Terror is the temper of our century in public affairs and in literature.
The Twenty first Century is only a quarter over and so it might seem too early to assess the temper of the times for the century. But a quarter into the cavalcade of centuries has already set its defining emotions. The Seventeenth Century started with the tragic mode of Shakespeare and Webster, as that was continued later in the century with Racine and Pascal. The Eighteenth Century abruptly changed to the comedy of Pope who shared a sense of humans as all too human and therefore comic as continued later in the century by Hume and Locke, who thought people to be reasonable and accommodating. “Gulliver’s Travels“ is, after all, a satire in that it exaggerated features to comic extreme, as by making British royalty into Lilliputians, even if the book presents, as a whole, a very tragic view of the human condition. The book was published in 1726, just a year past the quarter century mark. The Nineteenth Century of Romanticism and melodrama was set early with Wordsworth and Coleridge in their “Lyrical Ballads' in 1798 and Jane Austen’s inquiry into all the conflicting and well articulated motives was over by the quarter century mark, however well developed by Dickens later on in the century to high melodrama, including the insufferably bathetic “A Christmas Carol''. Darwin emerged much later in his century but the writers he combined, Malthus and Lyll, of his “Geology”, had been there at the beginning of theNineteenth Century. Modernist greats such as Picasso and Joyce and Kafka and Freud appeared in the early Twentieth Century and so it is possible to see already the strictures and the impulses of that. The epic literature of that century largely preceded the epic warfare of the century: the two world wars and the Cold War.
The present century begins with overt emotionally charged social events. The terror attack on the United States started on Sept. 9, 2001 with the downing of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon and the aborted attempt against the Capitol. People with expert opinion thought this might be the beginning of repeated assaults, the beginning of a war similar to those in the Twentieth Century, but that did not happen. Instead, it was a one-off attack, quite accurately seen as a way to terrorize the American population, which means spreading fear throughout the population, however limited the damage that actually occurred by the aggressor. It is as if Jimmy Dolittle’s bombing of Tokyo was the end of the American effort rather than just its beginning. Strictly speaking, a terror campaign intimidates everyone by harming just a special few. It occurred in the Nineteenth and Twentieth century under Jim Crow when the entire Negro community was intimidated by the lynching of a few thousand people on made up charges and bogus legal proceedings. It happens in the Twenty First Century in the case of school and other crazed assailants that make children fearful of going to school though very few children are killed in relation to the number of people killed by gangs and as a result of random shootings in various inner cities. Terror is a soupcon of fear that results from the media rather than a wholesale intervention of violence, as does occur in wartime.
Terror is the signature emotion in the literature of the century so far. The most significant novelist of the period is Kazuo Ishiguro who is known for fantasies but is better understood as providing an atmosphere of dread and therefore terror to stories where the protagonists or the audience are overcome by clouds of u knowing that create, each in their own way, a specter of terror, which is the sense that at any moment a person will be unnerved by a revelation of the truth. The clones in “Never Let Me Go” are anxious to find out the nature of their origins, thinking them descendents of humans, but what the reader can figure out and some of the human characters in the novel know is that the clones are descended from dogs, and many clues are strewn in the novel so as to get that. The clones, raised so they can be repeatedly harvested for body organs until they die, are dutiful, have excellent hearing, are not too intelligent, are sexually quite active, and are restless. The society shields and protects them in their caste so as to carry out their function, just as, in American life, there was a cloud of unknowing that people of an inferior caste were allowed to think this a moral and inevitable disparity and therefore disregard caste inequality. There are no organizations fomenting the rights of clones even though they have the central attributes of being human, which is to love and to be creative even if not well educated. Terror exists amidst what seems normal.
Other novels by Ishiguro also evoke terror, his own particular touch as in “Never Let Me Go”, where the reader but not the protagonists, understand why they are so terrified. In his novel, “The Buried Giant”, people have not yet or discovered memory and therefore causation and so lapse into custom, permanently afraid of what will happen next, what will be unsettling. Imagining such a primitive state of consciousness is to imagine life as ever terrorizing in a very fundamental way, a time before mankind had emerged from it. Another of his novels, “When We Were Orphans”, presents protagonists who have their own cloud of unknowing, one created by their self serving rhetoric, the words designed to give excuses for their own behavior and so hide people from their own failures and shortcomings, the protagonists wary of considering but frightened of their own ignominy, while the readers are aghast at how dreadful people can really be. That book is the most devastating in Ishiguro’s oeuvre.
