................... 28
2.3.6.
Jean Claude Julien ........................................................................... 30
2.4
Title and cover ..................................................................................... 32
2.4.
Structure .............................................................................................. 35
2.5.
Conclusion ........................................................................................... 36
Paul Auster’s Leviathan............................................................................... 39
3.1.
Main Theme ......................................................................................... 39
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3.2.
3.2.1.
The terrorists in the novel ................................................................ 39
3.2.2.
Vision of terror and link with literature ........................................... 43
3.3.
4.
Different views on terrorists and terrorism ........................................... 39
Characters and their link to terrorism ................................................... 45
3.3.1.
Benjamin Sachs ............................................................................... 45
3.3.2.
Peter Aaron ..................................................................................... 47
3.3.3.
Fanny .............................................................................................. 49
3.3.4.
Maria Turner ................................................................................... 50
3.3.5.
Lillian Stern .................................................................................... 52
3.3.6.
Maria Dimaggio .............................................................................. 52
3.4.
Title ..................................................................................................... 53
3.5.
The New Colossus ............................................................................... 55
3.6.
Structure .............................................................................................. 58
3.7.
Conclusion ........................................................................................... 62
Rushdie’s Shalimar the clown ..................................................................... 64
4.1.
Main theme .......................................................................................... 64
4.2.
Views on terrorists and terrorism ......................................................... 65
4.2.1.
The depiction of the terrorists.......................................................... 65
4.2.2.
View on terrorism ........................................................................... 76
4.3.
Characters ............................................................................................ 78
4.3.1.
Shalimar the clown or Noman sher Noman...................................... 78
4.3.2.
Max Ophuls .................................................................................... 80
4.3.3.
India Ophuls or Kashmira Noman ................................................... 81
4.3.4.
Boonyi ............................................................................................ 82
4.3.5.
Margaret Rhodes or Peggy Ophuls .................................................. 83
4.4.
Title ..................................................................................................... 85
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4.5.
Structure .............................................................................................. 86
4.6.
Conclusion ........................................................................................... 87
Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 89
Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 92
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Introduction
The theme of this thesis connects two aspects that interest me very much: literature
and politics. The three novels I discussed all deal with terrorism. It is my objective to
show how different contemporary authors develop another vision on terrorism and
terrorists. I first read the three novels discussed in this thesis, namely Don DeLillo’s Mao
II, Paul Auster’s Leviathan and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. Then I consulted
some theoretical works about terrorism and the terrorist, and secondary literature
concerning the three novels discussed.
Mao II was published in 1991 and Leviathan in 1992, which means that a great
deal of secondary literature can already be found on these novels. Many analyses of these
novels are available, but none of them puts the focus on the terrorist. Rushdie’s novel was
published in 2005, which means that except for some reviews, not much secondary
literature has been published on Shalimar the Clown.
The first chapter of this thesis provides a short introduction to the concept of
terrorism. The second chapter is an analysis of Delillo’s Mao II, in which I mainly try to
focus on his portrayal of the terrorist. The third chapter is an analysis of Paul Auster’s
Leviathan. I discuss some main themes and characters, but the main focus is again on the
characterization of the terrorist. The fourth chapter is an analysis on Rushdie’s Shalimar
the Clown - I try to explain how Rushdie is characterizing the terrorists.
My purpose is to show that different authors chose a different approach towards
the theme of terrorism. The characterization of the terrorists is different in all three novels
in order to reinforce their main theme, which differs in every one of them.
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Defining terrorism
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1. Defining terrorism
1.1. History of terrorism
The term terrorism came into use after the French Revolution. The “régime de la
terreur” was a systematic method to reveal and eliminate traitors by taking them to the
guillotine. This régime can be situated between 1793 and 1794. In the beginning this
violence or terror was considered a positive act. It was a means to penalize subversives
and other dissenters, who were considered enemies of the people by the new regime.
During this “régime de la terreur” Maximilien Robespierre and 40.000 other got
guillotined. Shortly after these executions, the English vocal critic of the revolution
described the proponents of the revolution as terrorists. The word is thus an heirloom
from the French Revolution, but terrorism as a practice is much older. It is thought to
have started in Judea around the first century. Jewish men killed the occupying Romans
in the presence of the public, by cutting their throats over with a short dagger. Six
centuries later, members of the thuggee cult in India, strangled their victims. They did
this as an act of sacrifice to the Hindu goddess Kali.
The philosophical roots of terrorism were founded by the Russian
revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin. Terrorism theory arrived in the United States thanks to
German radicals such as Karl Heinzen and Johann Most. These radicals advanced the
philosophy of “using weapons of mass destruction in a systematic campaign of
terrorism.” 1
1.2. Definition of terrorism
Terrorism is a term which is known all over the world. Especially since the attack
on the Twin Towers it has become a term which is used almost daily in the media. But
when searching for one all-embracing definition, we get stuck. As terror shows itself to
the public in many guises, it is a concept that can be defined in several ways.
1
Chapter paraphrased from: “Terrorism,” Encyclopedia of Terrorism, 2003 ed..
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What makes terror different from other criminal activities is that is has a political
dimension. 2 This political element is also the aspect that most definitions published on
terrorism have in common. In his book Thornton defines terror as “a symbolic act
designed to influence political behavior by extra normal means, entailing the use or threat
of violence.” 3 Thornton defines terrorism as a verbal or symbolic act, but he affirms that
the goal of the terrorist is political. The definition of Thornton dates back from 1964,
when terror was still considered as a rather marginal threat. That explains why he only
considers it to be something verbal. Since the 1960s terrorism has evolved a great deal.
Terrorists now have weapons of mass-destruction and nuclear weapons at their disposal.
Just as the weapons and techniques used by the terrorists, also the definition of terrorism
changed in the course of time. Margaret Scanlan defines terrorism as follows: “the
insurgent group chooses a symbolic target because it cannot hope to overpower by force
alone.” 4 In her definition terrorism does not end with verbal acts. Terrorists choose
symbolical targets to strengthen their words. In her definition, terrorists do not sound
dangerous because they do not seem to hurt people. When consulting a modern dictionary
the definition is again very different: “Terrorism is the use of violence, especially murder
and bombing, in order to achieve political aims or to force a government to do
something.” 5
Terrorism has a different meaning for a lot of people. But mostly three important
aspects are apparent in every definition: “the method (violence), the target (civilian or
government), and the purpose (to instill fear and force political or social change)” 6 Now
matter how hard many scholars and intellectuals try to find a correct and objective
definition of terror, none seems to be forthcoming. The term ‘terrorism’ is not, and will
never be a neutral term. As Whittaker mentions in his book:
[Terrorism] is not a neutral descriptive term. Even scholarly definitions of
terrorism are subjective because they must take in account ordinary
language uses of the term, which contain value judgments. Because of this
we are led to ask who calls what terrorism, why and when. Since
2
Paraphrased from: John Horgan, The psychology of terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005) 1.
Thomas Thornton, “ Terror as a weapon of political agitation,” Internal war: Problems and approaches
(New York: Free Press, 1964) 73.
4
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: novelists and terrorists in Contemporary Fiction ( Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 5.
5
“Terrorism,” Cobuild Advanced Learnes dictionary, 2003 ed..
6
“Terrorism,” Encyclopedia of terrorism, 2003 ed..
3
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‘terrorism’ is a political label, it is an organizing concept that both
describes the phenomenon as it exists and offers a moral judgment. 7
As terrorism becomes more and more a hot potato in our modern day society, there
is a need for theoretical books on terrorism. Since the 1980s and especially after the
terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, there has been a boom in terrorism research
and writings. According to John Horgan this boom is closely attached to the fact that
terrorism changed dramatically the last 18 years. Before terrorism did not evolve so
quickly and was not so intense as it is now: “During the historic interlude from 1989 to
2001, the nature and pace of terrorism changed significantly. Previously, the terrorist
threat was heavy and slow moving, predictable and explicable.” 8
Terrorism is now an important concept for research in all sorts of domains:
the economic consequences of terror, the social impact, political consequences. The last
years also the interest for the psychology of the terrorist has grown enormously. There is
not only a focus on the acts and consequences of the acts, but some scholars try to search
for reasons. What factors can drive terrorists to commit such acts? A lot has been
published about these motivations, but there is not one correct answer. There are many
different elements that can make a person want to carry out terrorist acts. Whittaker
divides these factors in three major motivations. The first is: “Rational motivation: the
rational terrorist thinks through his goals and options, making a cost-benefit analysis. He
seeks to determine whether there are less costly and more effective ways to achieve his
objective than terrorism.” 9 A second kind of motivation is psychological motivation:
“Psychological motivation derives from the terrorist’s personal dissatisfaction with his
life and accomplishments. He finds his raison d’être in dedicated terrorist action.” 10 And
the third motivation is cultural motivation:
In societies in which people identify themselves in terms of group
membership (family, clan, tribe), there may be a willingness to selfsacrifice seldom seen elsewhere. At times, terrorists seem to be eager to
give their lives for their organization and cause. 11
7
David Whittaker ed., The terrorism reader (London: Routledge, 2001) 10-11.
John Horgan, The psychlogy of terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005) vii.
9
David Whittaker ed., The terrorism reader (London: Routledge, 2001) 19.
10
David Whittaker ed., The terrorism reader (London: Routledge, 2001) 19.
11
David Whittaker ed., The terrorism reader (London: Routledge, 2001) 20-21
8
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There is a lot of interest in the subject, but there are still a lot of blanks. This has
two main reasons, in the first place the speed with which terrorism evolves is enormous,
which makes it difficult to follow. In the second place because most theories are based on
hypotheses and not on real accounts of terrorists, the reasons for this are that most of
them are either dead after their act, untraceable or unwilling to talk.
1.3. Terrorism in literature
Not only researches got interested in terrorism, but also a lot of novelists
introduced the theme in their novels. Margaret Scanlan believes that novelists are so
attracted to the theme of terrorism because their objective resembles that of the terrorists.
The novelist and the terrorist both want to influence public opinion and write history.
Different novelists have introduced terrorism and terrorists in their novel. Joseph Tuman
sums some of them up in his book:
Examples of terrorism and terrorists can be found in any number of
writings by prominent authors, including Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent
[…], Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson’s The
Dynamiter[…], Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Besy (translated as The Devils or
The Possessed) […], Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer […], and, in more
recent times, John LeCarré’s The little Drummer Girl. 12
As mentioned in the chapter about the definition of terror, the term ‘terrorism’
always implies a moral judgment. When novelists write about terror and terrorists they
also have a moral judgment. Some authors draw a positive portrait of the terrorist, by
which I mean that they consider them as being thinking individuals, while others prefer to
draw a more negative portrait. They consider terrorists as being brainless and violent
‘animals’. Some authors stand midway between.
Scanlan notes in her work on the
terrorist novel that writers can take several positions towards the terrorist: “In each of
12
Joseph S. Tuman, Communicating terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism (Thousand Oaks:
Sage Publications, 2003) 125-126.
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these novels, writers and terrorists encounter each other, resuming a motif of the writer as
terrorist’s victim, rival, or double.” 13
There is no such thing as a standard terrorist novel or novelist. Each novelist has
another view on terror and terrorism.
13
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: novelists and terrorists in Contemporary Fiction ( Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 2.
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Don DeLillo’s Mao II
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‘Nothing happens until it’s consumed.’ 14
2. Don DeLillo’s Mao II
2.1. Main theme
The main theme of the novel is the crowd and the related loss of identity. The
crowd has taken over the decision of what is important in the world and what is not. The
people make everything into something that belongs to the mass. The critical public gets
replaced by faceless millions, just swimming with the tide. Mao II sketches a world that
reduces history and human experiences to commodity.
The first example of this massification is the mass wedding in Yankee stadium.
The individual is totally forgotten, these youngsters are brainwashed by reverend Moon
and are no longer individuals but are all the same: children of their master. By
introducing this theme, DeLillo explains why the terrorist gains such great power in our
present-day society. The mass is only interested in persons who stand out and succeed in
doing things that are never done before. These terrorists do stand out, while other things
in the world can be fitted in universal concepts, terrorists cannot. What DeLillo wants to
point out is that the novelist, the artist has lost his power to inspire and excite the crowd.
The people are no longer impressed by what the artist has to say, or in what the artist
intends to say with his work. The mass fits these intellectuals into their universal scheme.
What the entire crowd wants is something that surprises them, something they have not
seen yet. That is exactly what a terrorist always does: he always finds a way to surprise
and shock. Consequently, the crowd has not found the method yet to explain why
somebody would kill to get his point across. The terrorists do not fit in the mass’s
universal scheme.
More broadly, Mao II announces-with mixed emotions-the end of the grand
narrative of modernist authority and its replacement by what I am calling,
after Jennifer Wicke, spectacular authorship: the power to use photographic
14
Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992) 44. From now on, all page references will be marked in
the text.
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or televised images to manufacture, as if by magic, spectacular events that
profoundly shape public consciousness. 15
The author announces the end of the novel and the novelist, but at the same time
DeLillo warns his readers for the loss of identity. “Mao II criticizes this sort of simulated
identity as symptomatic of a postmodern, globalized world in which no one is at home.” 16
That uncanny feeling determines the atmosphere in the entire novel. None of the
characters feels at ease with their place in the world. By presenting his characters as
decentred characters DeLillo follows a whole generation of writers who wrote about
terrorism. As Rowe 17 mentions in an article also writers such as Dostoyevsky, Conrad and
James wrote novels against a same changing social background. These authors all use an
atmosphere in which the individual thinking gets replaced by the ruling thoughts of the
crowd. All of these novelists use characters who are in search of themselves, who are
divided. All of these writers realize how important the role of the mass is in social matters
and culture.
2.2. Different views on terror and terrorists.
2.2.1. Depiction of the terrorist
There is only one terrorist group mentioned in the novel. It is the group that
takes a young Swiss poet as a hostage to get some publicity. What the group exactly does
and what it stands for, is never really explained. When Charles Everson, the publisher of
Bill Gray, a novelist and the main character in Mao II, explains what the group stands for,
he does not really know who he is dealing with: “We know next to nothing about the
group that has him. The hostage is the only proof they exist.” (98) Later on when Charles
has received more information from the group’s spokesperson, he can provide Bill Gray
with some more details: “‘There’s a new communist element.’ […] ‘There’s a Lebanese
Communist Party. There are leftist elements, I understand, aligned with Syria. The PLO
15
Mark Osteen, “Becoming incorporated: spectacular authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II,” Modern Fiction
Studies 45.3 (1999): 644.
16
John Carlos Rowe, “ Mao II and the War on Terrorism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (2004): 23.
17
Paraphrased from: John Carlos Rowe, “ Mao II and the War on Terrorism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly
103.1 (2004): 23.
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has always had a Marxist component and they’re active again in Lebanon.’” (124) Not
much more is said about the organization and the PLO 18 in general, except a short
fragment in which Scott Martineau sees Yasir Arafat, who has been the chairman of the
PLO for years.
Scott went over there and saw on the top step who wore a khaki field jacket
and checkered headscarf, a short guy with a scratchy beard, and it was
Yasir Arafat and he was waving at the people on the sidewalk. When a
hotel guest came out the door, Arafat smiled and nodded and people in the
crowd smiled in response. […] Everyone applauded now. Someone shook
Arafat’s hand and there was more applause. […] When Arafat went inside,
the people on the sidewalk smiled and clapped one last time. They wanted
to make him happy. (50-51)
The fragment does not explain much about the PLO but it does show how
charismatic and popular a figure active in the terrorist milieu can be. Yasir Arafat has a
lot of blood on his hands, but none of the bystanders really seems to care. They see a
known face and are very enthusiastic.
This communist element of the PLO, active in Lebanon, is not known yet. The
members of this communist element want to acquire recognition and that is why they take
a hostage. This hostage, a young Swiss poet, was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The group does not really care about the people they capture; they just want some
publicity. The spokesman of the group contacts Charles Everson because he is “chairman
of a high-minded committee on free expression” and will be interested in the welfare of
the young poet. Charles and the spokesman make a deal: Charles and his group will
organize a press conference and talk about the poet and the group who keeps him hostage
and the group will free him in return. In reality it is actually a win-win situation, both
groups get the press and the attention they need: “Your new group gets press, their new
group gets press, the young man is sprung from his basement room, the journalists get a
story, so what’s the harm.” (98) This fragment is a perfect illustration of how important
18
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is basically an umbrella organization that coordinates
various Palestinian terrorist groups, professional unions and syndicates, and civilian groups. Source:
“Palestine Liberation organization,” Encyclopedia of Terrorism, 2003 ed.
- 15 -
the media is. Both groups want to reach a mass audience and the fastest way to do this is
involving the media.
The novel is not only scarce on details concerning the terrorist group in general
but also about the leader of the organization. He is only mentioned one time by the
spokesperson of the organization: George Haddad. In the last chapter, Brita Nilsson, a
photographer who also took pictures of Bill Gray, takes pictures of the leader, called Abu
Rashid. The narrator describes Abu Rashid as an older man but it seems that time has not
taught him a lot. He is depicted as a copycat with no thoughts of his own. This image is
created by several elements. In the first place he himself does not speak to Brita. Almost
everything he says is explained by his translator: “Rashid drinks and wipes his mouth.
But it is the interpreter who speaks.” (233) The few things he does say, are either very
short and vague: “Don’t bring your problems to Beirut.” (232) or they are an echoe of
things that Mao Zedong or George Haddad have said:
He says, ‘Mao regarded armed struggle as the final and greatest action of
human consciousness. It is the final drama and the final test. And if many
thousands die in the struggle? Mao said death can be light as a feather or
heavy as a mountain. You die for the people and the nation, your death is
massive and intense. Die for the oppressors, die working for the exploiters
and manipulators, die selfish and vain and float away like a feather of the
smallest bird.’ (236)
Abu Rashid has no ideas of his own, he wants to copy what Mao Zedong did and
uses the same methods and rhetoric. He is presented as a man without a proper
personality. His character is a ragbag of ideas ‘stolen’ from other more charismatic
persons.
Not only has Abu Rashid no identity of his own, he also does not allow his coworkers to develop an identity of their own. They have to become one unified mass
willing to do everything for their leader and the cause: “The boys who work near Abu
Rashid have no face or speech. Their features are identical. They are his features. They
don’t need their own features or voices. They are surrendering these things to something
powerful and great.” (234) They have to wear a hood, so that they all look the same, no
more room for individuality. The boys working for him also have to wear a shirt with Abu
Rashid’s picture on it. This serves to give them their new ‘identity’, they all have to be
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the same as Abu Rashid, there is no room for diversity: “It gives them a vision they will
accept and obey. These children need an identity outside the narrow function of who they
are and where they come from. Something completely outside the helpless forgotten lives
of their parents and grandparents.” (233) All of these children have to renounce their
personal history and origin. Even Abu Rashid’s own son has to wear the hood. He is no
better than all the others for “They are all children of Abu Rashid. All men one man.”
