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Romancing the bomb: Gothic terror and terrorism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature

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Romancing the bomb: Gothic terror and terrorism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature

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Content ROMANCING THE BOMB: GOTHIC TERROR AND TERRORISM IN LATE NINETEENTH- AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE by Jennifer Lynn Malia A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2009 Copyright 2009 Jennifer Lynn Malia ii Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Introduction Endnotes 26 Chapter 1: “Public Imbecility and Journalistic Enterprise”: Mars Mania 28 and Terror(ism) in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds Chapter 1 Endnotes 62 Chapter 2: “Destructive Ferocity so Absurd as to be Incomprehensible”: 67 The Expectations of the Newspaper Reader in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent Chapter 2 Endnotes 96 Chapter 3: “A Methodical System of Terror”: The Print Media as 98 Revolutionary Propaganda in Boris Savinkov’s The Pale Horse and What Never Happened Chapter 3 Endnotes 119 Chapter 4: The Mysticism of Revolutionary Martyrdom: Liam 120 O’Flaherty’s Disillusionment with Irish Terrorism Chapter 4 Endnotes 160 Epilogue: “The Axis of Evil” and the “War on Terror(ism)”: The Bush 162 Administration’s Fear-Mongering Political Rhetoric References 167 iii Abstract This project examines the cultural relevance of terrorists within the Gothic genre, exploring how authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—mainly H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Boris Savinkov, and Liam O’Flaherty—adapted the Gothic as a literary vehicle by ironically invoking the Burkean sublime to expose both culture’s anxiety, and desire, for sensational stories on terrorism. I argue that these authors who ironically employ the sublime appropriate the Gothic to critique the press, such that the novel, which first employed the discourse of the Gothic, ends up debunking it. These authors assume that their readers recognize satirical or serious attempts to condemn sensational displays of terrorist violence. To a certain extent, they engage in terror tactics of their own with their depictions of political violence. They create a terrorizing, but pleasurable, experience for their readers who indulge in these stories of political violence, even if they do so to ultimately suggest that readers should condemn sensational accounts of terrorist violence. These authors’ portrayals of terrorist acts as Gothic spectacles and depictions of terrorists as protagonists of these novels often complicate their political purposes and challenge the reader’s moral stance on political violence. This project, therefore, contributes to Gothic studies a thematic lens to view the ways in which literary depictions of terror have been imagined in different cultures. It also contributes to the history of the novel as a form of discourse and broader discourses of terrorism and political violence, which provide important cultural antecedents to our contemporary understanding of the genre of the novel and terrorism as a political phenomenon. 1 Introduction Upon the horizon there appeared a gloomy form, illuminated by a light as of hell, who, with lofty bearing, and a look breathing forth hatred and defiance, made his way through the terrified crowd to enter with a firm step upon the scene of history. It was the Terrorist…He is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero. -Sergei ‘Stepniak’ Kravchinsky, Underground Russia (1883) When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we everyday experience. -Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) The apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where our moral feelings are not in the least concerned and no passion seems to be excited but the depressing one of fear, is a paradox of the heart. -Anna Laetitia Aikin, “On the Pleasures Derived from Objects of Terror” (1773) The way we understand and discuss terrorism as a cultural phenomenon has a long, little-known history—one commonly erased by contemporary dichotomies of good vs. evil, civilized vs. uncivilized, and democrat vs. fundamentalist. In his theory of the sublime, Edmund Burke famously recognized the paradox that fear can create pleasure under the right circumstances. Shortly thereafter, with the rise of Gothic fiction, Anna Laetitia Aikin suggested that stories of terror create a pleasurable yet terrifying experience for the reader, what she termed the “paradox of the heart.” Stories on terrorism create for readers a combination of terror and pleasure that is similar to what Burke and Aikin identify in their theories, as the reader is both terrified by acts of 2 political violence and fascinated by the spectacles that they create. Burke’s sublime and Aikin’s notion of Gothic terror have provided an important theoretical grounding for understanding the Gothic genre since the eighteenth century and have heavily influenced literary portrayals of political violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, Sergei ‘Stepniak’ Kravchinsky—a Russian revolutionary— recognized the importance of the sublime to understanding the figure of the terrorist, suggesting that he embodies the martyr and the hero, which makes him a figure of terror and fascination. 1 In this study, I analyze the fictional works of not only novelists who wrote about both real and imagined acts of terrorism but also terrorists who wrote novels on the subject, considering the relationship among literature on terrorism, actual historical incidents of political violence, and contemporary journalistic accounts of these incidents. This project examines the cultural relevance of terrorists within the Gothic genre, exploring how authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—mainly H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Boris Savinkov, and Liam O’Flaherty—adapted the Gothic as a literary vehicle by ironically invoking the Burkean sublime to expose both culture’s anxiety, and desire, for sensational stories on terrorism. I argue that these authors who ironically employ the sublime appropriate the Gothic to critique the press, such that the novel, which first employed the discourse of the Gothic, ends up debunking it. These authors assume that their readers recognize satirical or serious attempts to condemn sensational displays of terrorist violence. To a certain extent, they engage in terror tactics of their own with their depictions of political violence. They create a terrorizing, but pleasurable, experience for their readers who indulge in these stories of political violence, 3 even if they do so to ultimately suggest that readers should condemn sensational accounts of terrorist violence. These authors’ portrayals of terrorist acts as Gothic spectacles and depictions of terrorists as protagonists of these novels often complicate their political purposes and challenge the reader’s moral stance on political violence. This project, therefore, contributes to Gothic studies a thematic lens to view the ways in which literary depictions of terror have been imagined in different cultures. It also contributes to the history of the novel as a form of discourse and broader discourses of terrorism and political violence, which provide important cultural antecedents to our contemporary understanding of the genre of the novel and terrorism as a political phenomenon. The tropes of Gothic terror have influenced the ways in which terrorism is understood and the ways in which we discuss terrorism in the current political climate. Placing the terrorist within the Gothic exposes the history of political violence and reveals how authors critiqued the sensational image of the terrorist as an uncanny, grotesque figure who is physically and psychologically monstrous and how these monstrous displays parallel our common understanding of the terrorist as represented in contemporary media portrayals. The use of Gothic tropes is particularly complex in the novels written by terrorists who draw on their own experience with political violence. Boris Savinkov and Liam O’Flaherty do not simply condemn their culture’s tendency to sensationalize terrorism but specifically critique the ways in which the terrorist himself relies on Gothic sensationalism to create interest in the revolutionary cause. In their works, the ethical and moral codes of political fervor become intertwined with the Gothic and create competing models. Drawing on the effect created by the Burkean sublime, the Gothic genre, for example, attempts to exploit desire for the unknown or the inexplicable, 4 whereas revolutionary literature relies on a firm political conviction to its own type of rationality. Though these competing models have their own ideas of, and uses for, terror, they often overlap in the works of terrorism I examine, and thereby expose how the terrorist creates anxiety and curiosity about acts of political violence. Given the political immediacy of terrorism in contemporary society, the terrorist has become perhaps the most culturally significant, yet least understood, figure of the new century. As the first extended cultural study of the sensationalism found in literary representations of terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my project places the terrorist within the Gothic to reveal how historical depictions of political violence as Gothic spectacles parallel our contemporary representations of political violence. Some critics have highlighted the connection between literature and terrorism as central to our understanding of literature and culture. 2 To my knowledge, the only full-length literary studies on terrorism that mention the works I examine in this project are Barbara Arnett Melchiori’s Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (1985), Alex Houen’s Terrorism and Modern Literature (2002), and Richard Osborne’s Literature and Terrorism (2002). Melchiori surveys the wide range of works that fit into the category of terrorism in Victorian literature and attempts to trace the historical incidents reported in 1880s and 1890s newspapers, including actual terrorist attacks that inspired these writings. I build on the connections that Melchiori makes among Victorian novels, late nineteenth-century anarchist history, and contemporary newspapers. Extending the historical scope of Melchiori’s study, I perform close readings of fictional works that allude to or invoke the rhetoric of the newspaper. By focusing on the relationship between the history of political violence and the novel, I examine the 5 historical context surrounding the literature of terrorism, not simply as Melchiori does— to trace how historical events have influenced authors’ writings on political violence— but to investigate how historical depictions of political violence as Gothic spectacles parallel our contemporary representations of terrorism. Houen’s study also considers how literary authors responded to historical acts of political violence, though his focus is on the “tropes and stylistic strategies that writers have used to represent, mediate, and sometimes even practice, terrorism” in twentieth-century literature (18). My project examines different authors than Houen’s study, with the exception of Conrad, extends the historical scope of Houen’s study, and redirects the focus to the Gothic in order to attend to the complexities of genre. Though it was written only five years ago, I have been unable to locate a copy of Osborne’s book—which is not only out-of-print but virtually unobtainable—suggesting the need for more literary studies on terrorism. Few scholarly studies have addressed the invocation of the Gothic in literary portrayals of terrorism. Examining how the French Revolution influenced contemporary Gothic fiction in a brief article, Ronald Paulson argues that “the Gothic did in fact serve as a metaphor with which some contemporaries in England tried to come to terms with what was happening across the Channel in the 1790s” (534). His examination of French revolutionary mobs and the spectacle of the guillotine in literary works specifically addresses the Gothic tropes that authors used to sensationalize political violence during the Reign of Terror. Using this study as a model, I examine similar Gothic tropes in literary works from different cultural traditions and historical periods. In his book Gothic Pathologies, David Punter briefly considers Gothic representations of terrorism, arguing that they create a “dialectic between the body and the law, figured as anarchy and 6 culture” and in turn between “the unconscious and the superego” (100). In my study, I focus more directly on the spectacle created by these representations, particularly excessive displays of Gothic tropes—including the uncanny, the monstrous, and the grotesque—which I will discuss shortly. Definitions: Terrorism, Terrorist, and Terror Many academic studies are concerned with defining the seemingly elusive term “terrorism.” Bruce Hoffman simply describes terrorism as political violence: “terrorism is violence—or, equally important, the threat of violence—used and directed in pursuit of, or in service of, a political aim” (15). Political aims can be broadly construed, but Hoffman seems to refer to political aims that involve national concerns. Other scholars highlight ethical concerns in their definition. Pointing more specifically to the victims of terrorist attacks and the immorality of killing, Christopher Harmon writes, “terrorism is the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends” (1). There seem to be just as many definitions for terrorism as there are scholars who study it. After surveying leading academics, Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman cite 109 different definitions of terrorism in their book Political Terrorism. 3 As one might expect, “violence” and “political” make an appearance in most definitions of “terrorism,” leading Schmid and Jongman to conclude that these two aspects are crucial to defining this term. The ambiguous terms “terror,” “terrorist,” and “terrorism” have had a variety of connotations throughout history. The most significant event that influenced the way these terms were used historically was the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, 7 which lasted from March 1793 to July 1794. Citing this period in French history, the OED defines the phrase “reign of terror” as “a state of things in which the general community live in dread of death or outrage.” In his speech “Republic of Virtue” on 5 February 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobin leader, proclaimed the necessity of a government to use “terror”: if the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible. Robespierre was notorious for guillotining tens of thousands of people whom he considered to be enemies of the revolution. According to the OED, it was 1795 when Burke first coined the term “terrorist” in the English language, referring to French revolutionaries as “thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists” who were “let loose on the people” (75). At the end of the eighteenth century, then, the term was used to allude to acts of political violence carried out by the revolutionary tribunals during the Reign of Terror, which were intended to instill fear in the general public and to prevent further opposition. When defining “terrorist” as a political term, the OED offers two historical examples: “the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution, esp. to those connected with the Revolutionary tribunals during the ‘Reign of Terror’” and to the “members of one of the extreme revolutionary societies in Russia.” The OED also provides a more contemporary definition for “terrorist”: “a member of a clandestine or expatriate organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence against it or its subjects.” This definition suggests that current usage of the term 8 “terrorist” often refers to individuals or groups resisting governments rather than political violence carried out by those in power. In Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World, Noam Chomsky discusses the changing definition of terrorism: “Whereas the term was once applied to emperors who molest their own subjects and the world, it is now restricted to thieves who molest the powerful” (9). Chomsky’s Orwellian critique of Western violence, specifically the contemporary role of the United States in the Middle East, recalls the eighteenth century definition of terrorism in which governments are responsible for acts of political violence. Given the historical roots of the terms “terror,” “terrorist,” and “terrorism,” I examine representations of political violence in late nineteenth-century novels alongside more modern portrayals of terrorism to reveal how historical depictions of the terrorist parallel our common understanding of this figure in our contemporary society. The OED definition of terrorist—which traces the historical usage of the term— influenced one case study that I chose to examine in this project—the revolutionary terrorists involved in violence that led up to the Russian revolution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the term “terrorist” did not have the negative connotation that it has today. In fact, the term had a positive connotation for the radical Russian revolutionaries depicted in Boris Savinkov’s novels and his memoir, which reveal how revolutionaries viewed their own involvement in contemporary acts of terrorism. In What Never Happened (1912), revolutionary newspapers of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) refer to the actions of the Combat Organization—the branch of the Party that carries out acts of political violence—as acts of “terror” and “terrorism” and call the members who carry out these acts “terrorists,” which will be explored in more depth in 9 the third chapter. Savinkov also suggests that the term “terrorist” was used in a positive light at that time since he titled his autobiographical book, Memoirs of a Terrorist (1909), in which he portrays his actual participation in acts of political violence. Savinkov’s works on Russian revolutionary terrorism, then, shed light on the use of the terms “terror,” “terrorist,” and “terrorism” at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the purposes of this study, I define “terrorism” as a deliberate, calculated act of political violence, a “terrorist” as one who engages in these acts of political violence, and “terror” as the sensation of fear created by these acts of political violence. The acts of political violence considered in this study range from those of terrorist groups seeking to destroy for the sake of destruction to those of revolutionaries engaging in violence to incite change in political systems. It is important to note, however, that many revolutionary groups have used non-violent propaganda and other peaceful tactics to raise protest. It is primarily when revolutionaries have used violence to object to political policies or to eliminate government officials that they have been labeled as terrorists, and therefore this study uses the label of revolutionary terrorist for those who engage in these acts of political violence. I organize my project around historical moments of prominent political violence, including the anarchist bombings in fin-de-siècle London and Russian and Irish revolutionary terrorism in the early twentieth century. History of Political Violence In the 1880s and 1890s, anarchism was a vaguely defined movement in Europe, Russia, and the United States that supported the abolishment of government. As David Weir argues, the anarchist movement as a whole can be described as a cultural 10 phenomenon, suggesting that the rhetoric used to describe the movement is just as important as the movement itself. In fact, many have wrongly assumed a necessary connection between anarchism and violence, as George Woodcock acknowledges: “anarchy is very often mistakenly regarded as the equivalent of chaos, and an anarchist is often thought of as at best a nihilist—a man who has abandoned all principles—and at worst a mindless terrorist” (11). Although anarchists used a variety of methods to create propaganda for their cause, the link between anarchism and violence was particularly strong in the 1890s. At that time, the emergence of a doctrine known as “propaganda by the deed,” (i.e. the performance of a terrorist act that served as propaganda) resulted in waves of terrorist acts. Technological advances in the nineteenth century allowed anarchist terrorists to carry out acts of political violence more easily than their predecessors, especially with the invention of dynamite in 1863. Anarchist terrorists are perhaps best remembered for their role in spectacular assassinations at the turn of the twentieth century: American President Garfield (1881), Russian Tsar Alexander II (1881), French President Sadi Carnot (1894), Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas del Castillo (1897), Austrian Empress Elizabeth (1898), Italian King Umberto I (1900), and American President McKinley (1901). Besides assassinations, anarchist terrorists were involved in other acts of political violence at the time, which included blowing up public buildings and even throwing dynamite among crowds. 4 It is important to note that assassinations—which involve the killing of government officials—target the individuals who are directly concerned with political policy decision-making, but when terrorists bomb buildings, they kill random victims, including innocent civilians. David Miller describes the prevalence of 11 international anarchist terrorism at the turn of the twentieth century as a “climate of terror,” especially in Paris between 1892 and 1894 (111). Anarchist terrorists in England also created a “climate of terror,” but their acts of political violence did not result in much death or destruction. Each time there was a dynamite incident—regardless of whether or not it was successful—the newspapers spent months recounting “the capture of the terrorists, their trial (as much as a year later), sentence, execution or occasionally, escape, recapture and retrial” (Melichori 36). British newspapers, such as The Times and Evening News of London, especially printed sensational stories concerning anarchist violence in England, even though the threat was trivial. One of these stories in the Evening News was an article titled, “8000 Anarchists in London: Where These Enemies of Society Live in This Great Metropolis,” which was illustrated with so-called “Secret Anarchist Prints” (Shpayer-Makov 498). In his history of anarchism, George Woodcock argues that anarchist activity in England claimed only one casualty at the end of the nineteenth century, a French anarchist who accidentally blew himself up (414). Perhaps the bombing with the most coverage in the newspaper at the turn of the twentieth century was an incident that came to be known as the “Greenwich Bomb Outrage”—an incident on which Conrad based his novel, The Secret Agent (1907). The version of this incident now most accepted is that on 15 February 1894, a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin, accidentally dropped the bomb he was carrying in Greenwich Park, thereby mortally wounding himself in the explosion. He was the only causality of the bombing, which came to be known as “Bourdin’s Folly,” since no other damage resulted from the attack. Police investigation revealed that he was a member of the Autonomie Club, a well-known London-based meeting place for foreign anarchists. 12 Many of the details of this explosion remain a mystery, since the only person who could confirm the reason for the bomb was Bourdin himself, soon to be a corpse. Though he was seriously wounded, he did not die instantly from the explosion, living for thirty minutes after the bomb went off. Witnesses who arrived on the scene said he was able to speak, but he never revealed to them what had happened. Given the proximity of the explosion to the Greenwich Royal Observatory, the most prominent theory expressed at the time, and still considered probable today, was that this building was the intended target of the bombing. Reading the accounts in The Times the week following the presumed attack, though, one encounters a variety of conflicting details concerning the affair, including the intended target of the bombing, the condition of the victim’s body, the complexity of the bomb being carried, and even the extent of the Anarchist conspiracy. The newspapers’ sensationalized accounts of the supposed anarchist threat perpetuated a climate of terror for the late nineteenth-century reader. Reports of dynamite outrages were especially common during a wave of distant anarchist attacks between 1892 and 1894. During this time, the British were used to hearing about bombings on the Continent—mostly in France and Spain— but not on British soil. The Greenwich bombing generated perhaps more press coverage in The Times than any other act of anarchist terrorism, presumably because of the anxiety for attacks on home soil. Not only does Woodcock suggest that this bombing was the only anarchist attack that ever killed anyone in England, but whether or not this explosion was even an attempted anarchist attack at all was under question, making the print media’s reaction even more unwarranted. 13 The shock of having a supposed anarchist attack occur in London was enough to inspire many sensational accounts in the press. On 16 February, The Times portrayed Bourdin as an anarchist terrorist who was conspiring against England, assuming that he was not British even before the police had identified him: “that the man was a foreigner is placed beyond doubt” (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). The anxiety raised by the fear of foreign invasion evident in the reaction to Bourdin’s nationality was also evident in an allusion to the Assassins, an early modern terrorist group. A report of the Greenwich bombing in The Times on 17 February asserted, Englishmen having anything to lose and mindful of international propriety do not wish the capital of the British Empire to become the den of the Old Man of the Mountain, the acts of whose adepts gave rise to the term assassin. (“Comment in Paris” 5) In referencing the Assassins—particularly the Old Man of the Mountain who was their leader—The Times recalled the Gothic spectacles of this early modern terrorist group. 5 Associating the Greenwich bombing with the terror tactics of the Assassins, the article quoted above suggests that anarchists would terrorize the people, taking control of London and making the city “the den of the Old Man of the Mountain.” The suggestion that a terrorist group would seize command of the city invokes fear of foreign invasion; comparing the anarchist violence in London to the terrorist acts of the Assassins, then, sensationalizes political violence for nineteenth-century readers. Talk of an international conspiracy in The Times further sensationalized the bombing. On 16 February, the newspaper confidently reported: The London police have discovered an Anarchist conspiracy. These facts, among others, are beyond dispute—that the inquiries of the detectives, though cautiously made, frightened the plotters, that the gang hurriedly scattered, and that its chief met with his death last evening when 14 endeavouring to carry away to some place the explosives which were to have been used against society either in this country or in France. (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5) This article claimed certain facts are “beyond dispute,” despite the absence of corroborating evidence. Though Bourdin was the only person known to plan the Greenwich bombing, The Times apparently assumed he was the chief plotter among a group of anarchists. The paper also assumed that the Greenwich observatory was not necessarily the planned target, vaguely suggesting that the explosives could have been intended for anywhere in England. Widening the geographic scope of the potential bombing target, The Times raised further anxiety for terrorist attacks, since Londoners were left to imagine that the attack could have occurred anywhere in England. In addition, the newspaper shocked readers with the insistence on an international Anarchist conspiracy, suggesting that potential targets were anywhere. This conspiracy theory was never substantiated, and whether or not the bomb that exploded near Greenwich observatory was planned in the first place remains a mystery. Though other anarchist attacks occurred in France at the time, none were ever linked to the Greenwich bombing, which came to be seen as an isolated incident of terrorism. By linking the Greenwich bombing to a network of international anarchist activity, The Times created a spooky narrative of conspiracy to arouse the reading public’s desire for more sensational accounts. At the turn of the twentieth century, terrorist bombings were also prevalent on the international scene. Russian revolutionaries hoped to attain a more democratic form of government than the tyrannical one practiced under the Tsar. In the early twentieth century, Russia was perhaps the first nation in the world to face a large movement of 15 political terrorism, a movement that some scholars believe was quite different from those that preceded it. As Gérard Chaliand argues, “all nineteenth-century terrorist movements originated in the ideas proclaimed in 1789, while the 1917 Russian Revolution launched what was to become the aberrant rise of the modern politics of terror” (98). Russian revolutionary politics deserve to be designated as giving rise to the “modern politics of terror,” but it is difficult to discern why Chaliand places this rise as late as 1917. Other scholars more convincingly argue that modern terrorism started with Russian anarchist terrorism at the end of the nineteenth century, suggesting that the organizational strategies and methods used to carry out acts of political violence then were not unlike those used to conduct terrorist violence today. 6 In 1879, the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia) became the first major revolutionary terrorist organization in Russia. As Stephen G. Marks suggests, it was “the prototype of virtually all subsequent terrorist groups in the world” (16). Succeeding the People’s Will was the neo-populist Party of Socialist- Revolutionaries (PSR or SRs), which was comprised of a main branch responsible for mass organization and propaganda and a smaller branch called the Combat Organization, responsible for carrying out assassinations and other acts of terrorist violence. 7 As Michael Melancon argues, “the PSR as a whole never fixated upon terror nor viewed it as the most lethal weapon in its arsenal” (75). The PSR, though, “came to be perceived as the party of terror” because of the notorious acts of revolutionary terrorism carried out by the Combat Organization (Geifman 45). As one PSR bomber, Ivan Kaliaev, was famous for saying, “an SR without a bomb is not an SR.” Some of the spectacular assassinations for which the PSR was responsible included those of Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve on 15 July 1904 and Grand Duke Sergei, general governor of Moscow, on 17 16 February 1905. Boris Savinkov organized both of these assassinations and then later wrote about them in his autobiographical account, Memoirs of a Terrorist, as well as his two novels The Pale Horse and What Never Happened, which will be discussed in the third chapter. In the early twentieth century, Irish revolutionaries who were opposed to Britain’s 1801 Act of Union that deprived Ireland of autonomy sought to gain political independence for Ireland. An insurrection known as the Easter Rising of 1916 aimed to end British rule and to establish an Irish Republic. The Irish War of Independence (also know as the Anglo-Irish War and the Black and Tan War) was a guerilla war fought between 1919 and 1921, which resulted in a treaty that ended British rule in most of Ireland, with the exception of some northern counties. Some Irish nationalists—the Free Staters—supported the treaty and were therefore willing to compromise with the British—while other nationalists—the Republicans or Irregulars—opposed it. The latter group of nationalists continued to fight for complete independence from Britain, which resulted in a Civil War (1922-1923). 8 In many cases, the Republicans ended up fighting against the same revolutionary soldiers in the Civil War that they fought with in the Irish War of Independence. These events of Irish revolutionary history are the setting for the terrorist violence in O’Flaherty’s novels, which will be explored in the fourth chapter. Tales of Terror(ism) The literature on terrorism leads us to examine the relationship between “terror” in the Gothic sense of the term and “terrorism,” referring to political acts of violence. Gothic terror can be seen in the excessive displays of uncanny monsters, violence, 17 madness, and strange supernatural occurrences in fiction. According to the OED, the noun “terror” has two main definitions: “the state of being terrified or greatly frightened; intense fear, fright, or dread” and “the action or quality of causing dread” or “this action or quality in fiction, esp. in a novel (or tale) of terror.” The novel or tale of terror in the late eighteenth century—commonly referred to as the Gothic novel—was especially famous for creating a pleasing terror for its readers. Gothic fiction seeks to evoke a sensation for readers—Gothic terror—by producing fear that creates pleasure. This effect on readers is a form of the Burkean sublime, which I mentioned at the outset. In Gothic novels, then, monstrous figures create abhorrence on the one hand, but fascination on the other hand. We read in part for the pleasure of being terrified by these monstrosities. The literature of terrorism too conjures up a variety of responses from readers, as they are both terrified by acts of political violence and fascinated by the spectacles that these acts create. As mentioned earlier, the term “terror,” though not necessarily linked to political acts, can refer to a system of terror—as is the case with the Reign of Terror— or more generally the sensation that acts of political violence are intended to create. It is important to note, however, that novels cannot re-create for the reader the experience of witnessing terrorist acts. In other words, the response we have to actual terrorist events is not the same as the aesthetic response, a pleasurable kind of terror, we may have from reading Gothic fiction. Burke’s notion of the sublime is evident in his own work on the French Revolution, the events of which apparently inspired him to invoke pleasing terror for the reader. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) seriously critiques the politics of the revolution, but he relies on Gothic literary tropes to sensationalize the violence of the revolution, which was not unlike sensational accounts of revolutionary 18 violence found in contemporary newspapers. Referring to events that occurred in 1789, Burke writes that the King, Queen and their children were forced to abandon their palace, “which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses” (233). At the time it was written, Burke’s account was generally dismissed as rhetorical exaggeration, but this combination of literary technique and political discourse set the stage for literary depictions of political violence and terrorism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The combination of terror and pleasure produced by the Burkean sublime often comes from manifestations of the uncanny, a common Gothic trope found in the literature of terrorism. In his essay of the same name, Freud describes the uncanny as that which is terrible and “arouses dread and creeping horror” (122). He further defines the uncanny effect as a subversion of expectations which is “produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (152). The uncanny effect can occur when a present event or situation reminds us of something from the past that haunts us, something that is both known and unknown at the same time. Although Freud postdates the rise of the Gothic novel, his essay has provided an important theoretical grounding for analyzing the trope of the uncanny in Gothic literature from the eighteenth century to the present. Consider the uncanniness of the monster, a recurring figure of terror in Gothic fiction. Frankenstein (1818), which, according to Mary Shelley, was a ghost story intended to “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror— one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (171). The fine line between the “normal” and the monstrous is 19 what creates the uncanny terror surrounding the figure of the monster. Contrary to what we might immediately think, monsters evoke terror and fear not because they are so different from us, but because they are so similar to us; they represent the distortion of what we expect man to be. In other words, our similarity to monsters makes us wonder how different we really are from them. Shelley’s novel goes beyond telling a tale of terror, as she comments on the political situation in Europe at the time. Many scholars have read Shelley’s novel as an allusion to the French Revolution with Frankenstein’s creature representing a political monstrosity that embodies the turmoil of the French Revolution, including Chris Baldick who writes that Frankenstein originates from Shelley’s “parent’s debate over the great monstrosity of the modern age, the French Revolution” (27). In fact, the perception of revolutionaries as a race of monsters was not uncommon at the time of the French revolution. Baldick suggests that “long before the monster of Frankenstein, monstrosity already implied rebellion” (13). In his Reflections on the French Revolution, Burke metaphorically refers to revolutionaries as monsters. As we will see in the chapters that follow, terrorists are often depicted as uncanny, grotesque figures that are both physically and psychologically monstrous. The literature of terrorism can be thought of as transgressing boundaries because of its ambiguous commentary on political violence. Fred Botting suggests that in the eighteenth century, Gothic excess in fiction was believed to transgress “the proper limits of aesthetic as well as social order in the overflow of emotions that undermined boundaries of life and fiction, fantasy and reality” (4). At that time, many critiqued the Gothic novel’s indulgence in excess because it neglected to instruct the reader on proper moral behavior and in fact seemed to encourage debauchery and corruption. As 20 mentioned earlier, authors writing about terrorism engage to some extent in the terror tactics they seem to condemn, since they loosely base their fictional works on actual terrorist attacks. This is not to suggest that anyone who terrorizes is a terrorist; these writers should not be equated with those who are committing real acts of political terror. The situation becomes a bit more complicated, however, when authors, such as O’Flaherty and Savinkov, who participated in political violence write novels, engaging in sensitive material that some find objectionable. In fact, many of Liam O’Flaherty’s novels were banned in Ireland during his lifetime. In “The Irish Censorship,” O’Flaherty writes, “There is hardly a bookshop in Ireland that would dare show my books in its windows. There is hardly a library that would not be suppressed for having my books on its shelves” (141). While the Irish government banned O’Flaherty’s works, the objections to Savinkov’s works primarily came from members of his own revolutionary party, the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR), who were so enraged with What Never Happened that they “collected a war chest to stop any further efforts at publication” (Spence 95). 