There is a distinct difference between stories of terror, as exhibited by Ishiguro, and stories of horror, which are closely related to it. Stories of terror evoke an aura of threat and danger that might at any time descend on us and destroy us. That happens when a totalitarian society creates fear for the entire population, any one of which might be arbitrarily specified to do the will of the state so as to intimidate the entire population, and was exemplified by Hitler and prophesied by Kafka, but is not authoritarian in that those regimes are concerned only to persecute their enemies, as is in the case of Putin’s Russia. The miasma of fear and intimidation under terror is ever present, as it was for Shostakovich under Stalinism. Horror, on the other hand, involves specific threats of murder and mayhem whose violence will transform or kill or do worse to the people exposed to it. You go into the shed where the mass murderer will kill you with your chainsaw. Or else you will be disfigured forever, in body and soul. An original horror story is “Frankenstein” but Poe, writing in the same early Nineteenth Century, wrote both horror stories, such as “The Tell Tale Heart”, and terror stories, such as “The Death of the Red Plague”, and the same is true of Twentieth Century science fiction, where “The Day of the Triffids” is terrible because the ambulatory plants are attacking the electrified fences of the decimated sighted humans who are left, while Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” is horrible because there is no answer to the Martians destroying humanity, though microbes save the human race. A good example of a horror movie is the recent “Poor People”. It also relies on the Frankenstein story, this time after the carnage gone rather than anticipated and a monster who is both the doctor and his offspring make do, having created himself a laboratory created daughter who is a feral child who grows up oversexualized as if to show all sexuality is monstrous.
In general, what the present century is preoccupied with is the idea of normality, but not in the Durkheim sense of being unusual, or Goffman’s Twentieth Century sense of some people being tainted so as to either hide or declare their stigmas. Rather, being normal this century means being familiar and comfortable, like knowing the streets in your own neighborhood, rather than being terrified of strangers and of unknown places. I am thinking of “Silo”, a recent science fiction movie that shows people living in underground silos and unable to come outside since time immemorial, but somehow terrified in that they do not seem comfortable in their surroundings. Why shouldn’t they have adjusted to their millenia long homes? That people might not adjust is terrifying, everything in that life is always passing strange for reasons unclear. That, as in Ishiguro, is a violation of the human condition.
There is another genre of literature that has persisted for centuries but has become particularly important in the present century as evoking terror. That is the spy story which goes back to Exodus when Moses sent Caleb to check out Canaan before the Israelites invaded it, and is also exemplified in J.Fenimore Cooper and takes on its deep psychological resonances in Conrad where in “The Secret Sharer” the man achieves a sense of total freedom because he is secretly armed to blow himself up at any time. John Le Carre, who is not generally elevated to the highest ranks of a novelist despite the complexity of his plots, characters and descriptions of place, is the product of Cold War hugger mugger, but refashioned his insights and endeavors beyond the end of the Cold War, still relying on thee spycraft whereby people are pretending to be someone else than themselves while remaining true to themselves, dissembling so as to reveal and so one approximation of what it means to be human.
The terror inflicted from this point of view is that everyone is suspicious and has ulterior motives, and so any person is about to be found out, which is dreadful and terrifying. The mechanism of achieving this sense of dread is that events which unfold are not adventures in that people meet unexpected events, but have been planned out by other people, arranged by agents acting, as it were, by God’s instruction, to manipulate events, as happens in his “The Night Manager”, a novel from 1993, whereby a home invasion is just an elaborate ruse so as to inveigle a spy in to an evil m an’s entourage, just as there is in “The Little Drummer Girl” (1983) an elaborate ruse whereby an English girl turned spy becomes affiliated with a Palestinian terrorist by the Israelis staging a fake bombing..