(233)
The terrorist leader and his followers are all people without identity. Abu Rashid is
depicted as being a Mao copycat, the so-called Mao II. This image of the terrorist seems
oversimplified. He is depicted as a man without psychological depth and without
compassion for other human beings, not even for his own child. This image is probably
created because the author mainly wants to focus on the negative side of the terrorist. The
terrorist is the one ‘stealing’ away the influence of the novelist. If these terrorists seemed
rather intelligent and compassionate people, his point could not be made. The reader
would identify with the terrorist. And that is not the intention of the novel, because it has
to convince its readers to attach more importance to art and writings. It seems like the
author is so eager to make his point that he overlooks the psyche of his characters.
Margaret Scanlan makes the following remark in her book on terrorism and novelists:
“Similarly, as he flashes from New York to London to Athens to Beirut, DeLillo seems to
intent on reproducing the forces that homogenize the world that he gives up the
possibility of reproducing its heterogeneity.” 19 All characters seem to lack a real strong
personality that distinguishes them from other people. But it is especially notable
concerning the terrorists: these terrorists all seem copies of each other, without any
unique character traits. Margaret Scanlan says the following about this: “What one misses
in Mao II finally is an old-fashioned novelistic virtue, the attempt to communicate the
distinctive accents of a culture, of a time and place.” 20 Scanlan is only mentioning that
there is no attention for the distinctive accents concerning cultured place, but also the
distinctive aspects of the characters and in particular the terrorists presented, are forgotten
or ignored.
19
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 35.
20
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 36.
- 17 -
The novel gives an image of the ‘good’, the novelists, striding against ‘evil’, the
terrorists. As Boxall mentions, the book is using the rhetoric that is now used so often by
the American president, George W. Bush, in his speeches against terrorism: “Mao II
perhaps offers an insight into the conditions that determine the production of George W.
Bush’s new ‘Axis of Evil’” 21
2.2.2. Vision of terrorism
As explained in the introduction, there are different forms of terrorism. In Mao II
different types are mentioned and explored. Thomas Thornton defines terror as “a
symbolic act designed to influence political behavior by extra normal means, entailing the
use or threat of violence.” 22 This definition sees terror as a verbal act: the terrorist
threatens the public with words but never really acts them out. In the beginning Bill Gray,
a secluded novelist and the main character in the novel, believes he is dealing with such a
kind of terrorist organization. When he and his publisher Charles Everson arrive at the
building where a press conference will be held to announce that Bill will do something
for the poet who is taken hostage in Beirut, the phone rings and a man warns them for a
bomb. Bill does not really believe that the man on the phone is speaking the truth. He has
the feeling that the caller is bluffing and that there is no bomb at all. According to Bill
terrorists do not act immediately, they only threat they will.
‘The point is control,’ Bill said. ‘They want to believe they have the power
to move us out of a building and into the street. In their minds they see a
hundred people trooping down the fire stairs. I told you Charlie. Some
people make bombs, same people make phone calls.’ (124-125)
Bill does not believe there is a real danger, but it seems that he made a wrong
judgment call. While he and Charles are waiting till the detectives have inspected the
building, where the press conference is supposed to be held, the bomb goes off. It does
not seem that they are dealing with terrorists who only threat verbally, but with terrorists
who are not afraid to make their hands dirty. Consequently, there is a need for another
definition of terrorism. It seems that the definition given by Margaret Scanlan is more
21
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo, The possibility of fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006) 158.
Thomas Thornton. “Terror as a weapon of political agitation,” Internal war: Problems and approaches
(New York: Free Press, 1964) 73.
22
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appropriate in this context: “the insurgent group chooses a symbolic target because it
cannot hope to overpower by force alone.” 23 The terrorist group who has captured the poet
is now seen as a group that not really wants to hurt people. The organization uses
symbolical targets to get attention from the media. These terrorists capture people, blow
up buildings, but do not kill people, or certainly not yet. But these are not the only
meanings of terrorism presented in the novel. DeLillo also introduces Mao Zedong’s
regime, since Abu Rashid, the leader of the terrorist group in Beirut, sees Mao’s regime
as his example. To the reader it becomes clear that the terrorists will do more than threat
verbally or attack symbolical targets. This kind of terrorism comes closer to this
definition of terror given in the Collins Cobuild English dictionary: “Terrorism is the use
of violence, especially murder and bombing, in order to achieve political aims or to force
a government to do something.” 24 The group active in Beirut has only just begun and will
certainly evolve to a more aggressive form of terrorist warfare. DeLillo wants to point out
that terrorism always evolves in this way: the effect of one terrorist act always has to
surpass that of the former. When Bill Gray talks about the hostage, he is certain that the
group will do more than taking hostages: “The hostage is the miniaturized form. The first
tentative rehearsal for mass terror.” (163) The narrator wants to denounce this need for
spectacle and sensation, created by the media. The media always wants more: they want
to reach a big public by presenting spectacular footage. In the beginning the talks and
threats about terrorism were enough, when this was no longer satisfying, terrorists had to
come up with something more interesting. That is why terrorists began bombing
symbolical targets and kidnapping people. When this became old news, they started
killing people or killing themselves. And this keeps evolving, after a while killing one
person will not be interesting enough anymore and the terrorists will have to start killing
groups, and so on…. They know that, if they want to stand out and make the news, they
have to do something unprecedented and impressing.
23
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 5.
24
“Terrorism,” Collins cobuild advanced learner’s English dictionary. 2003 ed.
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2.3. Characters and their link to terrorism
2.3.1. Bill Gray
Bill Gray is the main character in Mao II. He is a secluded writer who has written
two famous novels, but does not seem to succeed in writing a third one that can match his
earlier ones. He can be seen as the opponent of the terrorist. He is the writer who totally
grasps the fact that he has lost his power and ability to enthrall the crowd. The mass no
longer wants to read, they are only interested in the news, and the people who are in the
news. Bill Gray, a novelist, feels a certain attraction towards the terrorist who is taking
over his role. Margaret Scanlan says the following about this strange relation between
novelists and terrorists:
I ask why so many writers have been drawn to terrorists and what affinities
they find between literary and terrorist plots, between literature and
violence. I see both writers and terrorists in these novels as remnants of a
romantic belief in the power of marginalized persons to transform history. 25
This feeling that he is no longer the one who is transforming history but that
terrorists have taken over that role is indeed what fascinates the main character in Mao II.
Bill Gray knows that he and the terrorist actually have the same purpose: they want to
write and influence history, mean something for the world and be remembered long after
their deaths. Bill Gray feels the attention of the public slipping through his hands. The
public wants to be swept of his feet by some spectacular event, and he, as an author, can
no longer provide these spectacular elements. He wants to know what it is that makes
terrorists so special. He is drawn to his substitutes. Bill Gray explains his connection with
the terrorists as follows:
There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we
become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and
influence…. Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter
the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that
25
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 2.
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territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to
do before we were all incorporated. ( 41)
Gray knows why novelists have lost their appeal on the public. They do not longer
stand out, because they do not surprise their audience anymore. In modern society where
the individual had to make room for the crowd, a strong intellectual individual is no
longer appreciated and valued.
The crowd is satisfied with bread and circuses: they work for a living and are
excited about a good spectacle now and then. Crowds are no longer interested in everyday
things, but want something they cannot reduce to a commodity. Cruel to say, but they
want to see the bloodshed live on television.
Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills
and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the
madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him
a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The
culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate. It’s confusing when they kill
the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed the only
language the West understands. (157)
Bill Gray knows he does not have that kind of influence on the public. But he does
not throw the towel in the ring just yet. Bill and his assistant agree that Bill should retreat
to the country, away from public sphere. By living in seclusion they hope he will regain
recognition and that people will get intrigued. Bill Gray wrote two major books, and he
and especially his assistant realize that, if Bill Gray immediately publishes a third one,
people will lose their interest. By hiding himself he does something unusual, and he gets
some attention. His assistant puts it this way: “That the withheld work is the only
eloquence left.” (67) It is only by not publishing that people are still curious.
It is clear throughout the novel that Bill Gray is actually a little bit jealous of the
terrorist. He has a hard time accepting that these supporters of violence have taken over
his role as someone writing history. Bill Gray does not agree with their methods, but he
would like to have the same kind of attention they have. When his assistant goes to pick
up Brita, the young photographer who is going to take some pictures of Bill, they have
this conversation:
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‘I feel as if I’m being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat in
the mountains.’
‘Tell Bill. He’ll love that,’ Scott said. ( 27)
It seems that Bill would like to be compared to a terrorist. Not because he wants to carry
out terrorist acts, but because he would like to have the same influence on the crowd.
Bill Gray wants to make a difference, and wants to help the young poet, that is the
hostage of the terrorist group. Bill’s publisher, Charles, contacts Bill and asks him if he
wants to go to London to speak at the press conference, in order to help the young poet.
But the press conference cannot go trough because terrorists have planted a bomb. Here
again the terrorists win, they can use their power to stop the conference, acts seem to have
more power than words. But Bill Gray does not want to give up just yet. George Haddad,
the spokesman for the group in Beirut contacts him and Bill Gray joins Haddad, together
they leave for Athens, where Haddad lives. After long and convincing talks with Haddad,
Bill decides to stay in Cyprus for a while, and eventually he decides to go to Beirut and
help the hostage there. During the boat trip from Cyprus to Beirut, Bill gets serious
physical problems, till he eventually dies on the boat trip to Beirut. The journey from the
States to London, from there to Athens and Cyprus and the final boat trip to Beirut, can
be seen as a metaphorical journey: Bill Gray, the novelist, a remnant of past glory, begins
a crusade against terrorism, but he loses more and more of his powers, literally and
figuratively speaking and eventually, his body can no longer stand the pain, and he dies.
During the trip he is also confronted with a lot of people who point out to him that
writers have lost their raison d’être. Bill debates several times with George Haddad, who
believes that terrorists can make a difference, and change the world for the better. Bill
Gray tries to defend his viewpoint, but in the end, it is the ‘fighting’ novelist who goes
down. It was Haddad who indirectly convinced Bill to go to Beirut, Haddad still lives
while Bill Gray dies alone and unfulfilled.
In Cyprus Bill Gray has a conversation with three veterinarians. He wants to ask
them advice about his injury. He tells them he is doing research for his new book. When
he says he is a writer, they reacts as follows:
‘Did they ever make a movie?’ the woman said.
‘Right. Are any of your books also movies?’ the second vet said.
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‘They’re just books, I’m afraid.’ (206)
His journey is not only a personal defeat, but also a defeat for the artist in general.
Here he is confronted again with the fact that people do not read anymore. They only
know writers if they have been on television or if their books where made into films or
other mass media products.
The book ends in a deeply pessimistic mood. The author lives and fights all his life
for his writings, and eventually, he loses everything. He does not only lose his life. But
what is probably even worse for him as an artist, is that also his identity, in the form of
his identity-papers, gets stolen after he dies. The man who finds him takes away all his
identification documents:
When he came to the man lying in the bunk he looked at the bruised and
unshaved face and the dirty clothes and he put a gentle hand to the pale
throat, feeling for the slightest beat. He said a prayer and went through the
man’s belongings, leaving the insignificant cash, the good shoes, the things
in the bag, the bag itself, but feeling it was not a crime against the dead to
take the man’s passport and other forms of identification, anything with a
name and a number, which he could sell to some militia in Beirut. (216217)
The man who finds him shows more respect for the materials Bill Gray is carrying
on and with him, than for the identity of the person. Nobody will ever know what
happened to the novelist Bill Gray. Bill had not told a living soul where he was going,
and if he will be found, nobody will know who he is because all means to identify him are
stolen. Bill dies in complete anonymity, exactly what he tries to avoid his entire life.
The author depicts Bill Gray as the only novelist who still cares and wants
to fight for his profession. Bill Gray does not want to admit his defeat against terrorism.
Richard Hardack describes Bill Gray as follows in an article: “The last unincorporated
novelist, Bill is thus a kind of Western bulwark against the mass identity of the East.” 26 It
seems that Gray is the last novelist willing to try. But he fails, and with him the novel
dies, because there is nobody left who cares.
26
Richard Hardack, “Two’s a crowd: Mao II, coke II, and the politics of terrorism in Don DeLillo,” Studies
in the Novel 36.3 (2004) 374.
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2.3.2. Brita
Brita is a young female photographer. She travels around the world in search of
writers. She has no specific purpose for doing this. Some of the photos get published,
others do not. But the money that she receives for the published pictures is not the reason
for which she makes the pictures. It is just something she started doing some day, and she
does not seem to have a special reason.
Ultimately I don’t know. People say some kind of gallery installation.
Conceptual art. Thousands of passport-size photos. But I don’t see the point
myself. I think this is a basic reference work. It’s just for storing. Put the
pictures in the basement of some library. If people want to look, they come
and ask. I mean what’s the importance of a photograph if you know the
writer’s work? I don’t know. But people still want the image, don’t they?
(26)
It seems that she herself still believes in the power of the novel and the novelist
behind it. She knows that what a novelist writes is far more important than what he looks
like. But just as Bill Gray, she has to conclude that she is also a slave of the mass. And if
the crowd wants pictures, she will give them pictures.
Bill believes she is taking pictures of writers, because they are an endangered
species that is going to be lost soon. “But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before
we disappear.” (42) There are some speculations, but why she really does it, is never
explained. Brita is just like Bill Gray, aware of the fact that the power in the world is
shifting therefore she knows what great power terrorists can have.
Yes, I travel. Which means there is no moment on certain days when I’m
not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding areas I never
sit near windows in case of flying glass. I carry a Swedish passport so
that’s okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the prime minister. (4041)
The fact that she is always thinking about terrorists and terrorism proves what a
major influence terrorists have. People are not even able to travel without being afraid of
becoming the victim of a terrorist act.
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In the beginning of the novel Brita can be considered as the sympathizer of the
novelists. She thinks they are important enough to take pictures of them. Towards the end
of the novel, she has a different opinion: she no longer takes pictures of writers, but takes
pictures of terrorists.
She does not photograph writers anymore. It stopped making sense. She
takes assignments now, does the interesting things, barely watched wars,
children running in the dust. Writers stopped one day. She doesn’t know
how it happened but they came to a quiet end. They stopped beint the
project she would follow forever. (229-230)
She realizes that making pictures of writers has lost its significance. Now she only
takes pictures that will interest the crowd and pictures of novelists no longer get attention.
Peter Boxall considers Brita as an example for the general shift in interest.
We begin with Brita photographing Bill Gray in the room in which he
imagines the world of his novel, and we end with her photographing the
terrorist, Abu Rashid, in the room in which he imagines the new future that
will be brought about by terrorism. The writer, perhaps, belongs to the past,
to the singular, to the unique, to the authentic, whereas the terrorist belongs
to the future, to the crowd, to the loss of the singular and the unique. 27
It does not make sense anymore to photograph writers because they belong to the
past. They will mean nothing to the future while terrorists will be the ones influencing the
future. The terrorist leaders will be the ones deciding what happens next. That is why she
is taking pictures of them now: it is much more interesting to show the future than to
dwell on the past.
It is not because she is taking pictures of terrorists that she is supporting their
cause or methods, on the contrary she tries to stay critical. In the last part she is in Beirut
to photograph Abu Rashid, the leader of the organization, and she is not afraid to speak
up to him. She says face to face that she does not approve of his methods. She is still very
critical, but nonetheless she has given up some of her principles to please the mass. She
now tries to work in another way. At first she uses writers to enfeeble the terrorists, but
27
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo, The possibility of fiction, (New York: Routledge, 2006) 164.
- 25 -
she realizes that writers no longer have the power to do this. That is why she now
photographs terrorists, because she wants to reveal their real face.
2.3.3. Karen
Karen is the most typical example of someone who is completely taken up by the
crowd. It is Karen who gets married in the mass Moonie ceremony. It is also through her
eyes that all the mass events are related and focused upon. Every time she is watching
television she is totally taken over by it, she loses herself in the footage. In that way she is
a typical figure of present-day society, her social life is limited to what she sees on
television. Bill sees a typical example for the future in her: “She carried the virus of the
future. Quoting Bill.”(119) She has lost her own personality, Laura Bennet calls her “the
quintessential decentered subject […] surfeited with incessant images from television and
picture books, she suffers from a peculiar lack of perimeters” 28 She does no longer see the
difference between what is important and what is not. When she looks at the television
screen she makes no distinction between advertisements and important items.
She watched the set at the foot of the bed. There was a woman on an
exercise bike and she wore a gleaming skintight suit and talked into the
camera as she pedaled and there was a second woman inserted in a corner
of the screen, thumb-sized, relaying the first woman’s monologue in sign
language. Karen studied them both, her eyes sweeping the screen. She was
thinboundaried. She took it all, pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic
matter, the baby bliss that falls from the air. (119)
As long as it moves, Karen looks at it. She is not only confused about these
boundaries. She also mixes the boundaries in her own life up. She is the girlfriend of
Scott Martineau, Bill’s assistant, but that does not keep her from having sex with Bill
Gray.
She can be considered as being exactly the opposite of Bill. She is the one
who wants to be incorporated by the mass, while Bill would do everything not to. Richard
Hardack remarks that they represent two different sides of identity: “The real distinction
is that what Bill demonizes and flees, Karen pursues, embraces and marries. These two
28
Laura Bennet, “‘here but also there’: subjectivity and postmodern space in Mao II,” Modern Fiction
Studies 45.3 (1999) 789.
- 26 -
characters best map the opposing geographies of cultural and racial identity in DeLillo’s
text.” 29 Karen is the personification of the lost identity, when she was a member of the
sect she did not think for herself any longer; even after she has left the sect, she never
fully regains her identity. Bill is the personification of the struggle to win back identity:
he fights till his death to defend the importance of identity.
2.3.4. Scott Martineau
Scott Martineau is the assistant of Bill Gray. As the assistant of an artist, it could
be expected of him to despise all mass consumption. But surprisingly, he does not, he
understands what the crowd needs, and wants to give it to them. It is Scott who does not
want Bill to publish his latest novel. He wants Bill to stay some kind of ghost for his
public. Scott Martineau is comparable to the terrorists because he is actually keeping Bill
as a hostage. Scott fears that this third book will be a stake through Bill’s heart, because it
is not as good as his former two novels: “The book is finished but will remain in
typescript. Then Brita’s photos appear in a prominent place. Timed just right. We don’t
need the book. We have the author.” (71) Scott wants to divert the public’s attention away
from the book and towards the author: “The book disappears into the image of the
writer.” (71) Bill has no say in the matter: he does what his assistant tells him to do. Scott
urges Bill not to publish: “Exactly what I’ve been urging you to do. Keep this book out of
sight. Build on it. Use it to define an idea, a principle.” This ‘power’ that Scott has over
Bill Gray is rather strange, bearing in mind that Scott actually is Bill’s employee. Scott is
a very compulsive person. When he had read a book written by Bill Gray, he was
determined to find the author and nothing could stop him. After he has found him and
became his assistant, he would do anything to keep Bill popular with the public.