9 The reception history of these novels written by revolutionary terrorists draws attention to the ways in which actual accounts of terrorism and fictional accounts of political violence become intertwined, suggesting concerns about the possibility of these novels having an influence on the politics of readers. Opposition to O’Flaherty’s works had more to do with anxiety about creating sympathy for Irish revolutionary terrorism, while the objections to Savinkov’s works had more to do with concerns about losing support for Russian revolutionary terrorism. I seek to examine literary works across national lines to reveal the different ways in which authors portray the source of terrorist activities. The vampire figure in Bram 21 Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read as an invader who commits acts of political violence, a metaphoric representation of a terrorist. In fact, Dracula wants to take over London for political reasons. In an attempt to stake his claim on British soil, he transports hundreds of boxes of dirt from Transylvania; his survival depends on having dirt from his homeland. Dracula realizes that to effectively infiltrate London, he needs to perfect his English so it will be impossible to detect that he is a foreigner from Eastern Europe. In the novel, it is necessary to seek out and kill the leader of the vampires to end the terror and begin restoring order to England. While Stoker’s Dracula essentially tells the story of a single invader, Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898)—which also uses a metaphor for terrorism—portrays foreign invaders from Mars attacking England, as we will see in the first chapter. Other novels set in England, such as Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (1908), which will be explored in the second chapter, also depict terrorists as foreigners invading from the outside. It is not uncommon for turn of the twentieth-century novels set in England to portray the figure of the terrorist as a foreigner motivated by nationalism, often depicting the invasion of England by a barbaric terrorist from somewhere outside of Europe. Displaying another sort of nationalist motivation for terrorism, the works set in Russia or Ireland often portray revolutionary terrorists carrying out acts of political violence against the State to liberate Mother Russia or Ireland. Savinkov and O’Flaherty, who participated in political violence, depict their revolutionary terrorists as homegrown nationalists, as we will see in the third and fourth chapters. The difference between novels set in England and those set in Ireland and Russia is reflected not only in the nationality of the terrorists that are portrayed in these fictional 22 works but also in the experience or lack of experience authors of these novels had with political violence. Walter Laqueur makes a distinction between “insider” and “outsider” novels on terrorism, referring to the former as fiction written by those who were involved in acts of political violence and the latter as fiction written by those who were not. The dynamite incidents that were prevalent in London newspapers influenced “outsider” novelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to write about them. Given the inconsistencies in reporting the details of the dynamite attacks, even if an author wanted to base his story on an actual event, it is unlikely that he could capture the true details. This difficulty for the novelist to obtain accurate details of terrorist attacks leads Walter Laqueur to bemoan the fact that late nineteenth-century “outsider” novels on terrorism offer very little for the historian. He goes on to say that these novels may offer something for the student of literature but that they reveal more about those who wrote them than about acts of terrorism. Indeed, Henry James claims that he came up with the idea for his novel The Princess Cassamassima while strolling the streets of London. In the preface to the 1909 New York edition of his novel, James claims that his protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, “sprang up for me out of the London pavement” (34). Though a particular terrorist act may not have influenced James to write his novel, the general panic that resulted from the dynamite outrages in London at the time was probably fresh in his memory. The accuracy of historical events depicted in fictional works written in response to terrorism should not be the only gauge of their value. There is certainly much to be learned from the responses these authors had to the acts of political violence contemporary in their time. In this respect, the literature of terrorism—whether “insider” 23 or “outsider” fiction—is useful to examine to further our understanding of the way authors from different cultures have imagined the figure of the terrorist. The dozen or so novels on anarchist terrorism produced at the turn of the twentieth century expressed the cultural fascination with sensational stories on terrorism at the time. While many of these novels reenacted contemporary plots of political violence, a few of these novels employed Gothic sensationalism to parody these literary reenactments. My first and second chapters explore satirical works of terror(ism) at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Using Gothic tropes to comic effect, these authors draw on another mode of the Gothic, what critics have referred to as the Comic Gothic. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik believe the comic turn in Gothic has a serious purpose; they suggest that Gothic fiction can be placed in “a spectrum that, at one end, produces horror-writing containing moments of comic hysteria or relief and, at the other, works in which there are clear signals that nothing is to be taken seriously” (4). The novels that parody political violence fall somewhere in the middle, as they invoke the Gothic to invoke fear and to ridicule. I argue that Wells invokes contemporary journalistic accounts not only to satirize the newspapers’ use of Gothic tropes to sensationalize political violence but also to warn the nineteenth-century reading public of the dangers of their preference of sensationalism over accuracy or civic responsibility. While Wells metaphorically exposes the hysterical response of readers to sensational news coverage of political violence, I contend that Conrad reveals the newspaper readers’ indifference to these accounts, suggesting that print media raises the stakes of symbolic 24 violence to the extent that even absurd reports cannot fulfill the readers’ lust for sensation. While the first two chapters of my project examine authors who write about terrorism objectively—from a removed perspective—the last two chapters consider novelists who were subjective participants in acts of political violence. My third chapter focuses on Boris Savinkov’s The Pale Horse (1909) and What Never Happened: A Novel of the Revolution (1912), novels written by a Russian revolutionary terrorist. In his memoirs, Savinkov downplays the Gothic, depicting acts of political violence as simply a means to an end rather than dwelling upon the violent actions taken. Presumably, one would also expect the violence of political terrorism to be downplayed in his novels given his role as a revolutionary terrorist, but the appearance of the Gothic is unpredictable and uncertain in them. Chapter three will consider his fiction rather than his memoir to maintain the focus of this project on the use of Gothic tropes in the literature of terrorism. Unlike Wells and Conrad, who satirically attack the newspaper and its readers, I argue that Savinkov invokes the Burkean sublime to perform a more serious critique of media sensationalism, revealing the negative effect it can have on the image of the revolutionary terrorist. In his novels, he exposes the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s reliance on sensationalized print media to further the revolutionary cause rather than propaganda by the deed and thereby expresses his frustration with his party’s failed attempts to create a “methodical system of terror.” My fourth chapter continues to explore the point-of-view of the terrorist, examining the ways in which Liam O’Flaherty—an Irish revolutionary—uses mysticism ironically to formulate nationalist rhetoric in The Informer (1923), “The Terrorist” 25 (1926), The Assassin (1928), The Martyr (1933), and Insurrection (1950), thereby revealing his disillusionment with Irish revolutionary politics. I argue that O’Flaherty was particularly critical of the mysticism that engendered fanatical devotion and that led to the revolutionary terrorist’s elevation to the heroic figure of the martyr. In his novels, O’Flaherty uses a combination of mysticism, Gothic sensationalism, and discourses of political fervor to expose the effects of the Burkean sublime on the actions of revolutionary terrorists, effects that reveal the inherent contradictions in their ethical codes and thereby question the validity of their radical revolutionary politics. 26 Introduction Endnotes 1 As Marks acknowledges, Stepniak’s Underground Russia was “the most widely read and influential work by a revolutionary” (19). 2 See Simon’s The Middle East in Crime Fiction: Mysteries, Spy Novels, and Thrillers from 1916 to the 1980s (1989), Kubiak’s Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (1991), and Scanlan’s Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (2001) for case studies with a focus on genre. 3 According to their study, the most commonly occurring words in the definitions are: Violence, force (found in 83.5% of the definitions); political (65%); fear, emphasis on terror (51%); threats (47%); psychological effects and anticipated reactions (41.5%); discrepancy between the targets and the victims (37.5%); intentional, planned, systematic, organized action (32%); methods of combat, strategy, tactics (30.5%). 4 For more on anarchist assassinations and bombings at the time, see Miller. For a discussion of particular articles from both liberal and conservative newspapers that sensationalized these assassinations and other alleged anarchist violence at the time, see Shpayer-Makov. 5 The Assassins were an early modern terrorist group comprised of members of an extremist sect of Shi’a Muslims in Persia and Syria between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries AD. As part of a religious revolutionary movement, the Assassins assassinated many Sunni Muslim leaders, creating a major conflict in Islam. Using only daggers, the fida’is (“devotees”) were responsible for the assassinations of governors, prefects, and caliphs. The majority of their victims were Sunni Muslims, though they also assassinated some Westerners, including Conrad of Montferrat, who was the Crusader King of Jerusalem. Many historians cite the Assassins as the first group of terrorists. Lewis and Burman describe the Assassins as a terrorist group who used assassinations as a political tool to inspire fear among their contemporaries. According to Lewis, “in one respect the Assassins are without precedent—in the planned, systematic and long-term use of terror as a political weapon” (129). The Assassins certainly did not invent assassinations, which have occurred since the beginning of history, but their calculated use of terror tactics resulted in the development of fearful myths in the West. In The Age of Terrorism, Laqueur writes, “the Assassins have fascinated Western authorities for a long time and this interest has grown in recent times, for some of the features of this movement remind one of contemporary terrorist movements” (13). These legends concerning the Assassins have been embellished over the years leaving a shroud of mystery over the history of this group. Some modern historians, however, believe that the legends are at least partially supported by actual historical events. According to legend, the Assassins would jump from towers at the command of their leader to show 27 their loyalty. This terrorist group is remembered for its death leaps and brutally killing their victims with daggers, though the terrorist acts immortalizing the Assassins were perhaps not as dramatic as legend would have it. Their calculated use of terror tactics fueled the fearful myths created in the writings of early modern Western chroniclers, such as William of Tyre’s A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea (end of the twelfth century), Jacques de Vitry’s History of the East (1215), Jean Sire de Joinville’s Chronicles of the Crusades (end of the thirteenth century), and Marco Polo’s The Travels of Marco Polo (1299). A writer in the nineteenth century, Abdul Halim Sharar—who was in England during the anarchist attacks in the late nineteenth century—also looks back at the death leaps and assassinations of the Assassins in his historical novel titled, Paradise of the Assassins (1899). The Gothic spectacles in the early modern roots of terrorism, then, continue to inspire the imagination of writers in the nineteenth century, suggesting the importance that these accounts have to our understanding of more modern depictions of political violence. 6 Rapoport argues that “modern terror began in Russia in the 1880s” (3). Marks also suggests that modern terror began with Russian anarchist terrorism in the late nineteenth century, claiming that “the organizational and killing methods developed by its Russian revolutionary adherents to fight the tsarist regime marked the birth of modern terrorism” (7). For more on the worldwide influence that Russian terrorists have had on the organization and methods of terrorism, see Marks. 7 According to Marks, some members of the Combat Organization “were criminals who conveniently wrapped their activities in the cloak of revolution, and for many of the hit men, terror became a craft disconnected from political or moral concerns” (17). 8 Hart focuses on the dynamics of violence in Irish revolutionary history, establishing “a statistical chronology of revolutionary (including counter-revolutionary) violence from January 1917 to September 1923” (64). 9 For more on the reaction the PSR members had to Savinkov’s novels, see Spence. 28 Chapter 1: “Public Imbecility and Journalistic Enterprise”: Mars Mania and Terror(ism) in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds Whatever paper the novelist in the…early 1890s propped up on his breakfast table, it would speak to him of dynamite outrages. -Barbara Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (1985) [It] was the time of the great Mars boom when public imbecility and journalistic enterprise combined to flood the papers and society with ‘news from Mars,’ and queries concerning Mars, most exasperating to grave thinkers and hard workers in science. -Anonymous, “New Views about Mars” in Edinburgh Review (1896) As Barbara Melchiori and the Edinburgh Review’s anonymous reviewer suggest, accounts of anarchist terrorism and stories about Mars were both prevalent themes in 1890s periodicals. These accounts reveal the late-nineteenth century fascination with stories that draw on the Burkean sublime, as the fear for aliens and terrorists create pleasure for the readers of these periodicals. In the Edinburgh Review article, the reviewer’s derisive quotation marks around “news from Mars” and reference to “public imbecility” emphasize the prevalence of these wildly speculative contributions to the debate about extraterrestrial life and testify to the public’s appetite for these accounts, which perpetuated what Robert Crossley has referred to as Mars Mania. 1 The public’s appetite for stories about Mars suggests their desire for stories that make a spectacle about the strange and unknown, in this case—men on Mars and possibilities of extraterrestrial communication. This Mars mania was so prevalent that Punch of London lampooned the fanciful speculations about men on Mars that were popular throughout the 1890s. 2 Set against this debate about extraterrestrial life were the reports of dynamiters and anarchist terrorists in the news—the most famous of which became known as the 29 “Greenwich Bomb Outrage”—prevalent enough to also warrant Punch’s derision. 3 Like the spectacles of aliens in the news, these sensational accounts of anarchist terrorism made it seem as though the public should be concerned about potential attacks from others who might invade England. The print media’s coverage of intelligent life on Mars and anarchist terrorism at this time revealed a core anxiety about invasion in the mind of the British public, and both of these were themes that informed Wells’s work in the mid- 1890s. This anxiety for Martians and terrorists reveals not only the terrorizing, but also the pleasurable, experience for readers who indulged in these stories of invasion. The suggestion of dangers from an alien or an anarchist attack was apparently enough to keep the public reading these accounts since so many of them appeared in newspapers at the time. Wells exposes and ridicules this English fear of foreign invasion in The War of the Worlds, for example, by focusing his alien invasion on British soil. 4 Though England is not the only country threatened by these attacks in Wells’s novel, it only vaguely alludes to terror(ism) elsewhere. In the novel, newspapers create panic among the public by sensationalizing attacks instigated by the extraterrestrials. By employing aliens as metaphors for terrorists—unknowable characters that quite literally create anarchy and chaos—Wells hopes to affect shock in the nineteenth-century British reader, while also poking fun at readers’ readiness to panic. I would ultimately like to suggest, therefore, that the novel is a critique of media sensationalism as a form of speculation about foreign invasion: it satirizes reports about the terrifying acts of the Martians in The War of the Worlds not only to draw attention to journalistic unreliability but also to warn the reading public to be cautious and skeptical of their information sources and to understand the motivations 30 and goals of print media. This media sensationalism exposes the nineteenth-century reading public’s desire for stories on terrorism since their support for these information sources is the reason for the perpetuation of invasion stories in the news. By associating the reader of the novel with the reading public of nineteenth-century periodicals, Wells cautions his readership of the dangers of its preference for sensationalism over accuracy or civic responsibility, a preference that can easily be exploited by the poetics of terror, and which Wells seems to suggest influences or permeates a wide range of discourses enveloped by print media—including the discourses of science. Wells’s satire of Mars mania with an apocalyptic invasion fantasy reveals the public’s panicked response to contemporary anarchist “threats” and ultimately suggests that Wells regarded anarchist politics as trivial. These so-called threats from Martians and terrorists, then, were so prevalent that a famous author like H.G. Wells felt the need to trivialize them in his novel. We know, with relative certainty, that terror(ism) and mass panic were intellectual and professional preoccupations of Wells in the mid 1890s. In 1894, he published “The Stolen Bacillus”—a short story featuring an anarchist who attempts to infect all of London with cholera bacillus—which, like The War of the Worlds, uses a scientific Gothic framework to explore these issues. 5 Critics have recognized the connection between The War of the Worlds and the spectacle of anarchist terrorism and between the novel and the fascination with Mars in the 1890s. 6 While the serialization of Wells’s story did not appear until 1897 in Pearson’s Magazine, Wells began writing it in 1895, not long after the Martian Opposition of 1894, which many scholars cite as the height of sensational speculation about Mars, and the so-called “Greenwich Bomb Outrage” of 31 1894, which provided months worth of news coverage. 7 I will examine the coverage of this bombing in The Times alongside The War of the Worlds as a representative example of Wells’s allusions to the violence of foreign invasion. Wells not only alludes to real periodicals—even to the same articles upon which Mars mania and fears of invasion fed—but also appropriates journalistic style to establish a solid connection between the symbolic representation of the novel and the 1890s print environment. It is this journalistic style and tone—which were not lost on Wells’s contemporaries—that symbolically link the satire of the Mars mania early in the novel with the apocalyptic terror of the invasion near the end of the novel. 8 Journalistic style foregrounds the apocalyptic tone of Wells’s fictional catastrophe, but Wells does not imitate journalistic style as much as he exposes the newspaper’s use of his style—or, to be more precise, the techniques and devices of fiction. Wells’s appropriation of periodicals, then, exposes their use of the sensational techniques of fiction, especially those of the Gothic science fiction genre, to which The War of the Worlds belongs. 9 The public’s appetite for newspapers that used Gothic literary devices resembling the Burkean Gothic sublime suggests that these papers appealed to them in ways similar to the fiction they were presumably reading at the time. The newspaper’s focus on the inexplicable monstrosities—whether aliens or terrorists—that could pose threats to England suggest the readers vicarious desire to experience these dangers, not unlike their experience reading Gothic novels. Wells features the market for periodicals prominently throughout the novel, and its presence as the only viable system of information-distribution in the novel amplifies the effect of the repeated failures of print media throughout the novel. 32 The first-person narration is the key to understanding these failures of print media and its connection to the rhetoric of terror(ism) later in The War of the Worlds. The narrator’s lack of a name is particularly important to note, as this lack of individuality suggests that the narrator, who is the most visible consumer of sensational accounts in the novel, stands in for the reading public of the late nineteenth century. As a consumer of sensational print media, the narrator lets his lust for sensation affect his narration. He emerges as an unreliable narrator whose narration emulates the language of the newspaper. Critics such as Tom Gibbons have pointed out the inconsistent point-of-view in Wells’s novel, since it would be impossible for the narrator to be aware of the “detailed thoughts and experiences” of characters such as Ogilvy (12). We can also read this inconsistency as an hermeneutic key to Wells’s novel, through which he reveals the influence of sensational print media on the narrator. The unreliable narrator coupled with the media sensationalism in the novel creates an information field that must be negotiated by a careful reader. Wells’s scientific writings reveal his concern with sensationalizing Mars mania in this respect. Wells had a long-standing interest in Darwin’s theory of evolution, which influenced his speculations about extraterrestrial life, and—as I will demonstrate later in this chapter—the terrorizing elements that appear late in the novel can be traced to the central misunderstanding of Darwinism Wells saw in the print media. In 1888, Wells presented a paper titled, “Are the Planets Habitable?,” to the Debating Society at the Royal College of Science, concluding that “there was every reason to suppose that the surface of Mars was occupied by living beings” (qtd. in Bergonzi 123). Wells also co- authored a textbook called Honours Physiography (1893), which speculated about 33 intelligent life on Mars (Smith 18). Though Wells was a firm believer in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, he scoffed at the popular view of scientists of his day who assumed intelligent life on Mars would resemble human physiology and/or human behavior. In his Saturday Review essay, “Intelligence on Mars” (1896), Wells writes, “no phase of anthropomorphism is more naïve than the supposition of men on Mars,” arguing that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provides strong evidence that sentient beings on Mars would not be comparable to man (297). In 1885, Wells presented a paper titled, “The Past and Future of the Human Race” to the Debating Society at the Royal College of Science (Bergonzi 36). According to Bernard Bergonzi, the earliest surviving version of this paper—“The Man of the Year Million”—was published on 16 November 1893 in the Pall Mall Budget (36). Drawing on Darwinian theory, this essay imagined man in the year million with a superior mental capacity—but a disturbingly simple bodily form—bathing in a nutrient bath, which Punch lampooned in a cartoon depicting the future evolution of man as aliens in a nutrient bath (“1,000, 000 A.D.”). Wells’s allusion to both this essay and the Punch cartoon in The War of the Worlds convincingly shows the degree to which his novel interacts with print culture in the 1890s. These uncanny allusions effectively create the sublime experience because, rather than suggesting the radical novelty of the alien form which Wells’s Darwinism assumes, they suggest the more terrifying proposition that the aliens are essentially man-like, comprehensible in a way that can be feared. Such a similarity facilitates the exploitation of invasion anxiety by facilitating the image of the invader. The print media’s use of anthropomorphism, then, relies on the Burkean sublime to portray monstrous aliens that create anxiety but also intrigue the reader. Wells applies Darwinian evolution to his depiction of Martians 34 in this novel, enhancing the apocalyptic invasion fantasy by creating monstrous aliens that have a simple bodily form, though they are far-advanced in their mental capacities. His Martians, then, as other scholars have noted, are not unlike the evolved men of his essay, “The Man of the Year Million.” 10 Elsewhere, Wells undermined ideas of extraterrestrial communication because “the creatures on Mars would be different from the creatures of earth, in form and function, in structure and in habit, different beyond the most bizarre imaginings of nightmare” (“Intelligence on Mars” 296). For Wells, then, to assume that extraterrestrials resemble men not only in appearance but also in behavior would be naïve. Wells undermines the easy logic of the popular phrase, “men on Mars,” in The War of the Worlds. He suggests that simple metaphors lead to lazy thought and bad science, which for Wells also constituted political or ethical problems that extended beyond the realm of science. Though Wells writes for the popular audience, he attempts to create his ideal readership, a readership attuned to the distinctions between the rigor of scientific discourse and the sometimes easy logic of public discourse. Wells explodes the metaphor of “men on Mars,” warning his readers of the danger of appropriating the logic behind this popular phrase, as the apocalyptic story begins when the aliens prove not to be like men. For Wells, the idea of “men on Mars” is not a metaphor or poetic language but rather the idea of extraterrestrials resembling men, a notion he found absurd because the probability of this is statistically negligible according to Darwin’s theory of evolution. According to Wells, creatures on Mars probably would not even have the same sense organs as man let alone experience the world the same way as man: “there might be no common measure of what they and we hear and see, taste, smell, and touch” 35 (“Intelligence on Mars” 297). As I will demonstrate later in the chapter, this central misunderstanding engenders the plot’s movement from curiosity to terror when the alien cylinders arrive in England. Wells objected, then, to the embellished and often sensationalized writings of contemporary journalists—and scientists—that utilized the discourses of terror in favor of the discourses of Darwinian evolution when speculating about intelligent life on Mars or the possibility of extraterrestrial communication. An exemplary episode that solidifies Wells’s objection to this sort of sensationalism comes in the opening chapter of The War of the Worlds, a chapter that obscures the distinction between actual and fictional print media with the narrator’s allusions to astronomical discoveries that do not take into account Darwinian theory. This disregard for the scientific reality—as we will later see—is similar to the disregard for the political realities of anarchist violence, which the narrator reveals by speculating about the methods the aliens use to terrorize the British public. Critics, such as Crossley, have neglected the importance of these allusions—particularly regarding Martian canals—dismissing them as being merely “at the periphery of Wells’s creation” (105). These allusions to contemporary astronomical discovery, though, are central to the first chapter as the foundational link between the novel and reality for the satire to take place later in the plot. The narrator first alludes to a popular Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, with whom contemporary readers would be familiar: “Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet…but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well” (Wells, TWOTW 53). 11 The markings refer to Schiaparelli’s observations in 1877 of canali on Mars—which contemporary newspapers translated as “canals” rather than “channels”—leading to speculation that they were not 36 naturally-occurring phenomena but rather artificial constructions made by intelligent life. 12 The fluctuating markings allude to Schiaparelli’s theory of germination, which occurs when “a given canal changes its appearance, and is found transformed through all its length, into two lines or uniform stripes” (Schiaparelli qtd. in Hughes and Geduld 199). Here scientific discovery and speculative journalism become intertwined, such that print media informs the way scientific theories are explained to the public. 13 The reader, though, must negotiate these multiple information sources, as there is a disjunction in ideas between the print media and the unreliable narrator of the novel. The narrator rejects the popular notion of canals on Mars, creating his own fanciful explanation for the markings observed on the planet: “the Martians must have been getting ready” to attack (Wells, TWOTW 53). Telling his story in hindsight, the narrator is aware of the impending alien attack and his visions of the apocalyptic story color his interpretation of this discovery. The narrator reads the movement of markings observed on the planet as evidence of a Martian militaristic effort. He interprets the movement of the markings through the lens of his own culture when he imagines that the Martians line up like Englishmen who are about to engage in war. Though the narrator recounts his story in retrospect and therefore cannot have the fear of an imminent attack, he shows his anxiety but also pleasure in imagining potential invasions with his speculative account of how the attack began and thereby suggests that the nineteenth-century reader gets a thrill from reading about the dangers of an invasion. The narrator’s attempt to embellish the alien invasion story early in the text exposes the influence of sensational periodicals and previous fiction about Mars on his narrative and establishes a pattern whereby journalistic practices and fiction converge in 37 the narrator’s mind. This influence that both journalism and fiction have on the narrator reveals not only the potential confusion between fiction and reality for the nineteenth- century but also this reader’s preference for embellished accounts of invasion. In the first chapter, the narrator alludes to sightings of a mysterious light on Mars, citing Henri Perrotin of Nice—who was the director of the Nice observatory at the time—and the California Lick Observatory, while reminding the reader that the “great light” on Mars was first reported to English readers in Nature (Wells, TWOTW 53). 14 On August 2 nd , 1894, an article titled, “A Strange Light on Mars” actually did appear in Nature, Britain’s foremost scientific journal. The article reported the mysterious light observed at the Nice observatory, which gave Londoners hope for extraterrestrial communication with its suggestion that “a better time for signaling could scarcely be chosen” (“A Strange Light on Mars” 306). 15 The narrator, though, rejects the popular interpretation of this discovery—that the Martians are attempting to communicate—in favor of a more sensational explanation: “I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us” (Wells, TWOTW 53). We should remember that the narrator cannot possibly know what happened on Mars, despite the fact that he narrates the tale after the fact. By making this assertion, then, he imposes a “correct” or “accurate” reading on the events to follow, a reading that consistently exploits the fear of invasion by employing the poetics of Gothic terror. The narrator not only reinterprets the mysterious light as flames on Mars, but also speculates that these flames represent the Martian’s method of interplanetary travel—the use of a space gun to travel to Earth. 38 This method of interplanetary travel was most famously utilized in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865). David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld note that “Wells’s Martian gun…seems no more than a nod to Verne” (199). But we can see Wells’s nod to Verne—who imagined this method of space travel for humans—as further evidence for the narrator’s cultural assumption that the Martians would use a method of travel similar to that speculated for men. Moreover, the fact that Wells alludes to Verne’s novel—a fiction—further undercuts the narrator’s journalistic legitimacy and suggests that the nineteenth-century periodical and fictions are one and the same in the reader’s mind, which metaphorically suggests the reader might have had trouble distinguishing the reality of violence from the fictional representations of it popular at the time. His allusion to Verne’s novel also sets the stage for his larger point later in the novel: media speculation employs fictional techniques to exploit Mars rather than sound journalistic reporting, and this exploitation of Martian attacks is similar to the way the media used fictional methods to exploit potential anarchist invasions in the nineteenth century, as we will see later in this chapter. In an attempt to legitimize his own allusion to fiction, the narrator supports his assumption of the Martian’s method of space travel with his own journalistic account of the astronomer’s discovery of flames on Mars at the Nice Observatory. The narrator’s account suggests that the conflation of fiction and print media terrorized but also inspired the nineteenth-century reader to imagine the violence that had led up to the invasion. The narrator refers to Lavelle of Java, a thinly veiled allusion to the actual French astronomer—M. Javelle—who observed the mysterious light that was reported in Nature. The narrator takes the reader back to a time before the article in Nature appeared and 39 rewrites the contemporary astronomical discovery of the mysterious light as the sighting of flames on Mars: As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the 12 th , and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.” (Wells, TWOTW 53) Here, the narrator invokes journalistic style to report the discovery of flames on Mars, presumably to give the appearance of accurately reporting the story. To show that he followed the progression of events, the narrator uses detailed time and date references, reporting what happened from “midnight on the 12 th ” to a “quarter past twelve.” His use of quotation and direct reference to a witness also invokes the conventions of the newspaper. In particular, he puts quotes around a simile that an astronomer, Lavelle of Java, supposedly uses—“as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.” The quotation marks not only mimic journalistic practices, but in this passage they also draw attention to the one phrase that employs poetic sensationalism through a violent simile. This violent simile and reference to a gun foreshadows the invasion tactics of the aliens who, we will later find, fire invisible heat rays and launch rockets with poisonous vapor to terrorize the British public. Even in the first chapter the narrator’s journalistic integrity—benefiting logically from hindsight—is called into question, as the narrator indulges in poetic techniques of fiction to invent violent explanations for the flames on Mars, which underscores the shifting rhetorical allegiances of the narrator, and which the reader alone must sort through. 40 In recounting the story of flames on Mars, the narrator attempts to create the illusion of authenticity for his theory of Martian space travel—which relies on an allusion to fiction—particularly by invoking eyewitness accounts to suggest the veracity of his story. The story of the astronomer’s discovery, however, is filtered through the narrator, presumably passed on from Lavelle of Java to Ogilvy (another astronomer) to the narrator to the reader. The three degrees of separation in Wells’s narrative parallels the situation we are placed in when reading newspapers; the story is told at least twice removed from the witness. Since we only have the narrator’s version of the story, we do not know the extent to which the narrator exaggerated the witness’ descriptions to recount the story. The witness, though, conveniently provides support for the narrator’s own speculation that the Martians traveled to Earth with a space gun, which suggests the influence of the narrator’s assumption that the aliens would behave like men. The narrator takes every opportunity to embellish his overwrought account, exclaiming that “the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race” (Wells, TWOTW 53). While the imminent alien invasion was undoubtedly cause for concern, the narrator here becomes a writer of sensation par excellence. At this point, the fictional and journalistic discourses merge completely, erasing the need for any such distinction. With his frantic exclamation of danger, the narrator arouses curiosity that tends toward anxiety with his apocalyptic premonition of the impending Martian attack. Here the narrator’s frantic reaction suggests that the nineteenth-century reader’s need for sensation leads to hyperbolic accounts of the dangers of invasion. With a journalistic account, he goes on to claim that “hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after, about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, 41 a flame each night” (Wells, TWOTW 54). How the narrator could know that so many people observed the flames is unclear. While he may have read about it in the newspaper, it is more likely that he—knowing from hindsight that ten alien cylinders eventually would land on the Earth—claims that ten flames were observed by many witnesses to support his theory of how the Martians traveled to Earth. The narrator’s speculations about the Martians—especially the idea that Martians would behave as men do when invading—continue to color his story of the flames on Mars, and the suggestion that the Martians would terrorize like men draws a further parallel to acts of political violence at the end of the nineteenth century since we later learn that the aliens have political reasons—to take over the land—for their acts of violence. The narrator reports, “why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain” (Wells, TWOTW 54). That is except for him. He presumes to know the reason for the disappearance of these flames with his assumptions that “the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience” after ten nights of firing and that these gases were “visible though a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches” (Wells, TWOTW 55). Observations from a telescope on Earth hardly justify the narrator’s claim that the Martians are using a space gun, let alone his conclusion that they are producing excessive gases which prevent them from continuing to fire it. The narrator’s conjecture that the “fluctuating patches” represent gases from a space gun on Mars recalls his earlier assumption that the fluctuating markings on Mars indicate the Martians’ preparations to attack and once again alludes to the violent means— particularly the poisonous vapor—the Martians will later use to terrorize the British public. With both of these conclusions, the narrator presumes to have knowledge of the 42 events that occurred on Mars before the alien invasion. These fluctuating patches—not unlike the fluctuating markings—corroborate the narrator’s story of the Martians’ preparations for the invasion, as he assumes once again that the Martians behave like Englishmen who are involved in a militaristic effort. The narrator’s assumptions about Martian behavior are not consistent with Ogilvy’s Darwinian views on the inhabitants of Mars. The astronomer Ogilvy scoffed at the vulgar idea of [Mars] having inhabitants who were signaling us…He pointed out to [the narrator] how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets. “The chances against anything man-like on Mars are a million to one,” [Ogilvy] said. (Wells, TWOTW 54) If Ogilvy—who is the narrator’s main source for the story of the flames on Mars— believes organic evolution makes extraterrestrial signaling highly unlikely, we should also be doubtful of the narrator’s other assumptions that the Martians would behave like men. In fact, Ogilvy’s skeptical views concerning Martian observation mirror those of Wells, and since we later discover that the Martians do not at all resemble men, Wells presents Ogilvy’s views as more scientifically sound than those of the narrator. As we will soon see, the narrator’s assumptions about the Martians’ appearance and behavior solidifies the degree to which his narration is unreliable and reveals that his sources of print media lead him to make these assumptions about the invasion tactics the aliens use to terrorize the public. The narrator’s assumption in the first chapter that the Martians resemble men continues to influence his narration in the rest of the novel. According to the narrator, the first man to discover the alien cylinder is Ogilvy, who shouts, “there’s a man in it—men in it! Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!” (Wells, TWOTW 57). Since the narrator 43 has already informed us that Ogilvy scoffs at the vulgarity of the idea of men-like Martians, Ogilvy’s assumption that the cylinder contains men seems inconsistent. On the one hand, Ogilvy’s fear could explain this inconsistency since he seems to revert to cultural assumptions about the aliens when he is frightened. But the fact that the alien cylinder is closed at this point of the story makes his outburst particularly odd. Ogilvy’s claim—or more likely the narrator’s conjecture—that the Martians are “half roasted” and look like men borders on ridiculous since neither Ogilvy nor the narrator could know what is inside the closed cylinder. Ogilvy’s, and in turn the narrator’s, fear of men trying to escape the scaly burnt metal of their cylinder and speculation about the men as potential victims who suffer burns exposes the fear but curiosity for the unknown invader and recalls images of Bourdin, the so-called anarchist terrorist who suffers burns from his presumed attack. According to the narrator, Ogilvy brings the journalist Henderson to the cylinder where they “[rap] on the scaly burnt metal with a stick,” and when they get no response, they “conclud[e] the man or men inside must be insensible or dead” (Wells, TWOTW 58). It is unclear how the narrator could know what Ogilvy, let alone Henderson, is thinking. The narrator’s suggestion that the man or men inside are dead not only hints at the possibility that these invaders are like suicide bombers who are killed in their own bombing attempt on England but also reveals how the newspapers influence his narration, as we will soon see. With the narrator’s apparent rewriting of Ogilvy’s story, Wells warns readers of the dangers of letting sensationalism erase science with the popular assumption in the nineteenth-century that Martians would be in the image of men, men who aim to terrorize not unlike the anarchist terrorists that were in the news. 44 The narrator’s suggestion of dead men from Mars is unsurprisingly consistent with the assumptions made in Wells’s fictional newspaper, which creates competing discourses that are so intertwined that truth is impossible. Though we do not have access to the fictional article, here is the narrator’s account of the frantic public reaction to the newspaper story concerning the alien cylinder: By eight o’clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already started for the common to see the “dead men from Mars.” That was the form the story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy about a quarter to nine, when I went out to get my Daily Chronicle. I was naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and across the Ottershaw bridge to the sand-pits. (Wells, TWOTW 58) The speculation in the newspaper influences these readers’ expectations, in this case by preparing them for uncanny Martians that resemble men, which leads them to the scene reported in the paper. This influence is perhaps most apparent with the narration— benefiting from hindsight—of Ogilvy’s discovery of the alien cylinder and his conclusion that it contains dead men from Mars. The narrator’s remark—“that was the form the story took”—draws attention to the shifting and largely inaccurate process of narration that typifies newspaper reporting and suggests that such a methodology can produce dire consequences for its readership. The reader of the novel is left to deduce how the story of “dead men from Mars” ended up in the Daily Chronicle. According to the narrator, this newspaper receives a telegraph from its journalist, Henderson, concerning news about the alien cylinder. Henderson’s conclusion—as reported by the narrator—that the aliens were dead in the alien cylinder suggests once again the influence the newspaper has on the narration. The story is presumably passed on from Henderson to the newspaper editors to the narrator to the reader. Whatever the source of the misappropriation, the end 45 result is that the fictional newspaper in Wells’s story does not report accurate news, as we later learn that the Martians are very much alive. The degrees of separation between Henderson and the reader of the novel are not unlike the distance between the eyewitness and the nineteenth-century newspaper reader. Wells, then, creates this parallel to underscore how the degrees of separation between the eyewitness and the newspaper facilitate the manipulation by the press of stories to capture the public’s interest with shocking news. The distortion by the press of the discovery of the Martian cylinder is successful in this respect. The newspaper’s shocking news of “dead men from Mars” encourages the narrator’s naïve assumption that the Martians would resemble men and his desire for a Gothic spectacle, and the speculation about a violent act that results in dead invaders provides the shock that the nineteenth-century newspaper relies on to keep the public interested in news about the attack. The narrator’s desire for this spectacle can be explained by the Burkean sublime. Paul Alkon recognizes that the science fiction and Gothic genres “reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics called the sublime” (2). The fictional newspaper in Wells’s novel appropriates this Gothic trope to create a pleasurable yet terrifying experience for the reader who indulges in articles reporting the alien invasion. The Daily Chronicle piques the interest of not just the narrator but a whole crowd of newspaper readers who “[lose] no time in going” to the site where the aliens landed. The narrator once again invokes the conventions of the newspaper when he reports that “boys and unemployed men” make their way to the cylinder at “eight o’clock” and that he follows close behind at “a quarter to nine.” He 46 assumes journalistic style to recreate the reading public’s and his own reaction to the shocking news of “dead men from Mars” and to provide a detailed description of the growing crowd of curious spectators at the pit where the aliens are presumed to be. The narrator, however, attempts to distinguish himself from these “common people” who “had anything but the vaguest astronomical ideas” (Wells, TWOTW 59). He claims the superiority of his own “scientific education” which helps him recognize the cylinder as “extraterrestrial,” a word that “had no meaning for most of the onlookers” (Wells, TWOTW 59; 60). Wells undermines the narrator’s scientific education by exposing the narrator’s persistent belief in the notion of men-like Martians, a belief that Wells found statistically negligible according to his interpretation of Darwinian theory. The newspaper—which is the reason for the narrator’s appearance at the site of the alien cylinder—clearly influences the narrator’s speculation about Martians more than his scientific education. In fact, the newspaper is the reason the narrator can anticipate the crowd’s reaction to the closed alien cylinder at the site: “I fancy the popular expectation of a heap of charred corpses was disappointed at this inanimate bulk” (Wells, TWOTW 59). The narrator presumes to know the crowd’s disappointment when it finds a closed cylinder instead of “a heap of charred corpses,” and in doing so he reveals his own dissatisfaction with not finding this grotesque display. Though we do not get the newspaper account as it is reported, we can assume it exploits sensational details if the crowd and the narrator expect “a heap of charred corpses.” The narrator, then, turns up to get a glimpse of the grotesque bodies and thereby reveals his morbid curiosity to view this spectacle. Even after his disappointment, the narrator remains at the site, delighted to be one of the “privileged spectators” with a good view of the cylinder and anxiously 47 awaiting an alien that resembles “a man to emerge” (Wells, TWOTW 61; 63). By suggesting how the nineteenth-century newspaper would have sensationalized the Martians, Wells underscores the papers’ reliance on, and the readers’ indulgence in, morbid curiosity to arouse public interest. This desire to see the dead men from Mars, particularly their charred corpses, after reading about them in the newspaper is not unlike the nineteenth-century reader’s curiosity to see, or at least vicariously imagine, extraordinary events such as the aftermath of a bombing, including victims burned in an attack. This attempt to create curiosity and anxiety for the Martians in the novel’s fictional newspapers extends from imagining the physical appearance of the aliens to raising expectations for invasion. The narrator’s reaction to newspapers that claim the Martians are attempting to communicate reveals how the press influences his narrative. In The War of the Worlds, the papers “startle” London with “enormous headlines” announcing, for example, “A Message Received from Mars: Remarkable Story from Woking” (Wells, TWOTW 60). The absence of newspaper stories and the prominence of headlines in the novel suggest the readership’s reliance on headlines for its news. The cylinder remains closed when the paper runs this headline; no new discoveries have been made. The newspaper’s claim that a message was received from Mars, then, is just as fictitious as its claim about dead men from Mars. The headline, though, apparently affects the narrator, who lets his “mind [run] fancifully on the possibilities” of finding a manuscript in the cylinder (Wells, TWOTW 60). His visions of communication with the Martians not only indicate the strong effect the newspaper has on his imagination but also reveal how his assumptions about Martian behavior inform his narration. The narrator— 48 imagining the Martians will write a message—assumes that they will use the same method of communication as men do. The narrator’s speculation reveals not only his hope for extraterrestrial communication but also his fear for unintelligible alien communication, and it is here that we see the tension between the narrator’s scientific speculation and Wells’ Darwinism seep into the plot of the novel. He goes so far as to imagine the “difficulties in translation that might arise” with the manuscript he presumes to be in the alien cylinder (Wells, TWOTW 60). The potential for difficulties with translation that the narrator acknowledges suggests his curiosity and anxiety for the unreadable message from the aliens, a message that could be either friendly or hostile. The manuscript is perhaps an allusion to the work of the British scientist—Francis Galton—particularly his Fortnightly Review article, “Intelligible Signals between Neighboring Stars,” which suggested a mathematical language suitable for communicating with alien civilizations. Wells takes advantage of this slippage between fact and fiction in his novel. Given the Mars mania in the 1890s, the possibility of communicating with extraterrestrials did not seem as far-fetched for the nineteenth- century reader as we may presume. Perhaps the most extreme example of this Mars mania is the famous Prix Guzman, which offered 100,000 francs to “La personne de n’importe quel pays qui trouvera le moyen, d’ici à dix années, de communiquer avec un astre (planète ou autre) et d’en recevoir réponse” (qtd. in Flammarion 282). 16 During the 1892 Martian opposition, scientists also seriously considered ways to communicate with Martians. 17 While this prize reveals the desire for extraterrestrial communication at the time, this desperate attempt to encourage contact with aliens also suggests the anxiety for potential unknown dangers. We should assume, however, that Wells finds these accounts 49 of potential alien encounters far-fetched given the assumption that Martians would communicate in a manner comparable to Englishmen, and he thereby cautions the nineteenth-century newspaper reader who takes this challenge to communicate with aliens seriously. This fascination with but also anxiety about communicating with the foreign invader was also apparent in the news coverage of the Greenwich bombing, which suggested the panicked response the British public had had to Bourdin’s nationality, as I mentioned in the introduction. If Wells is attacking this type of reader, then he does so in part by pointing out the inconsistencies in journalist practice and its wavering commitment to objectivity. In The World of the Worlds, the journalist Henderson sends a messenger on a bicycle to wire news about the open cylinder for the evening newspaper. The news is enough for the Daily Chronicle to consider a special edition, but Henderson’s story never makes it to the press: In London that night poor Henderson’s telegram describing the gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and his evening paper, after wiring for authentication from him and receiving no reply—the man was killed—decided not to print a special edition. (Wells, TWOTW 74) This is one of the most important points in Wells’s critique because when the newspaper receives accurate news—the unscrewing of the cylinder—it assumes Henderson’s telegram is a “canard,” and the story goes unwritten. As mentioned earlier, after Henderson sent his first telegram concerning the sighting of the cylinder, the newspaper hastily concluded that the pit contained “dead aliens.” Interestingly enough, verifying news of dead aliens was not important, but the opening of the cylinder needed to be authenticated. Clearly, the newspaper’s primary concern is not reporting accurate news 50 about the aliens. In fact, the newspaper seems more concerned about printing a contradiction to its earlier report than publishing an accurate story. After all, if the aliens were dead, how could they unscrew their cylinder? This is just one of the ways in which Wells questions the motives of the Daily Chronicle, a newspaper unwilling to accept accountability for printing inaccurate, sensational reports. We do not need to look too much further to see this fictional critique extended to the society in which Wells lived. In fact, the Daily Chronicle’s reluctance to correct the inaccuracies of its report featuring dead aliens in The War of the Worlds is similar to The Times’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for sensational reports of the Greenwich bombing in the nineteenth-century newspaper. Although the first report of the bombing emphasized Bourdin’s mutilated body, on 17 February, an article in The Times calls attention to the inaccuracy of the description: “the parkkeepers may readily be forgiven for the exaggeration which appears to have coloured their description of his wounds, for as a matter of plain fact, his body was not ripped and torn in the manner which has been described” (“The Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). The newspaper certainly could have done more to verify the facts before reporting on the Greenwich bombing. Printing a sensational account that speculates on the details of the incident helps the newspaper sell copies since readers are anxious to buy the latest version to get the “true” story. When The Times eventually corrects the inaccuracies of the first report on the Greenwich bombing, it suggests that others were responsible for the exaggeration. In displacing the blame, the newspaper does not take responsibility for piquing the curiosity of its readers with titillating details of the bombing to sell newspapers. 51 Contemporary reports in The Times continue to oscillate between knowing and not knowing the details of the Greenwich bombing to encourage the reading public to continue buying the latest stories. The paper first suggests that the authorities had the Greenwich bombing pretty much under control. On 16 February, the newspaper assumes that the police frightened Bourdin on the day of the bombing: there is “no room for doubt that he was fleeing from the police, and that his immediate desire was to rid himself safely of the explosive which he had taken away with him” (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). In insinuating that a police pursuit led to the explosion, the paper gives the impression that the authorities tried to capture Bourdin before he dropped the bomb. Another article that appeared on 17 February in The Times adds to this account, indicating that the anarchists at the Autonomie Club—including Bourdin—were under surveillance before the Greenwich bombing occurred. The newspaper confidently reports, “The vigilance shown by the police in watching the foreign Anarchists in London lately has terrified those against whom that vigilance was directed” (“The Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). The paper’s attempt to make the Greenwich bombing seem under control keeps the fear of the anarchists in check while encouraging readers to continue reading about the attack. The suggestion that the police knew about anarchist activity in London, though, may have raised some questions for readers. They may have wondered, for example, about the competence of the authorities who let Bourdin approach Greenwich observatory with a bomb. Little did readers know that Bourdin assembled his bomb without the police having much, if any, knowledge of it. On 20 February, The Times finally conceded that the authorities were not in fact aware of the anarchist presence in London, admitting that the police “really knew very little about the 52 Anarchical movement in England until the affair of Greenwich” (“The Greenwich Explosion” 5). By suggesting that the details of the Greenwich bombing are still unclear, the newspaper seeks to maintain the reading public’s interest and to make them eager to purchase the latest copy to stay abreast of the news. Though The Times corrects the details of the bombing in its report, it once again does not accept responsibility for printing erroneous information concerning the incident. The newspaper blames the earlier, inaccurate reports on the “shortsighted friends of the police” who claimed the authorities had been watching the Autonomie Club long before Bourdin’s bombing (“The Greenwich Explosion.” 5). By unveiling the police’s ignorance of the anarchist presence in London, the newspaper reverses itself, and thereby creates more anxiety for terrorist attacks and undoubtedly more newspaper sales. This atmosphere of anxiety is both the primary catalyst for The War of the Worlds and the target of the book’s satiric attack. The papers in the novel capitalize on the news of the open alien cylinder, relying once again on the tropes of the Gothic to create a sublime experience for their readers. To a certain extent, the fictional newspaper cannot render the sensation of an alien attack without employing sensationalism, but this hardly explains the near ridiculous treatment of the nineteenth-century newspaper reader in the novel. The narrator’s brother—not unlike the narrator—symbolically represents this reader who indulges in sensational newspaper accounts. Here is the telegram in the paper that inspires the narrator’s brother’s curiosity for the aliens: The Martians, alarmed by the approach of the crowd, had killed a number of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The telegram concluded with the words: “Formidable as they seem to be, the Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and indeed, seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative strength of the 53 earth’s gravitational energy.” On that last text their lead-writers expanded very comfortingly. (Wells, TWOTW 106) This telegram serves as dramatic irony: the reader of the novel already knows that the aliens have moved from the pit. While the reader suspects that the aliens are more dangerous than this report suggests, the newspaper readers within Wells’s story are assured by this report that the aliens do not pose an immediate threat to them. The newspaper’s confidence in reporting that the aliens remain in the pit convinces the narrator’s brother that it is safe for him to indulge his curiosity to “see the Things before they [are] killed” (Wells, TWOTW 106). This newspaper succeeds in piquing the curiosity of its readers while appeasing them with assurances that the Martians do not pose much of a threat, unless, perhaps, you go near the pit. The fictional newspaper account suggests that the alien attack is pretty much under control, tempering its report with assurances of public safety designed to keep the fear of the aliens in check while encouraging the public to continue reading about the Martians. This account may oscillate between terror and curiosity, alarm and assurance, but like other reports in the novel, it finally emphasizes the latter. As we will soon see, this particular example mirrors the process by which print journalism tempers public reaction to the invasion to ensure its own viability. The print media’s tempering of the public sentiment is so successful that Londoners continue to indulge their morbid curiosity while the Martians approach London, during which the newspapers are still able to profit from sensational accounts and to distribute them with touts. Using sensational catch phrases to interest the public in news of the aliens, newspaper touts selling papers in the street shout, “Fighting at 54 Weybridge! Full description! Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!” (Wells, TWOTW 109). Though they are only featured as minor characters, newspaper boys reappear throughout the novel. An early reviewer criticized Wells for depicting brawling newspaper boys in The War of the Worlds. 18 The newspaper touts in this novel, however, exemplify Wells’s suspicions about the newspaper industry. Selling breaking news of the alien attack at threepence a copy, the newsvendors charge anywhere between three and six times the normal price for a newspaper at that time (Hughes and Geduld 213). In Wells’s novel, the newsvendors, and by extension the newspaper industry, then, overcharge the public for papers because Londoners are more than willing to pay for sensational news of the aliens. With his depiction of newsvendors, Wells highlights the newspaper’s preoccupation with benefiting monetarily from the tragic events of the alien invasion and the reading public’s eagerness to indulge in this news. In fact, the newspapers these touts are selling give us one of the best examples of Gothic sensationalism in Wells’s novel. Even when the events of the alien invasion are truly shocking, the fictional newspapers continue to temper their reports—oscillating between alarm and assurance—to create the pleasing terror characteristic of Gothic fiction. The paper’s report features the Martians in “vast spider-like machines, nearly a hundred feet high, capable of the speed of an express-train, and able to shoot out a beam of intense heat” (Wells, TWOTW 109). This article does not suggest that the aliens pose a serious danger since “heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was optimistic” (Wells, TWOTW 109). While the article acknowledges that the aliens are a threat, it nevertheless assures the public that the situation is under control: 55 No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to avoid and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and terrible in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more than twenty of them against our millions...The public would be fairly warned of the approach of danger. (Wells, TWOTW 110) The newspaper engages the morbid curiosity of its readers with reminders that the aliens are “strange” and “terrible” beings, while confidently reporting that the aliens will be defeated since they are outnumbered. With an assurance that they will be “fairly warned” if the alien attack gets out of hand, Londoners do not flee the city; rather, they are inspired to read more about the aliens, as “men [scramble] off buses to secure copies” (Wells, TWOTW 110). By reporting that the alien attack is threatening, but still somehow under control, the newspaper continues to follow an oscillating pattern of alarm and assurance and thereby keeps the public reading papers for the latest news. In Wells’s novel, the newspapers—and in turn the public—finally realize the serious danger the Martians pose, but Londoners continue to indulge their morbid curiosity with newspapers despite the complete chaos caused by the imminent alien attack in London. While police warn the public with shouts that “the Martians are Coming,” newsvendors “selling unnaturally early newspapers [come] brawling into the street: ‘London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences forced! Fearful Massacres in the Thames Valley!’” (Wells, TWOTW 112; 113). The reappearance of the newsvendors once again highlights the newspaper’s undertaking to profit from the alien attack and the public’s excitement to read about it. Referring to The War of the Worlds, Frank McConnell argues that “Terror, Wells seems to be saying, is the most inefficient of responses to the terrible” and that the narrator’s brother, who does 56 not panic during the alien invasion, responds appropriately (139). The narrator’s brother may not panic, but he stops to buy a newspaper despite the chaotic scene of “flying people on foot and in vehicles” all around him as the Martians approach the city (Wells, TWOTW 112). Even though the only viable means of information-distribution at the time was of course print media, the chaotic scene around the narrator’s brother undercuts his decision to read a newspaper for information on the alien attack. Here, the narrator’s brother represents the reading public and its morbid curiosity to continue reading accounts of the Martians even when the alien attack is imminent. The narrator—telling his brother’s story—goes on to describe the anxiety that engulfs the city as the aliens advance upon London: “the first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the dawn of the great panic” (Wells, TWOTW 113). In these famous lines, the narrator utilizes a literary device, drawing on figurative language to portray the immensity of fear and to capture the mass panic in London. The narrator engages in the same type of fear-mongering as the papers with his depiction of the horror-stricken city as the “dawn of the great panic.” This type of literary sensationalism is at the heart of Wells’s satiric attack on the newspapers. By creating this scene of Gothic horror as a sensational report, Wells exposes the newspaper’s use of the devices of fiction to sensationalize the alien attack. As a novelist, Wells was certainly aware of the degree to which fictional methods could sell copy, and he uses this knowledge to accuse the newspaper of slighting its civic responsibility. The oscillating pattern of alarm and assurance in the newspapers breaks down when it becomes clear that the aliens pose a real and immediate threat to London. Despite this breakdown, the press makes ridiculous attempts to sell papers, exposing their 57 reckless desire for profit. One newspaper vendor resorts to “selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic” (Wells, TWOTW 113). Putting his life in danger to disseminate news of the aliens, the newspaper vendor continues to make a profit even as he flees the city. Ironically, he publicizes news of the Martians who are terrorizing London while he himself is terrorized by the alien invasion, creating a “grotesque” scene as he runs around the streets of London selling papers. This scene of profit and panic undercuts the necessity of the newspaper as a means of information distribution since the public is now an eyewitness of the alien attack. The newspaper continues to overcharge the public for news of the aliens, which costs at least twelve times the normal price at a shilling a copy (Hughes and Geduld 213). Here is the newspaper report Londoners read before frantically fleeing the city: The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but in instant flight. (Wells, TWOTW 113) This report suggests mass destruction and complete hopelessness, describing monstrous aliens who “smother” and “destroy.” On the one hand, referencing Black Smoke indulges the morbid curiosity of readers with the suggestion of an unknown and mysterious black substance that looms over the city. But the newspaper’s confidence in reporting that there is “no safety” from the Black Smoke creates an overwhelming sensation of fear and anxiety for the aliens who methodically annihilate Londoners. In response to this dispatch suggesting “instant flight,” six million terrified Londoners move “en masse northward” (Wells, TWOTW 113). Though the alien attack poses a threat all 58 along, the public is not aware of the extent of this danger until the paper suggests fleeing London. The newspaper influences its readers’ political beliefs since the invaders are eventually recognized as a threat to the British public when the papers suggest they are taking over the land. Wells suggests the strong influence the papers have on the actions of the public and warns readers to be skeptical of their information sources. With the aliens terrorizing London, the newspapers are eventually forced to cease publication, but after the demise of the Martians, the first newspaper to recommence coverage fails to fulfill its readers’ lust for sensational news. The narrator discovers a page of the Daily Mail when walking through the damage from the alien attack in London. This allusion to a popular halfpenny newspaper creates a sense of familiarity and authenticity for contemporary readers. Referring to a page of the Daily Mail, Wells’s narrator reports, “I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time—a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the red weed” (Wells, TWOTW 188). In the novel, the remaining red weed—which is a plant native to Mars that the aliens bring to Earth— reminds the narrator of the alien invasion. This image of a newspaper page clinging to a thicket of red weed epitomizes Wells’s critique of the newspaper. In particular, this image recalls the image of “profit and panic” discussed earlier; both serve to remind the reader of the newspapers’ concern with making a profit from the tragic events of the alien invasion. Seeing a page of the Daily Mail is enough to inspire the narrator to buy a copy of the grossly overpriced newspaper, but he is disappointed with its contents: I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the Martian mechanism had yielded astonishing results. Among other things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time, that the ‘Secret of Flying’ was discovered. (Wells, TWOTW 189) 59 Given the newspaper’s history of printing sensationalized accounts of the aliens, presumably the “fresh” news the narrator seeks would allow him to continue reading shocking accounts of the Martians. The only “fresh” story in this Daily Mail article, however, claims that the inspection of the Martian’s machines led to the discovery of flight. The narrator is not impressed by this discovery; it clearly does not fulfill his desire for sensational news. The newspapers disappoint him because, as Wells suggests, after possibilities to sensationalize the alien invasion have been exhausted, the newspapers unsurprisingly do not have much to say. In fact, in the end the attack turns out not be much of a threat, since the aliens who “calmly and methodically [spread] their poison cloud” in order to “[take] possession of the conquered country” do not succeed. Bacterial disease prevents the Martians from succeeding at interplanetary imperialism, which suggests the sheer luck that saved England and the rest of the world from invasion. The scientific explanation for the unsuccessful attack does not interest the newspaper—and in turn its readers—as much as the violence of the alien invasion does, just as the political realities of anarchist terrorism in the late nineteenth century did not get the same attention from the papers—and in turn the British reading public—as the suggestion of sensational bombings. Nineteenth-century print media featuring stories about Mars provided a two-fold catalyst for Wells’s apocalyptic novel: not only did these accounts inspire his plot, but their sensational pandering also inspired the book’s pervasive satirical attack on contemporary periodicals and its warning to the reading public to be skeptical of print media. Toward the end of the novel, Wells uses an elaborate metaphor to solidify the connection between fact and fiction in his novel: 60 Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents, gardens—already derelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the southward blotted. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart. Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a newfound valley, exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting-paper. (TWOTW 131) This elaborate metaphor has not escaped the attention of critics. Alkon acknowledges “how skillfully Wells employs the technology of flight circa 1898 to vary perspectives on the events of his story, and thus on the real world about which it is a metaphoric commentary” (48). As I have argued, one real world connection that Wells hopes to establish is between fictional newspapers and readers in his novel and actual nineteenth- century papers and readers of the novel. The print media’s manipulation with the “monstrous pen” and the public’s indulgence in Mars mania represented by the “gout of ink” spreading across the map may not be readily apparent except from a distance; in this case an observer in a balloon has the best view of the panic and terror that ensues from media sensationalism. The War of the Worlds highlights how journalistic history favored sensationalism at the expense of sound reporting, in effect terrorizing the reading public. With the image of the monstrous pen, Wells draws attention to genre conventions, exposing print journalism’s reliance on fictional tropes—especially those of the Gothic— and cautioning the reading public for accepting them as journalism. Wells defamiliarizes these tropes and thereby creates a parodic subplot to satirize the nineteenth-century newspaper’s perpetuation of—and the reading public’s appetite for—Mars mania, practices that equally inform the paper’s treatment of—and the readership’s reaction to— political violence, which was covered in the same pages of newsprint. 61 The satirical tone in The War of the Worlds, though, disappears in a later adaptation of the novel. With his radio version, Orson Welles neglects the satirical attack of the media embedded in Wells’s novel, opting instead to create his own sensational account of the alien invasion. In 1938, when Welles and the Mercury Theater of the Air performed this adaptation, many believed that the invasion from Mars was actually happening; the result was nation-wide mass panic in the United States, as the New York News headline that appeared the day after the broadcast put it, “Radio War Terrorizes U.S.A.!” (Noble 107). Wells was not pleased with this radio adaptation and therefore telegraphed to his representative in New York, “I am deeply concerned at the effect of the broadcast. Totally unwarranted liberties were taken with my book” (Noble 117). His disapproval comes as no surprise, as the radio play poses as a reenactment of the media sensationalism that Wells satirically attacks in The War of the Worlds. The public’s hysterical reaction to the radio adaptation, though, provides further support for Wells’s critique of media sensationalism, as the audience is terrified by the suggestion of an alien invasion but all too willing to indulge in the sensational details of the attack. The suspension of disbelief is taken to another level with Welles’s radio play, as the audience believed this dramatization was a news broadcast reporting a real act of terror. While the radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds may not capture the critique of media sensationalism that Wells so carefully plots in his novel, it provides another lens through which to view our culture’s desire for these Gothic media spectacles and draws attention to the fear-mongering tactics that Wells sought to expose. 62 Chapter 1 Endnotes 1 Perhaps the best articulated summary of the sensationalism of Mars appeared in this review of three popular astronomers’ books in the Edinburgh Review. The article attacks not only a sensational book called Mars (1895) but also the astronomer who wrote it: “Mr. Lowell, as an astronomer, is a purely Martian product” (“New Views about Mars” 370). Implying that studying Mars can create the astronomer, this review alludes to the fact that American Percival Lowell—who suddenly lost interest in his career writing about the Far East—became an astronomer in response to the heightened interest in extraterrestrial life in the 1890s. In another book review of Mars that appeared in the periodical Science, the astronomer William Wallace Campbell accused Lowell of sensationalism and criticized him for “[taking] the popular side of the most popular scientific question afloat” (232). Other prominent scientists at the time also wrote wildly speculative newspaper accounts, sensational scientific-journal articles, and books, which seriously considered the possibility of extraterrestrial communication and sometimes supported it. 2 On 11 August 1894, Punch entertained readers with a poem titled, “A Vote of Thanks,” purportedly written by “a hard-up journalist.” Alluding to this poem in a letter, Giovanni Schiaparelli—a popular astronomer whose scientific discoveries led to wild speculation about Mars—rhetorically asks, “Is there a self-respecting man who still risks publicly mentioning this unfortunate planet [Mars, which has] become the field of action for all the charlatans of the world; which (according to what Punch of London says) will in the future supersede the great sea serpent and other similar enticements to the curiosity of the star-crazed?” (qtd. in Crowe 515). On 18 August 1894, Punch lampooned the nineteenth-century fascination with photographs sought to provide evidence for intelligent life on Mars with a piece titled “The Message from Mars.” This piece featured a dialogue between Mars and Mr. Punch, which was the assumed name of the editors and the masthead of Punch. Referring to the actual photographic and spectroscopic assistant at the Greenwich Observatory at the time—Mr. Maunder—the character Mars asks, “Wants to take my photo, doesn’t he? As if I were a mere politician, a popular comedian, or ’ARRIET at the seaside on a Bank Holiday!” 