Book Review: Crimes of Art and Terror

• Published date: 01 March 2007
• Date: 01 March 2007
• Author: G David Curry
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299326
• Subject Matter: Articles

56 International Criminal Justice Review

Lentricchia, F., & McAuliffe, J. (2003). Crimes of Art and Terror. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299326

Although the work is only 187 pages, Crimes of Art and Terror may be the longest book that I

have ever read. The reason may be only my philistine status as an inadequate connoisseur of classic

and contemporary fiction. The authors are clearly identified as professors of literature and theater on

the dust jacket. I am a lifetime student of the social sciences and mathematics who can no longer

imagine myself as an acceptably well-educated consumer of the liberal arts. By this I mean that I

was repeatedly forced to read additional works to understand what I was reading in Crimes of Art

and Terror. I confess that I am a better read criminologist than I was when I began the experience.

Most of the chapters in Crimes of Art and Terror are stand-alone essays on the links between ter-

rorism and crime and the arts. Chapter 1, “Groundzeroland,” is an essential beginning in these times

when 9/11 so strongly defines our awareness of terrorism. A few days after 9/11, a world-renowned

German musician characterized the attacks on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art that

is possible in the whole cosmos.” The musician’s upcoming 4-day concert was canceled in response to

his remarks. But the theme of terrorism and crime as an art form is the primary idea of the book.

In my opinion, chapter 2 is the most essential chapter. The chapter gave me the authors’crucial link

between art—the poetry of Wordsworth—and terror—the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, better

known as the Unabomber. The authors integrate the perspectives of Wordsworth and Kaczynski into

the perspective of the central character of Don DeLillo’s Mao II. Frankly, I had never heard of DeLillo.

When I picked up my requested Mao II from my public library, I asked the librarian if he had ever heard

of DeLillo. He said, “No, but I recognize the guy on the cover from some place.” That “guy on the

cover” would be Mao Tse-tung. (Early in 2006, DeLillo was identified as the creator of one of the most

important novels in the past 25 years in a survey of New York Times Book Review readers.) I had

planned to scan Mao II enough to understand chapter 2 of Crimes of Art and Terror. That was a hope-

less intention. I not only read Mao II in its entirety but also reread substantial parts of Mao II. From

Crimes of Art and Terror, a typical complex thought grounded in multiple sources is the sentence, “In

Bill Gray’s description of writing as a process of ‘self-argument,’ DeLillo echoes Yeats’s exemplary

modernist account: that out of the quarrel with others we produce rhetoric, matter for the editorial page,

while out of the quarrel with ourselves we create art” (p. 35). Mao II would not be the last time that I

would have to read additional work to understand Crimes of Art and Terror.

Other contrasts encapsulated in the chapters include one in which Norman Mailer and his real-

life criminals, Gary Gilmore and Jack Henry Abbott, are contrasted with Fyodor Dostoevsky and his

literary creations, especially Raskolnikov. Lentricchia and McAuliffe do not limit themselves to

written works. There are visits with the films of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. Both Joseph

Conrad’s (Heart of Darkness) Kurtz and Marlow and Francis Ford Coppola’s (Apocalypse Now)

Kurtz and Willard are featured in the chapter “Crossing the Line,” an excellent discourse on where

civilizations’ morals begin and end. The greatest stretch in contrasts is the comparison of Jean

Genet’s and Frederick Douglass’s analyses of violence in chapter 5, “Rough Trade.” I still do not

really think that I understood that chapter. Reading supplementary works cited in Crimes of Art and

Terror,I reached an awareness of how far afield I had drifted when I read Melville’s Moby Dick with

the goal of better understanding Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” From

there, I followed the literary trail to chapter 1 of the Book of Jonah in the King James version of the

Bible. Reading Crimes of Art and Terror is comparable to a semester course in fiction. It is also as

much fun as it is a learning experience.