Scott sees himself not only as enabling Bill to write but also as the guardian of his
image. Convinced that the essentially completed third novel is a failure, Scott urges Bill
to withhold it; another publication “would be the end of Bill as a myth, as a force” (52).
He brings a photographer into the house, telling her that her photograph of Bill is all the
public needs. 30
29
Richard Hardack, “Two’s a crowd: Mao II, coke II, and the politics of terrorism in Don DeLillo,” Studies
in the Novel 36.3(2004): 374.
30
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 27.
- 27 -
The withholding of the third novel of Bill Gray and the pictures are indeed Scott
Martineau’s ideas. But he is not admitting this, he says and probably believes himself that
it is Bill’s idea: “He makes the decisions, I follow through. If he decides to publish, I’ll
work with him day and night on the galleys, the page proofs, everything.” (53) But
nothing is further from the truth, it is Scott who puts all these ideas in the head of Bill
Gray. Scott is transferring his identity and will into Bill’s head. Scott can be seen as a
representation of the will of the masses. He forgets that Bill is making a work of art and
he wants to transform his work and Bill himself into commodities.
The sudden need for Bill to get involved in the situation with the hostage can be
seen as an escape from Scott. Bill Gray is no longer controlling himself and his household
but obeys his assistant. He wants to think and decide for himself again. He vanishes and
does not warn Scott and Karen. Bill succeeds in escaping Scott’s control, but later on,
gets trapped in the power of the terrorists.
2.3.5. George Haddad
George Haddad can be considered as the brain behind the terrorists. Haddad has
connections with all sorts of groups and persons, but he never gets his hands dirty. When
Haddad meets Bill for the first time, Bill is very interested in his connection with the
group in Beirut.
Let’s say I sympathize with their aims if not their methods. This unit that took the
poet is one element in a movement. Barely a movement actually. It’s just an underground
current at this stage, an assertion that not every weapon in Lebanon has to be marked
Muslim, Christian or Zionist. (128-129)
George Haddad tries to talk himself out of the situation. He considers himself as a
harmless spokesperson. But he is not at all as innocent as he seems: “He said our friend
George is an interesting sort of academic. His name appears in an address book found in
an apartment raided by police somewhere in France – a bomb factory. And he has been
photographed in the company of known terrorist leaders.” (131) Because George Haddad
is very eloquent, he succeeds in convincing people of things that they would never have
believed, before they met him.
George believes that in modern day society there is a longing for total authority:
“This is crucial, Bill. In societies struggling to remake themselves, total politics, total
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authority, total being.” (158) He sees Mao as the greatest example of total authority and
hopes to create a new society based on the same principles:
In Mao’s China a man walking along with a book in his hand was not
seeking pleasure or distraction. He was binding himself to all Chinese.
What book? Mao’s book. The Little Red Book of Quotations. The book was
the faith that people carried everywhere. They recited from it, brandished it,
they displayed it constantly. People undoubtedly made love with the book
in their hands. (162)
George Haddad has enormous respect for what Mao realized: a society where
everyone thinks and acts alike. One nation, one identity, one narrative, one history, that
seems to be his dream. He believes that novels and novelists can contribute to this
formation of total authority. He has a totally different opinion on ‘the book’ than Bill has.
George Haddad describes a book as a means to bind people together, to inform the masses
of your ideas. George believes that this is the task of writers or novelists, to write books
where the masses can depend on. George Haddad even tries to convince Bill of this fact.
You could have been a Maoist, Bill. You would have spent many hours
talking and I can easily see you blending into that great mass of blue-andwhite cotton. You would have written what the culture needed in order to
see itself. And you would have seen the need for an absolute being, a way
out of weakness and confusion. This is what I want to see reborn in the rat
warrens of Beirut. (163)
George Haddad is here constructing a totally different view on novels and
novelists than Bill Gray. George Haddad sees the novelist as someone who can take away
his reader’s identity and feed them his own. The novelist should be someone that makes
“All men one man.” (233), a statement made by Abu Rashid. Bill hopes to be a novelist
able to teach individuality to his readers instead of taking it away. Bill believes everyone
has to read and interpret a novel in his own way. He does not want to have total authority
with his novels. Bill does not consider his writings to hold universal truths. According to
Hardack this disagreement shows what a novel has become in modern day society in
Dellilo’s opinion.
The once individualized text has been supplanted by a mass media—emblematized
by the book- waving crowd—that is oddly and somewhat inconsistently equated with
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film, photography, and group identity. With insufficient explanation, DeLillo suggests
that the book has become exclusively a product of the mass media, and can no longer
even be used to critique that media without itself being implicated. Collective book and
individual author become incommensurate. 31
Bill tries to keep his book out of the hands of the masses, but, as an individual
writer, he no longer has a platform.
2.3.6. Jean Claude Julien
As Bill Gray can be seen as the opponent of the terrorist, the poet taken hostage,
Jean Claude Julien, can be seen as the victim of the terrorist. Jean Claude Julien loses all
control of his life, because the terrorists have him in their power, literally and figuratively
speaking. They have taken away his freedom, and they have taken away his identity by
taking his pen.
Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could
tell him who he was. […] The only way to be in the world was to write
himself there. His thoughts and words were dying. Let him write ten words
and he would come into being once again. (204)
The power of the terrorist over the writer is clearly illustrated here. The hostage
takers have the power to take away the writer’s identity and personality, while the writer
is completely powerless. He is not even given the change to defend himself. His identity
has been taken away from him. When Brita is in Beirut and meets Abu Rashid, she asks
him what happened to the hostage.
He says, ‘We have no foreign sponsors. Sometimes we do business the old
way. You sell this, you trade that. Always there are deals in the works. So
with hostages. Like drugs, like weapons, like jewelry, like a Rolex or a
BMW. We sold him to the fundamentalists.’ (235)
Jean Claude Julien is no longer considered as a human being but he is compared to
objects that can be sold and traded. The fact, that nobody asks questions about him
31
Richard Hardack, “Two’s a crowd: Mao II, coke II, and the politics of terrorism in Don DeLillo,” Studies
in the Novel 36.3 (2004): 374.
- 30 -
anymore, proves that he is no longer important to the people. The media and its audience
only show interest for the terrorist himself and no longer for the innocent victim.
What happens to Jean Claude Julien is actually parallel to what Abu Rashid
does with the boys working for him. Abu Rashid takes away their identity first, and then,
he forces them to take over another ‘universal’ identity, namely his.
Forced to wear a hood in a small room in a location his captors never
disclose to him, Jean-Claude suffers from sensory deprivation. At first he
thinks to save himself by the traditional means; he tries to memorize details
that might someday allow him to identify his location, plans to learn
Arabic. As his sense of self fades, he begins to suffer from Stockholm
syndrome, identifying with the boy in charge of feeding and torturing him. 32
The story of Jean-Claude Julien explains how the process used by Abu Rashid
works: if you lose you own identity, you are in search for another one, and you adopt
yourself to the identity present in your environment. For the boys the overwhelming
identity is that of Abu Rashid, for Jean-Claude Julien it is the identity of the boy who
feeds him, because he is the only one present in his environment.
There is no longer any hope for Jean-Claude Julien. He no longer has the
capacity to win back his own identity. Bill Gray wants to write Jean-Claude back into the
world:
He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him
back, to return meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked
him in that room. Maybe that was it. When you inflict punishment on
someone who is not guilty, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, you
begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the
mind consuming what’s outside itself, replacing real things with plots and
fiction. (200)
Bill is trying to give Jean-Claude Julien his identity back. Because Jean-Claude
can no longer write for himself, Bill Gray will do it for him. By doing this for one writer,
Bill is making a statement: it would be a victory for the writers against the terrorists. But
32
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 32.
- 31 -
Bill does not succeed, because he dies during his quest trying to save his colleague.
Instead of being victorious both writers lose their identities and maybe even their lives.
2.4 Title and cover
It is not a coincidence that the author chooses a work of the artist Andy Warhol to
be the title of his work. The painting of Mao Zedong, made by Andy Warhol, is not only
the book’s title but Warhol’s work is also used for the cover of the book.
Warhol and DeLillo share certain ideas about art and artists. They both want to
revolt against the vulgarity of modern mass society. Warhol does this by making the
everyday into art. He criticizes the public that lost its ability to be critical. Andy Warhol
makes works of art that are easy to make and cheap to produce. This makes them
available to everyone. He criticizes mass production and mass consumption, but by doing
that, he becomes part of the process of mass production.
Warhol made the Mao-series in 1973. He made several portraits of important
personalities, and one of those personalities is Mao. He hung all these different copies of
the same person next to each other. He had used the official portrait of the Chinese
Chairman Mao Zedong, as it was depicted in the little red book. Warhol adjusted the
portrait by adding lines and brushstrokes. He also varied the color combinations. By
doing this he created a range of different portraits, which in essence were the same. 33 This
use of series seems to be the reason why DeLillo is so intrigued to use this work for his
book. The Mao-series can be compared to the mass: they all look a little bit different, but
in essence they all think and act alike. Warhol did not only make this repetition of a
portrait but he made several ones of different personalities. What is it that makes this one
portrait so special? The reason is that the author is not only interested in the work itself,
but also in the person depicted on the artwork. Throughout the book we read several
references to Mao Zedong. Abu Rashid, the local leader of the revolutionaries in Beirut
proves himself to be a second Mao and he even compares himself to the Chinese leader.
Mao believed in the process of thought reform. It is possible to make
history by changing the basic nature of a people. When did he realize this?
33
Paraphrased and translated from: Stefana Stabin, Andy Warhol: Geniaal exponent van de
wegwerpmaatschappij (Baarn: Tirion, 1992) 108-109.
- 32 -
Was it at the height of his power? Or when he was a guerilla leader, at the
beginning, with a small army of vagrants and outcasts, concealed in the
mountains? (236)
Rashid says this to Brita, the photographer who earlier on photographed Bill.
Rashid really sees himself doing the same thing as Mao, and believes he is doing a good
thing for his people and for the world in general. Abu Rashid considers himself to be a
reincarnation of Mao, and thinks the world needs such figures: “There is a longing for
Mao that will sweep the world” (236) Abu Rashid can be seen as a second wannebe Mao,
the so called Mao II.
There might also be a third reason why DeLillo uses the portrait of Mao. By
depicting Mao on the cover, and by using his name as the title, he is making a statement.
Again he is underlining the fact that people attach more importance to the picture of a
terrorist than to the picture of a novelist. Otherwise the author could have used a picture
of his main character Bill Gray, or he could have used a title that referred to Gray or to
the novelist in general. But as stated in the whole book, such non-sensational
announcements would not speak to people. A picture of Mao sends out a signal of power,
while a picture of Gray would send out a signal of defeat: “Mao used photographs to
announce his return and demonstrate his vitality, to reinspire the revolution. Bill’s picture
was a death notice. His image hadn’t become public yet and he was already gone.” (141)
DeLillo wants to put a charismatic figure on the cover to attract readers. Here again the
difference between the terrorist and the writer is highlighted. People do not really care for
the picture of a writer, who does not speak to their imagination. But they are interested in
what a terrorist looks like, because they want to see the face of the person who stands out.
The only thing a writer can do to get some attention is live secluded. That is the only way
by which writers can still try speak to the imagination of the public.
In the book, it is not only the terrorists who mention Mao, but the narrator refers to
him several times. Mao Zedong is seen as one of the great examples who used the crowd
to gain power. During his stay in Athens Bill Gray has a discussion with George Haddad,
the spokesman of the terrorist organization, about Mao. “‘Our god is none other than the
masses of the Chinese people.’ And this is what you fear, that history is passing into the
hands of the crowd.” (162) That is indeed what Mao did: he manipulated the crowd, took
away all personality and made the Chinese people into one. If someone succeeds in
dominating the mass, he has all the power he needs, and the ability to transform history.
- 33 -
This is also what Rashid tends to do in Beirut: “They are all children of Abu Rashid. All
men one man.” (233) Rashid is trying to construct one identity, just as Mao did.
It seems that this construction of one identity could succeed in modern day
society. DeLillo zooms in on some mass events that remind the reader of China under
Mao’s reign. In the prologue of the book, entitled ‘at Yankee stadium’, there is an
immediate confrontation with the theme of massification. We are witnesses to a mass
wedding of 6500 couples at Yankee stadium. The couples have been selected by the
leader of the Moonies, and they are married by reverend Moon. A wedding, which is
supposed to be a special and unique bond between individuals, is made into something
that happens in a crowd. No one stands out in this event; everything is swallowed up by
the crowd: “They’re one body now, an undifferentiated mass,”(3) It is no longer one
woman who gets married to one man, but a mass of boys marrying a mass of girls and all
at the same time. The father of one of the brides thinks the following about the event:
They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A
unit fueled by credulousness. They speak a half language, a set of readymade terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable,
everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and
memorized and passed on. (7)
He seems to grasp the fact that the power no longer belongs to the individual.
These young people now think as prescribed in the media. They are so easily influenced,
that the one who can convince them of his formulas has all the power. Most individuals
have lost the power to think for themselves. This event reminds the reader of the cultural
revolution of Mao Zedong:
Mass mobilization of urban Chinese youth, inaugurated by Mao Zedong,
attempting to prevent development of a bureaucratized Sovjet style of
communism. Mao closed schools and encouraged students to join Red
Guard units, which persecutes Chinese teachers and intellectuals and
enforced Mao’s cult of personality. 34
Mao knew if he had the youth, he had the future. He made them revolt against
intellectuals. This mass marriage foreshadows the same pessimistic future. In Yankee
34
“Cultural revolution,” Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001-2005 ed..
- 34 -
stadium, these youngsters are trading their individuality and contribute to their Master’s
cult of personality. The end of this prologue ends with the sentence “The future belongs
to crowds.”(16) An important implication of this fact is that if you want to get your point
across and mean something for the future, you have to be able to make an impression on
the crowd. And that is what DeLillo tries to point out with this novel. It used to be the
artist who had the power to influence the crowd, now it is the terrorist who has taken over
this power. Mao is the perfect example to illustrate this power over the mass.
2.4. Structure
The novel is split up into four parts: a short prologue, two large parts and a short
epilogue. The prologue is entitled: ‘at Yankee Stadium’ and the picture attached to the
title is a picture of a mass wedding. The picture foreshadows the statement made at the
end of the chapter: “The future belongs to crowds.” (16) These young people getting
married are the people who have the future in them: they are the ones who will have
children. These young people chose to go into this future as a mass and not as individuals.
This means that most likely their offspring will be raised in the same manner and that
they will share the same thoughts as their parents. The mass wedding symbolizes the end
of intimacy and individuality. This prologue immediately announces the main theme of
the novel: the masses and the related loss of identity.
The first big chapter in Mao II, is entitled: ‘Part one’. The title does not
give away much but this part is also accompanied by a picture:
Part one opens with an image that returns us to the crowd as a primal,
suffocating mass. […] this opening image speaks of the power of
boundaries to crush, to maim and kill. The image shows the victims of the
Hillsborough disaster, fans here to watch a football game between
Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, being crushed against the heavy gauge
fence that separates the crowd from the field of play. 35
Again a very negative image of the crowd is portrayed. The consequences of the
loss of identity and the danger that the mass can bring with it, are shown in the
35
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo, The possibility of fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006) 163.
- 35 -
photograph. This first part is especially focusing on the novelist, Bill Gray. The second
part of the novel, entitled: ‘part two’ is accompanied by a picture of the funeral of
Ayatollah Khomeini. Karen sees this event on television:
It was the body of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini lying in a glass case set on
a high platform above crowds that stretched for miles. The camera could
not absorb the full breadth of the crowd. The camera kept panning but
could not inch all the way out to the edge of the anguished mass. In the
screen the crowd had no edge or limit and kept on spreading. (188)
Again a mass follows its charismatic leader. No attention for each individual on its
own, but how they react in mass.
The epilogue is different from the other chapters because it is not accompanied by
a picture of a mass but by a picture of two young boys probably in Beirut, because the
title of the epilogue is ‘In Beirut’. This is a hint that this last part will focus on the
terrorist organization. The picture should serve to illustrate the harshness of the terrorists.
These two young boys are making the peace-sign with their fingers. They do not want to
be part of this fighting and violence, but they are obliged to do it. The picture is possibly
a hint at the harsh and emotionless way in which the boys are treated.
2.5. Conclusion
The book gives a very pessimistic view of the future. In Mao II DeLillo wants to
show the increasing power of mass and media. A society in which the individual has been
replaced by the mass which shows the individual what is important. There is a total loss
of identity: “All men one man.” DeLillo depicts a future in which all artists and
intellectuals lose their influential power, and the terrorist takes over this role. The main
character is Bill Gray, a novelist who once was successful but now has lost his influence
and no longer stands out. Now it is the terrorist who holds the scepter. These terrorists are
writing history now and receive all the attention of the audience. The image of the
terrorist created in Mao II is oversimplified. The author is so eager to prove that the
terrorist is an ‘evil force’ who is destroying the ‘intelligent and individualistic’ author
that he forgets to describe the terrorist in broad outlines. All characters and in particular
the terrorists are depicted with too little psychological depth. The leader of the terrorist
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organization, Abu Rashid, is portrayed as being a brainless Mao Zedong copycat without
emotions. He does not even think or speak for himself but echoes what Mao Zedong and
George Haddad, the spokesperson of the group, have said. Abu Rashid is the one who
steals away the identity of the boys working for him and he forces them to accept a new
identity. He is the ‘evil’ force causing the decay of intellect and identity. The
oversimplified image of the terrorist reinforces the point DeLillo wants to make, namely
to stay critical and read and not to allow your identity to be stolen away from you.
- 37 -
Paul Auster’s Leviathan
- 38 -
Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does 36.
3. Paul Auster’s Leviathan
3.1. Main Theme
The main theme of the novel is chance. Leviathan tells the story of Benjamin
Sachs, a man who sees his whole life change as a consequence of a series of unfortunate
coincidences. The book’s major goal is to point out that everything is connected:
“Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story.”
(51) Not only are the events happening in the novel connected, but all the characters
playing a role in the story are linked as well. By using these connections and coincidences
the story of Benjamin Sachs is recounted. Benjamin Sachs seems to be growing old like
an ordinary man, but unfortunately for him, life turns out totally different. In Leviathan,
his best friend, Peter Aaron, tells how it is possible to become a terrorist in the course of
fifteen years.
