{"id":106806,"date":"2019-02-01T04:49:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T09:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=106806"},"modified":"2019-03-29T15:04:34","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T19:04:34","slug":"empathy-exams-on-fictionalizing-extremists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/empathy-exams-on-fictionalizing-extremists\/","title":{"rendered":"Empathy Exams: On Fictionalizing Extremists"},"content":{"rendered":"

To read the news is to immerse oneself in the lives and deeds of extremists. Whether that extremism takes the form of violent religious fanaticism or neo-Nazis agitating in the streets, it\u2019s an alarming sight for anyone who strives for a peaceful and civil society. But those aren\u2019t the only manifestations extremism can take: a recent article<\/a> in New York<\/em> noted that a new generation of readers has been inspired by the writings of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, perhaps best known for killing several people via mail bombs and having written a lengthy manifesto advocating lethal action in opposition to modern technology. Radicalization can take many forms, all of them chilling.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why so many writers have been drawn to the lives of extremists\u2014whether to explore, in fiction, what might draw someone to this way of life or to create a novel exploring the aftereffects of extremism, especially for those who don\u2019t share that ethos. And it\u2019s resulted in some memorable works of fiction in the last few decades: the protagonist of Philip Roth\u2019s American Pastoral<\/em> grapples with his estranged daughter\u2019s radicalism, while in Paul Auster\u2019s Leviathan<\/em>, a disillusioned writer embarks on a campaign of destroying replicas of the Statue of Liberty, ultimately resulting in his death.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that every high-profile literary endeavor to explore the extremist mind is remembered successfully: John Updike\u2019s 2006 novel Terrorist<\/em> earned a plethora of mixed reviews, for instance. In the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, Matthew Price wrote that \u201cTerrorist<\/em> feels flat-out rigged.\u00a0Updike, leaving middle-aged suburbia for the American inner city, has written something like a teen coming-of-age story, but he wants his 24<\/em> moment too and indulges in some gratuitous button-pushing along the way.\u201d Therein can be found some of the dangers of writing about extremists and extremism: going too far in one direction can result in a cliched thriller; going too far in the other risks sapping any tension from the narrative.<\/p>\n

Some authors have dedicated a substantial portion of their bibliography to exploring extremist mentalities. Nearly all of John Wray\u2019s novels have done so, for instance: The Right Hand of Sleep<\/em> and The Lost Time Accidents<\/em> both examine the rise of fascism and its effects on mid-20th-century Europe, while Canaan\u2019s Tongue<\/em> is set in the Southern United States around the time of the Civil War. His latest, Godsend<\/em>, is loosely inspired by the life of John Walker Lindh<\/a>, an American who was captured fighting for the Taliban.<\/p>\n

Wray eschews a sense of history with a couple of names changed, and also adds another wrinkle into the plot\u2014namely, that protagonist Aden disguises herself as a young man when she travels to Pakistan to study Islam. What Wray meticulously demonstrates is the ease in which those with the best intentions\u2014in this case, Aden, and her boyfriend Decker\u2014can quickly find themselves in circumstances where there may be little choice but to become complicit with sinister acts. It\u2019s a kind of horror narrative, one where there\u2019s a sense of inevitability to her progress\u2014a confusion of action with devotion.<\/p>\n

<\/p>Therein can be found some of the dangers of writing about extremists and extremism: going too far in one direction.

<\/p><\/p>\n

As is the case with Wray, several recent novels by Nuruddin Farah also explore different facets of extremism\u2014although Farah\u2019s work frequently delves into the periphery of extremist violence. His 2014 novel Hiding in Plain Sight<\/em> was centered around a woman whose brother died in a terrorist attack. Farah\u2019s latest novel North of Dawn<\/em> is also set in the aftermath of extremist violence. Unlike that novel\u2019s protagonist, however, the aging couple at the center of this one are Gacalo and Mugdi, the parents of the man responsible for a horrific act: a frustrated young man who left Norway to rediscover his roots in Somalia and became radicalized there, ultimately dying in a terrorist act at an airport.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the only radical act of violence to be found here, though. That the novel is set in Norway is no coincidence; instead, Farah also incorporates the white-supremacist murders committed by Anders Breivik into this novel. Overall, Farah\u2019s thesis is that these two radical groups, each relatively tiny\u2014neo-Nazis and jihadis\u2014feed one another, creating a horrific landscape through which nearly all people must maneuver cautiously. \u201cThese two are at war and the rest are victims,\u201d Farah writes. It\u2019s a succinct and moving statement that encapsulates much of the world\u2019s horrors.<\/p>\n

