JAY MARTIN
"Yes."
"It is the same . Terror is theater. We inspire . We frighten, we
awaken indignation, anger , love. We enlighten. The theater also.
The guerilla is the great actor of the world."
81
Toward the book's end , after the bombing, "It was the worst play she
had ever been in ," she thinks.
After Khalil is killed , Charlie is given brief psychiatric care at a
sanitarium, along with new fictions to explain her absence from
London and the large sum of money she has acquired . Then she is
returned to the theater. But the tragic plays make her cry in panic,
and the comedies seem wholly irrelevant. She is stuck, and neither
reality nor other fictions will do for her.
Charlie is an actress, a good one, but not a great one. She is
good because she can so easily adopt whatever role is offered to her,
but not great because her own identity is insufficient. That prevents
her from powerfully infusing an authentic personality of her own in–
to her roles . Terrorists, on the other hand, are not "real" actors, but
actors in the theater of the real . They play out fictions in a truly
dangerous way- for themselves and for others . Their stage is the
daily newspaper, where the strange, terrifying, brutal fictions of our
time have their terrible scripts and violent denouements.