3.2. Different views on terrorists and terrorism
3.2.1. The terrorists in the novel
The first and most important terrorist presented in the novel is Benjamin Sachs.
Sachs is not involved in any political group or terrorist organization. He works alone. He
is an ideological terrorist who blows up replicas of the Statue of Liberty and that is how
he becomes the Phantom of Liberty. The definition that would fit Sachs best is that of
Margaret Scanlan: “the insurgent group chooses a symbolic target because it cannot hope
to overpower by force alone.” 37 The difference in this definition is that Benjamin works
alone. Sachs wants to make a political statement. He does not want to hurt anyone and
therefore only blows up symbolic targets.
36
Paul Auster, Leviathan (Chatham: faber and faber, 1992) 160. (From now on, all page references will be
cited in the text).
37
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting terror. Novelists and terrorists in Contemporary fiction (Charlottesville : The
University Press of Virginia, 2001) 5
- 39 -
He realized that it was a flimsy excuse, but these nocturnal outings were
unavoidable, a necessary precaution, for not only did he have to save his own
skin, he had to make sure that no one was ever hurt. […] That was Sachs’s
greatest fear, and he went to enormous lengths to guard against accidents.
(233)
It is very clear that Sachs never has any intention to really hurt someone. His only
purpose is to open people’s eyes. He sees terror as a means of warning people because he
grasps the fact that words are not enough. In his book the New Colossus (see 3.5), he had
tried to warn his readers, but he knows that these words have little power. Sachs had tried
to get his point through his literature. But Benjamin soon learns that blowing things up
speaks more to the public: “Terrorism had its place in the struggle, so to speak. If used
correctly, it could be an effective tool for dramatizing the issues at stake, for enlightening
the public about the nature of institutional power.” (224)
Sachs can be seen as an ideological terrorist. He wants to defend his beliefs but not
to the detriment of others. In the story Sachs does kill someone, namely Reed Dimaggio.
But the murder was not at all planned, since Sachs was simply defending himself and
Dwight, the boy with whom he was traveling. Dwight and Sachs were driving on a
country road, when suddenly they had to stop because a man was blocking the road.
Dwight gets out to ask what is going on. The man, called Reed Dimaggio, starts shooting
at Dwight without any reason. After the first two gunshots, Sachs gets out of the truck
and hits Dimaggio with a bat on the head. Reed Dimaggio does not survive the blow to
his head and Sachs never forgives himself for killing a man. He feels very guilty to have
taken a man’s life. The murder of Reed Dimaggio cannot be considered an act of terror.
Benjamin Sachs was simply defending himself and the boy.
That Reed Dimaggio is also a terrorist becomes clear when Sachs finds materials
to make a bomb in Dimaggio’s car. The narrator never clears out what kind of terrorist
Dimaggio really is. He is a member of a political group: “Dimaggio had been involved
with a left-wing ecology group”. (170) This group is called “Children of the planet” and
the group states that Dimaggio did not commit terrorist acts on their behalf. Sachs calls
Reed “a crazed idealist” (170) Sachs believes that Dimaggio is fighting for his beliefs.
The only thing Sachs wonders about is where Dimaggio got the 160.000 dollars that
Sachs finds in his trunk. If the money had been given to Dimaggio it could mean that he
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did work for some organization. It seems almost impossible that Reed could have
collected such an amount of money on his own.
Then he thought it might have been given to Dimaggio by some political
organization. If not the Children of the Planet, then someone else.
Terrorists, for example. The PLO, the IRA, any one of a dozen groups. He
figured that Dimaggio might have been connected to people like that. (238)
Dimaggio’s wife, Lillian Stern, believes that Reed was an undercover agent. In the
novel there are different assumptions about Dimaggio’s whereabouts and activities, but
his actual life story never becomes clear. Maria Turner, a friend of Peter Aaron and later
on also a friend of Sachs’s, considers him to be a rather nice guy: “The man wasn’t a
criminal. He was a student, an intellectual, a teacher, and he and Lillian had lived a rather
dull life in Berkeley.” (164) But when Lillian is talking about him a couple of years later
this nice guy seems to be a different person: “You’re beginning to sound like Reed. A
fast-talking son-of-a-bitch, all puffed up with your stupid arguments and theories.”(176)
Lillian also says that Reed hit her. What happened to make this significant change in
Reed is not at all clear. The change is very remarkable as for the last thing he does, is kill
an innocent boy. It seems that Reed starts out as an ideological terrorist, but changes over
the years. The picture given of him as a terrorist is rather negative.
The third and last terrorist we come across in the novel is Alexander Berkman.
Berkman is a historical figure who really existed. Reed Dimaggio had written his
dissertation about him.
Berkman was the anarchist who shot Henry Clay Frick- the man whose
house is now a museum on Fifth Avenue. That was during the Homestead
Steel Strike in 1892, when Frick called in an army of Pinkertons and had
them open fire on the workers. Berkman was twenty at the time, a young
Jewish radical who’d emigrated from Russia just a few years before, and he
traveled down to Pennsylvania and went after Frick with a gun, hoping to
eliminate this symbol of capitalist oppression. (223)
Aside from this short biography not much is said about Berkman in the novel. But
his role in the novel and his role in the development of the two other terrorists is very
important. A first very remarkable aspect is the term ‘radical’ that is used in the
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description. Berkman is not considered a terrorist, although his action would fit the
definitions perfectly. He used violence to influence political behavior. At the end of the
nineteenth century the term terrorist was not in use yet. If you spoke out against politics
you were called a radical. Berkman shot somebody and is a radical. Sachs does not hurt
anybody and blows up national symbols and he is called a terrorist.
Berkman is one of the most important influences in the development of Dimaggio
and Sachs. When Sachs reads the dissertation on Berkman written by Reed Dimaggio, he
immediately knows that this man played an important role in Reed’s life. Sachs says the
following about that role:
It was a step in his inner development, a way of coming to grips with his
own ideas about political change. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I
could tell that he supported Berkman, that he believed there was a moral
justification for certain forms of political violence. Terrorism had its place
in the struggle, so to speak. If used correctly, it could be an effective tool
for dramatizing the issues at stake, for enlighting the public about the
nature of institutional power. (224)
Dimaggio had been very much influenced by Berkman, but Sachs also gets
attracted to these ideas. After reading the dissertation he starts making his plans and
becomes the The Phantom of Liberty. Berkman was the last push Sachs needed to act out
his political beliefs. The
affection for Berkman is very clearly illustrated, when Sachs
uses Berkman’s name to lease an apartment: “He rented under the name of Alexander
Berkman”(234)
The three terrorists are described in a rather positive way. The novel tries to
present a finely tuned judgment of the terrorists. They are not portrayed as monsters who
simply kill for fun, but as people who risk their lives to reach their goals. They are not
bloodthirsty terrorists bent on mass destruction, but three very idealistic people who want
to defend their political ideas. The terrorists, and especially Sachs, are not represented as
flat characters, but rather with great psychological depth. The representation of Sachs
could even have been more realistic, if the author would not have depicted him so much
as a victim, but rather as a character who made every decision on his own.
- 42 -
3.2.2. Vision of terror and link with literature
Terror is considered as the only defense against a hypocritical society. Terror
seems to be the only thing that still means something in a society of political hypocrisy
and artistic incapacity. The fact is that all three terrorists were intellectuals and writers.
Sachs was a novelist who inserted political elements into his work. Dimaggio wrote a
very long dissertation. Berkman, as well, wrote a book and was editor of a magazine.
“After his release, he wrote Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist […] He was the editor of
Mother Earth.” (223) All three of them had tried to reach a public through writings. But
they are not remembered for their writings, the public knows them because of their
terrorist acts. This clearly proves that the terrorist has taken over the role of the novelist.
A first sign of this is that Leviathan is dedicated to Don DeLillo. DeLillo is an
author who studies the relation between literature and new ways of mass communication
and mass destruction. Boxall writes the following about DeLillo:
Delillo’s work offers an analysis of the ways in which the globalization of
capital, the end of the modernist avant-garde, and the expansion of US
military and economic power have transformed the production of fiction. 38
In Leviathan the narrator presents a similar situation. This story is also about the
relationship between novelists and terror. Benjamin Sachs was indeed a novelist who
became a terrorist. But over the years, he lost his belief in the novel. He no longer
believed he could reach a public with his novels.
Sachs went on doing what he had always done, but in the new American
order of the 1980’s, his position became increasingly marginalized. It
wasn’t that he had no audience, but it grew steadily smaller, and the
magazines that published his work became steadily more obscure. (104)
Thus as a writer Sachs no longer has a public with which to share his political
ideas. When the narrator focuses on him as a terrorist, Sachs suddenly does acquire a
large public and audience.
Over the next eighteen months, nine more statues were destroyed in various
parts of the country. Everyone will remember this, and there’s no need for
38
Peter Boxall , Don Delillo: The possibility of fiction, (New York: Routledge, 2006) introduction page.
- 43 -
me to give an exhaustive account of the Phantom’s activities […] Many
people were outraged, of course, but there were others who found
themselves in sympathy with the Phantom’s objectives. (216)
Sachs becomes a known phenomenon. The narrator does not even take the trouble
to tell what Sachs did, because he assumes that everybody remembers terrorist attacks.
People do not have to be reminded. These kinds of attacks are so remarkable that people
do not forget. The public does not only notice or remember him, he even has fans.
Eventually he even becomes a commercial product:
He had been discussed on call-in radio shows, caricatured in political
cartoons, excoriated as a menace to society, extolled as a man of the
people. Phantom of Liberty T-shirts and buttons were on sale in novelty
shops, jokes had begun to circulate, and just last month two strippers in
Chicago had presented an act in which the Statue of Liberty was gradually
disrobed and then seduced by the Phantom. (234)
This is probably not Sachs’s intention. He only wants to make a political
statement. But sadly enough, people do not get the political message behind the
bombings. Instead they make his ideological idea into commodity. Sachs is so preoccupied with what he is doing that he does not get it. He does not realize that the public
does not understand his political statement: “He was making a mark, he said, a much
greater mark than he had ever thought possible.” (234) It is indeed true that he is reaching
a much bigger audience than he did with his novels. But the question is whether the
audience understands what he is trying to say.
The change in Sachs’s line of interest is not the only clue that terrorism is
replacing literature. The novel constantly hints at literature’s loss of appeal. Peter Aaron,
Benjamin Sachs’s best friend and the one who tells the story, meets Sachs in a bar where
they are supposed to give a reading. The reading gets cancelled due to bad weather. When
Aaron arrives at the bar and asks the bartender where everybody is, this answer is given:
“Poetry’s a beautiful thing, but it’s hardly worth freezing your ass off for.” (11) This is
what people in general think of poetry and literature. It is an aesthetic diversion but is no
longer important enough to go through any trouble.
Aaron and Sachs differ in many ways. For instance, they have opposing opinions
concerning literature and terrorism. When they are talking about Sachs’s book, Sachs says
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the following: “There’s no rush. It’s only a novel, after all, and you shouldn’t take it too
seriously.” (18) Benjamin is able to put novels into perspective. With Aaron it is a
different story, he tries to defend the novel: “I always take novels seriously.” (19) When
Peter Aaron discovers that Sachs is no longer working on his novel he is deeply
disappointed.
Of all the tragedies my poor friend created for himself, leaving this book
unfinished becomes the hardest one to bear. I don’t mean to say that books
are more important than life, but the fact is that everyone dies, everyone
disappears in the end, and if Sachs had managed to finish his book, there’s
a chance it might have outlived him. (142)
Peter Aaron still believes that books have great power and that it is possible for a
book to carry on your memory. Aaron also wants to keep the memory of his friend alive
by writing a novel. Peter Aaron still has the impression you can reach people with a
novel. Shortly after Sachs has blown himself up, two FBI agents come to Aaron’s house.
They have found a paper with his number in the pocket of the dead person. Aaron
explains the presence of the note by stating that he is an author.
Without even knowing it, I enter the life of strangers, and for as long as
they have my book in their hands, my words are the only reality that exists
for them. […] They read your book, and something about it strikes a chord
deep in their soul. (4)
In this fragment Aaron explains that authors have an important power. According
to him authors can still enter people’s lives. Sachs does not share this idea. To him
writing does not mean a thing anymore: “The idea of writing disgusts me. It doesn’t mean
a goddamned thing to me anymore.” (122)
3.3. Characters and their link to terrorism
3.3.1. Benjamin Sachs
Sachs is the main character of the novel. He is a terrorist and from the very start of
the novel, the narrator mentions that he is dead. The information that is given about Sachs
is very balanced. The narrator wants to give an image of Sachs that is as complete as
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possible. During the story we see a remarkable change in Benjamin’s character and
behavior. The author wants to prove that terrorists are not always as bad as they seem, but
that they sometimes have a complicated history that made them who they are today. This
is the case with Sachs: he is a straightforward, good and nice guy, but life surprised him
in so many ways that he eventually becomes a terrorist.
In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by
the time he came to the last place, I doubt he even knew who he was
anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn’t have
been possible for him to remember where he had begun. (13)
The change happened very gradually, since it took Sachs fifteen years to change
from a politically inspired novelist to the Phantom of Liberty. Sachs had always been
interested in politics and was disappointed in the hypocrisy of modern society. He had
always felt very connected to the modern era of mass destruction. He called himself
“America’s first Hiroshima baby, the original bomb child” (23). When Sachs was still a
little boy he comprehended the hypocrisy of his country. When he was almost six years
old he went to visit the Statue of Liberty with his mother and he had to dress up for this
event. “Even then the irony of the situation didn’t escape me. There we were, about to
pay homage to the concept of freedom, and I myself was in chains.”(33)
A couple of years later Sachs proves again to have strong political ideas - when he
was called up to fight in Vietnam he refused and he had to go to prison. He wants to stand
up for his beliefs and wants to take responsibility for it: “I felt I had a responsibility to
stand up and tell them what I thought.”(19-20) During his time in prison he began to write
his first novel titled The New Colossus. This first novel written by Sachs plays a very
important role in Leviathan. (See 3.5).
In The New Colossus, Benjamin Sachs is again writing about his disappointment in
his country and its citizens. It is clear that Sachs has always been an idealist and a
politically interested novelist. But what caused him to change from idealist to terrorist?
He probably does not want this to happen, but due to a long sequence of unfortunate
coincidences, his whole life is turned upside down.
It seems that it had to happen. (see 3.6) The first step in his development is when
he falls down the fire escape on the hundredth birthday of the Statue of Liberty. Sachs is
talking to Maria Turner and wants to find a reason to touch her. He suggests watching the
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fireworks from the fire escape, because he knows she will have to touch him then.
Accidentally another woman bumps into Maria and Sachs falls. Sachs survives the fall,
but has a very weird reaction. He cannot forgive himself. He sees the fall as some sort of
punishment. He no longer believes in his own life and wants to change.
I want to end the life I’ve been living up to now. I want everything to
change. If I don’t manage to do that, I’m going to be in deep trouble. My
whole life has been a waste, a stupid little joke, a dismal string of petty
failures. (122)
The fall makes him realize that he wants to do something different. But he does
not know yet what he wants to do. What is also remarkable about the event is that there is
a link with the Statue of Liberty. For the second time in his life he has a negative
experience with the Statue. For a while after his fall, he begins to write again. But then a
second dramatic event occurs. And now, he does not only know that he wants to change,
but he is given a direction. He gets acquainted with Reed Dimaggio, whom he killed out
of self-defense. Sachs gets more and more intrigued by Dimaggio and when he reads his
dissertation he knows what he has to do.
Benjamin Sachs is portrayed as a typical tragic hero. Although he wants to do well
and has good intentions, fate has other plans for him. Some unfortunate coincidences and
wrong decisions on his part, cause him to end up as a totally different person from the
person he wants to be.
3.3.2. Peter Aaron
Peter Aaron is the best friend of Sachs and he tells us Sachs’s life story. He wants
the reader to have an extensive knowledge of Sachs. Aaron wants to defend the terrorist,
so to speak. It is not that he supports terrorism in any way, but he wants us to understand
that some things just happen. He also points out that he does not know everything.
“Except for Fanny, it’s possible that I was closer to Sachs than anyone else, but that
doesn’t make me an expert on the details of his life.”(22) He really wants to be honest
about Sachs and wants to develop a very balanced judgment of Benjamin.
By letting Aaron tell the story, a great contrast is created between two types of
writers. Aaron is the passive type. He has certain ideas, and he believes he can make a
difference through his writings. In contrast, Sachs no longer believes in the power of
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literature. He has literally traded his books for bombs. It is not as if Aaron does not want
to be of any value, but he cannot achieve enough. He does not have the same ideological
strength Sachs has. That is proven when he begins an affair with Sachs’s wife Fanny.
Aaron has always been Sachs’s best friend and is connected very closely to him. But
when Fanny seduces him to have sex, he is not strong enough to resist.
I took it for granted that I was going to marry Fanny. Even if it meant
destroying my friendship with Sachs; I was fully prepared to go ahead with
it. […] I imagined storms, dramatic scenes, immense shouting matches with
Sachs before any of this could happen. Perhaps it would finally come to
blows, I thought. I found myself ready for anything, and even the idea of
squaring off against my friend failed to shock me. (85-86)
He has absolutely no scruples about betraying his best friend. The fact that he
cannot control his sexual desires in order to preserve his friendship with Sachs, proves
that Peter Aaron is a much weaker character than Sachs. Peter tries to understand Sachs’s
convictions but is never really able to grasp them completely. Aaron does not have the
same ideological ideas. The only thing left for him to do is to tell the story of his best
friend. At least he will have accomplished something then. Aaron knows that he has
failed his best friend by being such a weak character. Peter thinks if he had been stronger
it might have been possible to save Benjamin Sachs.
Looking back on it now, I believe I would have served him better if I had
told him what I thought. I should have laughed in his face. I should have
told him he was crazy and made him stop. If there was ever a moment when
I failed Sachs as a friend, it was that afternoon four years ago. I had my
chance to help him, and I let the opportunity slip through my fingers. (118)
That is probably also why he is writing the book. He is seeking redemption not
only for Sachs but also for himself. He was not able to help his friend during his life, but
maybe he can do something for him now. Mark Osteen also considers the novel that
Aaron is writing as redemption for both of the novelists.
- 48 -
The novel is Aaron’s confession and thus; like all writing according to
Auster, is meant to ‘relieve some of the pressure caused by these buries
secrets.’ 39
3.3.3. Fanny
Fanny is Sachs’s wife. She is a very intelligent woman. She is an important source
of information to Aaron. She gives another image of Sachs, and thereby helping him in
building a very complete image of Sachs.