3 On 9 December 1893, a political cartoon in Punch titled “The Modern Medusa” depicted a knight representing law and justice defeating a medusa symbolizing anarchy. On 9 June 1894, this periodical continued to allude to anarchist violence with a comic lens, featuring a cartoon in which a cook remarks, “Lor, Miss Mary! I wonder they don’t treat them wretches like they do in France, and have the [sic] GALANTINED!” Three subsequent Punch pieces in 1894 also lampooned anarchist terrorism: on 23 June, a political cartoon alluded to Guy Fawkes, who was part of the so-called Gun Powder Conspiracy of 1605, on 7 July, a poem about anarchy ran titled “Vive la Republique,” and on 14 July, an article was featured titled “Anarchist Attempt on a Well-Known Bridge.” 63 4 Victorian England’s imperialism in the nineteenth century created fears of retribution. As Judith Wilt argues, “minor counter-attacks to Victorian imperialism—the Zulus, the dervishes, the Indian Mutiny, the Boxer Rebellion” play only a small role in fueling these fears of retribution, as the “Great Counter-Attack, the one that hits the west itself, occurs nowhere but in the Victorian imagination” (620). 5 Appearing in the Pall Mall Budget in June 1894, “The Stolen Bacillus” is believed to be the first story to explore biological terror in its attempt to, as Yorimitsu Hasimoto suggests, “articulate the possibility of the bacteriological weapon” (4). He convincingly argues that the events of contemporary anarchist terrorism influenced the writing of “The Stolen Bacillus.” 6 In a brief paragraph, Alex Houen suggests that Wells’ novel is “more realistic” than other novels that explore terrorism because it “show[s] the sheer concatenation of factors at play in terrorism’s impact at the time” (32-33). Hughes and Geduld suggest that the narrator “prepares to become a dynamiter, like the anarchists then much in the news,” while Brett Davidson proposes that the narrator is a potential suicide bomber (16; 48). They rightly argue that the narrator is compared to a dynamiter, if only momentarily, and would ultimately contend that the narrator’s desperation to defeat the aliens leads him to consider a terrorist bombing. In his essay, “‘Culture and Anarchy’ in The War of the Worlds,” Michael Bugeja writes, “In Wells’ book, chaos reigns along with the Martian invaders. Wells take pleasure in destroying Woking and environs and, finally, in sacking that great seat of class and society, London. With no form of government at work and with no military branch able to fend off the attackers, all classes of citizens struggle in anarchy merely to survive” (80). Crossley acknowledges the sensational cultural history of Mars and its importance to The War of the Worlds, surveying the “scientific and literary speculation” in the three centuries that preceded The War of the Worlds and arguing that Wells’s novel is intricately linked to the history of the telescope, which “set a new standard for fiction about other worlds” (83). Other literary critics, such as Hughes and Geduld, have also noted that Wells alludes to the “signaling mania” that characterized the 1890s in The War of the Worlds (201). Hughes also uncovers the role of yellow journalism—otherwise known as journalistic fear-mongering—in the publication history of The War of the Worlds with his exploration of sensational American newspaper adaptations of this novel, which were printed in the New York Evening Journal (December 15, 1897-January 11, 1898) and Boston Post (January 9-February 3, 1898). For other science fiction studies that discuss the fascination with Mars in the 1890s, see Fayter and Hillegas. For thorough cultural histories of the extraterrestrial life debate, see Crowe and Dick. For a cultural history that focuses entirely on Mars, see Sheehan. 7 Sheehan suggests that the 1894 Martian Opposition was “one of the most memorable oppositions in the history of Martian exploration,” especially due to Lowell’s controversial ideas about extraterrestrial life (98). In response to his observation of this opposition, Lowell published Mars (1895), which describes highly intelligent giant 64 Martians that are consumed with constructing an extensive canal system. Dick recognizes Lowell as “the most eloquent spokesman, and thus the eye of the storm that raged around the question of intelligence on Mars” (26). Critics disagree on whether or not Lowell’s Mars influenced Wells’s novel. Crossley doubts that it did since the British edition of Mars did not appear until 1896 when Wells was far along in the writing of his novel, while Crowe implies that Lowell’s book influenced The War of the Worlds when he writes, “Lowell’s Martians were well- suited to” H.G. Wells (104; 510). Wells does not directly allude to Lowell in his novel, but Hughes and Geduld provide convincing parallels between Lowell’s book and Wells’s novel in the notes to their critical edition of The War of the Worlds, suggesting that Wells was at least aware of Lowell’s theories in Mars. Whatever influence Lowell may have had on Wells, Crossley rightly suggests that “Darwin, not Percival Lowell, is the key influence on the Martian image” (104). 8 One early commentator on The War of the Worlds, in an unsigned review in the Critic, suggests that the novel “proceeds in journalistic style to tell of the coming of the first cylinder” and that it is “an Associated Press dispatch, describing a universal nightmare” (qtd. in Parrinder 68; 69). 9 In his 1933 Preface to The Scientific Romances, Wells announces his debt to fantasy, which Brian Aldiss has noted (26). Here Wells writes, “Hitherto, except in exploration fantasies, the fantastic element was brought in by magic…It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted…I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible” (qtd in Aldiss 26). Patrick Brantlinger takes the next step of associating these fantastic elements to which Wells refers with the Gothic, writing that Wells “believed that he had merely transposed elements of Gothic into what he called ‘scientific romances’” (32). The relationship between the Gothic and science fiction genres has been long- established in the critical literature and scholarship. For an overview on Gothic science fiction, see Botting’s “’Monsters of the Imagination’: Gothic, Science, and Fiction.” For a theoretical discussion of the merging of the Gothic and science fiction genres, see Brantlinger. In “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction,” he takes issue with the attempt by critics to associate science fiction with realism and rationality, arguing instead that “the conventions of science fiction derive from the conventions of fantasy and romance, and especially from those of the Gothic romance” (30). Ketterer also recognizes the underlying similarities between the Gothic and science fiction genres, both of which involve apocalyptic fantasies. For an examination of particular works of Gothic science fiction in the 1880s and 90s, see Wilt, who suggests “imperialism as a major contributing pressure for the mutation of gothic into science fiction” (618). 10 Previous scholarship has made the connection between Wells’s “The Man of the Year Million” and The War of the Worlds and has convincingly argued that his aliens are a metaphor for the men of the distant future. According to McConnell and Hynes, The War of the Worlds “is an apocalypse that does not take man to his final end, but 65 rather, more violently and dramatically, takes the final end to man as he is now” (362). Hillegas contends that “in the inhumanity of the Martians, Wells is emphatically underlining the idea that evolution, even though it may produce creatures with superior intelligence, will not necessarily lead to a better and better” (“Cosmic Pessimism,” 661). 11 I have chosen Hughes’s and Geduld’s A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds: H.G. Wells’s Scientific Romance for all references to Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which I have abbreviated as TWOTW. 12 In 1882, an unsigned article in the Daily Telegraph, which was reprinted in the New York Times, offered a reason for the canals or “long sea-ways, dug through the martial continents,” suggesting that “a mania for short cuts had seized the inhabitants of the planet” (qtd. in Crossley 96). As I already mentioned, subsequent popular astronomers, such as Lowell, also perpetuated Mars mania with their speculations about canals on Mars. 13 This meshing of different forms of print media is also apparent in the book reviews of the novel. The allusion to the canals on Mars was recognized by Wells’s contemporaries who approved of his attempt to incorporate contemporary scientific discoveries in his novel. For example, in an unsigned review in Academy, an early reviewer found The War of the Worlds plausible “from a scientific point of view” because it was “supported by the latest observations of the nature of the planet’s surface” (qtd. in Parrinder 72). 14 Wells added an allusion to the California Lick Observatory after the first serialized version of his story had appeared, as Hughes and Geduld point out (199). In a later installment of his story, Wells apologized for his “slight” to the Lick Observatory, where scientists reported lights from Mars in 1890. Hughes and Geduld do not find Wells to blame for his exclusion of this observatory, explaining that “1894 is singled out precisely because that sighting was of unusual brilliance” (199). Wells’s revision of the story to acknowledge the Lick Observatory’s role in reporting the mysterious light on Mars can be interpreted another way; the allusion provides a further clue for readers— especially American readers familiar with this California observatory—to make connections between the sensational accounts of contemporary astronomical discoveries and The War of the Worlds. 15 Reports of strange lights on Mars from observatories in France and California had been interpreted as signals from Mars, which spurred international interest in the possibilities of extraterrestrial communication. Using the curiosity created by the mysterious light as a point of interest—what Wells referred to as the “grain of fact from which the story grew”—he encourages his readers to connect his novel to this contemporary astronomical discovery (“The War of the Worlds” 391). Other periodicals, such as Athenaeum and Black and White, ran stories about the mysterious light at the time, the latter speculating explicitly that it was a message from Mars (Hughes and Geduld 199). 66 16 Here is my own translation: “the person of whatever country who finds a way, within the next ten years, to communicate with a star (planet or otherwise) and to receive a response from it.” 17 On 6 August 1892, The Times featured Galton’s “Sun Signals to Mars,” which proposed, “With funds and good will, there seems no insuperable difficulty in…sending signals that the inhabitants of Mars, if they have eyes, wits, and fairly good telescopes, would speculate on and wish to answer.” This article, written by a British scientist, not only speculated on the existence of intelligent life on Mars, but also suggested that extraterrestrial communication could be rather easily carried out with large mirrors and sunlight, assuming of course the availability of funds for scientific research. 18 In an unsigned review in Athenaeum, Williams does not believe that the newsvendors have any particular significance in Wells’s novel, suggesting instead that their inclusion detracts from the narrative: “Mr. Wells is content with describing the cheap emotions of…newspaper touts” (qtd. in Parrinder 67). 67 Chapter 2: “Destructive Ferocity so Absurd as to be Incomprehensible”: The Expectations of the Newspaper Reader in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intension of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest suspicion of any other object. -The Secret Agent (1907) The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift, constant march of foot traffic, the effect was of indifference, of a disregarded distribution. -The Secret Agent (1907) On the morning of 16 February 1894, readers of The Times in London awoke to grotesque descriptions of the “Greenwich Bomb Outrage.” The Times reported that “legs were shattered, one arm was blown away, and the stomach and abdomen were torn open,” and went on in this vein: “the man faintly besought help and then fell forward into a pool of his own blood” (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). Accounts such as this, which mingled journalism with the type of grotesque images popularized by Gothic literature, were prevalent in the 1890s, suggesting the reader’s desire for stories of dynamite outrages that utilized the tropes of Gothic fiction. One reader of The Times was certainly Joseph Conrad, who later made use of newspaper reports of the Greenwich bombing and other accounts of terrorist violence in The Secret Agent. These accounts were so prominent at the turn of the twentieth century that The Times dedicated a special column called, “The Anarchists,” to reporting these incidents. 1 Indeed, such concerns about anarchist violence are a predisposition of the novel, which, though not a Gothic novel, draws on Gothic tropes, characterized in part by grotesque descriptions such as those above. Though Conrad wrote The Secret Agent in 1906, his novel is set in the 68 1890s, and sensational accounts of terrorism in print media at the turn of the twentieth century, therefore, provided a two-fold catalyst for Conrad’s novel: not only did the newspapers inspire his plot, but their sensational pandering also inspired the book’s pervasive satirical attack on journalism and reading practices at the time. Part of Conrad’s critique is accomplished by placing himself in dialogue with other contemporary authors that also wrote parodies of political violence, which can be seen as a sub-genre of literature at the time. While examining the news coverage of the terrorist violence in The Times and contemporary parodies of political violence alongside Conrad’s allusions to news reports and literary works, I hope to demonstrate how readers in Conrad’s novel parallel readers at the turn of the twentieth century. In The Secret Agent, Conrad suggests—as does Wells in The War of the Worlds— that the reading public should be more aware of their information sources for news about acts of political violence. In fact, Conrad—who dedicated his novel to Wells—might have had The War of the Worlds in mind when he wrote The Secret Agent. Unlike Wells, however, Conrad does not trivialize the politics of terrorism by exposing readers’ panicked response to so-called threats but rather by revealing that readers are so inundated with reports of presumed terrorist violence—such as news of the Greenwich bombing—that they become indifferent to it. The Gothic spectacles that entertained the reader in Wells’s novel then no longer provided the reader with the same pleasure and fear for these spectacles in Conrad’s novel. The turn-of-the-twentieth-century reader’s indifference to these accounts of political violence suggests these reports—even if they depict the bloody aftermath of a bombing, for example—are not sensational enough to fulfill the appetite of the reader. By sensationalizing acts of political violence, the 69 newspaper desensitizes the public and thereby raises the stakes of symbolic violence such as terrorism to the point that news reports of anarchist violence must be “so absurd as to be incomprehensible” if they are to arouse the reader’s curiosity (Conrad, TSA 25). 2 In The Secret Agent, Conrad pokes fun at the absurd reasoning used to justify acts of political violence with his would-be terrorists who are aware of the press’s ability to influence how their acts of political violence are perceived by the reading public. In particular he exposes the ridiculous lengths the Professor—who carries a bomb at all times on his person—and Mr. Vladimir—the First Secretary of the Russian Embassy who plans the attack on the Greenwich observatory—would have to go to in order to fulfill the newspaper reader’s desire for sensational stories on anarchist violence. The extent to which these news reports would have to go suggests that news dissemination is a cycle in which the print media makes accounts of terrorism more sensational and the reader anticipates more each time, such that these accounts ultimately will fail to meet the reader’s expectations. The print media’s attempt to sensationalize violence for the reader is especially evident in Conrad’s essay “Autocracy and War” (1905), which highlights the effect that sublime reports of atrocities have on the readership and therefore provides a context for understanding his treatment of the press and the newspaper reader in The Secret Agent. 3 In this essay, Conrad suggests that the press manipulates how the reading public thinks and feels: “the printed page of the Press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about” (Notes on Life 90). Conrad exposes this artificial need for sensation in The Secret Agent by revealing the 70 reader’s expectations for newspaper accounts of anarchist violence that are both pleasurable and fearful. Previous scholarship has examined the role of journalism in The Secret Agent. 4 Critics, however, have ignored the treatment of the newspaper reader in this novel, with the exception of Peter Nohrnberg, who recognizes “Conrad’s satire on the Edwardian reading public in The Secret Agent” (51). 5 Conrad’s parodic treatment of the reading public, though, also applies to the late nineteenth-century reader since his novel is set at that time. While Nohrnberg examines what Conrad’s satire of the reading public reveals about literary culture, I focus on what it exposes about the politics of terrorism. In his 1920 “Author’s Note,” Conrad draws attention to the trivial anarchist politics at the turn of the twentieth century, which he explores in The Secret Agent with his treatment of the already old story of the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory: a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes. But that thing could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory, it did not show as much as the faintest crack. (TSA 229-230) The fact that the presumed attack does not even result in the “faintest crack” on the wall of the Greenwich observatory makes the speculation about the incident laughable. Conrad goes so far as to suggest that this supposed attack has nothing to do with an idea, let alone anarchist politics. In the beginning of the novel, Conrad suggests that politics have little to do with the paper’s attempt to portray the anarchist terrorist as a threat. He draws attention to the suggestion of foreign invasion that was prevalent in the accounts of anarchist violence in 71 the news at the turn of the twentieth century by revealing that the paper encourages xenophobia in an attempt to make the anarchist more terrifying for the reader. Mr. Verlock—an agent provocateur who admits that he is “in the habit of reading the daily papers” and therefore presumably aware of anarchist terrorism in the news—notices that Vladimir has “an amazingly guttural intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely un-European” (Conrad, TSA 16; 19). Verlock describes Vladimir by what he is not; he comes from somewhere other than England, and since he is from outside of Europe, he should be even more terrifying. Verlock draws attention to Vladimir’s accent in an attempt to create curiosity and fear of his otherness, not unlike the papers. Ironically, even Verlock—a proclaimed anarchist who is of both French and English descent—is disturbed by Vladimir’s accent. The way the narrator introduces Verlock in the novel also draws attention to the public’s xenophobia with a simile suggesting that the foreign anarchist brings disease from Europe: “he generally arrived in London (like the influenza) from the Continent, only he arrived unheralded by the Press” (Conrad, TSA 5). As John Lyons notes, in the early 1890s, press reports of a flu epidemic that arrived from the Continent were prevalent in The Times (235). The suggestion that Verlock is a disease from Europe about which the newspaper does not know, then, reveals the potential to create anxiety for the foreign anarchist’s presence in England. Conrad suggests that if Verlock’s presence in England were known, he would presumably be in the news as a potential threat not unlike the sensationalized reports concerning the flu epidemic or the coverage of the Greenwich bombing which speculated about Bourdin’s nationality. The introduction of the anarchist terrorists in Conrad’s novel suggests that 72 the nationalities of terrorists have more potential to create fear for the reader than their acts of political violence. Other turn-of-the-twentieth-century literature also ridicules the fear and anxiety created by the unknown nationality of terrorists, ironically suggesting that the real danger of the anarchist terrorist is that he is a foreigner. In G.K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (1908), for example, the narrator speculates about the origin of the presumed anarchist, Marquis de St Eustache: “whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East” (59). Though written after the publication of Conrad’s novel, Chesterton’s novel serves as another example of the turn- of-the-twentieth-century author’s parodic assumption that the anarchist terrorist is from outside of Europe; ironically, in the novel, the Marquis de St Eustache turns out to be British. In a footnote to “Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb” (1884), Robert Louis Stevenson points out that the terrorist Zero, whose nationality remains a mystery in the story, pronounces “bomb” as “boom,” spelling out for the reader that Zero is a foreigner. By depicting their would-be terrorists as foreigners who are invading England in their parodies of political violence, Conrad, Chesterton, and Stevenson expose and ridicule the English fear of foreign invasion that was prevalent in the news at the time. While Conrad primarily alludes to the news coverage of the Greenwich bombing of 1894 throughout his novel, in an early scene he refers to assassinations that were prevalent in the press at the turn of the twentieth century, revealing the influence of periodicals and previous fiction on Vladimir’s rationale for his terrorist plot. Lecturing Verlock on the type of bombing needed to get the public’s attention, Vladimir references historical acts of political violence and speculates about the contemporary reaction the 73 British public would have to similar accounts of terrorist violence in the news. Vladimir does not believe a political assassination would be an effective means to terrorize the turn-of-the-twentieth-century public because, in his view, “an attempt on a crowned head or a president is sensational enough in a way, but not so much as it used to be” (Conrad, TSA 23). Vladimir’s lack of interest in assassination as a form of political violence suggests that as a reader of the newspaper, he is so used to sensational news reports of political assassination that it hardly interests him—or, as he presumes, the rest of the reading public—as a terrorist plot. Vladimir could have in mind the countless attempts on the life of prominent political leaders or the seven successful assassinations of presidents and crowned heads in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which I mentioned in the introduction. A plot to kill a duke was the subject of a contemporary novel—Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886)—which Vladimir could also be alluding to when he suggests the reader’s previous exposure to assassination plots. The novel piques the reader’s desire for a spectacle of terrorist violence, but in the end, the anarchists do not go through with their plot, disappointing the nineteenth-century reader’s expectation for a sensational display of violence and thereby exposing the readership’s vicarious desire to indulge in a successful assassination plot. In The Secret Agent, Vladimir’s allusion to assassination plots suggests that even if they were successful, they would not fulfill the turn-of-the-twentieth-century reader’s lust for sensation, whether in the newspaper or in fiction. Conrad exposes the influence that contemporary fiction has on Vladimir’s “philosophy of bomb throwing” by objecting to attacking an art gallery because, similar to an assassination, it would not be sensational enough (Conrad, TSA 24). Here is the 74 reaction that Vladimir assumes the public will have to bombing the National Gallery: “there would be some screaming of course, but from whom? Artists—art critics and such like—people of no account. Nobody minds what they say” (Conrad, TSA 24). His objection to bombing the National Gallery recalls Stevenson’s “Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb” (1884), which involves a failed bombing attempt on this art gallery. 6 Vladimir dismisses bombing art as a worthwhile terrorist plot because it would not create the shock he expects from bombing an observatory, as we will soon see. Vladimir wants the entire reading public—not just the portion of it concerned with art, for example—to be shocked by his act of political violence. Conrad’s novel, then, suggests that just as the newspaper raised the stakes for symbolic acts of terrorism at the end of the nineteenth century, contemporary fiction also raised these stakes for the reader of works of political violence so that the reader’s lust for sensation created the need for more and more absurd terrorist plots in works of fiction. By suggesting Vladimir’s—and, in turn, the reader’s— desire for a terrorist plot that is more shocking than the attempted bombing in Stevenson’s story, Conrad exposes the press’s manipulation of newspaper readers, which heightens their expectations for sensational bombings not only in the news but also in the literature of terrorism. Vladimir goes on to allude to palace bombings in the press that were perhaps the most heavily covered terrorist attacks in the British newspaper in the 1880s, revealing the indifference that the turn-of-the-twentieth-century reader would have to this incident since not even the most shocking acts of terrorist violence in the 1880s would be enough to fulfill the appetite of this readership. Vladimir suggests that a palace would not provide the needed shock for the reader because it is “not the fetish of today” (Conrad, 75 TSA 23). In 1885, Irish Fenians bombed palaces in London, attacks which occurred almost simultaneously at Westminster Hall, in the Houses of Parliament, and at the Tower of London. 7 In The Secret Agent, Vladimir does not directly allude to these palace bombings, but as far as I know, these were the only terrorist attacks on palaces reported in the British newspaper at the turn of the twentieth century. On 26 January of 1885, the lead writer from The Times used excessive pathos to suggest that Fenian violence is more appalling and fearful than anarchist terrorism on the Continent, claiming that anarchists have “designs [that] are at least intelligible,” while “the Irish-American ‘dynamite fiend’…sweeps [crowds] at random into the meshes of his murderous plot” hoping “to strike terror into the souls of Englishmen, whether by the indiscriminate slaughter of holiday-makers and working people, or by the destruction of precious historical monuments.” Vladimir, though, does not make distinctions among the acts of political violence attributed to different terrorist groups in The Secret Agent, alluding to the palace bombings along with the other incidents of terrorist violence previously mentioned. Vladimir’s confusion of these different types of terrorist violence reveals the impression that these sensationalized newspaper articles, such as the reports of the palace bombings, make on him, suggesting his belief that neither historical incidents of Fenian or anarchist violence are sensational enough to shock turn-of-the-twentieth-century readers and that these reports of political violence obscure terrorist politics for the readership. This confusion between Fenian and anarchist violence was, according to Shpayer-Makov, not uncommon at the time: “with the growth of anarchist violence in the 1880s and 1890s, Fenian outrages were often retrospectively ascribed to anarchists” (492). 8 Conrad reveals that the print media’s sensational accounts of incidents such as the 1885 palace bombings 76 make acts of political violence—whether carried out by the Fenians or the Anarchists— become one and the same in the reader’s historical consciousness. With his proposed bombing of the Greenwich observatory, Vladimir suggests that terrorist attacks reported in the news must be absolutely absurd to attract the public’s attention, exposing the extent to which the print media must go to terrorize the public. Vladimir proclaims that not even a terrorist attack that functions as a “mere butchery” would create a panic among the reading public—because “murder is always with us. It is almost an institution” (Conrad, TSA 25). Vladimir, then, even dismisses what seems to be the most shocking material for the reader, the bloody aftermath of a terrorist attack that claims multiple victims. He is disappointed with the newspaper’s attempts at sensational rhetoric, particularly its “ready-made phrases” because “you can’t count upon their emotions either of pity or fear for very long” (Conrad, TSA 24). Here Vladimir reveals that he is aware of the manipulative process by which the press attempts to mitigate the reader’s response to acts of political violence and that he too wants to be part of this manipulative process. He aims to use propaganda by the deed to inspire the pity or fear in the public that will go beyond previous acts of political violence, presumably by creating a lasting outrage over the bombing that results in months of news coverage similar to the actual Greenwich bombing. Returning to the quote at the outset, Vladimir suggests that in order to create this lasting sensation and shock for the public, a bomb outrage must “go beyond the intension of vengeance or terrorism” and be “purely destructive” (Conrad, TSA 24). Part of the absurdity of this suggestion is contemplating what it would be like to go beyond terrorism. If we define terrorism as an act of political 77 violence that elicits the sensation of fear, then what would the sensation be if it were to go beyond this? For Vladimir, it seems to be carrying out a bombing that is recognized by the British public as having no meaning other than violence for the sake of violence: “What is an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying” (Conrad, TSA 25). In other words, the public must believe his act of political violence to be a threat of a magnitude that it has not encountered before. According to Vladimir, the observatory is an incomprehensible act of terrorism because it implies bombing science—in particular, astronomy—which has the “shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy” (Conrad, TSA 25). Barbara Arnett Melchiori acknowledges the influence that Stevenson’s “Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb” may have had on Conrad’s The Secret Agent, arguing that in the later the “implied attack on science is very like the attack on Shakespeare’s Monument as the representative of culture in Stevenson’s Tale” (74-75). But Vladimir would probably not agree that bombing the effigy of Shakespeare would provide the same shock value as his proposed observatory bombing because the former could be explained as a symbolic attack on a national hero. In Conrad’s novel, Vladimir’s desire for a bombing that he characterizes as pure madness—a symbolic attack on a monument that any rational thought process cannot explain—not only reveals the absurdity of his terrorist plot but also exposes the need for a senseless plot to attract the reader’s attention. If the attack is incomprehensible, then it cannot be political and thus not political violence or anarchism. Vladimir, then, suggests an attack that would create just terror for 78 the reading public, similar to the experience of reading a Gothic novel, which has no direct political correlation. The absurdity of Vladimir’s vision goes beyond shocking the public; he claims that his aim is to prevent anarchist terrorism by using propaganda by the deed, but his efforts at counter-terrorism expose his plot as a means to terrorize the public with print media. Here is his rationale for planning the bombing: “What we want is to administer a tonic to the Conference in Milan…Its deliberations upon international action for the suppression of political crime don’t seem to get anywhere. England lags” (Conrad, TSA 22). In the novel, this anti-anarchist conference is intended to influence pubic opinion so that the British do not readily grant asylum to anarchists who take refuge in England. This international meeting is fictional, as Lyon has pointed out, but Norman Sherry identifies a similar conference that was held in Rome in 1898, a conference with an aim to develop common anti-anarchist policies for Europe, but for which England did not send a representative (236; 246). 9 Conrad’s allusion to this conference is ironic since he suggests that Vladimir’s concerns about anarchist terrorism are unfounded and therefore the conference is not needed in the first place. Vladimir is disappointed with the newspaper’s failure to influence action taken against the anarchist presence in England. He expects that the absurdity of his bomb outrage will create the sensation of fear necessary to provoke professors to respond to this bombing by “writing to the papers” and that “a howl from all these intellectual idiots is bound to help forward the labours of the Milan Conference” (Conrad, TSA 24-25). He assumes, then, that his act of incomprehensible terrorism would create a panic among the public, a sensation in the press, and eventually “universal repressive legislation” to help prevent anarchists from 79 taking refuge in England (Conrad, TSA 23). The absurdity of making a point about the dangers of anarchist terrorism by carrying out a bombing of his own undercuts Vladimir’s desire to influence British legislation on anti-anarchist policy. As an avid reader of the newspaper that is aware of the press’s ready-made phrases, Vladimir goes on to “defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy,” suggesting the absurdity of this proposed symbolic attack (Conrad, TSA 26). Vladimir’s words are issued like a challenge to the press to explain the bombing which he intentionally plots to defy explanation, suggesting that he is more interested in manipulating the emotions of the public and its response to terrorism than influencing public opinion on anti-anarchist policies. Though the bombing would create more interest among the public, the press would presumably sensationalize it, which is more likely to pique the readership’s appetite for terrorist spectacles than prompt a serious response concerning the need for stricter British legislation. Ironically, Vladimir wants the public to believe that anarchists are responsible for the bombing, but his goal in plotting the attack conflicts with the anarchist cause—to abolish the government—since he wants policymakers to play a larger role in creating legislation. Vladimir, then, has a political cause, just not a cause about which he wants anyone to know. Conrad then suggests the trivial nature of terrorist threats at the turn of the twentieth century with the irony of Vladimir’s plan to engage in acts of terrorism in an effort to reduce political violence in England. The absurdity of Vladimir’s efforts at counter-terrorism in Conrad’s The Secret Agent is similar to those of a group of detectives that pose as terrorists in Chesterton’s 80 The Man who was Thursday, which also suggests that anarchist terrorism at the turn of the twentieth century only appeared to be a threat. In Chesterton’s novel, there is only one anarchist in the anarchist organization; one-by-one the other members are revealed as detectives disguised as terrorists. Sunday, the leader of the terrorist group, recruits detectives for an anti-anarchist secret taskforce at Scotland Yard to infiltrate an anarchist organization called the General Council of the Anarchists of Europe. The detectives’ absurd plan to plot a bombing in Paris to kill the French President and Russian Czar in an attempt to control terrorist activity is not unlike Vladimir’s ridiculous plan in The Secret Agent to bomb the Greenwich Observatory to reduce the anarchist presence in England. In a newspaper article, Chesterton reveals the irony of police detectives plotting acts of terrorism, describing Sunday as “the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order,” which suggests Chesterton’s deliberate attempt to create confusion for the reader between those who are doing the terrorizing and those who are keeping order (185). Like Conrad, Chesterton exposes the irrational fears of a whole anarchist network of terrorist activity set up in turn-of-the-twentieth-century London that was perpetuated by the papers at the time. Conrad further emphasizes the trivial nature of anarchist terrorist politics in The Secret Agent with his “perfect anarchist”—nicknamed the Professor—who claims that he aims to terrorize the public even though he does not make much of an effort to do so. Unlike Vladimir, who justifies his bombing plot as a means of counter-terrorism, the Professor is a would-be suicide bomber that does not even attempt to describe his actions as heroic: 81 I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means…It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly. (Conrad, TSA 49) Wandering the streets of London with a bomb attached to his body for his own protection from the police, the Professor is not affiliated with a terrorist cause. He aims to create terror for the sake of terror. His strategy is to terrify the public with what he is capable of doing rather than what he does. The majority of the public, though, is unaware of the fact that he is a would-be suicide bomber. It is only the police and the other would-be anarchists that know about his bomb, exposing the extent of his plot to make the public think he is deadly rather limited in scope. The Professor does not even have plans to execute bombings of his own; he is simply willing to provide bombs to anyone who may need them, not knowing or caring what would-be terrorists plan to do with his wares. In fact, the Professor is unaware of the planned attack on the Greenwich observatory. He only knows that Verlock plans to use explosives for a “demonstration against a building” because the Professor needed this detail to prepare the bomb (Conrad, TSA 56). The irony of the Professor’s desire for propaganda by the deed is revealed; he is critical of Ossipon and the other anarchist terrorists in the novel that only “talk, print, plot, and do nothing,” but he is a would-be suicide bomber that attempts to inspire fear without action (Conrad, TSA 54). By drawing attention to the Professor’s inaction, Conrad ironically reveals the Professor’s philosophy on bombing—which includes propaganda by the deed, even though he does not carry out any acts of terrorism—suggesting that his “will to use the means” is not as effective in frightening the public as he thinks it is. 82 The Professor’s ability to terrify the public has more to do with his uncanny physical appearance