Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics [1 ed.] 2022042234, 2022042235, 9781032035727, 9781032438443, 9781003188001

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Interpreting Violence

Representations of violence surround us in everyday life –​in news reports, films and novels –​inviting interpretation and raising questions about the ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we understand the processes of meaning-​making involved in interpreting violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation themselves be violent by reproducing the violence they represent? This book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the sense-​making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of violence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute to or benefit from practices of violence. Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at UiT –​The Arctic University of Norway. She is the author of three books and the editor/​ coeditor of three others: Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (ed., 2010), Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–​1848 (2013), The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), Phenomenology of the Broken Body (coed., 2019), Wild Romanticism (coed. 2020) and Global Human Rights Fiction (forthcoming). She is the President of the American Studies Association of Norway and leads both the English literature section at UiT and the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology research group. Victoria Fareld is Associate Professor of Intellectual History at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses mainly on political philosophy, theory of history and memory studies, with particular interests in the connections between time, ethics, memory and historical justice. Her most recent book is From Marx to Hegel and Back: Capitalism, Critique, and Utopia (coed., 2020). Among her recent articles and book chapters are

“Time” (2022), “Framing the Polychronic Present” (2022), “Entangled Memories of Violence” (Memory Studies, 14:1, 2021), “Coming to Terms with the Present” (2019) and “History, Justice and the Time of the Imprescriptible” (2018). Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku, Finland, and Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland research consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-​Critical Narrative Theory” (2018–​2023). Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, cultural memory studies and trauma studies. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014), and she has coedited, with Colin Davis, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018) and the special issues “Cultural Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies, 2021, with Eneken Laanes) and “Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” (Poetics Today, 2022, with Maria Mäkelä).

“Can violence be narrated? Can language help us understand the pain of others, of ourselves? Can words and images give shape to extreme bodily and mental experiences? How do we ‘interpret’ violence and suffering –​ and can these interpretations be violent themselves? This book raises fundamental questions about the reach and limits of language and human imagination. At the same time, it urges us to radically think through –​ supported by a rich repertoire of philosophical, narrative, and cultural concepts –​the nature of violence and the entire range of its brutal and subtle forms.” Jens Brockmeier, Professor of Psychology, The American University of Paris, France “The title Interpreting Violence immediately calls up the need for witnessing, that crucial activity that is the only thing we can do. But witnessing, as the first chapter of this book already intimates, is a socio-​ cultural attitude that can counter the violence of ghoulish reveling –​ remember Adorno’s warning. The authors, all renowned cultural analysts, delve deep into the many different aspects of the presence of violence in culture; the impossibility yet necessity to represent it. Erasure is no better solution than voyeurism. This is a book that matters.” Mieke Bal, Cultural Analyst and Video Artist

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

150 The Words of Winston Churchill Jonathan Locke Hart 151 Islam as Imagined in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English Literature Clinton Bennett 152 The Politics of Remembrance in the Novels of Günter Grass Alex Donovan Cole 153 The Words of Winston Churchill Speeches 1933–​1940 Jonathan Locke Hart 154 The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies Christopher Lloyd and Hilary Emmett 155 Digital Literature and Critical Theory Annika Elstermann 156 Temporal Experiments Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature Edited by Bruce Barnhart and Marit Grøtta 157 Interpreting Violence Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics Edited by Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja For more information about this series, please visit: https://​www.routle​ dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Interd​isci​plin​ary-​Persp​ecti​ves-​on-​Lit​erat​ure/​book-​ ser​ies/​RIPL

Interpreting Violence Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics Edited by Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Falke, Cassandra, 1977– editor. | Fareld, Victoria, 1973– editor. | Meretoja, Hanna, 1977– editor. Title: Interpreting violence : narrative, ethics and hermeneutics / edited by Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld, Hanna Meretoja. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022042234 (print) | LCCN 2022042235 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032035727 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032438443 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003188001 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Violence in literature. | Violence in popular culture. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PN56.V53 I58 2023 (print) | LCC PN56.V53 (ebook) | DDC 809/.933552–dc23/eng/20221129 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042234 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042235 ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​03572-​7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​43844-​3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​18800-​1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003188001 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of Contributors 

ix

Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations: Introduction 

1

C A S S A N D R A FAL KE , VICTO RIA FARE L D AN D HANNA MER ET OJA

PART I

Representing Violence, Violent Representations 

15

1 Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 

17

C A S S A N D R A FAL KE

2 Violence, Encore! Popular Music, Power and Postwar Memory 

32

AV R I L TY N AN

3 Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence: The Strangler Vine and “Thugs” in America  46 A M R I TA G H OSH

4 Variants and Consequences of Violence in Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine 

59

J A K O B L O THE

5 Violent Appetites: Distaste and the Aesthetics of Violence  TE R O E L J A S VAN H A N E N

72

viii Contents PART II

Understanding the Violence of Perpetrators 

87

6 A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 

89

B R I A N S C H I FF A N D MICH AE L JUSTICE

7 Narrative Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-​ Authored Documents: Interpreting Closure in The Stroop Report 

104

E R I N M C G L OTH L IN

8 Space of Murder, Space of Freedom: The Forest as a Posttraumatic Landscape in Holocaust Narratives 

119

H E L E N A D U F FY

PART III

Articulating Inherent Violence 

135

9 Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence: The Problem of Narrative in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle 

137

H A N N A M E R E TO JA

10 Reading Violence, Violent Reading: Levinas and Hermeneutics 

154

C O L I N D AV I S

11 Style and the Violence of Passivity in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is 

167

A M A N D A D EN N IS

12 Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence 

179

V I C TO R I A FA RE L D

Index 

192

Contributors

Colin Davis is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Warwick in the UK. His books include Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-​Century French Writing (2018), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (coedited with Hanna Meretoja, 2020) and Silent Renoir: Philosophy and the Interpretation of Early Film (2021). Amanda Dennis is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at The American University of Paris, France. Her book, Beckett and Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency (2021), explores how the physical body’s integration within its natural and built environments suggests alternative possibilities for agency. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and the Journal of Beckett Studies, among other places, and she recently coedited a journal special issue, “Beckett and the Non-​Human” (2020). She is also the author of the novel Her Here (2021). Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is Professor of French at the University of Wrocław in Poland and Fernandes Fellow at the University of Warwick (UK). She has also lectured French language and literature at the University of Queensland (Australia), the Université Blaise-​Pascal (France), the University of Turku (Finland) and Royal Holloway (UK) where she held the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-​ Curie Fellowship. Her research interests lie with contemporary French literature, with a particular focus on Holocaust fiction. She is the author of two monographs and many journal articles and essays, which have been published in Holocaust Studies, French Studies, French Forum and Forum for Modern Language Studies. Her latest book, The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction: Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics, was published in 2022 by Legenda. Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at UiT –​The Arctic University of Norway. She is the author of three books and the editor/​ coeditor of three others: Intersections in Christianity and

x  List of Contributors Critical Theory (ed., 2010), Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–​1848 (2013), The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), Phenomenology of the Broken Body (coed., 2019), Wild Romanticism (coed., 2020) and Global Human Rights Fiction (forthcoming). She is the president of the American Studies Association of Norway and leads both the English literature section at UiT and the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology research group. Victoria Fareld is Associate Professor of Intellectual History at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses mainly on political philosophy, theory of history and memory studies, with particular interests in the connections between time, ethics, memory and historical justice. Her most recent book is From Marx to Hegel and Back: Capitalism, Critique, and Utopia (coed., 2020). Among her recent articles and book chapters are “Time” (Routledge, 2022), “Framing the Polychronic Present” (Bloomsbury, 2022), “Entangled Memories of Violence” (Memory Studies, 14:1, 2021), “Coming to Terms with the Present” (Bloomsbury, 2019), “History, Justice and the Time of the Imprescriptible” (Berghahn Books, 2018). Amrita Ghosh is an assistant professor of South Asian literatures in the English Department at University of Central Florida, USA. She has previously worked as a postdoc and research fellow in Sweden’s SASNET at Lund university and Linnaeus University. Her recent coedited collection, Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-​envisioning, was published with Brill in 2022, and she is working on a monograph on literatures from and on Kashmir. Michael Justice earned his Bachelor of Arts with honors in Psychology at The American University of Paris, France. During his time at The American University of Paris, he collaborated on research projects with Brian Schiff on the psychology of pro-​ environmentalism and perpetrators of mass shootings. He was also a fellow of The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention. Jakob Lothe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. Lothe’s books include Conrad’s Narrative Method (1989), Narrative in Fiction and Film (2000), Joseph Conrad (2003), Litteraturvitenskapelig leksikon (with Christian Refsum and Unni Solberg, second ed., 2007), Titanic (with Per Kristian Sebak, 2012) and Etikk i litteratur og film (2016). The author of numerous essays and reviews, he has edited/​coedited many books, including four volumes in the series “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” published by Ohio State University Press. He is also the editor of The Future of Literary Studies (2017), Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust (2017) and Research and Human Rights (2020).

List of Contributors  xi Erin McGlothlin is Professor of German and Jewish Studies and Vice Dean of Undergraduate Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. She is the author of Second-​Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (2006) and The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021) and coeditor of After the Digital Divide? German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Digital Media (2009, with Lutz Koepnick), Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies (2016, with Jennifer Kapczynski) and The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes (2020, with Brad Prager and Markus Zisselsberger). Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku, Finland, and Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland research consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-​Critical Narrative Theory” (2018–​2023). Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, cultural memory studies and trauma studies. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and she has coedited, with Colin Davis, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018) and the special issues “Cultural Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies, 2021, with Eneken Laanes) and “Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” (Poetics Today, 2022, with Maria Mäkelä). Brian Schiff is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology and Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention at the American University of Paris, France. Schiff is the author of A New Narrative for Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2017), the editor of Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course (New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2014) and Situating Qualitative Methods in Psychological Science (Routledge, 2018) and coeditor of Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience (Oxford University Press, 2017). He was awarded the 2016 Theodore Sarbin Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division 24: Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Avril Tynan is a researcher in comparative literature at the University of Turku in Finland and associate researcher at the Open University, UK. She has previously held positions at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI), Essen, Germany. She has published widely on representations of history, memory and trauma in post-​ Holocaust

xii  List of Contributors French literature, including in Modern Language Review, French Forum and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. Her current research examines the intersections of narrative and ethics in literary representations of ageing, illness and death. She is coeditor of Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies. Tero Eljas Vanhanen is a literary scholar specializing in affective narratology and popular fiction studies. Currently, he is a researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has worked as a lecturer and university teacher at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku and is a member of Young Academy Finland. Previously, he was a Fulbright Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. He is the coeditor of When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow and The Art of Artertainment. His articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophy and Literature, SubStance, The Journal of American Studies and in several scholarly collections.

I nterpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations Introduction Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja Interpreting violence has a twofold meaning. It refers both to the process of meaning-​making involved in understanding representations of violence and to the potential violence involved in interpretive acts themselves. Narratives can be violent interpretations as representations of violence or as interpretations by which we understand ourselves or others. While poststructuralist thinkers, in particular, contend that language, narratives and understanding (which involve naming and categorizing the other) are inherently violent, from the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics it can be argued that genuine understanding is inherently nonviolent, receptive and self-​altering. Some hermeneutically inclined thinkers argue that in a pursuit of understanding, “We engage in dialogue with others to allow their being to unfold. We try to allow the world around us to speak” (Mootz & Taylor 2013, 1). Some see a difference in explanation and understanding in terms of their ethical implications: explanation allegedly limits our perception of violence as much as it opens it up because the analytical categories on which explanations are predicated imply mastery and appropriation of something singular, whereas understanding allegedly implies dialogical relationality. Etymologically, ex-​planus (Barnhart 1988, 357) means to lay something out flat and visible, to equalize difference. Conversely, understanding derives from the Old English “to stand in the midst of, stand between” (Barnhart 1988, 1185). Although it may be an accident of history that “understanding” retains this relational connotation while “explanation” implies a singular dominant agency, the difference between these concepts points toward the ethical importance of dialogical relationality as opposed to one-​ directional acts of appropriation. Thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas (1988) and Jacques Derrida (1997), however, assert that not just explanation but also understanding and interpretation, due to their reliance on language and its categories, are inherently violent. In contrast, the hermeneutic tradition suggests that there are different ways of using language and that an understanding guided by openness to the singularity of the other can be nonviolent. Instead of saying that interpretation is inherently violent, it may be better to acknowledge that there is a spectrum from violent to nonviolent processes of interpretation, that is, from DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-1

2  Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja what Hanna Meretoja calls “subsumptive” to “nonsubsumptive” interpretations: while the former subsume singular phenomena under fixed categories, the latter acknowledge the need of categories to expand and transform in the temporal, interpretive process in order to do justice to the singularity of the interpreted phenomena (2018, 107–​8). The tendency of explanations to concentrate on what preceded (motivation, circumstances) or what followed (justification, response) means that the experiential elements of violence easily escape. It is these experiential elements, excluded or marginalized by explanatory frameworks, that narratives of violence often try to evoke, and by emphasizing the singularity of those experiences, as well as the interpretive processes at work by multiple actors, including those interpreted as victim, perpetrator or witness, they can invite further interpretive acts with no implication that such interpretation will ever be complete. Narratives representing complex experiences of violence can furthermore reframe the notions of victims and perpetrators by focusing on those who are not directly involved but privileged by structures that they inherit, those who are “implicated” (Rothberg 2019) in a history of violence and injustice and who sustain the inherited structural injustices, not by being perpetrators in a conventional sense, but by being either the silent and passive “beneficiaries” (Robbins 2017) of these structures, or by using unmotivated violence in the name of self-​defense. Through the figure of the implicated subject and the beneficiary, attention is called to forms of violence that are not really visible within certain economies of representations, often conceptualized as structural, symbolic or systemic violence (Dodd 2017; Žižek 2008), but which exacerbate and perpetuate poverty and inequality around the globe. Violence can assume myriad forms. Individual instances of violence accumulate in the never-​ending and unwritable history of violent acts. Even as we type, prisoners in Myanmar are tortured, wives and children are beaten around the world, the Russian army bombs Ukrainian cities to rubble and teenagers in Chicago indoctrinate one another in gang loyalty. In every instance –​every contact with a lived body, every threat or fear of another strike –​the individuals involved are changed in an interplay of circumstances, decisions, receptions, responses and interpretations. Explanations of violence tend to absorb a violent act into a system that fits the act itself into a framework, the explanatory power of which arises from its ability to deem some factors and experiences less relevant than others; thereby much of the experiential and interpretive excess of these acts of violence will be rendered invisible through the process of explanation. Nevertheless, many attempts to explain violence serve practically ethical goals. They can clarify circumstances that encourage one person to harm another. Insofar as they clarify motivations for past violent acts, explanations facilitate decisions about punishment in line with legally codified principles of justice. It is primarily the assertion of the completeness of any explanation that renders such acts interpretively violent.

Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations  3 Philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes that, in contrast to an explanation, an act of understanding is never definitive. Hans-​Georg Gadamer describes understanding as a dynamic interplay of possible meanings that in their forthcoming reveal invisible preconceptions (2004, 269). As these preconceptions are revealed, they change, and reflective persons learn about themselves and approach new singular events with a more subtle capacity to receive them. Gadamer compares the otherness of a text to the otherness of a person whose position differs from us, but whom we want to understand (271). That understanding encompasses an always inadequate but nevertheless necessary attempt to see a person, a text or a situation holistically, knowing that the partial data an interpreter has to work with will bias the interpretive act in specific ways and knowing, in the case of a text, that the process of understanding creates as much as discerns connections between a written or filmic narrative and shared, lived reality. Standing among possible interpretations or between an event and the language we bring to it, one who seeks understanding knows herself to be in the midst of categories she did not create, events she did not initiate, possibilities she cannot foresee. One knows oneself to be confronted with others whose differences from oneself can never be exhaustively known. While the “hermeneutics” of our volume’s title means theoretical reflection on interpretation and understanding and does not entail a commitment to a certain conception of these phenomena, the contributions in this volume share the idea of the infinalizable nature of interpretation, which Paul Ricoeur formulates as follows: “The key hypothesis of hermeneutic philosophy is that interpretation is an open process that no single vision can conclude” (Ricoeur 1991, 33; see also Marion’s idea of “infinite hermeneutic,” 2013, 59). While Richard Kearney defines hermeneutics in terms of an “art of deciphering multiple meanings,” especially “the practice of discerning indirect, tacit or allusive meanings, of sensing another sense beyond or beneath apparent sense” (Kearney 2011, 1), Rita Felski (2015) emphasizes that hermeneutics does not entail the idea of unearthing a singular “hidden meaning” –​ rather, as Gadamer and Ricoeur also stress, it is a process of coproduction in which meaning arises ever anew in the encounter between the world of the text and the world of the reader (see also Gadamer 2004; Ricoeur 1988; Meretoja 2018). The process of interpretation need not be motivated by suspicion (Ricoeur 1970; Sedgwick 2003) and need not claim to find a meaning that excludes further interpretations. In consequence, and somewhat paradoxically, an approach to violence that aims to be interpretively ethical must aim at a relationally grounded dialogical form of understanding, which must, in order to remain nonviolent, never hope to entirely, conclusively succeed. Contributors to this volume pursue understanding of a violent act or event, not because we will arrive at an explanation that will exhaust the possibility to know it and not because our efforts at nonviolent understanding will ever offset the propagation or performance of violence

4  Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja in some imaginary ethical scale of value, but in order to contribute to the proliferation of nonviolent understanding, which in turn can, in its small way, reduce the circumstances in which violence is likely to be (always unpredictably) committed. In their 2020 book, The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler says nonviolence is neither “a means to a goal nor is it a goal in itself.” They call it “ungovernable,” “ongoing,” and “open ended,” “an active mode of thought or understanding, unconstrained by instrumental and teleological logics” (125). In this spirit, scholars featured here attempt to practice and encourage nonviolent forms of reasoning. We share the goal of disrupting the often-​unquestioned interpretive acts that make it possible for people to see violence as justifiable. We ask instead how violence can be narrated, read or viewed in ways that encourage mutual recognition, solidarity, even love, rather than indifference or hatred. Contributors also discuss the extent to which acts of interpretation can themselves be violent. They discuss phenomenological-​ hermeneutic and other contemporary conceptualizations of knowledge that call for new reconfigurations of intersubjectivity. By foregrounding the tension between discursive and embodied violence as well as their complex entanglements, contributors explore the relationship between these different forms of violence. Can stories direct our attention to that within the human that evades designation but nevertheless calls for protection? Can certain narratives of violence instead turn our attention to why some lives are considered worthy of protection, while others are not? Or to the violence immanent in the category of the human, directed at the nonhuman, animal or nature, in ways that challenge their human centered or intersubjective framing? (Wolfe 2012) We are not working with a shared definition of violence or interpretation but, instead, the contributors discuss different forms and levels of violence and explore the possibility of nonviolent interpretation in relation to a range of different ways of narrating violence. In Hannah Arendt’s slim 1969 volume On Violence, she notes that “violence and its arbitrariness [have been] taken for granted and therefore neglected” in the history of Western philosophy (8). “There exists,” she continues, “a large literature on war and warfare, but it deals with the implements of violence, not with violence as such” (8). Since then, much research into violence has been performed. In 2020, when Scott Straus and Michel Wierviorka launched their publication Violence: An International Journal, they observed that violence is “a major theme in the humanities and social sciences” (3), and the titles of publications concerned with violence bear this out,1 but the study of “violence as such” remains fragmented among multiple disciplines, multiple categorizations of types of violence and multiple contextual foci. It is not possible to express concern about this fragmentation without evoking the possibility that violence as such can be defined, but such a definition will always be impure and available for the violence-​ promoting act of declaring something not to have been violent. To adapt a phrase from Derrida, “The purity of the question” of what violence

Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations  5 as such is “can only be indicated or recalled through the difference of a hermeneutical effort” (1978, 99). Within scholarship on the representation of violence and the interpretations of such representations, which is the special focus of this volume, disciplinary fragmentation reinforces generic differences in written and filmic texts. Historians, criminologists and psychologists work with terrorist manifestos and violent institution’s bureaucratic narratives of their own abuses. Literary analysts work with memoir, fiction and poetic narration, media scholars with film. There are, of course, scholars who work across these divisions (Matthew & Goodman 2013; Ayyash 2019; Davis & Meretoja 2020), and this volume makes an intentional effort to breach disciplinary boundaries. Like violence as such, ethics as such must remain without preconceived definition in order to remain undogmatic and receptive of the complexity of the unique ethical quandaries that specific instances produce. Ethics is, nevertheless, at the heart of the communal scholarly endeavor this volume represents. The representation of violence for another’s consumption is an inherently ethically charged issue because it invites readers or viewers to imagine someone else’s pain or the suffering of others (Adorno 1973; Sontag 2003). A story may encourage readers/​viewers to place themselves in the position of victim, perpetrator, witness, rescuer or implicated subject. They may imagine the events narrated in the manner invited by the text or in a resistant fashion, but by engaging a depiction of violence at all, they deem it a pleasant or ethically worthwhile use of time and thought. This collection investigates the layers of interpretation involved in narrating violence and designating the engagement with violent stories as meaningful. Contributors focus especially on violence performed with political or symbolic goals, including war, colonialism, terrorism and mass violence, but our aim is to offer novel insights about the ethical quandaries of narrating and interpreting violence that are broadly applicable. With regard to narrative, we contend that stories play an important part in the epistemological acts of recognizing or failing to recognize an individual’s life as precious, precarious and grievable. As theorists hailing from the phenomenological-​ hermeneutic tradition such as Paul Ricoeur (1988, 1991) and Jerome Bruner (1987) have argued, we tell ourselves about ourselves and about other people in the form of narratives and such storytelling is an ethically charged process of interpretation. Narrative hermeneutics suggests that it is through narrative processes that our lives become objects of complex reflection (Brockmeier & Meretoja 2014; Brockmeier 2015). The forms of narration through which we become aware of fictional or nonfictional violent events, therefore, shape the very possibility of our ethical perspective toward those involved in violence. Narratives, however, are not inherently (due to their narrative form) ethically good; rather, their ethical potential or harmfulness should be evaluated contextually (Meretoja 2018). Ultimately, the meaning of narratives takes shape through our

6  Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja interpretive encounters with them. By recognizing the multilayered, temporally complex nature of every act of interpreting a violent story, this collection offers insights that are relevant for acts that most people engage in every day –​reading the news, turning on a film or picking up a novel. Moreover, in addition to concrete narrative artefacts, there are implicit cultural narratives that function as models of sensemaking that underlie such concrete narratives and which lead us to narrate our experiences in certain ways (Meretoja 2022). The essay collection grows out of an interdisciplinary multiyear project involving thirty scholars from eight countries. Many of these scholars have contributed to bodies of scholarship related to this book’s aim, including ethical criticism, interdisciplinary narrative studies, trauma studies, histories of violence, memory studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies. Their new work, represented here, steps out of these more specialized fields of inquiry to confront the contemporary increase in politically motivated violence against noncombatants and the increase in literary and media representations of that violence in a globally connected public sphere. Rather than try to explain violence, this collection tries to approach narratives of violence –​in literature, bureaucratic reports, humanitarian campaigns, terrorist manifestos and film –​ with understanding. This does not mean accepting, but it means creating conditions for dialogue. The collection is divided into three sections. The first section, entitled “Representing Violence, Violent Representations,” deals with the many and various ways in which violence is represented in literature and discourse. It has a particular focus on the ambiguousness involved in the act of representing and addresses the question of how representation itself can be an act of violence, continuing the violence that it represents. The double meaning of representation as “the act of presenting somebody/​ something in a particular way” and “the fact of having representatives who will speak […] for you or act in your place” (Oxford Dictionary Online) has a complex significance when related to violence. The privileged role ascribed to the victim in humanitarian representations of mass violence could be understood as an effort to present without representing, that is, without acting or speaking for the victim. However, as Cassandra Falke points out in her chapter “Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse,” a narrative that tries to present without representing, may also unintentionally perpetuate the violence that it seeks to condemn. Falke proceeds from the observation that our time is the “era of the witness” (Wieviorka 2006). Thousands of pages of testimony to violence during the Holocaust combine with a growing testimonial record from Biafra, Palestine and Syria to create an unmanageable mass of recorded victimization. In our age, the figure of the witness is venerated for possessing truths about humanity available only to the victim. For the sake of highlighting the extremity of suffering, Falke points out, critics and humanitarian organizations often publicize

Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations  7 the most shocking experiences and the most vulnerable victims; however this is stripped of a context that could establish peace and compassion as norms against which this violence is contrasted. Such portrayals risk normalizing what they strive to condemn. Through the figure of the reader as witness, Falke explores ways that violence can be represented without instrumentalizing suffering. In its ability to carry us beyond the bounds of the familiar, literature, she argues, is uniquely suited to the ethical representation of violence that preserves its excess untamed. The chapters by Avril Tynan and Amrita Ghosh both deal with representations of historical violence that in different ways continue in the present. In today’s memory culture, remembering a violent past often involves an effort to come to terms with it, addressing its unresolved calls for justice. Tynan’s contribution “Violence, Encore! Popular Music, Power and Postwar Memory,” calls attention to the use of memory as a way to avoid dealing with present demands for justice and responsibility. Attentive to the use of memory in cultural representations of the Algerian War, Tynan argues that it often illustrates an ongoing rejection of judicial practices and resistance to reconciliation. In an analysis of the French author Didier Daeninckx’s short story “Corvée de bois” (2003), she argues that memory moves in circular ways that prevent a just resolution of the past. The story’s explicit and even gratuitous presentation of war atrocities is entangled with popular culture and radio to suppress or perhaps censor memories of the past, Tynan claims. Memories of wartime violence are silenced by noise or the more insidious subversion of background music, which makes them dissipate into everyday environments and actions. Tynan concludes that although memories of the war return again and again in Daeninckx’s story, they are not articulated with the performative power to come to terms with the past or to evoke any calls for justice and responsibility in the present, but are turned into standardized recycled forms that dilute and ultimately de-​realize historic violence as intangible background noise. Cultural representations of colonial violence are also examined by Ghosh in her chapter “Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence,” which combines a reading of The Strangler Vine (2014), an adventure novel and historical thriller by the English historian and writer Miranda Carter, and contemporary uses of the term “thug” in the United States. Using the metaphor of the strangler vines, Carter revises the idea of violence and criminality of “thugs” in 19th century India. By following the history of the term “thug,” Ghosh shows how Carter’s novel engages not only colonialism but also contemporary political discourse. Ghosh connects the novel to President Barack Obama’s speech on the Baltimore riots in 2015 and President Donald Trump’s speech in 2020 on race riots in America. Ghosh claims that Carter’s shift in gaze and alterations of the adventure genre pose as a critique of colonial violence. Yet, the novel, she argues, also undermines its own decolonial narrative and ironically raises important questions on the very notion of colonial

8  Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja violence. By so doing, it shows how power and discourse are updated in asymmetrical planetary intersections and contexts that have uncanny reverberations at the present time. Jakob Lothe’s chapter, “Variants and Consequences of Violence in Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine,” examines the ethical dimensions of representing violence at the intersection of fiction and philosophy. In a reading of Iris Murdoch’s 1974 novel, Lothe focuses on how, and why, the main characters in the novel variously engage in or become entangled in acts of violence. He emphasizes that violence forms an essential part of Murdoch’s fictional exploration of ethical issues, which then encourages the reader to engage in a dialogue with Murdoch as an implied author. Taking his cue from Emmanuel Levinas’s claim that we are bound in networks of responsibility to known and unknown others whose vulnerability bids us not to commit violence, Lothe argues that the violence represented in Murdoch’s novel is a constituent element of an ethics that emerges through the fiction’s narrative, yet intimately linked to her philosophical writings. In the final chapter of this section, “Violent Appetites: Distaste and the Aesthetics of Violence,” Tero Eljas Vanhanen interrogates into the role of distaste in aesthetic representations of violence. Starting by pointing to the boundaries between tasteful and distasteful representations of violence within classical aesthetics, Vanhanen proceeds by examining Thomas De Quincey’s infamous essays on murder as art from the 1820s. For all the glinting irony of his writings, De Quincey, Vanhanen argues, keeps violence at an arm’s length just as classical aesthetics does. By narrating from the perspective of a bystander rather than the victim or the perpetrator, De Quincey assumes that a distance can be upheld between the audience and the violence, which weakens the affective power of violence to shock and makes it intelligible and interpretable, even permitting readers to experience violence as sublime. Vanhanen criticizes this sort of distancing, which is common in “tasteful” representation of violence. Through case studies of violent works of literature and their critical reception, Vanhanen argues for the need to elaborate less distancing ways of interpreting and responding to represented violence, ways that do not turn away from the shock and horror of violence by turning it into safe and comfortable modes of entertainment. Part II, “Understanding the Violence of Perpetrators,” focuses on making sense of the acts of those who commit violence, hermeneutically and critically. Within scholarship on violence, there has been an increase in research on perpetrators. To understand the conditions of possibility of violence, it is not enough to focus on victims; it is also necessary to study why ordinary people end up committing atrocities. The chapters in this section explore the violence of perpetrators, focusing mainly on the Nazis and their collaborators in the Second World War but also drawing links to other forms of mass violence, including contemporary mass shootings and the ongoing violence committed by humans on nature.

Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations  9 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice’s chapter “A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence” brings interpretive tools to bear on understanding perpetrators of mass violence whose actions are often considered a hermeneutic puzzle because they seem too extreme to be understood and because their own interpretations are dismissed as mere fabrications and lies. Schiff and Justice argue that understanding must be predicated on restoring the interpretive horizon of violent actions –​the set of collectively shared narratives that made violence possible. Mass violence requires synchronized and convincing efforts in the symbolic realm in order to motivate would-​be perpetrators, to provide justifications for action and to preempt potential dissent. Reviewing the scholarly debate on the motivations of genocidal perpetrators and closely analyzing the manifestos of contemporary mass shooters, Schiff and Justice argue that perpetrators are acting within a different moral horizon, supported by the narrative and symbolic resources of their time and context, in which, from their perspective and that of those around them, it makes sense to denigrate and destroy the other. Erin McGlothlin’s “Narrative Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-​ Authored Documents: Interpreting Closure in The Stroop Report” focuses on a relatively little-​known document on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an album known today as The Stroop Report, which was assembled by SS commander Jürgen Stroop and his staff as a commemorative souvenir for Heinrich Himmler. It documents the German military response to an uprising in which the violent effort to transport the remaining Jewish ghetto population to Treblinka was met with armed revolt by beleaguered ghetto internees. The report is comprised of daily military reports, photographs depicting combat and captured ghetto fighters and residents, and a narrative summary. Few critics have investigated the report’s narrative and its attempts to achieve mastery over the events it documents. McGlothlin examines the rhetorical strategies Stroop employs in his report to discursively induce closure through its construction of a straw enemy deserving of the full brutality directed at it and through symbolic and performative declarations of the vanquishment of that enemy. Helena Duffy’s chapter “Space of Murder, Space of Freedom: The Forest as a Posttraumatic Landscape in Holocaust Narratives” braids together Holocaust studies and environmental humanities by focusing on forests in the context of Holocaust perpetrator fiction. The chapter examines two novels, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck, which cast the forest as a Holocaust setting and thereby reinvest it with the symptomatology of human trauma. While endorsing Cathy Caruth’s conception of trauma as a belated response to painful events, and of history as an enmeshment of the victim’s and the killer’s traumas, the two novels broaden this conception by stressing trauma’s embodiment and embeddedness in nature. Duffy shows how Littell and Claudel challenge a humanistic understanding of trauma, reframe the Holocaust

10  Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja as a product of modern ontology with its privileging of the human within the human/​nonhuman binary, and suggest that this binary has legitimized both our abuse of the nonhuman world and the dehumanization and oppression of human groups. The third and last section of the volume, “Articulating Inherent Violence,” explores different levels of violence and pays particular attention to the violence that inheres in language, systems of signification and social structures. In “Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence: The Problem of Narrative in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle,” Hanna Meretoja distinguishes between different varieties of violence: physical, emotional and discursive. She then critically discusses, in the light of the distinction between subsumptive and nonsubsumptive cultural forms, the view that narrative is inherently violent. By drawing on discussions on our shared vulnerability and destructibility, she explores the possibility of dialogical, nonviolent understanding. In the latter part of the chapter, she analyzes narrative in relation to different types of violence in Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical series My Struggle. She argues that the series is fraught with a tension between a nonsubsumptive and a subsumptive dimension: while the narrator-​protagonist has crucial limits in relation to (non-​ subsumptive) dialogical openness to others, the self-​reflexive strategies of the series have potential to promote the readers’ ability to engage with the cultural narratives that surround us in ways that could contribute to breaking certain cycles of violence. In “Reading Violence, Violent Reading: Levinas and Hermeneutics,” Colin Davis explores the hermeneutics of violence in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Although Levinas is usually associated with ethics rather than hermeneutics, a large part of his work consists of interpretive commentaries on the Talmud. Davis draws on this commentary to sketch what a Levinasian hermeneutics might look like. He suggests that Levinas associates Talmudic study with violence done both to the text and the commentator, looking particularly at a commentary entitled “The Damage Caused by Fire.” He also discusses similarities and differences between Levinas’s reading practice and the thought of the major hermeneutic thinkers of the 20th century: Martin Heidegger, Hans-​Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Davis concludes by suggesting that a Levinasian hermeneutics is characterized by the combination of faith and rigor and by drawing attention to the ways in which interpretation can be a matter of life and death. Amanda Dennis’s chapter “Style and the Violence of Passivity in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is” examines the inherent violence in words. Her analysis of Samuel Beckett’s 1961 novel How It Is (Comment c’est) starts by interrogating into the violence involved in the novel’s own signifying process, being composed in strophes without punctuation. Dennis deals with the relationship between the novel’s refusal of traditional sentence structure and its unflinching descriptions of physical violence and

Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations  11 ritualized torture. She argues, however, that the work’s bold coupling of bodily violence and broken syntax is possible to read not only as a linguistic and stylistic innovation that discursively grasps limit-​experiences, but also, and even more importantly, as an exploration of new forms of relationality, which through foregrounding embodiment and the materiality of language, can open for a radical reimagining of subjectivity, sociality and, ultimately, community. In the last chapter, “Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence,” Victoria Fareld explores the connection between the concept of vulnerability and the language of violence in contemporary feminist philosophy. In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgent interest in the concept of vulnerability but often it is seen as a condition that has to be reduced in human life and which is primarily equated with injurability and passivity. In contrast, several feminist scholars call for a reconceptualization of vulnerability as not only limiting but also enabling and activating. Fareld examines the place and role of violence in this reclaimed understanding of vulnerability. She discusses the connection between different forms of violence and nonviolent ways of understanding subject formation, embodied life and responses to human vulnerability. She concludes by stressing the constitutive role of violence in a relational ethics of nonviolence. Overall, we hope this volume provides conceptual resources for thinking about violence in its many forms in times of global crises. As the volume shows, violence ranges from discursive and structural violence to concrete, embodied violence in war against humanity, against nature and in everyday interpersonal relationships. Often discursive violence is directly linked to bodily violence, as can be seen in the case of racist violence where hurtful words often lead to physical assaults. Becoming aware of the interconnections between different forms of violence and of the ways in which cycles of violence are perpetuated by practices and structures that often remain invisible is a necessary step in working toward breaking such cycles. In this volume, we explore the ethical potential of literature and other arts in such processes of making mechanisms of violence visible while also acknowledging that often good intentions can mask complicity in social structures that perpetuate practices of oppression.

Note 1 Straus and Wierviorka’s journal is preceded by the Journal of Interpersonal Violence (est. 1986), Journal of Family Violence (est. 1986), Violence and Victims, which is focused on interpersonal violence (est. 1986), Terrorism and Political Violence (est. 1989), Violence Against Women (est. 1995), Psychology of Violence (est. 2010). Only Violence and the International Journal of Conflict and Violence (est. 2007) explicitly integrate the study of public and private forms of violence.

12  Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialektik, 1966). Trans. E. B. Ashton. London & New York: Routledge. Arendt, Hannah. 1969. On Violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Ayyash, Mark M. 2019. A Hermeneutics of Violence: A Four-​ Dimensional Conception. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barnhart, Robert K., ed. 1988. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. “Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics.” Storyworlds 6 (2), 1–​27. Bruner, Jerome S. 1987. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54 (1), 11–​32. Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political. London: Verso. Davis, Colin, and Hanna Meretoja, eds. 2020. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. London & New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology (1967). Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Writing and Difference (1967). Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 79–​153. Dodd, James. 2017. Phenomenological Reflections on Violence: A Skeptical Approach. London: Routledge. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. 2004. Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960). Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury. Kearney, Richard. 2011. “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. 1 (2011), 1–​14. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas [Interview by Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes & Alison Ainley].” In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood. Trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright. London: Routledge: 168–​180. Marion, Jean-​ Luc. 2013. Givenness and Hermeneutics. Trans. Jean-​ Pierre Lafouge. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press. Matthews, Graham, and Sam Goodman, ed. 2013. Violence and the Limits of Representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2022. “Implicit Narratives and Narrative Agency: Evaluating Pandemic Storytelling.” Narrative Inquiry (online first April 19, 2022, https://​ doi.org/​10.1075/​ni.21076.mer) Mootz III, Francis J., and George H. Taylor. 2013. “Introduction.” In Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics, ed. Francis J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor. London: Bloomsbury: 1–​14. Representation. Oxford Dictionary Online (accessed June 20, 2022). Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations  13 Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today 35 (1), 73–​81. Robbins, Bruce. 2017. The Beneficiary. Durham: Duke University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2019. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke University Press: 123–​52. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Straus, Scot, and Michel Wierviorka. 2020. “Introducing a New Journal: Violence.” Violence: An International Journal 1 (1), 3–​7. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Trans. Jared Stark. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2012. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. London: Profile.

Part I

Representing Violence, Violent Representations

1 Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse Cassandra Falke

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the chorus pronounces on the nature of humanity, in a passage that has come to be called the “Ode on Man.” There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness. … He wearied even the noblest of gods, the Earth, indestructible and untiring, overturning her from year to year, driving the plows this way and that with horses. And man, pondering and plotting, snares the light-​gliding birds and hunts the beasts of the wilderness and the native creatures of the sea. With guile he overpowers the beast that roams the mountains by night as by day, he yokes the hirsute neck of the stallion and the undaunted bull. … Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue, he comes to nothingness. Through no flight can he resist the one assault of death In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger places the “Ode” at the center of his definition of humanity as violent (1959, 146–​148). In the context of the play, Kreon has taken control of Thebes following his nephews’ battle to the death. He has forbidden anyone to bury the body of one of the brothers, Polynices. Just after daybreak the following morning, a guard comes to tell Kreon that his order has been disobeyed. Polynices’ body has been ceremonially covered with dust. Kreon threatens to kill the guard if he does not find the person who was so bold to disobey DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-3

18  Cassandra Falke him. Thankful to have escaped the king’s wrath for the time being, the guard leaves the stage. The old men of the chorus are then left alone to speculate on the nature of man. They conclude, “There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness.” In Heidegger’s interpretation of these lines, the key term is “deinotaton,” the strangest. “This one word,” he says, “encompasses the extreme limits and abrupt abysses of his being” (1959, 149). The root of this word means terrible, wondrous, awful in the old sense of the term. Heidegger reads it as: powerful in the sense of one who uses power, who not only disposes of power but is violent in so far as the use of power is the basic trait not only of his action but also of his being there. Man, in his essential violence, “gathers the power and brings it to manifestness” (149–​150). Violence, for Heidegger, is an innate capacity whose presence in human beings joins us to the forces that move earth and waves, light-​gliding birds and hirsute stallions, but our awareness of this power as part of our Being elevates it within us, making us “strangest,” most awful of all, not least of all because we know we come to nothing in the end. The chorus’ speech offers several examples of fundamental violence to support this reading. “Overturning,” “driving,” “plotting,” “snar[ing],” humanity is pictured as dominating through violence a world of competitive, powerful forces. But for Heidegger it is not the habitual and necessary overpowering of nature through agriculture or hunting that constitutes our essential violence. These actions expose our power in a familiar way. Rather, man is most violent when, “tending toward the strange in the sense of the overpowering,” he “surpasses the limit of the familiar” (151). According to this definition, violent actions expose as possible things that the familiar workings of the world treat as impossible. In light of Heidegger’s definition, I want to question how violence can be ethically represented and interpreted. The question of what violence registers as normal or exceptional is an essential one for the representation of political violence in humanitarian discourse and fiction as the proportion of the world’s population affected by such violence steadily increases. In 2016, “more countries experienced violent conflict than any time in nearly 30 years” (UN and World Bank 2018, xvii). In 2021, one in 33 people “need humanitarian assistance and protection.” In 2020, it was one in 45 (OCHA 2021, n.p.). Although the causes of this need are diverse, global challenges such as climate change and resource extraction are increasingly associated with violence. I argue that, in their ability to establish norms and then carry us beyond the bounds of the familiar, novels are uniquely suited to represent violence as norm-​shattering. This is not to deny that novels can also work in the opposite way and present violence as normative, but to highlight the implications that a central

Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse  19 feature of novels –​their ability to evoke a world –​has for the theme of this volume. In contrast, humanitarian writings, because of their reliance on images and quick, consumable narratives, rely on violence’s excess of meaning and emotion to startle readers out of apathy and, therefore, risk instrumentalizing a person’s suffering as a means to relieve it. Both because of the constant imbalance between needs and the funding required to meet them and because of the persistence of structural inequalities that nurture political violence, humanitarian publications must continue to publicize such narratives in order to do the work of bearing witness, but they face the risk of normalizing victim status for certain people groups. Denis Kennedy (2009, n.p.) calls this a “fundamental humanitarian dilemma” because “if images of suffering are a means towards a principled end … they are also a powerful tool of social construction.” My intention in contrasting novels to images or brief narratives published by humanitarian organizations is not to critique the way any particular organization approaches the formidable challenge of representation. Rather, I want to highlight the potential of many contemporary historical novels to complement these organizations’ attempts to relieve and prevent suffering.