If anything, Le Carre’s late novels, well into the present century, sharpen and hone his insights so that illusions and reality are [parallel and about life more than spycraft however much he maintains this as the medium for his novels. His last completed book, “Silverview” (2011), retains the polish of Carre's previous works but is organized so as to highlight the ironies of leading a normal life and also a secret one of espionage. This detracts from the emotional depth and sweep of his Smiley trilogy or of, let us say. “The Little Drummer Girl'', but it accomplishes something else, which is to separate the various ironies, each one in a separate short chapter, some using old devices and some new ones. In the brief first chapter, there is a play between making life ordinary as opposed to faking life so as to cover up what should be hidden. So a person is advised to go to visit a school so you will think you have done it truly rather than as a pretext for what is to be covered up, the idea that being like truth is more truthful than it otherwise might seem, and so we all know that acting truthfully is close to being truthful, which is the case in all everyday behaviors, as when one goes to the day in bed without being truly sick so as to have an excuse to be home from work. Every person lives the life of the spy.
The second short chapter posits a different intrigue. A stranger approaches a new bookseller, one Julian Lawndsley, and charms him into helping him with his bookstore on the pretext that he was a schoolchum of Julian’s father. Why would he have done this? Was it an innocent gesture because of an old acquaintanceship that both people had time to pass? Coincidences and surprises can happen; in both real and fictional life. Or is there something else afoot, which is that, in fact, the older man is engaged in an elaborately planned counter-espionage operation that can allow any reader of spy fiction can imagine at any time to pop up to unravel up a grand and secret design. So are plots about to be understood as contrived or as “natural”, and how to tell the difference lest a person go md with suspicion or remain just naive about all the stratagems that are used to allow a life to proceed, as when a man plans to find an excuse to meet with a girl or has an ambition that undergirds everyday encounters. Is life a spy novel or is a spy novel a sinister joke on real life?
A third short chapter does something very different. It abandons the ironies of real and fake and presents a weather comical portrait of Stewart Proctor and his well to do family, with the home and the appurtenances of the politics and religion appropriate to his well satisfied clan, except that his occupation is that he is a master in the security services who is ought to catch those who engage in betraying secrets. He has a green telephone that is his main clue of his covert contact, even if everyone he knows suspects he is high up in the security services. So both things are real: that he is an ordinary as well as well off bloke and also a member in that very old profession, Does that mean there is no irony, which is what the reader will infer from his reading of the chapter, or a master irony in that ordinary life includes its secrets? Ironies of different levels abound, some a bit humorous but also deeply serious. And so on with some more chapters until getting on with the plot already telegraphed and moved along by the author.
Le Carre’s plot in “Silverview”, as it does in many of his novels, particularly in “A Perfect Spy”, where a spy is someone who is always a con man, born and bred in that nature and so almost inevitable, also shows how the security forces track down the prey, which is a traitor within their midst, the relentless counterspies using guile, charm, and penetrating insights to allow themselves to figure out what is going on. How is ordinary life slightly askew so as to infer that something dastardly is taking place? Why should a character be driven to convert from one’s prior allegiances? How have people been incidental to the betrayal or central to it? To penetrate these depths requires more than spycraft; it means understanding the human condition. Everyone is terrified that others or themselves are not what they seem to be. Or at least that is so in the present time. Who are to be trusted? The Trump supporters or their deniers? One or the other of those two groups are absolutely wrong.
Spy movies are ubiquitous on streaming sources during this century. Two of the best ones are worth noting. “The Americans'” portrays Russian spies in deep cover acting and being ordinary Americans. They are terrified that they will slip up and are ever aware whether some clue or random remark shows that they are about to be uncovered. They do things that would be disreputable, like killing people or having sex with strangers while married, except for these circumstances. Made more general and philosophical, is that ordinary people, not just spies, are always aware that their innermost secrets might get disclosed. Maybe a childhood robbery or an untoward sex activity or a bit of tax cheating. St. Augustine said that we did sex in the dark because it was something painful, something adults do but cover up even though this seems a legitimate activity. In the modern world, that custom may be a matter of privacy rat6her than shame but it amounts to the same thing: the embarrassment of disclosure. Don’t exaggerate so as to disclose. A newly wed should not yawn to show they were getting sex the night before. It is bad taste to announce it. You should act normally, as if it weren’t happening.