Sachs as seen through Fanny’s eyes was a more complicated and troubled
person than the one I thought I knew. He wasn’t just the ebullient and
gifted extrovert who had become my friend, he was also a man who hid
himself for others, a man burdened with secrets he had never shared with
anyone. (86)
She is indeed an important source of extra information. But she only knows Sachs
during his novelist days. Fanny does not know him during his terrorist days. As soon as
things start to go wrong, Sachs shuts her out of his life. This process begins immediately
after his fall. He stops talking for ten days and from that point on it only gets worse.
Within a month of coming home from the hospital, I think he was already
looking for a way to break free of his marriage. It was a unilateral decision,
a product if his need to wipe the slate clean and start over again, and Fanny
was no more than an innocent victim of the purge. (130)
Fanny has no say in the matter. It seems as if Sachs does not want to involve her in
his downward spiral.
But later on, she does play a crucial role in Sachs’s inner development. Even
though they are separated, Sachs goes straight to her after he had killed Reed Dimaggio.
Against all his expectations he finds her in bed with her new boyfriend Charles: “That
explains the confusion that followed. Not only was Sachs caught off balance when he
entered the apartment, but he was in no condition to absorb the least new fact about
39
Mark Osteen, “Phantoms of Liberty: The Secret Lives of Leviathan”, Review of contemporary fiction
14.1 (1994) 87.
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anything.” (158) Sachs hopes to find support, but he gets even more confused. He leaves
the house and tries to call Aaron. Sachs cannot reach him and eventually ends up in
Maria’s house. That is how the unfortunate accident with Reed becomes a disaster and
how Fanny has unwillingly made things worse for Sachs.
3.3.4. Maria Turner
Maria Turner is an artist who is introduced to Peter Aaron in the house of Fanny
and Ben. She is presented as a very strong character. She is always willing to try new
things. For a while she even becomes a stripper. But later on, the narrator illustrates that
she is not as strong as she would like to be. The narrator mentions two significant
examples of weakness. The first one is when she trades places with her prostitute friend
Lillian Stern. Maria decides she will take over Lillian’s customers. The trade does not
work out as she had hoped. She is afraid to go through with it and eventually even gets
beaten up by a client.
After the switch with Lillian, she learned how badly she had deceived
herself. She was weak, she discovered, a person hemmed in by her own
fears and inner constraints, as mortal and confused as anyone else. (77)
This is the first time the weak side of Maria is presented. After this event she is
afraid to be with a man again. Her next sexual experience is with Peter Aaron. Maria and
Peter have a sexual relationship for about two years.
That was the beginning of what turned out to be a sexual alliance that lasted
for close to two years. I use that phrase as a precise, clinical description,
but that doesn’t mean our relations were only physical, that we had no
interest in each other beyond the pleasures we found in bed. Still, what
went on between us was devoid of romantic trappings or sentimental
illusions […] Maria wasn’t hungry for the sorts of attachments that most
people seem to want, and love in the traditional sense was something alien
to her. (59)
Here again she is portrayed as a strong person. She is able to have a sexual
relationship with somebody for about two years and she has no other feelings. She is
presented as being a cold fish. But her inner self changes when she gets butterflies in her
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stomach. She falls for Sachs: “Maria had fallen for him […] she was talking to him like a
jilted lover, like a woman who had been spurned for someone else.”(192-193) But the
feeling is never returned. Sachs feels physically attracted to Maria the first time he met
her, the day of his fall. But the relationship never evolved, he never feels as she does.
Maria Turner is an important link between several characters in the novel. She is
the link between Sachs and Lillian Stern. It is also Maria who knows Reed Dimaggio. If
Maria had not known Reed Dimaggio, the story would have turned out very differently.
Sachs would have felt very guilty, and that would have been the end of it. When Maria
tells about Reed Dimaggio and Lillian Stern, however, Sachs decides to set his mistake
right. He leaves for California and wants to give Lillian the money, he found in Reed
Dimaggio’s car. By doing this, little by little he takes over Dimaggio’s life. It seemed a
terrible mistake to have gone to Maria after the accident.
Still, it turned out to be a terrible mistake. Not because she wasn’t prepared
to drop everything to see him through the crisis, but because she was in
possession of the one fact powerful enough to turn an ugly misfortune into
a full-scale tragedy. If Sachs hadn’t gone to her, I’m certain that things
would have been resolved rather quickly. (160)
Maria actually provides an important turn on the wheel of fortune. She is an
important factor in his battle with fate. (See 3.6) Actually Maria causes Sachs’s death.
She did not intend to do this, but her actions, set in motion a sequence of events that lead
to Sachs’s death.
Maria is also a character who reinforces the contrast between the two novelists and
best friends. Peter Aaron has only pleasant experiences with Maria. They have a sexual
relationship and it is also thanks to Maria he meets the love of his life. Peter Aaron
himself knows he Maria to thank for this: “Then came my meeting with Iris, and the
madness of those two years abruptly ended. […] It strikes me as both strange and fitting
that Maria Turner should have been the person who made that possible.” (101) Maria
helps Peter Aaron to end the madness, while she unintentionally helps Sachs to his grave.
For Aaron she is a fairy godmother in his fairy tale, for Sachs she is just another negative
twist on the wheel of fortune. (See 3.6)
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3.3.5. Lillian Stern
Lillian Stern is the person who is connected to the two terrorists in the novel. She
is also the one who compares the two of them. Lillian is presented as a very unstable
person. When Maria is telling about Lillian for the first time, we learn that she is a
prostitute. She is not ashamed of this, but feels very comfortable about her work: “It was
just a job like any other, she said, and when push came to shove, it was a damn sight
better than serving drinks or waiting on tables.” (70) But it becomes very clear that she is
not at all as comfortable with the situation as she would like to be. Lillian never tells her
husband what she did for a living when she met him. This is not her only lie. Maria
Turner knows that Lillian is not afraid to twist the truth.
That made three different stories, Maria said, a typical example of how
Lillian confronted the truth. One of the stories might have been real. It was
even possible that all of them were real-but then again, it was just as
possible that all of them were false. (165)
The three stories referred to in the fragment are the three different explanations
Lillian gives for her separation from Reed Dimaggio. Thus as a reader we never really
know why they separated. What we do know, or can assume, is that an unstable person
such as Lillian cannot be the right woman for someone who is struggling with ideological
issues. Reed Dimaggio was an idealist, but he got stuck and became a terrorist. We never
know exactly what changed him. But a woman as unstable as Lillian is not a good
companion for such a man. The same thing happens to Sachs. As Benjamin goes to
California to give the money to Lillian and her little daughter, he falls for the beautiful
Lillian, but she does not make life easy for him. If she had been a more stable person,
maybe things would have turned out differently. But she made him even more confused
than he already was. The narrator realizes what an important role Lillian plays in his
downward spiral: “It might not have been so hard on him if Lillian had been someone
else, but the strain of sleeping under the same roof with her every night kept him
permanently off balance.” (198)
3.3.6. Maria Dimaggio
Maria is the daughter of Lillian Stern and Reed Dimaggio. She is “five and threequarters” (182) old. The girl does not get much attention and is thrilled when Sachs
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spends a lot of time with her. She has an enormous influence on his behavior. Thanks to
her he calms down for a while. “ Maria became his companion, his consolation prize, his
indelible reward.” (200) She gives him renewed energy. But as soon as he begins a
relationship with her mother his relationship with Maria is ruined.
Maria is not the only child in the novel who has a positive effect on Sachs. After
his fall from the fire escape Sachs stops talking for ten days, he says his first words to
David, Aaron’s son. Sachs himself cannot give an explanation why he could speak to
David and not to any one else: “You walked into the room with David, and he walked up
to my bed and smiled at me. I suddenly found myself saying hello to him. It was as
simple as that. He looked so nice.”(122)
It seems that children have a big influence on Sachs. He loves their innocence and
honesty. He believes that all persons should be so honest. The fact that he never has
children of his own hurts him deeply.
3.4. Title
The narrator explains in the novel why he has chosen this title: “To mark what will
never exist, I have given my book the same title that Sachs was planning to use for his:
Leviathan.” (142) Aaron chooses this title in memory of his dead friend. If we consider
the title in this context, the title can be seen as referring to the biblical monster. Sachs
died because something bigger took over his life. He lost control of himself and was
swallowed up by something uncontrollable, the Leviathan.
“Leviathan has come to mean “whale” in modern languages, including
modern Hebrew, but in the Old Testament it is serpentine and connected
with rivers; it symbolizes the enemies of Israel. […] it may refer to
Babylon (land of two rivers, one of them crooked) or Egypt (land of the
Nile with its crocodiles). Ezekiel calls the Pharaoh “the great dragon
[leviathan] that lieth in the midst of his rivers” (29.3); but, saith the Lord,
“I will put hooks in thy jaws, … and I will bring thee up out of the midst of
thy rivers…/ And I will leave thee thrown into the wilderness” (4-5). Until
that day, however, the Israelites will have lives mainly in Egyptian or
Babylon captivity, as if inside the monster. That idea is seconded by the
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tale of Jonah, who spends three days and nights in the great fish before his
redemption. 40
This biblical monster would be a synonym for terror, an uncontrollable monster
that takes over your life. Sachs is then comparable to Jonah - they both get swallowed up
by the Leviathan and get redemption. Sachs gets redemption through the book his best
friend writes on Sachs’s life. The fact that he gets swallowed up is literally mentioned in
the text: “He went out for a walk one afternoon in the middle of September, and the earth
suddenly swallowed him up. That was the long and the short of it, and from that day on
he never wrote another word.” (142) The verb ‘swallow’ provides a link with some sort of
monster. This is the moment when Sachs loses control. He is no longer a novelist, but is
on his way to becoming a terrorist.
There are also other references to the Bible. When the narrator explains about the
bombings, he is making the link with the Bible: “In that sense, there was something
almost Biblical about his exhortations, and after a while he began to sound less like a
political revolutionary than some anguished, soft-spoken prophet.” (217)
It is also possible to understand the title from Sachs’s point of view and then
another meaning of the title is revealed. If ‘Leviathan’ is analyzed as the title of Sachs’s
unwritten book it could be a reference to Hobbes’s work. In 1651 Hobbes published a
treatise on political philosophy.
By ‘The Leviathan’ the author signified sovereign power. The basis of his
political philosophy is that man is not as Aristotle held, naturally a social
being, recognizing the claims of the community upon him and sharing in its
prosperity, but a purely selfish creature, seeking only his own advantage.
The state of nature is one of general war, and ‘the notions of Right and
Wrong, Justice and Injustice, have there no place.’ There is ‘continuall
feare… And the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.’
To escape these conditions man has adopted certain ‘articles of peace’,
those ‘Laws of Nature’, by which a man is forbidden to do ‘that which is
40
Michael Feber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 232.
- 54 -
destructive of his life’ and of which the science is ‘true moral
philosophy’. 41
In his work Hobbes portrayed a very pessimistic vision of the human race. He
stated that people have agreed to give up their freedom and to subject themselves to some
higher authority. They have done this to be sure so that other people will do the same.
This vision is comparable to what Sachs is trying to say. He has the same
pessimistic point of view. He wants to show the people that freedom no longer exists.
They have traded their freedom in order to be a part of society.
It seems very plausible that Sachs is referring to the treatise of Hobbes. It would
not be the first time he uses the title of an existing work. His first novel also had the title
of an existing work, namely that of a well- known poem by Emma Lazarus.
3.5. The New Colossus
The New Colossus is the title of Benjamin Sachs’s first novel, a historical novel he
wrote during his imprisonment. It deals with America’s past between 1876 and 1890, a
period he chooses to write about, because he believes “America has lost its way” (38)
since. Peter Aaron, the man telling Sachs’s story, says the following about The New
Colossus: “The dominant emotion was anger, a full-blown, lacerating anger that surged
up on nearly every page: anger against America, anger against political hypocrisy, anger
as a weapon to destroy national myths. (40)” All the characters in The New Colossus are
historical figures who meant something to society. Many of them are transcendentalists,
intellectuals who do not support doctrines or established religions. Sachs worships these
people and sees them as great examples, especially Thoreau: “Thoreau was his model,
and without the example of Civil Disobedience, I doubt Sachs would have turned out as
he did.” (26) Thoreau was a man who supported individual resistance to civil government.
Benjamin wants to use him, and the transcendentalists in general, as examples for the
public. He wants to show Americans how hypocrite the home country has become since
the end of the previous century. The transcendentalist’s ideas are not the only reason why
the New Colossus is an important element in the novel. What is even more remarkable is
41
“Leviathan,” The oxford companion to English literature. Ed. 1992
- 55 -
that the title, namely the New Colossus, is a pseudonym for the Statue of Liberty. It is the
title of a poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, engraved in the bronze plaque on the
Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. “Lazarus’s poem helped in transforming the Statue of
Liberty into a “welcoming beacon” for immigrants fleeing their native countries.” 42
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! 43
Not only does Sachs refer to this poem, he also refers to Emma Lazarus herself, by making
her into a character in his novel. He refers to the poem and its author to stress the original
importance of the Statue that once had a real ‘raison d’être’. Now, however, it has become an
empty symbol, since everyone has forgotten what it signifies. When he becomes a terrorist,
he is actually doing the same thing: he wants to highlight the original, symbolical power of
Lady Liberty, by blowing up replicas.
42
K. Jackson and S. Dunbar, Empire city, New York through the centuries, ( New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002) 314-315
43
K. Jackson and S. Dunbar, Empire city, New York through the centuries, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002) 314-315
- 56 -
The use of the poem also has another implication, namely the reference to the real
bombing of the Statue of Liberty, when the first publication of the New Colossus poem was
destroyed.
On June 3, 1980, a bomb exploded in the museum at the base of the Statue of
Liberty. Initially, at least five seperate terrorist groups took responsibility. […]
The explosion damaged a large section of the room’s ceiling, as well as some
contents of the exhibit case, including a first publication of Emma Lazarus
poem. 44
There is a great difference between the real terrorists and Benjamin Sachs. Sachs wants to
restore the importance of the poem as a symbol of the old American values, while these
actual terrorists show no respect and could not care less for the importance of the Statue. All
they really want is attention.
Two days later, however, the New York times and NBC received letters
from the Croatian Freedom Fighters, written in Croatian, taking
responsibility for the bomb. The letters made no specific demands, but
urged the worldwide community to recognize the plight of the people of
Croatia, who had lost their autonomy to Yugoslavia in 1971. 45
The Croatian Freedom Fighters had no intention to emphasize the values of the
Statue. They did not want to emphasize that the Statue should be a welcoming beacon, a
symbol for a country with an open mind, without hypocrisy. These Freedom Fighters just
wanted to blow up something big, so they would be on the news and could defend their
cause.
The narrator refers to the actual bombing to highlight how important Lady Liberty
is for the citizens. The fact that many groups want to claim the bombing proves its
significance. The importance of the Statue as a national symbol is also mentioned in
Leviathan:
Unlike the flag, which tends to divide people as much as it brings them
together, the statue is a symbol that causes no controversy. […] The Statue
44
45
“Statue of Liberty,” Encyclopedia of Terrorism, 2003 ed..
“Statue of Liberty,” Encyclopedia of Terrorism, 2003 ed..
- 57 -
of Liberty is immune from these conflicts. For the past hundred years, it has
transcended politics and ideology, standing at the threshold of our country
as an emblem of all that is good within us. (216)
Another remarkable fact about the New Colossus is that it again proves that
“everything is connected to everything else” (160). The narrator lists the characters in the
novel as follows:
Emma Lazarus, Sitting Bull, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Pulitzer,
Buffalo Bill Cody, Auguste Bartholdi, Catherine Weldon, Rose Hawthorne
(Nathaniel’s daughter), Ellery Channing, Walt Whitman, and William
Tecumseh Sherman. (38)
At first, it would seem as though Sachs chooses these characters because they are
important to him. It is a mix of people from different genders and different lines of
interest: an Indian leader, a general, a nurse and some writers. However, Sachs does not
choose them at random. All these characters are linked to each other. In one way or
another, they influenced each other’s lives. The same idea of connectedness is expressed
by the content of the novel. Here again, the major point of Leviathan that everyone is
connected to everybody else is proven.
3.6. Structure
The formal aspects and structure of Leviathan represent the content of the novel.
The randomness of destiny is not only expressed by the form of a Greek tragedy, as I
explain later, but also by all sorts of comments in the text. There are numerous sentences
intended to highlight the play of fate. If some things simply had gone differently, the
whole story would have been different. The narrator uses expressions such as: “If Dwight
had lived, he said, the whole story would have been different.” (153) and “If Sachs hadn’t
gone to her, I’m certain that things would have been resolved rather quickly.” (160)
The structure of Leviathan stresses the content of it. Not only is the novel built up
like a Greek tragedy, the content, too, is similar to that of Greek tragedies. In these
tragedies, we always find a struggle between a tragic hero and fate. The hero has to defeat
powers that are out of his control. Destiny or fate chooses his victims at random. The
combination of the randomness of fate and some wrong decisions made by the tragic hero
lead to the tragic end in which the hero always loses and most of the times he dies. In
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Leviathan the same plot is used. The narrator begins to tell the story of a hero, a man who
is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in. It looks as though all is well, but then, all
of a sudden, the hero is confronted with all sorts of unfortunate events that he cannot
control. The hero loses his grip and eventually he is defeated. Linda Fleck sees this
dramatic change represented in Sachs’s fall:
His entire tale corresponds to the inverted-U structure of tragedy, including
the fall of the tragic hero from “the top of the wheel of fortune” (Frye,
Anatomy 206), which in Leviathan, takes the form of the literal fall on July
4, 1986, the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. 46
The fall is not only used metaphorically, it becomes very literal when Sachs falls
from the fire escape. His fall is the first dramatic change.
Sachs himself partly causes his own downfall. It is indeed the case that fate made
life difficult for Benjamin Sachs. Nevertheless, just as all other tragic heroes, Sachs
makes some terrible decisions that expedite and worsen his downfall. Aaron understands
that his friend did not always choose the right path: “I just feel sorry for him,
inexpressibly sorry for the terrible things he brought down on himself.” (132)
Besides reflecting the content of a Greek tragedy, Leviathan adopts all the
structural elements of the tragedy as well. The novel is divided in five parts, each part
representing a part of the Greek tragedy. The tragedy always begins with a ‘prologos’.
The prologos is some sort of introduction in which the main character is presented and the
narrator gives away the plot, this makes that there are no surprises about the ending of the
story. From the beginning, it is made very clear that the story will end in death. We find
the same structure in Leviathan. The narrator immediately gives away the tragic ending
with his first sentence: “Six days ago a man blew himself up by the side of a road in
northern Wisconsin.” (1) The narrator leaves little to the imagination: the hero will lose
the battle against fate.
