Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewUnspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11. Peter C. Herman. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. viii+211.Ann LarabeeAnn LarabeeMichigan State University Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePeter Herman’s book is a fine demonstration of what the humanities might provide to the study of terrorism, usually left to social sciences. The argument revolves around literature and film’s ability to speak of the humanity of terrorists and their motives, even as public and political responses to terrorist events render them unspeakable. For centuries, as Herman shows, the common, repeated response to terrorism has been to forbid speech about it, as if, in its unexpected horror, it is beyond the pale of speech. Terrorism speaks—it broadcasts a message—even as it is unspeakable in public discourse. Herman provides an overview of literary and cinematic masterpieces that have explored this unspeakable dimension, even as they, too, reach a limit in what can be understood and spoken.The scope of the book is limited to European and American responses to terrorism, but the historical sweep is broad, from the seventeenth century to the present. He begins with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and their fellow schemers attempted to blow up King James I and the House of Parliament. In Macbeth, Shakespeare incorporates the official discourse surrounding the event, with its apocalyptic references to fire and explosion. For instance, Macbeth wishes of Duncan’s murder “that but this blow / Might be the be-all and end-all” (Macbeth 1.7.4–5). Herman’s contribution is to show that Shakespeare was not only addressing a terrorist act but reflecting on the evils of state terror in the formation of the Stuart dynasty.Unspeakable proceeds by focusing on other notable terrorist events: the Fenian dynamite campaign (1881–85), the anarchist bombings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the terrorist acts of postcolonial insurgents after WWII (including Irish, Algerian, and Palestinian insurgents), the Munich Olympics Massacre of 1972, and the 9/11 attacks. In each time period, writers and filmmakers tried to make sense of traumatic events that journalists and politicians called monstrous, impossible, unspeakable, and thus unassimilable. Herman gives persuasive new readings of well-known works within these historical contexts, including literary classics like Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1885–86), Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), and Seamus Heaney’s poetry, along with popular novels like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter (1885) and John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983). A precise study of anarchist plotting, Conrad’s novel, for example, includes three categories of terrorists with various motivations. The most striking figure is the nihilistic Professor, who, Herman suggests, foretells the unrestrained, suicidal drive of twenty-first-century terrorism. In a more knowing time, as terrorism becomes an all-too-familiar feature of the global political landscape, Don DeLillo attempts to understand the destruction visited upon New York in his fine novel Falling Man (2007). Herman is at his best here in examining DeLillo’s complicated characters as they navigate the trauma of 9/11, attempting resolution through philosophy, religion, games, sex, performance art, and intense conversation. Most daringly, DeLillo creates the mind of Hammad, a fictional 9/11 hijacker, exploring the nature of religious belief. Herman is somewhat skeptical about whether authors, as they attempt to incorporate differing viewpoints in their characters, can truly enter the minds of people with “a radically different cultural perspective and radically different values” (179).Although his focus is primarily on the literary, Herman also usefully includes film: Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) and Stephen Spielberg’s Munich (2006). Battle of Algiers delivers an analysis of the way “terrorism and counterterrorism are locked in an upward spiral of violence,” while Munich, as Spielberg himself has said, is an empathic effort to “understand why a country feels its best defense against a certain kind of violence is counter-violence” (84, 132). With this explanation, Spielberg was addressing critics who argued that his film humanized (and therefore in some way forgave) monsters. In keeping with his thesis that literature and film speaks of the unspeakable, Herman finds in Munich, as in the other included works, “a steadfast refusal to provide answers to hard questions” (133).In an epilogue, Herman discusses two less well-known, more recent works: Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011). Aslam’s novel is significant for its authorial perspective from a Pakistani emigrant to the United States, while Waldman’s book explores domestic (rather than international) terrorism.A single book, of course, could never exhaustively cover this literary and cinematic terrain. Those who study terrorism in literature might argue for the inclusion of other notable works that shine new light on the thesis. For example, Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist: A Thriller (1985) is a withering denouncement of a self-destructive female terrorist who is utterly bourgeois and delusional, with little sense of her own motivations. Further, the historical periodicity of the volume—separating into sets of terrorist events—might be challenged with a greater sense of creative continuity. Artistic responses to disaster often take place long after the terrorist event and respond to prior works. We could reasonably ask how the tension between the speakable and the unspeakable changes over time and alters the collective memory of events. For example, the Gunpowder Plot finds its way into Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta (1982), which glorifies the terrorist as an anti-superhero who wears a Guy Fawkes mask. After the film adaptation by Lana and Lilly Wachoswki, the mask entered the lexicon of protest as a potentially frightening symbol of collective anonymity, which hides the Gunpowder Plot and makes it unspeakable in a new way. The absence of these works is not a sin of omission in Unspeakable, but rather possible inspirations for related scholarship.Unspeakable is organized in a helpful way as units devoted to individual works within larger chapters devoted to a particular period. The main argument is clear throughout, and therefore scholars and teachers can usefully extract subject matter of relevance without losing sight of the whole. Historians and literary and film scholars, in particular, will find the book a welcome addition, but one might hope that terror experts in the social sciences will read it for a new perspective from the humanities for understanding terrorist events in their human complexity. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 4May 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712496 Views: 501 HistoryPublished online December 11, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.