Philip Roth, interview with the Independent, London – a year after 9/11 – removed shortly after publication online.

Responding to a question regarding an assessment of 9/11 and if we are moving toward the right wisdom, Roth said:

“ I really don’t know and I don’t care – that interests me as a citizen but not as a novelist. September 11th is not something I can draw on at an imaginative level – the only story I can take from it is the kitsch in all its horror, not the horror of what happened but the great distortion of what happened. It’s almost embarrassing – the kitschification of 3000 peoples deaths. Other cities have experienced far worse catastrophes – America itself has inflicted some in its past even if it was for the right reasons, I am not a pacifist.

One wouldn’t dream of slighting these people, it is awful but we need to keep a sense of proportion about these things. What we have been witnessing since 9/11 is an orgy of national narcissism and a gratuitous sense of victimization that is repellent and it doesn’t stop. Even now it’s impossible to watch a baseball game without listening to God Bless America beforehand or without being asked to remember our heroes. I feel like saying stop, dignity demands that you stop it.�

Thank you Philip!

Terrorist, ultimately, is no espionage style thriller, but a story about the ageless war between compassion and faith, this time set in an unfaithful society. The novel’s title character opens the narrative thusly,

Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God.

Yet even before that, in a double epigraph before the title page, Updike gives us this:

Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of Love and Other Demons

Ahmad is a Muslim by conversion: his father was an Egyptian but not religious; his mother an Irish-American and a non-practicing Catholic. In significant ways, Ahmad’s imam, Shaikh Rashid, represents a father for the eighteen-year-old protagonist. More importantly, the imam serves the novelist as a plausible source for the many Koranic quotes necessary to drive the plot.

I found Updike’s choice of quotes peculiar, however. For example, Ahmad’s transition from simple believer to active jihadi would have been much more convincing had Updike included quotes like these:

“Slay them wherever you find them…Idolatry is worse than carnage…Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme.� (Sura 2:190-93)

And hadiths like these:

“He who dies without taking part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief.�

“Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the Hereafter) would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it; except a martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world ands get killed again (in Allah’s cause).�

(Of course, using quotes like those would have made much less plausible his novel’s already-unconvincing climax—but more on this in a moment.)

Updike illustrates the depths and meanings of faith within an African-American church service. In it, the preacher compares the struggles of blacks in America to the putative sufferings of the exiles in the Old Testament (Numbers, mostly). He cites God calling the tribe of Israel ‘an evil congregation’ not because they were unempathetic or lacking any other kindly virtues, but because they quailed at the prospect of attacking the people whose lands they coveted, because: “…you lacked faith. Faith in the power of the Lord Almighty. That was your iniquity… and to drill his point home, God sent down plagues and pestilences…� after which, in desperation, the Israelites do in fact go on to attack and slaughter the already-settled peoples of the coveted land.

The preacher then explains,

“You see, my friends, the Lord had been with them, he gave them a chance to go forward with Him in all his glory, and what did they do? They hesitated…They didn’t let the Lord act through them. They had good human intentions, but they didn’t trust enough in the Lord…�

This, in a nutshell, is to me the great tragedy of modern religion, especially in its fundamentalist evolutions: it demands utterly unquestioning faith above all else. It even demands faith over empathy, which to my mind is the greatest of humankind’s many talents. Empathy is certainly humankind’s greatest virtue. More on this shortly…

Charlie, Ahmad’s boss, is in many ways the book’s most interesting character. Charlie admires the American guerrilla methods of the Revolutionary War, and equates that struggle with the modern Islamist jihad against the ummah’s colonizing oppressors, the West. Yet there’s more to Charlie than we know at first: his faith’s intensity and complexity differs from Ahmad’s. Ahmad’s faith is the simplistic zealotry of the convert, which Shaikh Rashid, while seducing Ahmad into the jihad (on page 234), characterizes like this,

“…whose love of God is unqualified, and who impatiently thirsts for the glory of Paradise…�

On the following page, Rashid says, “What is freedom…as long as we are slaves to our bodies and their necessities? How I envy you, dear boy. Compared with you, I am old and it is to the young that the greatest glory of battle belongs. To sacrifice one’s life…before it becomes a tattered, exhausted thing. What an endless joy that would be.�

Yet the ‘glorious sacrifice’ Rashid has enticed from Ahmad will of course murder hundreds if not thousands of innocents. Ahmad, however, doesn’t judge unbelievers to be ‘innocent’. Instead his holy scripture names them explicitly as destined for hell, and fully deserving of its eternal tortures. And he agrees.