The second part of a Greek tragedy includes the entrance of the choir. This choir is
the instance that tells the background stories. These are the stories that are too long or too
difficult to act out on stage. The entering of the choir takes place in the second chapter of
the novel. All the secondary characters are introduced such as Maria Turner, Lillian
46
Linda L. Fleck, “From Metonomy to Metaphor: Paul Auster’s Leviathan,” Critique 39.3 (1998) 260.
- 59 -
Stern, Delia and David. Maria even brings up Reed Dimaggio, though she does not
mention his name yet, she just describes him as Lillian’s husband. These secondary
characters are an important source of information. They are all a part of Sachs’s life and
history. They influenced his character in the past and will remain an influence on him in
the future. In Leviathan the narrator opens the second chapter by announcing a new
chapter: “The initial phase of our friendship lasted for approximately a year and a half.
Then, within several months of each other, we both left the Upper West Side, and another
chapter began.”(51) From now on, the introduction is over and the real story can begin.
The narrator is not only stating that a new chapter begins, he already mentions
many of the secondary characters in the first lines of the second chapter, too. The role of
these characters should not be underestimated; Aaron tries to explain their importance.
If not for the breakup of my marriage to Delia Bond, I never would have
met Maria Turner, I never would have known about Lillian Stern, I
wouldn’t be sitting here writing this book. Each one of us is connected to
Sachs’s death in some way, and it won’t be possible for me to tell his story
without telling each of our stories at the same time. (51)
The next parts in the Greek tragedy are the ‘episodiae’. These episodiae are
the chapters in which the tragic hero goes through a dramatic change. From that moment
on his life will never be the same again. In Leviathan the important alterations happen in
the third and fourth chapter. Sachs’s fall from the fire escape and the consequences of the
fall are treated in the first episodia or in Leviathan, the third chapter.
Immense changes occurred inside him, and while it’s simple enough to
pinpoint the moment when these changes began, to zero in on the night of
his accident and blame everything on that freakish occurrence, I no longer
believe that explanation is adequate. Is it possible for someone to change
overnight? Can a man fall asleep as one person and then wake up as
another? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t be willing to bet on it. (105)
Benjamin did not change overnight. He was already changing because of other
factors, such as the public’s lack of interest in his work and the changing political
climate. However, the fall from the fire-escape was a sort of ‘deus ex machina’ that
speeded up his decline. From that moment on, he considered his life changed forever:
“His body mended, but he was never the same after that.”(107) He wants to play a more
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active role in life: “I want to stand up from my desk and do something” (122 ) After this,
he does not want to watch the world go down anymore. For a while, he calms down and
starts writing a new book, but then the second episodia begins and again Sachs is
confronted with the unsparing cruelty of fate. In the fourth chapter, we learn about the
murder of Reed Dimaggio, which turns his life upside down. By getting involved in Reed
Dimaggio’s life, Benjamin gets to know the terrorists’ methods of work. He becomes
more and more fascinated and begins to copy Reed Dimaggio’s behavior. Again, Sachs is
confronted with something beyond his control.
No matter how wild we think our inventions may be, they can never match
the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This
lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way
or another, it always does. (160)
This element of chance and randomness is the most typical element in tragedies.
Terrible things just happen, while no one can do anything about it. An incontrollable
force takes control over the life of the tragic hero. That is exactly what happened to
Sachs. Destiny has power over the main character.
The last chapter of a Greek tragedy is the ‘exodos’. This chapter involves the
departure of the choir and focuses on the tragic main character. In Leviathan we see the
exact same thing: all the secondary characters leave the forefront and then the focus shifts
to Sachs and Aaron. In the first sentence the dramatic change is mentioned: “On January
16, 1988, a bomb went off in front of the court house in Turnbull, Ohio, blowing up a
small, scale-model replica of the Statue of Liberty” ( 215 ) From this moment on, there
will be no more surprises. Sachs has lost the battle against the so-called higher and
uncontrollable forces and turns to terror.
By using the structure of a Greek tragedy, the novel is again accentuating that
Benjamin Sachs is a victim. He does not want to be a terrorist. It is something that
happens to him by a whim of fate.
Tragedies emphasize the weakness of the human being. Humans are only a small
part of the universe, in which they should find a way to survive in the bigger whole. The
point is made in Leviathan. The character Benjamin Sachs proves the triviality of the
human race.
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The tragic ending becomes even more powerful when it is compared to the other
life story in the novel, namely that of Peter Aaron. If life is like a downward spiral for
Sachs, it is a rising one for Aaron. Linda Fleck describes this difference as follows:
Sachs’s life ends in tragedy; Aaron’s reads like a fairy tale. After a number
of trials and tribulations, he meets the woman of his dreams and lives
happily ever after. The encounter with Iris leads to love, which in turn,
transforms the contingent into the necessary, the tragic into comedic. 47
Even more tragic is that Aaron only learns what real love is through Sachs’s wife,
while Sachs’s marriage ends in tragedy.
There’s no question that Fanny was directly responsible for this change of
heart. If not for her, I never would have been in a position to meet Iris, and
from then on my life would have developed in an altogether different way.
(88)
Aaron sees his life evolving in a positive way from that moment on. Fanny turns
his life into a fairy-tale, something she had never been able to do for Sachs. The latter’s
life went downhill, as did their relationship and both ended in tragedy.
3.7. Conclusion
In Leviathan the narrator presents a very shaded image of the terrorist. The central
terrorist in the novel is mainly depicted as a victim. Terror slowly takes over his life and
he abandons his ideological writings to become a terrorist. The fact that the novel is built
like a Greek tragedy reinforces the theme that the terrorist himself is a type of victim.
Auster tries to portray an intelligent and likeable terrorist. He attempts to explain the
psychology behind his main character and to find out how this character turned into a
terrorist. But Auster does not succeed in bringing the story realistic enough. Sometimes it
is just too much coincidence. It seems almost impossible that someone can have so much
misfortune during one life time, while his best friends’ life is a fairy-tale.
47
Linda L. Fleck “From Metonomy to Metaphor: Paul Auster’s Leviathan”, Critique 39.3 (1998) 260
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Rushdie’s Shalimar the clown
- 63 -
To love was to risk your life. 48
4. Rushdie’s Shalimar the clown
4.1. Main theme
The main theme of the novel is love in all its forms: love between a man and a
woman, love between a child and his parents and love for one’s country. The sad
conclusion made in the novel is that not much good stems from this love. The novel
brings a tale of woe, in which love can bring many people to do violent things, even
terrorist acts. The two short excerpts used at the introduction of Shalimar the Clown
immediately predict the tragic consequences of love.
The first excerpt is a poem written by Agha Shahid Ali, an American writer with
roots in Kashmir. The poem was published in his collection of poems called the Country
Without a Post Office.
Country Without a Post Office.
I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.
The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves…
I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive. You can't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain
only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world?
48
Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (Londen: Jonathan Cape, 2005) 397. (from now on, all page
references will be made in the text).
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In his work Agha Shadid Ali writes about Kashmir. The Paradise he left, but still
loves. In this poem a deep feeling of loss and pain is expressed.
In the poems in The Country Without a Post Office Ali's portrayal of the
conflict between Muslim Indian militants and the Indian government over
control of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir violent events flare
briefly or suggest themselves in scenes of smoking rubble. 49
The poems suggest that too much love for one’s country can involve a destructive
dimension. The people are so eager to obtain control over Kashmir that they forget to
respect what they are fighting for. The same sad conclusion is made in Shalimar the
Clown. The freedom fighters presented in the novel want to gain control of their country
so badly that they fail to remember the essence, namely to have admiration for Kashmir’s
beauty.
The second extract is a verse from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. “A
plague on both your houses.” The destructive power of love is illustrated again. The
focus shifts from love for one’s country to love between two people. Romeo and Juliet
tells the tragic love story of two young people fighting their family convictions to be
together. But the story ends in the tragic death of the two main characters. An awakening
love ends in death and tragedy for both youngsters. A corresponding story is told in
Shalimar the Clown: two youngsters, the boy is a Muslim and the girl is Hindu, fall in
love and transcend the problems of their different upbringing. But not much good comes
out of this love, and it causes a lot of pain.
4.2. Views on terrorists and terrorism
4.2.1. The depiction of the terrorists
4.2.1.1. The terrorist fighting for his manliness: Shalimar the clown
The most important terrorist presented in the novel is Shalimar the clown, a
Muslim living in Kashmir, who grew up in Pachigam, a village where Muslims and
Hindus live together in peace. He falls in love with a Hindu girl, Boonyi, and they
49
Deborah Kletonic, “Waiting for word in the paradise that was Kashmir,” Umass magazine, spring (1998)
(http://www.umass.edu/umassmag/archives/1998/spring_98/spg98_books_ali.html), 30 maart 2007.
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become the ultimate example for the serene cohabitation in Pachigam. Their fairy tale
ends when Boonyi leaves Shalimar for Max Ophuls, the American ambassador in India.
This event causes the main character, Shalimar, to develop from a boy who could not
harm anyone to a heartless killer. In the early years of his life, his girlfriend Boonyi
describes him as being a very gentle person: “She loved him because he would not-he
could not!-hurt any living soul. How could he cause her harm when he would not harm a
fly?”(50) When he is trialed for the murder of Max Ophuls, the description of Shalimar
sounds totally different.
This vicious killer had been gripped by the need to know as intimately as
possible the life he planned so brutally to determinate. It was said in court
that such despicable behaviour proved the murderer to be a person so
inhumanly cold-blooded, so calculatingly icy of heart, so fiendishly
diseased of soul that it would never be safe to return to the company of
civilized men. (32)
Shalimar is not at all a forgiving person. As long as his expectations got fulfilled,
he did what was expected of him and seemed a rather normal person. When somebody
offends him, he does not even consider forgiveness, all he wants is revenge. Shalimar had
warned Boonyi “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my
revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children
also.” (61) Boonyi believes her lover is saying this to demonstrate how strong his feelings
for her are, but unfortunately for her, Shalimar means every word he says. As soon as he
gets abandoned by Boonyi, he turns into a bitter and bloodthirsty man, willing to do
everything to have his reprisal. His sole purpose is killing the woman and man, who stole
love away from him. Shalimar becomes a member of a religious liberation army. Not
because he really believes in their cause but especially because he wants to have the
opportunity to come close to Max Ophuls and to be taught the skills of a real murderer:
“For now and until freedom comes I’ll kill anyone you want me to, he said, but yes, one
of these days I want the American ambassador at my mercy.”(252)
Shalimar wants to win back his honor and manliness by killing the persons who
took those characteristics away from him. In an interview Rushdie explains that his main
character is a typical example of what happens in the mind of a jihadist. They live in a
society were honor is still very important and they are willing to kill to defend that honor.
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The most essential characteristic of the person who commits terror of this
kind is the idea of dishonored manhood. I try to show this in my novel. The
character Shalimar picks up the gun not just because his heart gets broken,
but because his pride and honor get broken by losing the woman he loves to
a worldly man of greater consequence and power. Somehow he has to
rebuild his sense of manliness. 50
This sense of pride is very important for Shalimar. He does not only respect
himself but shows great respect for his male superiors in the community. Pandit Pyarelal
Kaul, the Hindu leader in Pachigam and also Boonyi’s father, and Sarpanch Abdullah
Noman, the Muslim leader in Pachigam and also Shalimar’s father ask Shalimar not to
kill Boonyi. Shalimar promises the two men to fulfill their wish. When Boonyi arrives
back in Pachigam, Shalimar has problems controlling himself, all he wants to do is kill
Boonyi. Then the two leaders remind him of his promise and he retakes his oath.
In the first place, he said, the oath I made to the two of you was my
personal promise to you, and so I will respect it as long as even one of you
is alive. But the oath I made to myself was a personal promise as well, and
when you are both dead you will no longer be able to hold me back. (237)
Although his urge to kill the treacherous Boonyi is enormous, he shows respect for
his father and the other leader in the community and he only kills Boonyi after both of
them have died.
Another example of Shalimar’s respect for manliness is the fact that he does not
support and cannot respect suicide killings: “Shalimar the clown had never liked the use
of fidayeen suicides, which struck him as an unmanly way of making war.”(318) When
the freedom fighters begin to use this strategy of suicide attacks regularly, he can no
longer show respect for the organization and leaves it, to become the driver and servant of
Max Ophuls. Shalimar’s behavior seems to be a typical example of the class distinction
among the terrorists: “Strapping on a suicide belt is looked down upon by some who think
it is manlier to kill face to face with a knife. Fighting is manly. Suicide bombing is
cheap.” 51 Shalimar has too much respect for his manhood to blow himself up.
50
51
Salman Rushdie, “Inside the Mind of Jihadists,” NPQ: New perspectives quarterly 23.1(2006) 7.
Salman Rushdie, “Inside the Mind of Jihadists,” NPQ: New perspectives quarterly 23.1(2006) 7.
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Shalimar cannot be considered an ideological terrorist. He does not kill out of
conviction but for personal reasons. At first his murder of Max Ophuls is considered to be
an ideological act. This was a logic assumption considering the remarks Ophuls made in a
television show a couple of days before his death. Max had talked about the situation in
Kashmir: “Max Ophuls launched instead into a political diatribe on the so-called Kashmir
Issue” (27) Because this subject was not interesting enough for television, the makers cut
a lot out of his monologue. In the pieces that were kept, it seemed as if Ophuls was
favoring the Hindus. Max Ophuls watches the show together with Zainab Azam, an
Indian actress with whom he has an affair. Zainab Azam is not at all happy with the
statements made in the show.
He understood that the cause of her anger was his “bias” towards the
Hindus, and that it would do him no good to explain that his equal and
fervently expressed horror at the slaughter of innocent Muslims had been
deleted from the programme by the vindictive scissors of the network
apparatchiks, because the rage of religion had risen up in her and the very
rarity of her ardour made it impossible to quell. (29)
After they watched the show together, Zainab Azam and Ophuls quarrel,
eventually she leaves his house in extreme anger. When she is in the car, driven by
Shalimar, she outs her hate. This anger is certainly not the main reason why Shalimar the
clown killed Ophuls but it did speed up the process: “It is probable that this phone call
sealed his fate, or rather that what had been waiting to happen was finally precipitated by
the anger that spilled out of Zainab Azam into the driver’s ears.” (30) It was a logical
conclusion that the murder could have been a consequence of these statements. As soon
as the whole story came out, it became clear that Ophuls was not murdered for political
reasons but for personal ones: “The investigation had uncovered this one immense, allexplaining, devastating thing. The crime, which at first had looked political, turned out to
be a personal matter, insofar as anything was personal anymore.” (338)
If the statements of Ophuls would indeed have been the reason for the murder than
Shalimar’s act could be defined as follows: “Terrorism is the use of violence, especially
murder and bombing, in order to achieve political aims or to force a government to do
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something.” 52 Shalimar would then be a terrorist who acted out of political frustrations.
But this only seems the reason, seen that his real reason is not at all political. Therefore
the murder of Max Ophuls does not fit in any of the existing definitions of terrorism, if
one takes in mind that all of these definitions have a political dimension.
4.2.1.2. The man behind the scene, the counterterrorist: Max Ophuls
Shalimar’s victim, Max Ophuls, the American ambassador and also the man who
stole away his wife, is also involved in the terrorist milieu. During his Resistance years he
even commits a terrorist act.
Hungry for revenge, he joined the Action Section of Combat Étudiant under
the work-name “Niccolò” and learned about blowing things up. The first
and only bomb he threw was built by an assistant named Guibert in the
Institute of Chemistry, and its target was the home of Jacques Doriot, a
Vichy stooge who ran the pro-Nazi Doriot Association. The explosion-the
gigantic excitement of the moment of power, followed almost immediately
by a violent involuntary physical reaction, a parallel explosion of vomittaught him two lessons he never forgot: that terrorism was thrilling, and
that no matter how profoundly justified its cause, he personally could not
get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis.
(162)
This fragment proves that terrorism is not only a question of having a reason to do
it, but that a person has to have it in him, so to speak. Max Ophuls has several reasons to
be very furious and vengeful: the Nazis conducted medical experiments on his parents,
they killed many of his friends in the Resistance and he himself had to flee his
motherland. Nevertheless, he does not have it in him to take lives out of revenge. He tries
it, but has to recognize that he is not up to it. That is the big difference between him and
Shalimar. Shalimar is insulted one time and is no longer able to function as a normal
human being. The importance of personality is emphasized by contrasting these two
people.
52
“Terrorism,” Collins cobuild advanced learner’s English dictionary. 2003 ed..
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Ophuls is not capable of being a terrorist, but after his dismissal as American
ambassador, he becomes involved in counterterrorism.
Counterterrorism is the use of personnel and resources to preempt, disrupt,
or destroy capabilities
of terrorists
and their support
networks.
Counterterrorism is inherently an offensive, as opposed to defensive
approach to the threat, involving diplomacy, intelligence operations, and
counterterrorism training. 53
Max Ophuls is not as innocent as his daughter believes him to be. He has not the
personality of a killer, but he is the man behind the scene. He does not perform the
actions himself but he is the one pulling the strings. When Shalimar is fighting in the
liberation front, they receive weapons from the Americans, to kill the Russians. Shalimar
the clown recognizes the irony in this situation: an ambassador of counterterrorism who is
delivering weapons to kill: “Ambassador Max Ophuls, who these days was supporting
terror activities while calling himself an ambassador for counterterrorism.” (272) It is
possible that Ophuls indirectly killed more people than Shalimar ever did. Max Ophuls is
also responsible for a lot of bloodshed but unlike Shalimar he does not kill with his bare
hands, he stays ‘invisible’: “Invisible Max, on whose invisible hands there might very
well be, there almost certainly was, there had to be, didn’t there, a quantity of the world’s
visible and invisible blood.” (335)
4.2.1.3. The terrorist without a cause: Anees Noman
The novel also focuses on a third terrorist: Anees Noman, the older brother of
Shalimar the clown, the third son of the Sarpanch and his wife Firdaus. Anees is a
terrorist who stands in shrill contrast with the other two terrorists presented. He is
depicted as the standard terrorist we known from modern day media. He has no real
personality and ends up in the terrorist milieu by accident and not for his beliefs.
As his seventeenth birthday neared Anees began to display a growing skill
with his hands, casually creating miniature marvels of paperchain cutout
figures and fantastical creatures made out of twisted silver paper taken from
the insides of cigarette packs. […] It was this gift that brought him to the
53
“Counterterrorism,” Encyclopedia of terrorism, 2003 ed..
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attention of the local liberation front commander, and one star-filled night
Anees was brought by two fighters with scarves around their faces to the
wooded hill where Nazarébaddoor’s old cottage stood rotting and empty.