That perspective is evident in Guy Gunaratne\u2019s In Our Mad and Furious City<\/em>, in which the author shows how an Islamist murder of a soldier emboldens white supremacists to make the case for their own ideology\u2014and which causes several of the novel\u2019s older characters to see echoes of the National Front\u2019s racist campaigns and violence in Northern Ireland in decades past. In a 2018 interview<\/a>, Gunaratne spoke about the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby as having sparked the idea for the book. He noted that in a video of the killings, one of the killers \u201cwas talking the way I did, and was dressed the same way kids from my school were dressed. Even his mannerisms and the way he carried himself looked familiar. It was terrorism, just way too close to home.\u201d<\/p>\n

This in turn led Gunaratne to write a novel where, as he put it, \u201ceach character confronts their own version of extremism.\u201d Which, in a very different context, could describe Richard Powers\u2019s The Overstory <\/em>as well. The novel meticulously chronicles the disparate personalities that come together to oppose the destruction of forests on the Pacific coast of the United States, amidst substantial corporate and political opposition. That the novel is largely set in the late 20th century enables Powers to riff on certain moments in time, including the bombing of Earth First! activist Judi Bari, and also allows him to draw connections between activist moments. It\u2019s no coincidence that one scene late in the novel takes place at Zuccotti Park, for instance.<\/p>\n

What Powers does particularly well with his novel is to show just how easily the border between righteous beliefs and terrifying actions can, under certain circumstances, turn porous. Powers writes empathically about his characters\u2019 struggles, and the turn that some of them make towards violence is seen as a betrayal of that cause rather than a logical extension of it. But that moment of action becomes shocking because of the measured rhythms of the novel until that point: you don\u2019t realize that things are about to go terribly wrong until they do, and there\u2019s no turning back.<\/p>\n

That haziness is dramatized to a fantastic extent in R.O. Kwon\u2019s The Incendiaries. <\/em>At first, it seems to be the story of how a young woman named Phoebe becomes involved in a conservative Christian group whose opposition to abortion turns violent, told by Will, a man who\u2019d once been in a relationship with her and is now wracking his memories to discover what happened. And if that was all Kwon\u2019s novel was about, that would be enough for a compelling work on its own. But it\u2019s not\u2014the questions of memory and accountability raised here take the narrative to some interesting and disquieting places, and Will turns out to be something other than the wounded but objective figure he initially seemed.<\/p>\n

The Incendiaries <\/em>becomes a work about how easy it is to delude ourselves that we\u2019re the hero of our own narrative, and the violence that those delusions can cause. And what makes it such a particularly searing story is the way in which it ties certain narrative qualities associated with radicalism and ties them in with other disquieting elements of human behavior. A sudden shift towards violence, an unshakable belief in one\u2019s own righteousness, a self-justifying rationale: these aren\u2019t only characteristics of extremists, and this book refuses to let anyone off the hook. It\u2019s not as cut-and-dried as expressing empathy for someone with unpleasant beliefs; instead, it\u2019s about the recognition of where those beliefs could be rooted in almost anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To read the news is to immerse oneself in the lives and deeds of extremists. Whether that extremism takes the form of violent religious fanaticism or neo-Nazis agitating in the streets, it\u2019s an alarming sight for anyone who strives for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":240571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070],"tags":[16687,42219,4845,22801,3432,39895,33858,21997,6453,2896],"class_list":["post-106806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","tag-extremism","tag-guy-guratne","tag-john-updike","tag-john-wray","tag-nazis","tag-nuruddin-farah","tag-richard-powers","tag-ro-kwon","tag-terrorism","tag-tobias-carroll","story-type-deep-dive","story-type-essay"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/lh-holder-01.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-rMG","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}