English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Literary Terrorists of Transgressive Desire

Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe. Crimes of Art + Terror U of Chicago P, 2003. 187 pp. $22.50.

By Beth Capo, Illinois College

Turn on the television, open a newspaper, and you are confronted with accounts of violence and terrorism: the Madrid subway bombed 911 days after 9/11, “key” terrorist figure surrounded in the hills of Pakistan, three more killed in a roadside bombing in Iraq. Are we winning the “War on Terror”? Is it a winnable war?

America’s new awareness of vulnerability and hatred after 9/11 spawned a number of recent books. While many of these are expository accounts of the rise of terrorism or global politics hoping to catch a wave of public interest, the denizens of literary culture have joined in with collections of poetry and short fiction emerging from the ruins of the World Trade Center.  Although some, such as Poetry After 9/11, are mature and well-crafted works, others offer only what Daniel Harris would label “kitsch,” sentimental poems and images capitalizing on a gluttony of grief, offering a too-easy shorthand inadequate for interpreting and assimilating the complex nature of violence, terrorism, and cultural difference. Harris argues that this kitsch works to make our horror and grief manageable, functioning as mental Prozac against the disturbing implications of terror at home. But by imposing a comfortable, heroic narrative on American bravery vs. “evildoers,” this exploitative work silences dissenting voices.  We are faced with a series of dichotomous pairs: quality and kitsch, art and life, fiction and non-fiction, war and peace, good and evil. To quote President George W. Bush, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Our Mission 13-14).

            Enter Crimes of Art + Terror by Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAulifffe. Neither an expository analysis of world politics nor a literary outpouring of poems or stories, this book joins the two with an analytical and creative examination of art and terrorism. This slim book packs a major intellectual punch. A highly original work of cultural and literary study, Crimes of Art + Terror traces acts of terroristic violence and works of art to a common root: a romantic vision of a transformative power that would undo the rational and complacent Western order. 

            Crimes of Art + Terror begins with the controversial comment by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who described the attack on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” How could this devastating act be considered a work of art? Analyzing current events, works of fiction, and popular film, the authors tease out Stockhausen’s pronouncement to reveal the link: a performative act by a committed individual that captures and transforms human consciousness. The artist fulfills the romantic role of transgressor, rebelling against the restricting repression of conventional society. Thus “the disturbing adjacency of literary creativity with violence and even political terror is an inheritance of a romantic extremity whose force is still felt. Do killers, artists, and terrorists need one another?” (2). A key premise of the book may disturb some readers who hold the nostalgic notion that art is a humanizing act. Lentriccchia and McAuliffe insist that creative acts are based in a violent rather than benevolent desire for transformation. Artistic desire itself is (was/can be) transgressive in that its “desire [is] to stand somehow outside, so much the better to violate and subvert the regime itself” (3). In the process, they trouble the distinction between metaphorical violence and actual violence. In our short-attention-span world saturated with media soundbites, the power to arrest public attention is transferred from the artist who murders with fictional words and images, to the terrorist who kills in fact.

            This thesis is explored via an imaginative variety of material. One of the book’s main strengths is its combination of diverse and unconventional source material. The “high art” of literature from canonical authors is discussed alongside “pop culture” films and contemporary events and personalities such as the September 11^th attack and the Unabomber . The authors discuss a selection of literature that is both deep and rich: Yeats, Synge, Capote, Mailer, Melville, Pound, Douglass and Conrad are just some of the authors discussed, with provocative references to Aristotle, Wordsworth, Frost, Eliot and others.

These juxtapositions are fascinating, drawing readers into a skillful and highly convincing argument. For instance, chapter two discusses William Wordsworth, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Don DeLillo, and surrealist artist Joseph Cornell as “Literary Terrorists” reacting against the deadening effects of modernization. Each creates the “crime of originality” in a violent act against the state. In another chapter, the criminal Henry Abbott, writers Norman Mailer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Bret Easton Ellis, and Martin Scorcese's film The Kings of Comedy are presented as “Solitary Savages,” criminal personalities produced by the regime whose violent acts blur art and life.  The reader does not need a background in literature to understand the argument, as the authors provide brief but comprehensive plot summaries in the service of their analysis. Indeed, the summary is often woven so skillfully into the analysis that it is difficult to extricate one from the other. One minor weakness, however, is a noticeable shift in analytical style when discussing film, which may point to seams in the fabric of a text knit together by collaborating authors.

            The book’s structure as a “collection of dialogues” is simultaneously brilliant and frustrating. The authors warn in their introduction that “no single, tightly focused ‘argument’ unfolds step by logical step in order to conclude in an incontrovertible generalization…. We offer the reader, instead, extended description and analysis of a web of impulses” presented in “a series of interwoven and mutually illuminating case studies” (3). This organization is brilliant in that it does indeed allow the reader to imagine “other readings that we might have made, as relevant as those that we have written” (4). The divergent source material and its enlightening juxtaposition indeed results in the reader imagining other texts that work, soon extending beyond the book itself and enlarging the web of the argument. But the method ultimately doesn’t do justice to the power of the material. The frustration inherent in the book’s structure is that, in not “unfolding step by logical step,” a psychological let down occurs when the later chapters fail to fulfill the initial promise of the opening premise. Chapter 7 offers a mix of fictional dialogue, journal, and letters from Heinrich Von Kleist, a writer who performed murder and suicide in 1811. Introduced as “one of the earliest acts of performance art, violent death as art” (148), this case is creatively written as an example of the connection between art and crime, but not fully explored as a synthesis of text’s ideas. Followed by a brief Coda offering an imagined snippet of dialogue between Von Kleist and the suicide pilot Mohamed Atta, this ending is ultimately dissatisfying, provocative but vague, ethereal, offering finally image and idea without form. Readers wishing for a sense of closure, for an articulated direction, are left with the equivalent of a puff of smoke in place of the physical contact and material force of plane hitting building.

            Overall, Crimes of Art + Terror is a fascinating study, a book timely in its insistence on the transgressive connections of art and violence. And perhaps because of its open-ended logical structure, it will generate more questions than it answers. This book could be useful and interesting to a wide range of audiences outside of academia, as it is accessible both in style and subject. The book enacts its own founding conception, daring violence to our secure boundaries of life and criticism, literature and terrorism.

Works Cited

Harris, Daniel. “The Kitschification of September 11^th.” Salon.com. January 25, 2002. http://www.salon.com.

Johnson, Dennis Loy, ed. Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets. Melville House, 2002.

Our Mission and Our Moment: President George W. Bush’s Address to the Nation Before a Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001. New York: Newmarket Press, 2001.