Here he was asked by a man he could not see if he would like to learn to
make bombs. Okay, Anees Shrugged. At least this meant that his
melancholy life was likely to be short. (106)
Anees gets what he wishes for: his life is indeed very short and ends in a tragic
way. He is captured by troops who torture and eventually kill him. After he died they
bring his dead body to the house of his parents and lie him there, as if he were a dead dog:
“ The corpse was tossed onto the doorstep, wrapped in a bloodied grey blanket, and the
front door was smashed down.” (307) The persons who capture him show no respect, they
even cut off his hands, his trademark.
Anees does not act out of love as opposed to Shalimar the clown and Ophuls. He is
portrayed as someone who makes bombs as a means of passing time. Many of the suicide
terrorists presented and talked about in Shalimar the clown are similar to Anees. They
cooperate with freedom fighters to get a reward, but not out of conviction. They are the
so-called foot-soldiers acting out the orders of the superiors, who want to reach a certain
goal. Rushdie says the following about these terrorists in an interview: “ You have to be a
weak personality to be a suicide bomber. […] There is a whole range of appeals, few of
which have to do with ideology.” 54 The difference between this kind of terrorists, acting
for reward, and the ones who act out of conviction, is used as a defense by the lawyer of
Shalimar the Clown during his trial. His lawyer tries to describe Shalimar as a victim of
these higher commanders who ‘brainwashed’ him into being a terrorist: “ Certain
personality types were more suggestible than others, could be shaped by external forces
and aimed like weapons by their masters against whatever targets were deemed worthy of
attack.”(383) This is indeed true, some of these terrorist are just puppets in the hands of
their superiors. But the irony in this situation is, that Shalimar is not at all a puppet. He is
not at all a weak personality who is willing to do everything his superiors tell him to do.
Shalimar is one of the strongest personalities presented in the novel, and he acts only on
his own behalf.
54
Salman Rushdie, “Inside the Mind of Jihadists,” NPQ: New perspectives quarterly 23.1(2006) 7.
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In the book the depiction of the suicide terrorist is very negative. Shalimar cannot
show respect for him and no one really respects them. The main reason for this depiction
is to create a great contrast with the main character, who clearly has more passion in him
than the others. But Eagleton states in his book that certainly not all suicide bombers are
following orders and have no conviction of their own.
The act of self-dispossession writes theatrically large the self-dispossession
which is your routine existence. Laying violent hand on oneself is in this
sense simply a more graphic image of what the enemy is doing to you
anyway, and so converts your powerlessness into a public spectacle. Death
is a solution to your existence, but also a commentary on it. […] Destroying
yourself is a sign of just how dramatic a transformation would be needed to
make your daily life tolerable. 55
This gives a more complete image of the suicide bombers, sometimes there is no
other way out than to kill yourself. There must be all sorts of suicide terrorists, indeed
people who just follow orders, but certainly also people who are convinced that what they
are doing, is the only possibility. In the novel only the ones listening to and following
orders are portrayed, surely to make a contrast with the main character Shalimar.
4.2.1.4. The psychology behind the terrorists
The main terrorists are described in great detail with much attention for their inner
developments. They are considered as individuals with a complex mind. The author
focalizes in the first place on the terrorists and in the second place on their acts.
Before a terrorist attack can take place, a weapon must be assembled.
Volatile ingredients must be combined, a trigger put in place, a timer set
ticking. That weapon is the mind of the terrorist. But since 9/11—and
before—pop culture has focused mainly on the other sort of bombs. […]
Salman Rushdie has taken up the subject in his latest novel, Shalimar the
clown. 56
The novel succeeds in describing the terrorist act and the evolution in terrorism by
using personal drama. The main focus is not put on the event, but on the psychology that
55
56
Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford university press, 2005) 90.
James Poniewozik, “Terrorists get their close-up” Time Canada 166.21 (2005) 1.
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is behind it. These strong main characters and terrorists are personifications of the
evolution of terrorism in general. And the evolution in their lives is a personification of
the situation in Kashmir. The novel focuses on some individuals to represent a universal
history. In an interview Rushdie explained that he likes to write in this way.
I’ve always thought there are two ways of writing good books. One is to try
to put the whole world in and fail obviously, but fail interestingly. As
Beckett said, try again, fail better. Or to take one strand out of the hair of
the world and look at that single strand in great detail and to find infinity in
it. Now I, by and large, have tended to the former strategy. 57
This is indeed what happens in Shalimar the Clown, there are no stories on great
historical events, but on the people behind the events. The Second World War and the
Resistance are mentioned through Max Ophuls. He is Jew, an important Resistance
member and he loses his parents to the Nazis. A great number of aspects concerning the
Second World War are worked out in one single character. The problems concerning
Kashmir are mirrored in the lives of Shalimar and Boonyi. In the beginning they live
together in loving harmony, just as it used to be in Kashmir. Later on Boonyi gets
confused and does not know what she wants anymore: live in luxury with Max or live in
love with Shalimar. Boonyi then would be representing Kashmir, not knowing where she
belongs to, to India, represented by Max: “She decided that the term “Indian armed
forces” would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence
in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body” (197) or be
independent, represented by Shalimar: “Whenever she said “Kashmir” she secretly meant
her husband” (196). This same dilemma is reinforced by the identity struggle of the
illegitimate daughter of Max Ophuls and Boonyi. She is named India, after the country to
which her father was an ambassador for many years, but she never really likes the name:
“‘India’ still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation of a
reality that was not hers to own, and she insisted to herself that it didn’t fit her anyway,
she didn’t feel like an India.”(5) She did not have any affinity with this name, she had
much more affinity for Kashmir: “(That the terms Kashmir and paradise were
synonymous was one of her axioms, which everyone who knew her had to accept)” (4)
57
Pradyumna S; Chauhan, ed., Salman Rushdie Interviews: A sourcebook of His Ideas (Connecticut:
Greenwood press, 2001) 205.
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Just as her deceased mother she feels much closer to Kashmir than to India, as her mother
was dominated by ‘Indian forces’, India is dominated by her name. As long as the name
keeps her prisoner, she cannot develop into a complete human being. It is only when she
discovers her roots in Kashmir that she can explore her own personality. With this
change, a name change comes along and she is called Kashmira form then on. (see
chapter 4.3.3) Resembling her mother she feels trapped in the strong boundaries of
‘India’. She never wants to be ‘India’ again, she is Kashmira: “There is no India she
thought. There is only Kashmira. There is only Kashmir.” (357)
The importance of every single individual and what an individual can mean
for society is mentioned in a speech by Max Ophuls.
‘The loss of one man’s dream, one family’s home, one people’s rights, one
woman’s life,’ said Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, when he could
resume, ‘is the loss of all our freedoms: of every life, every home, every
hope. Each tragedy belongs to itself and at the same time to everyone else.
What diminishes any of us diminishes us all.’(138)
Every single person is important, and what is important is the human being behind
every event. Also Shalimar makes a statement in which he outs his belief that the people
carrying out the acts are far more important than the act itself. It is a quote he uses to
Ophuls’s girlfriend, the day before he murders Max Ophuls: “For every O’Dwyer,” he
had said in excellent Urdu as she got out of the car, “there is a Shaheed Udham Singh,
and for every Trotsky a Mercader awaits.” (30) Shalimar does not even mention the word
‘murder’, he only gives the names of the murderers and their victims. The story of
O’Dwyer and Shadeed Udham Singh is explained in the novel: “the story of the man who
murdered the imperialist lieutenant-governor who had sanctioned the Amritsat massacre,
the story of Udham Singh who went to England and waited for six years and then shot
O’Dwyer at a public meeting.” (30) The story about Trotsky and Mercader is not
explained but is very similar to the other one. “In Dec., 1936, the Soviet government
obtained the expulsion of Trotsky from Norway, and he settled with his family in a
suburb of Mexico City. There, on Aug. 20, 1940, he was assassinated by Ramón
Mercader, a Spanish Communist and possible agent of Stalin.” 58 The main focus is on the
murderers, who hate the person or what he represents so badly, that they follow their
58
“Trotsky,” The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001-2005 ed..
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victim and kill him without hesitating. Shalimar commits a crime that resembles these
two crimes a lot. When the newspapers are relating Max Ophuls’s dismissal as American
ambassador, they predict him being killed by someone resembling Mercader or Udham
Singh:
He will be one of the makers of this new age, too, until old age rings down
the curtain, and Death comes to his door in the form of a handsome man, a
Mercader, an Udham Singh, Death asking him, in the name of the woman
they once both loved, for work. (213)
The novel attaches great importance to the psychology of man. A great number of
statements are made about the nature of a human being: “There are no surprises in the
animal kingdom. Only Man’s character is suspect and shifting. Only Man, knowing good,
can do evil. Only Man wears masks. Only Man is a disappointment to himself”. (91-92)
Every one of the main characters has great psychological depth. Even the terrorists
are described with a lot of attention for their inner development. This is remarkable since
terrorists are often considered or depicted as being heartless and cold personalities. It is
often forgotten that terrorist do act for certain reasons. As John Horgan mentions in his
book, terrorist acts are always connected to a certain context.
Any form of behaviour, terrorist or otherwise, exists within a social and
political context, but terrorist behaviour (like criminal behaviour) refers to
activities that belong to an environmental context which gives rise to,
sustains, directs and controls it largely in the same fashion as any other
embedded in it. We can never separate terrorism from society because it is
embedded in it. 59
These inner thoughts and developments are clearly brought up in the novel. The
terrorists are presented before they carry out any acts. And their movements are followed
until after they get caught or stop with terrorist acts.
4.2.1.5. Ideology of the terrorist
The strange thing about the terrorists in this novel is that none of them seems to
act out of conviction or ideology but out of frustration. Shalimar is frustrated because he
59
John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005) 33.
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lost his manliness, Ophuls because his parents got killed and Anees is very frustrated
about his insignificant existence. The line between terrorism and ordinary crimes is very
thin in this novel. Especially as for what Shalimar is concerned.
Whittaker mentions in
his work that the most important difference between a terrorist and ‘regular’ criminal is to
be found in the fact that terrorist is not acting to improve his own conditions.
Unlike the ordinary criminal or the lunatic assassin, the terrorist is not
pursuing purely egocentric goals- he is not driven by the wish to line his
own pocket or satisfy some personal need or grievance. The terrorist is
fundamentally an altruist: he believes that he is serving a ‘good’ cause
designed to achieve a greater good. 60
Shalimar can definitely not be considered an altruist. All he thinks about are his
own needs. He would do everything to regain his honor. The question is if Shalimar then
can be considered as a terrorist or is he just a vicious murderer? Shalimar and also Anees
can be defined as individuals who fit in the frustration-aggression hypothesis (FAH).
The FAH, originally developed by Berkowitz describes the response to
frustration, or blockage of attainment of one’s personal or environmental
goals. The response to this denial or blockage may emerge as a ‘fight or
flight’ situation- as either an aggressive, defensive reaction, or none at all. 61
Some scientists and scholars agreed with this hypothesis but it became contested.
Some psychologists say it puts too much focus on the individual aspect. The theory is also
developed to explain individual violence. The thing is that the acts that Shalimar carries
out would seem or resemble terrorist acts but actually he is a cold murderer. Shalimar is
actually a regular criminal who pretends to be a terrorist, because he then would be able
to learn certain methods and have the opportunity to come closer to Ophuls.
4.2.2. View on terrorism
The book gives examples of different forms of terrorism and different aspects of
the terrorist act. A first remarkable part of the terrorist act is the fund- raising.
60
61
David J. Whittaker, The Terrorism Reader (London: Routledge, 2001) 9.
John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005) 57.
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The often-spectacular nature of terrorist activities sometimes obscures the
simple fact that terrorist organizations need financial support to sustain
operations. […] This funding may be necessary for activities ranging from
proselytizing to training to purchasing materials for specific operations to
basic commodities such as food and lodging. 62
This aspect which is often forgotten and almost never mentioned in media or
literature is brought up in the novel: “The first phase of Shalimar the clown’s initiation
into the world of the liberation front involved him in the group’s fund-raising
activities.”(253) It is also an example of how new recruits become professional terrorists.
They have to go through several phases before they are professionals.
The novel presents different forms of terrorism. And also explains why some
terrorists prefer to work in a certain way. The evolution in terrorist tactics and methods is
shown. There are stories about bomb attacks: “His legs had been blown off by some sort
of homemade bomb and his head had been severed from his body by a single slash of a
blade”(111). Also a hijacking is mentioned: “An Indian Airlines Fokker Friendship called
Ganga after the great river had been hijacked by Pak-backed terrorists, two cousins called
Qureshi, who had absconded across the border to Pakistan”(246). There is a lot of
attention for suicide terrorism: “The increased use of fidayeen, suicide bombers, by the
group led by Maulana Bulbul Fakh and also by other insurgents […] was a new
annoyance.” (311). And even nuclear terrorism is mentioned: “The century was ending,
badly, of course, and she did worry about him of course she did, though she wasn’t good
at showing it, there had been eleven weeks of Indo-Pak fighting around the Line Of
Control and people kept mentioning the nuclear option.” (395)
Although a great number of techniques are mentioned, the main focus is not on
these techniques. By focusing on personal histories the book explains the evolution in
terrorist methods and thoughts. Personal histories tell a bigger universal history. It is not
because the author is focusing on the terrorists behind the acts, and tries to explain why
they carrying out certain acts, that he is approving of terror. It is not because he wants to
focus on the human aspect behind terror, that he is trying to prove that terror is not
inhuman. On the contrary he is not at all positive concerning terrorism:
62
“Fund-raising,” Encyclopedia of terrorism, 2003 ed.
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When the killers come, will it matter if we lived well or badly? Will the
choices we made affect our destiny? Will they spare the kind and gentle
among us and take only the selfish and dishonest? It would be absurd to
think so. Massacres aren’t finicky. I may be precious or I may be valueless,
but it doesn’t signify either way. (295)
The novel does not want to give a justification for terrorism. It just tries to
understand why some people can become so cruel and vindictive.
4.3. Characters
4.3.1. Shalimar the clown or Noman sher Noman
Shalimar the clown is the child of the sarpanch, the Muslim leader in Pachigam.
He is a person with a very strong personality. He is a man of extremes: he does not know
grey, all he knows, is either black or white. This dark side of his personality is not really a
total surprise; his mother had prophesied it at his birth.
‘He gives me the shivers,’ she repeated to herself both before and after the
birth, because she saw something in his newly opened eyes, some golden
glint of piracy, warning her that he, too, would have much to do in his
burgeoning life with lost treasures, fear and death. (75)
At first it seems that her fear was unfair and ungrounded. Shalimar seems to be
growing up as a kind and happy child. The love he receives from the people who surround
him makes him a better person: “‘My father’s love was the first phase,’ he told her. “It
carried me as far as the treetops. But now it’s your love I need. That’s what will let me
fly.’” (58) It seems that he needs people watching over him to stay on the right track. In
this first phase of his life nothing seems to go wrong. He is extremely happy and does not
lean over to ‘the dark side’ of his character. But as soon as his loving environment
collapses, he becomes a different person. He is not able to forgive and all he wants is
revenge and bloodshed. He is no longer able to have feelings of love anymore, the only
feeling he knows is hate. He becomes a professional killer and does not feel guilt for
murdering innocent war victims. When he meets India, the daughter of Boonyi, he gets
very intrigued. She reminds him of Boonyi when they were young and he creates a special
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feeling towards India. It seems like she would be able to bring him back to the real world,
but he is no longer able to love.
He had warned Boonyi against leaving him. In Khelmarg long ago he
promised her, “I’ll never forgive you. I’ll have my revenge. I’ll kill you and
if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children too.” And here
now was that child, the child she had concealed from him until the end, the
child in whom the mother was reborn. How beautiful she was. He could
love her if he still knew how to love. But he had forgotten the way. All he
knew now was slaughter. (323)
Hate embitters him in such a way that he forgets how to love someone. When he is
eventually found and taken to prison he shows no remorse. When some prisoners force
the doors he runs with them and tries to escape. He gets help from “the Blood King” who
had a metal cutter with him. They both succeed to get on the wall, but the “Blood King”
is not as limber as Shalimar and has trouble. He asks Shalimar for help, but Shalimar does
not even show the slightest interest for the person who helped him escape in the first
place: “The Blood King, wobbling desperately on the wall, called to him, sounding
suddenly like a child being abandoned by his parents. […] Shalimar the clown turned
away and ran faster.” (394) He has really become a heartless person. He is so absorbed
with hate that he is no longer capable of showing compassion. The end of the novel is the
culminating point of his wrecking hate. He goes to the house of India/ Kashmira to
complete the promise he made to himself and Boonyi many years before: “Don’t you
leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you
have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also.” (61) He has already killed
Max Ophuls and Boonyi and wants to complete the task. He wants to kill an innocent girl:
India had nothing to do with the treacherous behavior of her mother but has to pay for it
according to Shalimar. The novel ends with a scene in the bedroom of India/ Kashmira,
both are armed and ready to make their move. But who will succeed to inflict this fatal
stab and who will survive is not mentioned. It is not mentioned if Shalimar can fulfill his
promise.
Shalimar’s inclination to see the world in extremes is innate. But as long as
there were no negative impulses from his environment he could have grown up as a
normal person. But these feelings come to the surface when he is crossed in love. He
turns away from his old life and becomes a vindictive, heartless killer. Shalimar has
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become a terrorist as a consequence of a combination of character traits and
environmental causes. Once he made this mental click is his head there was no way back.
4.3.2. Max Ophuls
Max Ophuls is a man who leads a long and turbulent life. His career has a very
promising beginning: he is a talented student and Resistance hero. He gets married and he
and his wife are considered as icons in the States. He is appointed as Ambassador in India
and is very popular there. It seems that Max was on his way to lead a happy and tranquil
life. Nothing is further from the truth. His life takes a totally unexpected turn, as soon as
he falls for Boonyi, a beautiful Kashmir girl. In the beginning the relationship seems to be
one of his many flings, but it does not take long before he begins to develop real feelings:
“He began to smile whenever he thought of her, to visit her more often than was wise,
and to lavish gifts on her.”(193) Not much good comes out of this relationship. The once
down-to-earth Max lets this young girl trouble his vision on politics:
And he allowed her diatribes on the “occupation” of “Kashmir” to affect his
thinking, never suspecting that she was secretly railing against himself and
against the ineffectual husband who had failed to come to her rescue. He
began to object, in private session and un public speeches, to the
militarization of the Kashmir Valley, and when the word oppressors past
his lips for the first time the bubble of his popularity finally burst. (197)
This was only the beginning, later on when it comes out that Max made a Kashmir
girl pregnant, he gets dismissed as ambassador: “Here is ex-ambassador Maximilian
Ophuls, falling, for the time being, out of history. Here he is in disgrace” (212) His
unpopularity in India, causes the deterioration of the political and diplomatic situation
between India and the States.
