Crimes of Art and Terror

Rating:
Summary: Mostly literary criticism applied to the current situation
Review: CRIMES OF ART AND TERROR (2003) from The University of Chicago Press has a definite point of view in which the feelings of writers are often treated as being more important than society as it is, for writers are pictured as desiring a great change that can only be accomplished by violating society's norms. Early in the book, society is given the opportunity to assert its own preferences against Karlheinz Stockhausen, an opera composer who has used a Lucifer character regularly in a series of seven operas. A four-day concert festival was cancelled in Hamburg after comments Stockhausen made on the events of September 11, 2001, based on early reports. He was inspired by the idea that "people practice like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for a concert, and then die." (p. 6). "You have people so concentrated on one performance, and then 5,000 people are dispatched into eternity, in a single moment." (p. 7).

The second chapter compares the aims of William Wordsworth, The Unabomber, and Don DeLillo. In the third chapter, the relationship between Norman Mailer and author killer Jack Henry Abbott is explained by passages from Fyodor Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Martin Scorsese's movie, `The King of Comedy,' and Bret Easton Ellis's character Patrick Bateman in the novel AMERICAN PSYCHO. I am not familiar with the details of the following chapters, but Chapter 7 is called "The Last Maniacal Folly of Heinrich Von Kleist (A Fiction)." (pp. 148-165). A Short Bibliography lists works with ideas that have contributed to each of the seven chapters. Then Works Cited (pp. 173-175) includes a web page for Karlheinz Stockhausen. The index (pp. 179-187) includes the designation "mentioned" under Wordsworth for three pages where his name merely appears. Dostoevsky also has two pages listed for "mentioned." T. S. Eliot takes 5 lines in the index, with only one page designated "mentioned." This kind of index is valuable for readers who often wish to locate what they previously read and check the relevance of offhanded comments.

My interest in the book was mainly due to its look at Theodore John Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who is definitely both a writer and a criminal in a way that relates to the theme of this book. Offhandedly, Ted's manifesto is subject to comments that illustrate a mentality that is ultimately individual:

`Under normal grammatical conditions, as opposed to the conditions of Unabomber grammar, it is not possible to say that "civilization" is "criminal."' (p. 78).

Ted was willing to plead guilty to avoid a trial that would seek the death penalty because he did not want to claim insanity to avoid punishment. The defense team of lawyers had taken steps to substantiate insanity, but the preliminary issue of how competent Ted was to act in his own defense kept the trial from proceeding smoothly to a determination of that issue. Thus I vaguely disagree with the assertion in this book that "Like the Unabomber, Raskolnikov is tried on an insanity defense because the world cannot accept the actions of such terrorists as rational." (p. 49). I used to have an editorial cartoon on my wall in which lawyers behind Ted's back were making loony bin gestures while Ted was trying to protect all his Constitutional rights and the judge was trying to decipher the confusion about who was representing Ted's best interests. Ted was going to be tried on the contents of his diary, which was written in a code that was found in his cabin, and the pleasure he finally displayed in being able to admit that he was the author of the Unabomber manifesto ought to balance the displeasure of those sentenced to years in prison for illegal substances that messed up their minds in ways that illustrate the concept of transgressive desire as much as this book does.