Strange, Human Violence There are several implications of Heidegger’s definition of violence that make it useful for considering ethical ways of interpreting and narrating violence. First, he implies that there are no nonviolent people; there are people who have not exercised their violent capacities. This has been confirmed with disturbing regularity by social psychologists. The Milgram experiments at Yale in 1963 and the later Stanford prison experiments in 1971 are the two most famous examples. Fascinated by Adolf Eichmann’s assertion that he “did not feel [himself] guilty” or “responsible” for the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, Stanley Milgram sought to determine what percentage of people would physically harm another person if commanded to by an authority (Eichmann 1962/​2016, n.p.). Participants were told that they were to help with an experiment in memorization. A “learner” would be given word pairs to memorize. As “teacher,” participants were instructed to shock the learner when pairs were wrongly remembered. The shocks that the learner pretended to receive ranged from “slight shock” to “Danger: XXX.” In 1961, students predicted 1–​2 percent of participants would use the highest level of shock. But as Milgram demonstrated, 65 percent of us, statistically, are willing to shock “learners” into silence and presumably death when someone in a professional wardrobe tells us to. This percentage has remained the average as the experiment has been imitated with thousands of people worldwide (Zimbardo 2009, xv–​xvi).1 When Phillip Zimbardo reflects on his own Milgram-​inspired Stanford prison experiments in relation to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, he decides that the “potentially toxic impact of bad systems and bad situations” make “good people behave in

20  Cassandra Falke pathological ways that are alien to their nature” both in history and in experimental settings (195). As the narrator says in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, “you” –​we –​“should be able to admit to yourselves that you” would probably have followed orders in these situations too: I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the exception. (Littell 2016, 20) The disturbing excess of violence is present through the capacity Heidegger identifies even when no violence is being performed. A second implication of Heidegger’s definition is that there are people who have exercised their capacity to powerfully reframe reality in ways that resist political violence. As Slavoj Žižek points out, according to Heidegger, Antigone’s burying of her brother is the truly violent act (2008, 60). Martin Luther King’s stubbornly peaceful marches in Birmingham, Alabama, violently rearranged the country’s perspective on the need for civil rights in the south, particularly after hundreds of children were arrested for marching in 1963. The peaceful protestors in Peshawar’s Storytellers’ Bizarre (Qissa Khawani) violently stirred action for independence among India’s Muslim population after hundreds of unarmed Pashtun people stepped across a growing line of bodies to be shot by British imperialists in 1930. These things –​the mobilization of over a thousand children for nonviolent protest, the “cool courage” (Ghandi’s term) of protestors challenging British soldiers to look at them, unarmed, and shoot –​exceeded what contemporary onlookers thought was possible. “The violent one, the creative” one, Heidegger writes, “sets forth into the un-​said –​breaks into the un-​thought, compels the unhappened to happen and makes the unseen appear” (1959, 161). Calling these nonviolent acts “violent” is not meant to reduce violence to a metaphysical level that fails to distinguish between harm in the flesh and symbolic violence (Derrida 2001, 148). Nor is it meant to place nonviolent protest on a continuum with revolutionary violence merely because it sometimes succeeds in effecting change. I would disagree with both of these positions. But it is worth remembering that that same great, strange force Heidegger identifies, whatever we call it, can be used in acts of protest that are, physically speaking, defiantly nonviolent. Physical violence frequently has the quality of revealing new possibilities as well. History demonstrates that physical violence is hard for most people to perform. Sociologist Randall Collins points out that “most of the time … the barrier of tension/​fear … makes violence difficult to carry out …. It is much more common to carry out … conventional gesturing” (2008: 338) –​whining, trash talk. This is why, in most cases, performing violence requires something that pushes the perpetrator beyond the bounds

Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse  21 of regular patterns of interaction. This might be chemical (soldiers taking stimulants; Kamienski 2016), emotional (the contagion of victorious emotion during the 1937 Nanking massacre; Collins 2008, 98–​99) or situational (isolation in intimate partner violence; Johnson 2010, 16). Soldiers undergo intense training to make taking the first shot in battle possible (Grossman 2009 et al., 13–​14). In most scenarios today, then, physically harming another person is violent not only in the conventional sense of physical brutality but also in Heidegger’s sense of manifesting power in a way that “surpasses the limits of the familiar.” For the victim, violence reconfigures their operative knowledge about what to expect from others. For the perpetrator, it reconfigures what one knows oneself to be capable of. And for the onlooker –​the witness –​violence either alters a norm or secures an act further as unexceptional. But this leads to a third and final implication of Heidegger’s broad definition of violence, the one that is most important for contemplating the alteration of norms through humanitarian discourse and fiction; the same degree of harm strikes us as more or less violent depending on our proximity and the extent to which harm is normalized in a given situation. The familiar can be made to include physically harming others. What becomes familiar in times of genocide, for example, differs jarringly from the familiar safety in which most academic readers live. Furthermore, the suffering of people in some regions or some demographics has become so familiar that the excess of what those individuals endure may not register with some reading audiences. Žižek recalls that in 2006, Time magazine ran a cover story about “the Deadliest War in the World,” namely the destruction of over 5.4 million Congolese people in political violence between 1996 and 2006 (2008, 2). But, as he says, “none of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of readers’ letters –​as if some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact in our symbolic space” (2). Spread out over a number of years and nine countries, these deaths were accommodated within the familiar. To put it more bluntly, the American public was used to people dying in Africa. Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop makes a similar point about news of the Rwandan genocide: In an Africa viewed as the natural site of all the world’s disasters, the Rwandan massacres were just one more tragedy to add to those in Somalia, Algeria, and Liberia. This attitude demonstrates a racism so complacent that it no longer even knows it exists. (Diop 2004, 110) He continues by adding that having said all this, honesty compels me to admit that the Rwandan tragedy provoked, if possible, even less interest in Africa than in the

22  Cassandra Falke rest of the world …. The truth is, all of Africa’s failures have caused the continent to lose its self respect. (111) In both of these examples, war in the Congo and genocide in Rwanda registered with (at least some) American and African publics as normal.

The Humanitarian Dilemma This leads us to the problem humanitarian organizations face in trying to rouse support. How can violence that victims experience as world-​ shattering be represented in a way that disrupts the day-​to-​day habits of people not immediately effected? In globalized media spaces, information can move nearly instantaneously. There are greater-​ than-​ ever technological possibilities for communicating one person’s experience of violence to another person, but how to break through the buzz of everyday life to make someone hear it without being sensational or exploitive? Humanitarian organizations rely on shock and the cultural construction of sentiment to move potential donors and volunteers. As Heide Fehrenbach and David Rodogno write in their introduction to the Humanitarian Photography: A History, “Humanitarian imagery is moral rhetoric masquerading as visual evidence” (2015, 6). It says (to expand the rhetorical metaphor) this suffering is unacceptable. It is “unjust yet amenable to remedy” (6). In order to compel action, it must display a level of suffering that exceeds a viewer’s norms for acceptable levels of suffering. The same is true of humanitarian narratives. And it is rare to see humanitarian narratives not accompanied by the moral rhetoric of images. In a perverse adaptation of the Kantian sublime, the excess of suffering can be qualitative or quantitative. Over 4 million textile workers in Bangladesh work 75 percent of their waking life for somebody else’s profit (Worker Rights Consortium 2020, 30–​32). Thirteen-​and-​a-​half-​ million Syrian refugees are internally or internationally displaced from their homes (World Vision 2021). Nearly 43,000 Rohingya parents are missing and presumed dead in Myanmar (Barron 2018). Civilian casualties in Iraq number 209,000 (Iraq Body Count 2021). In each of these cases, an organization could zero in on one worker, one displaced person, one orphaned child or other family member left behind and portray the qualitative excess of his or her suffering. Most robust humanitarian campaigns online combine these numbers with individual stories, or at least photos of individuals. In the following section, I analyze two examples of this qualitative/​quantitative pairing and consider how each relates to the normalization of violence. My first example is the UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) “Children under Attack” campaign, which strives to represent a range of conflicts, many of which have gone on for all or most of these children’s

Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse  23 lives. The website opens with a photo of a girl in a refugee camp. She is looking directly into the camera with a determined expression, balancing herself on rocky ground against a tent, her ballet pink patent leather shoes scrupulously clean. No information about her name, age, location or background is given. Clicking the link to “Afghanistan” to see if there might be more information there, I find another picture of a child about the same age, this time a boy off-​center, peering over a nest of fabric around his neck, his shadow beside him on the wall and darkness in the room behind. The other clickable country in the first paragraph of the website is Yemen. The child pictured there, also a boy, is younger. He is abstracted from his surroundings to the extent that one cannot guess where he is. There are concrete steps behind him, but no hint of where they lead. His eyebrows crease in the manner of concerned adults, and the script beside his photo reads: Access to education provides a sense of normalcy for children in even the most desperate contexts and protects them from multiple forms of exploitation. Yet more than two million school-​age children are now out of school as poverty, conflict and lack of educational opportunities disturb learning. I click the link beneath the text, which says “Read ‘Education Disrupted,’ ” presumably a report that will contain this boy’s story, but instead find a photo of another unnamed boy in a decimated classroom. In the organization’s “Ethical Reporting Guidelines: Key Principles for Responsible Reporting on Children and Young People,” UNICEF provides specific guidance regarding the use of names. “All children should have their identity (name and nationality) respected in visual representation.” This includes not publishing the names of children victimized by or accused of perpetrating sexual abuse. Child combatants and children charged with crimes must also have their names and visual identity obscured. On the other hand, the guidelines suggest that using a child’s identity may sometimes be in their best interest, for example, when they are “engaged in a psychosocial program and claiming their name and identity is part of their healthy development” or when the “child initiates contact with the reporter.” The child in the decimated classroom must belong to one of these categories because, as I continue my search in the pages about educational needs in Yemen, I find his story. His name is Ahmed, and he is 12 years old. He is pictured at Al-​Hamzi school, Hajjah, in 2021. The statistic of 2 million children being out of school is repeated here, followed by statistical evidence of how the situation has worsened since 2015 and a numerical account of teachers not being paid. To the right is a link for multimedia materials, but Ahmed’s story is not there. It is at the bottom of the general page about the Yemen crisis. The video is one minute and 56 seconds long and shows Ahmed in a waistcoat and white shirt discussing being frightened about attending school after

24  Cassandra Falke a bombing in the same classroom in which he was photographed. The video switches to a view from the back of girls running to enter a school, followed by an interview with Yahya Al-​Atr, the school’s principal. He is sitting in a student desk in a classroom with standing walls, but rubble is visible in the windows to his right. He mentions the students’ morale being damaged, but also their determination to return to school. He describes how they resumed school “in the rubble, inside the tents and under the shade of the trees.” In the second minute of the video, Ahmed’s father promises “I will do whatever I can to help my son complete his education.” We see Ahmed writing and showing his writing to a younger boy wearing a suit coat, while he states that his “dream is to graduate from university.” The video situates Ahmed in a discoverable history. It situates him in a family and a school community. It highlights his hope for the future without ignoring the psychological damage of his past. Taken as a whole, the video foregrounds features of Ahmed’s life that establish the norms for childhood flourishing (education, family, community, hope) and highlights the agency of victims, including Ahmed and other children, while also informing viewers about the bombing and showing its consequences. Operating within the humanitarian dilemma, the video succeeds as well as any two-​ minute piece of craftsmanship possibly could, but if I step back from the video, I must recognize that I spent several minutes reading statistics and looking at photos of nameless children before I found Ahmed’s story. In the world of the UNICEF website, malnutrition and lack of access to education are the norm. Evidence of political violence is present in the rubble outside the window or as part of somebody’s past, but in the present, potential donors are asked to deal with the practical problems of getting children fed and schooled. The background, the violence itself, becomes the norm against which the exceptional feat of educating children in tents and rubble must be achieved. My second example is the UK-​based charity Survivors Fund (SURF), which aids Rwandan genocide survivors. Websites attempting to render violence violent, in Heidegger’s sense of something breaking through the familiar, sometimes juxtaposes survivor testimonies with the larger image of a violent world. The matter-​of-​fact language that survivors typically use conjures the gap between the extremity of violence presented through statistics or broader description and the language of one person whose expectations for what is possible have been violently rearranged (Fassin 2011, 207). SURF collaborates with the UN on an “Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda” to collect testimonies and make them publicly available in English. Mary Kayitesi Blewitt, who lost 50 family members, initiated the Survivor Testimony project, and testimonies are now available on the UN “Outreach Programme” website under “Resources” as PDFs, with each testimony arranged by the victims’

Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse  25 first names. One of the testimonies is from a woman named Donatha, excerpted here: On May 5 (1994), we heard many people singing in the road. They were wearing banana leaves and when they arrived at our house, they ordered us outside. I asked God to receive us into his kingdom. They asked the old lady to go back into the house and sleep. They followed her in, covered her with all the clothes that were in the room, poured petrol on her and set her alight. I tried to run away, but at a roadblock I was caught by two men. They asked me if I was from the house. I said no, but they nevertheless brought me back, raped me and locked me in the toilet. When they left, I escaped and went to the neighbors. The full recorded testimony is a page-​and-​a-​half long, presented on its own in a plain black-​ and-​ white document with no commentary. No pictures accompany individual accounts. The Survivors’ Fund has done their best to let the testimonies stand forth unmediated. There is enough here to learn something of Donatha’s world –​her faith, her resilience in moments of crisis. She describes the violence done to the old lady in greater detail than her own suffering. But there is no way to know what her world looked like before the attack when she was just Donatha, and not Donatha the genocide and rape survivor. Only her status as a survivor and witness could bring her to my attention at all although she is just about my age. I was a junior in high school, May 5, 1994. It was a Thursday. With a certain amount of imagination, I can set those Thursdays side by side and link her world and mine. But inevitably she appears in my world now as someone I could potentially help. I cannot imagine what she would have done on the Friday if that Thursday had not happened. Although she has come within the logic of visibility through which my world operates, that generative logic flounders in trying to produce more than a day in her life, the day she became a victim.

Worlds of Literature Exceeding norms in an ethical way is also a challenge faced by contemporary authors trying to awaken their readers to histories of political violence. Robert Eaglestone characterizes contemporary African literature in English as “ ‘engaged literature’ in a renewed Sartrean sense. That is, they are not simply affective works; they are also aimed explicitly at pricking Western consciousness” (2017, 136). They have a humanitarian goal. Much contemporary literature about violent histories globally is also “engaged literature” in this sense. Examples include Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Shadows, which begins in Nagasaki and ends in Guantanamo Bay, or Thi Bui’s portrayal of the Vietnamese–​American

26  Cassandra Falke War and the subsequent refugee crisis in her illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do. The presence of novels about Biafra or the sufferings of Afghanistan’s Hazara on the New York Times bestseller list indicates that English-​language readers are engaging with the problem of global political violence to an unprecedented degree. But it is hard to know if this engagement extends beyond a voyeuristic interest in other people’s problems. Novels about political violence offer an elevation of emotional, moral and intellectual intensity. Other people’s crises awaken us to the joys of tucking the children in or a peaceful morning coffee. They invite the safely sublime experience of knowing death is coming but not yet. The fact that the violence narrated relates to actual flesh may heighten the intensity of these joys further without a reader taking responsibility for the fact that that violence happens in an actual shared world. It is worth thinking for a moment about what it means to share a world. Alain Badiou is convinced that we do not share a world anymore (2012, 61–​62). To have a shared world would mean to share a “logic of visibility,” but today “the world deprives the vast majority of human beings of their visibility” (64). There are an endless multiplicity of worlds in which what is present and what is possible follow independent and irreconcilable logics or the fluctuating logic of meeting immediate needs. Violence no longer occurs in a place or to a person with a past, not even to a “refugee” or a “worker.” To designate victims in this way is to give them a name. He says now their name is only “excluded,” and part of what they are excluded from is a place in the visible world (64). Those vast numbers of people embroiled in political violence are present for so many of us as a kind of placeholder. We know that they exist, and we know that we cannot know who they are or where, how many. Because their existence and our confidence in their continual invisibility are equally certain, they occupy an epistemological no man’s land, present and comfortably indeterminant. Novels, I think, are uniquely capable of granting visibility. To turn to another essay by Heidegger, works of art manifest a world. He says that “the unconcealedness of beings –​this is never a merely existent state, but a happening” (2013, 52). It occurs when a work of art manages to “transport us out of the realm of the ordinary” (64). Art discloses truth by “open[ing] a world and keep[ing] it abidingly in force” (43). Heidegger’s rethinking of art begins with his rethinking of the world and our relationship to it. When we wake up in the morning, we are not merely ourselves, present in clean autonomous subjectivity. We are in a bed, windows open or closed, with someone or without. We are in a body –​cold, warm, comfortable or in pain. When we hear a sound, it is the coffee perking downstairs. It is not a sensual phenomenon that we then secondarily interpret as coffee perking. We are, in every waking moment, within a world already interpreted, whose presence provides the terms through which we see ourselves. And this world, our world, does not consist really of windows, beds and coffee percolators. “World

Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse  27 is never an object that stands before us and can be seen” (43). Nor is it “an imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things” (43). Heidegger insists that the “world worlds” (43). It rises up prior to our representation and shapes the way that representation and all forms of decision-​making become possible for us. It structures our relationship to time, space, other people and ourselves. If Badiou is right that this process of worlding no longer unfolds with a logic that succeeds in revealing truth, it is not because the coffee, bed, partner and window are not there in the usual way. It is because alongside the givenness of that world we are aware of other worlds so radically different from our own that we cannot access the logic of that world’s unfolding. It is not that if we met Ahmed in his shattered schoolroom, we could not experience recognition of one another in love or hate and thereby see that other person within our world as it unfolds. We could do that. But that meeting does not seem part of our possible future. Furthermore, there are 11 million children in Yemen with inadequate food and shelter following the outbreak of war there in 2015. Even if we did go, and Ahmed or his class of 30 children achieved visibility in our world, there would be others who we would know to exist in some nameless way, in some other country seeing other forms of violence, but we would know that we do not even know how to name them in their suffering. Literature cannot bring all of those worlds into force, but one novel can stretch our capacity for thinking what’s possible enough to bring one other world within the visible horizon and field of forces in which we know ourselves to live. Brought forth within a world that already contains a narrative logic, with all the causal structures, fields of comparison and predicative possibilities that that entails, a fictional character based on Donatha would bring the world that contains her into force in a different way, even if no character by that fictional character’s name had ever existed. Because we use the same habits of understanding characters that we use with real people, we approach characters as having a past and future, a social milieu and quirks, all while remaining aware of their fictionality. We intuit that they possess motivations, which they may or may not understand themselves, and we habitually attribute interpretive agency to them so that in an imagined room full of imagined people, we direct our attention to a field that contains multiple perspectives on the same incident unfolding simultaneously. The contrast among these multiple perspectives defamiliarizes the novel’s world even if the focalizing perspective seems very close to our own. For comparison with Donatha’s story, I want to examine an example of wartime rape from a contemporary work of literature. When Ugwu rapes a girl in Adichie’s (2007) novel Half of a Yellow Sun, the scene has been set. It is 1967, Igbo identifying as Biafrans have declared their independence from Nigeria. Ugwu has been kidnapped from the home where he lives with his employers and pressganged into fighting a losing war. He

28  Cassandra Falke is in his mid-​teens and has proven himself a decent soldier by this point in the narrative and earned the respect of other conscripts. “Part of him wanted to be here,” we learn (Adichie 2007, 453), but equally he felt “he was not living his life; life was living him” (457). He is drinking homemade gin with the other soldiers after his first successful mission. He got up to urinate outside and, afterward, leaned against a tree and breathed in the fresh air. It was like sitting in the backyard in Nsukka, looking at the lemon tree and his herb garden …. When he finally went back inside, he stopped at the door. The bar girl was lying on her back on the floor, her wrapper bunched up at her waist, her shoulders held down by a soldier, her legs wide, wide ajar. She was sobbing, “Please, please, biko.” Her blouse was still on. Between her legs, High-​Tech [a younger child soldier] was moving. His thrusts were jerky, his small buttocks darker-​ colored than his legs. The soldiers were cheering …. Ugwu does not initially want to take part in the group rape of the girl, but by the end of the scene: Ugwu shrugged and moved forward. “Who is afraid?” he said disdainfully. “I just like to eat before others, that is all.” “The food is still fresh!” “Target Destroyer, aren’t you a man?” The barroom, the fellow soldiers are here for us to imagine as they would appear to Ugwu and the girl. We can think about the feeling of the floor, the facial expressions. Because the story has followed Ugwu from his rural village, to his employment in the university town of Nsukku, through his frivolous exploratory sex life to this moment, we can imagine what he might see as possible or impossible to do in the given situation. The reader enjoys some freedom with regard to the perspective she takes up, but the violence itself stands forth as something beyond all of those perspectives, something whose uninterpretable excess is evoked and preserved by the text. Readers of Adichie’s novel know almost as little about this unnamed bar girl as readers of Donatha’s testimony know about her. The fact that readers are affiliated with Ugwu during the scene resonates with Heidegger’s insight that everyone bears the existential capacity for violence. Still, we are 458 pages into Ugwu’s story by the time the scene above occurs. Calculated at an average reading speed of 300 words per minute, we have spent over 12 hours imagining his life and circumstances. Directing and populating our attention for all those hours, Half of a Yellow Sun worlds as a work of art. It grants Ugwu’s world greater visibility. It problematizes his renaming according to an act of war and the namelessness of his rape victim. The novel also renders visible the processes that obscured the visibility of the Nigerian Civil War

Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse  29 while it was occurring by featuring a white, British journalist living in Biafra who wants to write the stories of what he is seeing. His stories are not sensational enough for the British and American press, and as his friends and his Igbo lover, Kainene, tell him, it is not his story to tell. In both humanitarian material and literature, the subject experiencing violence appears before a background. On humanitarian website or in mail-​outs the figure of the subject may appear in a photograph, a short narrative or a testimonial statement. The individual, perhaps with his or her family, represents the truth of suffering (Fassin 2012: 8). The background, which focuses on the facts of political economy and social injustice, is presented as naturalized, uninterpreted. The reader is called to witness the incident after the fact, deeming the victim worthy or unworthy of assistance. We become responsible perhaps for reparations, but not implicated in the situation causing the violence, which is clearly past and finished. In contrast, the reader of a novel stands as a witness to action as it unfolds, even as our own, often safe, surroundings provide a background quite different from that in the fictional world. The fictional background stands forth clearly as interpreted, evoking the already initiated process that we as readers carry forward. It is interpreted by the narrative perspective, and the invitation to interpret the same scene differently, through one of the other characters or in light of violent structures or politics, stands always open. The narrative may draw attention to its own interpretive processes to a greater or lesser degree through layers of conflicting narration such as that we see in Half of a Yellow Sun (which features three focalizers and a novel within the novel), or through an unreliable narrator, but the reader is invariably reminded of the cultural processes that bring violence to visibility through the layers of narration present in any novel –​ reader, narrator, implied reader, implied author and so on. Violence and literature are both strange in Heidegger’s use of the term, both excessive and incapable of being fully determined. They both paradoxically bring a world into force by defamiliarizing it. For a reader who has suffered sexual violence, reading about Donatha’s or the bar girl’s rape may reactivate trauma, the act standing forth in its awfulness, but for readers without a personal experience of violence, altering the perception that war and suffering are normal in some parts of the world demands a radical readjustment of norms inadvertently promoted by humanitarian discourse. Before violence can become violent in the sense of surpassing the familiar, familiarity must be established by making the world of a particular violent history visible. Adichie’s novel achieves this, affirming more broadly the potential for novels as powerful actors in humanitarian discourse.

Note 1 In 2016, researchers at the University College of London published results of a Milgram-​style experiment involving real electronic shock and discovered that “coercion … reduced the neural processing of the outcomes of one’s

30  Cassandra Falke own actions. Thus, people who obey orders may subjectively experience their actions as closer to passive movements than fully voluntary actions” (Caspar et al. 2016).

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007. Half of a Yellow Sun. New York: Harper Collins. Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Adventure of French Philosophy. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso. Barron, Laignee. 2018. “More Than 43,000 Rohingya Parents May Be Missing. Experts Fear They Are Dead.” Time, March 8. https://​time.com/​5187​292/​ rohin​gya-​cri​sis-​miss​ing-​pare​nts-​refug​ees-​ban​glad​esh/​. Caspar, Emilie A., Julia F. Christensen, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Haggard. 2016. “Coercion Changes the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain.” Current Biology 26 (5): 585–​592. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro-​Sociological Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge. 97–​192. Diop, Boubacar Boris. 2004. “African Authors in Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory.” In Literary Responses to Mass Violence. Translated by Jane Hale. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. 109–​124. Eaglestone, Robert. 2017. Broken Voice: Reading Post-​Holocaust Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eichmann, Adolf. 1962/​2016. “Letter by Adolf Eichmann to President Yitzhak Ben-​Zvi of Israel.” New York Times, January 27. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Berkley: University of California Press. Fehrenbach, Heide, and Davide Rodogno. 2015. “Introduction –​The Morality of Sight.” In Humanitarian Photography: A History. Edited by Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–​21. Grossman, David. 2009. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Back Bay Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1959. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2013. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial. 15–​86. Iraq Body Count. 2021. www.iraqbo​dyco​unt.org/​. Accessed September 8, 2021. Johnson, Michael. 2010. A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Kamienski, Lukasz. 2016. “The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier.” The Atlantic, April8. Kennedy, Denis. 2009. “Selling the Distant Other: Humanitarianism and Imagery –​Ethical Dilemmas of Humanitarian Action.” Journal of Humanitarian Assistance 28: 1–​25.

Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse  31 Littell, Jonathan. 2016. The Kindly Ones. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. London: Chatto and Windus. Milgram, Stanley. 2017. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row. OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). 2021. Global Humanitarian Overview 2022. www.gho.uno​cha.org. UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund). 2021. “Children under Attack.” www.uni​cef.org/​child​ren-​under-​att​ack. Accessed September 15, 2021. United Nations and SURF (Survivors Fund). 2021. “Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations.” www. un.org United Nations and World Bank. 2018. “Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches for Preventing Violent Conflict.” Open Knowledge Repository. doi:10.1596/​ 978-​1-​4648-​1162-​3 Worker Rights Consortium (2020). “Worker Rights Consortium Assessment of Bangladesh’s Home Textile Industry: Findings from Worker Interviews.” www. framti​den.no/​bil​der/​dok​umen​ter/​Home_​T​exti​les_​Repo​rt_​F​INAL​_​36.pdf. World Vision. 2021. “Syrian Refugee Crisis: Facts, FAQs, and How to Help.” 13 July. Zimbardo, Philip. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House. Zimbardo, Philip. 2009. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

2 Violence, Encore! Popular Music, Power and Postwar Memory Avril Tynan

Just Memory In January 2021, historian Benjamin Stora published his report on “les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d’Algérie” (“questions of memory relating to colonization and the Algerian War”).1 Produced at the request of French President Emmanuel Macron in July 2020,2 what is more commonly called the rapport Stora, or Stora report, proposed to synthesize the “travail de mémoire, de verité et de réconciliation” (“work of memory, of truth and of reconciliation”) (2021, 2) that had been achieved so far in public and private arenas, and to recommend future strategies for progress. Above all, Stora highlights the irrecoverable depth and diversity of memories, but he asserts the need to find what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “juste mémoire” (“just memory”) (2021, 92),3 an equitable balance of quantity and distribution that would avoid both excesses and poverties of memory (Ricoeur 2000, 1). As a result, Stora proposes that the future of memory work in France and Algeria must involve the open circulation of divergent memories to foreclose the possibility of a conclusive judgment (2021, 92). Yet, Ricoeur’s discussion of just memory precisely emphasizes the roles of judgment and justice, claiming that memory has a truthful and pragmatic duty to serve justice to the other (2004, 88–​92). The duty of memory, for Ricoeur, is a productive endeavor situated at the intersections of past, present and future that recognizes the transmission of heritage from the other to the self. The settlement of debts owed to the victims of violence does not propose to reconcile distinct histories but precisely to delineate past from present and self from other. In this chapter, I suggest that memory of the violences committed in Algeria necessitates expression in order to incite action that would embed the past firmly into the world, not only as an episodic object of history but as part of the interpretative structures through which the world takes shape among and between others. As critics of the Stora report have argued, memory may be manipulated to stall productivity by generating parallels and commonalities between different parties;4 successful communication, on the other hand, depends upon distinction and plurality. DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-4

Violence, Encore!  33 In recent affective trends toward memory as a form of labor, memory is framed as a transformative activity that creates a “felt relation between the present and the past” (Allen and Brown 2011, 316). However, I argue that such embodied acts of recollection that preserve traces of the past in the present might –​intentionally or otherwise –​hinder the duty of memory to serve justice to others by encouraging passive inertia rather than action. Drawing on the distinctions between labor, work and action as presented by Hannah Arendt (1958/​1974, 1987), I suggest that framing memory as a form of action, rather than labor or work, contributes an important step in judicial, moral and social progress by furnishing and maintaining the narratives through which we interpret the world (see Meretoja 2018). Turning to cultural representations of the Algerian War, I argue that the futility of recollection as labor takes shape through entanglements of violent memories and music. In Didier Daeninckx’s short story “Corvée de bois” (2003), the explicit and even gratuitous presentation of war atrocities is enmeshed with popular culture and radio. Building on Jacques Attali’s socioeconomic theory of music as a means to power, I argue that narrative memories of the war are censored and silenced by the performance of monologic noise. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that music may be exploited to arouse feelings of “distraction and inattention” (1941/​1998, 205) in the listener, I suggest that the atmospheric circulation of memory pacifies and neutralizes the realities of the past as repetitious and inauthentic commodities of everyday life. Through this entanglement of violence and background music, or muzak, I suggest that memory of the Algerian War has been diluted in public and private spaces. Memories of the war return again and again –​encore et encore –​in political and cultural consciousness as part of the “open door” memory policy advocated by Stora (2021, 92–​94), but this laborious standardization of memory derealizes historic violence as intangible background noise that evades narrative action. To embed memories of violent histories into the human world, we must not only delineate “what” took place through narrative means but also how violence shapes “who” we are among others in the world today.

Memory Labor, Memory Work, Memory Action Memory work refers not only to the efforts of recollection but also, as Ricoeur made explicit, to the exercise of memory as justice that bridges the gap between the past and the future (2004, 363). What matters, as Annette Kuhn has argued, is not simply what we remember but what we do with these memories, “how we use [them] to give deeper meaning to, and if necessary change, our lives” (1995/​2002, 158). Following the affective turn in cultural and social studies from the end of the twentieth century (Clough 2008), processes of memory have been reframed as a form of labor rather than work that brings recollection into dialogue

34  Avril Tynan with the body. Building on the three vita activa or fundamental human activities that Hannah Arendt identifies in The Human Condition (1958/​ 1974) –​labor, work and action –​memory labor has replaced memory work as a resource for economic and biopolitical potential. For Arendt, work designates a process with a definite and tangible end point –​the construction of a chair or a house, for ­example –​while labor indicates the production of goods for (immediate) consumption through a circular process of “toil and trouble” (1987, 32) with “neither a beginning nor an end … only pauses, intervals between exhaustion and regeneration” (36). In memory studies, the inextricable connection between labor and life means that memory holds cultural capital that may be circulated as affective states to thereby commemorate the past through lived experience in the present (Allen and Brown 2011; Allen 2014). For Matthew Allen and Steven Brown, the persistence of memory as a lived connection to the past is only possible as an inexhaustive process of labor: If we treat the production of a memorial as “work,” then we see it as the production of an inert worldly artefact that has a determinate, fixed meaning once it is complete. But to see this process as “labor” means developing a sensitivity to a much more intimate and indeterminate relation between its producer and artefact, where the latter is never really “finished” as such. (2011, 316) Yet, Arendt also qualifies labor as “ ‘unproductive’ and futile” (1987, 33) because it endlessly (re)produces the very lack that it strives to fill. As a tireless process of (re)collection, memory as a form of labor cannot fulfill its duty to settle debts of the past because it always consumes what it produces. Understanding memory labor as a process of perpetual repetition brings into focus the frustrations over recycled memories of the Algerian War and the stagnation of justice. Memory as work, on the other hand, signifies distinct processes of “fabrication and usage” (Arendt 1987, 35) that produce stable and solid objects to be used and reused –​without significant alteration –​over time (34). This is not to imply that memory work fabricates only inert monuments to the past (Allen and Brown 2011, 323), but rather that it yields an objective and manmade end point that may be exploited –​either materially or immaterially –​over time and stand up to the “subjectivity of man” (Arendt 1987, 173–​174). If it is abused, memory labor will only perpetuate inaction and contestation through endless repetition; memory work, on the other hand, might respond more effectively to the debts of the other and a duty to justice by pursuing artificial, practical and durable outcomes, such as an acknowledgment of responsibility, judicial proceedings and reparations. Yet, the notion of objectivity in processes of memory work is contentious; can we ever say that the past has truly been reckoned, or that it yields a

Violence, Encore!  35 discernible result? Indeed, is it not more fruitful to consider how the past might come to effect change in different times and places, and between different agential subjects? Arendt’s third, and most misunderstood, human activity is action, an activity often perceived purely in political terms but relating to a more generic performance of speech and deeds that signals entry into the human world (1958/​1974, 175–​181). Like work, action is productive, but unlike work, action does not know what it will produce: action initiates or sets in motion a change to the existing pattern or fabric of understanding (177–​178). Actions, unlike labor or work, cannot take place in isolation but in a “web of human relationships … where their immediate consequences can be felt” (183–​184), and it is because of this existing web of human relationships, interconnecting a plurality of voices, intentions and perspectives that actions are unpredictable, irreversible and limitless (1987, 36–​41). While words and acts are themselves transient, they reveal themselves in the presence of others to produce stories “as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things” (Arendt 1958/​1974, 184). In order to become worldly things … they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things –​into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. (95) Distinguishing memory as a form of action, as opposed to labor or work, moves away from reiterative or functional outcomes of recollection and toward an understanding of how every act of memory “falls into an already existing web, where it nonetheless somehow starts a new process that will affect many others even beyond those with whom the agent comes into direct contact” (Arendt 1987, 40). At the same time, it illuminates how actors may wish to prevent memory finding expression that would lead to action in order to thwart the progression of uncertain and irrevocable change. If action, as Arendt claims, reveals “who” rather than “what” one is in the world, then individuals and communities may prefer to remain “in complete silence and perfect passivity” (1958/​1974, 179) rather than give voice to memories that will henceforth become inextricably bound up with a collective social identity. We cannot forget that memory is never neutral but is “intertwined with power, interest, and resistance precisely because it is so vital and fundamental to what we are as citizens and to what our society is as a community capable of relations of justice” (Booth 2008, 259). In the case of memories of the Algerian War of Independence, the need for action

36  Avril Tynan that would embed memories of the past within the identity constructions of contemporary Franco–​Algerian relations is at odds with the desire to perpetuate a specific and stable politico-​historical image of the war. In the following analysis of Didier Daeninckx’s “Corvée de bois,” I show how memory fails to elicit action in the novel, disappearing as soon as it appears through distraction and inattention. Entangled with popular music, violent memories of the war are diffused into the background of everyday spaces and situations where they may be dismissed or neglected by social actors as futile background noise. As a result, memories of violence are instrumentalized in the impersonal, inert and indistinct spaces of the narrative to homogenize, silence and subvert the plurality of human stories.

Popular Music, Violence and Censorship in Didier Daeninckx’s “Corvée de bois” The Algerian War of Independence raged from 1954 to 1962, and it continues to spark heated debates, particularly concerning the uses of torture and contentions over free economic movement between the two countries. As a colony of France, Algeria was considered a department rather than a separate country, and terminology relating to war was minimized to imply minor civil disorder.5 Although the war began as coordinated terrorist uprisings of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), it descended into a disastrous war of attrition that gradually alienated international support and deeply divided national opinion. The war eventually ended in March 1962, when President Charles de Gaulle ceded independence to Algeria in the Évian accords, but the topic remained –​and remains –​controversial, not least because de Gaulle presented Algerian independence as what he called a “victorious defeat.” Official memory has been slow to accept the realities of the war –​including systematic uses of rape, torture and the murder of civilians –​often reiterating that crimes were committed on both sides6 or limited to an aberrant, unrepentant minority. Cultural memory, however, was quick to pick up the gauntlet and assume responsibility as a witness both to the events and to their mitigation in collective French memory. Cultural works, such as novels and films, laid bare the unsavory character of the campaign and helped to expose French atrocities by dealing with the darker side of the war. Gillo Pontecorvo’s historical film La Bataille d’Alger (1965; The Battle of Algiers), Rachid Bouchareb’s controversial film Hors-​la-​loi (2010; Outside the Law) and Didier Daeninckx’s detective novel Meurtres pour mémoire (1983; Murder in Memoriam, 1991) are among the most well-​ known of these works. Although lesser known, Daeninckx’s (2003) short story “Corvée de bois” continues to pursue themes of truth and deception in relation to the Algerian War and to historical narrative more broadly. Published at a time of renewed public interest in the Algerian War,7 “Corvée” is an

Violence, Encore!  37 explicit denunciation of the appalling acts of violence committed by the French army, and also of the subversive measures of censorship and interpretation used both during the war and afterwards. The title translates literally to signify the collection of firewood, but the more sinister translation is a euphemism for the execution of prisoners during the war, usually using game-​like tactics. It is in line with many of the themes typically presented in Daeninckx’s work, such as Meurtres pour mémoire, which unravels the history of the massacre of October 17, 1961, as a detective fiction recounted from the perspective of a seemingly random present-​day murder in Toulouse, but interlinked with the history of the Occupation in France. Although “Corvée” lacks the key polar or detective elements that are present in the earlier work (see Gorrara 2003, 81–​89), it is similar in that it aims to show how the truth of the past is concealed beneath intersecting stories. As Donald Reid writes, Daeninckx’s obsessive play on the relationship between supposedly different histories stems from “the idea that there is a past hidden by those in power –​and they seek to keep it hidden” (2010, 40). He continues: “Daeninckx is primarily concerned with revealing the power exercised through the policing of collective memory narratives, predicated on what is excluded, as well as on what is said” (40). “Corvée” tells the story of an unidentified, 23-​year-​old French medical student at the Sorbonne who is inadvertently caught up in a riot in Paris and opts to avoid prison by joining the French campaign in Algeria. After the protagonist’s military training, he is assigned to a paratrooper detachment in Algeria where the short story portrays, in harrowing detail, acts of rape, torture and the execution of civilians committed by the narrator and his military colleagues. The narrator eventually returns to France after an insurgent attack leaves him paraplegic, and here he performs duties with the censorship bureau where he helps to prevent the truth of the war filtering out into public consciousness. Popular music is a curious trespasser into the narrative that is seemingly at odds with the overwhelmingly historical tale of violence and censorship, and yet the performance of music functions to silence the other and prevent communication as loudspeakers become instruments of censorship, reproducing noise and seizing power. The riot in which the protagonist becomes caught up occurs following a Gilbert Bécaud concert at the Olympia in mid-​1950s Paris.8 When the audience, enthralled by the enthusiasm of their idol, start to destroy their concert seats, the narrator and his friend, Jacques, kick an armrest across the room before breaking the glass of a display cabinet and taking some pictures of Bécaud. Although their transgressions are minor, they are arrested and held overnight, but avoid prison by agreeing to sign up for military service in Algeria. Jacques is sent to the medical service, while the narrator integrates a paratrooper regiment in southwest France before he is posted to commence service in Algeria. In this brief prelude to the narrative of Algeria itself, the popular music of Bécaud

38  Avril Tynan performs a paradoxically inflammatory and extinguishing role. For economic and social theorist Jacques Attali, music is a means of establishing and maintaining social control through interrelations of economics, technology, politics and culture; it is a form of entertainment but a means to power (1977/​1985, 6–​9). The scene of the music concert, a site of (re)production and repetition, is an instrument of power that can silence people by “mass-​producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises” (19). According to Attali, spaces of music and dancing are little more than “a pretext for … noncommunication, … solitude, and … silence” (Attali 1977/​1985, 118), and in places such as popular music concerts and night clubs, where music is at its loudest, Attali sees an ironic imposition of silence as “the music prevents people from speaking –​people who in any event do not want to, or cannot, speak” (1977/​1985, 118). In the vociferous repetitions of noise, all other dialogue is silenced by the organized monologue of the performer, and the words and deeds that Arendt defended in the production of action become uniform, repetitious and oblique. Of course, music has been shown to have strong connections precisely with what Arendt would define as action, setting in motion unstoppable and unknown operations (Hintjens and Ubaldo 2019; Pieslak 2015; Fast and Pegley 2012; Anderson, Carnagey and Eubanks 2003), but it may also be the case that music prevents action by subverting the words and deeds necessary for new beginnings. In “Corvée,” Bécaud’s music silences the crowd by reducing dialogue to a chorus of repetitions, firstly as the audience scream his name when he appears on stage –​“Bécaud, Bécaud, Bécaud …” –​and then throughout the performance as the crowd sing along, repeating and echoing the words of their idol (Daeninckx 2003, 14). Bécaud’s lyrics are themselves reproduced and transcribed on the page, generating an acoustic ekphrasis, or noiseless noise, that shows nothing but repetition. Finally, the only attempt at spontaneous, dialogic communication in this scene –​when Bruno Coquatrix, the director of the Olympia, appears alongside Bécaud on stage to congratulate him and end the concert –​is interrupted by the commotion of the audience as they attempt to invade the stage (Daeninckx 2003, 14–​15). In all these examples, music is the prelude to the disruption of communication, privileging repetition and meaningless noise over autonomous discourse. In Algeria, repetition of Bécaud’s music again imposes a select silencing as the screams of tortured civilians are drowned out by a powerful sound system. As in the scene of the concert, this episode contains no direct speech but reproduces, through acoustic ekphrasis, refrains of the popular track “Quand tu danses” (“When you dance”) (Daeninckx 2003, 48). The suppression of human voice by music both during the concert and in Algeria demonstrates not so much the ways in which music itself may be violent (such as at extreme volumes, Attali 1977/​1985; Carvalho 2013) but rather how it is used to cover up, interrupt or extinguish the words of others. This theme is not in itself remarkable; throughout the narrative,

Violence, Encore!  39 instances of coverups, counternarratives and censorship are rife. Indeed, the narrator’s presence in Algeria was itself a coverup, a way of avoiding prison by feigning to volunteer for military service. When he is caught on camera murdering an Algerian boy, the narrator kills the American journalist who took the photo to eliminate the evidence. These actions are in turn covered up by the French army who dispatch him to carry out propaganda work among the local community. In this capacity, he promotes an alternative historical narrative that boasts the accomplishments of the French in Algeria and portrays the rebel army as grasshoppers, a destructive, exploitative and thankless pest to be exterminated from the population (Daeninckx 2003, 41). When the narrator is returned to France in a wheelchair, he accepts a position in the censorship bureau where he passes much of his time viewing films or reviewing books to note “les scènes litigieuses, les dialogues faussement anodins qui cachaient un double sens, les allusions à l’actualité, les atteintes à la dignité de nos gouvernants” (“the litigious scenes, dialogues that were falsely benign and hid a double sense, allusions to current affairs, attacks on the dignity of our governing powers”) (Daeninckx 2003, 53). In this capacity, he prevents the reprinting of the Marquis de Sade’s Histoire de Juliette (Juliette), an explicitly violent text that weaves together sexual pleasure and pain. In these examples, music becomes another instrument for the silencing of discordant voices and a way of organizing political and social masses according to a strict monologic view. As the narrator’s former friend Jacques, who is heading up the printing team of de Sade’s Histoire, exclaims: “Ce n’est pas ce que vous faites là-​bas [en Algérie] qui vous gêne … C’est quand on met des mots dessus!” (“It’s not what you are doing over there [in Algeria] that bothers you… It’s when you see it in writing!”) (Daeninckx 2003, 58). By silencing these narratives of violence, the novel shows that memory can fail to elicit action when it is denied the tools of speech and expression.