than his potential to carry out acts of terrorism, suggesting that he only seems to be a threat. Ossipon imagines the Professor’s round black-rimmed spectacles progressing along the streets among an omnibus, their self-confident glitter falling here and there on the walls of houses or lowered upon the heads of the unconscious stream of people on the pavements. The ghost of a sickly smile altered the set of Ossipon’s thick lips at the thought of the walls nodding, of people running for life at the sight of those spectacles. If they had only known! What a panic!” (Conrad, TSA 47) Ossipon presumably refers to the people’s ignorance about the bomb the Professor carries when he suggests the panic that would ensue “if they had only known,” highlighting that the Professor chooses not to make the general public aware of the fact that he carries a bomb and therefore makes it more difficult for him to terrify the public as a would-be suicide bomber. Ossipon’s sickly smile and his suggestion that the public would be so easily frightened by the Professor also reveals that Ossipon—who is also a would-be terrorist—overestimates the threat that an anarchist terrorist, such as the Professor, poses to the public. The personification of the Professor’s spectacles and the absurdity of the walls nodding and people running for life at the sight of his glasses undercuts the Professor’s role as the perfect anarchist, revealing that his appearance would be more frightening to Ossipon—and presumably the public—than the fact that he is carrying a bomb. The terrifying glasses of an anarchist are also employed parodically in Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday, a novel in which Saturday’s “opaque spectacles” make him the “wickedest of all those wicked men” (60). The suggestion that he is wicked because of his glasses rather than his role in acts of terrorism makes the threat that he poses as an anarchist terrorist questionable. Using the Gothic trope of 83 terrifying glasses, Conrad and Chesterton satirize these uncanny anarchists that are frightening like villains in a Gothic novel because of their appearance, not because of their terrorist politics. In The Secret Agent, the Professor’s ability to terrorize is further undercut when the possibility of sensational coverage of a bombing in the newspaper is more disturbing to Inspector Heat than a bombing the Professor threatens to carry out. The Professor, who plans to blow himself up if the police come near him, warns Inspector Heat of his intentions: I’ve no doubt the papers would give you an obituary notice then. You know best what that would be worth to you. I should think you could imagine easily the sort of stuff that would be printed. But you may be exposed to the unpleasantness of being buried together with me, though I suppose your friends would make an effort to sort us out as much as possible. (Conrad, TSA 69). Even though the Professor appeals to Inspector Heat’s anxiety for a terrorist attack, the Professor threatens Heat not so much with dying or even with the “unpleasantness of being buried together” with the Professor but rather with the “sort of stuff that would be printed” in the papers. The Professor suggests that the obituary in the newspaper would make a spectacle of Inspector Heat’s death, especially since the bodies would have to be sorted out. As a reader of the newspaper and an inspector of the aftermath of the Greenwich bombing, Inspector Heat believes the Professor’s threats, presumably because “he had too much insight, and too much exact information as well, to dismiss them as rot” (Conrad, TSA 69). Inspector Heat, then, is more concerned about letting the newspaper sensationalize his death than preventing the Professor from carrying out a terrorist attack. In other words, Inspector Heat is more concerned with the subject of 84 Gothic terror than the form that it takes. Conrad reveals that the newspaper—not the Professor—poses the real threat to Inspector Heat, suggesting that the public is so used to sensational accounts of terrorism that the Professor does not terrify it as much as he thinks he does. It does not take much to see how Conrad’s critique of media sensationalism applies to the society in which he lived. The contemporary reports in The Times that depicted Gothic images of Bourdin’s burned and dismembered corpse also exposed readers to repetitious images of the aftermath of the bombing. Returning to the 16 February 1984 article that I mentioned at the outset, The Times emphasizes the grotesque body that was found in the aftermath of the Greenwich bombing: “one hand was blown off and the body was open” (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). In the same column, the reader is reminded of the disfigured body once again: “His legs were shattered, one arm was blown away, and the stomach and abdomen were torn open” (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). Shocking the reader with several images of the “terribly mutilated” body, The Times creates the illusion that the bombing resulted in multiple casualties (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). The only victim of the terrorist attack, however, was the terrorist himself. The depiction of the victim could refer to anyone: “the man faintly besought help and then fell forward into a pool of his own blood” (“Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). Since the body had not yet been identified, all of the descriptions of the terrorist/victim are referred to with “the man” or “he.” The vague language used to describe the aftermath of the bombing makes it easy for the reader to forget that the terrorist and the victim are one and the same. The newspaper employs this ambiguous language to manipulate the reader. Invoking excessive grotesque images of the terrorist 85 attack, the paper confuses the reader into thinking that the scale of the casualties was larger than it was. The horrifying details of Bourdin’s mutilated body continue in subsequent newspaper accounts, and the repetition of grotesque images in these accounts aims once again to shock the reader. On 17 February, The Times reports that Bourdin is found “kneeling on the ground in a pool of blood, with his body slanting backward, but his head bowed forward upon his chest” (“The Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). The description continues, “the path was soaked with blood and the railings which border it were spattered with portions of flesh” (“The Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). These images, though, provide no new information for the reader, as they merely restate in different words that the body was dismembered or fragmented and clearly lost blood. The images reveal that the newspaper reader is bombarded with ready-made phrases to explain this incident, to which Conrad alludes in his novel, as we will soon see. Conrad pokes fun at the print media’s attempt to engage the curiosity of the turn- of-the-twentieth-century reader with grotesque images of the Greenwich bombing aftermath by suggesting that the way news travels among the public is more important than the news itself. In the novel, the presumed anarchist attack on the Greenwich observatory is first revealed by Ossipon, who looks to the papers for “the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about,” to put it in Conrad’s words. This need for sensational news is especially apparent in a conversation between the Professor and Ossipon at a beer salon. Here Ossipon hints at the startling news of the bombing, about which he has learned upon reading the account in the paper: “It may be you haven’t heard yet the news I’ve heard just now—in the street. Have you?” 86 The little man shook his head negatively the least bit. But as he gave no indication of curiosity Ossipon ventured to add that he had heard it just outside the place. A newspaper boy had yelled the thing under his very nose, and not being prepared for anything of that sort, he was very much startled and upset. (Conrad, TSA 47-48). This conversation highlights the print media as the main source of information distribution at the time, indicating not only how news spread via the brawling newsboy— which Wells also reveals in The War of the Worlds—but also how news traveled among the public by word of mouth. Ossipon’s desperate attempt to pique the Professor’s morbid curiosity expresses Ossipon’s strong desire to share news of the Greenwich bombing. The Professor’s lack of curiosity, though, frustrates Ossipon, who clearly aims to shock the Professor. The reaction the Professor has to the news is more important to Ossipon than informing the Professor about the incident, especially since Ossipon delays revealing the news. In fact, Ossipon makes “an effort to assume a sort of indifference” while he continues to try to capture the Professor’s curiosity for the bombing report (Conrad, TSA 48). Delaying the news is also a clever narrative technique that Conrad uses to keep readers of the novel in suspense, since they must wait a few pages to find out what is so shocking. Ossipon finally reveals that “there’s a man blown up in Greenwich Park this morning,” which does not surprise the Professor but serves to capture the reader’s curiosity and anxiety for terrorism with the revelation of a mysterious bombing (Conrad, TSA 52). As the narrative unfolds, Conrad exposes the reader’s waning interest in news of the Greenwich bombing, which we will soon see. Conrad goes on emphasize the newspaper’s attempts to encourage the public’s curiosity for morbid spectacles but suggests that readers like Ossipon are not satisfied with the grotesque descriptions of the burned victim of the bombing because presumably 87 they have encountered the same “ready made phrases” before, to use Vladimir’s words. Ossipon “scan[s] the pages rapidly” of a newspaper and sums up for the Professor what he reads: Ah! Here it is. Bomb in Greenwich Park. There isn’t much so far. Half- past eleven. Foggy morning. Effects of explosion felt as far as Romney Road and Park Palace. Enormous hole in the ground under a tree filled with smashed roots and broken branches. All round fragments of a man’s body blown to pieces. That’s all. The rest’s mere newspaper gup. No doubt a wicked attempt to blow up the Observatory, they say. H’m. That’s hardly credible. (Conrad, TSA 53) Ossipon’s comments—“there isn’t much so far” and “that’s all”—suggest that he is disappointed with this account of the incident but that he expects to read more about it in the papers. Like the actual Greenwich bombing news coverage, Ossipon’s summary of the fictional newspaper article suggests that the paper uses vague language to describe the presumed attack—a man—because the victim has not yet been identified. Ossipon, however, is not fooled into believing that the scale of the bombing is larger than it is since he is aware that the bombing claimed only one victim, explaining to the Professor that there “were fragments of only one man” (Conrad, TSA 53). Returning to the quote at the outset, the “disregarded distribution” of newspapers suggests that the crowd of indifferent newspaper readers presumably have the same desire as Ossipon for a more sensational account from the press than the “newspaper gup” they find in the paper (Conrad, TSA 59; 53). As this crowd’s and Ossipon’s disappointment suggests, the reading public looks to the sensational accounts in the paper as a good read and therefore disassociates what the press says with reality, hoping to be entertained by this news. Their expectations for newspaper reports are clearly higher than the ready-made phrases that attempt to manipulate them, making the spectacle of the presumed attack too 88 ordinary for their taste. The curiosity for this spectacle of a body blown to pieces does not last for the newspaper reader in Conrad’s novel as long as the curiosity for a heap of charred aliens does in Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Conrad suggests that even the grotesque description of the burned corpse from the bombing is not enough to keep the interest of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century reader. Ossipon’s lust for sensation becomes perhaps most apparent when he imagines that he witnesses a terrorist attack, suggesting that the newspaper influences the reader’s reaction to reports on terrorist bombings. While conversing with the Professor in the beer salon, Ossipon pictures the over-lighted place changed into a dreadful black hole belching horrible fumes choked with ghastly rubbish of smashed brickwork and mutilated corpses. He had such a distinct perception of ruin and death that he shuddered again. (Conrad, TSA 50). Ossipon’s account is sensation par excellent, clearly going above and beyond the description of the Greenwich bombing that he read about in the paper. Attempting to portray the Professor as a serious threat, Ossipon reveals his anxiety for anarchist terrorism. His journalistic account of the imagined terrorist bombing in the beer salon parallels the contemporary reports of the Greenwich bombing in The Times, which also exploited the morbid curiosity of readers with an eyewitness account. The Times seeks to make its report seem more authentic by including the following witness testimonial: “I trust that it may never be my duty to look again upon a sight so horrible” (“The Explosion in Greenwich Park” 5). The newspaper, then, uses the testimony of an eyewitness to shock the reader just as Ossipon creates his own sensational journalistic account to horrify the reader. Let us return for a moment to Ossipon’s reaction to the 89 fictional newspaper. Ossipon may recognize that the bombing claims only one victim, but he is seemingly unaware of the entire manipulative process whereby the anarchist threat is mitigated. He still imagines a large-scale attack even though he knows the Greenwich bombing has only claimed one casualty, revealing that the newspaper succeeds in manipulating his response to potential terrorist attacks. Conrad ridicules Ossipon’s hysterical response and trivializes his anarchist politics since he fears the sort of attack he would presumably support as a would-be anarchist terrorist. His ability to pose a terrorist threat of his own is called into question, as we will also find at the end of the novel when he is terrified by domestic violence. Ossipon’s fear for a terrorist attack is undercut by the repetition of journalistic accounts of the Greenwich bombing that sensationalize the incident. While the reader first learns about the dismembered corpse from the bombing in Ossipon’s summary of the newspaper article, the image of the fragmented body appears throughout the novel, which serves to expose how the newspaper inundates readers with the grotesque aftermath of supposed terrorist attacks. Chief Inspector Heat reveals the scene of the presumed attack as displaying “a heap of rags, scorched and bloodstained, half concealing what might have been an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast” (Conrad, TSA 64). Later Inspector Heat reminds us of this image when he tells Verlock about the grotesque body found at the scene in an attempt to get Verlock to admit to being part of the bombing: “Blown to small bits: limbs, gravel, clothing, bones, splinters—all mixed up together. I tell you they had to fetch a shovel to gather him up with” (Conrad, TSA 154). Inspector Heat embellishes this account with further grotesque imagery perhaps revealing the influence of the newspaper on his story. He is presumably unsatisfied, though, with the 90 news reports about the Greenwich bombing, believing the paper is “written by fools for the reading of imbeciles” (Conrad, TSA 154). He happens to have the extra special evening newspaper because of his “interest in horses,” not because he is curious to know what the paper has printed about the Greenwich bombing (Conrad, TSA 151). Ironically, Inspector Heat condemns the paper, while he provides his own journalistic accounts for the reader of the novel, using the same sensational catch phrases in which the paper indulges. By reminding the reader of Stevie’s burned and dismembered corpse throughout the novel, Conrad imitates the news coverage of the Greenwich bombing to expose how the newspaper’s attempts at fear-mongering desensitize the reading public to accounts of terrorist bombings. Conrad will not let the reader of the novel forget the grotesque image of Stevie’s mangled corpse, creating the most sensationalized journalistic account from Winnie Verlock’s point-of-view. Here is her hysterical account of the Greenwich bombing after she learns that her brother was the bombing victim: A park—smashed branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly flesh and bone, all spouting up together in the manner of a firework. She remembered now what she had heard, and she remembered it pictorially. They had to gather him up with a shovel. Trembling all over with irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very implement with its ghastly load scraped up from the ground…after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone. (Conrad, TSA 191). Her embellished journalistic account creates a Gothic spectacle of her own brother’s death, which is highlighted by the fact that she had only one source of information for news on the bombing. Her only access to this news is an overheard conversation between Inspector Heat and her husband, since she has not been outside and “the newsboys never 91 invaded Brett Street” (Conrad, TSA 150). If we compare her account to Inspector Heat’s description of the bombing aftermath, we find that she adds a grotesque metaphor of a firework to describe the explosion, but neither she nor Inspector Heat has witnessed the bombing. Inspector Heat’s account also does not mention pieces of flesh or a decapitated head, which are other embellishments to Winnie Verlock’s account. Toward the end of the novel, Conrad reminds the reader yet again of the repetitive details of the bombing that appeared in the papers, mocking the newspaper with a parenthetical narration: “the sister of the late faithful Stevie (blown to fragments in a state of innocence and in the conviction of being engaged in a humanitarian enterprise)” (Conrad, TSA 195). This journalistic imitation of an obituary reveals that the image of the dismembered corpse cannot even be left out of Stevie’s sister’s obituary. It also recalls the Professor’s suggestion that the press would sensationalize Inspector Heat’s obituary. Conrad exposes how repetitive displays of the dismembered corpse create Gothic spectacles for newspaper readers, fueling their desire for each new account to be more sensational than the last. Conrad’s imitation of the Greenwich bombing news goes beyond the grotesque aftermath of the bombing. In the novel, the Assistant Commissioner’s assumptions about the bombing are not unlike the actual claims made in The Times concerning the presumed attack on the Greenwich observatory, which reveals his xenophobia for the foreign anarchist terrorist. Here the Assistant Commissioner speculates about the perpetrator of the Greenwich bombing: “The inference is that he was imported from abroad for the purpose of committing this outrage. At the same time one is forced to the conclusion that he did not know enough English to ask his way” (Conrad, TSA 103). At this point in the 92 story, the Assistant Commissioner has no reason to assume that the perpetrator is a foreigner or that he has limited knowledge of the English language, and as we later find out, he is wrong on both counts. The Assistant Commissioner’s assumptions about the nationality of the bomber recall the assumptions about the nationality of the actual Greenwich bomber in The Times, which suggested that the bombing was carried out by a foreigner before this fact was verified. In the novel, the Assistant Commisioner later admits that the attack was planned “theoretically only, on foreign territory; abroad only by a fiction” because the plotting occurred in an embassy (Conrad, TSA 167). Here Conrad exposes the irrational fear for foreign anarchists, as this presumed attack was essentially planned in England, but not England by a technicality. It is carried out by someone that others assume is a foreigner, including the reader of the novel, who is led to believe that Verlock—who is of French origin—blew up with the bomb, even though the man who actually carried it out was Stevie, who is British. The fear that the attack was planned in England was also a concern expressed in the actual accounts of the Greenwich bombing, as I mentioned in the introduction. By poking fun at the assumptions about the actual news coverage of this incident in The Times, Conrad suggests the irrational speculation about, and fears of, a terrorist plot that was presumably planned in England and carried out by a Frenchman. Conrad parodies the reader’s anxiety for terrorist plots that are fueled by faulty assumptions with his story of a presumed attack that is not planned on British soil and that is not carried out by a foreigner. The anticipated bombing of the observatory never takes place, disappointing Vladimir’s—and presumably the reader’s desire for an incomprehensible act of terrorism—but Conrad provides a subplot of domestic violence that is more shocking for 93 the reader than his anarchist terrorist plot. Winnie Verlock—who is a British housewife—murders her husband in a scene that is arguably the most terrifying act of violence in the novel, suggesting that anarchist terrorism is so trivial that a domestic dispute is more dangerous than an anarchist conspiracy. Winnie is a woman to be feared because she does not hesitate or fail to carry out her act of violence, as the incompetent terrorists do in the novel. Ironically, it is the wife of a proclaimed anarchist—not an anarchist—that performs the most violent action in the novel. When Ossipon comes across the scene of the murder and realizes that Winnie has stabbed her husband with a knife to the chest, Ossipon admits that he is “terrified by this savage woman” and imagines himself “living in abject terror” of her (Conrad, TSA 213). Conrad, then, seems to contrast this serious subplot of domestic murder with the parodic subplot of anarchist terrorism in order to emphasize his satiric treatment of political violence in the novel. At the end of Conrad’s novel, the Professor continues to walk through London with his hand clutched around the detonator of his bomb, but no one takes notice of the would-be suicide bomber who “passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men” (227). On the one hand, this simile indulges the Gothic curiosity of readers with the suggestion of an unknown terrorist threat—like the beer salon bombing that Ossipon imagines—looming over London. The Professor, then, could symbolize the terrorist that is capable of carrying out the incomprehensible act of terrorism that Vladimir suggests is necessary to maintain the public’s interest in the papers. On the other hand, this image recalls the hysterical reaction to the Professor’s spectacles traveling on an omnibus that Ossipon also imagines. The Professor might be unknown to the public, but the figurative language used to describe him as a pest suggests that he is 94 like an unwanted insect or rodent that annoys the crowd rather than a real danger. The public does not know about the bomb the Professor carries on his person, just as it is not aware of Verlock’s and Vladimir’s roles in the bombing, but anarchist terrorism turns out not to be must of a threat in the novel, suggesting the futility of reporting their involvement. Ossipon even contemplates that the whole plot to blow up the Greenwich observatory might have been a hoax: “What an immense joke if Verlock had simply made fools of the whole of Europe, of the revolutionary world, of the police, of the press, and of the cocksure Professor as well” (Conrad, TSA 203). Ossipon’s suggestion that the incident is an elaborate joke serves as dramatic ironic since the reader of the novel knows the plot only appears to be carried out by anarchist terrorists. Conrad then ridicules the newspaper reader’s need for terrorist figures like Vladimir, Verlock, and the Professor who inspire the fear and desire for accounts of anarchist terrorism. The sensationalized accounts of the Greenwich bombing in The Secret Agent underscore the newspaper’s reliance on Gothic spectacles to create the Burkean sublime. By drawing attention to genre conventions, Conrad accuses print journalism of using fictional tropes, especially those of the Gothic, and the reading public for accepting them as journalism, albeit journalism that disappoints their expectations for sensational news and thereby that must constantly aim to be more sensational. The pattern that the news at the turn of the twentieth century follows in order to maintain the reader’s interest in anarchist terrorism is perhaps best described when the narrator satirically acknowledges that Ossipon’s “revolutionary career…was menaced by an impenetrable mystery—the mystery of the human brain pulsating wrongfully to the rhythm of journalistic phrases” (Conrad, TSA 227). Here Conrad suggests that Ossipon’s incompetence as an anarchist 95 terrorist is linked to his indulgence in newspapers. The figurative language reveals that the newspaper determines how the brain functions; readers are not only apathetic to what they read in the papers but they are unaware of the newspaper’s control over their thoughts, suggesting the harmful effects that the repetition of images—such as the dismembered body from a bombing—can have on turn-of-the-twentieth-century readers. Conrad ultimately suggests that print media is the source of terror, not political groups. The suggestion that the news media, which evokes the Burkean sublime, is a vital player in terrorism emphasizes the trivial role of anarchist politics and terrorism at the turn of the twentieth century. 96 Chapter 2 Endnotes 1 For more on British public opinion on anarchism, see Shpayer-Makov who “documents the nature and scope of the biased image of anarchism in Britain in the years 1880-1914, explores the major factors responsible for its formation, credibility, and prevalence, and examines the political consequences of that image” (488). 2 I have chosen Lyon’s 2004 Oxford edition for all references to Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which I have abbreviated as TSA. 3 For further analysis of “Autocracy and War” as well as Conrad’s other essays and works of fiction that reveal his opinions on the press, see Rubery. 4 David Mulry convincingly argues that Conrad drew on a variety of sources concerning the Greenwich bombing for his novel, including “the initial reports in the press to anarchist responses and an alternative fictional account of the anarchist background to the bombing” (43). Williams suggests that Conrad uses fetishism to “[draw] his most ironic and bitter picture of the ascendancy of information technologies and the threat such technologies pose to the primacy of literature” (45). Arac briefly analyzes Conrad’s essay, “Autocracy and War,” in relation to Conrad’s treatment of city crowds and news in his novels. Rubery briefly examines the role of the newspaper in revealing Winnie Verlock’s suicide. 5 According to Nohrnberg, “The Secret Agent participates in the paradoxical modernist desire to insulate or shore up literature against the encroachments of mass culture, while at the same time, breaking out or transcending the narrowly constructed category of the literary altogether” (59). 6 As Melichori has convincing argued, Stevenson’s tale is based on an actual attempt to bomb the Nelson Column, which failed in May 1884 (68). 7 Depending on what newspaper you read that reported the incident, you will find a variety of different details, including the size of the hole in the floor, the number of injuries, and even the location of the bomb. On 26 January, The Times dramatizes the moment when William Cole, the police constable who tried to rid Westminster Hall of a smoking bag dropped the parcel: “It was fortunate for him that he did so, for in an instant a terrific explosion burst from the parcel.” The group responsible for these “dynamite outrages,” as many referred to them at the time, was the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish terrorist group, who mainly targeted public buildings in England. According to The Times, the usual Saturday morning crowd gathered on 24 January to visit Westminster Hall. After viewing the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the tour continued down a stone staircase to St. Stephen’s Crypt. A woman discovered a smoking black bag surrounded with what appeared to be children’s clothing 97 in the passage of the Crypt. She showed her brother, Mr. Green, who recognized the bag as a bomb, rushed his sister up the staircase, and called out a warning to the police constable, William Cole, who was on duty in the crypt. P.C. Cole carried the smoking bag to the Crypt entrance, but the extreme heat coming from the parcel caused him to let go of the bag. He dropped it just in time, as the bomb exploded shortly after, resulting in a hole six feet in diameter in the floor and in the roof. P.C. Cole and Mr. Green were severely injured in the bomb, as was another police constable that was close to the bomb. 8 For more on the confusion between Fenian and anarchist violence, see Melichori who discusses dynamite novelists of the 1880s and 1890s who based their stories on contemporary terrorist acts. 9 For more on the 1898 anti-anarchist conference in Rome, see Jensen. The British asylum laws that many European nations objected to were the Extradition Act (1870) and the Aliens Act (1905) because they felt that these laws aided and abetted terrorism at the time. At the turn of the twentieth century, anarchists who took advantage of Britain’s asylum laws included Peter Kropotkin and Henri Malatesta, who were exiled in England. 98 Chapter 3: “A Methodical System of Terror”: The Print Media as Revolutionary Propaganda in Boris Savinkov’s The Pale Horse and What Never Happened “Have you read, George, what they say in the News?” “What about?” “Why, about the governor” “No, I haven’t.” “There it is. Read it, George.” I had no desire to listen to him, or to read the paper. I pushed it away and said in a bored voice: “Take it away. I don’t care to read.” “You don’t care? How can you take it like that? That’s what we did it for.” “For a paragraph in the papers?” “You make fun of it…But the printed word has great importance.” -The Pale Horse (1909) He knew very little about the Party; only those sensational, but really insignificant, items, which are published in Party newspapers. -What Never Happened (1912) Winston S. Churchill, in his Great Contemporaries, writes a sympathetic essay about Boris Savinkov, a Russian revolutionary terrorist, which concludes, “When all is said and done, and with all the stains and tarnishes there be, few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people” (133). Savinkov is perhaps most remembered for organizing the assassinations of Interior Minister von Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei. While Savinkov participated in at least thirty assassination plots as a member, and eventually leader, of the Combat Organization of the Party of Socialist- Revolutionaries (PSR or SRs), his involvement in acts of Russian revolutionary terrorism was essentially as an organizer. As Savinkov’s biographer Richard B. Spence points out, the PSR bestowed the title “General of Terror” on Savinkov for his role in the von Plehve assassination (38). Savinkov, then, developed a somewhat undeserved reputation as a violent revolutionary terrorist since he “never fired a gun, threw a bomb, or took a life. 99 He had planned killings and sent others to die” (Spence 72). His experience as an organizer of acts of revolutionary terrorism provided him with material for his novels, which he based on his own involvement in assassinations as well as other events of actual revolutionary violence. Savinkov’s The Pale Horse (1909) and What Never Happened (1912)—both of which he published under the pseudonym “V. Ropshin”—provide a subjective perspective on Russian revolutionary terrorism at the beginning of the twentieth century. 1 As I argue, Savinkov employs a curious mixture of Gothic sensationalism and political fervor in these novels to depict the failed attempts of revolutionary terrorists to organize effective acts of political violence. He suggests that these failures are due to the Party’s reliance on print media— a media which evokes the Burkean sublime to create a heroic image of the terrorist and to promote a “methodical system of terror”—rather than propaganda by the deed. By highlighting the terrorist’s response to bombings and to accounts of these attacks in his novels, Savinkov ironically reveals the effects that the Burkean sublime can have on the revolutionary terrorist. In his novels, participants in acts of political violence reveal their desire to indulge in these accounts, especially those that glorify the revolutionary terrorist as a heroic martyr. Savinkov, then, suggests that Gothic spectacles of terrorism create a pleasing terror for the revolutionary, especially by way of propaganda that garners more support for the revolutionary cause and enthusiasm for heroic martyrdom among terrorists who are already involved in the cause. The Pale Horse, which is a semi-autobiographical novel, was written a few years after the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, on which this novel was based. 2 In the novel, the first person narration is the key to understanding the critique of the terrorist’s 100 desire for the pleasing terror that accounts of political violence can provide. In the beginning of the novel, the narrator George O’Brien—who is a Russian terrorist posing as a British subject—not only indulges in but also creates his own sensationalized accounts of political violence. However, as the novel proceeds, he becomes disillusioned with these accounts that make a spectacle of terrorist violence. The narration sheds light on revolutionary politics at the beginning of the twentieth century since Savinkov based The Pale Horse on an actual terrorist plot. By making a connection between fiction and the political realities of an actual assassination, Savinkov reveals the influence of the Burkean sublime on the politics of assassination. Critics have acknowledged O’Brien’s change in attitude as indicative of his—and in turn Savinkov’s—doubts about the morality of terrorism. 3 Even Savinkov’s contemporaries believed that O’Brien questions the validity of terrorism in the novel. 4 Spence suggests, for example, that PSR members at the time criticized Savinkov’s The Pale Horse for revealing an “ambiguous attitude toward terror, and by extension, the whole moral basis of the Revolution” (93). But, as I will argue, Savinkov’s disillusionment with sensational displays of terrorist violence has more to do with questioning the efficacy of acts of terrorism rather than expressing a philosophical objection to acts of political violence. Savinkov reveals this disillusionment by exposing the revolutionary’s desire for violent spectacles to create a heroic image of martyrdom. In the novel, O’Brien suggests that his lust for sensation leads him to create grotesque images of his fellow revolutionary terrorists. O’Brien watches Erna assemble bombs, which reminds him of another bombmaker who accidentally blew himself up: 101 The blue tongues of flame—like serpents’ fangs—lick the iron…One of my comrades perished in doing similar work. His corpse, or, rather, pieces of it, was found in the room: the splashed brains, the blood- covered chest, the lacerated legs and arms. All this was heaped into a cart and carried away to the police station. (Savinkov, TPH 104) O’Brien’s use of passive voice in his account—indicating that the bombmaker “was found in the room”—suggests that O’Brien did not witness the explosion. The source of his information, then, is called into question. Perhaps he read about the incident, heard details from a fellow terrorist, or even created his own embellished account with sensational material. Whatever the case, the grotesque details in O’Brien’s account— mainly the “splashed brains,” the “blood-covered chest”, and the “lacerated legs and arms”—create a Gothic spectacle of his comrade’s death. The reliability of O’Brien’s account of this incident is even further questioned when O’Brien imagines Erna to have a similar fate: What if she should actually be blown up? If, instead of flaxen hair and wondering blue eyes, there should remain only a red heap of flesh?...Then Vania would have to do the work in her place. He is also a chemist, and can do the work well. (Savinkov, TPH 104) The sexual overtones in this passage—albeit sparse, with the description of the female bombmaker’s “flaxen hair” and “blue eyes”—suggest that revolutionary politics are not the focus of O’Brien’s vision of bombmaking. O’Brien is also not concerned about the possibility of Erna’s death, since he matter-of-factly points out who will take over the work when she is gone. While one might expect O’Brien to glorify her heroism, he does not focus on the dangers of her work or her willingness to sacrifice herself for the cause. Instead, he imagines her death as a Gothic spectacle in the form of a “red heap of flesh,” though this account does not sensationalize the incident to the degree with which he 102 recounts the previous bombmaker’s death. This grotesque image of Erna’s remains is not unlike the image of Stevie’s bloody, dismembered corpse in The Secret Agent. In The Pale Horse, O’Brien’s images of mangled bombmakers undercut the revolutionary terrorist’s desire for heroic martyrdom in favor of Gothic sensationalism. We later learn that O’Brien may have a personal reason for imagining a violent end to Erna’s life, since he wants to end his romantic affair with her. O’Brien’s apparent desire to search for a new bombmaker, then, may be tied to his hope to find a new romantic partner, which would suggest that his image of Erna blowing herself up undermines his seriousness for the revolutionary cause. O’Brien’s imagination continues to expose his lust for sensation. O’Brien reveals his morbid curiosity to see the aftermath of a bombing when he recounts the scene of an attempted assassination of a governor, suggesting that the revolutionary terrorist’s appetite for Gothic spectacles is similar to that of the general public in the novel. Here is O’Brien’s sensational account of the incident: I made my way through the crowd with great difficulty. The crowd swarmed in the lane. The smell of hot smoke still lingered in the air. Bits of glass were scattered on the pavement, the broken wheels were lying in a black heap. I could see that the carriage had been smashed to pieces. A tall workman in a blue shirt stood in front of me. He was swinging his bony arms and saying something quickly and excitedly. I was about to push him aside in order to come nearer the carriage, when suddenly I heard sharp shots coming in quick succession from another street on the right. I rushed in that direction. (Savinkov, TPH 112-113) The frantic public reaction to the attempted assassination—an assassination that O’Brien organizes—does not stop him from fighting his way through the crowd to get a glimpse of the destruction from the bomb. O’Brien describes not only what he sees—the swarming crowd, the “black heap” of broken wheels, the carriage “smashed to pieces”— 103 but also what he smells—the “hot smoke”—as well as what he hears—the “sharp shots”—and thereby reveals the limitations of his own perception, which seems to suggest that he has to rely on more than his vision to make sense of what has happened. This reliance on multiple senses also draws attention to Gothic sensationalism, which is based on sight and imagination. Savinkov undercuts the efficacy of Gothic tropes with O’Brien’s account of the attempted assassination, which makes a spectacle of terrorist violence. In fact, O’Brien is so anxious to get a good view of the bombing that he considers pushing aside someone in the crowd in order to be closer to the carriage. Savinkov equates O’Brien with a spectator among the crowd to undercut O’Brien’s revolutionary politics, exposing the revolutionary’s desire to vicariously experience the pleasing terror from witnessing the destruction from the bomb, which is not unlike the experience of reading a Gothic novel. In the novel, the journalistic account that follows the assassination attempt is less sensational than O’Brien’s account of the incident, suggesting that revolutionary terrorists are more interested than the newspaper in creating a Gothic spectacle of acts of political violence. Here is an excerpt from the fictional newspaper article in response to the bombing: As he approached the carriage he took the box in both hands and threw it under the wheels. A terrible explosion followed. Fortunately, the governor was unhurt. He rose to his feet unaided and walked to the nearest porch, where he remained until the arrival of his escort, which had been ordered by telephone. The governor’s coachman was badly wounded in the head. He died after he had arrived at the hospital. (Savinkov, TPH 114) This matter-of-fact account reveals details of the bombing incident but does not emphasize the violence of the terrorist attack and certainly does not attempt to make a 104 spectacle of the bombing. In particular, this report does not exploit the potential for grotesque details, simply indicating that a “terrible explosion” occurred and that the governor’s coachman was “badly wounded in the head.” In fact, this excerpt even focuses on mundane details, including the governor walking to a nearby porch and waiting for his escort to arrive. The newspaper article goes on to describe the pursuit of the assassin, but once again the incident is not dramatized, as the account reveals matter- of-factly that the assassin killed two police officers and wounded a third in the stomach. By juxtaposing this report that downplays the violence of the bombing with O’Brien’s more explicit account of the incident in the novel, Savinkov suggests the revolutionary terrorist’s desire for Gothic spectacles exceeds that of the general reading public, for which this report of terrorist violence is intended. The unsuccessful assassination in the novel is followed by a second attempt on the governor’s life, involving another bombing that O’Brien organizes and for which he is present. O’Brien reveals his desire not only to view the scene surrounding the assassination but also to read about the attack in the newspaper, suggesting that the appearance of the account in print media is just as important to the revolutionary terrorist as the success of the assassination. Here is O’Brien’s sensationalized account of the bombing: I heard the familiar cast-iron rumble. A cab-driver’s horse rose on its hind legs startled by the noise. A lady in a large black hat, who was walking in front of me, shrieked and sat down on the sidewalk. A policeman stood still with a pale face for a moment, then rushed in the direction of the sound. I ran to the Surikov house. Again there was the crash of glass and the smell of smoke. I forgot all about my box, the contents of which beat against its sides with quick measured knocks. I heard cries, and I knew for certain: this time he was killed. 