Another spy series is “Homeland”. The protagonists are terrified for the opposite reason. They are CIA operatives who are terrified that they may not catch tube everywhere present spies who might cause great damage to America? What are the unknown fiends planning that will surprise the people who are vigilant to safeguard America? Everything might be suspicious while ordinary people can treat the ordinary as just ordinary. Again, generalizing and deepening beyond the esoterica of spycrafty and intricacies of falsehoods, everyone is terrified that their own lives will spin under control, that both planned and circumstantial events can work against our interests. Is that boss supporting or undermining you? Is an acquaintance a person not to be trusted as a friend? Ordinary people make friends on charm and compatibility without much thought but a suspicious person might regard anyone as untrustworthy, all of us subject to the wheels within wheels that make up the social environment.
The thing about these Twenty First Century spy dramas is that they are not specified. The historical context is just the McGuffin. The Russians or the Arabs are just a pretext for the feeling of terror that is invoked. That is different from war movies made during World War II. They were not about terror but about the somewhat glorified retelling of events that had occurred quite recently. They informed the audiences of recent history about the jungles in Guadalcanal, or the preparations on Midway for the Japanese attack, or how Claire Chenauult laissoned with the Chinese so as to field the Flying Tigers or how sandy and open were “The Sands of Iwo Jima''. People died and some were terrified by that but the moral was to be stoic about whether your number would come up.
The war between Israel and Hamas is the epitome of the terrorism of the Twenty First Century. Israel was terrorized by the Hamas attack on October 7th in that there was no limit on the mayhem and Hamas said it would continue doing such attacks until all the Jews in Israel were killed. Israel’s security, based on military force, had not been sufficient to deter Hamas and so Israelis had come to fear eradication. Another feeling of dread came about because most of the rest of the world decried the Israeli military response for attacking Hamas because it involved the killing of Palestinian civilians even though the United States had engaged in large scale attacks on civilians in Dresden and Tokyo that could be regarded as punitive rather than military. What was Israel to do about the Hamas attack other than say tsk tsk or maybe offer a resolution of condemnation in the United Nations, one that would be vetoed or outvoted? Indeed, Hamas supporters applauded the atrocities as justifiable responses to what they consider the Israeli occupation of Gaza despite the fact that no Jews were in Gaza since 2005.
For its part, Gazans were victims of Israeli bombing, though there are no clear figures as to Palestinian casualties or whether the numbers are disproportionate to the military objectives. But the brutality is sufficiently broad so that some Gazans say, perhaps just rhetorically, that the Israelis should kill all the Gazans so that it is over and done with, he Jews have to be eliminated because of the relentless laws of which is a cry of despair and a sense of hopelessness that amounts to dread, and so is terror laden. The Gazans do not seem to have the Locke principle that it is part of human nature for people to organize a new social compact when the present one has outlasted its purposes. They are victims of history rather than agents of history.
So Israelis and Gazans are terrorized by events of the near and present and more remote past, and wars may not in this century come to an end, as happened in the world wars and the Cold War, but continue on, spurts of violence, always even during truces, filled with fear and mutual loathing, permanent terror.
Hard distinctions are to be made. Under the dispensation of terror, evil becomes a necessity as it is required by leaders or impersonal forces where people are controlled by above as if they could not do otherwise. The Jews have to be eliminated even if you thought you had a soft part for some of them because the iron laws of racial warfare made genocide necessary. The Kulaks are subject to the iron laws of historical materialism. Spies kill people to protect themselves so that they can be spies. It is their nature. Even mild mannered Soren Kierkegaard can make himself imagine the necessity for a father to kill his own child just so as to show that he will do whatever he can do to show he is obedient. All of life is whatever can be made into dread.
That is not so within other dispensations. Tragedy is driven by fate, people managing it badly even also as best as they can. Every Othello finds his Iago. Every Hamlet finds he cannot escape from the intrigues of his childhood home. Under the dispensation of comedy, people meet cute and in perhaps richly unfolding circumstances. “In “Smiles in a Summer Night” and “Hannah and Her Sisters”, and befriend an old flame and find unexpected new love. In the epic, there is a quest, whether to found Rome or destroy the Nazis. In melodrama, there is an outpouring and unfolding of the human spirit, whether to make a match or find oneself out. Power is energized and extolled through the expression of self. We happen to be at a time when much is dreaded and much is done for and by dread.