Facing the Muzak The most intriguing imposition of music as a force for silencing comes much later, when Bécaud’s lyrics are entangled with memories of the violences committed at the concert and in Algeria. In the final paragraph of “Corvée,” the narrator presents a summative future past: “Je me suis marié, quelques mois après la fin de la guerre. Et j’ai tout effacé. Ça revient par bouffées que j’ai appris à maîtriser quand, par moments, Bécaud passe à la radio” (“I got married, a few months after the end of the war. And I erased everything. It returns in flashes that I’ve learned to control when, every now and then, Bécaud plays on the radio”) (Daeninckx 2003, 58). Beyond the disturbing composure of the narrator’s postwar return to civilian life, this paragraph brings the reader back in a complete circle to the beginning of the story and the Bécaud concert at the Olympia. In doing so, it emphasizes the repetitive labor of recollection –​whether

40  Avril Tynan willed or unwilled –​that is both traumatic and trivial. Through the radio, this music enables the infiltration of memories into the home, where the intimation of violence is domesticated and normalized. Despite the mass transmission of music over the airways and the parallels created with an everyday knowledge of the atrocities committed in Algeria, the entanglement of this awareness with popular culture pacifies and suppresses these narratives as repetitions and simulacra. Played over the radio, the music –​ and with it the memories of the war –​is at once pervasive and radically ineffective, producing little more than a repetitive refrain or a background sound for everyday living. With the subversive intrusion of memory into the home, “Corvée” begins to connect popular culture and music to the futility of memory labor. In “On Popular Music,” Adorno establishes a critique between “popular” and “serious” music that hinges on “the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization” (1941/​1998, 197). By standardization in popular music versus nonstandardization in serious music –​most masterfully displayed, in Adorno’s view, in Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas –​he argues that popular music conforms to a preestablished code that ensures every hit will “lead back to the same familiar experience” (1941/​1998, 198). For Adorno, what he calls popular music is derivative and predictable; a popular hit –​however unique or free it attempts to be –​ is merely a variation on the theme of another hit, one chorus substitutable by any other.9 For the listener, this standardization of popular culture means that a piece of music arrives “pre-​digested” (Adorno 1941/​1998, 201): “The whole is pre-​given and pre-​accepted, even before the actual experience of the music starts” (198). While Adorno’s critique of popular music translates poorly beyond the temporal and spatial specificity of 1930s Germany and has been subsequently resisted in contemporary analysis as elitist and dichotomous, overlooking the dynamics of consumer and industry (Paddison 1982; DeNora 2003; Hamilton 2007), his theory is useful in providing a pivot for notions of familiarity, domestication and repetition. As Daeninckx’s work suggests, the explicit (re)presentation of atrocities in Algeria is not unexpected or unfamiliar: details are widely available and frequently circulated. The problem is quite the opposite; although the narrative is available, listening is no longer necessary or even possible since it has already been heard so many times before; words and deeds, if indeed they do find expression, no longer provoke actions. In contemporary applications of functional background music, or muzak, the instrumental, unobtrusive “easy-​listening” music played in workplaces, public transport, shops, elevators and on telephones, such inattention is privileged to distract from activity and enhance productivity and well-​being (Vanel 2013; Lanza 1994; Jones and Schumacher 1992; LaBelle 2010, 171–​172). As a socially engineered aesthetic of distraction, muzak incites a numbness that “[lulls] the listener to inattention” (Adorno 1941/​1998, 206). For Simon C. Jones and Thomas G. Schumacher, in their discussion of power and functional music: “By

Violence, Encore!  41 encouraging nonreflective, nonintentional listening, and by producing low-​level cognitive responses, functional music defies traditional notions of musical reception, use, and meaning” (1992, 166). Yet, the inattention that is both a presupposition and a product of muzak may distract or mislead the listener for subversive gains. While historically viewed as a contemptuous object of auditory inconsequence –​the performative background to activity –​Hervé Vanel notes that muzak is also a powerful weapon for psychological stimulation: “Its pervasiveness is dreaded as a powerful ideological tool” (2013, 5). For the American composer Roger Reynolds, “Muzak is the single most reprehensible and destructive phenomenon of Western music” (Peyser 1978, 253).10 In the manipulation and deployment of sound as muzak, Vanel and Reynolds point to the ways in which it is not innocent or anodyne but often representative of a more insidious social agenda. This is certainly true of the background music Adorno identified with bars and cafés of the 1930s. “The first characteristic of background music is that you don’t have to listen to it” (1934/​2002, 507) he wrote, even going so far as to suggest that such music was only evident when it suddenly disappeared, replaced by silence (508). Like the sounds of muzak that would follow, this background music performed a homogenizing or standardizing role as “a social cement” (Adorno 1941/​1998, 206), binding customers together in a shared space. Although Adorno’s reflections seem, here again, to speak to the insignificance and inconspicuousness of background music, there is a more subversive ideological potential intermingled in the auditory anesthetic. As Vanel has suggested, muzak is to be feared precisely because it escapes our attention. For Adorno, background music in cafés and bars “seeps into the murmur of the conversations” (1934/​2002, 507), while radio music “serves to keep listeners from criticizing social realities; in short, it has a soporific effect upon social consciousness” (1945/​1996, 232). Attali goes further, suggesting that background music is “a means of silencing” (1977/​1985, 111), not through noise –​as he observed in concert halls and night clubs –​ but through neglect. Like Adorno, Attali notes the inconspicuous infiltration of music into every aspect of life: It has replaced natural background noise, invaded and even annulled the noise of machinery. It slips into the growing spaces of activity void of meaning and relations, into the organization of our everyday life: in all of the world’s hotels, all of the elevators, all of the factories and offices, all of the airplanes, all of the cars, everywhere, it signifies the presence of a power that needs no flag or symbol. (Attali 1977/​1985, 111) As memories seep back into the life of Daeninckx’s narrator and into his home, they are –​like the innocuous music that carries them –​“perceptible but not intrusive” (Peyser 1978, 252). Intertwined with the music of

42  Avril Tynan Bécaud played over the radio, these memories become as unnoticeable, even inexistent, as the noise that transmits them, perpetuating inattention, ignorance and inaction.

Interpreting Violence In the commercial advent of the radio that saw mass transmission of popular culture, Adorno observed what he saw as the degradation of music to repetition that was not listened to but rather assimilated by the consumer (1945/​1996, 231; 1941/​1998, 203–​204). The memories that return to the narrator in “Corvée” through Bécaud’s songs on the radio are equally corrupted; they are repetitious and inconspicuous, concealed within a seemingly inoffensive and unobtrusive musical interlude. Narratives of the Algerian War, Daeninckx suggests, although (re) presented again and again –​encore et encore11 –​fail to fulfill the duty of memory to justice if they are automatically distilled into an anodyne acoustic environment that “encourages passive hearing rather than active listening” (Peyser 1978, 253). More than this, memory must go beyond the functional instrumentalization enacted by work if it is to effect genuine change and instigate new possibilities. This discussion has therefore argued that there is a need for some form of memory action that not only conjures the past in the present but sets in motion a series of unknown, uncertain and unstoppable operations. Certainly, it cannot be guaranteed that any sort of action would be necessarily and objectively good, since it inheres in the unreliability of the human condition, but it would, at the very least, demonstrate a movement that breaks away from homogenizing and generalizing discussions of the past. As Arendt writes, “One deed, one gesture, one word may suffice to change every constellation” (1987, 41). As this discussion of musak in “Corvée de bois” has shown, simply because memories are present and engaged in cultural parlance does not inherently mean that they will elicit action. In the interference of recollection through music, “Corvée” reveals the potential inertia of individual and collective memory when it is forced into the background as the indistinct murmur of historic violence. Indeed, most telling is the unresolved anonymity of the narrator who can never reveal “who” he is if not an indistinct and atemporal specter of violent memories. Despite the explicit evocation of violent acts, the narrator’s persistent anonymity reveals the inaction of memory to give shape to identity if it is not taken up and embedded within the narrative spaces of interpretation, rather than itemization. This task, Daeninckx suggests, cannot take place in isolation, but necessitates the interconnections and interrelations of multiple others if it is to succeed, and it will not only reveal the plurality of violent memories, but more importantly and also distressingly the ways in which violence enacted in the past shapes our relationships, our worlds and our individual selves today.

Violence, Encore!  43

Notes 1 All translations from French are my own unless otherwise stated. 2 As leader of En Marche! and presidential candidate in 2017, Macron had already staked his candidacy on the “reconciliation of memories” in Franco–​ Algerian relations when he declared the French colonization of Algeria a “crime against humanity” (Roger 2017). His comments enflamed political opponents from right-​wing and extreme-​right-​wing parties, such as François Fillon, then presidential candidate for Les Républicains, who claimed that Macron’s comment was little short of a hate crime against his own country. See also Le Monde (2017). 3 The English translation does not allow for such ambiguity, claiming specifically the author’s preoccupation with “the just allotment of memory” (Ricoeur 2004, xv, emphasis mine). 4 Criticism of juridical stagnation between France and Algeria, and the inadequacy of the Stora report, builds on Algerian historian Noureddine Amara’s presentation at an online discussion event (“Rapport Stora” 2021; see also Amara 2021; Jordi and Pervillé 2021; Larkeche 2021; Le Monde 2021). 5 Euphemisms referring to security operations and enforcement were only officially replaced by “war” in 1999. 6 See Stora (1991). In September 2018, Emmanuel Macron became the first president to admit the systematic use of torture during the war. 7 The trial of Maurice Papon (1997–​1998) played a significant role in this revived consideration, particularly turning attention to the October 1961 massacre in Paris. 8 Daeninckx is most likely drawing on the events of February 17, 1955, when a riot broke out at Bécaud’s concert at the Olympia (La Presse 2001, C3). 9 Jacques Attali makes a similar point when he argues against the “banalization of the message” in popular music and rock (1977/​1985, 109). 10 Reynolds’ comments are aimed at the Muzak Corporation, a company producing ambient music for various situations. However, Muzak and muzak are often used as synonyms, and his comments are here applicable both to the company and to the product. 11 In live music events, the encore is often perceived as spontaneous but has become increasingly ritualized as part of the structure of performance (Webster 2012).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1934/​2002. “Music in the Background.” In Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, new translations by Susan Gillespie, 506–​512. Berkeley: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1941/​ 1998. “On Popular Music.” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, 197–​209. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1945/​1996. “A Social Critique of Radio Music.” Kenyon Review New Series 18 (3–​4): 229–​235. Allen, Matthew J. 2014. The Labour of Memory: Memorial Culture and 7/​7. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

44  Avril Tynan Allen, Matthew J., and Steven D. Brown. 2011. “Embodiment and Living Memorials: The Affective Labour of Remembering the 2005 London Bombings.” Memory Studies 4 (3): 312–​327. Amara, Noureddine. 2021. “Sur le rapport Stora: Une mémoire hors contrat.” https://​assaf​i rar​abi.com/​fr/​35753/​2021/​02/​01/​sur-​le-​rapp​ort-​stora-​la-​ver​ite-​ premi​ere-​dev​ant-​reg​ler-​les-​rappo​rts-​den​tre-​les-​hom​mes-​est-​la-​just​ice-​non-​la-​ memo​ire/​. Accessed June 8, 2021. Anderson, Craig A., Nicholas L. Carnagey, and Janie Eubanks. 2003. “Exposure to Violent Media: The Effects of Songs with Violent Lyrics on Aggressive Thoughts and Feelings.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (5): 960–​971. Arendt, Hannah. 1958/​ 1974. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1987. “Labor, Work, Action.” In Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, edited by S. J. James and W. Bernauer, 29–​42. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Attali, Jacques. 1977/​1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Booth, James W. 2008. “The Work of Memory: Time, Identity, and Justice.” Social Research 75 (1): 237–​262. Carvalho, John M. 2013. “‘Strange Fruit’: Music between Violence and Death.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (1): 111–​119. Clough, Patricia T. 2008. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies.” Theory, Culture and Society 25 (1): 1–​22. Daeninckx, Didier. 2003. Ceinture rouge, précédé de Corvée de bois. Paris: Gallimard. DeNora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fast, Susan, and Kip Pegley. 2012. Music, Politics, and Violence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Gorrara, Claire. 2003. The Roman Noir in Post-​War French Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, Andy. 2007. Aesthetics and Music. London and New York: Continuum. Hintjens, Helen, and Rafiki Ubaldo. 2019. “Music, Violence, and Peace-​ Building.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 31: 279–​288. Jones, Simon C., and Thomas G. Schumacher. 1992. “Muzak: On Functional Music and Power.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9: 156–​169. Jordi, Jean-​ Jacques, and Guy Pervillé. 2021. “Analyse critique du rapport de Benjamin Stora.” February 17. http://​guy.pervi​lle.free.fr/​spip/​arti​cle. php3?id_​arti​cle=​460. Accessed June 8, 2021. Kuhn, Annette. 1995/​2002. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London and New York: Verso. LaBelle, Brandon. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum. Lanza, Joseph. 1994. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-​ Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: St Martin’s Press. La Presse. 2001. “Disparition d’un des deux derniers monstres sacrés de l’après-​ guerre.” December 19. https://​numeri​que.banq.qc.ca/​pat​rimo​ine/​deta​ils/​ 52327/​2216​419. Accessed June 18, 2021.

Violence, Encore!  45 Larkeche, Seddik. 2021. “Rapport Stora: le monde fantasmé de Benjamin Stora.” TSA Algérie, January 31. www.tsa-​alge​rie.com/​rapp​ort-​stora-​le-​monde-​fanta​ sme-​de-​benja​min-​stora/​. Accessed October 18, 2021. Le Monde. 2017. “En Algérie, Macron qualifie la colonisation de ‘crime contre l’humanité’, tollé à droite.” February 15. www.lemo​nde.fr/​elect​ion-​pre​side​ ntie​lle-​2017/​arti​cle/​2017/​02/​15/​mac​ron-​quali​fie-​la-​colon​isat​ion-​de-​crime-​con​ tre-​l-​human​ite-​tolle-​a-​dro​ite-​et-​au-​front-​natio​nal_​5080​331_​4854​003.html. Accessed June 8, 2021. Le Monde. 2021. “Pour Alger, c’est comme si le rapport Stora sur la réconciliation des mémoires entre la France et l’Algérie ‘n’existait pas’.” March 24. www. lemo​nde.fr/​afri​que/​arti​cle/​2021/​03/​24/​fra​nce-​alge​rie-​pour-​alger-​c-​est-​comme-​ si-​le-​rapp​ort-​stora-​n-​exist​ait-​pas_​6​0742​66_​3​212.html. Accessed June 8, 2021. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paddison, Max. 1982. “The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music.” Popular Music 2: 201–​218. Peyser, Joan. 1978. “Commentary: ‘The Phonograph and Our Musical Life.’” Musical Quarterly 64 (2): 250–​254. Pieslak, Jonathan. 2015. Radicalism and Music: An Introduction to the Music Cultures of al-​Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-​Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-​Animal Rights Militants. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. “Rapport Stora: Quels impératifs éthiques pour l’histoire?” 2021. Discussion organized by the Centre d’études françaises at Cornell University, April 9. Reid, Donald. 2010. “Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History.” South Central Review 27 (1–​2): 39–​60. Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Roger, Patrick. 2017. “Colonisation: Les propos inédits de Macron font polémique.” Le Monde, February 16. www.lemo​nde.fr/​elect​ion-​pre​side​ntie​lle-​ 2017/​arti​cle/​2017/​02/​16/​pour-​mac​ron-​la-​colon​isat​ion-​fut-​un-​crime-​con​tre-​l-​ human​ite_​5080​621_​4854​003.html. Accessed June 8, 2021. Stora, Benjamin. 1991. La Gangrène et l’oubli. Paris: La Découverte. Stora, Benjamin. 2021. “Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d’Algérie.” Vie publique, January 20. www.vie-​publi​que.fr/​rapp​ ort/​278​186-​rapp​ort-​stora-​memo​ire-​sur-​la-​colon​isat​ion-​et-​la-​gue​rre-​dalge​rie. Accessed June 8, 2021. Vanel, Hervé. 2013. Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-​ Plus. Urbana and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Webster, Emma. 2012. “‘One More Tune!’ The Encore Ritual in Live Music Events.” Popular Music and Society 35 (1): 93–​111.

3 Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence The Strangler Vine and “Thugs” in America Amrita Ghosh This chapter focuses on two distinct discourses of violence and textuality that have larger consequences for how we imagine structures of power, race and citizenship. To this end, I examine Miranda Carter’s adventure novel and historical thriller The Strangler Vine (2015), set in 1840s colonial India. The novel revisits the history of Thugs through the heroic narrative of the historical figure of William Sleeman, “the slayer of Thugs” in the British Empire. In the same year the novel was published, the word Thug emerges dominantly in American political imagination. President Obama used the term during his speech on the Baltimore riots (April 2015), and President Trump uses it again in 2020 to represent the race riots occurring in the United States after the murder of George Floyd. I juxtapose the novel with this concurrent emergence and inclusion of the “Thug” in American political memory to showcase how the slippage of the term confirms a concatenation of political, (neo)colonial violence that constructs a certain historical legacy of criminality and ultimately seeps into a normalized racial discourse in contemporary America. The Strangler Vine, thus, raises important questions on the notion of colonial violence to show how power and discourse are updated in asymmetrical planetary intersections and contexts that have dangerous reverberations at the present time. Carter’s novel begins as a Kiplingesque adventure with the central characters, William Avery and Jeremiah Blake, employed by the British Raj, pursuing the missing poet Xavier Mountstuart who was kidnapped by Thugs in the heart of colonial India. On the surface, the novel seems to deconstruct the usual colonial adventure text and to question the dominant colonial discourse, which associates Thugs with a narrative of monstrous criminality. Using the metaphor of the “strangler vines,” Carter revises the idea of the Thugs in nineteenth-​century India; however, as the essay argues, the novel presents an aporia that poses serious questions for the decolonial narrative it aims at, which ultimately points to larger ramifications of epistemic violence in the present time. Cut to May 2020, the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in the United States led to nationwide protests and outrage among people. Cities were under curfew, and the National Guard DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-5

Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence  47 was deployed in various states to mitigate the riot-​like conditions on the streets. The New York Times (Lai, Marsh and Singvi 2020) reported widespread arrests of protestors and the use of teargas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds. Philip V. McHarris described the protests and violence as a “rebellion against an unjust system” after Floyd’s death was determined to be a homicide by the medical examiners. As tension escalated, President Trump tweeted in late May 2020 about the protestors: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd,” followed by “When looting starts, shooting starts” (Twitter, May 29, 2020). Soon after, in August 2020, Trump gave his presidential nomination acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention and once again called the protestors “Thugs” –​as he stated, “Those weren’t friendly protestors. They were thugs” (Reuters 2020). Interestingly, this was certainly not the first time the term “Thugs” was used in American political imagination. In the American history of racial brutality by police, the word has casually emerged often, denoting criminality. In April 2015, civic unrest rocked the nation after the 25-​year-​old Black American man from Baltimore, Freddie Gray, went into a coma and died from the injuries inflicted by the police. Reports say violence continued in the streets of Baltimore; over 300 businesses were damaged, and fires broke out in buildings and vehicles. President Obama, at the time, used the same rhetoric later used by Trump, calling the rioters “criminals and Thugs who tore up the place” (qtd. in Henderson 2015). The word Thug comes from the Sanskrit origin “Thag,” which means a deceiver or con person. Later, the term gains a colonial signification within British imagination from the nineteenth-​century Thugee culture, or bandits who were known to kill people on the roads. The discourse on Thugs is not without complexities and exists alongside a debate in postcolonial scholarship that ties a novel like The Strangler Vine with the reemergence of the term in US politics. Thus, I suggest that colonial violence represented in the novel is tangled with the asymmetrical planetary relations leading to present-​day America and acts within the larger “social field of violence” (using Daniel Neep’s phrase; 2012, 2) that recreates itself in the normative imagination. I connect Carter’s novel to concerns of the present times to show how colonial legacies of violence link to present conditions of Black criminalization as well as construct a national imaginary of exclusion and inclusion in India that has a long complex history. The intersection of these two seemingly unrelated histories reveals the structures of (neo)colonial violence that relates “Thugs” to a larger continuum, now symbolizing Black men and justifying incarceration within the United States, as well as forming a casteist social hierarchy within Indian history. A note on asymmetrical planetarity and how this essay uses the phrase: In “The Planetary Condition,” Amy Elias and Christian Moraru (2015) define the term planetary as “a new structure of awareness.” According to them, “planetariness is a fast expanding series of cultural formations”

48  Amrita Ghosh that is defined by “relationality.” They define this planetarity as having “a thrust towards coming together and the vision being ethical.” Thus, planetarity means to rethink our relations with each other, to think of “the planet as a living organism, as a shared ecology” (xi). Elias and Moraru also state that Gayatri Spivak coined the word to mean a kind of “collective responsibility to reimagine the planet” and to rethink the “subject as planetary.” In another definition, Jennifer Gabrys (2018) defines the concept of the planetary as “a way to figure, de-​figure, and re-​ figure collective responsibility to the other in postcolonial and decolonial circumstances.” I take these understandings of planetarity and probe the notion of “asymmetrical planetary” to rethink how relationality can problematically trickle into vast formations of neocolonial violence that have grave implications for unequal belongings within a national imaginary. So, I am emphasizing the phrase “asymmetrical planetarity” to show complications within the planetary itself. Political scientist Daniel Neep (2012) discusses the “micro-​practices” of colonial violence that continue to act as “workings of power that tend to be overlooked” (2). In the context of tracing the French colonial regime over Syria, Neep suggests these “micro-​practices” have significant impacts on space, time and meaning (2–​3). In Carter’s novel, the text presents such “micro-​ practices” of symbolic violence and portrays critical erasures of native subjects. Using a mélange of historical (famous, nondescript) and some fictionalized characters, Carter builds a narrative through an unreliable narrator William Avery, lieutenant in the British colonial system, posted in Calcutta. Avery’s encounter with India is initially replete with stereotypical orientalized discourses of “dirty,” “uncivilized” natives needing colonial order. The initial sections of the novel fit the genre of any colonial adventure novel, built on the model of adventure series by Kipling, or popular colonial adventure works by George A. Henty, such as In Freedom’s Cause (1885) and The Dragon and the Raven (1886). Kipling’s colonial adventure texts, of course, become a focal point in their complexity and representation of colonial life in India, whereas Henty’s works are more direct in their justification of the Empire. The Strangler Vine, too, initially falls into the usual conventions of tone, rhetoric and imperial production in service of the Company. The novel officially begins in 1837, Calcutta, at a time when colonialism in the Indian subcontinent was at its zenith. Calcutta and its surrounding areas are described in a typical colonial narrative with associations of “disease lurk[ing] in its miasma” (Carter 2015, 4) and “infernal heat” (3), making it unbearable for the Company people residing in the “Whitetown” part of the city. William Avery’s memory of England is set starkly against this diseased tropical Calcutta with heat, mud and dust, as he remembers the England he left behind with, “summer heat that was never excessive, snow on the moors, the soft grass of the hay meadows” (Carter 2015, 34). Even Jeremiah Blake, the mysterious Company man who had “gone

Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence  49 native” and been entrusted to find poet Xavier Mountstuart is assumed to have “gone astray” with radical views against the British Raj. Avery and Blake embark on their journey from Calcutta, under the machinations of the Company, on an espionage mission to find Mountstuart, who has stumbled upon some secrets on the Thugee that could destroy the Company’s image. During this journey, Avery’s imperial point of view collapses, especially in the second half of the text. Avery, the dutiful Company man, who believes “whatever happened I would do my duty” (62), who despises everything Blake stands for with his “Hindoostaane” language and “native” ways, and who believes that the Empire stands for “peace, order, roads and trade to all” (71), begins to dismantle his colonizer’s self slowly by questioning the colonial technologies of violence dominating the lives of the native people. As Blake challenges William Sleeman’s ideas of imperial control and order into the Thugee world, Avery for the first time experiences his “head is full of contradictions” about the British empire (173). Avery’s self-​fragmentation has begun and the novel has exploded into questioning structures of colonial violence and what the metaphor of the “strangler vines” really means. The first time the novel’s title and its literal meaning are introduced is in the novel’s second part when Blake, Avery and their native collaborators reach Jubbalpore, within the heartland of India, where Thugs originate from. Blake describes the place: The heat was oppressive and we passed thicket upon thicket in which the trees had been encircled by other sinisterly twisting gray trunks. ‘It is as if one would squeeze the life out of another, and then another, and then another,’ I said aloud. (Carter 2015, 102) In his inquiry to Blake, he learns for the first time that they are called “strangler vines” slowly squeezing the life breath out of trees in repetition. The chapter ends there with the group entering Jubbalpore, the Thug world, managed by the very capable Sleeman and his Company men. From this stage of the text, Avery’s narrative is a deconstructed colonial adventure novel that demystifies everything one assumes about facilitators of the Empire and the dangerous Thugee violence in nineteenth-​century India. The latter parts of the novel present Avery, Blake and Mir Aziz, the Company’s secret informer, leaving the Company territory into Doora, King Rao Viswanath’s region, further into the search for Mountstuart. They ultimately get ambushed and kidnapped by Thugs and find Mountstuart “living with them” (258). It is in this section of the novel that Mountstuart makes the claim, “There is no such thing as Thugee” (261). Mountstuart, himself, a secret Company espionage man who was appointed by London to find out about the rumors and misdemeanors of the Empire, announces that “Thuggee exists only in the mind and writings of Major William Sleeman.” There is no secret fellowship of

50  Amrita Ghosh Thugs that acts across Hind. “There is no Thug language. There is no common method of killing. There is no Thuggee cult of Kali” (261). It is, hence, revealed that the whole Thuggee department constructed by the Empire is, in fact, a concoction based on a lie. It is important to note that within postcolonial discourses there is a huge scholarly debate on the Thugee and whether they really existed. Subramaniam Shankar (2013) traces the origins of the concept of “Thugee” and compares it with the standard dictionary meaning. As Shankar states, in the Oxford English Dictionary “the commonly used word, thug, means … a cutthroat, ruffian, rough. It is a word with common associations of criminality, violence and loutishness” (98). Shankar traces the origins of the word and argues that before the English dictionary’s common association of criminal activity with Thug, the word “had a more adventurous history originating in nineteenth-​century colonial India, in a discourse inaugurated by an East India Company official, named William Henry Sleeman” (98). Tracing the etymology and signification of the word, Shankar also points out that the discourse on thugs … played a key role in defining the shape of British power in colonial India. As the OED indicates, thug entered the English language in India in the early nineteenth century from Hindi, where the word meant, “a cheat, a swindler” …. In the OED, the entry after thug is for the related word thuggee, whose meaning is given as “[t]‌he system of robbery and murder practiced by the Thugs.” “With Capital T,” the OED notes, the word indicates “[o]ne of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India who strangled their victims; a p’hansigar.” Thuggee and thug, entered the English language, then, as identifications of a monstrous and criminal “system” and of those who were members of it. … Thuggee, then, is the name given to the activities of certain robbers called Thugs. (99) Shankar, however, articulates his suspicions about the discourse on Thugs from colonial India, as he points to a “growing doubt” (2013, 99), whether Thuggee, “defined as a specific, ritualized, and gruesome form of criminal activity” (99), existed at all, much like the doubt posed in Carter’s novel. This is because the word’s association, from the dictionary definition, with gruesomeness or ritualized killing and its larger discourse were created by the British (99). What then becomes of this “Thuggee” association, as Shankar argues, is “not a criminal practice, but a discursive colonialist construction of criminal behavior in nineteenth century India” (99). The Strangler Vine even adds an “afterword” to the text, in which it mentions that the Thuggee department “made Sleeman’s career” (Carter 2015, 358) and confirmed his status as “very effective public administrator” (358) in the Company. Carter goes on to state, “It seems

Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence  51 likely that ‘Thuggee’ emerged from an amalgam of stories, colonial fears, moral panic and Sleeman’s own dark imaginings” (359). In a more recent study of Thugs and colonial imagination in the Indian context, Sagnik Bhattacharya (2020) asks “how can we explain the sudden appearance of thugs in the colonial archive in the 1830s and the disproportionate interest of the administration in eradicating them?” (1). Bhattacharya makes an incisive case that explains how the creation of Thugs by the colonial state has wider consequences on the present postcolonial nation-​state and citizenship. This is crucial because it also shows planetary concurrences with the present American political imaginary regarding Thugs and how a certain exclusionary politics plays out in the Indo-​American intersections of the term. According to him, the “discovery” of Thugs in the way known to the British colonial regime had far-​reaching implications in “othering tribal and anomic populations in the new Weberian state that the colonial and postcolonial regimes envisioned to establish” (1). This is of particular significance not only for texts like The Strangler Vine that set out to modify the colonial discourse and the mystification of Thugs, but also in its larger planetary relations to present-​day politics of the nation-​state and its inherent violence toward marginalized people, including tribal people and nomads. For Bhattacharya, such a discourse reveals “flaws in the epistemic framework that gave rise to it” (2), another form of colonial, epistemic violence that has serious implications on the present. Similar to Shankar, Bhattacharya (2020) also points to a faulty colonial epistemology that constructed a certain framework for Thugs as monsters. His study particularly focuses on problems in discursively explaining Thugs with the lack of knowledge –​which, he emphasizes, “often result[ed] in the ethnogenesis of new ‘tribes’ and ‘nations’ in regions, which lacked them completely” (5). Thugs came from both Hindu and Muslim backdrops, and the British colonial “cataloguing” under caste or religion was problematic (5). Bhattacharya also focuses on the marginal spaces that the Thugs inhabited and came from. From the perspective of colonial India, Thugs originated from beyond the control of “Company or their collaborators.” Rather, they were from forests, highways and their “position was beyond the epistemic reach of the empire” (5). These areas were ruled by “tribal, nomadic or local chiefs” and were not easy areas to rule even in precolonial times (Luiz qtd. in Bhattacharya 2020, 6). Thus, if we understand the necessity of the thuggee discourse as a justification of colonialism that posed as law and order through the structured establishment of the Thuggee department, the violence the colonial state needed for the “monstrous Thugs” to be erased from the colonial state tells a larger story of who that violence was wreaked on. Bhattacharya also remarks, “The colonial state, in suppressing the thug was essentially trying to establish itself by monopolizing forms of organized violence in Weberian tradition” (6).

52  Amrita Ghosh This same structure of violence seeps into the symbolic use of Thugs in American political frame. The word Thug first entered American lingo in 1852 with a New York Times article titled “The Thugs of New York,” in which the scary Indian Thugs were compared to the “rowdies of New York” (Kutner 2015). Max Kutner traces the etymology of the word in Western and specifically American culture and claims that Mark Twain’s travelogue on Indian Thugs, Following the Equator in 1897, bolstered the popular imagination on Thugees. A century later, American pop culture and entertainment included Thugs in the now-​famous Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom film, in which Thugs were represented as terrifying specimens wrapped in orientalist and exotic fare. Later, the war on terror mobilized the word as President Bush used the term to refer to insurgents in Iraq (Wagner qtd. in Kutner 2015). Kutner also reminds us that the word’s inclusion in hip-​hop culture occurred with Tupac Shakur’s promoting his famous phrase “Thug life,” which came to be associated with transformation from “signifying disgust, rebellion to coolness and power …. The label was attached to black and brown people, impoverished people, living in urban communities, regardless of their behavior” (Jeffries qtd. in Kutner 2015). Michael Jeffries also connects the dots and explains that “it’s not a coincidence that the rise of this word in public sphere coincided with the uptick in the punishment and hyperincarceration of black and brown people living in late 20th century urban America” (qtd. in Kutner 2015). Elsewhere, Shari Stone-​Mediatore (2019), in her work on American incarceration and state-​organized violence, makes the argument that underlying the “social imaginary of criminal-​justice” lie underpinnings of colonial violence (542). She calls this a “recurring colonialist patterns of state-​violence-​disguised-​as-​righteousness” (543). Stone-​ Mediatore’s work focuses on the state technologies of violence perpetrated on incarcerated individuals in the United States, but what is significant in her argument here is that she connects present political and socio-​justice discourse back to a colonial machinery. The idea of “Thugs” carries a vision of criminality that projects barbaric natives and rioting Black youth needing corrective measures. It is the same kind of colonial violence that enables a rhetoric of “Thugees” –​ marginalized, othered people who need to be folded into under a colonial “civilized order” of justice, a process that ironically reveals the torture and violence that the state is based on. This is something Stone-​Mediatore (2019) characterizes as “an imaginary of righteous violence” (544), a social imaginary that sustains a “transmitted myth of certain social identities” (544). In “Reflections on Violence, Law and Humanitarianism,” Talal Asad (2015) also makes a similar point in explaining a certain kind of colonial violence that the nation-​state requires in order to sanction state technologies of violence. Asad’s work is based on the post-​9/​11 world and the neocolonial mechanisms of warfare and violence. Yet, his argument is particularly germane here, as he questions any easy understandings of moral standards and benevolence of the modern nation-​state. Asad states:

Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence  53 What the modern world has inherited from the Enlightenment is not simply the moral standard that universal suffering should be reduced but a complex genealogy that is partly older than the eighteenth century in which compassion and benevolence are intertwined with violence and cruelty, an intertwining that is not merely a co-​existence of the two but a mutual dependence of each on the other. In other words, Asad is offering a different lens to understand the nation-​ state that uses violence “in paradoxical ways” in the way it is written into its law and morality. Asad emphasizes the form of colonial violence intrinsic to a notion of humanitarianism that developed during the peak era of European colonialism and still trickles down into varied forms of violence built into the notion of imagining the human based on difference. Columnist Jeffrey Barg (2019), who is interested in the way language and rhetoric shapes the world around us, writes that the word Thug “has had a checkered history but it always held a patina of otherness.” Barg also explains that “labeling people as Thugs is about painting them as savage, animalistic, unable to be tamed –​and therefore subject to retributive violence.” This is “violence that can be excused in a court of law or public opinion” (Barg 2019). This configures the idea of colonial violence apropos to the two different contexts intersecting in this essay and points to an embedded memory of this discourse in envisioning the nation and its “rightful” citizens. Here I point to a line spoken by American football star Colin Kaepernick’s mother to a young Colin reprimanding him to “fix” his braided hair in a scene from the recent Netflix series that documents his life, career and race relations. “You look like a Thug,” she says. In that one moment, the registers of otherness and embedded notions of criminality are framed as subtexts related to belonging within the family, the football team and, ultimately, the nation. Ironically, the line registers the compassion of a white mother who tells a young Black boy how to be accepted within the nation’s fold, whose other side is violence. While the novel The Strangler Vine initially attempts to explode this colonial violence by exposing the historical figure William Sleeman’s role as a capable imperial administrator and suppressor of Thugee culture, the ending of the novel does pose a peculiar problem, one that upsets the novel’s grand deconstructive gestures and connects to the political imaginary of the present. The text sadly reinforces the same colonial machinations of embedded violence in varied ways. As discussed earlier, the novel meticulously sets out to question the idea of Thuggee savagery and showcases the hushed-​up colonial violence at the heart of it. It symbolizes colonial violence as the “strangler vines” within the forests of India, oozing life out of subjects, suffocating them to death (an eerie reminder of police violence in Eric Garner’s death, when he repeatedly cried “I can’t breathe”). Yet, as mentioned before, a radically challenging text such as this reveals a metanarrative of embedded violence that

54  Amrita Ghosh subscribes to the same power structures the writer tries to undo while rewriting a colonial fantasy and questioning the violence of the Empire. The ending of the text underscores this in the way it imagines power relations and the interactions (or lack thereof) with the Thugs. Carter’s novel originally came out in 2014 and is set in peak colonial India of the nineteenth century. A quick look at the Western reviews of the novel reiterates Carter’s decolonial aims. The New York Times review by Susan MacNeal states, “With gorgeous historical detail and deft characterization, Carter creates a rip-​roaring detective romp –​while also casting a gimlet eye on the effects of British imperialism and colonization of India” (Carter 2022). A. N. Wilson from the Financial Times calls it an “enlightened modern book that has a properly skeptical view of imperialist propaganda” (Carter 2022), and finally the Guardian review claims that the novel “has a smirking sense of the absurdity of the whole colonial project.” Of course, these reviews are not claiming anything outrightly untrue about the text. But since the text’s goal is clear –​to question easy understandings of the colonial enterprise and the gigantic machinations of colonial violence –​I want to closely read the ending of the novel in the context of its reviews and analyze what it means for the representation of Thugs and for colonial violence. As the denouement of the text occurs in Part Four of The Strangler Vine, Blake and Avery are asked to meet with the Governor General, Lord Auckland. Avery’s exclamation about the colonial technologies of violence and fear, “It is all so dirty,” is met with Blake’s rather interesting statement, “The Company is a vast creature of many heads and many arms. It is not all rotten, at least I am not sure it is” (Carter 2015, 327). Intriguingly, all of Blake’s other very serious admonitions against the Empire and the violence it wreaks on people come to a halt as one encounters this hint of doubt about the nature of the “Company” and that it might not all be “rotten.” Later, when Avery and Blake have their final meeting with the Governor General and explain what they have learned about the Empire’s workings and Thuggees, the mighty General of the British Raj is portrayed as someone who is naïve and shocked at the machinations of the Empire. As he states, “This is very shocking. I can hardly believe it;” these are “very serious, very unpleasant accusations” (Carter 2015, 332). The novel, thus, represents the upper echelons of colonialists to be benevolent benefactors “for” the natives; they are portrayed as not knowing the evils of colonialism and inhabiting a space removed from it –​a rather strange turn in the so-​far-​scathing decolonial narrative. What the ending of the text then offers is just a semblance of sad disagreement within the Raj, where the subjectivities that are upheld are those of British heroes like Avery and Blake, who are “good” British subjects critiquing the rotten system. There is no native subject, not even one Thug figure that appears noteworthy or worthy of proper representation in this grand scheme of the text. The denouement of the novel is also secure with Blake returning to England and Avery getting more job offers in colonial India, engaged to

Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence  55 his love interest and deciding to stay back in India. The focus on Thugs, the critique of Company, is finished, and the ending posits a valorization of the British self, one that is sympathetic to the natives and critical of colonialism. So, what happens to the Thugs and the natives in the text? A novel that is aimed at decolonizing the myth of Thugees and so critical of the epistemic violence and the erasures in the colonial history of Thugs could have easily included an alternative frame of representation for the native subjectivity in the text’s ending. The Thugs in the novel, despite every decolonial gesture, remain in a confounded space –​they are still “monsters in the dark” toward the end (using Sagnik Bhattacharya’s phrase). The novel’s attempt to rewrite the Thug story needed an epistemic shift in which the Thugs should have been written back into the story correcting the faulty imaginary. It fails in doing precisely that. The novel ultimately recreates the same kind of epistemic violence where Thugs are written out of the story, and the British self is pivotal. The novel, thus, becomes a symbol of this embedded symbolic violence that connects to the larger unequal planetary relations of race and legitimate belonging of certain subjects through significations that are carried within the subtexts of the layered text. As previously mentioned, Bhattacharya’s (2020) article is significant in the way it reminds readers of the colonial state’s first entry into forests and highlands, the margins of the Empire where it encounters the Thugs, tribal and nomadic people. This, according to Bhattacharya, has critical implications for how the postcolonial Indian nation-​state is still imagined with respect to the tribal populations. As he states, “the discovery of the thug fundamentally attempted to rewrite the teleology of Indian history that has consequences to this day in the understanding of tribal populations by the post-​colonial state” (6). That the “Thug” was a nomad, and thus not clearly “identified” by the “European notions of territoriality” or as legitimate native subjects of princely states, becomes a marker of unidentifiability for which the Thugs were pushed toward erasure or met with (epistemic) violence. Two things are key here in this discussion: first a radical text demystifying the thuggee myth completely erases Thugs toward the end; what we still get is that a criminal group of Thugs had kidnapped Mountstuart and kept him, Avery and Blake hostage before they flee in the end. That plot is never returned to in the text. Secondly, as Bhattacharya once again rightly claims, the Criminal Tribes Act that was institutionalized to control the Thugs in British India in 1871 had not been “entirely abrogated in the Republic of India after independence, but only repealed by the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952” (2020, 7). This led to far-​reaching consequences in the imagination of postcolonial India, which treats the tribal populations as “iterant populations that are not only persecuted by the state but also continue to suffer from human right violations that in many cases go unchecked by the law enforcement authorities –​the police” (Bhattacharya 2020, 7). Bhattacharya also cites Ganesh Devy’s important work on the problematic continued

56  Amrita Ghosh teaching of the Criminal Tribes Act in police training in the Indian police system. Sachin Jadhav (2018) also points out that the tribes who were “de-​notified from the Act are officially referred today as the De-​Notified Tribes (DT) or the Vimukta Jati (VJ) (freed).” They still belong to one of the most alienated spaces of society, away from any development and modernization in postcolonial India, and as Jadhav states, “stereotyping continues to haunt them, with reports now and then of these people being considered the prima facie suspects of any theft and robbery nearby.” Documenting the profiling and discrimination by the police and media, Quleen Kaur Bijral (2017) also emphasizes the “violence of colonial legacy” that continues to shape the lives of tribal people in present-​day India. According to Bijral, the “De-​Notified” tribal people are huddled in a “spectre of stigma” where they continuously face scapegoating and are forbidden from joining the mainstream. Apart from two quick mentions of native subjects toward the end of the novel, the Thugs remain in marginal othered spaces in the text that sadly endorse that very hegemonic imagination they set out to critique. The novel ends with Blake mentioning his Bengali wife Anwesha, who had died of child birth, and the last paragraph at the very end of the novel literally lumps together laboring natives –​“all around me the natives pressed, rolling barrels, lifting sacks” (Carter 2015, 356). Literally, The Strangler Vine becomes a reminder that a good native subject is either dead (Anwesha) or erased: the Thugs are still an unidentified group of criminals that cannot possibly be represented within the novel’s universe. This frame of representation brings us back to the reemergence of “Thugs” in the present time –​what the word denotes and how it symbolizes a systemic contemporary violence. For the American political discourse, critical race theorists Calvin Smiley and David Fakunle (2016) argue that there is a shift in imagining Blackness as coded with notions of brutality and criminality: The synonymy of Blackness with criminality is not a new phenomenon in America. Documented historical accounts have shown how myths, stereotypes, and racist ideologies led to discriminatory policies and court rulings that fueled racial violence in a post-​Reconstruction era and has culminated in the exponential increase of Black male incarceration today. (350) Smikey and Fakunle’s work highlights the historical trajectory that led to constructing the “brute” image of Blackness. The image of the “brute,” according to them, germinated during the period of reconstruction after the Civil War. There was a fear within dominant white ideology that Black people would acquire freedom and political power. Hence, the earlier image of a compliant, submissive slave shifted to the image of a savage brute. But as Smiley and Fakunle also emphasize, in recent

Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence  57 sociopolitical imagination, this media history–​led imaginary has given way to the “negative connotation” of the “Thug.” It is not that the mythical construct of the brute and its concomitant punishment in the form of death (lynching in history) is erased, but its place has been taken by “Thugs” in recent political discourse. What is interesting in Smiley and Fakunle’s argument is the emphasis on language that becomes a coded determinant of creating a certain value of life itself –​to be certain, black life –​that is of less value and more prone to criminalization (2016, 351). In 2014, the sports news channel DeadSpin published an article that pointed out that the word “Thug” had been trending in the sports world, and just that week in January 2014, it had been used 625 times in one day (Wagner 2015). Kyle Wagner states that “the word ‘thug’ [is] really more of a shorthand. It means a black guy who makes white folks a little more uncomfortable than they prefer.” What is fascinating in this linguistic codification is the “repackaging” of the word “Thug” back in American sociopolitical imagination for Black youth. Smiley and Fakunle argue that historically Black figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. “were vilified while alive and then sanitized in death to be repackaged as an acceptable part of the United States historical narrative” (2016, 351), whereas in contemporary America, the “thugification” of Black men in the United States points to a specific kind of demonization; that is, “Thugs” are criminals whose deaths are justified, or for whom incarceration and violence are legitimate. This essay connects Carter’s novel along with present political manifestations of the Thug in America to point to similar structures of (neo)colonial violence that are coded with linguistic, epistemic and literal violence and create spaces of extreme otherness. The notion of thuggee from the colonial adventure novel to our present times has not changed much. It is not just a racial slur; a murky colonial history on Thugs connects with the present criminalization of Black youth in America and trains a majority to dismiss certain people from the legitimate order of existence within the nation-​state. This essay also cautions against using easy positioning of planetarity as forms of alliance and coming together and questions relations of power and inequality that lurk within it. Novels like The Strangler Vine create asymmetrical planetarity of relations for both the marginalized in India and for Black youth in American contexts where they are trapped under the same yoke of symbolic violence and pushed to a space of radical alterity. Even now, the Thug reveals a violence generating narrative that normalizes institutionalized violence.