105 An hour later extra editions announcing the news were sold in the streets. I held the paper in my hands, and my eyes were dim with excitement. (Savinkov, TPH 127-128) O’Brien’s box contains a backup bomb that he is supposed to throw in the event that his fellow revolutionary fails to carry out the assassination. O’Brien, though, is so caught up in the sounds that result from the explosion and the fearful reaction of the crowd—the shrieks of a woman, the pale face of the policemen, and even a startled horse—that he apparently forgets about his role as a potential bomber in this act of political violence and neglects the contents of his box. O’Brien assumes the governor is killed when he hears “cries” from the crowd after the explosion. Even though O’Brien claims that he is certain about the outcome of the terrorist attack, he buys a newspaper announcing the news and thereby reveals his desire to read a written account of the incident, presumably in order to vicariously experience what he could not see as a witness of the assassination. This time we are not privy to the contents of the newspaper, so whether or not the paper has matter- of-factly recounted the assassination is unclear, but O’Brien’s excitement to read news about this bombing suggests that print media is more entertaining than informative for the revolutionary. By omitting the newspaper account of a successful bombing, Savinkov reveals that he is more concerned with the outcome and results of terrorist attacks than with the rhetoric used to describe them. O’Brien’s desire to read about the bombing in the newspaper mirrors Savinkov’s own desire to read actual newspaper accounts about assassinations he organized at the turn of the twentieth century. 5 Savinkov’s view of print media seems to have changed between then and the time during which he was writing the novel, since he reveals his skepticism of newspaper accounts of terrorism in The Pale Horse. Savinkov’s skepticism is not unlike O’Brien’s indifference to 106 newspaper reports later in the novel, as we will soon see. In the novel, Savinkov exposes the revolutionary terrorist’s preoccupation with recording acts of political violence, suggesting that written accounts of acts of terrorism take the focus away from the acts themselves. Unlike the newspaper article that recounts the first bombing attempt without making a spectacle of the incident, the eyewitness account of the successful assassination written by the bomber draws on sensational details, revealing his desire to have his participation in the incident recorded as a heroic account. Here is the first-person account of the attack written in a letter that Vania, the bomber, sends from prison to his fellow revolutionary terrorists: Contrary to my desire…I was not killed. I threw the bomb from a distance of three paces right into the window of the carriage. I saw the governor’s face. He leaned hastily back when he saw me and threw up his hands to protect himself. I saw how the carriage was smashed to pieces: the smoke and the splinters flew in my face. I fell down. When I got up I looked around and saw bits of clothing and the dead body lying a few steps away. I was not wounded, although blood was streaming from my face and the sleeves of my coat were burned away. I walked on, but the next moment some one seized me from behind with strong hands. I made no resistance. They took me away. (Savinkov, TPH 128) This account of the bombing—which seems to serve no other purpose than to dramatize the event—raises the question of why Vania decides to write a letter detailing his role in the assassination. Vania’s letter is not needed to inform his fellow revolutionaries about the success of the assassination, since the newspaper would have been readily available to them if they had not witnessed or heard about the outcome of the attack. Vania’s account makes a spectacle of the incident with descriptive verbs that sensationalize his experience, particularly the carriage that was “smashed,” the smoke and the splinters that 107 “flew” in his face, the coat sleeves that were “burned,” and the blood, presumably from the governor, that was “streaming” down his face. Vania glorifies his role in the assassination by detailing the danger in which he is placed to carry out the attack, suggesting, for example, that he had to throw the bomb into the carriage from “a distance of three paces.” Vania even points out that he had hoped to die in the bombing, revealing that he wants to be remembered as a heroic martyr who is willing to sacrifice himself for the cause. His desire for blood sacrifice leads him to evoke the Burkean sublime to create a heroic image of his courage during the assassination, in effect drawing more attention to himself than to the revolutionary cause. Vania’s hope to be both a hero and a martyr recalls Stepniak’s suggestion that the revolutionary terrorist aims to be a sublime figure of terror and fascination, which was mentioned in the introduction. In addition, Vania reveals that he does not resist being captured after carrying out the bombing, providing further evidence of his desire to make his fellow terrorists aware of his heroic efforts. With the bomber’s glorified account of his participation in the assassination, Savinkov exposes the revolutionary terrorist’s attempt to influence how acts of terrorist violence are written down and remembered. The dramatic shift in perspective from O’Brien, who only witnesses bombings in earlier scenes, to Vania, who carries out a terrorist attack, further reveals the influence of the Burkean sublime on the revolutionary terrorist by providing a first-hand account. The written accounts of terrorist bombings that appear earlier in the novel are further undercut later in novel when O’Brien suggests that the assassination of the governor is carried out for an insignificant account of the incident in the newspaper. Returning to the quote at the outset, O’Brien has a conversation with a fellow 108 revolutionary, Heinrich, which reveals the former’s indifference to, and the latter’s desire to, read the newspaper account of the assassination. By claiming that the incident was carried out “for a paragraph in the papers,” O’Brien suggests that revolutionary terrorists are preoccupied with how others will interpret their participation in acts of political violence. Given his excitement to read a newspaper account of the assassination earlier in the novel, O’Brien’s lack of interest for this other account of the incident in the paper reveals his increasing disillusionment with print media, particularly the negative effects it can have on the revolutionary cause. On the other hand, Heinrich’s desire to read the paper suggests that he wants to be entertained by the report of the assassination, whether to read a heroic account of a fellow revolutionary terrorist’s participation in the incident or to vicariously experience what it would be like to witness a terrorist bombing. With this conversation between O’Brien and Heinrich in the novel, Savinkov problematizes the terrorist’s belief that the “printed word has great importance” for the revolutionary cause. Savinkov suggests that newspaper accounts do not make acts of political violence significant—and can even trivialize these acts—thereby revealing his disillusionment with print media as useful propaganda for the revolutionary terrorist. O’Brien further reveals that revolutionary terrorists are concerned with how acts of political violence are perceived, which can trivialize their role in these acts. Here he uses a theatrical metaphor to compare his and his fellow revolutionaries’ participation in acts of terrorist violence to a puppet show: To-day I am on the stage with Vania, Fedor, and the governor. Blood is flowing. To-morrow I will be dragged on again. Carabineers are on the scene. Blood is flowing. In a week it will be again the admiral, Pierrette, Pierrot. Blood is flowing –that is, cranberry juice… Come to the show—it is open to the public… 109 Is it vaudeville or is it drama? Cranberry juice or blood? Puppet show or life. (Savinkov, TPH 174-175) Here Savinkov alludes to a Russian tragifarce, Alexander Blok’s The Puppet Show or The Fairground Booth (1906), a one-act play in which a clown complains to the audience that he is bleeding cranberry juice, but after he supposedly dies, he jumps up and winks at the audience. 6 Savinkov’s allusion to this sensationalized play not only undercuts the revolutionary’s role in acts of political violence but also exposes the revolutionary’s role in creating spectacles of terrorism. In the novel, O’Brien is critical of his own role in staging acts of political violence as a performance. His elaborate metaphor for acts of terrorism as acts in a puppet show suggests that revolutionary terrorists are not even in control of their own actions; they are puppets with someone else pulling the strings. He suggests that reality and fiction become so entangled that they become impossible to differentiate, such that participants in acts of terrorist violence function like performers in a puppet show, a puppet show that continues to be staged with no beginning or end to it. The suggestion that revolutionary terrorism is repeatedly staged without making progress exposes the negative effects that sensationalizing acts of political violence can have on the effectiveness of terrorism. Peter G. Christensen argues that Savinkov’s theatrical metaphor “give[s] greater weight to the sense of human absurdity and the temptation of philosophical nihilism”(5), but this metaphor specifically draws attention to the spectacle of terror, which parodically reveals the role of revolutionaries as performers for each other and in turn the public. With this theatrical metaphor, Savinkov ironically comments on the revolutionary terrorist’s role in providing pleasing terror for both fellow 110 revolutionaries and the general public and thereby exposes the dangers of creating spectacles of political violence. Savinkov’s depictions of revolutionary terrorists that do not take their participation in acts of political violence seriously has led some critics to focus on the morality of terrorism not only in Savinkov’s The Pale Horse but also in his later novel, What Never Happened. Spence, for example, argues that What Never Happened reveals that Savinkov “unequivocally condemned terrorism, and seemed to pronounce the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the movement” (94). On the other hand, Christensen contends, in What Never Happened the failure of the revolutionary movement is not due to its moral failings but to its political problems, which have two sides: first of all, the PSR lacks sufficient unity and direction; and second, the difficulty of controlling mass political events is exposed. (6) Christensen’s suggestion that the politics of terrorism is the main concern in this novel is supported by Savinkov’s focus on the failures of print media. Ironically, Savinkov parodies PSR newspapers in What Never Happened, even though he first publishes this novel in the same sort of print media that he condemns, a PSR organ, Zavety. On the one hand, Savinkov’s publication of his story in one of his Party’s newspapers undercuts his critique of the PSR’s print media. On the other hand, Savinkov emphasizes his Party’s ineffective organization of terrorist violence in the medium he deems responsible for the PSR’s failure to efficiently carry out acts of political violence. As I argue, Savinkov ironically employs the Burkean sublime in What Never Happened to expose the Party’s sensational rhetoric, which he suggests contributes to its failure to organize systematic terror. 111 In an early scene of the novel, a PSR newspaper writer, Andrey Bolotov, reveals the futility of sensational rhetoric used to promote acts of political violence, particularly with the Party’s proclamation of a “methodical system of terror.” Bolotov reflects on an editorial that he wrote for his Party’s newspaper, The Dawn: He picked up the sheets and read: “We are concerned with political terror as one of the methods in our fight, as one element in our party tactics. Only a methodical system of terror, which conforms to the other tactics and which is in harmony with the aims and general conditions of our fight, can come under discussion…” As he read these lines, they seemed to him cold, indifferent and hypocritical. He felt ashamed. “Have I really written these words? A methodical system of terror…A terror that arouses…that disorganizes…that dominates…What childish arguments.” (Savinkov, WNH 31-32) Bolotov condemns his own rhetoric used to promote systematized terror, suggesting that even revolutionaries who write propaganda in the PSR newspaper do not believe what they write. As Bolotov reconsiders his own editorial, the words seem “indifferent” and “hypocritical” to him, presumably because he has no direct experience in carrying out acts of political violence. In fact, we learn earlier in the novel that Bolotov “had never taken part in terrorist ‘undertakings’ and never had killed anyone” (Savinkov, WNH 22). In particular, he questions the Party’s claim that “a methodical system of terror” has the power to “arouse,” “disorganize,” and “dominate,” realizing the futility of his empty rhetoric since he does not even know what systematized terror entails, let alone what it would do. The suggestion that terror can be organized and controlled draws attention to the relationship between the terms “terror” and “terrorism.” In referring to revolutionary terrorism as a “system of terror,” Bolotov, and by extension the PSR, conflates the political meaning of “terror”—acts of political violence—with the Gothic meaning of “terror”—the sensation of fear that these acts are intended to elicit. In the novel, the 112 PSR’s rhetoric revealing its desire to methodically systematize terror recalls the rhetoric of the French revolutionary tribunals during the Reign of Terror, which suggested the response to terrorism—the sensation of fear—could be controlled. Savinkov suggests that revolutionary politics have little to do with the Party’s print media since the goal of this propaganda is exposed as a ploy to make revolutionary terrorists feel powerful by sensationalizing their ability to create fear like villains in Gothic novels. As we will later see, Bolotov is criticized for being a terrorist in words only, which further questions the role of sensational rhetoric in promoting the revolutionary cause. Bolotov goes on to question the authenticity of the PSR’s rhetoric in newspapers, which presumably aim to create a heroic image of the terrorist for the Party and thereby encourage participation in acts of political violence. Here is Bolotov’s cynical reaction to the projected hanging of his fellow revolutionary terrorists: “And David will die and so will Vanya…They will both hang. And I shall write in the Party organ: ‘Our comrades went to the gallows honourably and courageously…’ Wherein, then, lies the truth?” (Savinkov, WNH 32). Bolotov’s word choice—“shall write”—implies that he has not yet written this story for the newspaper but that he will inevitably record it this way because the Party determines how stories are recorded. Bolotov questions the authenticity of the Party’s presumed account about the revolutionary terrorists—which is determined before the hanging even takes place—by suggesting the impossibility of determining the “truth” about the situation from the PSR newspaper. He goes on to elaborate his imagined account of how Vanya will be remembered by the Party: “To us he is either a ‘hero’ or a ‘fanatic of terror,’ or—worst of all—‘a worshipper of the bomb,’ ‘an unreasoning bomb- thrower.’…Wherein, then, lies the truth?” (Savinkov, WNH 33). Using the pronoun, 113 “us,” Bolotov draws attention to his own complicity in creating inconsistent accounts about Vanya. The repetition of the question—“wherein, then, lies the truth?— emphasizes Bolotov’s skepticism of the Party’s intentions, suggesting that the rhetoric used to describe revolutionary terrorists allows the Party to manipulate how political violence is perceived. By presenting different opinions that Party members might have about a bomber’s role in revolutionary terrorism, Bolotov reveals the potential for disagreements even among these members as to how acts of terrorist violence should be viewed. In fact, one would expect a member of a Party that supports terrorism to see the role of the revolutionary in acts of political violence as courageous or heroic, rather than fanatical or unreasonable. The sensational rhetoric used to describe the bomber reveals the Party’s desire to create a spectacle of terrorist violence. By exposing the dissent among Party members, Savinkov suggests that the rhetoric used in PSR newspapers contributes to the ineffectiveness of systematic terror. Another Party member, Vladimir Gliebov—known as “Volodya”—condemns other members—and by extension himself—who do not directly participate in acts of political violence, especially those that write sensational accounts of revolutionary violence to create an image of the terrorist as a heroic martyr. Here Volodya accuses Bolotov of writing revolutionary propaganda rather than taking an active role in terrorism: If you’re a member of the Party, which recognizes terror, you must be able to come out any moment with a bomb in your own hands…what good is it to preach revolt when you yourself like a coward keep away? Just think— you write articles on terror, you harangue, you shout, but you yourself don’t go in for terror. (Savinkov, WNH 83) 114 Volodya claims that to be a Party member you have to carry bombs—to practice terrorism—not just “preach revolt.” The suggestion that a revolutionary must actively participate in terrorism to be worthy of Party membership is a direct critique of the actual organization of the PSR at the beginning of the twentieth century. As I mentioned in the introduction, the PSR mainly consisted of members involved in mass organization and propaganda, while only a few members carried out terrorist violence as part of the Combat Organization. In the novel, Volodya disapproves of Party members not only who write accounts on terror but also who read them. He goes on to criticize revolutionaries who are excited to read about a successful assassination in which they did not directly participate: The dear comrades, the honorable members of the Party, on reading the telegram about Plehve’s death, were intoxicated with joy. Each one of them ought to die of shame that it wasn’t he who killed Plehve. He ought to be bursting with envy. But not a bit. We are terrorists, of course, in words only. So they took a drink, sang the Marseillaise, and that’s all. Let the Sazonovs create terror, and we shall write books about terror, and have them printed across the frontier. (Savinkov, WNH 83-84) Volodya alludes to the French Revolution with his reference to the Marseillaise, which was the rallying song at that time. He condemns the attempts by revolutionary terrorists to create a romanticized vision of revolutionary terrorism by celebrating the success of the assassin as though they too took part in the heroic deed. By indicating the revolutionaries found out about the assassination via telegram, Volodya emphasizes the extent of their lack of involvement in the incident. The suggestion that a revolutionary terrorist should be the one to throw the bomb in an assassination or else “die of shame,” or at least “be bursting with envy,” reveals that Volodya is more concerned with the heroic image of the terrorist than with the success of the assassination and what this 115 success means for the revolutionary cause. Since Savinkov did not actually throw the bomb that killed von Plehve, the allusion to this assassination might suggest Savinkov’s regret that he did not play a more active role in the incident. In the novel, Savinkov exposes incompetent revolutionaries who are drawn to the sensational rhetoric of political violence but who do not know what it means to carry out acts of terrorist violence. Here is a conversation among revolutionary terrorists— including Seriozha, Volodya, David, and Bolotov—who want to “make terror”: “What do you think Seriozha?” “What I think? There’s nothing to think,” Seriozha answered, lighting a cigarette. “We must make terror.” “How? How? What do you mean? How make terror?” David broke in hurriedly. “How?” Volodya frowned again. “Well, that’s a minor matter. We’ll see later how to go about it. Have we all got revolvers? All right. Are you with us, Bolotov?” (Savinkov, WNH 95). This conversation dramatically reveals that these revolutionary terrorists who attempt to engage in political violence do not even know what actions constitute terror. In fact, some of them—including Bolotov, who only writes about revolutionary violence—have no experience participating in acts of terrorism. Returning to the quote at the outset, David’s knowledge of the Party comes from only “those sensational, but really insignificant, items, which are published in Party newspapers,” such as the articles that Bolotov writes (Savinkov, WNH 34). The revolutionaries eventually decide to make terror by carrying out the assassination of Yevgeny Pavlovich Sliozkin, the Colonel of Gendarmes, in his own home. Volodya pronounces a death sentence on Sliozkin: “By the decision of the Moscow terrorist organization you have been sentenced to death by hanging” (Savinkov, WNH 104). All of the revolutionaries, except for Volodya, end up 116 fleeing the scene, presumably because they change their mind about participating in an act of political violence. Volodya succeeds in killing Sliozkin, but there is nothing systematic about how he engages in this act of terrorist violence. He is guilty of using sensational rhetoric—not unlike Bolotov—to explain his act of political violence, attempting to make the interaction with his victim like a trial. By issuing a death sentence, Volodya insists on using rhetoric to “make terror,” even while in the midst of carrying out an act of political violence. With this scene, Savinkov draws attention to futility of sensationalized rhetoric, exposing the revolutionary’s inefficient attempts to organize systematized terror. In the novel, the newspaper is not the only source of sensational rhetoric for the revolutionary. Bolotov relies on novels to inform him about what constitutes terror, revealing fiction as an influence on the revolutionary who engages in acts of political violence. Here Bolotov describes his experience with creating terror while participating in revolutionary warfare: For the first time in his life he knew, not from talk or books, what an uprising, barricades, murder, death meant. To his surprise he saw it was all much simpler, plainer, easier than the novels made it appear to be. (Savinkov, WNH 117) Bolotov admits to reading fictional accounts of political violence, presumably to be entertained by the heroic actions of revolutionary terrorists. Novels, of course, provide accounts of terrorist violence that are even more inauthentic than the PSR newspaper reports that Bolotov criticizes earlier in What Never Happened, which makes his indulgence in fiction ironic. The fact that he first learns about terrorism from a novel reveals his interest in vicariously experiencing the sensation that reading about political 117 violence provides, like the pleasing terror of a Gothic novel. Bolotov’s suggestion that actual revolutionary terrorism is “simpler, plainer, easier” than the novels depict it on the one hand reveals that his terror tactics may not be as effective as he thinks they are and on the other hand that fiction and fact become so entangled in his mind that they become difficult to tell apart. Savinkov, then, reveals that fiction, like newspapers, distracts the revolutionary terrorist from the cult of action. At the end of What Never Happened, most of the revolutionaries are dead—by hanging, by bombing, or by gun shot—having been killed by the police, by fellow terrorists, or even by themselves. Needless to say, the attempt to create an effective system of terror fails miserably. The few revolutionaries that are left continue to aimlessly write articles about the necessity of systematized terror. In order to explain Savinkov’s participation in acts of political violence even after writing novels that seemed to condemn terrorism, Spence argues that Savinkov’s attitude toward terrorism was only a “temporary disillusionment” and that “Savinkov, at heart, remained a devotee of the cult of action, of which violence was the most profound expression. The act, in his mind, was still more significant than its result” (96). Savinkov’s The Pale Horse and What Never Happened, though, do not suggest that he is disillusioned with acts of terrorism, only accounts of terrorism. In his novels, Savinkov objects to the revolutionary’s desire to create a spectacle of heroic martyrdom in accounts of political violence, especially in print media. Ironically, Savinkov has inspired others to sensationalize the figure of the revolutionary terrorist and accounts of terrorist attacks. According to Tadeusz Swietochowski, Savinkov’s trial was a source of entertainment for his contemporaries: “almost everybody who was anybody in Communist Moscow 118 gathered to watch the sensational trial” (xxiii). In addition, the Russian filmmaker, Karen Shakhnazarov, was inspired by Savinkov’s The Pale Horse to create a spectacle of terrorism in his adaptation of this novel for the screen called The Rider Named Death (2004). In the film, the attempted assassination of a governor results in a scene exposing the bloody aftermath of the bombing. Unlike Savinkov’s narrator in the novel—whose view of the bombing is obscured by the crowd—the film viewer can vicariously experience the pleasing terror that the bloody aftermath of a terrorist attack provides. 119 Chapter 3 Endnotes 1 I have chosen the translations of Zinaida Afanasévna Vengerova and Thomas Selzer for all references to Savinkov’s The Pale Horse and What Never Happened, which I have abbreviated as TPH and WNH, respectively. The criticism has already established that Savinkov’s The Pale Horse is based on actual assassination attempts. Churchill claims that what is “most instructive” about Savinkov’s novel is “the account given by implication of the relations of the actual Terrorists with the Nihilist Central Committee who lay deep and secure in the underworld of the great cities of Europe and the United States” (127). Spence argues that “no one who knew anything about” Savinkov and the assassination of the Grand Duke Sergei that “he described could doubt that the book was essentially autobiographical” (92). 2 The novel was first published in Russkaia Mysl’ (Russian Thought), a so-called “thick” journal. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian prose and poetry was often published in a “thick” journal—a name which alluded to its two hundred or more pages—before it appeared as a book. 3 Niqueux suggests that the main question posed by The Pale Horse is whether or not terrorism can be ethically justified. Palmer argues that this novel indicates that Savinkov had “begun to reconsider his attitude toward terror” (45). 4 Beer argues that The Pale Horse and What Never Happened created controversy about the validity of political violence among the public at the time. 5 As Spence notes, Savinkov learned that the von Plehve assassination was successful in the newspaper (38). 6 For an analysis of tragifarcical elements in The Fairground Booth, see Listengarten 73-103. 120 Chapter 4: The Mysticism of Revolutionary Martyrdom: Liam O’Flaherty’s Disillusionment with Irish Terrorism The Irish patriot re-enacts a redemptive myth sanctifying not only the infliction of death and violence upon others but also the suffering of it by faithful nationalists. -Seán Farrell Moran, “Patrick Pearse and Patriotic Soteriology” (1991) Whatever their professed politics, most terrorists are really mystics and the idea of martyrdom obsesses them. -Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (1987) In January of 1922, the Irish revolutionary Liam O’Flaherty seized the Rotunda on O’Connell Street in Dublin with a group of one hundred and twenty unemployed workers, raised a red flag, and declared an Irish Soviet Republic “in an effort to start a Communist revolution” (“Autobiographical Note” 94). Naming himself “Chairman of the Council of the Unemployed,” O’Flaherty put up barricades and drilled his group of unemployed workers. The occupation, though, was fairly short-lived and non-violent: his stand at the Rotunda lasted only four days, and there was no blood shed. Even though it was essentially an act of political non-violence, the press sensationalized the occupation, indicating the interest the public had in reading about accounts of revolutionaries believed to be extremely dangerous. O’Flaherty later took part in the Four Courts Rebellion, which marked the beginning of the Irish Civil War, but his participation was again short-lived. As a result of his involvement in these revolutionary activities, O’Flaherty developed an almost-entirely undeserved reputation as a violent revolutionary, a reputation much less deserved than that of Boris Savinkov who was at least responsible for organizing a large number of acts of revolutionary violence that resulted in bloodshed. 121 O’Flaherty attempts to dispel his reputation as a violent revolutionary in his autobiography, Shame the Devil (1934), by exposing the effect of the Burkean sublime on the public, which indulges in stories of the revolutionary as a participant in terrifying acts of violence. In this autobiography, he recounts a sensational rumor about his own death, which he overheard during the capture of the Republican Headquarters by the Free State troops at the beginning of the Irish Civil War in June of 1922 1 : A cordon had been drawn all round the doomed buildings, and crowds of people stood outside the barriers, watching the scene, as at a public entertainment. Then I heard an old woman in a group behind me say: “Did ye hear that bloody murderer, Liam O’Flaherty, is killed, thanks be to God?” “Who?” said another old woman. “Liam O’Flaherty,” said the first. “The man that locked the unemployed up in the Rotunda, and shot them unless they spat on the holy crucifix. The man that tried to sell Dublin to the Bolsheviks.” “Is he dead?” said a man. “Shot through the heart this morning in Capel Street,” said the old woman. “The Lord be praised for ridding the country of that cut-throat. Ho, me hearties! Give the bastards what’s comin’ to them.” (O’Flaherty, Shame the Devil 35-36) Here O’Flaherty pokes fun at the public’s reaction to the scene of bombings and gunfire since they watch the revolutionary violence as if at a “public entertainment.” The crowd is not only entertained by witnessing revolutionary violence but also unconcerned about the bombings and gunfire going on around them. The opportunity to share stories of terrorist violence, then, is so appealing to the public that personal safety is not much of a concern. In O’Flaherty’s account, the crowd’s appetite for violent spectacles is similar to what one might expect at a public execution. The crowd goes to the extent of inventing their own detailed story about news of a dead revolutionary, creating a spectacle of his presumed death. The old woman’s recounting of the capture of the Rotunda—or to be 122 more precise, O’Flaherty’s version of what he overheard—is more sensational than that of a contemporary journalist for Freeman’s Journal, who admits “to avoid futile shedding of blood, [O’Flaherty] gave orders to his followers to evacuate the building” (Griffin qtd. in Sheeran, The Novels 75). 2 Whether or not O’Flaherty accurately recounted the old woman’s vitriolic story, he satirizes the public’s desire for sensational rumors and its appetite for violent spectacles. With this story, O’Flaherty suggests that the crowd’s interest in these spectacles overshadows its support for the revolutionary cause. This preference for a public display of revolutionary violence also draws attention to the role that public opinion plays in creating an image for the terrorist. After overhearing the old woman’s account, O’Flaherty claims that he told his comrade, “that old woman was right. I’m dead,” and shortly thereafter he left Ireland and ended his involvement in revolutionary activities, having “abandoned hope in the coming of the revolution” (Shame the Devil 36). His frustration with the public’s response to his participation in revolutionary activities seems to have played a role in his disillusionment with the revolutionary cause. The evidence from O’Flaherty’s autobiography, including the account above, suggests that his role in revolutionary terrorism was probably minor, as scholars, such as James Cahalan and Declan Kiberd, have noted. 