The country felt more than mere disappointment in Max Ophuls; it felt
jilted. Like a scorned lover, India turned on the charming cad of an
ambassador and tried to break him into charming little bits. And after his
departure, his successor, Chester Bowles, who tried for many years to tilt
American policy away from Pakistan and towards India, was nevertheless
given an altogether rougher ride. (139)
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Here again a personal tragedy is turned into an event with larger consequences.
The unprofessional behavior of an individual means bad news for the entire nation.
Not only his political career suffered from his affair with Boonyi, also his personal
life gets shattered. Although his wife is willing to keep trying and make the relationship
work, their marriage ends. Also his death is a direct consequence of his relation with
Boonyi. Max Ophuls destroyed a good career and his marriage because he fell for the
wrong girl.
4.3.3. India Ophuls or Kashmira Noman
India Ophuls is the illegitimate daughter of Max Ophuls and Boonyi. She is the
living proof of the love that shattered both of her parents’ lives. When India is first
introduced, she is presented as being a superficial personality. At 24 she has never loved
yet, she is seeing a man and does not even care enough to remember his name. She cannot
become a fully developed individual because she does not know the past that should have
shaped her. She does not know who her birth mother is. Her father and adoptive mother
never told her what the real story is: “The deadness of India’s mother, however, was of
the worst and deadest kind. The ambassador had entombed her memory under a pyramid
of silence.” (18) This hole in her personal history causes her personality to be incomplete.
This lack of personality and individuality causes her to be insensitive. The only person
she is able to love and respect, is her dad. She is never really happy because she always
has this feeling that she is missing something and that her life is based on a lie.
So she was trapped in a lie, far away from the truth, held captive in a
fiction; and within her the turbulence grew, an unquiet spirit moved like a
giant coiled serpent stirring at the bottom of the sea. (346)
After the murder of her father, the real story is revealed. She gets to know her
roots and has the ability to form a personality. The irony of this situation is that the man,
who took away her father, gives India her mother: “It was something. A gift from a killer.
He had taken her father but her mother was being given to her.” (340) The knowledge of
her mother makes India into another person. This is shown in the novel, because from that
moment on, she has another name. The first chapter is titled India, the name she received
from her adoptive mother. The fifth and last chapter is titled Kashmira, the name her birth
mother gave her. Not only her name changes, but with the name she also requires a real
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identity. Kashmira now is capable of creating real feelings. She had never cared enough
for anyone to have feelings of love or hate. But after the murder and the discovery of her
new self, she develops a deep-seated hatred against Shalimar the clown.
I am going to write and write and write to you and my letters will be your
conscience and they will torture you and make your life a living hell until if
things go as they should it is brought to an end. […] My letters are threats
they should frighten you and I will not stop writing them until you are dead
and maybe after you die I will go on writing them to your spirit as it burns
and they will torment you more agonizingly than the inferno. (374-375)
Kashmira does not only create feelings of hate, but for the first time in her life she
is able to let a man in her heart: “She also fell in love.” (391) Kashmira begins a
relationship with a man living in Kashmir.
India or Kashmira is the ultimate example of how important personality and
individuality are. When she did not have created a personality of her own yet, she was
incapable of loving or of having other feelings. By learning her history and become a full
individual she is able to have real and deep feelings.
4.3.4. Boonyi
Boonyi is the daughter of the Hindu leader in Pachigam, Kashmir. She is
extremely beautiful and this beauty will be the ruin for many people including herself. As
a young girl she falls in love with a boy her age. They make love, this gets discovered by
their families and they have to marry. That is not what Boonyi wants, she wants to see
and have more in the world. She wants to break free and escape the little community she
is living in.
For at the very moment in which the village had decided to protect her and
Shalimar the clown , to stand by them by forcing them to marry, thus
condemning them to a lifetime jail sentence, Boonyi had been overwhelmed
by claustrophobia […] She knew that she would do anything to get out of
Pachigam. (114)
She is aware that she has the physical capacities to seduce every man she wants.
She is aware that her beauty and sexuality are important advantages: “an immature belief,
rooted in her highly eroticized self-image, that she already knew everything she would
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need to get men to do whatever she desired” (105) She sees her chance when Max
Ophuls, the ambassador arrives in her village. It did not take long before Max lost his
head over her: “She swung her hips for him and he thought, And I’m also a married man.
She swung her hips again and he ceased to think. (141) Boonyi thought that this was what
she wanted, live in luxury. She saw her relationship with Max as a business agreement:
“Whereupon for an hour they hammered out the treaty of their affiliation as if it were a
back-channel negotiation or an international arms deal, each recognizing a need in the
other that complemented their own.”(192) She would give him her body in return for all
sorts of gifts and luxurious products. She thought it would be an easy task, but it appears
that she is not as heartless as it seems. She misses her husband and seeks comfort in food.
She neglects her body and becomes fatter and fatter. She knows that Max will leave her if
she is not pretty anymore. And she knows that she will not be welcome anymore in her
home village after what she has done. Bent on self-preservation she clutches the last straw
and becomes pregnant with Max’s baby. She knows this will destroy Max’s life but she is
without compunction. Just as before, she only thinks of herself. But her plan does not
work out as she hoped it would. Peggy Ophuls, Max’s wife takes away her baby and
sends her back to Pachigam. In Pachigam, her old village, she is considered as being a
dead person, even her father acts like she is ghost. She lives alone in a tent on the top of a
hill until she is eventually killed by Shalimar. Boonyi had high hopes for herself, but she
dug her own grave.
4.3.5. Margaret Rhodes or Peggy Ophuls
The name Margaret Rhodes is the maiden name of the character. The other name,
Peggy Ophuls, is the name she acquired after her marriage with Max Ophuls. Mrs. Ophuls
is a paragon of the power of love. During the second world war, she is an important
member of the French resistance, which gets her the nickname “the Grey Rat”: “the rat
the ratcatchers can’t catch;” (168) She is a strong, self-confident woman who does feel
inferior to any man in power, she describes herself as follows: “Are you ready to crawl
through the Spanish border with a girl who has killed a man with her bare hands?” (168)
She meets Max thanks to mutual friends in the Resistance, and, as many other women,
she falls for his charms. As soon as Margaret fancies Max, she becomes a different
woman. She is no longer the strong confident woman who is not afraid to kill, but a shy,
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stammering girl trying to impress Max. When Max asks her if she is willing to see him
again, she has no clue how to react.
This reduced her to confusion, and unleashed an astonishing routine of foot
shuffling and deep blushing and hand-wringing and small sharp manic
laughs punctuating bursts of staccato speech. “Ha! Ha! Well, I’ve
absolutely no idea! Why you’d ever want to! But, ahem! Aha! If that is
you’re really, I mean! Serious, you know? One doesn’t wish to! Hahaha!
Impose! Not that it would be a bally imposition I suppose? Eh, eh, haha?
Since you’re doing the asking in the first place! Since you’re, ah, kindly
enough, oh blow I’m so pathetic at this! Oh, help, mother, all right.”(169)
Margaret gets completely infatuated with Max and becomes a totally different
person. After the war they get married. Although they keep up appearances for the public,
their marriage is far from perfect. “So the fiction of undying romance was kept up,
impeccably by her, extremely peccably by him.” (176) While he cheats on her with one
woman after another, she never stops loving him and cannot let go. She knows about his
infidelities and forgives him for every one of them, till he meets Boonyi. Peggy knows it
is a different story now that her husband has fallen for this Kashmiri girl. She is hurt very
badly and tries to break up the relationship. Because Boonyi starts to neglect her looks
and becomes fatter and fatter, Max loses his interest and returns to his wife. Mrs. Ophuls
is not mad at all and just happy that she has her husband back.
Max’s attention began to wander after that, though for a long time after
that, though for a long time he refused to acknowledge the change in
himself. He stayed away from Boonyi for longer periods. Once or twice he
dined privately with his wife. Peggy Ophuls was annoyed with herself for
feeling so pleased. She was legendary for her toughness but with him she
was always weak.(200)
It is remarkable how a strong and intelligent woman such as Peggy Ophuls stays
with a man who keeps on hurting her. But his unfaithfulness has its consequences: she
keeps forgiving her husband, but the other people around her have to put up with a great
deal of her repressed anger.
Peggy Ophuls is willing to go all the way to win back her husband’s affection.
Unable to have children of her own, she steals away the illegitimate baby of her husband
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conceived with Boonyi. She convinces Boonyi to give up the baby and leave for Kashmir.
Struck with guilt towards her husband, Shalimar, Boonyi lets Peggy persuade her and
gives up her baby daughter. Despite all her efforts, Peggy gets abandoned. Max leaves her
and her adopted child never respects her as a real mother. India, her adopted child refers
to her as “the woman who was not her mother, the woman she had lived with when she
was a child.” (338)
Peggy is a perfect example of how destructive too much love can be. She would
have been willing to die for her husband. She loved him so much that she raised his
illegitimate child. But, in the end, she is left without a loving husband, without a loving
daughter, she has nothing left except her regrets.
4.4. Title
The title: Shalimar the clown, reinforces the novel’s emphasis on character rather
than on plot. By using this name, the individuality and the personality of the character is
highlighted. There is no focus on the terrorist acts committed by this individual, but only
on the character itself.
The title contains a wink to Indian folklore. Indian tradition often uses a ‘clown
protagonist’. Rushdie says in an interview that he regrets that this ‘clown protagonist’ is
forgotten so often.
It’s right that a kind of Charandas Chor kind of clown protagonist is so
common and omnipresent in Indian folklore and village theatre that it’s
amazing that he never became the protagonist in Indian novels-not in
English any way. They all seem so solemn! 63
He used a ‘clown protagonist’ in his novel Midnight’s Children and does it again
now. The clown protagonist he mentions in the interview, Charandas Chor, is the title of
a play written by Habib Tanvir, translated the title is: Charan, the thief. The title of the
novel has the same structure as the title of the play mentioned: a proper name followed by
a noun.
63
Pradyumna S. Chauhan, ed., Salman Rushdie Interviews: A sourcebook of His Ideas (Connecticut:
Greenwood press, 2001) 37.
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Shalimar the clown embodies the two main characteristics of a clown. The best
known and important characteristics of a clown are his humor and acrobatic tricks: “a
comic character usually distinguished by garish makeup and costume whose antics are
both humorously clumsy and acrobatic.” 64 These character traits are present in the young
Shalimar. His society is a society of actors and performers.
Before Shalimar the clown and Boonyi were born there had been the
villages of the actors and the villages of the cooks. Then times changed.
The Pachigami performers of the traditional entertainments known as
bhand pather or clown stories were still the undisputed player kings of the
valley, but Abdullah the genius-young Abdullah in his prime-was the one
who made them learn how to be cooks as well.(61)
There is a concrete reference to the clown stories. Shalimar becomes a member of
this performer society and performs acrobatic acts, he is as a tightrope walker: “ After his
first walk it proved impossible to keep Noman off the rope and gradually it rose higher
and higher until he was flying at the level of the treetops.” (56) This gets him the name
Shalimar the clown.
Shalimar is not only a clown in the traditional sense of the word. He is also
representing the other aspects of a clown: “One of these, the bald-headed, white-faced
French character, Pierrot, had by the 19th-century developed into the now classic
lovesick, melancholic clown.” 65 This is the clown Shalimar becomes after he is
abandoned by Boonyi. Just as his father said to him: “Metamorphosis was the secret heart
of life;” (56) Shalimar changes from an acrobatic clown to a melancholic clown. When he
is in prison he is referred to as “Shalimar the assassin” (60) By changing this noun behind
his name, the metamorphosis is reinforced.
4.5. Structure
Each character is presented in his own chapter. The novel has five chapters: India,
Boonyi, Max, Shalimar the clown and Kashmira. By presenting each character in their
64
65
“Clown,” The Columbia Encyclopedia,2001-2005 ed..
“Clown,” The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001-2005 ed..
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own chapter, they all get personal attention. Again there is a great focus on the
individuality and personality of each character. By naming the first chapter after India
and the last and fifth one after Kashmira, this sense of individuality and personality is
even more underlined.
The last sentence of the novel is the culminating point of this sense of
individuality. The most important and most psychologically developed characters are
placed face to face: “There was no possibility that she would miss. There was no second
chance. There was no India. There was only Kashmira, and Shalimar the clown.”(398)
The individuals are placed opposed to each other literally and figuratively speaking. The
‘victim’ and the ‘seed’ from the relation between Max Ophuls and Boonyi are up for the
final duel.
4.6. Conclusion
The main theme of Shalimar the Clown is love, and the novel focuses especially
on the destructive dimension of love. All main characters’ lives end in calamity because
they loved too much or too intensely. Not only love for a person but also love for your
country can be destructive. The main character is a man crossed in love and honor, and
willing to do everything to have his revenge. This is how he becomes a professional killer
and terrorist. The main character, Shalimar the clown, is described with great
psychological depth, just as all the other characters in the novel. All main characters are
presented with their thoughts, feelings and fears. Every single one of them is a strong
individual with an interesting personality. This individuality and psychology is very
important in the novel. Nothing happens without a reason. The individuality is reinforced
with several elements: each main character gets his own chapter and the title is the name
of the most important individual in the novel.
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Conclusion
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5. Conclusion
The three novels discussed in this thesis each represent another aspect of terrorism
and terrorists. The reason for this is that all three novelists want to reinforce their main
theme through the characterization of the terrorist.
DeLillo's Mao II presents a very pessimistic view of the future. The “future
belongs to crowds” 66 and “Nothing happens until it’s consumed.” 67 are the two
pessimistic one-liners echoed throughout the entire novel. DeLillo is afraid that the
individual will go down in a world dominated by the media and the mass. The novelist
and the artist in general have lost their influence because the terrorist has taken over that
role now. The terrorist is the one who stands out and is able to reach a large public. The
terrorist is portrayed as an 'evil' force who does not leave room for intellect. The main
terrorist in the novel is depicted as a brainless copycat. He is violent, has no emotions and
is not even able to construct his own thoughts. He copies the methods and rhetoric of his
example Mao Zedong. Mao is also the inspiration for the title: the terrorist is the so-called
Mao II. DeLillo did not attach much importance to the psychological characterization of
the terrorist. The terrorist only serves as the 'evil' opponent of his main character: Bill
Gray, a novelist. The loss of identity and the danger of the mass are not only constructed
by opposing a novelist and a terrorist, but also other elements are used to underline this
theme. DeLillo introduces a great number of characters, who belong to the mass and who
make world and art into a commodity. Bill Gray’s assistant, Scott, and his girlfriend
Karen are two young people who are totally taken up by modern media. Also the title of
the novel reinforces the theme: Mao II is the title of a mass-produced artwork by Andy
Warhol. Each portrait looks slightly different, but in essence they are all the same. This is
also what is happening to the individual: they all look a bit different, but actually
everyone is the same. Also the structure of the book refers to the domination of the
masses: three of the four chapters are introduced by a picture of the mass and the last
chapter depicts a harsh image of the terrorists.
DeLillo is so eager to defend the
individual and the novelist that there is no room for real psychological depth in the
terrorists.
66
67
Don Delillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992) 16.
Don Delillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992) 44.
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Paul Auster's has another main theme and also another vision on terrorism and the
terrorist. A big difference is already to be found in the fact that the main character in
Leviathan is a terrorist, while in Mao II, the terrorist only plays a minor role. Auster
characterizes his main character, Benjamin Sachs, a terrorist, as a victim. The main theme
of Leviathan is the element of chance, and how random fate decides. The line that is
echoed throughout Leviathan is: “Anything can happen. And one way or another, it
always does.” 68 This is exactly what happens to Benjamin Sachs: everything that could go
wrong in his life goes wrong. Sachs began his career as an ideological writer, but
somewhere on the way he lost control. All sorts of curious and strange events and persons
changed his life into a tragedy. Sachs becomes a tragic hero, his life gets controlled by
forces he cannot master, and this in combination with some wrong decisions he made
himself, makes him change from an ideological writer into a bomb making terrorist.
Auster depicts his terrorists with some more depth, but does not portray a very realistic
image of the terrorist. Auster is portraying his main character neither in a positive nor in a
negative way. The structure of the novel resembles that of a Greek tragedy, which
reinforces the fact that Sachs is a victim and a tragic hero. His downfall is seen as a
consequence of a higher power, he is swallowed up by a ‘Leviathan’, a monster out of his
control. Auster is trying to give an explanation for Sachs’s acts, but it seems a bit
unrealistic and exaggerated that so much misfortune could happen to anyone. Leviathan’s
characterization of the terrorist stands in between the other two novels: it makes room for
psychological depth, but it is not brought realistic enough.
With regard to psychological depth, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is a
totally different novel than the other two. In it there is no attention the background events,
but the main focus is on the characters and especially the main character, Shalimar the
clown: a terrorist. The one-liner recurring throughout the novel is: “To love was to risk
your life.”
69
This immediately accentuates the personal element in Shalimar the Clown.
All characters and consequently, also the terrorists act out of personal reasons. They all
act out of love, either love for their country or for their loved ones. The terrorist is not
depicted as an oversimplified ‘evil’ force or a victim, but is a developed thinking object.
He has a reason for all his acts. The importance of individuality is emphasized by several
elements. The title of the novel is the name of the most important terrorist in the novel.
68
69
Paul Auster, Leviathan (Chatham: faber and faber, 1992) 160.
Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (Londen: Jonathan Cape, 2005) 397.
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He is not named after a copycat, like in Mao II, but is introduced by his own name. The
novel is divided in five chapters, each one named after an individual. Rushdie attaches
great importance to the psychological development of the terrorists. It is not like he is
supporting terror in any way, but he considers terrorists as human beings, who deserve as
much psychological depth as any other character.
All three novels present its readers with another kind of terrorist. DeLillo makes
him the opponent of his main character and gives a rather oversimplified image. Auster is
trying to give a more extensive view of the terrorist, but his terrorist seems a bit
unrealistic. Rushdie chooses to depict a terrorist with a lot of psychological depth.
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Trotsky.” The Columbia Encyclopedia,. Sixth ed. 2001- 2005. (online service on
www.barthleby.com)
Tuman, Joseph S..Communicating terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of
Terrorism. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003.
Rushdie, Salman. “Inside the Mind of Jihadists.”
NPQ: New perspectives
quarterly 23.1(2006): 7-11.
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Whittaker, David J.. The Terrorism Reader. London: Routledge, 2001.
7. List of Ilustrations
Cover page of Mao II : DeLillo, Don. Mao II. London: Vintage, 1992.
Cover page of Shalimar the Clown: Rushdie, Salman. Shalimar the Clown.
London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.
Picture taken of the Statue of Liberty on 21 september 2006, by Elien Loncke.
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