Works Cited Asad, Talal. 2015. “Reflections on Violence, Law and Humanitarianism.” Critical Inquiry 41 (2, Winter): 390–​427. Barg, Jeffrey. 2019. “The Problematic History of the Word ‘Thug.’ ” Philadelphia Enquirer, April 17. www.inqui​rer.com/​opin​ion/​com​ment​ary/​thug-​tupac-​rac​ ism-​langu​age-​reap​prop​riat​ion-​20190​417.html

58  Amrita Ghosh Bhattacharya, Sagnik. 2020. “Monsters in the Dark: The Discovery of Thuggee and Demographic Knowledge in Colonial India.” Palgrave Communications 6 (78): 1–​9. Bijral, Quleen Kaur. 2017. “The Violent Legacy of Stigma: Ex Criminal Tribes in India.” The Logical Indian, 11 May. https://​thelo​gica​lind​ian.com/​opin​ion/​ ex-​crimi​nal-​tri​bes/​. Carter, Miranda J. 2015. The Strangler Vine. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Carter, Miranda J. 2022. “Praise for The Strangler Vine.” http://​mj-​car​ter.com/​ books/​the-​strang​ler-​vine Elias, Amy J., and Moraru Moraru. 2015. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-​ First Century. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Gabrys, Jennifer. 2018. “Becoming Planetary.” E-​Flux, October, www.e-​flux. com/​archi​tect​ure/​accum​ulat​ion/​217​051/​becom​ing-​planet​ary Henderson, Nia-​ Malika. 2015. “Riots Test Obama’s Power to Heal Racial Divide.” CNN Politics, 29 April. https://​edit​ion.cnn.com/​2015/​04/​28/​polit​ics/​ obama-​and-​race/​index.html Jadhav, Sachin. 2018. “The Real Thugs of India and Their (Unfortunate) Legacy.” Medium, September 30. https://​med​ium.com/​@sac.jadha​v93/​the-​real-​thugs-​ of-​india-​and-​their-​unfo​rtun​ate-​leg​acy-​e02d8​d605​30e Kutner, Max. 2015. “A Brief History of the Word ‘Thug.’ ” Newsweek, April 29. www.newsw​eek.com/​brief-​hist​ory-​word-​thug-​326​595 McHarris, Philip V. 2020. “The George Floyd Protests Are a Rebellion against an Unjust System.” The Guardian, June 4. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​commen​tisf​ ree/​2020/​jun/​04/​geo​rge-​floyd-​prote​sts-​riots-​rebell​ion Neep, Daniel. 2012. Occupying Syria under the French Mandate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rebecca Lai, K. K., Bill Marsh and Anjali Singhvi. 2020. “Here Are the 100 U.S. Cities Where Protesters Were Tear-​Gassed.” New York Times, June 20. www.nyti​mes.com/​inte​ract​ive/​2020/​06/​16/​us/​geo​rge-​floyd-​prote​sts-​pol​ice-​ tear-​gas.html Reuters. 2020. “Trump Says People Protesting in Washington Thursday Were Thugs.” Reuters, August 28. www.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​us-​usa-​was​hing​ton-​ trump-​thugs-​idUSKB​N25O​359 Shankar, Subramaniam. 2013. “Thugs and Bandits: Life and Law in Colonial and Epicolonial India.” Biography 36 (1) (Winter): 97–​123. Smiley, Calvin John, and David Fakunle. 2016. “From ‘Brute’ to ‘Thug’: The Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in America.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26 (3–​4): 350–​366. Stone-​Mediatore, Shari. 2019. “How America Disguises Its Violence: Colonialism, Mass Incarceration, and the Need for Resistant Imagination.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 22 (5): 542–​561. Wagner, Kyle. 2015. “The Word ‘Thug’ Was Uttered 625 Times on TV on Monday.” DeadSpin, January 1. https://​deads​pin.com/​the-​word-​thug-​was-​ utte​red-​625-​times-​on-​tv-​yester​day-​150​6098​319

4 Variants and Consequences of Violence in Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Jakob Lothe

Taking its cue from Emmanuel Levinas’ claim that as human beings we are bound in networks of responsibility to known and unknown others whose vulnerability bids us not to commit violence,1 this chapter discusses how the main characters in British novelist Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974/​1976) variously engage in or become entangled in acts possessed of aspects of violence –​even though Murdoch does not often use that word. These aspects are, as I will attempt to show, inseparable from, and constituent elements of, the ethics presented through the novel’s narrative discourse. My approach is a variant of narrative analysis that, concentrating on narrative ethics, is inspired by narrative hermeneutics. A tenet of narrative hermeneutics is that while as readers we are engaged in interpretative acts, “narratives themselves –​and literary narratives in particular –​are forms of interpretation: they are about interpreting human possibilities and modes of being in the world” (Meretoja 2017, 135–​136; cf. Meretoja 2018 and Gadamer 1960/​2013, 307). In the fictional narrative under consideration here, these forms of interpretation are closely linked to, and utterly dependent on, the way in which Murdoch makes her third-​person narrator present not just the characters’ actions, thoughts, perspectives, experiences and values but also their interpretations of them. My understanding of narrative is indebted to definitions given by Mieke Bal and Ernst van Alphen. For Bal, storytelling is “the presentation in whatever medium of a focalized series of events” (2018, 37). Emphasizing narrative’s temporal dimension, Alphen finds that “narrative can be seen as an existential response to the world and to the experience of that world” (2018, 68). I link both these definitions to Hanna Meretoja’s conceptualization of narrative as “a culturally mediated practice of sense-​making that involves the activities of interpreting and presenting someone’s experiences in a specific situation to someone from a certain perspective or perspectives…” (2018, 48). I argue that this is exactly what the main characters in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine do or, more precisely, what Murdoch as implied author makes the third-person narrator tell us that they do.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-6

60  Jakob Lothe In order to establish a basis and reference point for the discussion, I give a summary of the novel’s plot: The psychotherapist Blaise Gavender lives with his wife Harriet and their 16-​year-​old son David in a comfortable home near London. Blaise has been having an affair with Emily McHugh, and they have an eight-​year-​old son named Luca. Even after he has been forced to tell Harriet about Emily, Blaise vacillates between the two women, hoping to continue relations with both. Forced by Emily to choose, he leaves Harriet, who, increasingly distressed, turns to the detective novelist Monty Small for support. Although it turns out that he was complicit in her death, Monty is grieving his wife Sophie, with whom his friend Edward Demarnay was also in love. Taking Luca with her on a trip to Germany, Harriet is killed fortuitously by a terrorist in Hanover airport, but she saves Luca’s life by covering him with her body. Rejected by Monty, Edward tries to help David to come to terms with the loss of his mother. Murdoch’s uses a third-​person narrator to present ethical questions that arise at different stages of the novel’s plot. She introduces these questions by identifying them as issues that, though linked to the main characters’ ethos, are relatively general. As the plot develops, these issues are perceived by the characters to become not only more relevant but also challenging in new and unpredictable ways. Variants of violence form an essential part of Murdoch’s fictional exploration of these ethical issues, which, assuming the form of questions rather than approximating to stable positions, encourage a dialogue between Murdoch as implied author and the reader. Constituting an ethical crisis in the novel, the characters’ dissimilar responses to the ethical challenges have ethical consequences that are linked to and, in no small part, contribute to the plot’s resolution at the end of the narrative. The terrorist attack in which one of the main characters is killed highlights physical violence in a way that, particularly on a second reading, makes facets of psychological violence more apparent throughout. I concentrate on the key functions that Murdoch’s third-​person narrator and four of the characters –​Harriet, Blaise, Emily and Luca –​play in the author’s narrative exploration of ethical questions.3 The introduction of each of the main characters adds new ethical issues. Harriet is morally committed to her family in a way reminiscent of sacred love; Blaise is caught up in a long-​lasting affair of profane love that forces him to routinely lie to his wife; Monty is engaged in a process of grief that, while at one level understandable, makes the reader wonder about his motives and choices. When as a reader I reach the stage of the narrative where Murdoch abruptly makes her narrator introduce me to Emily, I arrive at the point where narrative beginning blends into narrative middle, prompting an ethical crisis in which different values are played out against each other. The crisis becomes apparent when, fearing that Harriet may be told about his affair by somebody else, Blaise decides to write Harriet a letter:

Variants and Consequences of Violence  61 My darling Harriet and my dear wife. I am too cowardly to tell you what follows face to face, so I am telling you it in a letter. I shall try to explain clearly because clarity and truthfulness are of the utmost importance here …. Some years ago (over nine years ago to be precise) I took a mistress. Her name is Emily McHugh and she is now over thirty. I was physically attracted and I succumbed to temptation. This, I know, is indefensible …. I am profoundly ashamed, and in now confessing this can only cast myself onto your love as a religious person casts himself onto God …. I deserve punishment, but I ask for grace. (139–​140) Confessing to Harriet what I know already as a reader, Blaise uses words that the narrator has made me expect he would use. This includes his strategic employment of the word “grace,” which appeals to Harriet’s enduring love and, Blaise hopes, readiness to forgive. The second aspect follows from the first: Blaise focalizes the affair in a way that, seen from his perspective, will maximize the chance of an understanding and forgiving response. Without necessarily making his writing insincere, this kind of calculated effort is ethically dubious. Reaching the end of Blaise’s letter, I tend to conclude that he wrote it because he had to, not because he felt ethically obliged to do so. This reading is supported by the third-​person narrator’s observation that, writing the letter, Blaise found himself “unexpectedly inspired …. He moved himself” (141). The narrator here signals a notable attitudinal distance from Blaise. For the narrator, and for Murdoch as implied author behind her, being moved by one’s own confession of betrayal is not particularly laudable; the sentence is tinged with irony. Harriet’s reaction to the letter is in consonance with her ethos as presented by the narrator until now, that is, until this turning point of the novel’s plot. Though “devastated and defiled Harriet did not for a second doubt Blaise’s love for her” (144), and when he asks “Do you forgive me?” she replies “Yes, of course” (145). Apparently, then, Blaise’s strategy of writing the letter has worked, and he can continue living in his self-​contained world. That he thinks he can do this becomes evident when the narrator reports that, “with a sudden deep surge of joy,” Blaise reflects that “she had forgiven him, she had said she loved him” (147). His intention not to break with Emily becomes even clearer as the “surge of joy” he feels is accompanied by another lie: that the only person he has told about the affair is Magnus, the fictitious patient invented as an excuse to spend time with Emily. Both Blaise’s intention and his following action, which is consistent with his intention, involves a form of psychological violence related to, and in one sense following from, his failure to act responsibly in his marriage. The narrative of a novel by Murdoch tends to challenge the self-​ contained world that the characters of the fictional universe are inclined to construct for themselves. This stage of The Sacred and Profane Love

62  Jakob Lothe Machine illustrates this characteristic feature of her fiction: Marking a dramatic narrative turn, Blaise’s letter to Harriet not only changes the plot but also entails, and dramatizes, a series of ethical consequences for the characters, and for Harriet in particular. For Blaise, Harriet’s first response indicates a “moral force” that comes as a genuine surprise to him. Enabling her to forgive, her ethos gives her a “new strength” that, to Blaise’s great surprise, even makes her insist to see Emily. In a significant act of reaching out to her rival, in one sense even her enemy, Harriet makes Blaise take her to Emily’s home. The scene that follows includes the following dialogue: “I don’t want any relation,” said Emily. “As far as I’m concerned you don’t exist.” “Oh but I do exist,” said Harriet. She said it in a quiet explanatory tone, her face very grave, her eyes huge. (158) A significant variation on Murdoch’s narrative method, this dialogue juxtaposes, and contrasts, Harriet’s ethical values with those of Emily. For Harriet, there is an ethical obligation to reach out to those around her even, and indeed especially, when she might want to distance herself from them. This kind of ethical obligation is affiliated with the ethical responsibility toward others highlighted by Levinas (1991; Davis 2007, 83). That Emily does not feel this ethical obligation –​which for Harriet, concerned as she is with “duties” (159), extends to include Luca, the personification of her husband’s infidelity and betrayal –​does not mean that Emily has no ethics, however. It is true that, contrasting herself with Harriet in a conversation with Blaise a few pages later, she claims that “I’m not a moral being, or a person of principle” (177). Yet Emily too has values –​values that are so different from Harriet’s as to render communication between these two characters virtually impossible. It is a gain of Murdoch’s narrative strategy that, in one sense in common with Harriet, as a reader I find it difficult to identify Emily’s values beyond sensing that they are closely associated with her feelings for Blaise. Seen from Emily’s perspective, one ethical consequence of making her prolonged affair with Blaise known to Harriet is emotional confusion. Emily asks herself, “What could be the matter with her, with Harriet, with Blaise, that this could happen at all?” (179). Yet it is to Emily as though, after the disclosure of the affair, “the love between her and Blaise seemed strangely renewed and made innocent. Innocent: was that the important thing?” (180). The question is illustrative of the way in which Murdoch makes ethical questions explicit in the novel. This particular question is, it seems, prompted by a combination of making her affair with Blaise known to Harriet and the latter’s surprising visit to her. Although it would be oversimplified to claim that Harriet’s first response (which leads to her visit) makes Emily ask this question, it underlies it and is curiously linked to it.

Variants and Consequences of Violence  63 There is an element of irony in that Emily, rather than Harriet, uses the word “innocent.” If, as Murdoch invites me to do, I link “innocent” not just to Emily but also to the third-​person narrator, the tinge of irony in the sentence becomes more apparent. And yet Emily, whose “simple faith [in the] enduring nature of her own sexual link with her lover” (180) is emphasized by the narrator, could perhaps have used it herself. Is there perhaps a sense in which “innocent” does not apply to the profane love represented by Emily the way it does to Harriet’s sacred love –​a love that, reaching out even to her rival, suggests a remarkable innocence? It is both an aspect of plot and an ethical aspect of plot development that Harriet cannot, as Blaise hopes, remain “absolutely there in the background” (329). On the contrary, fearing “some new appeal from Blaise” (333), she flies to Germany. It is significant that she takes Luca with her: Feeling rejected by all those around her –​including her son David, whose “disappearance” (333) she finds particularly cruel –​the only person she feels she has left, left to spend time with and care for, is the son of her rival Emily. Murdoch presents Harriet’s decision to leave as both rational and irrational, as “a matter of principle” (332) and yet perhaps not. Asking herself whether principles are “just feelings” (332), she reflects that “resentment and hatred are forms of strength” and that, had she not fled, “I would become weak and spiteful and demoralized and crazed with humiliation” (333). It seems Harriet is now considering, or at least not ruling out, the possibility of acting violently. In historical reality, a massacre in an international airport is contingent; it is an event that can happen anywhere at any time and that I may or may not be part of. In one sense the massacre at Hanover airport in Murdoch’s novel is also contingent. And yet, as an integral part of the author’s design, it serves a twofold purpose of which a real-​life massacre is not possessed: First, it is an effective –​surprising and dramatic –​turn in the novel’s plot; second, it enables Murdoch to make her protagonist’s final action illustrative of her ethics: “Harriet had perished in the massacre at Hanover airport. She had saved Luca’s life, shielding him with her bullet-​riddled body. Blaise … had flown out to bring home his wife’s remains and his shocked alienated child” (336). Just before the massacre, while waiting for the luggage to arrive from the plane at Hanover airport, Harriet reflects that “I am not the good person I used to think that I was” (333). Yet her desperate, and successful, attempt to save Luca shows that she is, at least in one elementary, and important, sense of the word “good”; she dies as she literally reaches out to help and protect the human being nearest to her. To make this point is not to argue that while the massacre at Hanover airport is contingent, the part that Murdoch makes her protagonist Harriet play in it is coherent. But it is to suggest that while Harriet is increasingly possessed of thoughts and feelings that take her in different directions and appear worryingly irreconcilable, her care for others –​manifested in her repeated acts of reaching out to those around her –​gradually establishes a pattern that,

64  Jakob Lothe though not coherent in the strict sense of the word, is remarkably consistent, and from which I can glean an ethics presented as preferable to those who survive Harriet, particularly Blaise and Emily. Discussing the novel that Murdoch published one year before The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine –​ The Black Prince (1973) –​Paul Fiddes notes that: if the novel dramatizes the tension between the search for coherence and the test of contingency, it also dramatizes Murdoch’s conviction that love can be a means of releasing the person from the self-​enclosed cage of the self, and of turning the person outwards to notice the details of the world and the reality of others. (2012, 101) Without making these two major Murdoch novels more similar than they actually are, I find that, forming an essential part of her ethos, love enables Harriet to turn outwards to notice, and then respond to, “the reality of others.” I am not sure this love is “sacred,” though there is a sense in which this key word of the novel’s title invites me to think it is. Yet it is certainly not “profane;” there is a great contrast between the love represented by Harriet, on the one hand, and that experienced and lived by Blaise and Emily, on the other. Only the first variant of love can, in Fiddes’ phrase, produce that “loss of self” that can set the character “on the road to the higher Eros, or the Good” (Fiddes 2012, 101). To emphasize this point is not to claim that Murdoch as implied author establishes a clear and stable difference between sacred and profane love. Both are constituent elements of the “love machine” that infiltrates the characters’ lives, including Harriet’s. Reflecting on the disappearance of those she loves, she finds that “that too was part of a machine from which she had not, for all her ‘feelings’ and her ‘principles,’ the spirit or the courage really to escape” (333). Yet, although the difference between sacred and profane love is unclear, it becomes clearer, and more significant, after Harriet’s death. To put this another way, Harriet’s death enables Murdoch to reiterate, and sharpen, some of the novel’s key ethical questions by linking the values of characters still active in the plot to those of the main character she has killed off. I will illuminate this aspect of the novel’s ethics by briefly discussing Murdoch’s concluding presentation of three characters, Emily, Blaise and Luca. As regards Emily, the narrator comments: The fates had done Emily an amazingly good turn, and she could afford to be generous …. She did not pretend any sorrow, nor did she trouble her imagination about Blaise’s sufferings which she regarded as strictly temporary. She concealed her satisfaction under a gentle cool tact, though every now and then she would murmur something

Variants and Consequences of Violence  65 like: “How awfully considerate of Mrs Placid to go off and get herself massacred.” (338) Although the cynicism of this thought is striking, Emily’s satisfaction is not inconsistent with her attitude to Harriet earlier on in the plot. Clearly, the narrator (and Murdoch behind her) distances herself from this kind of cynicism, and as a reader, I am asked, or expected, to do so too. More effective, and surprising, is the way in which Murdoch makes her narrator suggest that Emily does “not pretend any sorrow” for Luca either. As her son barely survived the massacre, how is it possible that “the fates had done [her] an amazingly good turn”? Does she really believe this, or does the comment just reflect the narrator’s opinion? I am inclined to think it does not, and to me there is something appealing in the way the narrator here expresses her bewilderment, her inability to understand Emily. This kind of inability to fully understand the characters whose actions and thoughts she reports makes the third-​ person narration more credible. Signaling a humbler attitude on the part of the narrator, it suggests that my own interpretation may similarly profit from a degree of humility in my attempts to understand the complexity of the human psyche. Although the narrator distances herself from Emily’s lack of “sorrow,” and probably also of remorse, she appears to find her brutally honest stance more consistent than that of Blaise. That Emily “did not pretend any sorrow” implies that he does pretend, and, seen from an ethical perspective, Blaise’s attitude after Harriet’s death is just as, if not more, dubious than Emily’s. The remorse he feels for his wrongdoing is expressed through, and limited to, his dreams about Harriet: “How could I have done that to my dear wife who is so kind and good”? (338). An effective narrative variation, this question is an example of free indirect discourse: Rather than quoting a question Blaise asks himself in a dream, the narrator reports it, perhaps paraphrasing it and making it more explicit, and thus potentially more challenging, than Blaise is able, or willing, to do. Just after the question, the narrator comments, “Waking, he soon put away these refinements of pity and terror …. With swift mechanical efficiency his egoism took its own counter-​measures” (339). The narrator’s attitudinal distance from Blaise incorporates an element of irony. Reporting, and asking the reader to believe, that egoism is a strong, perhaps dominant, motivating factor not only for Blaise’s actions but also for his conscious thought, the narrator presents him in an ironic light by implicitly contrasting his actions and thoughts with those of Harriet, who is dead, and those of Luca, who, conceived as a burdensome problem, had remained one for Blaise. The strange child, as it grew, inspired guilt and fear. It was a relief to

66  Jakob Lothe have it officially classified as subnormal and taken away to be looked after by experts. (341) In a thoughtful essay titled “The Many Faces of Platonism,” David Tracy has argued that “like Plato’s ancient dialogues –​[but] unlike the realist novel Iris Murdoch’s novels both so resemble and dissolve, her novels’ characteristic open-​ endedness demand an active questioning response on the part of the reader” (1996, 68–​69). Although I dissent from Tracy’s qualification about the realist novel (a novel such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch clearly demands an active response from the reader), his important point is supported by ethical questions that the reader is prompted to ask at the end of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, including that considered above. As I have aimed to show, since my “active questioning response” as a reader is my response, other readers’ responses may differ from mine. Yet, as I have also attempted to demonstrate, my questioning response is influenced and shaped by questions, not least ethical questions, that Murdoch presents in, and intensifies through, her narrative discourse. Critics of Murdoch have emphasized the key role of dialogue in her novels: As the characters reveal their ethos in their contributions to dialogues in the discourse, different ethical positions and questions are linked to different characters who often function as doubles or contrastive pairs. Just as importantly, the characters’ ethos is shaped by their actions, decisions and responses to the plot events –​most revealingly, in my reading of the novel, to the event I have described as “ethical crisis.” For me, some of the most though-​provoking consequences assume the form of ethical questions linked to, and prompted by, the fate of Luca. There is a strong sense in which Luca, a minor character, becomes the novel’s ethical core or center, not because of what he does himself, but because of what the three main characters on whom this discussion has focused do to him. In an extreme, desperate act of reaching out to another person –​a fictional representative of a human being –​Harriet saves Luca’s life while losing her own. That those left to take care of Luca –​who is, inevitably, deeply traumatized by the event –​are unwilling or unable to do so is an ethical consequence that makes me pause as a reader. Why does responsibility and care seem to be absent from Blaise’s, and in a different way also from Emily’s, attitude to Luca? Even though Blaise and Emily did not particularly care for Luca before the massacre, how can they continue not caring for him afterwards? This ethical question becomes more urgent because, seen from the perspectives of Blaise and Emily, there are extenuating circumstances. After the massacre at Hanover airport, it is difficult for them to relate to and care for Luca in a meaningful way: “Since that appalling moment Luca had not spoken, had not uttered a word or a sound, looking mutely out at the world with terrified eyes which seemed bright with pain as

Variants and Consequences of Violence  67 if bright with tears” (336). Yet “he recognized Blaise and his mother,” and the psychiatrist at the “special institute for mentally disturbed children” to which he is taken “did not regard his case as hopeless” (337). As a reader I am asked to believe that, had she been alive, Harriet would have done more for Luca than Blaise and Emily do or care to do. The ethical challenge represented by Luca generally, and after the massacre in particular, calls Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of the face strikingly to mind.4 I hasten to add that, for Levinas, the Other’s face is not an object; rather, it is, or represents, an expression that “affects me before I can begin to reflect on it” in a face-​to-​face encounter.5 Seen from Levinas’ phenomenological perspective, human beings, and characters who represent them in narrative fiction, are involved in projects directed toward other human beings, and toward the world. This kind of relational project –​which assumes the form of intentional orientation in the world, and which thus expresses a desire to achieve or accomplish something –​is challenged in the face-​to-​face encounter. For Blaise and Emily, there is a defenseless quality about Luca that, in the narrative analysis presented here, is illuminated by the combination of nudity and paradoxical force or impact that Levinas associates with the face of the Other. Both Blaise and Emily sense the ethical challenge of Luca’s face, but, reorienting their projects in accord with their desires, they shy away from it. Revealingly, Blaise uses the word “face” not about Luca but about Emily: “he felt that she too was relieved when that terrible incomprehensible silent suffering was taken away from before her face” (341). This facet of the novel’s ethics depends on, and follows from, Murdoch’s narrative strategy. There is a strong sense in which the part of the narrative subsequent to Luca’s death becomes an epilogue with a dual function: first, to bring the plot to conclusion, and, second, to highlight the novel’s ethical dimension by revealing the ethical consequences of earlier actions and decisions, as well as asking further ethical questions linked to, and prompted by, these consequences. As noted already, the third-​person narrator plays a key role here: presenting the final events of the plot, the narrator comments on them by identifying and asking ethical questions, particularly as regards Blaise, Emily and Luca. Referring to Levinas’ idea of the face, I have indicated how, in spite of feeling both “guilt and fear,” Blaise and Emily are unable, or unwilling, to encounter, and in the next instance respond to, Luca’s face the way Harriet would probably have done. Because Luca does not speak, we cannot know what he thinks. I would like to suggest, though, that Luca is not just traumatized by the massacre in Hanover; he is also engaged in a lasting process of grief. For me, Luca’s silent mourning for the loss of the person who cared for him to the extent of saving his life significantly strengthens the novel’s ethical dimension. Luca’s silence constitutes an ellipsis, a gap, in the narrative. The gap is linked to mourning as described in Jacques Derrida’s late work, including

68  Jakob Lothe The Work of Mourning and Mémoires: For Paul de Man. In the latter book, Derrida suggests that Mourning is impossible, and for us most of all. The “trace of the other,” the other who has died and that remains other, is at once inside and outside of us, marking a gap that moves in “us,” as “us” –​living who sign our name. (1989, 49) It is a distinctive feature of Derrida’s late work that, as Pamela Osborn puts it, “the multiple losses described become gaps which both simultaneously imply meaning and deny narrative stability so that the text becomes haunted by absence and undecidability” (2012, 113). The concluding part of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is haunted by the absence of Harriet. Variously experienced by all of the novel’s characters, Harriet’s absence is felt most acutely by Luca, who, however, is unable to express his feelings. While admitting that his inability to speak makes this last point somewhat speculative, I note that there is a sense in which Luca’s grief, in common with Derrida’s, is also iterative: although his primary object of grief is Harriet, he may also be mourning the loss –​the gradual and apparently unstoppable distancing process –​of Emily and Blaise. The loss of Harriet, his dearest friend, comes in addition to the loss of his parents. In The Work of Mourning, Derrida, writing of the loss of a close friend, notes that I have already lost too many friends (and the discourse of mourning is more threatened than others, though it should be less, by the generality of the genre, and silence would here be the only rigorous response to such a fateful necessity). (2001, 95) That Luca does not choose to be silent does not make his silence less significant, and the ethical questions furthered by the narrative discourse become more urgent, and more haunting, as a result. One such question is this: How do I mourn –​what are, for me, the constituent elements of mourning? And a related question: How do I wish to remember the deceased? And how may I wish to forget him or her?6 The reader may counter that these questions are not, strictly speaking, ethical, and neither are they directly linked to the problem of violence. Yet, there is not a great difference between asking, for example, how I wish to, or can, remember a friend or relative who has died and asking about, or reflecting on, the values that person has possessed –​and which may make me want to remember, or forget, him or her. I hope to have shown that, for Harriet in Murdoch’s novel, one such value was that of reaching out to those around her. Though laudable, it does not follow that this value, or ethical priority, is ethically unproblematic: The narrative challenges

Variants and Consequences of Violence  69 all the characters choices, including Harriet’s, which have increasingly dramatic, even disastrous, consequences. Yet, in a more consistent, and stronger, fashion than any other character in the novel, Harriet aspires toward the good. And in spite of her values’ defects and the unforeseen consequences of choices that they prompt her to make, this aspiration toward the good sets her values apart from those of the characters around her. Although Murdoch does not often use the word violence, it is remarkable how closely the different values identified, presented and interpreted in the narrative are related to, and serve to illustrate aspects of, psychological and physical violence, thus also demonstrating how closely these two facets of violence are interlinked. I find there is a sense in which elements of violence are lurking underneath, infiltrating the narrative discourse and coloring the narrator’s presentation of all the characters and the actions in which they are involved. Creating a “synthesis of textual and readerly dynamics,” the progression of a narrative “is crucial to its effects and purposes” (Phelan 2017, 10). It certainly is in the novel discussed here. As Murdoch, via her third-​ person narrator, constructs a narrative discourse in which ethical issues become visible and through which ethical questions are asked, I engage in a readerly dynamics in which, responding to the ethical questions arising from the discourse, I ask my own ethical questions. That some of these questions and reflections, including those on my own egoism, may keep troubling me is a measure of the uncompromising intensity of Murdoch’s ethical exploration in the novel. Finally, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is an illustrative and thought-​ provoking instance of Hanna Meretoja’s conceptualization of narrative (2018, 48). Attempting to make sense of their lives, the main characters in this novel by Iris Murdoch are engaged in activities of interpreting and presenting their experiences in specific situations, each from their own perspective. The third-​person narrator plays a key role here, presenting and interpreting the characters’ activities. That Luca, after having been saved by Harriet, does not or cannot narrate strengthens, rather than reducing, the importance of narrative as a culturally and historically mediated practice of sense-​making.7

Notes 1 This idea is presented, discussed and defended in several of Levinas’ works, including Levinas (1991). See also Davis (2007, 81–​84) and the entry on Levinas in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​ entr​ies/​levi​nas/​#LogTot​Inf 2 I thus distinguish between the author of a narrative and the narrator (or narrators) in that narrative. The implied author is “the streamlined version of the actual author responsible for the construction of the narrative, including its ethical and thematic commitments” (Phelan 2017, 26). However, regardless of whether the reader locates the implied author inside or outside the text, “our

70  Jakob Lothe knowledge and evaluation of the implied author are entirely dependent on our reading of the text …. An unread novel has an author but not (yet) an implied author” (Lothe 2019, 359). 3 Although there are few studies of Murdoch that link ethical issues, including that of violence, explicitly to her narrative strategies, several Murdoch critics incorporate comments on various aspects of these strategies into their discussions of other topics. Purely aesthetic considerations of Murdoch’s fiction are, unsurprisingly, rare. For example, the novelist A. S. Byatt’s early study of the author identifies freedom as a central theme in Murdoch’s fiction; discussing this theme, Byatt also makes perceptive comments on Murdoch’s interest in the thought of, among others, Plato and Simone Weil (Byatt 1965). Three helpful collections of criticism are edited by Antonaccio and William Schweiker (1996), Rowe (2007) and Rowe and Horner (2012). 4 See, in particular, Levinas (1991, 194–​219). As Colin Davis notes, Levinas has become “an almost obligatory reference point in what is sometimes called the ‘ethical turn’ of poststructuralism and literary criticism.” In a way this is paradoxical because, as Davis points out, in an article published in 1948 titled “La Réalité et son ombre” (“Reality and Its Shadow”), Levinas launches an attack on art that echoes Plato’s discussion in Book 10 of the Republic. See Davis (2018, 25). 5 Quotation from the entry on Emmanuel Levinas in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​entr​ies/​levi​nas/​#LogTot​Inf 6 This last question could be seen as applying to both kinds of forgetting discussed by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History and Forgetting: actively, forgetting as a deliberate erasing of the traces of the past; passively, forgetting “held in reserve” (2004, 414–​416). 7 I thank Paul Fiddes and Cassandra Falke for their critically constructive comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Works Cited Alphen, Ernst van. 2018. “The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive.” In Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis, 68–​83. London: Routledge. Antoniaccio, Maria, and William Schweiker, eds. 1996. Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bal, Mieke. 2018. “Is There an Ethics to Story-​Telling?” In Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis, 37–​54. London: Routledge. Byatt, A. S. 1965/​1994. Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Vintage. Davis, Colin. 2007. Levinas: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Davis, Colin. 2018. “Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge.” In Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis, 23–​36. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Mémoires: For Paul de Man, translated by C. Lindsay et al. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The Work of Mourning, edited by Pascale-​Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Variants and Consequences of Violence  71 Fiddes, Paul. 2012. “Murdoch, Derrida and The Black Prince.” In Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts, edited by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 91–​ 109. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. 1960/​2013. Truth and Method, translation revised by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lothe, Jakob. 2019. “Narrative Communication as a Rhetorical Act: James Phelan’s Poetics of Narrative.” Poetics Today 40, no. 2 (June): 355–​365. Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. “Narrative Hermeneutics and the Ethical Potential of Literature.” In The Future of Literary Studies, edited by Jakob Lothe, 135–​ 147. Oslo: Novus Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. New York: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1974/​1976. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. New York: Penguin Books. Osborn, Pamela. 2012. “Minding the Gap: Mourning in the Work of Murdoch and Derrida.” In Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts, edited by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 110–​125. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Phelan, James. 2017. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History and Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rowe, Anne, ed. 2007. Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds. 2012. Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tracy, David. 1996. “Iris Murdoch and the Many Faces of Platonism.” In Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, edited by Maria Antoniaccio and William Schweiker, 54–​75. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

5 Violent Appetites Distaste and the Aesthetics of Violence Tero Eljas Vanhanen

Think back on the last time you flicked through the channels on your television or scrolled through the recommendations on your favorite online media service. How many of the shows and movies you saw featured acts of violence? I’d imagine quite a few. In fact, a few years back, media scholars Brad Bushman and Rowell Huesmann calculated the average amount of characters featured on a night’s programming of American television. They then set out to determine just exactly how many of those characters ended up being murdered. A quick calculation showed that if Americans were as homicidal as their fictional counterparts on TV, murder rates would increase by 2400 percent. Every single person in the United States would be murdered in less than 50 years (Bushman and Huesmann 2001, 226). Violence seems to be a part of human behavior that gets represented quite regularly in the stories we tell each other, whether on Netflix or in true crime podcasts or gathered around the campfire. The masses’ interest in violent entertainments has usually been discussed in worried tones. But as Bushman and Huesmann’s findings remind us, there does not seem to be any straightforward correlation between the popularity of violent representations and the prevalence of violent behavior in a society. Nevertheless, in the field of aesthetics, violence in art and entertainment has long been met with suspicion. Many of the great philosophers of art from Aristotle on have warned against excessive violence in art. The representation of violence, while often exciting and in the proper context even sublime, can all too easily go too far and venture beyond the bounds of propriety. Importantly for aesthetics, this means venturing beyond the bounds of good taste. Typically, aesthetic theories about represented violence focus on distinguishing between tasteful representations of sublime violence from distasteful scenes of gore and carnage. This chapter focuses on the role of distaste in the aesthetics of violence. I begin by outlining how classical aesthetics has contrasted and evaluated tasteful and distasteful representations of violence. Interpolating from the reasonings of David Hume, I argue that excessive graphic violence forms the standard of distaste that falls outside the scope of traditional aesthetic inquiry. DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-7

Violent Appetites  73 Hume’s reluctant attitude toward the representation of violence has not completely curbed the development of aesthetical theories on the subject. To illustrate this, I examine an exceptional oddity in aesthetics, Thomas De Quincey’s set of semi-​ satirical essays on murder as art, which aim to formulate the guidelines of both tasteful homicide in reality and its sublime representation in narrative. Finally, I criticize the long-​ standing idea of the sublimity of violence that De Quincey establishes in his essays. Through an analysis of the roles of distaste and disgust in aesthetic theory, I argue that the kind of tasteful representation of violence that Hume or De Quincey would approve of is in some ways more ethically problematic than an openly distasteful approach to the representation of violence.

Achilles’ Tummy Not all representations of violence are necessarily distasteful. As with any term beginning with a negation, to define distaste, it is useful to first examine its opposite. Let’s consider a canonical example of purportedly tasteful violence: swift-​footed Achilles, a proto-​superhero from a culture that didn’t yet divide characters neatly into heroes and villains. In Book 20 of The Iliad, Achilles is raging about the battlefield, driven into deadly fury by the death of his beloved friend Patroclus: ...As Tros grasped his knees, desperate, begging, Achilles slit open his liver, the liver spurted loose, gushing with dark blood, drenched his lap and the night swirled down his eyes as his life breath slipped away. And Mulius next –​ he reared and jammed his lance through the man’s ear so the lance came jutting out through the other ear, bronze point glinting. (Homer 1990, 518; Hom. Il. 20.468–​474) Admittedly, this is pretty gruesome stuff. Thrusting a spear through a man’s skull from one ear to the other won’t make for an easy PG-​13 adaptation. But, while there have been plenty of concerns about all the blood and gore in this classic of classics about war, there have not really been many serious doubts about the aesthetic value of the epic. Among works that feature scenes of explicit violence, The Iliad is unimpeachable, a cornerstone of our culture. If explicit violence can ever be represented tastefully, Homer’s epic should by all accounts be one of the best examples of tasteful representation of violence that we can find. Even so, a couple of books later, Homer gives us a hint about what distasteful representation of violence might be like. In Book 22, Achilles

74  Tero Eljas Vanhanen has gone berserk on the Trojan forces, killing and mauling warriors left and right, when he finally comes face to face with Hector, the champion of the Trojans and the killer of Patroclus. Achilles will have his revenge. He screams at Hector that if he could only stomach it, he would carve Hector’s flesh raw and devour it in revenge for what Hector has done. This is one of the more difficult passages to translate in the poem. There’s a sense of Achilles almost vomiting at the thought of eating human flesh, as he lacks the beast-​like nature geared for it.1 Here, Achilles’ delicate stomach lets us know where the limits lie. He is the reaper of men, practically bathing in the blood of his enemies, ready to skewer his opponents from ear to ear, tear out their livers, hack off their heads with one fell blow –​but there is a line he cannot cross. No matter how he would love to disgrace Hector and turn his enemy literally into excrement, Achilles cannot bring himself to feast on Hector’s flesh. This is the line that separates good taste from bad when we’re dealing with represented violence. Achilles hesitates not because of pride or because he holds himself above such savageries, but because he is physically disgusted by the idea of tearing beast-​like into a fellow human being with his teeth. Homer is onto something here. Disgust marks the final dividing line between the tasteful and the distasteful. Somatic disgust originally developed in humans in part to keep us from eating spoiled food (Rozin et al. 2008, 759). What’s disgusting is distasteful by definition. And we find the same structure in aesthetics and the discourse on taste. If a scene in a novel or film manages to turn your stomach, it’s a safe bet we’re dealing with a work that’s in bad taste. In particular, the representation of graphic and extreme violence has been a problematic issue for thinking about stories and art from the very beginning. Extreme violence is no longer heroic, no longer funny. It goes too far, becomes unsettling and unseemly. It’s hard to imagine that the Greeks would have related to Achilles in the same way had the swift-​footed hero actually dug in and feasted on Hector’s innards, face slathered in dark arterial blood. Warnings against distastefully violent scenes and stories have been par for the course for thousands of years. In the Poetics, Aristotle warns that some plays might go too far and become too tragic. He expressly condemns stories where a genuinely good man comes to a bad end. This sort of tragedy would no longer incite pity and fear in spectators, he argues, but would rather be only repulsive and shocking. Tellingly, Aristotle calls plays like this μιαρός, often translated as “shocking” or “polluted,” but literally meaning “stained with blood” (2012, 184; Poet. 1452b34–​37). Tragedy requires the negative emotions of pity and fear to generate the proper response of pleasure for the play’s audience. But if tragedy goes too far, if it becomes too tragic, it runs the risk of becoming unappealing and repellent. Excessively tragic, blood-​soaked plays can’t lead to cathar­ sis, leaving the audience to deal with the decidedly unpleasant feelings of disgust and shock all alone and unpurified.