3 Walter Laqueur, however, argues that O’Flaherty had first-hand knowledge of Irish revolutionary terrorism in his role as an “insider” (174). Laqueur assumes not only that O’Flaherty was a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) but also that O’Flaherty’s novels shed light on actual events of contemporary terrorism: “O’Flaherty’s preoccupation is not with the art of the novel, but with the authenticity of the account,” even though there is no evidence to support either 123 of these claims (174). Laqueur’s exaggeration of O’Flaherty’s role in revolutionary violence suggests that reality and fictional accounts of terrorism become so intertwined that they are virtually indistinguishable. The other possibility is that Laqueur is intentionally attempting to create further interest for this revolutionary figure for the modern reader, not unlike O’Flaherty’s contemporaries had done. In any case, O’Flaherty’s reputation as a violent revolutionary, then, obscures historical fact. The extent to which O’Flaherty was involved in revolutionary terrorism remains unclear, but the consensus among critics is that he is sympathetic to revolutionary terrorism even if his participation in it was marginal. The assumption that O’Flaherty supports revolutionary violence reveals that even O’Flaherty scholarship is influenced by the need for stories that sensationalize terrorism. O’Flaherty’s allusions to contemporary acts of political violence in The Informer (1923), “The Terrorist” (1926), The Assassin (1928), The Martyr (1933), and Insurrection (1950), though, do not suggest O’Flaherty was as sympathetic to Irish radical politics as the aforementioned critics seem to indicate. They reveal instead his disillusionment with political violence as a means to further a revolutionary cause. His lack of support for this cause is particularly tied to his depiction of terrorists who make a spectacle of blood violence and in turn create for the public sensational stories of martyrdom. In the quote at the outset, Seán Farrell Moran acknowledges the importance of martyrdom to the Irish Republican tradition, in which revolutionaries look to mythology to justify the infliction of death and violence to themselves and others, thereby creating “a cult of martyrdom replete with iconography, hymnology and liturgy” (19). The mystic quality of O’Flaherty’s rhetoric has not been lost on critics, such as Patrick F. 124 Sheeran, who writes of O’Flaherty’s fiction, “It is part of the impenetrable quality of much nationalist rhetoric…that what is said is not couched in political terms, often not even nationalistic, but mystical” (The Novels 243-4). This rhetoric reveals the important role that mysticism played for the revolutionary in the early twentieth century. I would like to suggest that by using mysticism ironically to formulate nationalist rhetoric in his novels, O’Flaherty reveals his disillusionment with Irish revolutionary politics and suggests that the terrorist’s reliance on this rhetoric to gain support for the revolutionary cause encourages him to make a spectacle of blood sacrifice. As I will argue, O’Flaherty was particularly critical of the mysticism that engendered fanatical devotion and that led to the revolutionary terrorist’s elevation to the heroic figure of the martyr. The Irish revolutionary terrorist’s attempt to glorify martyrdom exposes how the ideologies of religious devotion become intertwined with those of political violence to justify acts of terrorism, resulting in sensational displays of political violence to emphasize the heroic sacrifice of the revolutionary. The absurdity of this “cult of martyrdom,” to use Moran’s term, which relies on creating a mystical experience for revolutionaries, is exactly what O’Flaherty sought to expose. In his novels, O’Flaherty uses a combination of mysticism, Gothic sensationalism, and discourses of political fervor to expose the effects of the Burkean sublime on the actions of revolutionary terrorists, effects that reveal the inherent contradictions in their ethical codes and thereby question the validity of their radical revolutionary politics. O’Flaherty’s The Informer, a novel published a year after his stand at the Rotunda and involvement in the Four Courts Rebellion, reveals O’Flaherty’s disillusionment with the politics of martyrdom, politics that he suggests encourage sensationalizing the figure 125 of the terrorist. Critics, such as John Zneimer, however, have not only ignored how the role of the martyr informs revolutionary politics in The Informer but have even suggested that these politics are not important to the novel. This neglect is perhaps one of the reasons why critics underestimate the importance of the spectacle of blood sacrifice in early twentieth-century Irish revolutionary politics. Zneimer writes that this novel “is about a person, a man who is put through an ordeal; and the novel is not a serious attempt to write about Irish politics or the secret Irish revolutionary organization” (70). O’Flaherty’s critique of the revolutionary’s participation in a cult of martyrdom, though, makes Irish radical politics a central concern of the novel, a concern that reveals the influence that this cult had for the revolutionary terrorist in early twentieth-century Ireland. As I will argue, The Informer suggests the absurdity of the fanatical hero- worship of terrorists by examining the role of the terrorist organization, its leader, and its members in creating a cult of martyrdom, a cult that relies on mysticism to promote its cause. O’Flaherty first invokes the monstrous in The Informer to expose the terrorist organization’s reliance on supernatural mysticism, which it uses to create interest for its cult of martyrdom. The protagonist of the novel, Gypo Nolan, informs on a fellow revolutionary, Frank McPhillip, which eventually leads to McPhillip’s death. Nolan believes two other revolutionaries, Tommy Connor and Barly Mulholland, suspect him of informing, but Nolan is more afraid of what they represent than the men themselves. Connor and Mulholland were not merely two men, two human beings. They were something more than that. They represented the Revolutionary Organization. They were merely cogs in the wheel of that Organization. That was what [Nolan] 126 feared, what rendered him powerless. He feared that mysterious, intangible thing, that was all brain and no body. An intelligence without a body. A thing that was full of plans, implacable, reaching out everywhere invisibly, with invisible tentacles like a supernatural monster. A thing that was like a religion, mysterious, occult, devilish. (O’Flaherty, The Informer 69) Here O’Flaherty uses an elaborate simile for the terrorist organization and its influence on the revolutionaries who join it. The terrorist organization’s mysticism suggests that its members become indistinguishable from one another, their bodily form subsumed by the organization itself. This lack of individuality is expected for the would-be revolutionary martyr because, to take part in the cult of martyrdom, he must be willing to become a blood sacrifice for the spiritual victory of the organization. By revealing Nolan’s fear of the supernatural influence of the monstrous terrorist organization that makes him feel powerless, O’Flaherty depicts the terrorist organization as an occult force that draws in followers and insists on blind belief in the revolutionary cause. In The Informer, this blind belief is further perpetuated by the media. O’Flaherty constructs a scene in this novel that focuses on the media’s interest in the revolutionary activities of Commandant Dan Gallagher, the leader of the revolutionary organization. This scene mirrors the media’s actual attention to O’Flaherty’s own participation in revolutionary work and thereby exposes how media sensationalism perpetuates the fanatical hero-worship of the terrorist leader. In the novel, the murder of the Farmers’ Union Secretary creates a “sensation” in the press (O’Flaherty, The Informer 72). The newspapers are particularly interested in Commandant Gallagher, who is believed to be responsible for the murder, even though he denounces his organization’s involvement: He came out of obscurity in a night, as it were. People suddenly discovered that he was a power in the country. He was photographed and 127 interviewed and his photographs appeared in all the newspapers both in this country and in England and in America. (O’Flaherty, The Informer 72) O’Flaherty satirically depicts Gallagher’s successful public image as a powerful revolutionary who becomes an international media sensation overnight. The public’s desire for news about Gallagher makes him a celebrity of sorts, which is similar to O’Flaherty’s own experience as a revolutionary leader. As O’Flaherty recalls in his autobiography, Shame the Devil (1934), his seizure of the Rotunda in 1922 “caused a great sensation in the public press” (22). In fact, according to Costello, “Liam became the sensation of the city and as Chairman of the Council of the Unemployed was interviewed by the newspapers” (40). As Sheeran acknowledges, Freeman’s Journal published a photograph with the “leading members of the garrison posed under the red flag” to accompany its article concerning O’Flaherty’s seizure of the Rotunda (The Informer 13). With his reference to interviews and photographs of Gallagher in The Informer, O’Flaherty is critical not only of the print media that sensationalizes this revolutionary leader but also of the reading public that indulges in accounts of Gallagher. O’Flaherty suggests, then, that the newspaper’s—and in turn the public’s—sudden interest in Gallagher as a powerful figure helps to catapult him to the mystical status on which the revolutionary cause depends. O’Flaherty satires the media’s attempt to create a spectacle of Commandant Gallagher in fictional newspaper extracts and in turn the public’s indulgence in these sensational stories featuring a revolutionary terrorist. In The Informer, an article in the leading newspaper of the English aristocracy sarcastically surveys Gallagher’s life: “His brand of Communism is of the type that appeals most to the Irish nature. It is a mixture 128 of Roman Catholicism, Nationalist Republicanism and Bolshevism. Its chief rallying cries are: ‘Loot and Murder’” (O’Flaherty 73-74). Sheeran has suggested that this fictional newspaper article reveals Gallagher’s ideological beliefs are in line with those of O’Flaherty (The Novels 277). The sarcastic tone of this article, though, undercuts Gallagher’s political views and in turn those of O’Flaherty when he was participating in revolutionary activities. In particular, this article reveals O’Flaherty’s disillusionment with the revolutionary cause, a cause with rallying calls that encourage one to “loot and murder.” In The Informer, the official organ of the American Revolutionary Organization also undercuts Gallagher, particularly his heroic acts as a revolutionary leader. Here is an excerpt from this fictional periodical: “When the glorious history of the struggle for proletarian liberation in Ireland comes to be written, the name of Comrade Dan Gallagher will stampede from cover to cover in one uninterrupted blaze of glory” (O’Flaherty, The Informer 74). Here the newspaper glorifies Gallagher, whose heroic feats will presumably be recorded in accounts of revolutionary history. In The Informer, the media’s attempt to sensationalize accounts of the terrorist, and presumably the readership’s indulgence in these accounts, reveals the reading public’s desire to vicariously take part in the cult of martyrdom promoted by revolutionary terrorists. O’Flaherty also uses fictional newspaper extracts in his novel to satirize his own experience as a revolutionary leader, exposing print media’s perpetuation of the heroic image of the terrorist with the revolutionary exploits of Gallagher, which creates for the reading public the desire and anxiety for accounts of the terrorist and prepares it for more sensational acts of political violence. The same fictional newspaper article assures its 129 readers that the short-lived hoisting of the red flag will not be the end of Gallagher’s heroism: The collapse of the farm workers’ strike need not dishearten those comrades who expected great things from the hoisting of the red flag at M- last October. Comrade Gallagher has not seen fit as yet to call the Irish bourgeois bluff. When the time arrives… (O’Flaherty, The Informer 75) This direct allusion to O’Flaherty’s raising of the red flag when he was seizing the Rotunda draws attention to the fictional techniques the newspaper uses to create interest in terrorism, since the short-lived raising of the red flag did not actually result in further revolutionary events at the time. The newspaper’s suggestion that other revolutionary acts will follow creates anticipation for the reader who is anxious to read stories about the revolutionary violence to come. Presumably the fictional newspapers that portray Gallagher’s heroic revolutionary deeds are responsible for attracting would-be terrorists, who would otherwise have little interest in revolutionary politics, to join the terrorist organization. In fact, we later find that another revolutionary, Peter Hackett only “belonged to the organization…out of fanatical hero-worship for Commandant Dan Gallagher” (O’Flaherty, The Informer 198-199). This suggestion that fanatical hero- worship provides a stronger motive for participation in revolutionary violence than does devotion to a political cause reveals the strong influence that the public image of a terrorist can have in encouraging participation in acts of revolutionary violence. O’Flaherty emphasizes the absurdity of the revolutionary’s desire for heroic blood sacrifice with a final grotesque scene that undercuts Nolan’s efforts to become a martyr for the revolutionary cause. In the logic of the revolutionary group, Nolan is perhaps the character who least deserves to be elevated to the status of a patriotic martyr, given his 130 role as an informer. At the end of the novel, to revenge the death of McPhillip, the members of the Revolutionary Organization, led by Gallagher, put Nolan on trial for the murder of McPhillip and sentence Nolan to death. Though Nolan does not want to abandon his revolutionary group, he is not willing to let his fellow members execute him for being an informer. He manages to flee before his execution, but they manage to shoot him before he can get out of the city. Once Nolan realizes that he is dying, he seeks the mysticism of the church in a desperate attempt to become a heroic martyr, hoping that he will not die in vain. The resulting scene invokes the Gothic to amplify Nolan’s slow and painful death as he crawls up the steps of a church holding his bowels in his hands: Reverently he dipped his hand into the holy water font. He wet his hand to the wrist. He tried to take off his hat in order to cross himself. His hand pawed about his skull, but his fingers were already dead. They could not grip the tattered hat. He tried to cross himself. Impossible. His hand could not reach his forehead. (O’Flaherty, The Informer 254-255) The revolutionary’s attempt to carry out a religious ritual—to bless himself with the Sign of the Cross—coupled with grotesque imagery undercuts the seriousness of the revolutionary cause. In the church with its “quaint odour of mystery, the mysterious calm of souls groping after infinite beings,” Nolan becomes an object of fascination and dread (O’Flaherty, The Informer 255). Nolan recalls the disembodied image of the terrorist organization as a supernatural monstrosity with his dead hands that continue to move. By defying death, he becomes a walking dead man who represents the consequences of being consumed by the supernatural powers of the monstrous terrorist organization. His attempt to become a blood sacrifice for the revolution, though, is denied since he cannot carry out the ritual—making the Sign of the Cross—that would presumably give him the spiritual victory needed to catapult himself to the status of a mystical martyr. 131 In The Informer, O’Flaherty depicts the cycle of deaths as meaningless displays of Gothic violence that do not attempt to further the revolutionary cause, thereby denying the terrorists the heroic martyrdom they seek. In an effort to achieve martyrdom, Nolan seeks forgiveness from the mother of the man he informed on, who happens to be attending mass in the church. She could symbolically represent McPhillip, but O’Flaherty emphasizes the futility of Nolan’s attempt to become a heroic martyr by seeking forgiveness from someone who is not even connected to the revolutionary group. When she forgives Nolan, we are left with the grotesque imagery of his death, suggesting the absurdity of his efforts to elevate himself to the status of a martyr: “Then with a gurgling sound he fell forward on his face. His hat rolled off. Blood gushed from his mouth. He stretched out his limbs in the shape of a cross. He shivered and lay still” (O’Flaherty, The Informer 256). By paralleling the informer’s death to Christ’s crucifixion, one could argue that Nolan becomes a martyr for the revolutionary cause. Though he does not specifically refer to Nolan as a martyr, Sheeran argues that “the informer emerges as a hero of the ‘sacrificial crisis,’ the scapegoat whom it is necessary to offer up in order that the community be redeemed from its own violence” (O’Flaherty, The Informer 6). But O’Flaherty undercuts Nolan’s attempt at penance and his desire for a heroic ideal. The cult of martyrdom that informs the ethical codes of the Irish revolutionary terrorist applies here, particularly the idea that “martyrdom offered a theodicy whereby apparent failure was ultimate victory in mythic terms” (Moran 19). Nolan recognizes that in his role as an informer he is responsible for McPhillip’s death, and therefore Nolan’s individual effort to support the revolutionary cause fails. His actions in the final scene of the novel suggest his desire for symbolic resurrection in order 132 to obtain a symbolic victory for the revolutionary cause. O’Flaherty, though, creates a situation that denies the would-be martyr this ultimate victory. As an informer, Nolan inspires his fellow revolutionaries to seek revenge on him, and therefore he dies at the hands of his comrades. Nolan’s death, then, does not elevate him to a hero for his blood sacrifice but rather completes the cycle of meaningless deaths in the novel. The desire to become a mythical hero for the revolution must have been an important political issue for O’Flaherty since he revisits it in The Assassin, which was published in 1928. With his allusions to actual events of political violence in this novel, O’Flaherty creates a foundational link between the novel and the political realities of Irish revolutionary history. Like Savinkov, O’Flaherty establishes this link to expose the influence of the Burkean sublime on the politics of assassination. He bases his novel on an actual political assassination that took place on 10 July 1927, when three men shot down Kevin O’Higgins—Minister for Home Affairs in the Provisional Government—in the street when he was on his way home from Mass. According to O’Higgins’s biographer—John P. McCarthy—the assassins were never caught, which resulted in numerous conspiracy theories and otherwise unfounded speculations about the assassination (288). 4 George William Russell, for example, who was the editor of The Irish Statesman at the time, not only speculated that the assassination of O’Higgins was an “expression of political hatred” but also suggested that this act of political violence had a naturalistic cause: “there are some people who by nature are terrorists and believe that they can by terror deflect the will of the nation” (439). But O’Flaherty—perhaps not satisfied with the motives assumed by this journal editor or by others who speculated about it—creates his own fictional account of the assassination on which he bases his 133 story. As I will argue, the assassins in O’Flaherty’s novel are motivated by their desire to become idealized heroes for their participation in the assassination and are therefore preoccupied with how others interpret their participation in this act of political violence. The assassins’ desire for blood sacrifice leads them to sensationalize the assassination by invoking the Burkean sublime to glorify their participation in this act of political violence, in effect undercutting their fervor for the revolutionary cause. In an early scene in the novel, O’Flaherty employs irony to expose Michael McDara’s preoccupation with becoming a hero for his role in the assassination. Walking by the Nelson Monument, McDara—the main protagonist of the novel who plots the assassination—imagines what the public’s reaction to this act of political violence will be: From all corners of the land came peasants marching, with blood on their waving banners, into the capital, into the fortress of the tyrant, who had been struck down in death, by the hand and brain of Michael McDara. A head! THE HEAD! With blood-stained, yellow lips and a scattered brain. (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 38) In setting this scene in front of the Nelson Monument, O’Flaherty alludes to Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson—who was mortally wounded while fighting in the Battle of Trafalgar and for whom the memorial was built. Nelson’s biographer, Tom Pocock, describes the media reaction to Nelson’s death in the early nineteenth century: “every newspaper and periodical printed ballads, orations, and hymns in Nelson’s praise” (335). But this popular naval war hero—who was praised in England—was not well-liked in Ireland because he represented Ireland’s colonial past. The monument could symbolize not only the English tyranny that McDara hopes to rebel against with the assassination but also the heroic image that McDara hopes to obtain as an assassin. McDara’s desire to 134 be commemorated for his deed in the manner of Nelson is clearly ironic. Paralleling McDara to Nelson is not the only way O’Flaherty undercuts McDara’s heroism. McDara imagines grotesque images of the unnamed politician’s “blood-stained, yellow lips” and pieces of his “scattered brain”; this sensational imagery suggests that McDara too has the potential to be a tyrant. He assumes—as his notion of peasants marching suggests—that the public will approve of this assassination. As we will later see, his assumption proves to be wrong. The ironic reading of McDara’s reverence for the Nelson monument—and by extension the heroic image of Nelson—becomes clearer as the novel proceeds. This scene at the Nelson monument sets the stage for O’Flaherty to undercut McDara’s ideal vision of a revolutionary terrorist as a mystical hero. McDara’s visions of heroism continue in a later scene in the novel in which he reveals his desire to be remembered by historians for his participation in the assassination. In front of the Nelson monument once again, McDara imagines how the assassination will be recorded: He thought with pride that historians would use great rhetoric to describe this deed. Suddenly he wanted, instead of flight, to carry the bloodstained head through the city and show it to the people. “This is the head of the tyrant.” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 112) McDara continues to assume that the public will approve of the assassination and moreover that historians will praise the deed with “great rhetoric.” His desire to show the head to the people suggests that he not only wants the assassination to be written down in history as a heroic effort but also hopes to be credited by name for his role in this act of political violence. McDara’s strong desire to influence how the assassination will be interpreted and remembered becomes clearer when he considers becoming an informer: 135 “He wanted to go out and report at once to the police that arrangements had just been completed for a political assassination of tremendous (yes, he would use the word tremendous) importance” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 126). McDara not only carefully chooses “tremendous” to describe the importance of the assassination but also repeats the word for emphasis, presumably so that this historical event will be recorded as such. This attention to word choice recalls McDara’s desire for historians to use “great rhetoric” to depict his deed. How the assassination is recorded, then, is more important to McDara than the assassination itself. In fact, he is willing to risk compromising the success of the assassination to ensure that he is remembered for his involvement in what he believes is a tremendously important act of political violence. McDara’s desire to sensationalize the rhetoric used to describe the incident reveals his awareness of the influence that the Burkean sublime can have on how the public views the assassination. McDara’s and his fellow terrorists’ desire to be remembered as important revolutionary assassins becomes clearer in their romantic allusions to warfare, which exposes their preoccupation with the glory of heroic sacrifice while planning the assassination. McDara imagines the enthusiasm for, and the triumph of, battle: Again he heard the blare of trumpets on the Po. The romance of war rose up before his mind, the joy of conquest, the fanatical enthusiasm of people marching, singing the “Marseillaise.” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 119) This reference to the Po recalls an earlier allusion in the novel to the Punic Wars, particularly the heroic feats of Hasdrubal, who served as a Carthaginian officer. McDara also alludes to the French Revolution, when the “Marseillaise” was the song used as a rallying call, which I mentioned in the previous chapter. While Savinkov’s Volodya parodies the revolutionary terrorist’s romanticized vision of political violence in What 136 Never Happened, the allusions to both classical warfare and revolutionary history in The Assassin reveal McDara’s desire to take part in the “romance of war.” McDara hopes that his role in the assassination will be comparable to these heroic feats of historical importance and plans to rally others to follow his lead. This desire to create enthusiasm among the people is the hope of another terrorist—Frank Tumulty—who wants to lead the people in revolution with his participation in the assassination: I’d like to die like that, leading the people. I think it would be a great thing to fall down, with blood pouring from yer wounds, and feel the feet of the people trampling on yer dying body and they rushing forward, shouting. (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 120) Here Tumulty sensationalizes his own death with grotesque details of the blood pouring from his body and thereby envisions his ideal image of heroic sacrifice. The referent— “that”—is ambiguous, but Tumulty’s visions of heroic martyrdom take place while he sits at the base of the Nelson monument, which suggests that he gets his inspiration from Nelson. Tumulty’s apparent reverence for this English hero—who, again, was unpopular among Irish revolutionaries—is ironic, then, similar to McDara’s admiration for Nelson which was discussed earlier. By fantasizing about their glorified roles in the assassination, the terrorists undercut the importance of political violence for the revolutionary cause, exposing their motivation for a romanticized vision of heroic martyrdom. O’Flaherty further undermines the importance of this assassination for the revolutionary cause by ironizing the incident with grotesque imagery. In keeping with the O’Higgins assassination, the unnamed government official in the novel had been on his way to Mass when he was shot down in the street. His face “contorted as if with 137 grotesque laughter” and he “made a gurgling sound and fell forward on his face…A big pool of dark-red blood oozed out about his shattered head” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 166-167). These sensationalized images are remarkably similar to the images that McDara imagines for the victim of the assassination earlier in the novel. The reaction of the unnamed politician in the novel is quite different from the actual reaction that O’Higgins had upon being gunned down in the street, according to witnesses. The first man to arrive on the scene reported that O’Higgins said, “I forgive my murderers” (qtd. in McCarthy 287). But O’Flaherty certainly does not suggest in his novel that the unnamed politician—whose apparent laughter borders on absurdity—forgives his assassins. This suggestion of laughter undercuts any serious motive for the assassination, for even the dying victim ironically looks like he is mocking the terrorists’ attempt to further the revolutionary cause. After the assassination, O’Flaherty continues to undermine the importance of this act of political violence with an odd combination of grotesque imagery and religious ritual. A man from the crowd, which has gathered around the dying victim of the assassination, performs a strange version of a religious ritual by dipping his hand in the victim’s blood to make the Sign of the Cross: Then a little man with a yellow face, wearing large spectacles, crawled in through the crowd on his hands and knees, until he got to the pool of dark- red blood. He dipped his hand in it. It had curdled and the blood-froth reached to his wrist. The little fellow stood up and raised his frenzied face to the sky. “Make way, make way,” he cried to the people. “Make way for the Sign of the Lord.” They stepped back and he walked through them, with his knees trembling, to the corner of the grey orchard wall. He reached the wall. Then, with a grotesque gesture, he struck his chest, twisted his body, held out his gory hand and made the Sign of the Cross with the blood, on the wall. Then he 138 pointed to the crooked bloody cross he had made and burst into a peal of hysterical laughter. (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 167-168) This man’s hysterical laughter is just as unexpected as the look of laughter on the face of the dying victim of the assassination. The absurdity of this version of a common religious ritual contrasts with the version of it that was presumably performed at the scene of the O’Higgins assassination. A pastor who arrived on the scene gave O’Higgins his last rites, which normally includes anointing the sick by using holy oil to make the Sign of the Cross on the forehead (McCarthy 287). In the novel, the unnamed politician is denied his last rites and thus absolution for his sins. The odd use of the victim’s blood to perform a religious ritual coupled with the man’s appearance of laughing undermines attaching symbolic meaning to the assassination, particularly the idea that the unnamed political figure is a heroic martyr who is assassinated by revolutionaries in a holy war. This combination of grotesque imagery and religious ritual results in a curious Gothic spectacle, creating a pleasing terror for the crowd that gathers around the assassinated politician with their “loud cries, curses, prayers and lamentations…in a confused medley” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 167). Furthermore, by invoking religion at the assassination scene, O’Flaherty suggests the paradox between the moral codes of Christianity (i.e. thou shall not kill) and those of the revolution (i.e. killing for the revolutionary cause) and thereby questions the motives for this act of political violence. The conflicting moral codes of the revolution and Christianity are also apparent in the public’s reaction to the assassination, which is not as supportive as McDara had expected it would be, disappointing his hopes for creating an image of the heroic ideal. He witnesses the reaction that a crowd of newspaper readers have to the assassination: 139 They had heard the news. Newsboys were on the streets. People were snatching at the papers. Excited cries issued from lips that had just read the words printed on the black, blurred columns. “God have mercy on us.” “The earth should open up and swallow them.” “Shot down like a dog in his prime.” “The only hope of the country gone.” “Now what’s going to happen to us?” “…Look at the horrible mark this’ll leave on the soul of the people. Assassins in cold blood.” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 176-177) McDara did not anticipate these newspaper readers’ “excited cries” of outrage and exclamations of shock at news about the assassination. He underestimates their adherence to the moral codes of Christianity, especially the readers who invoke their religious beliefs to express their moral objections to the assassination. The O’Higgins assassination was also met with strong public disapproval, according to Russell of The Irish Statesman, who acknowledges the “moral indignation universal after the act” (439). In the novel, the public’s disapproval of the assassination certainly does not fulfill McDara’s desire to be remembered as a glorified hero for his participation in it. This disapproval exposes the degree to which his desire for heroic worship blinds him to the political realities of the people. McDara’s hope for admiration from the public is also disappointed when he overhears others talking about the assassination “with interest, as of a spectacle that had been provided for their amusement” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 178). The public’s fascination with this act of political violence does not fit his romantic vision of being remembered for performing a heroic feat. After leaving the crowd, McDara comes across another man and tries to determine his reaction to the assassination just by looking at him: 140 It was the glitter that comes into the eyes when a mind begins to enjoy the ecstasy of contemplated assassination. The young man, standing there on the pavement, was enacting the assassination in his mind and finding pleasure in it. (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 192) Here McDara speculates about this man’s thoughts and assumes that the man not only contemplates the assassination but also takes pleasure in imagining it. McDara encounters this man as he passes by the Nelson monument, which recalls O’Flaherty’s ironic treatment of McDara’s heroic visions. This man’s supposed mental enactment of the assassination, then, is not unlike McDara’s own romanticized visions of the assassination before carrying it out. In fact, McDara’s thoughts—“Have I reproduced myself? Am I no longer alone?”— not only suggest that this man reminds McDara of himself but also reveal McDara’s disturbed mental state (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 192). McDara’s assumption that the man vicariously participates in this act of political violence further exposes McDara’s own desire for the heroics of war—a desire he assumes that others have. McDara is determined to change public opinion of the assassination so that others will revere him as a hero for his role in it. He proposes a solution to his fellow assassins to alter the reaction the people have to this act of political violence: There is only one way to become heroes and have ballads written about you…Let us go out together in single file and shout out to the people that we have killed him, because we believe that whenever a tyrant appears, just men must rise and sacrifice themselves to free the people from tyranny. Then we’ll be taken and hanged at dawn on some fine day. They’ll put the cold rope around our necks and we’ll be swung off into…Eh? We’ll die singing and people will keep singing about us for hundreds of years. Come along, then. I’ll lead. (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 202) 141 Here McDara desperately seeks to have the assassination recorded differently. His desire to have the people sing ballads for his triumph over the tyrant for hundreds of years recalls the allusion to the “Marseillaise” discussed earlier, a song not only that encouraged revolutionaries to fight against tyranny during the French Revolution but also that has been sung for more than a hundred years as the national anthem of France. His suggestion that ballads will be sung to commemorate his and his fellow terrorists’ hangings also reminds readers of the songs that memorialize the Manchester martyrs, three Irish Fenians who were hanged in 1867 for the killing of a police guard during a prison escape. According to Gary Owens, “the executions touched off a predictable avalanche of broadside ballads,” the most famous of which—“God Save Ireland”— “nationalists immediately adopted as their anthem” (22). 5 O’Flaherty’s allusion to the Manchester martyrs reveals McDara’s belief that hanging for his role in the assassination would allow him to become an ideal image of patriotic martyrdom and to be remembered with ballads that are sung to immortalize what he believes is a heroic act. As Moran points out, the song “God save Ireland” “stress[ed] a mystique of death whereby patriotic death was made to be mandatory in the face of failure” (19). On the one hand, the assassination in The Assassin is not a failure because the politician targeted does in fact die. On the other hand, according to the revolutionary terrorist’s cult of martyrdom, blood sacrifice is necessary for any act of political violence to be successful. In other words, McDara must become a mystical martyr for the revolution in order to consider the assassination successful. His desire for a patriotic death, then, has more to do with creating a heroic image for himself than furthering the revolutionary cause. 142 McDara, though, does not follow through with his plan to change public opinion about the assassination or to become a blood sacrifice for the revolution and therefore ultimately fails to become a heroic martyr. Criticism tends to suggest that the political assassination in The Assassin has no real meaning, citing as evidence O’Flaherty’s essay, A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland, in which he satirizes Irish revolutionary terrorists who do not plot an act of political violence “unless it be some utterly purposeless act committed by what Dostoievsky called the ‘Contemplatives’” (52). Zneimer, for example, assumes that McDara is a Dostoievskian contemplative (80). While it is true that McDara is not concerned with furthering the revolutionary cause for its own sake, he does have a motive linked to revolutionary politics. His visions of being revered as a mystical hero lead him to carry out the assassination, even though he ultimately fails to become a mystical martyr for the revolution. At the end of the novel, McDara no longer has faith in the heroic image of the martyr. His fellow revolutionaries think he has “gone mad” when he tries to convince them to hang like the Manchester martyrs (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 203). His disturbed mental state is further revealed when he has a haunting vision of the man he assassinates: “He could see HIS face. It kept bobbing back and forth and there was a look of wonder in the eyes. Why? Why?” (O’Flaherty, The Assassin 220). In the end, McDara escapes the city, questions his motive for the assassination, and contemplates suicide, thereby revealing his disillusionment with revolutionary politics and the glorified image of the terrorist—not unlike O’Flaherty himself. O’Flaherty’s ideas for the plot of The Assassin come in part from “The Terrorist” (1926), which reveals the effects of the Burkean sublime on the revolutionary’s philosophy on bomb throwing. The Assassin was based on this short story, a story in 143 which O’Flaherty first explored the romanticized visions of war to reveal the revolutionary’s desire for heroic martyrdom. In this short story, the would-be suicide bomber—Louis Quiqley—imagines what his role in the suicide bombing would be before he attempts the attack, which is not unlike McDara in The Assassin, who imagines his participation in the assassination before carrying it out. Quiqley’s vision of his role in the suicide bombing draws on the same classical war allusion—the “blare of trumpets at dawn on the banks of the Po”—as The Assassin (O’Flaherty, “The Terrorist” 7). His romanticized vision of war, though, goes beyond that of the revolutionaries in The Assassin who imagine that they will rally support for the revolution by inspiring others with the heroics of their assassination. In “The Terrorist,” Quiqley envisions crying out a prophecy before throwing the bomb, which would “go forth to all the world as a clarion call” (O’Flaherty 7). His desire to create enthusiasm among the people to revolt by using a clarion call suggests that it is more important to him to be seen as a heroic leader with the support of fellow revolutionaries than to carry out the suicide bombing in a theatre. Quiqley imagines that “his own people”—presumably fellow revolutionaries who already support the cause—are part of the crowd in the theatre (O’Flaherty, “The Terrorist” 7). He assumes that at least some people who will die in the theatre bombing are not only willing but even “waiting for his word and the sacrifice of blood” so that they can become revolutionary martyrs who will “[march] with the prophecy on their lips” (O’Flaherty, “The Terrorist” 7). Quiqley’s romantic allusions to warfare—while he contemplates his role as a suicide bomber—expose his preoccupation with the glory of heroic martyrdom not only for himself but also for his fellow revolutionaries who he presumes are more than willing to become blood sacrifices. 144 O’Flaherty’s suggestion that the primary motivation of the terrorist is to become a martyr is perhaps best understood by comparing the failed acts of political violence in “The Terrorist” and The Assassin. In the anti-climatic ending of the “The Terrorist,” the failure of the would-be suicide bomber to bomb the theatre is two-fold: the terrorist— who is prevented from finishing his prophecy—not only fails to carry out the bombing but also fails to become a heroic revolutionary martyr. But the failure of the would-be suicide bomber to carry out the bombing does not seem to be as important as catapulting himself to the status of heroic martyr if we read this short story alongside The Assassin. As previously discussed, in this novel, the revolutionaries view their act of political violence as a failure, even though they manage to assassinate their target. If we assume, as O’Flaherty seems to suggest in The Assassin, that to consider any act of political violence successful, the revolutionary must sacrifice his life during the effort, presumably not just any terrorist bombing in the theatre would be considered a successful act of political violence in “The Terrorist.” In other words, it is only as a suicide bomber that Quigley can become the heroic martyr he imagines himself to be before attempting the attack. By adapting the plot of “The Terrorist” in The Assassin to emphasize the importance of blood sacrifice, then, O’Flaherty suggests the real failure for the revolutionary terrorist—his failure to become a heroic martyr. O’Flaherty’s interest in the politics of revolutionary blood sacrifice continued long after his brief involvement in revolutionary violence in 1922. In The Martyr, a post- Irish civil war novel published in 1933, O’Flaherty ironically invokes Irish mythology to undercut the revolutionary’s desire to be remembered as a heroic martyr. His critique of the role that Irish mythology played in the nationalist movement is not surprising in The 145 Martyr given his treatment of “Irish mystical patriotism” in A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland, which appeared in print four years before the novel (O’Flaherty 53). In this satirical work, O’Flaherty is especially critical of his culture’s belief in mystical women as symbols of Ireland: The disease…manifests itself among our politicians principally in the belief that Ireland is a living being; a woman in fact…At one moment she is Caitlín Ní Houliháin, at another Roísín Dubh, at another The Old Woman of Beara. She changes her name to suit the particular character of the politician that courts her. (A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland 44) Here O’Flaherty suggests that Irish mystical patriotism is a disease and thereby reveals his cynicism for the role that the women of Irish myths have played in the political arena. In The Martyr, O’Flaherty particularly focuses on the role that the myth of Roísín Dubh or Dark Rosaleen has had in violent revolutionary politics. Referring to this myth, one literary critic—Hedda Friberg—without an explanation, briefly mentions that “O’Flaherty certainly casts a cold eye on the mythologies of the Nationalist movement” (181). I would like to suggest that the key to understanding O’Flaherty’s cold eye on Irish mythology in The Martyr is in examining the role that the myth of Dark Rosaleen has played in promoting the Irish revolutionary’s cult of martyrdom, to use Moran’s term. As I will argue, this novel ironically alludes to Dark Rosaleen to critique the revolutionary’s reliance on mysticism in order to establish an ethos of blood sacrifice and thereby create a heroic image for the terrorist. The allusions to this mythical figure invoke the supernatural and the uncanny, suggesting the influence of Gothic violence on the terrorist’s commitment to the revolutionary cause. An exemplary episode that solidifies O’Flaherty’s objection to this sort of mysticism comes in an early scene in the novel when he introduces Angela Fitzgibbon, a 146 female revolutionary. With his depiction of Fitzgibbon, O’Flaherty alludes to the myth of Dark Rosaleen to critique the female revolutionary’s role in eroticizing blood sacrifice. 