At this point I should leave the novel’s climax unspoiled by further revelation. Yet I can’t help but state that the ending felt contrived: Ahmad is an ultimately unconvincing character; and the plot-device Updike employs to grant Ahmad a choice for determining his fate feels transparently contrived too. Let’s just say that the device is a proper, if overly-simplistic, struggle between his faith and his empathy. I must reveal at least that much, because, although the novel might not succeed on every level, it does at least give the reader an exposition of and a reason to ponder the differences between ordinary empathy and the demands of faith.

I know I’ve developed a reputation in these threads as an unabashed critic of religion and religiosity. Not only do I not care, but Updike seems to support me after a fashion, by giving us a novelistic version of the same critique. Because although it is true that religion—at its best—harnesses and sanctifies the human capacity for empathy, religion also actively and explicitly disables empathy in its faithful. This is especially so in the many bloodthirsty evolutions of the Abrahamic traditions. How else can we explain the God-sanctioned carnage of books like Joshua and Judges, and of the xenophobia of the Koran and hadith, and even of the putatively peace-loving Jesus, whose much more probable xenophobia is characterized by A.N.Wilson thusly:

“The Gospels were written to make us suppose that Jesus did indeed reach out to all mankind as some Saviour-figure who would embrace Gentiles as well as Jews, so it is all the more remarkable that these books should clumsily have recorded sayings, which on balance would seem to be authentic, in which Jesus is quoted as saying that his mission is to ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’; that he has no desire to throw the pearls of his wisdom before the Gentile pigs. In another place he is quoted as saying that the Gentiles were dogs.

“Jesus would seem to have shared the views of many Jewish contemporaries that the world was about to come to an end and that God would redeem Israel and bring to pass a new era in which the rule of the Gentiles would be smitten and driven away. Since the end of ages was at hand, and the Gospels record Jesus as predicting as much, it is hard to imagine why Jesus would have entertained the quite incompatible belief that several thousand years of human history stretched ahead in which a new ‘religion’ would be necessary. As far as the historical Jesus was concerned, it seems overwhelmingly likely that he did not think there was any future for the human race at all; that is, in so far as we can deduce any interest in the ‘human race’, as opposed to the fate of the Jews or more narrowly of his own followers, in the recorded sayings of Jesus.�

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/paul.htm

It’s high sacrilege, I know, to pour the cold water of truth onto our cultural sacred cows. After all, if you give them a cold, they might catch pneumonia and perish.

But somebody’s got to do it.

And it’s simple to do, too. Sadly simple, in fact. Because religion would be truly wonderful if its only function were the enhancement of the human capacity for empathy. Instead it has developed elaborately multi-layered equivocations that demand not only a childlike surrender of credulity and a concomitant adult refusal to question ancient and obsolete beliefs, but that also divide our species into ‘in-groups’ worthy of empathy and ‘out-groups’ deserving only of death and eternal suffering.

This battle between faith and empathy is the central lesson of Terrorist – if, that is, you read it with a mind unclouded by religious conceits and preconceptions.

I give it a ‘B-’. But I also think it an appropriate and timely post 9-11 novel, which is what this thread is all about.

…three issues: empathy, politics/media, and the function of literature. And these operate within personal life, too! We will all die, but how many people have confronted the inevitable on an existential level? Life is an action movie in modern America — because we CHOOSE not to live life on an existential level…

Ditto, 9/11: It has been objectified. The novelist tries to put one into a situation, but more: he/she tries to make us emotionally react to that situation. Paradoxically, the more often we THINK about 9/11 (or Katrina) the further we alienate ourselves from the event. It becomes a rational construct, engraved in memory, chatted about on TV, analyzed by professors, and speechified by politicians. Most folks — most of us — choose to regard our world, not on an existential and personal level, but simply as a backdrop to our own lives and concerns — deliberately oblivious to the commonplace that each of us is PART of that world… and ultimately all destined for extinction.

Man, that’s so insightful it’s awesome. I take a lot from it, but mostly a reminder that before we analyze anything (be it memory, ongoing circumstances, or possible choices to presently be made), the first place to start is the underutilized yet damn near divine human capacity called empathy. A bit more empathy running about loose in the world would do not just a little bit of ‘touchy-feely’ good but REAL good – in the humanistic sense – and on an exponential scale. And literature – especially novels – can teach empathetic lessons in an almost miraculously effortless way (since novels are, after all, little more than beautifully elaborate lies). I say ‘effortless’ because a well-written novel inhabited by understandable and sympathetic characters is more than entertainment: ideally, such literature teaches something objective (and subjective!) about humankind. (Too bad that Hollywood, its imitators, and the noxious fun called videogames has so diminished the impact of literary fiction, hmmm?)

Anyway: thanks, tbrucia, especially for the mention of empathy.

I won’t even mention its quotation from Raimondo whose antisemetism and embrace of conspiracy theories should have put his remarks off limits by anyone one who wants to be taken seriously.