Violent Appetites  75 The same attitude pops up a few millennia later in David Hume’s “Of Tragedy” (1757a). Hume’s essay points our attention to something strange: Aristotle takes it for granted that pity and fear lead to pleasure in the context of tragedy. But pity and fear are in themselves disagreeable emotions. How can they lead to a pleasurable experience? Hume offers an elegant solution to this paradox of tragedy that’s still influential today: the positive aspects of the work –​the elegance, force and beauty of expression –​overpower its negative elements.2 If a tragic scene is sufficiently well-​written, Hume argues, its artistic merits give us so much pleasure that the displeasure we might feel from our negative emotional response is eclipsed. Importantly, the affective charge of the originally negative response then merges with the pleasurable aspects of the aesthetic experience and strengthens our enjoyment. In a well-​written tragedy, the valence of our negative emotional response inverts and ultimately adds to the overall pleasure the work affords. Hume compares it to how love reaches its “full force and violence” only when combined with some amount of jealousy, which in itself is a “painful passion” (1757a, 191–​195). There is just one exception. Extreme violence can be so disgusting and disturbing that no amount of elegance of style or forcefulness of expression can salvage the story: An action, represented in tragedy, may be too bloody and atrocious. It may excite such movements as will not soften into pleasure; and the greatest energy of expression, bestowed on descriptions of that nature, serves only to augment our uneasiness. (Hume 1757a, 198) When a tragic scene is too violent, Hume argues, the conversion of the affective charge works in the opposite direction. All the emotional force, including our admiration for the artistic merits of the work, adds to the overall negativity or painfulness of the experience. The elegance, force and beauty of expression in an overly violent work serve only to augment our uneasiness. Following Hume, no matter how accomplished the work is in skill and eloquence, if it is too bloody and atrocious –​think of blood-​spattered Achilles hungrily digging into Hector’s steaming innards –​it should be wholly unpleasant for the audience. The more skilled and eloquent this kind of writing is, the more unpleasant the work will be. We could call this the standard of distaste of Humean aesthetics. Depictions of extreme violence, blood and guts, viscera and gore defile even the most accomplished feats of artistry. Not only does the representation of excessive and graphic violence lead to a work being disgusting and distasteful, but good writing, or the greatest energy of expression, as Hume puts it, only serves to make us even more disturbed. The bloodier the scenes of violence are and the more skillfully they’re depicted, the more distasteful the work is bound to be.

76  Tero Eljas Vanhanen

Amusing Murders and Other Deathly Delights Hume never defines what he means by too bloody and atrocious. He never explicitly states where the line is drawn. But for the aesthetics of violence, this is a crucial question. At what point does our appetite for violence turn into distaste? At what point does our stomach start turning, like Achilles’ does when he considers ripping Hector into bite-​sized morsels and munching down on the results? We find some important early answers to these questions in the February 1827 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, which featured an essay titled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” While originally published anonymously, the essay was soon attributed to literary provocateur Thomas De Quincey, already infamous for his Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater (1821). Over the years, “On Murder” began to take an increasingly central role in De Quincey’s oeuvre. He returned to the subject several times, penning a sequel in 1839 and adding a long explanatory postscript to the two essays in 1854. Tellingly, the postscript is a bit longer than both of the original essays put together. A quarter century later, De Quincey clearly felt that he still had a lot to clarify about his thoughts on the aesthetics of violence. At first glance, “On Murder” is just a juvenile piece of over-​the-​ top irony aiming for shock value. The essays seem to be an extended spoof on the idea of the criminal as an artist. The idea had been vaguely thrown about in Blackwood’s Magazine before, but De Quincey’s essay is the first full-​fledged treatment of the subject (see Schoenfield 2013). Nevertheless, behind the pitch-​ black comedic façade, De Quincey formulates a surprisingly coherent theory on the aesthetics of murder that had a considerable influence both on true crime writing and the nascent genre of detective fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, was heavily influenced by De Quincey, especially in his detective fiction (see Morrison 2001). While De Quincey’s essays may have borrowed their satirical bent from Swift, the essays on murder are not as outlandish as the good Irish Dean’s famous proposal. People are really not likely to start eating newborns no matter how hungry they may get, but people are interested in murders, and they do talk about them in evaluative tones. Murders and violence are regularly considered from the perspective of aesthetics, he argues. Once the initial moral shock has quieted down, “inevitably the scenical features (what aesthetically may be called the comparative advantages) of the several murders are reviewed and valued” (De Quincey 1854, 62). Although De Quincey’s ideas had a profound impact on fiction writers like Poe, he is primarily interested in real murders rather than in fiction. Accordingly, De Quincey bases his aesthetic theory on an examination of a series of real murders that shocked London in December 1811. Known as the Ratcliffe Highway murders, they consisted of two violent break-​ ins 12 days apart in Wapping, a poor riverside district in East London. In both cases the attacks seemed unmotivated, and the murderer brutally

Violent Appetites  77 bludgeoned and then slit the throats of his seven victims, including a baby only a few months old. There seemed to be no motive. No valuables were taken, and the victims were ordinary people with no ties to local crime. The attacks were by far the most infamous crime of the era, only eclipsed by Jack the Ripper’s murders in the neighboring district of Whitechapel at the end of the century (see James and Critchley 1971). At the time, it was quickly assumed that the killer was one John Williams, although the evidence seems inconclusive by today’s standards. Nevertheless, De Quincy paints the murderer as a rare genius: “Williams’s murders [were] the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed” (1827, 211). In evoking the concept of sublimity in connection with the Ratcliffe murders, De Quincey makes a shrewd move that ties his thinking about the representation of violence to the fundamental issues of aesthetic theory. He is drawing on an idea endorsed in classical British aesthetics from Lord Shaftesbury to Edmund Burke: something overwhelming or terrifying can be a source of aesthetic pleasure. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke defines the sublime as a sort of negative pleasure that we feel whenever we come across something that excites the ideas of pain, danger or terror. He argues that while pain and danger are disagreeable emotions, when we encounter them “at certain distances and with certain modifications,” they can result in “a delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror” (Burke 1990, 36–​37, 123). Burke doesn’t explicitly mention violence or murder as potential sources of the sublime, but they easily fit his criteria. They are undeniably dangerous and painful, and people are fascinated and excited by sensational murders. Straightforwardly applying Burke to the aesthetics of violence, De Quincey argues that murder and violence can be experienced as pleasurably sublime if we come across them at the proper distance and with the right modifications. The aesthetics of violence that he sets out to outline are essentially a survey of this proper way of looking at –​and, more or less satirically, performing –​murder. Using the Ratcliffe murders as a shining example of sublimity, De Quincey goes on to formulate guidelines defining the aesthetic value of an act of murder. The guiding principle for De Quincey is that murder should be a feat of genius. The act should be as spectacular and bloody as possible, committed in broad daylight and out in the open –​but an ingenious murderer should manage to slip away, nonetheless. Even more importantly, the act of murder should be disinterested. Its motive should be pure desire for murder. Not profit as in robberies, or strife as in feuds between criminals, but simple desire for murder for murder’s sake (De Quincey 1827, 211–​213). The key words here, of course, are “genius” and “disinterested,” concepts pointing straight to another great aesthetician of the eighteenth century, namely Immanuel Kant. Importantly, from De Quincey’s perspective, the disinterested genius is the murderer, not the writer. The killer is the true artist; the writer is exposed as an

78  Tero Eljas Vanhanen impostor, a lesser artist, a mere recorder of true art (Black 1991, 39). For De Quincey the reality of murder is impossible to represent adequately in narrative form: it’s sublime. De Quincey’s view on the sublimity of violence prefigures the now common idea of the unspeakability of violence that views violence somehow so powerful that it exceeds human comprehension and cannot be adequately represented in a narrative (see Bachner 2011, 3). Nonetheless, there is an art to telling stories about murder. Looking at De Quincey’s three essays as a whole, we find an aesthetic theory of representing violence as well. In The Aesthetics of Murder (1991), literary critic Joel Black formulates a hierarchy of four types of representation of murder based on De Quincey’s essays. The hierarchy is based on the perspective from which the murder is represented: 1) Lowest of all is to tell the story of the murder from the victim’s point of view. This way of representing murder offers nothing but shock value, leading to a crass and sensationalistic narrative. The victim’s perspective is wholly distasteful, as the audience is asked to imagine the victim’s suffering, and indeed to imagine what it feels like to die in the hands of a murderer. In Hume’s terms, this would be where a narrative becomes too bloody and atrocious, precluding any possibility of aesthetic pleasure. 2) Less distasteful, but still a pointedly banal and tedious way of representing murder is to tell the story from the perspective of the detective. This leads to a murder mystery or a case file. 3) A better and more interesting way of representing murder is to tell the story from the perspective of the murderer. This is the psychological confession, familiar from many classics of literature. Think of Macbeth or Raskolnikov –​or Maximilien Aue from Jonathan Littell’s Kindly Ones (2006), for that matter. From De Quincey’s perspective this type of a murder story can be aesthetically valuable but runs the risk of making the audience identify with the murderer. For all his boisterous exultations of murder, De Quincey still maintains that murder is morally wrong. Excessive identification with the murderer can lead to excusing the crime –​or even worse, emulating the murderer in real life. 4) Finally, best of all is to represent murder from the point of view of the witness. The witness functions as a stand-​in for the audience, modelling the properly horrified response that we should have while keeping us at a safe distance from the actual terrifying spectacle. Notably, this distance allows for a pleasurable aesthetic experience. Black argues that for De Quincey the act of murder will only become “an aesthetic experience of the sublime when it is mediated by a witness”

Violent Appetites  79 (1991, 66–​67). In short, for murder to be represented aesthetically, there must be a buffer or a distance between the murderer and the audience. The witness as the narrator or focalizer supplies this mediating buffer. Fittingly, the witness as a buffer corresponds to the “certain distance and modifications” that Burke was writing about in his theory of the sublime (1990, 36–​37). By mediating the violence through the perspective of the witness, violence becomes a source of an aesthetic experience of sublimity. In her study on the representation of violence in American literature, The Prestige of Violence (2011), cultural critic Sally Bachner argues that this sort of mediated representation of violence is often considered a tasteful way of representing violence, typical to distinguished works of high artistic value (Bachner 2011, 4). Thus, when violence is depicted indirectly in a mediated fashion, it should be sublime and tasteful. But here lies the problem. By upholding the distance between violence and the audience, we run the risk of sweeping the ethical repercussions of represented violence under the rug. Distancing softens the affective force of the violence and makes it more palatable, lacking real impact and real consequences. When we represent violence in a tasteful, distancing way, it may be exciting, but it may also ignore the pain and suffering that violence causes. For instance, enchanted by Homer’s remarkable eloquence and soothed by the unfocalized, witness-​like narration, we might see Achilles’ rampage in The Iliad as an example of ferocious heroism, downplaying the horrific death of the Trojan soldiers. Tasteful representation of violence runs the risk of celebrating violence, of dismissing its ugly consequences. How, then, should violence be represented, or should we just side with the moralists and ban violent stories and images altogether? I suggest that the type of representation of violence that might sidestep the problems that sublimity poses is in fact De Quincey’s lowest, most distasteful type: representing violence from the point of view of the victim. Sure, we typically find this sort of narration in lowbrow contexts that are considered in poor taste, in trashy gothic novels, shock shlock B-​movies, extreme horror or exploitation films, all the stuff that Hume would find much too bloody and disturbing. But in these kinds of violent works, we are not keeping violence at an arm’s length, we’re not elevating it to the lofty heights of sublimity. Violence from the victim’s perspective can never be sublime in the sense that Burke defines it. It is no coincidence that this kind of anti-​sublime representation of violence appears mostly in lowbrow genres. Class distinctions underlie aesthetic preferences, and as Pierre Bourdieu famously argues, the central distinction between high and low aesthetics is the elite’s “capacity for sublimation” (1984, 6). Thus, violent works that deny the possibility of sublimation tend to be disregarded in highbrow culture. For instance, when academic discourse –​highbrow by definition –​tackles works that feature anti-​sublime violence, the violent aspects of the works tend to be overlooked or minimized (Vanhanen 2017, 209, passim).

80  Tero Eljas Vanhanen Highbrow concerns over anti-​ sublime representations of violence are hardly unfounded. Representing murder from the perspective of the victim aims for transgression and shock value and can make violence into a spectacle, which opens a whole new can of worms (see Vanhanen 2016, 20–​22, 155–​156). Nevertheless, the victim’s perspective treats violence in a way that upholds its shocking, disturbing and frankly disgusting aspects. Maybe we shouldn’t be feeling aesthetic pleasure when we encounter violence in art. When we see representations of violence, isn’t it more appropriate to flinch rather than to have a pleasurably sublime aesthetic experience? De Quincey’s aesthetics of murder sketch out the ways that violence has been typically represented tastefully, in ways that are not offensive or unpalatable to high-​or middlebrow audiences. In keeping the victim’s truly horrifying experience at a safe distance, De Quincey’s aesthetics mark the boundary between attraction and repulsion, between taste and distaste. The reality of violence, however, is inherently distasteful and disagreeable. Perhaps, then, some aspects of violence are best represented in distasteful and disagreeable ways as well.

Don’t Trust Your Disgust One of the problems with graphic and shocking representation of violence is that it is literally repellent. When Hume discusses works that revel in the atrocity of violence and confound “the limits of vice and virtue,” he falls back on the vocabulary of disgust and monstrosity. Works that are too bloody and atrocious, he argues, must be condemned as “deformed” and “disfigured” (Hume 1757b, 236). The repulsion we might feel when faced with scenes of graphic violence is tantamount to disgust. On the level of content, bloody violence is distasteful; on the level of affect, distaste manifests as disgust. A few decades after Hume’s work on taste, the problem of disgust in art appears once more, but this time the problem of disgust is formulated even more forcefully. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), one of the originating texts of modern aesthetics, Immanuel Kant argues that art may represent disagreeable or ugly subjects, but real art can never depict the disgusting: Fine art ... describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly …. There is only one kind of ugliness that cannot be presented in conformity with nature without obliterating all aesthetical liking and hence artistic beauty: that ugliness which arouses disgust. (Kant 1987, 180, italics in original) Disgust is antithetical to aesthetics, Kant argues, since it destroys all aesthetic satisfaction –​it contaminates aesthetic experience. Paying close

Violent Appetites  81 attention to this passage, Jacques Derrida argues that disgust, rather than the sublime, is the absolute other of the beautiful in Kantian aesthetics (1975, 88–​89). The etymology of the word supports this. Dis-​gust is literally dis-​taste: gustus is Latin for “taste.”3 Here’s the interesting part of Kant’s take on the disgusting: he goes on to argue that while the disgusting offers only displeasure, it nevertheless forces itself upon us. The disgusting object insists “on our enjoying it even though that is just what we are forcefully resisting” (Kant 1987, 180). Disgust forces us to enjoy it, Kant concedes. This is an uncharacteristic passage in Kant, but he recognizes something very human: we are in some strange way attracted to the disgusting. Somatically, this is connected to the way that disgust, like fear, tends to direct our attention to the object that we’re reacting to (Miller 1997, x). We have a hard time averting our eyes from a piece of roadkill we pass by; we laugh at fart-​jokes in Rabelais and South Park; and we might enjoy a grisly scene of violence in a slasher film or a horror novel. Disgust, then, is inherently paradoxical. A disgusting object is unpleasant, but it tends to trigger a strange sense of fascination as well. Sara Ahmed notes that our fascination with the disgusting is based on its repellent nature, that the disgusting attracts precisely because it pulls away (2004, 96). Without this pulling away, the repellent would not be alluring. For Kant, this fascination with the disgusting is a threat to all aesthetic satisfaction. Or, to put it another way, the disgusting is a threat to good taste. Disgust is the emotion of contamination, and from the perspective of classical aesthetics, it has the ability to contaminate the entirety of an aesthetical experience. As Hume puts it, if a work is too bloody and atrocious, it is wholly disfigured and deformed, no matter its possible aesthetic accomplishments. For classical aesthetics, and Kant in particular, this poses an ethical problem as well. For Kant, ethics and aesthetics are irrevocably linked. Beauty is “the symbol of the morally good” (Kant 1987, 227); the sublime is only appealing because it reveals how our mind is able “to rise above … obstacles of sensibility by means of moral principles” (Kant 1987, 132). What’s aesthetically good, Kant implies, is connected to what’s morally good. Since disgust precludes any possibility of aesthetic pleasure –​whether through the experience of the beautiful or the sublime –​ it marks the point where the aesthetical object is ethically suspect. And it’s not just Kant. Empirical research affirms this idea as well. In an extensive Australian sociological survey on taste, most respondents defined bad taste in ethical terms. Respondents tended to describe things they considered in bad taste mostly in ethically loaded terms such as “upsetting” or “disgusting” (Woodward and Emmison 2001, 312). In ethics the feeling of moral disgust influences our ethical guidelines and is often used as a regulating principle in legal practice (which is highly problematic: see Nussbaum 2004, 14–​16; Johnson 2010, 151–​156). It’s the same situation in aesthetics: what’s disgusting is usually considered distasteful, aesthetically suspect.

82  Tero Eljas Vanhanen Let’s go ahead and apply all this to the representation of violence. Here’s an example from a little-​known niche of horror fiction usually labeled extreme horror. The passage is from Poppy Z. Brite’s (1996) novel Exquisite Corpse, an acknowledged classic among horror fans and considered quite disturbing even by seasoned devotees of extreme horror (see Vanhanen 2016, 245–​246). In this scene, Jay, a cannibalistic serial killer from New Orleans, has finally managed to ensnare his ideal victim, a 17-​year-​old beautiful boy called Tran, who’s now tied up at Jay’s apartment in the process of being tortured to death: Jay thrust the knife into the incision again, and Tran’s head fell back. The cold blade twisted inside him, severed some tough membrane with an agonizing crunch, sank into vital softness. Tran heard his own blood pattering onto the table, felt it pooling warmly beneath his back and buttocks. Blood filled his throat, welled past the gag and trickled out of the corners of his mouth. Jay unfastened the gag and pulled it out. A freshet of blood and bile followed it. Tran coughed, retched, tried to scream. It sounded like somebody attempting to gargle boiling water. (Brite 1996, 227–​228) The disgusting aspects of this passage don’t necessarily come out well in a short passage quoted in a scholarly article, but I don’t think it’s too far-​ fetched to say that the scene might make somebody uneasy and disgusted in the context of reading the entire novel. From an ethical perspective, violence is at first glance presented here as entertainment, reduced to a sexualized spectacle for the giddy consumption of horror fanatics hungry for blood and gore. From a narrative perspective, there are several aspects in the passage that are apt to trigger a disgusted bodily response in the reader. For instance, compared to the passage from The Iliad we looked at in the beginning, Brite’s murder scene is much more detailed and contains more sensory description. There’s the description of the sounds of a knife piercing Tran’s body, the dripping of blood and the final auditive and tactile simile of gargling boiling water. And, of course, all of this is described with disturbingly sexual overtones, the knife thrusting, Tran’s head falling back and so on. From the perspective of De Quincey’s aesthetics of murder, this passage exemplifies the most distasteful way of representing violence. The scene is told from the point of view of Tran, the murder victim. This kind of representation of violence, then, should be ethically suspect, in exceptionally poor taste and thus unable to provide pleasure for readers. But for all this, Exquisite Corpse is a popular text, one still in print more than 20 years later, one still revered in fan circles and argued about in scholarly publications (see, e.g., Cook 2006; Mueller 2007; Wright 2014; Vanhanen 2016, 2017). All in all, it’s a well-​ written novel –​just one designed not to please and amuse but to disturb

Violent Appetites  83 and repulse readers. It easily passes Hume’s criteria for being bloody and atrocious, and it exhibits a force of expression that should make it even more disturbing. Regardless of the book’s distasteful nature, I don’t think fans of Exquisite Corpse are all simply blood-​thirsty brutes displaying deplorable tastes in fiction, nor are they perverts looking for one-​handed reading (at least not all of them). It’s not just that the extreme violence of the book is simply perceived as cool or exciting by thoughtless degenerates. Rather, it’s precisely because admirers of Exquisite Corpse are disgusted and shaken by it that they enjoy reading fiction like this. Compared to the passage from The Iliad, Brite’s novel works along a different logic, an anti-​aesthetic of distaste, where disgust, unease and shock are desirable. Typically, though, fans of extreme horror describe their fascination with the genre as a guilty pleasure (see, e.g., Wisker 2002; Svehla 2018). Particularly with extreme horror, there is a sense of going against something they shouldn’t, of breaking the rules. This implies that readers are at least somewhat aware of the ethical and aesthetic transgressions of works like Exquisite Corpse. They know that the genre is often dismissed as lowbrow trash and that enjoying grisly sexualized murder scenes is ethically suspect. With extreme horror, there’s a guilty pleasure of going too far, of going against good taste and against good ethical judgment. This resistance to aesthetic and ethical norms forms a big part of the appeal of extremely violent narratives. Extreme violence triggers distaste and disgust that we enjoy precisely because extreme violence transgresses the boundaries of good taste. Disgust functions here as the affective marker of crossing these ethical and aesthetic boundaries. The joy of transgression, of going too far, of the illicit is a crucial part of the enjoyment of extremely violent narratives. But transgression isn’t just a form of juvenile rebellion against set norms. Transgression is inherently paradoxical. When we transgress beyond the boundaries and limits we’ve set for ourselves (for instance, the boundaries of good taste or the ethics of fiction), transgression affirms those limits as well. Transgression needs limits to overstep them. There can be no transgression if there are no rules or limits to transgress (Jenks 2003, 2). So, if there’s no good taste, there cannot be distaste either. While Kant sees the disgusting as an existential threat to aesthetic value, the anti-​aesthetics of distaste do not destroy the limits of good taste –​but reaffirm them by transgressing them. If horror aficionados find themselves enjoying their disturbed and disgusted response to a particularly bloody and violent scene, it doesn’t mean that they condone violence, find violence pleasant or that their disgust suddenly has a positive valence. Rather, they are enjoying their disturbed and disgusted response to the scene and the ambivalent, guilty pleasure that it triggers in them. So-​called tasteful representations of violence –​whether in fiction or in true crime writing –​sidestep this naturally repellent response to violence. If we approach violence only at a distance, as a source of some

84  Tero Eljas Vanhanen sublime contemplation, we risk aggrandizing violence. Tasteful violence can seem heroic, exciting, elevated. Conversely, Exquisite Corpse stays more truthful to the horrific forcefulness of violence. The murder scene in Brite’s novel is in some ways more ethical than the description of Achilles’ rampage in Homer. It does not occlude the suffering of the victims, and it forces us to face and affirm the distasteful and the physically and morally disgusting aspects of violence. And, perhaps, to face our own guilty attraction to it. Strangely, then, the fact that we might enjoy a scene of extreme violence reveals that we still perceive violence as horrifying, disgusting and ethically problematic. To appreciate these kinds of scenes of extreme violence, one must enjoy that which repels and disgusts. And to do so, one must be repelled and disgusted in the first place. If we aren’t repulsed by the shocking nature of a particularly disturbing scene of represented violence, we’re ultimately sidestepping the ethical ramifications of violence and its representation. The aesthetics of violence must come to grips with the role of distaste and disgust in the allure of violence.

Notes 1 In literal terms, Achilles says that he wishes that his animal fierceness and appetite would spew out of him, he would tear off Hector’s flesh and eat it: “αἲ γάρ πως αὐτόν με μένος καὶ θυμὸς ἀνήη /​ ὤμ᾽ ἀποταμνόμενον κρέα ἔδμεναι” (Hom. Il. 22.346–​347). 2 Of course, Hume’s conversion theory is not the only solution to the paradox of tragedy in circulation, see Smuts (2009). 3 The argument pops up again in more recent affect theory as well: Sianne Ngai focuses on this passage in Kant’s Critique of Judgment in her book Ugly Feelings (2005) but makes no mention of Derrida’s work from 40 years earlier, even though she echoes the exact same arguments.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aristotle. 2012. Poetics. Ed. Leonardo Tarán and Dimitri Gutas. Leiden: Brill. Bachner, Sally. 2011. The Prestige of Violence. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Black, Joel. 1991. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979/​1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brite, Poppy Z. 1996. Exquisite Corpse. New York: Simon & Schuster. Burke, Edmund. 1757/​1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bushman, Brad, and Rowell Huesmann. 2001. “Effects of Televised Violence on Aggression.” In Handbook of Children and the Media, Ed. Dorothy Singer and Jerome Singer, 223–​254. London: Sage.

Violent Appetites  85 Cook, Susan. 2006. “Subversion without Limits: From Secretary’s Transgressive S/​M to Exquisite Corpse’s Subversive Sadomasochism.” Discourse 28, no. 1: 121–​141. De Quincey, Thomas. 1827. “On Murder as Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February: 199–​213. De Quincey, Thomas. 1854. “Postscript.” In Selections Grave and Gay, Ed. Thomas De Quincey, 60–​111. Edinburgh: J. Hogg. Derrida, Jacques. 1975. “Economimesis.” In Mimesis: des articulations, Ed. Sylviane Agacinski, 57–​93. Paris: Aubier-​Flammarion. Homer. 1990. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Press. Hume, David. 1757a. “On Tragedy.” In Four Dissertations, 185–​200. London: A. Millar. Hume, David. 1757b. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Four Dissertations, 203–​ 240. London: A. Millar. James, P. D., and T. A. Critchley. 1971. The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811. London: Constable. Jenks, Chris. 2003. Transgression. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Paul. 2010. “Law, Morality and Disgust: The Regulation of ‘Extreme Pornography’ in England and Wales.” Social & Legal Studies 19, no. 2: 147–​163. Kant, Immanuel. 1790/​ 1987. Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morrison, Robert. 2001. “Poe’s De Quincey, Poe’s Dupin.” Essays in Criticism 51, no. 4: 424–​441. Mueller, Monika. 2007. “ ‘A Wet Festival of Scarlet’: Poppy Z. Brite’s (Un) Aesthetics of Murder.” In The Abject of Desire, Eds. Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller, 255–​270. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt and Clark R. McCauley. 2008. “Disgust.” In Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edition, Eds. Michael Lewis et al., 757–​776. New York: Guilford Press. Schoenfield, Mark. 2013. “The Taste for Violence in Blackwood’s Magazine.” In Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine, Eds. Robert Morrison and Daniel Roberts, 187–​200. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. “Art and Negative Affect.” Philosophy Compass 4, no. 1: 39–​55. Svehla, Gary J., and Susan Svehla, eds. 2018. Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Film. Albany: Bearmanor Media. Vanhanen, Tero Eljas. 2016. Shock Tactics and Extreme Strategies: Affectivity and Transgression in Late Twentieth-​ Century Extreme Fiction. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Unigrafia. Vanhanen, Tero Eljas. 2017. “The Good, the Bad, and the Nobrow: Structures of Taste and Distaste in the Nobrow Age.” In When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow: Popular Culture and the Rise of Nobrow, Eds. Peter Swirski and Tero Eljas Vanhanen, 207–​233. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

86  Tero Eljas Vanhanen Wisker, Gina. 2002. “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Women’s Horror.” Femspec 4, no. 1: 1. Woodward, Ian, and Michael Emmison. 2001. “From Aesthetic Principles to Collective Sentiments: The Logics of Everyday Judgements of Taste.” Poetics 29, no. 6: 295–​316. Wright, Laura. 2014. “Post-​ Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25: 347–​365.

Part II

Understanding the Violence of Perpetrators

6 A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence Brian Schiff and Michael Justice

Shock. Disgust. Astonishment. Terror. These are some of the possible reactions to the violent spectacle produced by extremists taking up arms in order to murder innocent and defenseless persons and their laudation of these acts in words and images. But, perhaps, even more than these raw emotional reactions, we feel a sense of disbelief or unreality. How are such crimes possible? How could a human be so brutal, callous and inhuman? Understanding the motivations of perpetrators is not an easy task. Extreme violence challenges our ability to understand. Because their actions are so extraordinary, we believe that perpetrators must somehow be extraordinary too; they must be sadistic, insane or biologically flawed (Waller 2002). But historical (Browning 1992; Straus 2006) and social science investigations (Milgram 1963; Zimbardo, Maslach and Haney 2000) show that everyday persons are capable of committing heinous acts and are the primary source of manpower in atrocity crimes. Still when confronted with acts of extreme violence, understanding seems elusive. In this essay, we analyze the accounts, self-​published “manifestos,” distributed on the internet by five mass shooters, or so-​called lone wolf terrorists: Anders Behring Breivik, Dylan Roof, Brenton Tarrant, John Earnest and Patrick Crusius. In each case, an act of symbolic violence is part of and accompanies the act of physical violence. Although the manifestos are different in focus and tone, each documents the motivations of the killer for their deeds. Accompanying their murderous actions, they articulate a crafted identity and symbolic context, which includes a racist subversion of reality. Playing on the word manifesto, we offer our own manifesto on how to understand these texts differently. In our analysis, we make no presuppositions of their actual motives, but rather investigate the discourses they harness and propagate. Although we find their opinions contemptible, we attempt to explore the world from the perspective of the killers and to understand their reasoning. In other words, we work from the stance of a hermeneutics of restoration in order to describe the voice and world of the killer (Ricoeur 1970). Of DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-9

90  Brian Schiff and Michael Justice course, interpreters are always telling the stories of others in a “double hermeneutic” (Meretoja 2017) and are unable to free themselves completely from prejudice in order to reach the meanings of others. Still we explore these textual constructions examining who the authors say they are, how they intend for their crimes to be understood and how they portray other groups, history and the world. One of the central obstacles to understanding is that we impose our ideas about what is moral onto others and, falsely, believe that they are operating on similar assumptions. The manifestos frame the moral reasons for mass shooters’ actions to the public and those who might be influenced to commit similar actions. Chillingly, from their perspective, killing is a rational action that rests upon irrefutable evidence. Pernicious lies and mischaracterizations of other groups are part of the symbolic vocabulary where the other is libelously portrayed as being in violation of the natural or sacred order. Murder is, therefore, seen as a moral and even a heroic project. As Fiske and Rai (2015, xxii) argue, “When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.” Likewise, as Welzer (2004, 16) asks, “What if the perpetrators did not violate their moral code, but rather, within the framework of their Weltanschauung, acted according to the highest moral standards?” Following Shweder et al. (1997, 125–​ 126), we find it helpful to consider moral reasoning from a pluralistic standpoint, which argues that interpretations of the right and good are multiple and “unequally distributed around the world.” Importantly, Shweder et al. (138) distinguish three clusters of moral explanations: (1) an ethics of autonomy concerned with “harms, rights, and justice” that “aims to … promote the exercise of free will in the pursuit of personal preference;” (2) an ethics of community concerned with “duty, hierarchy, interdependency, and souls” that “aims to protect the moral integrity of the various stations or roles that constitute a ‘society’ or a ‘community;’ ” and (3) an ethics of divinity concerned with the “sacred order, natural order, tradition, sanctity, sin, and pollution” that “aims to protect the soul, the spirit … from degradation.” For Shweder et al. (1997), these ethical discourses are found across the globe and coexist, but different cultures have preferred ethics to explain actions. In the context of mass murder, one can only speak about the ethics of community or divinity as moral goods in a perverse sense. But, in order to understand, we need to look at matters from the perspective of the perpetrator. Understanding requires interpreting their explanations as expressions of an alternate moral ontology that must be recovered on its own terms in order to view the rationale for their violent actions. The manifesto is their argument for the moral virtue of their actions. They sanctify the task by positioning themselves as the right person carrying out the attack for the right reasons. As we will argue, there is a dangerous combination of being both a victim and a hero. They are

A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence  91 victims, as part of an unjustly persecuted group, and they are the self-​ anointed hero who will contribute to the rectification of this injustice through purifying violence. In essence, they are proclaiming themselves as an active agent in the restoration of the world. These tasks are perceived as good because they are intended to restore what they see as the natural or sacred order.

Lone Wolves Lone wolf terrorism is a relatively new term that, because of its origins, we are somewhat reticent to apply. As Mattias Gardell (2021, 11) writes, “ ‘Lone wolf’ is a metaphor that began to be used by white radical nationalists in the 1970s to connote unorganized individuals who committed violent crime to further white racist/​white nationalist aims.” Furthermore, as Gardell (2021) points out, lone wolf terrorism is promoted as a strategy for initiating and accelerating a race war. Despite these reservations, lone wolf is the term most researchers use to describe the phenomenon of single-​actor terrorism. A lone wolf can be defined as a self-​radicalized, unaccompanied perpetrator who acts outside the direction of a terrorist cell. However, they are only alone in their actions; they participate in relationships, either online or face to face, and share systems of beliefs with communities (Schuurman et al. 2019). Self-​radicalization is commonly encouraged by right-​wing extremist groups in an effort to spread their ideology while staying undetectable and hard for governments and antihate groups to counter (Gardell 2021; Bates 2012). In 2010, the use of this term came onto the world stage when the Department of Homeland Security declared that lone wolves represent the greatest threat to the national security of the United States (Capellan 2015). Shortly after the 2011 attacks of Anders Breivik, President Obama stated on CNN that the biggest concern for the country is “the lone wolf terrorist” who is capable of carrying out wide-​scale massacres with a single weapon (Bates 2012, 2). However, for decades, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Posse Comitatus and Identity Christian have inspired solitary terrorists and provided the means for radicalization through exposure to their writings (Bates 2012). Lone wolves have been studied by psychologists, sociologists and criminologists, but there is no consensus on their profile or how they become agents of murder. For instance, Capellan (2015) argues that a general model of lone wolf perpetrators can be created –​white males who are isolated, unsuccessful in life –​and even suggests that some form of mental illness is common. However Gill, Horgan and Deckert (2014) argue that mental illness is not a strong-​enough identifier to include in a universal model. Using a fully automated method of analysis, the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), Baele (2017) has identified distinctive patterns in the writings of lonewolf terrorists. Examining

92  Brian Schiff and Michael Justice the writings of 170 lone actor terrorists from 1940 to 2013, Baele (2017) finds cognitive sophistication and flexibility in combination with extremely high levels of negative emotions, in particular, anger. Others, such as Gill, Horgan and Deckert (2014), have argued that there is “no uniform profile of lone-​actor terrorists” (433). However, in their study of 119 journalistic accounts of lone wolf terrorists from the popular press, they observe useful markers of their intentions that could help identify terrorists. For example, lone wolves have a more extensive network of contacts than the term would suppose, and “evidence suggests that other people generally knew about the offender’s grievance, extremist ideology, views and/​or intent to engage in violence” (434). Lone wolves participate in various social networks and an “observable range of activities with a wider pressure group, social movement, or terrorist organization” (434), and furthermore their acts are fairly well planned out and are “rarely sudden and impulsive” (434).

Methods In the following, we analyze five manifestos by lone wolves written from 2011 to 2019. On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik attacked government offices in Oslo, killing eight people, before killing 69 participants of the Worker’s Youth League summer camp on the island of Utøya (Lewis and Cowell 2012). Before his attack, Breivik disseminated 2083: A European Declaration of Independence to 1,003 email addresses and attached a link to a YouTube video. On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof killed nine worshipers in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston South Carolina (Blinder and Sack 2016). Before the attack, Roof created a website, www.lastrh​odes​ian.com, where he posted his manifesto. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant murdered worshipers at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch New Zealand, killing a total of 51 people and injuring 40 others (Martin and Smee 2019). Tarrant emailed his manifesto to the prime minister of New Zealand, government officials and international media outlets (Holcombe 2019). On April 27, 2019, John Earnest killed one person and injured three others in the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego, California. Prior to the attack, Earnest posted his manifesto, “An Open Letter,” to a message board commonly used by right-​wing extremists, 8chan (Parvini 2019). On August 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius killed 23 people and injured 23 others at a Walmart in El Paso Texas (Del Quentin 2019). Like Earnest, Crusius also posted his manifesto to 8chan (Arango et al. 2019). In our analysis, we conceive of these manifestos as interpretive actions (Schiff 2017), narrative framings that attempt to take a stance or craft an identity position within a conversational context (Bamberg 2004). Although the conversation is not face to face, but mediated through platforms such as social networks or the internet and the format of the

A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence  93 manifesto allows for a longer conversational turn, it is helpful to think of these documents as intertextually related to one another and other textual resources both in real life and online. As small story theory suggests, these manifestos are drafts, bids for attention, influence and alignment that are potentially circulated, contextualized and recontextualized into other discursive contexts (Georgakopoulou 2020). Although we are concerned with the projected self-​identity of lone wolf shooters, we are equally interested in their portrait of the world and other groups, or what can be thought of as their self-​in-​the-​world. In the following, we analyze and compare these manifestos for the rationale and justification for their actions. What self-​in-​the-​world does the author project? By what means do they make the case for their actions?

2083 Anders Behring Breivik’s 2083: A European Declaration of Independence is massive –​over 1,500 pages long. However, one should not imagine that Breivik is, otherwise, exceptional. The text harnesses concepts and genres from established resources, large portions of which are plagiarized. Still, like any other narration, Breivik arranges these resources in his own fashion and discursively positions himself, and his views, in a world. One striking example of resource borrowing is stylistic. Near the end of his manifesto, Breivik inserts a simulated interview where he poses questions from an imagined interviewer. Although there are other possible sources for this stylistic choice, it was also employed by the Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh (Gardell 2021). And, interestingly, the staged interview is echoed in the manifestos of several mass shooters that we consider. Because of the length of the document and the fact that large portions of Breivik’s writings are uncited quotations, we limit our analysis to Breivik’s “Interview with a Justiciar Knight Commander of the PCCTS, Knights Templar” (1350–​1413). Breivik’s style is rambling, egocentric and written in heavy-​handed prose. Even the relatively short 63 pages of questions and answers is a challenge to read. But the persistent reader is to learn Breivik’s lessons, his worldview and is invited to see the world as he sees it. Apparently in irony, Breivik begins the interview by stating that it “was conducted over three sessions” and that he decided to include it because he “personally would enjoy reading a similar interview with another resistance fighter” (1350). The interviewer takes the role of a sympathetic fan, attempting to understand but also to amplify his ideas and actions. Breivik’s imagined interviewer wants to know how others will interpret the atrocity that he committed, about his political views and his personal life as if Breivik is a celebrity. Although there are many inconsequential or self-​serving details, the interview provides an opportunity for Breivik to recapitulate the themes he has already developed but also to put these ideas in his own voice and a less formal style.

94  Brian Schiff and Michael Justice In Breivik’s manifesto, there is a discomforting presentation of self-​in-​ the-​world, what we describe as the victim-​hero narrative, which is also found in the other manifestos analyzed. Similar to a religious conversion, the victim-​hero narrative is predicated upon a fundamental shift in the perception of reality. Each lone wolf offers a story of their own revelation and enjoins the reader to follow in their footsteps in order to understand that what they take to be real is but illusion due to forces, heretofore, either unnoticed or too uncomfortable to fully ingest. There is something enticing and seductive about the logic of this way of thinking. With various levels of sophistication, each manifesto intends to shred the veil that blinds us and, just as the author has, to take the red pill –​the metaphor drawn from the film The Matrix and used by extreme right ideologues to connote stripping illusion to see the truth. In this vein, Breivik responds to the putative interviewer that “I can totally understand that most people will condemn people like us because they do not ‘yet’ understand what is going on” and that “people live in denial and are suffering from historical amnesia” and “fail to identify or comprehend what the Western European governments are doing to Europe” (1350). Breivik’s red pill enjoins the reader to “understand the situation,” as Breivik does, as a dystopian world conspiring to destroy white European Christian culture. The path is set for destruction and can only be redeemed through spectacular acts of violence of the kind that Breivik carried out himself. This narrative arc from passive victimization to awakening and redemption of the world through self-​sacrificing heroic action is his dominant presentation of self-​in-​the-​world. Breivik portrays a vast array of forces conspiring to establish an Islamic Europe: immigration policies of the European Union, the liberal pluralistic ethos of multiculturalism and what Breivik terms cultural Marxism, birthrates in Muslim communities, and so on. Certainly, Muslims are the feared and hated others, but, for Breivik, the oppressive and conspiratorial system that welcomes these others is to be equally despised and is literally his first line of attack. In response to his question about why he didn’t take the “easy way,” Breivik first states “I know what has to be done” and outlines his duty to make “a small crack in the discriminating and genocidal multiculturalist system” (1359). Appropriating and contorting concepts such as genocide and Indigenous rights, Breivik casts white Christian Europeans as the true victims of an oppressive system. He continues: How can I procreate knowing that we are heading for cultural suicide? … How could I silently watch while Islamic demographic warfare is being waged against our societies, diminishing our numbers and the influence over our very own lives? I feel compelled to act, even though I know that very few will dare to become one of the pioneers, one of the first martyrs. (1359)

A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence  95 Indeed, in his eyes, Breivik’s path is the way of the hero, of active selfless sacrifice and bravery. “I choose selflessness, to resist a tyrant oppressor by all means necessary” (1360). Breivik fashions himself as a modern-​day crusader. Evoking the sect of monastic knights protecting Jerusalem and pilgrims from Muslims after the First Crusade, he calls himself one of the Knights of the Templar. He imagines and details a support network across Europe that helped orchestrate the planning and execution of this crime. Although the Knights of the Templar was, likely, tactical in order to stoke fear of other attacks, the trope of the crusader is interesting in the sense that he offers himself a heroic persona heavy with Christian symbolism and a readymade enemy. Rather than taking the fight to Jerusalem, the battleground is the homeland, protecting it from a supposed invasion of alien others. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Breivik instrumentalizes another historical memory, the centuries-​long wars against Muslims in Europe and their late fifteenth-​century defeat and expulsion from Europe, by analogy, as another Reconquista. To the last question, “What would you say to your European brothers and sisters?” Breivik responds, “know that you are not alone in this struggle” (1412) and recapitulates his particular brew of propaganda and advocacy of extreme violence. He gives some encouraging words to those who might follow him. Finally, he ends with the statement: A single successful “Operation Regime Ender” after Jan. 1st 2020 will lead to a chain of events that eventually ensures that the multiculturalist EUSSR hegemony collapses. Support the reconquista, support the PCCTS, Knights Templar! (1413) No doubt, the logic is bizarre and contorted. But, from the perspective of Breivik, his actions are warranted and rational. If we accept his dark portrait of the world, they are even necessary and moral.