6 Though she does not specifically refer to martyrdom, critic Nicole Morgan has suggested that sexual desire plays an important role in the commitment female terrorists make to their cause. She argues that in history and literature, women become involved in terrorism because it is a “Demon Lover,” having a sexual appeal; men are attracted to the terrorist cause, but women function only as “token terrorists,” joining the cause because they are attracted to men (Morgan 119). The gender roles Morgan assumes are reversed in O’Flaherty’s novel since men join the revolutionary cause in large part because of their sexual attraction to Fitzgibbon: She was regarded by the revolutionary mass of the people as a living symbol of their insurrection. To them she was the fairy queen of whom the poets had sung, the Dark Rosaleen who was the spirit of the enslaved motherland, now walking the earth to urge on the risen warriors to victory. Yet victory never seemed to follow in the tracks of this dark angel. Instead, she seemed to be the harbinger of death. Up and down the land she went, enslaving by her beauty whatever leader she imagined for the moment to be pregnant with the nation’s destiny. (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 63) Here O’Flaherty directly alludes to nationalist poets who invoke the myth of Dark Rosaleen in their poetry, calling Fitzgibbon “the fairy queen of whom the poets had sung, the Dark Rosaleen.” As one literary critic, Joseph Valente, argues, Gaelic bards and balladeers employed this myth “to retrieve from the defeat of their culture an aestheticized and sentimentalized culture of defeat,” which nationalist poets, such as Joseph Plunkett and William Butler Yeats, “nostalgically resurrected…to sentimentalize and even sexualize the ritual of blood sacrifice” (198). 7 O’Flaherty’s depiction of Fitzgibbon, though, as a beautiful but “dark angel” and “harbinger of death” who 147 “enslaves” men to take part in revolutionary violence certainly does not portray the myth of Dark Rosaleen in a positive light. Unlike Irish nationalist poets who celebrated these myths, then, O’Flaherty invokes the image of Dark Rosaleen to critique the nationalist impulse to eroticize blood sacrifice. He suggests that anxiety over gender roles in revolutionary politics undercuts the nationalist poets, and by extension revolutionaries, who invoke the myth of Dark Rosaleen to eroticize and therefore mysticize martyrdom. O’Flaherty particularly emphasizes this anxiety over women’s participation in revolutionary violence by rewriting the myth of Dark Rosaleen to expose Fitzgibbon’s success with seducing revolutionaries and convincing them to commit to martyrdom. In the novel, Fitzgibbon attracts a lot of attention because of her mythical status: “they stood in awe of her fatal beauty and of the royal title they had conferred on her: their Dark Rosaleen” (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 64). Here the suggestion that Dark Rosaleen is a “royal title” solidifies the connection O’Flaherty wants the reader to make between Fitzgibbon and old Irish sovereignty myths. According to Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, the figure of the goddess in pre-historic Irish sovereignty myths was a symbol of the land, whose union with the prospective king ensures his sovereignty. Without union with her, he cannot become a king acceptable to his people. Without her rightful ruler she is lost, old and occasionally deranged. When united with her sovereign she frequently changes from her former shape of an ugly old woman to a beautiful young girl. (525) The figure of the goddess in these myths was important to the Irish nationalist tradition. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish revolutionaries re-imagined myths about the goddess of sovereignty—for example the myth of Dark Rosaleen—to garner support for their cause in the form of patriotic mysticism. As Valente acknowledges, Roísín Dubh or Dark Rosaleen is “a Norman transcription of the poor old 148 woman from the sovereignty myths” that represented a “female embodiment of Irish suffering” (198). While union with the goddess of sovereignty in early Irish myths helps the future king become an acceptable leader for his people, Fitzgibbon in The Martyr, who symbolizes Dark Rosaleen, helps revolutionaries become suitable leaders for the nationalist cause. O’Flaherty, though, is critical of Fitzgibbon’s impulsive decisions and promiscuity; her commitment to finding leaders for the revolutionary cause is only “for the moment.” In addition, she imagines seducing revolutionary leaders who become “pregnant with the nation’s destiny.” While this image suggests that the men she seduces will be responsible for leading the nation in revolution, the strange diction indicating that they are pregnant, rather than she, could imply Fitzgibbon’s desire for the gender roles to be reversed. This suggestion of gender role reversal also foreshadows Fitzgibbon’s attempt to play a larger role in the revolution than reproducing sons who will lead and sacrifice their blood for her. As we will later see, Fitzgibbon’s determination to be a heroic leader who becomes a martyr for the cause results in anxiety over women’s participation in leadership roles for the revolution. O’Flaherty, then, creates his own birth myth to expose the female revolutionary’s attempt to overstep her symbolic role as Mother Ireland. This anxiety over Fitzgibbon’s role in revolutionary violence is even more evident when O’Flaherty downplays the seriousness of the revolutionary’s blood sacrifice for Dark Rosaleen by depicting Fitzgibbon as an uncanny harbinger of death from a superstitious tale. According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny, in which the familiar is terrifying because it is also unfamiliar at the same time, the “double” is at first an “assurance of immortality” but later “becomes the uncanny harbinger of death” (Freud 149 211). In the novel, Brian Crosbie, a revolutionary leader, reveals his uncanny attraction to Fitzgibbon; he is at first mesmerized by her beauty but then “shudder[s]” in her presence because “the swishing of her skirts reminded him of the whispering fairy wind which always precedes death in superstitious tales” (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 72). Here O’Flaherty draws attention to the conventions of genre with his suggestion of a superstitious tale that involves a premeditated death. According to Ní Bhrolcháin, in early Irish mythology, “heroes are often lured to their death as a direct consequence of a woman’s actions,” creating “tales…where the death of the hero is premeditated and predestined, and a feeling of foreboding surrounds the characters” (529). In the novel, Crosbie is the hero whose death is premeditated as a direct consequence of Fitzgibbon’s actions since he is reluctant to offer himself as a martyr for the revolutionary cause until Fitzgibbon motivates him to do so. In fact, her efforts to seduce and thereby persuade him to make a commitment to martyrdom have the foreboding atmosphere characteristic of early tales of Irish mythology. The following passage sets the scene for Fitzgibbon’s seduction of Crosbie: He saw the grandeur of the mountains and the streams of silver blood flowing into the ocean and everlasting peace. But her breath was on his lips and her vibrant arms caressed his neck and he felt completely hypnotised (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 70). The image of “streams of silver blood flowing” could symbolize the blood sacrifices that Irish revolutionaries have made for Fitzgibbon, which draws attention to her seductive powers. Fitzgibbon, who is “intoxicated by whatever devil of destruction ruled over her wild soul,” uses her mythical status as Dark Rosaleen to hypnotize Crosbie and then informs him of his destined role in revolutionary violence: “Dark Rosaleen will cry out 150 for deliverance and she will be delivered from her bondage by you” (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 71). O’Flaherty’s depiction of Fitzgibbon as an uncanny female revolutionary, who tempts men to sell their souls to her, places the ritual of blood sacrifice and the myth of Dark Rosaleen in the realm of the supernatural. The invocation of the supernatural to suggest that the revolutionary’s death is predetermined by the seductive powers of women serves to not only undercut the seriousness of martyrdom but also to foreshadow the supernatural circumstances surrounding Crosbie’s blood sacrifice, which comes in the final scene of the novel. The supernatural also plays an important role in a scene that comes shortly before Crosbie’s blood sacrifice, in which O’Flaherty creates sensational images of Irish patriotic mysticism to mock the symbolic representation of Ireland as a woman. Crosbie’s speech to his executioner, shortly before Crosbie becomes a martyr, suggests that Fitzgibbon has a strong influence on his belief in mythical nationalism and political fervor for the cause: Ireland knows it already and even if you now hold her strangled, she will rise again and wave her holy banners on the hills and cast your damned bones from her bosom. She will rise again, I say, and save Europe from the devil. I say she will rise again, but this next time she will make sure that there are no agents of the devil in her holy army. (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 192) His suggestion that Ireland is “strangled” but will “rise again” recalls Fitzgibbon’s earlier speech to him, in which she proclaims that Dark Rosaleen, who symbolically represents Ireland, will be delivered from bondage. While Crosbie’s references to “holy banners” and a “holy army” reveal the importance that his religious convictions have to his political fervor, O’Flaherty undercuts Crosbie’s commitment to the revolutionary cause 151 with a sensational allusion to the devil. Ironically, Crosbie suggests that Ireland must “save Europe from the devil,” even though his own belief in the myth of Dark Rosaleen leads him to be guilty of giving in to the temptations of an “agent of the devil,” Fitzgibbon. With his belief in Irish mythical patriotism, then, Crosbie cannot even save himself from the devil. Crosbie also sensationalizes the allusion to the myth of Mother Ireland with a Gothic image of her “cast[ing]…damned bones.” O’Flaherty, then, mocks the nationalist impulse to symbolize Ireland as a woman and thereby the patriotic martyr who believes that his sacrifice for Dark Rosaleen represents his commitment to Ireland. While O’Flaherty reveals the seductive power of martyrdom for a male revolutionary, he also exposes the anxiety over a woman’s desire to become a revolutionary blood sacrifice with Fitzgibbon’s desperate attempt to achieve it. Critic Louise Ryan argues that the writings of Republican men do not suggest that women take on leading roles for the Irish revolutionary cause: The fact that women were expected to take second place behind the cause of Irish freedom, symbolized by the beautiful young woman Roisin Dubh, suggests something of the gendered nature of the republican campaign. (53) Though Ryan does not specifically refer to O’Flaherty’s works, the suggestion that women are expected to follow, not lead, is especially evident in The Martyr since Fitzgibbon is denied the opportunity to become a martyr for the cause. In the novel, both Crosbie and Fitzgibbon are captured while taking part in revolutionary violence, but Fitzgibbon is set free while Crosbie remains in prison. Fitzgibbon not only wants to be recaptured and hanged but also reveals her desire to die for the revolutionary cause in Crosbie’s place when she asks herself: “Why don’t they kill me instead of that cowardly 152 rat?” (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 171). While her willingness to become a blood sacrifice has the potential to make her a heroic figure in the novel, O’Flaherty undercuts Fitzgibbon’s motivation for martyrdom. As Sheeran acknowledges, O’Flaherty emphasizes the extreme measure that Fitzgibbon is willing to go to in order to remain a mystical figure in The Martyr: “there is a fine absurdity in the final image of Roisin Dubh trying to get herself arrested by the forces of the Irish Government in order to regain her proper, mythical status” (256). Taking this a step further, Fitzgibbon’s desperate attempt to get herself arrested for her own benefit undermines the ethos of blood sacrifice for the cause. In other words, it is not enough for her fellow revolutionaries to become martyrs; Fitzgibbon’s determination to take their place is an attempt to fulfill her own ambition as a leader of the revolution and to become a hero for the cause in the name of Dark Rosaleen. In the final scene of the novel, O’Flaherty exposes the revolutionary’s reliance on mysticism as an inadequate justification for blood sacrifice since Irish legend becomes so intertwined with reality that they become indistinguishable. Crosbie’s refusal to denounce his support for the revolutionary cause leads him to be literally crucified, but critics disagree on how to interpret Crosbie’s blood sacrifice in The Martyr. On the one hand, Patrick Sheeran suggests that O’Flaherty’s depiction of Crosbie is evidence that O’Flaherty does not completely condemn mysticism in the novel (250). On the other hand, John Zneimer briefly acknowledges that O’Flaherty is critical of “Ireland’s tendency toward mysticism” in The Martyr, especially in his depiction of Crosbie (117). A logical extension of Zneimer’s point then is that Crosbie is a representative of the sort of revolutionary politics O’Flaherty condemns. This view is supported by the Gothic 153 sensationalism O’Flaherty uses to expose the dangers that a belief in mysticism can have for the revolutionary martyr. He sets the scene of Crosbie’s blood sacrifice at the “Mountain of the Ghost,” where a revolutionary, Kate McCarthy, observes the crucifixion from afar: Had it been the ghost? There was a legend that a druidic priest who mocked the Saviour had been hurled from that mountain top by Saint Patrick and that his ghost had haunted it since then. Was it that ghost? (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 272; 284) As far as I know, the legend mentioned here does not allude to an actual legend, at least not a legend that I could find documented. In the above quote, McCarthy suggests that a ghost is haunting the mountain, readily invoking the supernatural as an explanation for what she sees. McCarthy is the only one to witness the crucifixion besides the executioner, but she does not recognize that what she witnesses is a blood sacrifice for the revolution. McCarthy’s favoring of a supernatural explanation over the reality of martyrdom reveals the futility of Crosbie’s death for the revolutionary cause, as his blood sacrifice goes virtually unnoticed. In fact, he becomes a martyr in the first place because of Fitzgibbon, but she is not even privy to the consequences of her seductive powers—the blood sacrifice Crosby makes for her. In addition, as an outside observer, McCarthy does not view the crucifixion as a heroic act: “She gasped with horror. She saw a flaming cross against the sky and a man crucified upon it…There was a wild shriek, cut short, and then the flaming cross vaulted over the precipice after the rope” (O’Flaherty, The Martyr 286). O’Flaherty’s Gothic depiction of Crosbie’s martyrdom as a horrifying crucifixion that is unrecognized as a revolutionary blood sacrifice suggests that a belief in mysticism can obscure the reality of Irish revolutionary politics. 154 In his final novel on Irish revolutionary violence, Insurrection, set during the 1916 Easter Rising, O’Flaherty especially attacks the ways in which a belief in mysticism can obscure the reality of radical politics by encouraging the revolutionary to sensationalize his participation in the violence of the insurrection. In this novel, fiction and reality become so intertwined that it is difficult to distinguish them; actual revolutionary terrorists who participated in the Easter Rising are featured as characters. In an early scene, O’Flaherty ironically alludes to Patrick Pearse to expose the desperate attempts that this actual revolutionary leader makes to create a heroic image for the terrorist. One critic, Moran, argues that “Pearse promulgated an archetype of Irish republican martyrdom” and that his “ability to describe this conflict and its violence in theological terms that were historically understandable to Irish nationalist culture…made him such an important figure within the Republican tradition” (9; 17). O’Flaherty’s readers, then, would be familiar with Pearse, who relied on the mysticism of martyrdom to rally support for the revolutionary cause during the Easter Rising. In Insurrection, when Pearse reads the Proclamation of Independence, the narrator, Bartly Madden—who is a would-be revolutionary—compares Pearse’s audience to a crowd at a theatre: All eyes were turned towards the Grecian columns of the portico, where Patrick Pearse stood ready to proclaim the purpose of the insurrection. The people were now like an audience at a theatre, tensely waiting for the climax of a play’s first act. (O’Flaherty, Insurrection 29) Sheeran has already acknowledged that in this scene, “the narrator makes explicit the dramatic analogy,” but an extension of this logic might suggest that the crowd’s intense desire to hear Pearse’s speech could reveal the strong influence this revolutionary leader 155 had on his audience (The Novels 240). This dramatic analogy, though, serves to undercut the seriousness of Pearse’s speech, suggesting rather that Pearse provides entertainment for his audience like an actor in a play. The play metaphor is not unlike that found in Boris Savinkov’s The Pale Horse, which parodies the role of revolutionary terrorism in creating a spectacle for an audience, as discussed in the previous chapter. In Insurrection, the suggestion of a spectacle comes at the beginning of Pearse’s speech: “In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom” (O’Flaherty 29). His speech—which combines nationalist rhetoric, an allusion to Mother Ireland, and religious imagery—reveals his desire to create a heroic image for the terrorist by dramatizing the mysticism of martyrdom. One might wonder why Madden is so easily persuaded to join the insurrection, given his description of this dramatic scene, which seems to suggest that he is aware of the extreme measures Pearse takes to convince revolutionaries to commit to the revolutionary cause. Sheeran convincingly argues that after Pearse’s speech, “Madden’s dumb soul is stirred by the drama of what he sees and hears” (The Novels 241). Taking this a step further, the power of Pearse’s speech, which convinces Madden to participate in revolutionary violence, further suggests the revolutionary’s—and in turn the public’s—confusion between a fictional play and the reality of revolutionary politics. O’Flaherty further pokes fun at the revolutionary martyr’s belief in blood sacrifice by exposing the absurdity of his attempts to be remembered as a heroic martyr. In the novel, O’Flaherty alludes to another actual revolutionary terrorist, Cathal Brugha, who 156 also participated in the Easter Rising. A young woman who observes the revolutionary violence describes Brugha as a heroic leader: Then Cathal Brugha saved the day. Riddled with bullets from the waist down, he was kneeling in a pool of blood by the kitchen window, firing his revolver at the enemy until his ammunition was spent. Then he crossed himself with his empty gun and began to sing ‘God Save Ireland.’ That did the trick. The other lads rallied and began to sing with him. Then they charged and swept the enemy off his feet. (O’Flaherty, Insurrection 85) This young woman’s account of Brugha’s heroic feat recalls the revolutionary’s preoccupation with the romance of war in The Assassin. Brugha’s heroics, then, create enthusiasm for the insurrection since the young woman is impressed with his blood sacrifice and his ability to rally his fellow revolutionaries with the song “God Save Ireland.” As mentioned earlier, this song created a mystique for revolutionaries in the face of failure (Moran 19). O’Flaherty, though, undercuts this attempt to create a glorified vision of martyrdom for the terrorist by sensationalizing Brugha’s death. The odd combination of Gothic imagery and religious ritual recalls the absurdity of the assassination scene at the end of The Assassin. The image of Brugha “riddled with bullets” and “kneeling in a pool of blood” in the novel is more dramatic than his actual death. Brugha was a revolutionary during the Easter Rising, but he did not die in this conflict. During the Irish Civil War in 1922, he suffered a bullet wound to the leg which severed an artery, and he eventually bleed to death. In the novel, the grotesque imagery of Brugha’s death coupled with his attempt to perform the Sign of the Cross with his gun not only suggests the extreme measures the revolutionary is willing to take to become a blood sacrifice but also downplays the seriousness of the revolutionary’s heroic efforts for the cause. 157 The Gothic imagery in Insurrection continues to undercut attempts to create a heroic image for the terrorist by exposing the dependence on supernatural mysticism to generate interest for its revolutionary cult. Madden becomes directly involved in the revolutionary violence of the Rising but is frustrated with the insurrection, which proves to be largely unsuccessful. In the midst of battle, he imagines the enemy soldiers as a monster: the enemy was a beast that his beautiful rifle could maim but not kill. This beast was a colossus, armed with hundreds of yellow limbs, which he kept thrusting forward towards the bridge with indomitable will. Several hundred of those limbs had been severed. There they lay upon the roadway, some writhing in agony and others motionless in death. (O’Flaherty, Insurrection 130) Though Madden is unsuccessful at killing his enemy, his “indomitable will” and determination suggests the revolutionary martyr’s attempt to achieve a spiritual victory in the face of failure. His willingness to sacrifice his life, though, is undercut by the enemy that he battles, a half dead beast that serves as an elaborate metaphor for the enemy soldiers. This grotesque image of a beast with “severed” limbs, some of which are “writhing in agony” creates an image of the enemy that recalls the image of the monstrous terrorist organization from The Informer. The individual soldiers become indistinguishable from one another, functioning as “hundreds of yellow limbs” of a beast. Here the enemy soldiers rather than the revolutionary insurgents are part of the beast, which could suggest a lack of individuality for soldiers, whether insurgents or otherwise, on both sides of the conflict. In fact, Madden has “a mysterious and satisfying feeling of unity with these men” and thereby identifies with his enemy. This suggests that both the insurgents and enemy soldiers are subsumed by terrorist organizations and are expected 158 to become martyrs for the spiritual victory of their respective organizations. O’Flaherty, then, exposes the absurdity of blood sacrifice, which was used to create a heroic image for participants in political violence on both sides of the conflict during the Easter Rising. An early reviewer of Insurrection in The Bell criticized O’Flaherty for his attempt to create “philosophical meaning for the desperate act of violence” in the novel and he claims that “only readers who know nothing about Easter Week could get the best value out of Insurrection” (qtd. in Sheeran 247). The final scene in Insurrection, though, emphasizes the hopeless attempt to find philosophical meaning for revolutionary violence by dramatizing the public’s apparent support of the revolutionary’s commitment to martyrdom. The crowd not only witnesses the violence but also interacts with the insurgents as they pass by: “Many people came out onto the pavements and knelt in prayer. A few of them even ran into the roadway, touched the clothes of those walking to their death and then crossed themselves” (O’Flaherty, Insurrection 245). This desire to touch the terrorists suggests that the crowd worships them as heroes for the revolutionary cause. One of the insurgents who walks to his death is, unsurprisingly, Madden, and the image of his dead body at the end of the novel emphasizes the revolutionary’s desperate attempt to become a martyr: “the dead body that lay prone, with a rifle slung across its back and each outstretched hand gripping a pistol” (O’Flaherty, Insurrection 248). This image of Madden’s body, which is shaped like a cross, clinging to guns, emphasizes the inseparable relationship between religious mysticism and political violence that informs the ideologies of the revolutionary terrorist. Madden’s symbolic crucifixion recalls not only the final scene in The Informer when Nolan falls to his death in the church with his arms stretched out to each side but also the final scene in The Martyr when Crosbie is the 159 victim of an actual crucifixion. While all of these images draw attention to the cult of martyrdom that encourages the heroic image of the terrorist, this final image in Insurrection exposes the extent of these desperate heroics with the suggestion of excessive revolutionary violence. The lack of an extensive biography of O’Flaherty makes it difficult to make definitive conclusions about his revolutionary politics, but The Informer, “The Terrorist,” The Assassin, The Martyr, and Insurrection suggest that he was not the supporter of Irish radical politics that many believed him to be. His lack of support is especially evident in the Gothic displays of political violence in his works, which expose the revolutionary terrorist’s reliance on the sublime to promote martyrdom. As a critic of the revolutionary’s desire for heroic martyrdom rather than a champion of Irish revolutionary politics, O’Flaherty examines the complex ethical codes of revolutionary terrorists in his novels and thereby reveals that their desire for attracting public attention to their role in acts of political violence as a heroic martyr is more important to them than carrying out successful acts of terrorism. His works shed light on the culture of radical revolutionary politics in early twentieth-century Ireland, particularly the public’s desire and anxiety for accounts of the heroic martyr’s role in the revolutionary cause. 160 Chapter Four Endnotes 1 There is a slight discrepancy in the literature concerning the date O’Flaherty witnessed this scene. Though he claims that it occurred in June of 1922, his biographer—Costello—cites this event as taking place at the beginning of July of 1922. 2 O’Flaherty’s account of the rumors spread concerning his death is generally consistent with his biographer’s—Costello’s—claim that “rumors were flying around the city that [O’Flaherty] had been shot the day before in Capel Street” (40). 3 Cahalan acknowledges that O’Flaherty’s “obituary notice described his short- lived occupation of the Rotunda in January 1922, and pointed out that this dramatic political act turned out to be an anomaly in O’Flaherty’s life” (33). Kiberd notes that O’Flaherty’s “involvement in radical politics, always marginal and unclear, was neither sustained nor disciplined” (491). O’Flaherty also wrote anecdotal incidents of his participation in revolutionary activities in his autobiographies, none of which suggest he took a major part in any acts of political violence. In “Autobiographical Note,” O’Flaherty admits that he was “almost expelled from [school] for organizing a corps of Republican Volunteers” in 1913, that he was “a volunteer in the Republican force and an anarchist” in college, and that he “joined the Republican Four Courts Rebellion” during the Civil War (93-94). For more on O’Flaherty’s accounts of his participation in revolutionary activities, see his autobiography Shame the Devil. He also wrote articles in revolutionary newspapers, which has led Sheeran to conclude that O’Flaherty’s revolutionary activities were “mostly journalistic, earn[ing] him an unmerited reputation as being au fait with the inner circles of various secret organizations” (The Novels 74). O’Flaherty wrote “articles for Republican papers like the Plain People” (“Autobiographical Note” 94). He was also the editor for the left-wing paper, The Worker’s Republic (Costello 40). For more on O’Flaherty’s journalism, see Shame the Devil. 4 McCarthy goes on to say that it was not until fifty-eight years later that the identities of the three assassins were revealed—Archie Doyle, Bill Gannon, and Timothy Coughlan—all of whom were members of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) (288). For more on the O’Higgins assassination, see McCarthy 287-292. 5 For more on the Manchester executions and their impact on the Irish nationalist imagination, see Owens 18-36. For the lyrics to “God Save Ireland,” see Zimmermann 266-267. 6 O’Flaherty’s depiction of Fitzgibbon recalls not only the myth of Dark Rosaleen but also an actual female revolutionary during the 1916 Easter Rising and 1922 Civil War—Countess Markievicz—which suggests the strong influence that mythology had on 161 Irish revolutionary politics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tindall has convincingly argued that O’Flaherty bases Fitzgibbon on Countess Markievicz. In the Easter Rising and the Civil War, Countess Markievicz prepared bombs and bullets, carried weapons, and even participated as a sniper. As one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, she encouraged women to “dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels and gold wands in the bank, and buy a revolver” (qtd. in McCoole 24). 7 For a brief analysis of Plunkett’s “The Little Black Rose Shall Be Red at Last,” particularly its “meshing of patriotism with the sexual,” see Cairns and Richards (103- 104). For an extensive analysis of the personification of Ireland as a woman in the works of William Butler Yeats, Patrick Pearse, and Seamus Heaney, see Cullingford 1-21. 162 Epilogue: “The Axis of Evil” and the “War on Terror(ism)”: The Bush Administration’s Fear-Mongering Political Rhetoric The sensational accounts of terrorism in our contemporary media recall the spectacles of political violence found in nineteenth-century periodicals that commented on revolutionary terrorism in Europe. On 2 April 1881, a New York Times article was titled, “War on Terrorism: European Measures for its Extermination.” The phrase “war on terrorism”—also called the “war on terror”—was re-introduced by the Bush administration. On 20 September 2001, President George W. Bush Jr. first proclaimed America’s war on terror in a televised address to Congress: "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." The terms “war on terrorism” and “war on terror” were used interchangeably by the Bush administration, drawing attention to both the act of political violence (“terrorism”) and the emotion that acts of terrorism are intended to elicit (“terror”). In fact, the assumption that a war can be fought against terror assumes that terror is tangible. Otherwise, how could you fight a war against it? This use of “terror,” though, suggests that the enemy is an undefined evil that is to be feared and thereby invokes rhetoric that is not unlike that found in a Gothic novel to create the sensation of fear for the public. Declaring a “war on terror” and claiming an “axis of evil,” the Bush administration’s fear-mongering rhetoric especially facilitated Gothic spectacles in the media. Here is an excerpt from President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, during which he coined the phrase—“axis of evil”: [Our goal] is to prevent regimes (terrorist) that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass 163 destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children…States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. Here President Bush singles out countries—North Korea, Iran, and Iraq—as an “axis of evil” because they “sponsor terror.” By invoking September 11 th , Bush reminds us of the terrorist act that first enraged the American public, and thereby suggests that similar terrorist attacks are to be expected at the hands of the “axis of evil.” The speech goes on to say that even when these countries are “quiet,” we should keep in mind their “true nature” which is presumably “evil.” Bush, then, implied that once these countries are labeled evil, we should assume that they cannot be anything but evil, suggesting that countries are moral absolutes with rhetoric that sounds like it could come from a Gothic novel. Of course, “evil” is even more vague than “terror,” and thus not exactly a precise term upon which to enact policy. The speech continues to use pathos—pointing to these countries’ murderous deeds, pursuit of weapons, and threats to peace—in an attempt to convince the American public of the “grave and growing danger” that these countries pose. Bush goes on to make some rather large assumptions, using an apocalyptic slippery slope fallacy to reason that these countries would provide terrorists with weapons, which 164 would necessarily result in “catastrophic” attacks or blackmail. This speech, then, sets the stage for Americans to be outraged and to create fear of future terrorist attacks like 9/11, which this speech suggests are inevitable if we are indifferent to the “axis of evil.” By utilizing this political rhetoric, the Bush administration presumably had hoped that Americans would accept whatever actions the U.S. government took in order to prevent future terrorist attacks. The phrases “war on terror” and “axis of evil” exploit a well-documented culture of fear in America. The American media has especially facilitated this fear of terrorism with sensational news coverage of actual and potential terrorist attacks, as scholars such as Noam Chomsky have addressed. Burke’s theory of the sublime can provide an explanation for the strange attraction to the sensational images of terrorist attacks, as we, perhaps paradoxically, find some pleasure in the paranoia. The insistence on retelling the events of, and thus the inability to bring closure to, high-profile incidents such as 9/11 suggest the continual need to stage and re-stage, through the imagination, terrorist acts. This staging of terrorism recalls, sadly, Savinkov’s theatrical metaphor in The Pale Horse. The Bush administration’s rhetoric not only exploited a culture of fear but also aroused public outrage and thereby suggested that extreme retaliatory acts were justified to systematically combat terrorism. In this respect, the Bush administration’s political speech pronouncing a “war on terror” was not unlike the call for systematized terror in Boris Savinkov’s What Never Happened. Both employ rhetoric and Gothic spectacles to create an emotional response from the public that, to a certain extent, perpetuates a cycle of terrorism. Perhaps the popular American TV show 24 gives us the best example of a 165 government’s potential to enable a cycle of terrorism. In the latest season, a private military company and defense contractor—Starkwood—tries to use biological weapons to attack the United States, while claiming its actions are necessary in order to prevent further terrorist attacks. Ironically, Jonas Hodge, a Starkwood executive, and his associates attempt to create panic and terror among the public in an effort to make the company seem necessary to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. Their claim to use terrorism as a means of counter-terrorism is not unlike Vladimir’s philosophy on bombing in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Contemporary responses to counter-terrorism in the Middle East have also suggested that countermeasures can create more panic and terror than the original acts of terrorism that inspired them. In fact, allusions to Dracula have been made in response to the involvement of Britain and the United States in the Middle East. Many criticized President Bush, and Prime Minister Tony Blair by association, for having imperialistic projects in the Middle East and for using terrorist tactics to carry them out. In addition, Michael Howard—who served as the British Conservative Party leader—was nicknamed “Dracula” by the British press because of his Transylvanian heritage. After Iran was labeled as part of the “axis of evil,” placards at an Iranian rally read: “Bush as Dracula.” By alluding to the figure of the vampire in Dracula, these responses from the press and the public associate the actions of Western governments in the Middle East with Gothic terror. Though they may not recognize the novel as an imperial text—Dracula does, after all, attempt to control the land—they equate the actions of Western leaders with those of this vampire from a popular Gothic novel, suggesting that they believe these leaders are invaders that metaphorically represent terrorists. The Bush Administration’s political 166 discourse, then, employed fear-mongering rhetoric that perpetuated Gothic terror with its proclamation of an “axis of evil” and declaration of a “war on terror(ism).” 167 References “1,000,000 A.D.” Punch or the London Charivari. 25 Nov. 1893: 250. 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Creator Malia, Jennifer Lynn (author)

Core Title Romancing the bomb: Gothic terror and terrorism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 09/30/2011

Defense Date 07/31/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anarchist history,Irish revolutionary history,journalism,nineteenth-century literature,novel,OAI-PMH Harvest,political violence,Russian revolutionary history,terrorism,twentieth-century literature

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), Alkon, Paul K. (committee member), Seifrid, Thomas (committee member)

Creator Email jmalia@aus.edu,jmalia@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2626

Unique identifier UC1499847

Identifier etd-Malia-3204 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-255679 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2626 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Malia-3204.pdf

Dmrecord 255679

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Malia, Jennifer Lynn

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu