Metatextuality of Transnational Marriages in Updike’s Terrorist

Abstract

In this paper, we intend to analyse an American novel, John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), with the aim of examining its critical standpoint of the American women’ marriages to Muslim migrants. This essay explores the reasons which lead Updike to refuse this social hybridity and how that refusal disseminates biased attitude against the Muslim Americans in general. Having appropriated Gerard Genette’s theory of metatextuality to frame our analysis of the novel, we argue that metatextuality refers to the texts’ explicit or implicit critical treatment of one another. Our analysis of Updike’s metatextuality of the transnational marriages concludes that Updike is extremely biased against the Arabs and Muslims because his refusal of these marriages concentrated merely on American women who marry Arab and Muslim migrants. He develops dialogues to expose the Arab Americans as having a strong Islamic identity which, as he claims, provokes them to reject the US liberal life and oppose the US policy and history. In addition to that, the novel reveals that American transnational matrimonies to Arabs result in confused American identities that live in-between spaces; they are neither Americans nor Arabs and their loyalties lie with the religion and culture of their Muslim fathers, not of the American mothers. This suspicion is intended to expose the Arab and Muslim Americans as dangerous for the US security. It also uncovers the author’s ideology which stands against the Arabs and Muslims.