The Last Rhodesian Dylann Roof’s manifesto is a short, poorly written document that ends with an apology for the text’s shortcomings: “Please forgive any typos.” Still, Roof does manage to describe his views on many groups, but he reserves his opprobrium, mostly, for African Americans. He also details his worldview and positions himself within. Roof’s manifesto begins with his awakening to the violence and victimization of whites at the hands, mainly, of African Americans. Roof claims that he was not aware of race until the shooting of Treyvon Martin by George Zimmerman. He says that he kept on hearing the name Trayvon Martin and decided to “see what the big deal was” and immediately decided that “it was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right.” He

96  Brian Schiff and Michael Justice continues, “But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.” Roof discovers a litany of injustices committed by African Americans against white Americans. Roof writes, “I was in disbelief” and “how could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?” Roof’s answer to this question rests on an unnerving analogy: Say you were to witness a dog being beat by a man. You are almost surely going to feel very sorry for that dog. But then say you were to witness a dog biting a man. You will most likely not feel the same pity you felt for the dog for the man. Why? Because dogs are lower than men. This same analogy applies to black and White relations. Roof seems to be saying that we don’t pity the violence committed by African Americans against white Americans because white Americans enjoy higher status than African Americans. A second way to understand this analogy is that we don’t notice the violence of the dog biting the man, but it is a subversion of the natural order of things and unjust. Dogs aren’t supposed to bite men, and men are justified to retaliate if they do. From Roof’s perspective, whites bear no responsibility for the injustices of slavery and discrimination, but “we are told to accept what is happening to us because of ancestors wrong doing, but it is all based on historical lies, exaggerations and myths.” The natural hierarchical order, what Shweder et al. (1997) termed community, is being subverted and white Americans are being victimized. “I have tried endlessly to think of reasons we deserve this, and I have only came back more irritated because there are no reasons.” Referencing a discourse on divinity, Roof writes that “segregation was a defensive measure” and that “it protected us from being brought down to their level. Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals.” In response to this victimization, Roof positions himself as an active agent willing to take the necessary “drastic action.” He is the self-​elected savior of his hometown: I have no choice …. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

The Great Replacement Brandon Tarrant’s manifesto is a grab bag of different genres. It contains poetry, short political tracts and, following in Breivik’s footsteps, an interview with himself. The document is blunt and straight to the point. Tarrant is interested in converting readers to his worldview and encouraging attacks. For example, in “Section II: Thoughts and Potential Strategies,”

A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence  97 styled as political tracts, Tarrant often writes in the second person, placing the reader in the position of a potential terrorist considering their reasons and tactics for committing violent action. As the title, “The Great Replacement,” indicates, Tarrant is peddling in the dangerous conspiracy theory that a disaster is looming through the replacement of white ethnics by Muslim immigrants. Tarrant begins, in the form of a stanza, with the words “It’s the birthrates” written three times (4). For Tarrant, the problem boils down to the belief that Muslim immigrant communities are reproducing faster than white European communities. He erratically shifts his anger from New Zealand, where he murdered 51 Muslim worshipers, to France, Britain, Sweden, Australia and the United States. For Tarrant, the story is clear, everywhere that races are mixed, conflict, moral degradation and cultural decline are inevitable. The genre of the faux interview isn’t the only gesture to Breivik. Tarrant mentions Breivik’s name three times. The first time his name is noted alongside the names of other mass shooters, including Dylann Roof, who, in his words, have taken “a stand against ethnic and cultural genocide” (24). Shortly after, Tarrant writes, “But I have only had brief contact with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission” and that he “only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik” (24). From these passages, two important observations can be made. First, Breivik’s manifesto and those of others were important intertextual resources for Tarrant in the development of his own positionality and sculpting his worldview. Such referential nods are useful for creating visibility on the internet and establishing a network of linked texts, but there are other intertextual resources that Tarrant inserts into his manifesto. In the self-​interview, Tarrant brushes aside his mock interviewer’s questions about whether or not he is a Nazi or a neo-​Nazi. However, there are slightly rephased versions of neo-​Nazi David Lane’s fourteen words, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children” (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.), found at multiple points in Tarrant’s manifesto. For those in the know, there is no mistaking his sentiments. Second, it is difficult to gauge whether or not Breivik’s “blessing” is meant to be taken as truthful, figurative or satirical. Similar to other far-​ right internet bloggers, trolls, Tarrant adopts an ironic posture (Greene 2019) and there are many instances where he calls attention to the fact that he may be, or actually is, joking. Tarrant claims that he was a Navy Seal with “over 300 confirmed kills” (27) before threatening to kill the mock interviewer. And, there is the offensive quip that Tarrant has “been working part time as a kebab removalist” (7). Although Tarrant sometimes presents himself as a jokester, his aim to foment and accelerate a race war in order to create ethnically homogeneous states is deadly serious. Tarrant details numerous violations to the sacred and natural order of the world that his actions endeavor to rectify. In his view, the combination of immigration and higher birthrates in Muslim communities threatens the natural hierarchy of whites in Europe

98  Brian Schiff and Michael Justice and lands they have colonized. To his question, “Why did you carry out the attack?” Tarrant responds, “To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that … they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people” (7). The words “our lands” are key. Positioning himself within a group using the first-​person plural, “our” group possesses a right to power and dominance that is being violated by another group. In his view, not only is this an infraction of the natural hierarchy, but it has consequences in the sacred realm. Tarrant links immigration and birthrates to the degradation of the natural environment. Because they are the same issue, the environment is being destroyed by over population, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment. (29) Also, recounting his awakening, Tarrant invokes the story of Ebba Akerlund, a Swedish girl who was killed in a terrorist attack in 2017, writing: “I could no longer ignore the attacks. They were attacks on my people, attacks on my culture, attacks on my faith and attacks on my soul” (10). Finally, in one of the tracts oddly titled “The Rape of European Women Invaders” (40), Tarrant lists the Wikipedia links to child sex rings and gang rapes in the United Kingdom, Finland, Germany and Australia involving, apparently, Muslim men. The sanctity of white women is taken to be threatened by the inversion of the natural order. Like the other mass shooters, Tarrant projects himself as a hero in the quest to restore the world to moral order: Strong men do not get ethnically replaced, strong men do not allow their culture to degrade, strong men do not allow their people to die. Weak men have created this situation and strong men are needed to fix it. (39) From the perspective of Tarrant, his actions are the actions of a strong and good man and thought to be a corrective force to the victimization of his group.

An Open Letter Although John Earnest titles his manifesto “An Open Letter,” there are relatively few paragraphs that resemble the genre of letter writing. Following Breivik and Tarrant, most of the document is styled as an interview with himself. At the beginning of the manifesto, Earnest positions

A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence  99 himself within his “European ancestry” and “magnificent bloodline.” He also addresses “family and friends” who might pose questions such as “how could you throw your life away?” Earnest answers them by situating his life in a racialized group conflict in which Europeans are the victims of Jews. “What value does my life have compared to the entirety of the European race? Is it worth it for me to live a comfortable life at the cost of international Jewry sealing the doom of my race?” And he casts his planned actions as resistance and rectification of this purported victimization. As he writes: “I sacrifice this for the sake of my people. OUR people. I would die a thousand times over to prevent the doomed fate that the Jews have planned for my race.” Earnest begins the faux interview with the question, “How does killing Jews help the European race?” Earnest’s response is chilling: “Every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race.” Earnest then goes on to accuse Jews for virtually every stereotype and conspiracy theory that have led to Jewish persecution over the past 2,000 years. He concludes that “every Jew young and old has contributed to these. For these crimes they deserve nothing but hell. I will send them there.” Earnest views his manifesto as spreading the truth and his actions as defending the European race with the hope of inspiring others to take up his mantle and to “take a stand as well.” Earnest’s manifesto is a strange brew of traditional Christian antisemitism mixed with snarky, conspiracy-​fueled, internet-​savvy, new-​right antisemitism. He assumes both stances. From his stance as a Christian, Earnest quotes several passages of the New Testament that have inspired Christian hatred of Jews over centuries. In light of the racist violence he is about to commit, he defends his Christian identity, reasoning that even from a Christian perspective his actions are not immoral but committed in self-​defense. Even “a child can understand the concept of self-​defense.” Furthermore, Earnest frames his actions as a justified rectification of the natural order of the world, community, by saying: “It is unlawful and cowardly to stand on the sidelines as the European people are genocided around you …. The Jew has forced our hand, and our response is completely justified.” From his stance as a new-​right antisemite, Earnest spews vile racist slurs and conspiracy theories using lingo from the dark corners of the internet, such as “glow-​niggers,” “sandniggers,” “normalfags” and a “Jewed-​media.” Like Tarrant, he adopts the stance of the jokester. He speaks about the extreme violence that he is about to commit as if it is a game of Minecraft. He writes, “If your goal is strictly carnage and the highest score –​I’d highly recommend you look into flamethrowers (remember kids, napalm is more effective than gasoline if you want Jews to really light up like a menorah).” After this twisted racist insult, Earnest adds, “Again, I’m talking about Minecraft.” Though their target groups and scorned others are different, the manifestos of Tarrant and Earnest are interlinked. Earnest mentions other inspirations such as Robert Bowers, five times, who murdered worshipers

100  Brian Schiff and Michael Justice at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, as well as Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ and Ludwig van Beethoven. But, Earnest mentions Brenton Tarrant a total of ten times. Importantly, Earnest quotes a passage as inspiration for his actions: Tarrant was a catalyst for me personally. He showed me that it could be done. And that it needed to be done. “WHY WON’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING? WHY WON’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING? WHY DON’T I DO SOMETHING?” –​the most powerful words in his entire manifesto. Earnest proclaims his path as that of action, bravery and courage in defending his group against victimization at the hands of Jews. In his eyes, it is a moral task for which he feels no remorse, but “I only wish I killed more. I am honored to be the one to send these vile anti-​humans into the pit of fire –​where they shall remain for eternity.”

The El Paso Shooter Manifesto In the first words that he writes, Patrick Crusius marks the intertextuality of his manifesto with a reference to Tarrant: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” And, once again, although the victimizing group changes, the narrative pattern is identical. Crusius writes, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” “My motives for this attack are not at all personal. Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.” After this brief introduction, Crusius divides his points into sections: political reasons, economic reasons, gear, reactions and personal reasons and thoughts. For political reasons he writes: “America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.” Like Tarrant, Crusius believes that the Hispanic population will change the demographics in Texas and shift the balance of power toward the Democrats. Also like Tarrant, Crusius links together immigration and the environmental crisis: I just want to say that I love the people of this country, but god damn most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable. Unlike Tarrant, Crusius adds an economic factor, automation is shrinking the labor market, and second-​generation immigrants will take the scarce jobs that remain. The reaction to his crime, Crusius surmises, will be a

A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence  101 return of migrants who came to the US for economic reasons to their home countries and for corporate America to realize that they are “on the wrong side of history.” And as personal reasons and thoughts, he writes: My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist. The job of my dreams will likely be automated. Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas, changing policy to better suit their needs. They will turn Texas into an instrument of a political coup which will hasten the destruction of our country. The environment is getting worse by the year. If you take nothing else from this document, remember this: INACTION IS A CHOICE. I can no longer bear the shame of inaction knowing that our founding fathers have endowed me with the rights needed to save our country from the brink of destruction. In response to this claimed victimization, Crusius also chooses the path of action, which he views as moral and just. “This is why I see my actions as faultless. Because this isn’t an act of imperialism but an act of preservation.” After, bizarrely, declaring that “the idea of deporting or murdering all non-​white Americans is horrific” and defending their history and role in building the United States, Crusius rails against “race mixing” and advocates for ethnically pure territories. Still he argues that “it is not cowardly to pick low hanging fruit” and ends by declaring, “I am honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.”

Conclusion In this essay, we have argued that the manifestos of lone wolf terrorists should be understood as expressions of an alternative moral reasoning. In no uncertain terms, their words and actions are racist, ugly and dangerous. But we believe that the only way to design effective measures for countering such symbolic violence, and the acts of physical violence that follow, is first by understanding, from the perspective of the perpetrator, how and why they are appropriated and used. These five intertextually linked manifestos provide insight into the circulation and movement of a narrative pattern of victimization and rectification through heroic action. Although the othered group differs, each portrays a dystopic inversion of the natural or sacred order of the world and, purported, suffering at the hands of these alien others. With heavy handfuls of lies, distortions and conspiracy theories, the other group is portrayed as being an urgent threat to the future health, integrity, existence, well-​being of the perpetrator group. From this perspective, it is perceived as a moral task to bring the world back into order. These manifestos employ a moral vocabulary, mischaracterizing vulnerable groups as threats and making violence –​in the eyes of those who carry it out –​right, good and necessary to bring the world back to moral order.

102  Brian Schiff and Michael Justice Although we have analyzed each of these cases individually, we do not view them as separate phenomena. Rather than focusing on individual lone wolves as distinct cases and looking for characteristics about each lone wolf, we believe that the literature could benefit from a more critical analysis of the development, circulation and appropriation of meanings. In other words, the narrative and hermeneutic tools we have employed are essential in restoring the realms of meaning in their words and for understanding their circulation and recirculation. After all is said and done, these lone wolves write and act as members of a community of beliefs that must be understood and, somehow, addressed to make real-​ world progress. Of course, we don’t have the magic solution to these problems, but only incomplete thoughts about how we can engage with extremism. But, as we have argued, understanding the dynamics of the problem must come first.

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A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence  103 Gill, Paul, Horgan, John and Deckert, Paige. 2014. “Bombing Alone: Tracing the Motivations and Antecedent Behaviors of Lone-​Actor Terrorists.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 59, no. 2: 425–​435. Greene, Viveca S. 2019. “’Deplorable’ Satire: Alt-​Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies.” Studies in American Humor 5, no. 1: 31–​69. Holcombe, Madeline. 2019. “New Zealand PM’s Office Received Shooter’s ‘Manifesto’ Minutes before Attack.” CNN, March 16. https://​edit​ion.cnn. com/​2019/​03/​16/​asia/​chris​tchu​rch-​new-​zeal​and-​mos​que-​shoot​ing/​index.html Lewis, Mark and Cowell, Alan. 2012. “Norway Killer Is Ruled Sane and Given 21 Years in Prison.” Pittsburg Post-​Gazette, August 24. www.post-​gaze​tte. com/​news/​world/​2012/​08/​24/​Nor​way-​Kil​ler-​Is-​Ruled-​Sane-​and-​Given-​21-​ Years-​in-​Pri​son/​stor​ies/​20120​8240​183 Martin, Lisa and Smee, Ben. 2019. “What Do We Know about the Christchurch Attack Suspect.” The Guardian, March 15. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2019/​mar/​15/​ rightw​ing-​extrem​ist-​wrote-​manife​sto-​bef​ore-​livest​ream​ing-​chris​tchu​rch-​shoot​ing Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Milgram, Stanley. 1963. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4: 371–​378. Parvini, Sarah. 2019. “Poway Synagogue Shooting Suspect Linked to Anti-​Semitic Internet Manifesto.” Los Angeles Times, April 28. www.lati​mes.com/​local/​lanow/​ la-​me-​ln-​synago​gue-​shoot​ing-​john-​earn​est-​san-​diego-​20190​428-​story.html Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (trans. D. Savage). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schiff, Brian. 2017. A New Narrative for Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Schuurman, Bart, Lindekilde, Lasse, Malthaner, Stefan, O’Connor, Francis, Gill, Paul and Bouhana, Noemie. 2019. “End of the Lone Wolf: The Typology That Should Not Have Been.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 8: 771–​778. Shweder, Richard A., Much, Nancy C., Mahapatra, Manamohan and Park, Lawrence. 1997. “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering.” In Morality and Health, edited by Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin, 119–​169. Florence: Taylor & Francis. Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d. “David Lane.” www.splcen​ter.org/​fight​ing-​ hate/​extrem​ist-​files/​ind​ivid​ual/​david-​lane. Accessed February 15, 2022. Straus, Scott. 2006. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waller, James. 2002. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press. Welzer, Harold. 2004. “Mass Murder and Moral Code: Some Thoughts on an Easily Misunderstood Subject.” History of the Human Sciences 17, no. 2/​3: 15–​32. Zimbardo, Philip G., Maslach, Christina and Haney, Craig. 2000. “Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, Transformations, Consequences.” In Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, edited by Thomas Blass, 193–​237. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.

7 Narrative Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-​Authored Documents Interpreting Closure in The Stroop Report Erin McGlothlin

Introduction: Interpreting Documents of Violence One of the most formidable challenges posed by the legacies of the Holocaust and other genocides and mass traumas is the ethically fraught task of interpreting the historical documents of violence that both catalyzed and responded to the events in question. In such cases, the demands of interpretation require those of us who wish to understand such narratives to situate ourselves –​as far as that is possible –​within the emotional, ideological and experiential frameworks of those directing, participating in or suffering the violence, as well as those recounting it, and at the same time it asks us to cultivate an attitude of remove that allows us to evaluate those documents from an exterior perspective. Such a hermeneutic exercise thus necessitates both empathy and distance and predicates an ethically grounded method of reading that simultaneously considers the motivating impetus for narratives of violence and reads the documents against the grain to identify and analyze the specific strategies they adopt to achieve their rhetorical and ideological aims. While the critical practice of reading from both within and without is peremptory for engaging with any text that represents historical violence –​whether penned by victims or survivors, by perpetrators or other complicit parties, or by persons entirely external to the events –​it is particularly imperative in the case of documents produced and circulated by agents of violence. In their attempt to represent their own commission of violence and, indeed, to justify its necessity to the world and to themselves, such perpetrator-​ produced texts frequently mobilize specific narrative devices to achieve what Hanna Meretoja terms “narrative mastery” in order to paradoxically “conceal their own nature as narratives –​as perspectival interpretations that can always be contested and told otherwise” (2018, 302). In other words, perpetrator-​authored historical documents often work to efface their own rhetorical positioning and deemphasize the deliberate narrative strategies they employ in order to claim for themselves the status of transparent accounts of the apparently self-​evident character of the events they represent; as the Holocaust historian Yehuda DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-10

Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents  105 Bauer argues, “Documents of the perpetrators were very often designed to mislead rather than to inform, to hide rather than to reveal” (2001, 23). For that reason, such texts demonstrate –​over and above their historical import as evidence of atrocity, which historians often are forced to establish through a hermeneutics of skepticism –​the ways in which narrative can be mobilized to engender and justify violence as necessary and natural. This is particularly the case of the perpetrator-​authored texts and bureaucratic documents that, beginning especially with the work of Raul Hilberg in the 1960s, have formed the foundational corpus of research on the Holocaust. Such texts not only are of interest to historians, who are tasked to engage with them as a means for reconstructing the character of the crimes, they are also increasingly the object of analysis of cultural and literary critics –​particularly narrative theorists like me –​who can bring to bear their own disciplinary methodologies in order to shed light on the documents’ rhetorical construction as well as the narrative techniques through which perpetrators naturalize their presentation of their violent acts.1 Employing a narratological approach that illuminates the strategies through which bureaucratic texts work to achieve narrative mastery, this essay investigates a particular perpetrator-​authored document that has obtained canonical status in Holocaust Studies for its representation of a particularly brutal chapter in the history of the genocide, namely the ferocious suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by German forces. As my analysis will demonstrate through hermeneutical attention to the document’s rhetorical positioning and performative dimensions, the bureaucratic text functions as an instrument of narrative closure through which the perpetrator endeavors to obtain narrative mastery over the violent events the text at once incites, depicts and justifies.

Reading The Stroop Report In mid-​ May 1943, immediately following the officially proclaimed successful suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, whereby the violent National Socialist effort to transport the remaining Jewish ghetto population to the killing center at Treblinka was met with armed revolt by beleaguered ghetto internees, SS commander Jürgen Stroop, assisted by his chief of staff Max Jesuiter, began to assemble what Robert R. Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg, later called an “almost incredible text” (1946, 143). Given the correspondingly incredible title Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr! (“The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!”), the document Stroop produced contains three main sections: copies of daily communiqués describing the militarized suppression of the uprising that Stroop’s office dispatched to his superior Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich-​ Wilhelm Krüger; a collection of several dozen photographs taken by an unknown photographer depicting combat actions and

106  Erin McGlothlin captured ghetto fighters and residents accompanied by pithy handwritten captions; and a 12-​page narrative summary of the history of the ghetto and the month-​long military engagement. Appended to these main sections is also a list of combat units deployed in the campaign along with a record of German troops wounded or killed.2 Employing a lexicon of bureaucratic inventory and military conquest and an “idiom of statistics” (Wyschogrod 2005, 212), Stroop’s text depicts the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a roughly equally matched military engagement between valiant German soldiers and opponents whom Stroop calls “subhumanity, the bandits and terrorists” (“das Untermentschtum, die Banditen und Terroristen,” missive from May 8, 1943). In contradistinction to Stroop’s representation of the German suppression of the revolt as a military battle between equivalent forces, however, the actual encounter involved a bitter, weeks-​long resistance on the part of unevenly trained, gravely unequipped and severely undernourished Jewish ghetto fighters against what Joseph Wulf calls “superbly armed Waffen SS and Wehrmacht battalions along with entire regiments of order and security police” (“tadellos bewaffnete Waffen-​ SS oder Wehrmachtbataillone sowie ganze Regimente der Ordungs-​und Sicherheitspolizei”) (1984, 13). Stroop’s text thus extols the German brutal suppression of the revolt, which officially ended when he personally activated the explosives that detonated the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, both as an act of German military prowess, courageous endurance and heroic self-​sacrifice for the racial hygiene of the nation and as a glorious triumph and the ecstatic culmination of violence toward a perceived mortal enemy. Known today generally as The Stroop Report, the text chronicling the German suppression of the uprising as a triumphal act was commissioned by Krüger as a commemorative keepsake for SS-​Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who himself planned the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto –​a process that was forecasted to require at the most a few days –​as a birthday present for Hitler. Four distinct copies of the text were produced and assembled by hand; one copy remained on file with Jesuiter; of the other three, all of which were prepared in what Wulf calls “attractive packaging” (“netter Aufmachung”) (1984, 45), typed on fine Bristol paper and bound in black pebble leather, one was gifted to Himmler, the second was sent to Krüger, and the third retained by Stroop. After the war, two of the copies were recovered and entered into evidence at the trials in Nuremburg in 1946 and 1947 and at Stroop’s trial in Warsaw in 1951, at which he was convicted for crimes against humanity and executed. Since its discovery by Allied forces, The Stroop Report has become a notorious document of the Holocaust primarily on account of the widespread dissemination of the photographs produced for and included in it, many of which have since achieved iconic status, particularly an infamous one –​“one of the most recognizable photographs ever taken” (Magilow and Silverman 2020, 13) –​that depicts a young boy with a

Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents  107 group of women and children, all of whom hold their hands up in surrender to armed soldiers. Divorced from the specific historical framework of the report; reproduced perpetually in innumerable texts, contexts and media; and read synecdochally for the entire events of the Holocaust or as an unmediated or objective representation of the chilling brutality of its perpetrators, the photographs have achieved an afterlife of their own and are, as Richard Raskin writes in his 2004 monograph A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo, “often perceived as though they had been intended as damning records of Nazi outrages, rather than as celebrations of a genocidal project” (2004, 57). Via these iconic photographs, The Stroop Report has thus entered into Holocaust memory, but it subsists there only obliquely, ambivalently and incompletely; as a larger, more comprehensive narrative of violence (in which the photos play only a part), it operates in public discourse as a kind of shadow text or overlooked archive, an important Holocaust representation that nevertheless, as Raskin argues, “remains relatively uncharted territory” (2004, 25). The imbalance in the relative notoriety of the component parts of The Stroop Report, whereby the visual evidence garners the bulk of public attention while the narrative report remains virtually unknown (at least outside of the small circle of historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust), is echoed by the literary and cultural scholarship, which has focused principally on the report’s photographic archive, particularly the image depicting the capture of the young boy. Although a handful of historians have investigated the historical context of the report, few scholars have analyzed the structure of the report’s narrative or the nature of the overarching text that emerges as a result of the interactive relationship between its media. (One notable exception is Andrzej Wirth, whose discerning analysis of the language of fascism in The Stroop Report is included in his introduction to the 1979 published reproduction and English translation of it.) My aim here is to fill in this gap in the scholarship by attending to the generic framing of the text of the report alongside its discursive function. In other words, my goal is not only to conceptualize what kind of text The Stroop Report is, but also to illuminate what it seeks to accomplish as a narrative and discursive act.

Determining Genre in The Stroop Report As a hybrid mixture of discourse types and media and a spectacular representation of the German military’s collective commitment to and fervent participation in the National Socialist genocidal project, Stroop’s report resists the conventional generic designations we have on hand to describe it, a phenomenon demonstrated by the critical attempt to catalog it. Chief Prosecutor Jackson’s depiction of it as an “almost incredible text” alludes to its defiance of easy appellation, as does historian Peter Fritzsche’s characterization of it as a “special narrative” (2010, 388).

108  Erin McGlothlin Yet, despite its singularity, and as is perhaps understandable, scholars endeavor to locate adequate existing text types, genres and metaphors through which they can align Stroop’s seemingly unprecedented text with known frameworks. A number of critics, in keeping with the popular focus on the photographic evidence contained in the report, term the text a “album,” a designation that alludes to Stroop’s clearly commemoratory intent (as far as his intent can be determined) and the text’s reliance on visual documentation as what Fritzsche terms “material for commemoration and celebration” (2016, 124). But, of course, the use of the term “album” overlooks the fact that the section Stroop himself termed the “pictorial report” (“Bildbericht”) is featured as an appendix rather than as the main event; the pride of that place is given to Stroop’s own narrative summary. Moreover, “photo album,” like another moniker frequently used by scholars, “memento,” implies the documentation of a fond private memory (an inference made even more explicit with Wirth’s comparison of the text to a “family album” [part I of introduction]). However, although Stroop, with his handcrafted production of only three copies of the text, did not intend his report to be publicly available or even widely disseminated within the Nazi leadership, it was clearly also not simply the result of personal recollection or an instrument of private archival memory (as was, for example, the photo album titled “Good Times” [“Schöne Zeiten”] compiled by Kurt Franz, deputy and then the last commandant of Treblinka; included in Klee, Dressen and Riess 1988, 206–​207). Richard Raskin more aptly captures not only the multimedial nature of the report but also the discursive work Stroop intended it to do by referring to the photographs as “essentially trophies” and the collection of daily dispatches as “score-​sheets” that enabled “Stroop to relive what he saw as his life’s triumph and to present it as such” (2004, 51–​54). But these metaphors too –​while evocative of the celebratory, vainglorious character of the report and its representation of the uprising as an evenly matched battle between archenemies –​essentially connote a private act of recounting and accounting on the part of Stroop of his own role in the suppression of the uprising. As Raskin argues further, For Jürgen Stroop, making a book about the operation was a way of taking fuller possession of it, of turning it symbolically into his own narrative, by ascribing to himself the role of the historian, presiding over the telling and transmission of the story …. And making the album was his way of achieving closure, of wrapping up the sprawling and often uncontrollable event in one neat package. (2004, 54–​55) Raskin’s assessment of Stroop’s impetus for making his report is without a question astute, particularly his observation that Stroop endeavored to appropriate the narrative of the uprising through a gesture of closure

Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents  109 (an aspect of The Stroop Report that I will analyze shortly). However, this characterization of Stroop’s motives implies that he wrote his text chiefly for his own commemorative purposes and belies both the report’s intended audience and the discursive objectives of the mixed media text. In fact, the primary goal of Stroop’s text was not to declare Stroop’s mastery over his own private experience and memory of the uprising; had it been so, the result would have indeed resembled a private diary appended by a photo album. On the contrary, as the very composition and structure of The Stroop Report demonstrates, it was formulated and compiled with an explicit audience in mind, namely Stroop’s superiors within the SS hierarchy. It was meant not only to serve as documentation of the German military’s suppression of the Jewish uprising and, as Stroop himself writes euphemistically, of its historic undertaking “to remove the Jews completely from the city of Warsaw” (“die Juden aus der Stadt Warschau ganz herauszunehmen,” p. 3 of summary report), but also to function as evidence of Stroop’s own success as commander of the campaign. Stroop, as Wulf writes, was an ambitious man, whose rapid advancement in the SS pecking order signified “a breathtaking, lightning-​ fast career” (“[eine] atemberaubend[e]‌Blitzkarriere”) (1984, 33); his text bears the stamp of that ambition, as it is meant to both impress his bosses and make the case for his status as a “military leader” (“Heerführer”; Wulf 1984, 33). According to Werner Angress, “For Stroop, the Ghetto Uprising was an occasion to express, if only in outline form, his talents as a commander, which up to that point had been untested” (“Für Stroop … war der Ghettoaufstand eine Gelegenheit, seine bis dahin unerprobten Fähigkeiten als Feldherr (wenn auch im Kleinformat) zum Ausdruck zu bringen”) (1980, 243). Moreover, the report was also an opportunity, as Israel Gutman argues, “to justify the lengthy military campaign he was forced to undertake –​tying up so many troops and arousing attention –​ against an enemy that had no real weapons” (1984, 243); in this way it represents Stroop’s “attempt to counteract [any] loss of prestige” (Raskin 2004, 55) that he experienced due to the unexpected stamina, courage and fortitude of the resistance fighters. The Stroop Report was thus in the main not simply an attempt to commemorate; rather, its aim was to convince. Created for and circulated to the senior leadership of the SS, its primary purpose was to function as a promotional exhibit for Stroop’s military accomplishments and leadership. For this reason, the more suitable (if not comprehensively applicable) metaphoric and generic designation for the text is not that of the memorial photo album, but of the strategic work portfolio. As a verbal and visual text akin to the dossier that experts in a variety of professions compile in order to showcase their work and disseminate it publicly, the Stroop portfolio formulates its account of the destruction of the ghetto and its inhabitants in the idiosyncratic, militaristic and antisemitic idiom of the particular institutional context for which it was written, namely the SS leadership Stroop hoped to impress. On the level of military

110  Erin McGlothlin communication, it constructs the narrative of the German response to the uprising as one of the inordinate heroism of the German troops, “who tirelessly fulfilled their duties in true comradeship and stood together as exemplary soldiers” (“die … in treuer Waffenbrüderschaft unermüdlich an die Erfüllung ihrer Aufgaben herangingen und stets beispielhaft und vorbildlich ihren Mann standen,” p. 10 of summary report). Within its subtext, however, the report also makes the case for the consummate leadership of the part of the operation’s commander, who in June 1943, mere weeks after the report was delivered to his superiors, was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class and promoted to Higher SS and Police Leader for Warsaw. Stroop’s report is thus not only a fully bureaucratic document that provides a definitive chronicle of the German suppression of a Jewish armed insurgency, celebrates the ruthlessness of the German military response and naturalizes the genocidal violence against the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto; as a work portfolio, it is also a textual performance of its author’s own professional profile and careerist ambitions within the SS and the German military hierarchy; it can thus be viewed, Bauer writes, as Stroop’s “overt attempt to curry favor with Himmler by beautifying –​if that is the right word –​German actions” (2001, 24).

Reading Narrative and Ideological Closure in The Stroop Report As the official German account of the abolition of the Warsaw Ghetto, one that is meant to serve as the primary source for all future histories of the ghetto and its destruction, The Stroop Report is thus what Todd Carmondy calls “a document of narrative closure” that “closed the book on the Jewish resistance” (2008, 99), a characterization echoed by Raskin (2004, 55). Although neither scholar defines the precise nature of closure in Stroop’s text or how it functions, both have identified an important aspect of the report that bears further investigation. As I will demonstrate, The Stroop Report functions as an example of closure within narrative; it shows us how narrative –​in this case, the portfolio of an ambitious military officer –​can construct and impose what is meant to be an overarching, authoritative and conclusive interpretation of events. But beyond that, Stroop’s text is also a document of narrative as closure, in that Stroop uses the report itself to claim closure to what in reality were ambiguous, unbounded and unresolved events. The report thus both instrumentalizes the rhetoric of closure and itself operates as an instrument of closure. Closure in narrative, as H. Porter Abbott explains, “has great rhetorical power” in its promise to bring “satisfaction to desire, relief to suspense, and clarity to confusion” (2008, 60). It occurs when a narrative resolves a conflict, particularly in ways that fulfill the reader’s expectations and produce a satisfying sense of completeness. Closure imposes order, normality and meaning onto narrative; it also reifies what Abbott terms

Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents  111 “masterplots,” which he defines as “recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals[,] that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values and the understanding of life” (2008, 236). Narrative theorists are particularly interested in how fictional texts achieve, defer or deny closure, but they point as well to the central role that closure plays in a variety of nonfictional texts, especially those that revolve around particular masterplots, such as battle chronicles or national histories. In fact, as Abbott argues, following Hayden White, “History as practiced in modern western culture is a narrative art in which closure plays a key role of imposing ‘moral meaning’ on events” (2010). In its facilitation of dominant masterplots, which aim to reduce complex phenomena to singular renderings of the world that are tendered as objective, natural and value-​ free but are, in fact, often the means through which hegemonic viewpoints are propagated, closure functions as an instrument of narrative mastery, which refers to the ways in which narratives, according to Meretoja, “mask their own narrative, interpretive, and perspectival nature and pretend to provide a totalizing narrative explanation” (2018, 245). In all narratives to some extent, but particularly in those constructed around formulaic masterplots, the role that closure plays is an ideological one; through authorial strategies, readers are navigated toward a particular reading of events, an interpretation that conveys the illusion of completion, seamlessness, narrative mastery and, paradoxically, the absence of an ideological message, and that precludes or discourages alternative viewpoints. Indeed, the degree of coherence and sense of inevitability of closure in such narratives point to their relative ideological dimension. Given that, as Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck explain, ideology “translates power relations into natural, self-​evident structures through which we experience and interpret the world” (2007, 217–​218), closure’s capacity to produce axiomatic unity, seemingly innate realities and commonsensical solutions makes it a powerful instrument of ideology. For this reason, what narrative theorists call “narrative closure” is closely related to the concept of “ideological closure,” particularly as theorized by social scientists. Moreover, while ideological closure appears to bring resolution to an extant problem or conflict, it actually generates that problem in the first place; according to political theorist Glyn Daly, “a central paradox of ideology is that it can only attempt closure through simultaneously producing the ‘threat’ to that closure” (1999, 220). As Daly further argues, “Ideology subsists in the fantasy of establishing a final consistency, of suturing the unsuturable, by providing straw enemies –​‘fictional’ embodiments of a transcendental lack/​impossibility –​which ‘if only they could be eliminated’ would enable the realization of harmonious reconciliation” (1999, 224). Closure, in Daly’s view, thus depends –​for both its appeal and its apparent efficacy –​on the ideological production of the very problem or dilemma it swoops in to unequivocally solve. Daly’s work on ideological closure is primarily theoretical; however, he cites as

112  Erin McGlothlin a notable example of its operations the National Socialist figuration of Jews as the “retroactive construction of Otherness as such” (1999, 225), an alterity against which the Nazi regime created and defined the Aryan “Volksgemeinschaft” and which it then attempted to overcome through the promised closure of a “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (“Endlösung der Judenfrage”).

Interpreting Performances of Closure in The Stroop Report Abbott’s and Daly’s concepts of narrative and ideological closure help us better apprehend the ways in which closure functions in The Stroop Report both as an internal rhetorical and narrative mechanism and as discursive performance. In terms of the former, Daly’s account of closure as the construction and then elimination of “straw enemies” provides a perspective from which we can analyze the organization of the report, whose narrative summary begins not, as one might expect, with a description of the armed revolt of the insurgents, which began on April 19, 1943, when SS forces began what was designed to be a three-​day final clearing of the remaining ghetto residents. Rather, it commences with a description of the creation of the ghetto in 1940 by German ​occupying forces, who found the measure necessary “[in order] to protect the Aryan population from the Jews” (“[um] die arische Bevölkerung vor den Juden zu schützen”) and “[in order] to banish the dangers that continually emanate from the Jews” (“um die Gefahren zu bannen, die von den Juden immer wieder ausgingen,” p. 2 of summary report). Stroop thus justifies the programmatic violence on the part of the SS that he chronicles in the report by citing the original source of danger in the Jews themselves. Moreover, he ties it to a longer historical trajectory of such ostensibly necessary measures against Europe’s Jews: The creation of Jewish quarters and the imposition of residential and economic restrictions on the Jews are nothing new in the history of the East. These practices began as far back as the Middle Ages and have continued through the last few centuries. (“Die Bildung jüdischer Wohnbezirke und die Auferlegung von Aufenthalts-​und Wirtschaftsbeschränkungen für die Juden sind in der Geschichte des Ostens nich neu. Ihre Anfänge gehen weit bis ins Mittelalter zurück und waren auch noch im Verlaufe der letzten Jahrhunderte immer wieder zu beobachten,” p. 1 of summary report) Further, Stroop inverts the power relationship between the Jewish ghetto inhabitants and the German-​occupying forces in Warsaw by characterizing the ghetto as a site of lawless anarchy run by a sort of militarized Jewish mafia, rather than as an atrophied community composed largely of traumatized, terrified and malnourished residents and underequipped,

Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents  113 hardboiled ghetto fighters under no illusion about their likely fate. He writes, “I cannot imagine another place as chaotic as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Jews controlled everything, from chemical substances used in the manufacture of explosives to items of clothing and equipment for the Wehrmacht” (“Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, daß irgendwo anders ein größerer Wirrwarr bestanden haben kann als in dem Warschauer Ghetto. Die Juden hatten alles in ihren Händen, von chemischen Mitteln zur Anfertigung von Sprengstoffen angefangen bis zu Bekleidungs-​und Ausrüstungsstücken der Wehrmacht,” p. 5 of summary report). In fact, Stroop rhetorically reverses the culpability for the German offensive, claiming, “The Jewish and Polish flags were hoisted on top of a concrete building in a call to battle against us” (“Es wurden die jüdische und die polnische Flagge als Aufruf zum Kampf gegen uns auf einem Betonhaus gehißt,” p. 5 of summary report). The Stroop Report thus constructs the embattled remnant of the ghetto population, which had already survived the “Great Action” (“Grossaktion Warschau”) of the previous fall, in which approximately 300,000 inhabitants were deported to and murdered at the Treblinka killing center, as a threatening opponent fully deserving of the extreme brutality of the German military response to its alleged provocation. Concomitantly, it characterizes the German troops as upright and largely blameless defenders of their own interests, who find themselves at the mercy of “bandits and terrorists.” In this way, Stroop retroactively substantiates the threat that his military operation was supposedly activated to neutralize; using the operations of narrative mastery and the rhetoric of ideological closure, he thus constructs out of the solution the problem it ostensibly solved. By virtue of such authorial strategies, he lays claim to the “last word” on the matter of the ghetto. Moreover, his text also fulfills one of the criteria associated with closure, namely “mastery of the material through its control of form” (Chandler and Munday 2020). In other words, The Stroop Report achieves a kind of enforced closure through its verbal and visual control of the official German chronicle of the suppression of the uprising. At the same time, however, Stroop’s text not only produces closure within its narrative, it also performs it as a discursive act. Performative acts, as critical readers of The Stroop Report, such as Paloff, Wirth and Żbikowski, have argued, formed a key dimension of the German response to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Stroop himself was certainly aware that the significance of his operation lay not only in the defeat of the ghetto fighters and eradication of the ghetto but also in the image of the liquidation in the greater public arena in which the conflict played out. For this reason, the German response was in part, according to Andrzej Żbikowski, “a theatrical show of power” (qtd. in Jewish Historical Institute 2013). Stroop himself is reported to have called the orchestrated climax of his operation in the destruction of Warsaw’s Great Synagogue on the last official day of the uprising “a fantastic piece of theater” (qtd.

114  Erin McGlothlin in Moczarski 1981, 164), meaning that he keenly recognized the ways in which that public act of violence would performatively connote the final end of Varsovian Jewish existence.3 As Benjamin Paloff points out, this culminating act was mostly symbolic, since at the time of the uprising, the synagogue was located outside the bounds of the ghetto and thus did not constitute a military target (2017, 431). But by destroying in what Stroop reportedly termed “a suitably artistic manner” (qtd. in Moczarski 1981, 164) a building that not only functioned as the most recognizable signifier for the city’s Jewish religious and communal life, but also at one time was the largest synagogue in the world, Stroop performed a carefully stage-​ managed act of closure whose meaning, as the culmination of violence in one of the most important chapters of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, was to be unmistakably unambiguous. From his postwar Polish prison cell, Stroop is said to have described the destruction with vivid physical detail, exuberant pride and unmistakable awareness of its genocidal consequences, claiming, “With a thunderous, deafening bang and a rainbow burst of colors, the fiery explosion soared toward the clouds, an unforgettable tribute to our triumph over the Jews” (Moczarski 1981, 164). In Stroop’s rendering, the violent performance of closure that culminated in the destruction of the Great Synagogue was thus an expression of orgasmic, even transcendent joy. Moreover, this annihilative act not only “punctuated” (Paloff 2017, 431) the end of the uprising, but it also announced in no uncertain terms the Nazis’ genocidal intentions both to the world outside the ghetto and to the remaining Jews within (for, despite Stroop’s grandiloquent rhetoric about the complete annihilation of the ghetto, an unknown number of Jews still remained hidden in the ghetto after the officially declared suppression of the uprising, a fact that Stroop was forced to admit at the end of his report). While, on a linguistic level, the Nazis maintained a tightly controlled idiom of euphemism to disguise to themselves and the world the methods and aims of their genocidal project (a terminology that, as Wirth points out in part III of his introduction, Stroop adopts in his report), the expression of their plans for Poland’s Jews was made incontestably clear in this climactic act of violence. In an analogous way to the orgiastic orchestration of violence of the destruction of the Great Synagogue, The Stroop Report itself, as a text, functions as an act of performative closure. Indeed, by virtue of its very title –​The Jewish Quarter Is No More! –​the text performs discursively the violent physical erasure of the ghetto and the murder of its inhabitants. Yet, Stroop proclaims the end of the ghetto not only ex post facto, in the aftermath of the suppression of the uprising, but also during the conflict itself in his daily dispatches to Krüger, in which he iteratively describes the ghetto as the “former Jewish quarter” (“ehemaliger jüdischer Wohnbezirk,” missive from May 10, 1943). These paradoxical references to an allegedly nonexistent entity that Stroop and his

Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents  115 forces are nevertheless struggling to annihilate express the reverse of what Andrzej Wirth, in part III of his introduction to the English translation of the report, describes as “[t]‌he absurd logic of totalitarian wishful thinking (‘only what should exist does exist’)” (1979). In this case, Stroop proclaims that only what should not exist does not exist, a rhetorical strategy that instantiates the erasure of the ghetto as a measure to right a radical wrong. Moreover, Stroop’s repeated insistence throughout the report on the expiry of the ghetto is meant, at least in part, to function as an illocutionary act in the sense of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. According to Austin, an illocutionary act is an utterance (whether a declaration, a command or a promise) that accomplishes the deed to which it refers. The most explicit of illocutionary acts are performatives, which are sentences that not only describe a given social reality but also change the social reality they are describing. Such declarations, according to John R. Searle, “chang[e]‌the world in such a way as to bring about the truth of [their] propositional content” (2001, 103). Of course, it would be absurd –​not to mention historically disingenuous and ethically obtuse –​to claim that Stroop’s report operates primarily as an illocutionary act; after all, the destruction of the ghetto proceeded not merely from Stroop’s words but more concretely from the violence committed by the troops under his command. To insist that the violence he wrought was exclusively discursive would be to deny the actual suffering and death experienced during the uprising by the many thousands of Jews (by Stroop’s own count, over 50,000 [p. 10 of the summary report]). At the same time, however, Stroop’s report aimed not simply to recount and justify the violent events of the uprising; rather, it also endeavored to shape the reality it claimed to merely describe, meaning that the rhetoric of closure was intended to, in fact, seal the victorious finality of the operation by claiming for itself hegemonic control over the narrative of the events. As part of a particular rhetorical strategy that aimed continually to claim narrative mastery over an event that exceeded Stroop’s control, namely a ghetto liquidation operation that was originally envisioned to be a easily accomplished three-​day event and that ballooned into a protracted insurgency in which, according to Stroop’s numbers, 17 German troops were killed and 93 wounded, Stroop’s performative declarations function to induce forcibly a sense of closure into a situation rife with uncertainty and incompleteness, with which the German forces did not –​at least initially –​make notable progress. As Daly argues, “The driving force behind closure is the attempt to resolve a fundamental experience of lack” (1999, 236); in the case of the report, Stroop attempts to performatively overcome his lack of military success and to rewrite the narrative of his initially inept response to the uprising with recurrent and insistent closural gestures. Seen in this light, The Stroop Report reveals itself to be not quite the seamless triumphal text and impressive portfolio of professional achievement that Stroop intended it to be. Rather, its manifest narrative

116  Erin McGlothlin celebrating the joys of violence, with its forced inducement of closure through the construction of a straw enemy deserving of the full brutality directed at it and through symbolic and performative declarations of the vanquishment of that enemy, is shadowed by a tenacious subtext of deficiency, insecurity and inadequate military leadership. In this way, Stroop’s portfolio not only celebrates military success and narrative mastery; it also obliquely narrates his failure.

Conclusion: Reading Perpetrator-​Authored Documents through the Lens of Literary Methodologies As my reading of The Stroop Report demonstrates, scholarship that focuses on Holocaust-​era documents produced by perpetrators can –​and should –​avail itself of methodologies and hermeneutic strategies that are more conventionally applied to literary texts, whether fictional or nonfictional. While such documentary texts can certainly be mined by those who endeavor to establish the historical record for empirical evidence of the crimes they document and the ways in which those crimes were enabled, planned and executed, they also should be read through an ethical and narratological lens for the narrative practices they marshal in their attempt to discursively legitimize, mobilize and justify the violence they sanction and engender. Further, perpetrator-​authored documents should also be interpreted for the ways in which they bolster the truth effect of the events they describe, meaning strategies, such as narrative and ideological closure, through which they naturalize their hegemonic perspective on the violence. Such documents implicitly or explicitly seek to tell a story about the brutal events they represent, and at the same time they work to efface such narrative positioning in their attempt to discursively produce a stance of objectivity and self-​evident truth. By employing a methodological approach that attends to the narrative construction of documentary texts, we can provide an alternate reading of the events they convey, puncture the truth effect they produce and posit narrative possibilities that challenge their hegemonic control over the historical record.

Notes 1 For a good introduction to the ways in which methodologies of literary criticism can be fruitfully brought to bear on analyses of historical documents, see Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History, edited by Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (2020), especially Christoph Reinfandt’s chapter, “Reading Texts after the Linguistic Turn: Approaches from Literary Studies and their Implications” (41–​ 58). For a discussion of a hermeneutical approach to nonfiction, see “Narrative Strategies and Nonfiction” in my monograph, The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (58–​65).

Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents  117 2 The Stroop Report was published in English in 1979 as a collection of facsimiles of the original report in German accompanied by superb facing-​page translation and annotation by Sybil Milton and an astute introduction by Andrzej Wirth. Unfortunately, however, the volume includes pagination for neither the report itself nor its excellent paratextual apparatus, which makes referring to particular parts of the text quite difficult. Yet, Stroop himself did paginate his introductory summary report, and his daily missives are identified by their respective dates; I will therefore cite this information when quoting from the report. Furthermore, Wirth’s introduction is divided into seven sections, each of which is designated by a Roman numeral; when citing his text, I will indicate the section in which the quote originates. 3 Kazimierz Moczarski, an officer of the Polish Home Army who was imprisoned by the postwar Polish Communist regime on suspicion for having been aligned with the Nazis and who shared a cell with Stroop for nine months, wrote an account of Stroop’s daily disquisitions about his past, particularly his role in the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, in their shared cell. In 1977, Moczarski published Rozmowy z katem, which appeared in English translation as Conversations with an Executioner in 1981.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abbott, H. Porter. 2010. “Closure.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-​ Laure Ryan. London: Routledge. http://​libpr​oxy.wustl.edu/​login?url=​https://​sea​rch-​proqu​ est-​com.libpr​oxy.wustl.edu/​docv​iew/​213​7942​966?accoun​tid=​15159 Angress, Werner T. 1980. “Review of The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More. A Facsimile Edition and Translation of the Official Nazi Report on the Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen no. 2 (January): 243–​244. Bauer, Yehuda. 2001. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Carmondy, Todd. 2008. “The Banality of the Document: Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust and Ineloquent Empathy.” Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 1 (Fall): 86–​110. Chandler, Daniel, and Ron Munday. 2020. “Closure.” In The Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oxfo​rdre​fere​nce.com/​view/​10.1093/​acref/​978019​1800​986.001.0001/​ acref-​978019​1800​986-​e-​360 Daly, Glyn. 1999. “Ideology and Its Paradoxes: Dimensions of Fantasy and Enjoyment.” Journal of Political Ideologies 4, no. 2 (June): 219–​238. Dobson, Miriam, and Benjamin Ziemann, eds. 2020. Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Fritzsche, Peter. 2010. “German Documents and Diaries.” In The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, edited by Peter Hayes and John K. Roth. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 381–​396.

118  Erin McGlothlin Fritzsche, Peter. 2016. “The Management of Empathy in the Third Reich.” In Empathy and Its Limits, edited by Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan: 115–​127. Gutman. Israel. 1984. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. 2007. “Ideology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 217–​230. Jackson, Robert R. 1946. “Opening Address for the United States.” In Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (1946–​1948), Volume I, edited by Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office: 114–​174. www.loc.gov/​rr/​frd/​Milit​ary_​Law/​ pdf/​NT_​N​azi_​Vol-​I.pdf Jewish Historical Institute. 2013. “Stroop’s Report in the New Version.” www. jhi.pl/​en/​blog/​2013-​05-​09-​str​oop-​s-​rep​ort-​in-​the-​new-​vers​ion Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess. 1988. “Schöne Zeiten”: Judenmord aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Magilow, Daniel H., and Lisa Silverman. 2020. “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto (Photograph, 1943): What Do Iconic Photographs Tell Us about the Holocaust?” In Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction, 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury: 12–​20. McGlothlin, Erin. 2021. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moczarski, Kazimierz. 1981. Conversations with an Executioner, edited by Mariana Fitzpatrick. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-​Hall. Paloff, Benjamin. 2017. “Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Warsaw Ghetto?” Modernism/​modernity 24, no. 3 (September): 429–​460. Raskin, Richard. 2004. A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Searle, John R. 2001. “How Performatives Work.” In Essays in Speech Act Theory, edited by Daniel Vanderveken and Susumu Kobo. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins: 85–​107. Stroop, Jürgen. 1979. The Stroop Report, translated by Sybil Milton. New York: Pantheon. Wirth, Andrzej. 1979. “Introduction to the First Edition.” In The Stroop Report, translated by Sybil Milton. New York: Pantheon. Wulf, Joseph. 1984. Das Dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein. Wyschogrod, Edith. 2005. “The Warring Logics of Genocide.” In Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, edited by John K. Roth. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 207–​219.

8 Space of Murder, Space of Freedom The Forest as a Posttraumatic Landscape in Holocaust Narratives Helena Duffy

With “Auschwitz” having become a synecdoche for the Nazis’ annihilation of European Jewry, it is understandable why concentration camps were Holocaust Geography’s original focus.1 Subsequent studies have paid attention to other settings, such as ghettos (Cole 2003), trains (Gigliotti 2009; Cole 2011) and hiding places in urban areas (Paulsson 2002; Moore 2010). Scholars have equally turned to the role of the forests during the genocide (Merin and Porter 1984; Tec 1996; Weber 2008, 2012, Reichelt 2017; Cole 2019), an unsurprising choice considering Claude Lanzmann’s identification of the gassing of Jews in the Rzuchów Forest as the beginning of the Holocaust (1986, 11). However, even before gas vans came into use, as in Rzuchów on December 8, 1941, the forests had provided a stage for what Father Patrick Desbois has called the “Holocaust by bullets.” (2008) Being secluded from public view, the “bloodlands,” as Timothy Snyder has dubbed the borderland forests of western Poland and eastern Soviet Union (2010), saw mass shootings of Jews, Romanies, communists, the mentally ill and other social and ethnic groups the Nazis considered a threat to the security of their troops. Following in the wake of the Wehrmacht, between 1941 and 1942, four Einsatzgruppen conducted massacres, such as those in the Rumbula Forest, the Krępiecki Forest, the Ponary Forest and the Sosenki Forest.2 But, forests also provided hiding spaces for Jews escaping from ghettos, transports and executions. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 fugitive Jews sought refuge in the forests and that only 10 percent of them survived the war (Cole 2019, 667–​668; Weber 2012, 2). The testimonies of these fugitives demonstrate that although, being primarily urban, Jews initially perceived the forest as alien and menacing, they ultimately found it liberating, consolatory and protective (Cole 2019). As exemplified by the group of Jewish partisans headed by the Bielski brothers, the forests also provided Jews with scope for active resistance against the Nazis (Tec 2009). Due to the negligible number of survivors of the mass shootings of Jews and the small number of surviving forest fugitives, these two aspects of what Roman Sendyka has dubbed the “dispersed Holocaust” have been poorly documented (Sendyka n.d.).3 They have nevertheless been subject to fictional reworkings, as exemplified by Anthony Hecht’s poem “More Light! DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-11

120  Helena Duffy More Light!” and Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Heavy Sand.4 Likewise, the two contemporary French-​language novels I examine in this chapter cast the forest as a major Holocaust setting and, in so doing, maintain its aforementioned duality; while in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (first published in French as Les Bienveillantes (2006)) woodlands are the stage for mass executions, in Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck (first published in French as Le Rapport de Brodeck (2007)) they shelter three fugitive women. Additionally, the protagonists of the two narratives project their Holocaust memories on to the forest whereby they construe it as a posttraumatic landscape. It is the two novels’ investment of woodlands with traumatic images and their consequent opening of Holocaust violence to a reinterpretation through an ecocritical lens that interests me in this chapter. Notably, I examine the ways in which Littell and Claudel expand the trauma theory in the direction of ecocriticism, with a view to drawing attention to the role of nature in the Nazi genocide, to the human/​nonhuman interconnectedness and to the implications of interhuman violence for the environment. As its starting point, my discussion takes Cathy Caruth’s reorientation of Sigmund Freud’s reading of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1996, 1–​10), a sixteenth-​century epic that, written in the spirit of counterreformation, imaginatively reconstructs the First Crusade of 1099. In the episode reexamined by Caruth, Tancred and his fellow knights venture into the forest of Saron with the aim of felling trees. They intend to rebuild the siege towers that had served to attack Jerusalem’s high walls, but which Muslim warriors, including Tancred’s beloved, Clorinda, burnt down in the night. What the Crusaders do not know is that the sorcerer Ismeno has cast a magic spell upon the forest and that the trees will produce images that play on the knights’ worst fears. For example, Tancred, who mortally wounded Clorinda in a skirmish, sees his beloved’s blood gush from a cypress when he strikes its trunk with his sword. Then, when he strikes the tree again, Tancred hears Clorinda complain of having been killed twice. While for Freud the episode illustrates the repetitiveness of traumatic neurosis (1954, 16), for Caruth it demonstrates that trauma is a deep and painful mental wound that, left by a shocking event, manifests itself belatedly and in an unmediated form: Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature –​the way it was precisely not known in the first instance –​returns to haunt the survivor later on. (1996, 4) The scene additionally reveals trauma’s potential for an ethical encounter with the Other’s pain, leading Caruth to reconceptualize history as an enmeshment of different traumas: “We can … read the address of [Clorinda’s] voice here, not as the story of individual in relation to

Space of Murder, Space of Freedom  121 the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” and in which it can engender “the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (1996, 8). Despite the ample scrutiny of Caruth’s rereading of Tasso’s text, few critics have paid attention to its topographical setting. Advocating the expansion of trauma studies beyond its dominant humanistic focus, Stef Craps bemoans the fact that the epic and its readers “trope away from environmental destruction,” thus “derealizing and invisibilizing the scene of literal damage to a tree” (2020, 281). Where Craps sees a manifestation of “plant blindness,” Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper perceive an opportunity for reconceptualizing trauma as an “environmental and cosmological rupture, as something that happens … not simply to individuals …, but also to the broader network of relations by which life itself is animated” (195). In fact, Caruth herself who engages only with Freud’s commentary on Tasso’s epic, rather than with the epic itself, glosses over the forest’s instrumentality in the revelation of Tancred’s trauma and of his trauma’s entanglement with that of the Crusaders’ Muslim victims.5 Caruth’s narrowly humanistic reading consequently overlooks the traumatized subject’s implication in the nonhuman world and the ensuing potential for posthumanist and environmental approaches to trauma. In contrast, even if stopping short of embracing either approach, Jane Tylus foregrounds the imbrication of Muslim and Christian suffering and attaches the violence of the Crusaders toward Jerusalem’s inhabitants to the damage they inflict upon their victims’ natural environment. For Tylus, both Clorinda’s “bleeding body trapped in a tree” and the bleeding bodies of the Muslims chased by the Crusaders to their wooden stockades invoke Christ’s crucifixion “on a tree” (1999, 119). Likewise, Clorinda’s entrapment “between life and death” calls to mind the human form that Christ took to save mankind (1999, 122). Yet, in accordance with the image of universal and triumphant Christianity Jerusalem Delivered promulgates, Tasso does not capitalize on these haunting parallels, instead contrasting the positively valorized Crusaders with Jerusalem’s demonized residents (124). Hence, contrary to Caruth’s positive reading of the episode, the knights forego the opportunity for a transformative encounter with the otherness of their victims, instead pursuing their murderous agenda in regard to both the local population and its natural environment. The felling of the trees not only enables the reconstruction of the towers and hence the driving out of the Muslims, but also produces environmental harm, leaving the forest’s inhabitants –​the birds and the beasts –​homeless (Tylus 1999, 124). It is the underresearched role of the forest in Tasso’s epic, whose role is both evidential (the forest exposes Christian violence through an ironic analogy between victimized Muslims and the crucified Christ) and agential (it temporarily hinders the Christian conquest of Jerusalem), that provides the impetus for my examination of the reframing of Holocaust

122  Helena Duffy violence in The Kindly Ones and Brodeck. In the first part of my discussion, I inquire whether by ultimately redirecting our attention to the Jewish tragedy, Littell’s focus on perpetrator trauma redeems the promise of ethical effectiveness that Jerusalem Delivered fails to fulfill. This can be achieved through isolating the forest as the locus of the entanglement of different traumatic histories, including those belonging to the nonhuman world. Brodeck, too, as I argue in the second part of my analysis, foregrounds the porosity of the human/​nonhuman boundary, posits the traumatized human subject as inextricable from its natural environment and casts this environment as a posttraumatic landscape construed by the protagonist through the processes of projection and identification. Hence, while endorsing Caruth’s conception of trauma as a belated response to a painful event that resists representation, and of history as an enmeshment of the victim’s and the killer’s traumatic stories, the two narratives potentially broaden this conception by stressing trauma’s embodiment and embeddedness in nature. I will contend that this challenge to the humanistic understanding of trauma recasts the Holocaust as a product of modern ontology with its privileging of the human within the human/​ nonhuman binary. Indeed, as the two novels suggest, it is this binary that has not only legitimized our exploitative and abusive relationship with the nonhuman world but also enabled the dehumanization and consequent oppression of human groups, as emblematized by the Holocaust.

The Forest in the Perpetrator’s Murdering Hand Littell’s hugely successful albeit controversial debut novel narrates the Holocaust from the perspective of a former officer of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence agency of the Nazi Party. Settled in northern France under a false identity, Maximilien Aue reminisces about his deployment on the Eastern Front as of Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941. His over-​900-​page memoir charts the progression of the Third Reich’s exterminatory policies, beginning with the Aktionen, as the Nazis euphemistically called mass executions of Jews and other ethnic and social minorities that they deemed undesirable. The first Aktion at which Aue is present takes place in a Ukrainian forest that, as it transpires when the condemned Jews start to dig their own graves, has already been used by the Bolsheviks as an execution and burial site. Contextualized with Caruth’s emphasis on the unknowability of trauma at the time of its occurrence (1996, 3), the implausible calm marking the scene and Aue’s own similarly unlikely composure signal the protagonist’s traumatization that will later manifest itself through classic PTSD symptoms.6 The unavailability of the painful event to Aue’s consciousness is additionally communicated by his failure to register the moment when long pieces of wood lodge themselves within his hand. While for Eric Sandberg this detail testifies to the tremendous emotional stress that Aue experiences, but of which he is unaware at the time (2014, 242–​243), for Liran Razinsky,

Space of Murder, Space of Freedom  123 the splinters are a miniaturization of the forest that “marks itself within the perpetrator’s body, within the murdering hand itself,” becoming “an ineffaceable sign of the acts committed” (2012, 53). To synthesize the two critics’ comments, the forest makes Aue (or rather the reader) realize his implication in the Nazis’ genocidal violence, just as in Tasso’s epic it makes Tancred fully grasp his responsibility for Clorinda’s death. In other words, it becomes a site for the killer’s potentially ethically productive encounter with his victims’ trauma. The embodiment of human mental wounding in nature finds articulation when the forest unexpectedly and repetitively yields the literal image of the crime that, in relation to the novel’s diegetic moment, is about to be committed but, in relation to the narrative moment, has already been carried out. Since, having been buried in winter, the bodies of the victims of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) have not decomposed, the traumatic memory of the violent event returns in an unprocessed form. Trauma’s unwished-​for repetitiveness postulated by both Freud and Caruth finds further illustration in the analogies between Soviet and Nazi methods. Irrespective of their moral outrage at the Bolsheviks’ war conduct in the Soviet-​annexed parts of Poland (Littell 2010, 83), the Nazis reappropriate their enemies’ execution sites and replicate their killing techniques. Should we reconsider Tancred’s belated realization of his crime in the light of the aforedescribed scene, we can see more clearly why Caruth’s focus on Clorinda’s killer and, in her reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1964, 11–​25), on the murderous Israelites has raised such fierce objections and why these objections repeatedly use the Holocaust as their reference point. Ruth Leys argues that if Tancred can become the victim of the trauma and the voice of Clorinda testimony to his wound, then Caruth’s logic … would turn the executioners of Jews into victims and the ‘cries’ of the Jews into testimony to the trauma suffered by the Nazis. (2000, 297) Similarly, Anne Rothe fears that, if the Israelites not only were traumatized by their murder of Moses but also committed this murder without experiencing it, “the Nazis were traumatized by their murder of the European Jews which they likewise did not experience” (2016, 191). However, in The Kindly Ones, Leys’ and Rothe’s anxieties regarding the ramifications of the trauma theory for Holocaust memory are neutralized by Aue’s awareness of the criminality of the Nazis’ actions, which he throws into sharp relief with the ironic contrast between the massacre of the Jews he witnessed and his own relatively minor physical and mental discomfort: “For us, it was another dirty day’s work; for them, the end of everything” (Littell 2010, 83). Furthermore, notwithstanding Aue’s successful extraction of the splinters, the posttraumatic sylvan landscape has irreversibly penetrated and polluted his consciousness. This

124  Helena Duffy is evidenced by Aue’s subsequent inability to enjoy woodlands (Littell 2010, 702) and by the superimposition of his wartime memories over his happy childhood memories of German forests: “That’s what forests used to mean to me, games like that, full of keen pleasure and boundless freedom; now, the woods filled me with fear” (Littell 2010, 109). As for the accusation that Caruth’s theory inverts the victim and the perpetrator positions, Littell’s novel counteracts it by fulfilling the unrealized ethical potential of Jerusalem Delivered, held in the correspondences between Clorinda’s entrapment in a tree and Christ’s agony on the wooden cross, and between the Muslims’ and Christ’s bleeding flesh. Unlike Tasso’s epic that programs its sixteenth-​century audience to ignore Muslim suffering, Littell’s representation of Aue’s trauma draws our attention to the Jewish tragedy with renewed strength, thus opposing the compassion fatigue resulting from the oversaturation of victim-​focused narratives, including these concerning the Holocaust (Dean 2004; Mitschke 2016). By assuming the perpetrator perspective, Littell’s novel not only refuses to inscribe the “Holocaust metanarrative” (Hunter 2019), which ushers readers into what Eric Leake terms “easy empathy” (2014, 175) with the morally irreproachable victim,7 but also aligns itself with the Caruthian idea that different traumatic stories become interlaced within the fabric of history. According to James Berger, Caruthian theory demonstrates that each national catastrophe invokes and transforms memories of other catastrophes, so that history becomes a complex entanglement of crimes inflicted and suffered, with each catastrophe understood –​ that is, misunderstood –​in the context of repressed memories of previous ones. (1997, 572) To Littell’s implicit adherence to Caruth’s conception of history testifies his narrator’s identification of Nazi crimes with the Soviets’ extermination campaigns. Apart from deriding the Germans’ self-​perception as superior to their enemy, his novel thus wrests the Holocaust from its unproductive (or even counterproductive) designation as unique or at least unprecedented, which “distracts from the consideration of other historical tragedies” (Rothberg 2009, 9) and has “compelled [the Holocaust] to become generalized and departicularized”8 (Alexander 2002, 51). Referring more specifically to trauma studies, Karyn Ball links their ethical investment to the move beyond the “ahistorical insistence upon the sublime singularity of the Holocaust” (2000, 10) and toward “the strategy of comparison” (2000, 15). Significantly, with the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyń Forest epitomizing Stalin’s war crimes, woodlands become an apt means of forging a link between Nazi and Soviet violence, a link spelt out by the anachronistic graffiti “Katyń=​Auschwitz” that Aue encounters later in the novel (2010, 619).9

Space of Murder, Space of Freedom  125 The Kindly Ones further expands the interpretative framework of the Nazi genocide by encompassing the nascent posthumanist and ecocritical perspectives in Holocaust Studies (Małczyński et al. 2020; Cole 2020b; Domańska 2020).10 Scholars championing these approaches invite us to contemplate the role of nature in the Holocaust and the Holocaust’s and its commemorations’ transformative influence on the environment (Smykowski 2020; Małczyński 2020). They also raise the question of the cultural construction of Holocaust settings as posttraumatic landscapes (Baer 2002), the genocide’s and ecocide’s shared origins in modernity’s separation between the human and the nonhuman and its related quest for humanity’s control over nature (Katz 1997, 2015; Małczyński et al. 2020). Such efforts to ascribe quasi-​human agency to nature or to discuss its instrumentalization in the genocide have, however, met with critique and resistance. While for Tim Cole these efforts continue to “privilege[e]‌ human actors and action” (2020a, 275), Omer Bartov deems the responses to the Nazis’ antisemitic policies of local governments and populations more important than the trees that “were neither silent, nor witnesses [but] were simply there” (2021, 3). The critic additionally finds “equating the killing of a human being to chopping down a tree” an ethically dubious exercise (2021, 10). Although the forest that shields the Aktion from public view in Littell’s novel could be endowed with a conspiratorial or evidential role in relation to Nazi and Soviet crimes, I am more interested in identifying it as a mnemonic space constructed through its investment with the symptomatology of human trauma, and in Littell’s resulting enlargement of Caruth’s theory through his reinsertion of the human subject into the nonhuman world. In other words, The Kindly Ones foregrounds trauma’s “trans-​corporeality,” which means that “the human is always intermeshed with the more-​than-​human world,” and that nature is more than an inert and empty background available to human exploits (Alaimo 2010, 2). The posthumanist resonance of the aforediscussed scene is further borne out by Aue’s jaunt into the surrounding countryside during the Aktion. The pleasure that he takes in the landscape’s pastoral beauty –​a pleasure that echoes the uncanny serenity of posttraumatic spaces remarked by Holocaust geographers (Charlesworth and Addis 2002, 231; Young 1993, 120) –​is spoilt by his sighting of a crow crucified by its feet. This reference to Christ’s –​or rather St Paul’s –​crucifixion seems to position the Holocaust as the culmination of centuries of Christian antisemitism. Yet, Aue’s attentiveness to farm animals –​a flock of “fat geese,” “a frightened calf” and “a weeping cow,” whose inevitable and tragic fate is suggested by the qualifiers Aue employs to describe them –​reconnects the Holocaust to the violence men inflict upon the nonhuman world and bridges human and nonhuman trauma (Littell 2010, 82). The episode therefore demonstrates Littell’s implicit concurrence with John Roth’s view that the Holocaust has produced a world that is both spiritually and ecologically scarred by “its killing centers, mass graves and incinerated

126  Helena Duffy bodies,” and that “disrespect for human life and disregard for the natural world are intertwined” (2013, 25).

The Forest on the March By focalizing his novel through a victim rather than perpetrator, Philippe Claudel seems to adopt a more conventional approach to narrating the Holocaust. That said, Brodeck departs from the traditional representation of the victim as invariably righteous, instead staging a protagonist who becomes mired in complicity with his oppressors in the camp. Upon his return to his village, Brodeck is forced to reenter the “grey zone” of collaboration, this time by reporting on his neighbors’ murder of a newcomer nicknamed de Anderer. Troubled by the stranger’s alterity and linked capacity for stirring unwelcome memories of wartime collaboration, the villagers kill him and, to cover up their crime, feed his remains to pigs. Alongside the conventional figuration of the survivor, Claudel rejects the realist aesthetics that many deem the most appropriate in Holocaust literature (Adams 2014). Namely, he opts for an allegorical approach to the Holocaust and to France’s both postwar reluctance to recognize its implication in the Jewish tragedy and continued persecution of ethnic otherness in the colonies. In keeping with its universalizing ambition (Duffy 2018), Brodeck is set in an unnamed village located on the border with a Germanophone country and nestling in a sylvan landscape. The centrality of the forest in the novel is in keeping with its Germanic flavor and fairy-​tale ambiance, including its indebtedness to the work of the Grimm Brothers. Indeed, the Germans have long associated themselves with Waldbewußtsein (forest-​mindedness) and have at times identified with wooded landscapes (Imort 2005, 55; Wilson 2012, 3). This tendency intensified in the nineteenth century when, in reaction to Napoleon’s occupation of the German lands, artists and thinkers hoped to unify the beleaguered people through their local culture and especially through the folklore of the forest. Exemplified by the Grimms’ fairy tales whose key locale are woodlands (Wilson 2012, 25), such efforts led to a politically motivated Germanization, mythification and aestheticization of the forest. In the 1930s, the Nazis capitalized on the Romantics’ völkisch conception of the “German forest” by reintegrating it into their Blut und Boden (blood and soil) rhetoric of a national renewal arising from nature (Imort 2005, 59; Wilson 2012, 225). As in fairy tales, including those by the Grimms (Zipes 2002, 68),11 where the forest “designates danger, even possible death” (Landwehr 2009, 158), but can also signify freedom (Ashliman 2004, 6), in Claudel’s novel the woods maintain their fabular ambiguity. More specifically, they provide de Anderer with aesthetic pleasure and artistic inspiration, and the locals, who hunt and gather, with sustenance. The woods are a source of livelihood for Brodeck himself whose job is to report to the authorities

Space of Murder, Space of Freedom  127 on the local fauna and flora. More pertinently, during the war, the forest offers refuge to three fugitive Fremdër girls, the term “Fremdër” designating in the novel a minority in which we easily recognize Jews.12 The forest’s protective capacity is, however, limited. Having come across the young women, the peasants lure them to the village where, with the blessing and participation of the occupying forces, they rape and murder them. They also sexually assault and then leave for the dead Brodeck’s wife, Émelia, who came to the women’s rescue. This episode reflects not only the narrow survival chances of Jews hiding in forests but also the until-​recently-​historically-​neglected phenomenon of sexual assault and exploitation Jewish women faced in hiding (Waxman 2010; Levenkorn 2010), including in sylvan settings (Tec 1996, 39). At the same time, the forest is a space on to which Brodeck projects the trauma resulting from his experience of the camp where he was reduced to the canine servant of his tormentors. Importantly, in narrativizing his incarceration, Brodeck uses not only recognizable concentrationary tropes such as “useless violence” (Levi 1988) but also, as exemplified by the repurposing of a butcher’s hook in the daily hangings, imagery of animal cruelty. Intrusive memories of captivity contaminate Brodeck’s sleep and torment him in daytime, as during an outing with Émelia and her daughter Poupchette. That the protagonist perceives the woods as an all-​engulfing and menacing force is illustrated by his remark that a pond has tripled in size –​an ominous sign in itself –​and that the trough standing in its midst and once capable to stirring pleasant associations with a floating vessel resembles a tomb. Disturbed by this morbid vision, Brodeck hurries back to the women, but, as if in a nightmare, he slips on the marshy ground and sinks into holes and quagmires that emit “sounds like the groans of the dying” (2010, 164). Claudel anthropomorphizes the forest further by equating it with the bulldozing violence of the invading soldiers, in whom we unmistakably recognize the Wehrmacht,13 thus seemingly drawing on the well-​established link between the “German forest” and militarism. Echoing German-​language poet Elias Canetti, who likened the German army to a “marching forest” (1978, 173), and writers of Canetti’s generation who sought parallels between uniformed ranks of soldiers and rows of trees (Wilson 2012, 178–​179), Brodeck fears that the shed shielding his writing from the ill-​founded curiosity of his neighbors will be razed by trees on the march. The forest’s duality is further revealed by the symbolic investment of its flora, exemplified by the mushrooms that Brodeck receives from his former teacher, Ernst-​Peter Limmat, and by the flower for which he vainly searches in memory of his fellow deportee, Moshe Kelmar. The traditional evil symbolism of the black-​colored and funnel-​shaped fungi, which owe their name “trompettes de la mort” to the belief that they were trumpets played by the dead, is confirmed by the threats with which Limmat coerces Brodeck to exonerate de Anderer’s murderers in his report. But the forest is also –​or at least was –​home to the valley periwinkle whose

128  Helena Duffy delicate beauty Kelmar evoked to mitigate the horrors of the deportation. Since Brodeck fails to locate the flower in the forest, but finds it in an almanac of local flora, he assumes that nature has withdrawn it from its catalog in punishment for humanity’s wrongdoings (2010, 235). If the agency with which Claudel imbues the forest is undoubtedly part of his novel’s fabular anthropomorphism, it challenges the idea of the environment as a passive backdrop to human activities and an entity separate from humanity. Indeed, Brodeck reasserts interconnections between men, animals and plants through a plethora of zoological and botanical similes and animal parables. One of these parables recounts the collective suicide of foxes, which Brodeck investigates in his professional capacity and which defies the idea of self-​inflicted death as uniquely human (Bennett 2017, 26–​28). As well as foregrounding, as does The Kindly Ones, man’s trans-​corporeal connections to the natural world, with its Germanic setting, Brodeck inscribes its protagonist’s embodied trauma into Germany’s quest for national self-​definition. This quest brought into dialogue ecological and racist ideas, turning the forest into “a laboratory for social Darwinism” (Wilson 2012, 177). This is exemplified by comparisons between German people and German woodlands where “proud trees” were thought to “withdraw from the company of lower classes of plants” (Imort 2005, 63) or by the extension of the botanical term “Schmarotzenvolk” (social parasites) to Poles and Jews (Neuman 2012, 110). A further insight into Claudel’s representation of the forest can be gained through Brodeck’s occupation. As a scribe, the protagonist helps to control nature with the use of language that, significantly, the novel situates as a humanity-​ defining feature; if Brodeck’s animalization in the camp culminates in aphasia, his rehumanization signals itself by his recovery of speech. The two types of oppression –​that of nature and of that human alterity, whose assassination Brodeck is forced to justify –​are consequently equated through their insertion into humanity’s self-​identification with logos and desire for domination over human and nonhuman otherness. Like The Kindly Ones, Brodeck thus foregrounds the imbrication of human and nonhuman trauma and extends the Caruthian understanding of mental wounding to the natural world. It additionally shows the categories of perpetration and victimhood to be blurry and protean rather than clearly defined and static, with Brodeck occupying the position of a morally compromised victim in the context of racial violence and, in relation to the forest, of an “implicated subject,” as Michael Rothberg defines a “beneficiar[y]‌of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously” (2013, xv). Thus reframed, Brodeck’s decision to leave his typewriter behind upon his departure from the village denounces culture’s enlistment in both interhuman and human–​nonhuman violence. The novel’s message is reinforced by Brodeck’s donning of de Anderer’s fur cap, slippers and mittens, and by the presence at his side of a dog,

Space of Murder, Space of Freedom  129 Ohnmeist. Having resisted domestication when living among humans, the stray mongrel, who is clearly Brodeck’s canine doppelganger, returns to the forest to assume his earlier undomesticated form of the fox. In alignment with its fairy-​tale aura, the novel concludes with the utopian image of humanity’s postwar rehabilitation through its reintegration into the natural world, and with nature’s corresponding recovery of its autonomy and agency of which it has been stripped through humanity’s quest for control, progress and profit.

Conclusions Despite their rather different approaches to narrativizing the Nazi genocide –​Littell adopting the perpetrator’s perspective and Claudel the victim’s perspective –​by encoding Jewish suffering in wooded landscapes, the two novels share their endorsement of the Caruthian model of trauma as resistant to conventional representational or descriptive language. While also corroborating Caruth’s view of history as a tangle of different traumas, The Kindly Ones and Brodeck go beyond this view’s humanistic dimension, showing trauma to be an environmentally embedded phenomenon that reconnects the mentally wounded human subject to the (wounded) nonhuman world. In other words, contrary to the classical understanding of the traumatized individual as being isolated in working through the belated effects of a shocking event, the two narratives work toward decentralizing and deprivileging the liberal human subject by endowing it with what –​following Rosi Braidotti –​Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim calls “a relational embodied and embedded, affective identity” (2020, 233). The two protagonists’ reconnection to nature happens either through their degrading, yet enlightening animalization (Brodeck), or through their infiltration by the pain of their victims embodied in the forest that was the theater of these victims’ agony (The Kindly Ones). Whatever the traumatogenic process, in both novels the forest becomes a culturally constructed landscape that the traumatized protagonist invests with his mental torment and with which he consequently identifies. Paradoxically, appropriative cultural construction of sylvan spaces was also part of Germany’s nineteenth-​century search for a unified national identity through the internalization of the values of freedom, heroism, vigor and manliness, which Romantic artists and thinkers attributed to wooded landscapes (Imort 2005, 59). Yet, it is more likely the recognition of both the “German forest” and the Holocaust as outcomes of modernity that prompted Littell and Claudel to privilege the woodlands as a stage for the enactment and entanglement of Holocaust trauma with nonhuman suffering (Wilson 2012, 9).14 Put differently, the rootedness of the two concepts in modernity serves the two novelists to reinsert the Nazi genocide into a wide comparative framework that entails not only other instances of traumatogenic interhuman violence but also man’s abusive exploitation of the nonhuman world.

130  Helena Duffy

Notes 1 For an overview of the discipline, see Cole (2020a). 2 In Rumbula, the Einsatzgruppe A and its local auxiliaries murdered 25,000 Jews between November 30 and December 8, 1941; in Ponary, 75,000 people were massacred between 1941 and 1944; in the Sosenki Forest, 23,550 people were murdered over three days in November 1941. 3 Testimonies to mass shootings have been provided by perpetrators and eye/​ earwitnesses (Vice 2019, 92, 89). 4 See also Bronia Jablon’s A Part of Me (2018), Ruth Yaffe Radin’s Escape to the Forest (2000) and Rebecca Frankel’s Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Trial and Love (2021). For a discussion of literary works dramatizing the Holocaust by bullets, see Vice (2019). 5 Craps remarks that in the afterword to the twentieth-​anniversary edition of Unclaimed Experience, “the issue of what happens to trees in the poem” is related to a footnote (2020, 281). 6 These include digestive problems, hallucinations, nightmares, episode of hypervigilance and anxiety. For a further elaboration of Aue’s trauma, see Duffy (2020). 7 For a discussion of empathy in Littell’s novel, see Meretoja (2018, 217–​254). 8 For a discussion of Littell’s endeavor to reinsert the Holocaust into the historical continuum, see Meretoja (2018, 217–​254). 9 Liran Razinsky demonstrates the inscription’s historical implausibility as it uses Auschwitz as the reference point when the camp had not yet been recognized as a symbol of evil (2012, 55), 10 Efforts have been made to identify nature with bystanders, perpetrators and victims. For example, Polish artist Łukasz Surowiec believes that the trees growing around the former camp of Birkenau “draw water from the soil mixed with the ashes [of the victims’ bodies] and breathe the same air that carried the smoke from incinerated bodies. These trees hold something of those people” (Miller and Surowiec 2012, my own translation). Conversely, Dutch artist Armando calls the landscape surrounding the former concentration camp of Amersfoort “schuldig Landschap” (guilty landscape), thus establishing a continuity between trees and perpetrators (Sendyka 2015, 20). 11 Zipes illustrates his conception of the forest as unconventional, free, alluring, but also dangerous with Hansel and Gretel, where the children get lost in the forest before emerging from it richer and wiser. If Snow White confirms the forest’s enchanting potential, in Red Riding Hood the forest is a stage for dangerous temptations and the dwelling place of predatory males (2002, 65–​68). 12 Brodeck has an uncharacteristically swarthy complexion and black hair, and is circumcised. 13 Headed by Adolf Buller, who is a travesty of Adolf Hitler, the enemy soldiers march under black-​and-​red banners reminiscent of the Nazi flags. Like the real-​life Nazis, they readily use animal analogies. 14 Wilson opposes the dominant perception of the Germans’ fascination with sylvan spaces as symptomatic of antimodern mysticism and irrationalism. He argues that, orderly and managed, Germany’s forests symptomatized a high modernist approach to the environment (2012, 11). Similarly, Imort identifies the “German forest” as a concept “very much rooted in the mechanistic

Space of Murder, Space of Freedom  131 worldview of the Enlightenment: symmetry and uniformity underpinned the new forestry” (2005, 62).

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Part III

Articulating Inherent Violence

9 Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence The Problem of Narrative in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle Hanna Meretoja Narrative is an important form of human interaction and a fundamental mode of understanding selves and others. While this has been widely acknowledged, particularly as part of the “narrative turn” of the humanities and social sciences since the 1980s, there is also an influential tradition of literature and thought that finds narrative a highly problematic form, for epistemological, ontological and ethical reasons. Particularly since the Second World War and poststructuralism, many thinkers and writers have taken narrative form to be inherently violent.1 There are, however, different forms and logics of narrative, and arguably not all of them are violent, at least not to the same extent and in the same way. I have earlier discussed narrative in relation to ethics, hermeneutics and violence by drawing a distinction between subsumptive and nonsubsumptive narrative practices (see Meretoja 2018a, 2018b). In this chapter, I will first discuss different varieties of violence –​physical, emotional and discursive –​and then explore, in the light of the distinction between subsumptive and nonsubsumptive cultural forms, the view that narrative is inherently violent. In the latter part of the chapter, I will discuss narrative in relation to different forms of violence in Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical series My Struggle.

Varieties of Violence There are varieties of violence, which can be categorized in different ways. I will here distinguish between physical, emotional and discursive violence. Physical violence is the most concrete form of violence. In its simplest form, we tend to think of violence in terms of a physical blow inflicted by one person on another. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, violence refers to the “deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc.; physically violent behaviour or treatment” (2014). As Judith Butler (2020, 2) writes, the figure of the blow has shaped discussions on violence, suggesting that “violence is something that happens between two parties in a heated encounter.” But it is also evident that there is more to violence than that. The definition DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-13

138  Hanna Meretoja put forward by the World Health Organization is already somewhat wider: violence is the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation. This definition acknowledges the threat of physical violence, violence inflicted on a group or community and the emotional damage that violence can do in addition to physical harm. Narratives can incite concrete physical violence, as is evident, for example, in how the narrative of the superiority of the “Aryan race” undergirded the mass murder of the Jews in Nazi Germany, but such physical violence is accompanied by nonphysical types of violence, to which I will now turn. The concept of emotional violence acknowledges that we can hurt each other through words and actions that do not involve physical blows or even a direct threat of physical harm. Emotional violence refers to harm done through psychological mechanisms such as attempts to humiliate or isolate. Emotional abuse can take different forms, such as threatening, name-​ calling, ridiculing, scapegoating, manipulating, neglecting or ignoring the other. Such practices of emotional mistreatment, however, do not emerge out of nowhere. When a child becomes the victim of racist segregation in school, for example, and the bullies make up a narrative of “us” and “them,” it is not an isolated event, but fueled by social structures that perpetuate systemic racism in society. If a teacher, for example, tells a belittling sexist or racist narrative of why a pupil is having trouble with her math homework, the narrative is a form of emotional violence that can be linked to mechanisms of structural violence, which brings us to the third type of violence. Our narratives and interactions with others are always embedded in wider social and cultural webs of meaning, which mediate our experiences. We narrate our experiences and give meaning to things as beings entangled in such webs. Our social worlds are largely constituted through discursive practices that frame things in a certain way and involve practices of categorization and stigmatization. Discursive violence is a concept that acknowledges this complex social embeddedness of our actions and inactions. Such violence is symbolic in the sense that it concerns the symbolic systems that mediate our life worlds. The concept of discursive violence draws particular attention to social discourses and discursive acts that wound, ranging from blatant hate speech to more implicitly wounding narratives of “us” and “them,” which in turn are embedded in social structures and symbolic systems. The notion of discursive violence is also useful in drawing attention to how social discourses can be violent without anyone particularly meaning to harm another person. Violence can lie in the tendency of certain discursive practices to categorize or define

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  139 people in ways that counter how they would define themselves. Naming certain behaviors as “mad” or “abnormal,” for example, involves a normative dimension and suggests that they are outside normal, desirable or healthy behavior. Sometimes well-​meaning discursive practices, such as diagnostic categories in medicine, can be hurtful even when they are used with the intention to help patients. When doctors, for example, evaluate the mental health of patients and diagnose them, they practice power that can affect the patients in a variety of ways ranging from helpful to damaging. To take an example from my own experience, I recently received, completely out of the blue, a breast cancer diagnosis, which was so terribly shocking that I thought I should seek psychological help. In order to be eligible for counseling, one’s problem needs a medical label, and the one I received was “an adjustment disorder,” which involves the “development of emotional or behavioral symptoms in response to an identifiable stressor(s)” and typically “marked distress that is out of proportion to the severity or intensity of the stressor” (DSM-​V). To me it felt hurtful and wrong that when I found it difficult to deal with the news that I have cancer (which could mean that I will not see my children grow up), my reaction was categorized as pathological, “out of proportion,” unhealthily intense. Suddenly the problem was no longer my cancer and the grueling treatments but also my failure to adjust. This is an example of the potential violence of medical discourse that goes largely unrecognized but affects the lives of millions of patients every day. It also illustrates how the different types of violence overlap: physical, emotional and discursive. The illness itself has a violent physical aspect, but that is simply part of a biological process; for me, more difficult was the emotional violence exerted on me by those who gave me advice on how I should react, and the discursive violence linked to the pathologization of my distress. Cultural narratives affect how other people respond to our situation and experience, and sometimes the culturally dominant narratives feel hurtful to those whose experiences are at stake. For example, the dominant cultural narrative about cancer is that of battle and war. I was struck by how often people said to me: “Now you just have to fight hard!” The battle narrative is problematic because it positions cancer survivors as winners and losers, as if those who die did not fight hard enough. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that a strong fighting spirit would increase one’s chances of survival.2 Discursive violence can also be linked to defining someone exclusively on the basis of her illness. Many people seem to have a strong need to put me in a box and only see me as a patient, an ill person who should not be too much involved in healthy people’s lives, work or public life. Despite good intentions, this tends to perpetuate a patronizing, gendered discourse, which positions women as passive objects of care rather than as active agents. Through my own experience, I have come to understand that illness and health are not a binary. For people with chronic illness, the experience of good

140  Hanna Meretoja health can be more pervasive than moments of feeling ill. To respect their agency, it is important to acknowledge health within illness and illness within health (see Carel 2008). Some argue that we are always already entangled in power relationships and webs of violence, and that violence is an inevitable aspect of our social interactions, since language itself is already violent. There is an influential strand of Continental philosophy, which suggests that violence is ingrained in our systems of signification. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, has powerfully argued that conceptual knowledge is inherently violent because it masks the singularity of things by subsuming them under general concepts: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-​equivalent” (2001, 145). Drawing on this Nietzschean criticism, Emmanuel Levinas (1988, 170) equates “comprehending” with “englobing” and “appropriating,” and Jacques Derrida writes about “the originary violence of language” (or “arche-​violence”) with reference to how language is based on classifying, naming and inscribing “the unique within the system” (1997, 112). According to this conception, knowledge, understanding, language usage in general, and narrative in particular, involve assimilation and appropriation, that is, the act of subsuming something singular under something general, such as a general concept, law or model. There is a long tradition of thinking of understanding in such terms. René Descartes, for example, takes experience to conform to the innate ideas of the mind that regulate understanding, and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason presents understanding as a process of organizing sense perceptions according to general, atemporal categories.3 Descartes and Kant did not see this act of subsumption as inherently violent, but Nietzsche and Derrida challenged this tradition. The aspect of discursive violence to which they draw attention could be called conceptual or philosophical violence. It raises the question: is narrative, as a form of discourse, inherently violent?

The Possibility of Dialogical, Nonviolent Understanding If violence is inherent to our sense-​making practices, is there, then, any way out of violence? Can violence only be countered by counterviolence? Recent discussions on this topic have drawn attention to the prior human relationship that exists before any acts of violence, that is, to our fundamental dependency on one another, our shared destructibility (Butler 2009, 2020; Murphy 2012; Oliver 2018; Meretoja 2018a, 2022b). Commentators have pointed out that our interdependency implies not only susceptibility and ability to violence but also susceptibility and ability to care. We are capable of being destroyed by others, but we are also capable of being loved and touched. I would like to add that we are also capable of being transformed by others who leave a trace on our understanding, sensibility and mode of existence. Being responsive to others involves making room for their individuality. When one listens

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  141 to the other, one can learn something new and expand one’s perspectives, thereby acquiring a broader understanding, a more capacious view on things or even taking up a new mode of being with others. Listening is the key to nonviolence. My own experience as a cancer patient supports the hermeneutic view that nonviolence always starts with listening, with dialogue. I have experienced the opposite of discursive violence when I feel that someone is willing to listen rather than telling me what I should feel or do; this can be an experience of sharing the difficulty of the experience of illness and uncertainty, in all its messiness. It can happen when people say that they do not know what to say; when they ask how I am coping or feeling, or what it is like; when they ask anything at all; when they express their not-​ knowing, helplessness and grief rather than suggesting that they know how I should feel or respond. Most people have experienced nonviolence, particularly linked to experiences of being seen or heard or held by others. In addition to such experiential knowledge, there is a philosophical tradition of thought that allows us to flesh out the conditions of possibility of nonviolence. Namely, philosophical hermeneutics presents understanding as a fundamentally temporal process, which follows the structure of the hermeneutic circle: when we encounter something new in the world, we draw on our preunderstanding shaped by our earlier experiences; but instead of simply subsuming the unfamiliar under the familiar, the new experience can shape, modify and transform our preconceptions. As Hans-​Georg Gadamer writes, language usage does not consist of “acts of subsumption, through which something particular is subordinated to a general concept”; instead, as we use general concepts in particular situations, these concepts are “enriched by any given perception of a thing, so that what emerges is a new, more specific word formation which does more justice to the particularity of that act of perception” (1997, 428–​429). The temporality of the use of language and of processes of understanding entails that they are always already infused with the unfamiliar, strange and other: instead of being vehicles of appropriation, they are in a process of becoming. This hermeneutic conception emphasizes the performative dimension of language: rather than merely representing what has happened, language gives reality structure and shape. This view allows us to see how understanding, mediated by language, neither necessarily perpetuates dominant sense-​making practices nor is inevitably oppressive; it can also open up new possibilities, experiences and realities. However, there are ethically crucial differences in the ways in which concepts are transformed in the process of understanding. Understanding in the strong hermeneutic sense is successful only when it has what Gadamer calls an event character and the structure of negativity: we properly understand only when we realize that things are not what we thought they were (1997, 353–​361). Instead of subsuming the singular under general concepts, in such genuine understanding, the singular has power to

142  Hanna Meretoja transform the general. Gadamer does not adequately acknowledge, however, that often –​in the absence of a nonsubsumptive ethos –​lack of openness to otherness leads to violent appropriation. (Meretoja 2018a, 110) Nevertheless, he articulates how the temporality that is integral to all language use makes possible nonviolent use of language. In a genuinely dialogical relationship, the concepts we use are modified and transformed in the encounter with the other so that they do justice to the experience of the other. There is a continuum from subsumptive to nonsubsumptive practices of understanding, and in the ethical evaluation of narratives, it is helpful to distinguish between subsumptive narrative practices that attempt to explain singular experiences or events by subsuming them under culturally dominant narrative models, and nonsubsumptive narrative practices that challenge such categories of appropriation and present themselves as explorative and dialogical processes of interpretation and interaction (Meretoja 2018a, 112–​113). This is not meant as a clear-​cut dichotomy, however, as there can be no purely subsumptive or purely nonsubsumptive acts of (narrative) understanding. In all understanding, there is an element of the general and the particular, but their dialectical relationship can be closer to the subsumptive or nonsubsumptive end of the continuum. The possibility of nonsubsumptive understanding can be seen to underlie Hannah Arendt’s (1968, 1998) and Adriana Cavarero’s (2000) views, according to which storytelling makes it possible to acknowledge the lives of others in their uniqueness without trying to appropriate them through abstract conceptual schemes. In Arendt’s account, we are unique in our capacity to initiate new processes in the world –​to give birth to the unpredictable –​and we reveal our uniqueness to others through action and speech; while conceptual representations and definitions tend to reduce the unique “who” to a “what,” she suggests that a story in which the “who” –​the temporal, individual subject –​is presented as acting in the world in concrete, complex situations can give expression to the unexchangeable “who” revealed in that action (1998, 180–​181). The subject thereby appears in the process of becoming rather than appropriated in atemporal, conceptual, abstract terms: “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” (Arendt 1968, 105). Arendt and Cavarero deal with narrative and ethics from the point of view of the one whose life is being narrated. While third-​person narratives have been criticized for exploiting the pain of others –​suggesting that we are interested in stories of the suffering of others because we gain cathartic pleasure in reading about their misfortunate –​Arendt and Cavarero, in contrast, seem to think that having one’s story told and heard bestows one with a certain dignity, and that this is a stronger ethical benefit than the ethical cost of being a vehicle of someone else’s cathartic pleasure. Cavarero (2000) writes about a desire for narrative, which she understands as a desire to be told and thereby seen as a unique being, rather than being a mere exigent being. It is, however, useful to

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  143 supplement their view with one that places the emphasis on the agent of storytelling and with a perspective that takes into account our ways of engaging in practices of telling our own lives. The notion of narrative agency designates how we practice our agency by engaging in processes of narrating our experiences and navigating the narrative webs in which we are entangled. As Catriona Mackenzie puts it, “to be a person is to exercise narrative capacities for self-​interpretation,” which bring about “the integration of the self over time,” through a process that is “dynamic, provisional and open to change and revision” (2008, 11–​12). I suggest, however, that the narrative dimension of agency is not only at play in processes of self-​interpretation, but is more broadly a constitutive aspect of moral agency as we constantly participate, through our actions and inactions, in narrative practices that perpetuate and challenge social structures (Meretoja 2018a, 11–​12). I have defined narrative agency as our ability to navigate our narrative environments: to use, (re)interpret and engage with narratives that are culturally available to us, to analyze and challenge them, and to practice agential choice over which narratives we use and how we narrate our lives, relationships and the world around us (Meretoja 2022b). Storytelling provides the possibility of turning the victim of violence into an agent of storytelling who practices her narrative agency by telling her own story. This can be an empowering process, as it entails the possibility of selecting what gets told and how. There are, of course, significant differences, however, in whose stories get heard. Narrative agency is always socially embedded and contextual. The risk of using other people’s pain for our own purposes is one that authors of autobiographical narratives may seem to avoid by focusing on their own experiences of violence and suffering instead of those of others. But, if we take seriously the relationality of subjects and acknowledge that one cannot tell the story of one’s life without thereby also telling versions of other people’s lives, it is evident that the narrator of an autobiography cannot avoid the question of how to deal with the risk of violently using the lives of others for one’s own purposes.

Violence as Constitutive of Subjectivity I will now move on to discuss varieties of violence in Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical series My Struggle. This six-​volume series appeared in Norwegian in 2009–​2011 and in English in 2012–​2018. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to Knausgård by his surname when talking about the narrator of the autobiographical series, and I will use the first name, Karl Ove, when referring to the young character whose life the narrator recounts.4 An important theme of the series is that Knausgård has developed into his current self through the life experiences he narrates and through the process of narrating them and the project of writing his life. How is this process entangled with different forms of violence?

144  Hanna Meretoja From the first volume onwards, it is evident that Karl Ove Knausgård grows up to be who he is in a world that is replete with both physical and emotional violence exerted on him by his father, who in turn represents the violence of a traditional masculine culture that is under pressure to give way to broader narrative models of masculinity. Knausgård presents violence as constitutive of who he is: he would not be the man he is had he not grown up in that male-​dominated world that oozed violence. The bodily experience of the constant threat of emotional and physical violence committed by his father is an experience that accompanies him from his early childhood to his adult life. When he writes about his childhood, the affect that most strongly dominates his memories of his early years is fear of violence: “The very thought of dad, the fact that he existed, caused fear to pump through my body” (2014c, 73). The thought of his father takes hold of Karl Ove’s every movement: he is constantly conscious of where his father is moving in the house, and the father’s presence fills him with tension. Even after his father’s death, he cannot shake off the basic feeling of humiliation and shame. Knausgård tells us that in his dreams he is always a child overwhelmed by the feeling of humiliation: And even though the events that occurred there were new every night, the feeling they left me with was always the same. The constant feeling of humiliation. Often it could take several hours after waking before that feeling left my body. (2014a, 223) The most influential affect of his life is precisely the experience of humiliation and the feeling of shame that accompanies it. The violence he suffered as a child started earlier than he can remember. It predates his conscious memory, and some of it he knows only through his mother’s stories: The only thing I was told about that time was that I fell down the stairs and hyperventilated so much I fainted, and mum ran with me in her arms to the neighbour’s house to phone the hospital, as my face was going bluer and bluer, and I had screamed so much that in the end my father had dumped me in the bathtub and showered me with ice-​cold water to make me stop. Mum, who told me about the incident, had shielded us, and given him an ultimatum: one more time and she would leave him. (302) Through this narrative, their mother presumably attempts to present herself as someone who protected her son from harm, but Karl Ove tends to experience her mainly as an accomplice. She was part of a home culture that normalized violence. Even if she was not happy about it, mostly she

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  145 silently accepted it. Moreover, the violence that Karl Ove’s father inflicts on them is part of an intergenerational violent heritage: “Normally, we’ve always reproduced the pattern, repeated what we ourselves experienced as children. My dad’s dad used to hit him, so dad hit us” (2018, 215). The regular physical violence inflicted by their father on Karl Ove and his older brother Yngve is accompanied by emotional abuse that becomes increasingly complex the older they grow. A large part of Knausgård’s memories of his childhood center around emotional violence, which ranges from emotional neglect and indifference to verbal abuse and public humiliation. Under the constant threat of humiliation, the lives of Karl Ove and Yngve become a complex mirror hall of shame. Yngve cannot afford to make any mistakes or “show weakness,” or else he becomes their father’s object of ridicule, but when he does “fail,” Karl Ove’s worst fear is that Yngve notices his shame for his brother (2014a, 369). Given that Knausgård takes the violent atmosphere of his childhood home to be constitutive of who he has become, he is troubled by the question whether he is condemned to perpetuating the cycle of violence, or is there a way out. He thinks that if Yngve could stop passing on the legacy of their father to his children, then he could consider having children of his own: he sees that as a kind of test, concerning “whether what dad had handed down to us was in our bone marrow or whether it would be possible to break free” (303). To his relief, it goes well: [T]‌here was nothing of dad in Yngve as regards his attitude to children [...]. He never rejected them, he always had time for them whenever they went to him or he was needed, and he never tried to get close to them by which I mean he didn’t make them compensate for something in himself or in his life. (303) Karl Ove, too, is obviously a very different kind of father than his father was to him, but the attempt to break free –​as a father, man and human being –​is clearly not simple. It requires the project of writing. Knausgård says explicitly that he writes The Struggle largely to free himself of “the hold” that his father has always had over him (483). Knausgård feels that he can become himself only by a symbolic murder of his father, by writing himself free from him, and of the narrative models in his life that limit and constrict him. Telling the story of his own life clearly opens up for Knausgård the possibility to turn from a victim of violence to an agent of storytelling, who practices his narrative agency by telling his own story. This is for him an empowering process. He explores his identity through a temporal process of writing in which he keeps changing and is not subsumed under any fixed idea or category. Thereby he portrays his own life nonsubsumptively, in the process of acting in the world, in his temporal being.

146  Hanna Meretoja

Discursive Violence: Cultural Narrative Models and the “Force of We” In Knausgård’s autobiographical series, there is a salient tension between the collective and the individual, and it contains a rich reflection on the risks of discursive violence that lie in the collective aspects of language and cultural narrative models. The project of writing his life is also a project of negotiating the cultural narrative models that surround him and which he finds violent or limiting. It is first and foremost the “prefabricated nature” of everyday routines, habits and narrative scripts, their conventionality and predictability that offends him (2014b, 75–​76). For Knausgård’s ethos, crucial is the struggle against everything that stops him from becoming himself –​or to put it more generally: the struggle of individuals to become who they are –​integral to which is the struggle against conventions, norms and narrative models (Meretoja 2022a, 130). Knausgård repeatedly places the singularity of what is happening to him versus general narrative models: As I stepped out of the house that morning and followed Yngve to the car, for a moment it was as if I was entering a larger story than my own. The sons leaving home to bury their father, this was the story I suddenly found myself in. (2014a, 296) But after a while “The sensation of the great story had gone. We were not two sons, we were Yngve and Karl Ove; we were not going home but to Kristiansand; this was not a father we were burying, it was dad” (297). Karl Ove feels that becoming a father and taking up the Scandinavian model of a father who stays at home with the children takes something away from him: When I pushed the buggy all over town and spent my days taking care of my child it was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result; on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity […]. I squeezed myself into a mould that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move. (2014b, 99) However, for Knausgård, the problem goes deeper into language and its tendency to categorize and, in particular, reinforce the categories of “us” and “them,” which can lead to extreme political violence. In the sixth volume of My Struggle, he writes in the aftermath of the Utøya massacre (2018, 810) and reflects on the “power of the we.” (2018, 810, 828). After hearing about the massacre, he was overcome by a strong

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  147 need to be part of the Norwegian people who stood together against such violence. Later he thought that the need to be part of that “we” was the same need that Hitler abused: Only afterwards did I realise that these must have been the same forces, the enormous forces that reside within the we, that came over the German people in the 1930s. […] Against this we stood the they of the Jews. (2018, 811) “The language by which the we was conveyed” was “constitutive of the new identity” (811). In Nazi Germany, the Jews became “they” and then “it,” “bodies with limbs” (471), which could be simply destroyed: “This dehumanisation took place in the language, in the name of the we” (474). Seeing Hitler simply as “evil,” as “of  ‘the other’, and thereby not of us,” “we are unburdened of the atrocities he and Germany later committed, these being something ‘they’ did, dangerous no longer to us” (2018, 555). This is “indicative of how we humans think in terms of categories, and of course there is nothing wrong with that as long as we are aware of the dangers” (555). Knausgård thereby articulates the development from the violence of categories to the violence of the Holocaust. The Nazis abused the need for narrative identity, reinforced by the exclusion of the Jewish “others.” At the root of this problem is the tendency to subsume individuals under general categories, seeing them as representatives of a collective. In war, for example, “every soldier on the other side was firstly an enemy, representative of a collective, who could be killed as a matter of course, and only then an individual. It is this collectivity that is signalled by the uniform” (786). Seeing the Nazis as “our great ‘they’ ” stops us from realizing that “we ourselves, had we been a part of that time and place and not of this, would in all probability have marched beneath the banners of Nazism” (827). Knausgård acknowledges that we cannot escape all forms of “we,” so we just have to hope that “our we is a good we”: “Because if evil comes it will not come as ‘they’, in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as ‘we’. It will come as what is right” (828). This suggests that the use of categories is inevitable, but it is crucial to be aware of their dangers. Similarly, Knausgård shows that narrative always carries the risk of being abused, and hence we need awareness of our narrative environments. Nevertheless, he suggests that narratives are not inherently violent but can also be a way of encountering the singularity of the other, provided that we stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every

148  Hanna Meretoja human is revealed, unique and inalienable, and listen attentively to the story of a day in the life of each and every one of them. (820) Here Knausgård acknowledges how central dialogical responsiveness to others is to the possibility of nonviolence.

An Ethics of Honesty Is it, then, possible to narrate one’s life in a way that avoids the risk of violence that may inhere in narratives? How to narrate a life as nonviolently as possible? As we have seen, narrating one’s own life story makes it possible to exercise one’s own narrative agency. Such agency is always limited because we can never be aware of all the cultural narratives that shape us and which we perpetuate without our awareness. There is nevertheless the possibility of telling one’s own counternarratives that resist culturally dominant narratives.5 But when viewed from the perspective of other people in Knausgård’s life, is the narrative that is liberating for him violent for his loved ones? What liberates Knausgård from the oppressive forms of collectivity is first and foremost art. He is fighting to get hold of the singularity of who he is, under the general models and norms in which individuals are forced. Linear narrative form represents something general for Knausgård, which is why he struggles to give expression to what evades narrative, and in this effort, he turns to the fragmentary, essayistic form that he develops throughout his series. It seems that for Knausgård, art is both redemptive and dependent on violence –​because it has to break social norms in order to liberate us from those norms, and by so doing, some people are bound to get hurt. Telling one’s own story and showing oneself as an agent in the world inevitably involves telling the stories of others. How does Knausgård deal with the ethical problem of using his narrative power violently against other people in his life? He responds to this challenge through an ethics and aesthetics of brutal honesty. Knausgård searches for a language and narrative style that, according to him, would be as true to reality as possible. Tired of fiction, he wants to develop an aesthetics of truth that is animated by a hunger for reality: “The idea was to get as close as possible to my life” (2012, 654). His search for his own identity is inextricably linked to his project of writing in which he puts at display the secrets of his soul as scrupulously as possible (Meretoja 2022a, 131). For Knausgård, My Struggle is clearly first and foremost about himself, his perspective, his truth, his shame and anguish. He seems to think that truthfulness functions as the polar opposite of discursive violence: to the extent that his autobiographical narrative manages to be true, it makes possible integrity and provides a space to be who he really is and to show his life in all its complexity, contradictions and messiness. But since his life is entangled with those

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  149 of others, he also has to consider the price of that. The social cost of his autobiographical experiment has been covered extensively in the media. Half of Knausgård’s family is not talking to him, and his father’s side of the family threatened him with a lawsuit. According to his uncle, he committed “verbal rape” in his description of his father and the circumstances of his death. Knausgård is aware of hurting people around him. In an interview, he says that in My Struggle he sold his soul and there is hence “a measure of guilt”: “I get the rewards; the people I wrote about get the hurt” (Knausgård 2012). Despite its focus on the author-​narrator’s own subjective experiences, it also involves what is presented as a true account of other people in his life. Brutal honesty comes at the expense of his loved ones, especially at the expense of his children and the women of his life and their privacy. His ethics of honesty ultimately depends on an act of discursive violence against those around him. He seems to think of himself as writing only about his own pain, shame and humiliation. He makes his shame his trademark, his brand, and it clearly works –​it has made him rich. But at the same time, he cannot avoid writing about the pain and suffering of those around him. This becomes perhaps the most problematic in the last volume in which he writes about the bipolar disorder and hospitalization of his wife and fellow writer Linda, now his ex-​wife. He also makes his own children public property –​sharing intimate details about them in ways that are bound to affect them. Although the series is animated by an ethos of brutal honesty and shamelessness, at the same time it is evident that it is a selective interpretation: some things are left out, some are told with excruciating detail. It is part of the power that comes with narrative agency that the narrator can decide about such matters. Storytelling is always a way of presenting things from a certain perspective –​the narrator cannot do justice to everyone, and Knausgård the narrator sticks quite strongly and explicitly to his own perspective. His autobiographical project is in many ways rather monological, and the dominance of the protagonist’s perspective is potentially ethically problematic from the point of view of other characters. On the other hand, Knausgård foregrounds the process of writing in a way that shows that he does not try to efface himself in any way, quite the contrary. In fact, the self-​reflexive dimension of the series entails that Knausgård never pretends to tell the whole truth or the only truth. He wants to tell his own truth –​the truth of his subjective experience. Knausgård not only defends his project by insisting that what he writes is true; his defense is also that he did it for the sake of literature, for art. He aims at a new aesthetic that he calls the “banality of the everyday” (Knausgård 2012). In a way, this is for him not only an aesthetic but also an ethos that he uses to justify placing art above the ethical commitments woven into the fabric of family life and community life. Ultimately, only art is sacred for him; art is what turns the tedious everyday life into

150  Hanna Meretoja something meaningful and makes life worth living. He is willing to sacrifice everything for that, even his own children. He writes that the birth of his daughter made him feel intense happiness for four weeks, then he lost interest and just tried to make her sleep so that he would have time to read and write: “irrespective of the great tenderness I felt for her, my boredom and apathy were greater” (2014b, 81). “There wasn’t even the slightest spark of inspiration” in taking care of the children, so it “deflates” him “rather as if I’d had a puncture” (95): Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or made me happy [...]. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts. (75) Knausgård wants to have it both ways. He insists simultaneously on the literariness and factuality of his series. He tries to justify his autobiographical project that feeds on other people’s lives both by saying that it is true and by saying that it serves literature. It is sacred because as fiction it is art, and it is innocent because as nonfiction it is true. Perhaps it has resonated with so many readers precisely because of this duality. We all have to negotiate in one way or another the fine line between the fictional and the nonfictional when we narrate our lives and negotiate the ways in which our life stories are entangled with those of others. In evaluating Knausgård’s relation to narratives and violence, we should also acknowledge that the subject position he occupies is a highly privileged one in numerous ways. I have become more aware of how privileged I have been by losing some of my privileges (becoming a cancer patient and hence more vulnerable). Knausgård does not present himself as physically vulnerable. He is part of the Global North, a citizen of one of the most affluent countries in the world, a white, male, able-​bodied writer who has become rich by writing about his own life. He does little to acknowledge his privileged position in his work. He has the power to use narrative to his own advantage, to write and narrate his own life as he pleases, and his narrative is read and heard. Not everyone has this privilege. On the other hand, Knausgård succeeds in showing that even the most privileged are emotionally vulnerable –​even they can feel shame and insecurity. Overall, the series is fraught with a tension between a nonsubsumptive and a subsumptive dimension, and their weight depends on the angle from which one looks at it. The self-​reflexive dimension of the series shifts it toward the nonsubsumptive end of the continuum. Rather than

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  151 simply categorizing others, the narrator shows the temporal process of sense-​making in which the narrator relates his own experiences to people around him. Through its self-​reflexivity, the series also invites readers to reflect on their complicity in engaging with the experiences and sufferings of the people whom Knausgård tells us about. At the same time, however, the series manifests a lack of sensitivity to the vulnerability of others. It conveys little dialogical openness or genuine attempt at attentive listening to the perspectives and narrative versions of others. Knausgård’s case demonstrates poignantly how narrative practices are intricately entangled with different forms of violence and how the ethical evaluation of narratives and their violent dimensions is always contextual. What is liberating for the author and the readers may be less liberating for the side characters and antiheros of the narrative, and vice versa. But insofar as narratives increase our awareness of this dynamic, through their self-​reflexive strategies, they have a potential to promote our ability to engage with the cultural narratives that surround us in ways that can break at least some persistent cycles of violence.6

Notes 1 On the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the “narrative turn” and of the critique of narrative, see Meretoja (2014). 2 See Hauser and Schwarz (2020); I discuss the battle narrative also in Meretoja (2022b). 3 For a more detailed discussion of Kant’s subsumptive view of understanding, see Meretoja (2018a, 107–​108, 145n22). 4 Such a distinction can be made for analytic purposes even though they are obviously also entangled in the series (see Meretoja 2022a). 5 On the dynamics and dialogics of counternarratives, see Hyvärinen (2021) and Meretoja (2021). 6 Work on this chapter has been funded by the Academy of Finland project “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-​Critical Narrative Theory” (project number 314769).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War. New York: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political. New York: Verso. Carel, Havi. 2008. Illness. London: Routledge. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London & New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology (1967). Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

152  Hanna Meretoja Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. ​1997. Truth and Method (1960), 2nd ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Hauser, D. J., and N. Schwarz. 2020. “The War on Prevention II: Battle Metaphors Undermine Cancer Treatment and Prevention and Do Not Increase Vigilance.” Health Communication 35 (13), 1698–​1704. Hyvärinen, Matti. 2021. “Toward a Theory of Counter-​Narratives: Narrative Contestation, Cultural Canonicity, and Tellability.” In The Routledge Handbook of Counter-​Narratives, eds. Klarissa Lueg and Marianne Wolff Lundholt, 30–​42. London & New York: Routledge. Knausgård, Karl Ove. 2012. “I Have Given Away My Soul: An interview by Jon Henley.” The Guardian, March 9 (www.theg​uard​ian.com/​lifea​ndst​yle/​2012/​ mar/​09/​karl-​ove-​kna​usga​ard-​mem​oir-​fam​ily). Knausgård, Karl Ove. 2014a. A Death in the Family: My Struggle 1 (Min kamp 1, 2009). Trans. Don Bartlett. London: Vintage Books. Knausgård, Karl Ove. 2014b. A Man in Love: My Struggle 2 (Min kamp 2, 2009). Trans. Don Bartlett. London: Vintage Books. Knausgård, Karl Ove. 2014c. Boyhood Island: My Struggle 3 (Min kamp 3, 2009). Trans. Don Bartlett. London: Vintage Books. Knausgård, Karl Ove. 2018. My Struggle 6 (Min kamp 6, 2011). Trans. Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett. London: Harvill Secker. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas [Interview by Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley].” In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, 168–​180. London: Routledge. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2008. “Introduction: Practical Identity and Narrative Agency.” In Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, eds. Kim Atkins and Catriona Mackenzie, 1–​28. New York & London: Routledge. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-​Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018a. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018b. “From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration: A Non-​ Subsumptive Model of Storytelling.” In Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, eds. Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis, 101–​121. London & New York: Routledge. Meretoja, Hanna. 2021. “A Dialogics of Counter-​Narratives.” In The Routledge Handbook of Counter-​Narratives, eds. Klarissa Lueg and Marianne Wolff Lundholt, 30–​42. London & New York: Routledge. Meretoja, Hanna. 2022a. “Metanarrative Autofiction: Critical Engagement with Cultural Narrative Models.” In The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms, eds. Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor, 121–​140. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Meretoja, Hanna. 2022b. “Implicit Narratives and Narrative Agency: Evaluating Pandemic Storytelling.” Narrative Inquiry (online first April 19, 2022, https://​ doi.org/​10.1075/​ni.21076.mer). Murphy, Ann. 2012. Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary. New York: SUNY Press.

Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence  153 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2018. Response Ethics. London: Rowman & Littlefield. “violence, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. www. oed.com/​view/​Entry/​223​638. Accessed March 19, 2022.

10 Reading Violence, Violent Reading Levinas and Hermeneutics Colin Davis

Emmanuel Levinas is primarily associated with ethics, and certainly not with hermeneutics. He studied under Martin Heidegger; he was an almost exact contemporary of Hans-​Georg Gadamer and a colleague and friend of Paul Ricoeur; yet hermeneutics does not figure much as an explicit concern in his work.1 He was, however, an avid reader and interpreter, at least in regard of one prestigious text: the Talmud. From 1960 onwards, Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries were a regular feature at the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française. On each occasion, Levinas would distribute a passage from the Babylonian Talmud and comment on it, analyzing and continuing the tradition of rabbinic commentary while drawing out the relevance of the passage to the particular theme of the annual conference.2 While Levinas’ essays on secular literary texts are disappointing (see Levinas 1976b), he showed himself to be a brilliant, witty, resourceful and imaginative reader of the Talmud; and even if he did not theorize his reading practice in the vocabulary of contemporary hermeneutics, it nevertheless resonates with the reflections of Gadamer and Ricoeur. As Annette Aronowicz has argued, Levinas’ hermeneutic “is not limited to any set of texts, be they rabbinic or biblical. It is a hermeneutic tout court, an approach to interpretation as such” (2003, 47). And violence is a part of this hermeneutic, as it is central to Levinas’ thought in general. Jacques Derrida picks out the importance of violence in Levinas’ ethics in his long essay “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas,” which was first published in 1964 and arguably remains one of the most important interpretations of Levinas. Derrida shows how, for Levinas, the very practice of philosophy is violent insofar as it fails to respect alterity. Conceptual thinking is itself a form of violence, as it forces the ungraspable “otherwise than being” into preformed, falsifying terms and ideas. This violence cannot simply be relinquished; rather, our difficult task is to exercise a lesser violence in our necessarily violent resistance to violence. There is no way out of this dilemma, but at best there may be ways of confronting and minimizing its worst effects. Discourse is violent; interpretation is violent. And yet, discourse and interpretation are our daily bread. DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-14

Reading Violence, Violent Reading  155 This chapter examines in detail one of Levinas’ commentaries, “The Damage Caused by Fire,” and outlines some of the principles that guide Levinas’ practice of reading. Finally, the chapter briefly compares Levinas’ implied hermeneutic with aspects of the thought of his teacher, Heidegger, and his contemporaries Gadamer and Ricoeur. To begin, though, I want to draw out the explicit connection between reading and violence that emerges in one of Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries. This arises when Levinas discusses a passage that describes the scholar Raba immersed in study. As he reads, he scratches his foot so hard that he does not notice that he draws blood. Here, the scholar inflicts violence upon himself while in the act of reading. Levinas extends this violent situation to include the reader’s relation to the text: As if by chance, to rub in such a way that blood spurts out is perhaps the way one must “rub” the text to arrive at the life it conceals. Many of you are undoubtedly thinking, with good reason, that at this very moment, I am in the process of rubbing the text to make it spurt blood –​I rise to the challenge! Has anyone ever seen a reading that was something besides this effort carried out on a text? To the degree that it rests on the trust granted the author, it can only consist in this violence done to words to tear them from the secret that time and conventions have covered over with their sedimentations, a process begun as soon as these words appear in the open air of history. One must, by rubbing, remove this layer which corrodes them. (1990, 46–​47) There is a whole theory of reading here, and it is a theory grounded in violence. Immersed in the text, the reader does not realize that she is bleeding. But the reader also exercises violence on the text, scratching it in order to discover its secrets. There is both exorbitant trust in the text and overt distrust of it: trust that it has something important to say, but distrust because what it has to say is hidden beneath deceptive words and the accretions of custom and history. The reader is both the subject and object of violence: she bleeds and causes the text to bleed. The text has agency, but only when actualized through the reader. In reference to this passage, Ethan Kleinberg notes “the violent and transformative nature of [Levinas’] interpretative reading” (2019, 448), as Levinas accepts and embraces the violence he does to the text in order to elicit ever-​new meanings from it. Kleinberg then poses a pertinent question: “one must ask who or what is to keep this multiplicity of meanings from falling into pure perspectivalism or subjective musing? This is to ask, what keeps his hermeneutics from lapsing into relativism of one kind or another?” (2019, 448). This is an issue to which we shall return.

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“The Damage Caused by Fire” “The Damage Caused by Fire” was delivered in 1975, two years after the Yom Kippur War, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states.3 In this tense political context overcast by the recent memory of violent conflict, war was the theme of the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française. The Talmudic passage chosen for commentary by Levinas has no obvious, immediate relevance to this theme. It begins with a verse from the Bible, which the King James version renders as: If fire break out, and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith; he that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution. (Exodus 22, 6) There then follows a lengthy series of commentaries that Levinas summarizes in his talk. Levinas begins, though, by highlighting his own inadequacy to the task before him, as he does at the start of other instances of his Talmudic reading: “I always feel inferior to my text. This is not a purely rhetorical statement or false modesty but the acknowledgment, once again, that these texts contain more than what I am able to find in them” (1990, 229). I want to take Levinas at his word here. This is not false modesty, but rather a fundamental statement of belief: the text says more, knows more, than any commentator or act of interpretation can draw from it. Levinas’ discussion follows the development of the passage he is interpreting. In the first phase, every word of the biblical verse must be interrogated. Why is there a progression from thorns, to stacks of corn, to standing corn, to the whole field, and why are they separated by the word or (“the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field”) rather than and? The issue here is: for what is the person who started the fire responsible? And the answer is: not only for the immediate carrier of the fire, that is, the thorns, but also for its further consequences: not just the harvested corn, but the standing corn, and everything else that stands, and not just the corn but the whole field, including its furrows and stones. Whoever started the fire is responsible for everything that ensues. And the word or is used because responsibility extends to all instances of damage individually, whether they occur together or separately. At this point, the Rabbinic discussion of the passage takes another turn. In Talmudic terms, Halakhah becomes Aggadah as prescriptive law gives way to an occasion for philosophical and religious speculation.4 The stakes of the biblical passage are raised higher and higher. What if the fire were comparable to an epidemic? Who is responsible, who will be punished and who will be saved? What if the fire were comparable to a famine? Again one must ask, who is responsible, who will be punished and who will be saved? If the Angel of Death is in the city, how do we

Reading Violence, Violent Reading  157 avoid it? As we have already seen, whoever lights the fire is responsible for its consequences; but what does the fire represent, and who is the fire-​ lighter? The passage ends by comparing the fire to an arrow. They may seem different because an arrow is deliberately aimed at its target, whereas a fire, once lit, has unforeseeable consequences. But from the standpoint of responsibility, they are the same: whoever sets the fire must pay. Throughout his commentary, Levinas sticks closely to his source text. An important question, though, is: what does he add? What does his commentary supply that is not already, indisputably, explicit in the Talmudic passage? In terms suggested by the extract concerning Raba discussed above, where is the violence of reading that makes blood spurt from the text? The simple answer is that the commentary is inflected at every stage by the situation of the commentator, his immediate concerns and the state of the world around him. As Aronowicz puts it, Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries are “soaked in the present historical context” (1990, xxiv). In the 1975 colloquium, Levinas was supposed to be talking about war. Early in his commentary, he concedes that the Talmudic discussion of the damage caused by fire is not concerned with war. But then he qualifies this concession: fire, epidemics, famine and death are, after all, effects of war, he says (181). Perhaps, Levinas suggests, the Talmudic discussion of destruction and responsibility is, despite initial appearances, pertinent to the theme of war; and maybe, Levinas ponders, the passage allows the commentator to conceive of the very essence of war, even if that is not its overt topic. Moreover, the fire that catches in thorns and then burns the corn stacks and the standing corn and the whole field has a very specific resonance for Levinas, that is, the crematoria of Auschwitz. He names Auschwitz early in his commentary (1990, 182), and it recurs throughout his discussion. Of course, this was not and could not have been a reference point in the original Talmudic passage; but for Levinas, whose family and people were destroyed by the Holocaust, who dedicated his major work of 1974, Autrement qu’être ou au-​delà de l’essence, to the victims of antisemitism and who was talking here in 1975, in the aftermath and memory of the Yom Kippur War that threatened the existence of Israel, this passage is all about Auschwitz. Whoever lit the fire is responsible for its consequences. And someone has to pay. The reference to Auschwitz becomes particularly powerful and uncompromising when Levinas builds upon a passage in the Talmudic text that describes the Angel of Death circulating in the town. Levinas takes this to mean that exterminating violence is ubiquitous and of all times, so that “there is no radical difference between peace and war, between war and holocaust” (1990, 192). Even in times of peace, extermination has always already begun: Everywhere war and murder lie concealed, assassination lurks in every corner, killings go on on the sly. There would be no radical

158  Colin Davis difference between peace and Auschwitz. I do not think that pessimism can go much beyond this. Evil surpasses human responsibility and leaves not a corner intact where reason could collect itself. But perhaps this thesis is precisely a call to man’s infinite responsibility to an untiring wakefulness, to a total insomnia. (1990, 193) This passage illustrates Levinas’ hermeneutic at its most daring. The first part of it seems to be at a far remove from the Talmudic text. The ubiquitous, unescapable Angel of Death is transformed into a figure of human violence in a bleak, pessimistic vision: peace is just a form of war, murder is everywhere, Auschwitz is ever present even when peace seems secure, and evil surpasses human responsibility. But the final, one-​sentence paragraph fundamentally changes this position while referring back to the biblical passage with which the commentary began. Whoever lights the fire is responsible for all its consequences, however unintended or unforeseeable; and in the context of the pervasive evil that leads to war and extermination, Levinas suggests that, rather than constituting a limit on human responsibility, it does the very opposite. Responsibility is infinite, not bounded by any alibi or excuse. The Talmudic passage discussed by Levinas ends by alluding to biblical verses that refer to the destruction of Zion by fire, and to its future reconstruction and defense by a wall of fire. Levinas’ commentary also ends at this point, describing how destructive fire can be transformed into a protective wall (1990, 196). The Talmud announces, as Levinas says, “that Zion will be rebuilt,” and he insists that this “matters a great deal to us at the present moment [because without it] the war criminals would never have paid” (1990, 196). Here, Levinas links the Holocaust to the existence and survival of Israel. If Zion is not rebuilt, the war criminals have not paid the price for their crimes; those who lit the fire have not made restitution for the damage it caused. I presume that the protective wall of fire also alludes here to Israel’s successful self-​defense in the Yom Kippur war. This is a controversial conclusion. Levinas’ Zionism and his failure to condemn Israel’s treatment of Palestinians have been severely criticized by some. In a radio discussion in 1982, Levinas was evasive when invited to condemn the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which were committed with the collusion of the Israeli military; and when asked directly if the Palestinian could be the Other, for whom Levinas insists we have an infinite responsibility, he once again avoided the question (see Caygill 2002, 190–​194). Rather than taking a position on these difficult matters, my aim here is to point out how Levinas turns a commentary on a text from the Talmud into a reflection on the contemporary political situation. Indeed, he turns it into a reflection that some of his readers may find unsettling or unacceptable. The Talmudic passage is used to predict the emergence of the Jewish people from the destructive fire of

Reading Violence, Violent Reading  159 Auschwitz to the protective fire of the Yom Kippur War. And Levinas ends his commentary with a question, which may or may not be rhetorical: “But where is the glory of His presence among us, if not in the transfiguration of consuming and avenging fire into a protective wall, into a defensive barrier?” (1990, 196). Here, the commentary stops, as it must stop some time. But further commentary and commentary on the commentary is always possible. Howard Caygill, for example, expresses dissatisfaction with Levinas’ endorsement of the protective wall of fire: The protective wall is not all that it seems, since it too is a strange fire and what it protects it may equally destroy, for with a change of wind the fire directed without, toward the enemy, may turn within. (2002, 203) There may be no end to the process of commentary, just as there may be no end to the consequences of violent actions, and no limit on the price to be paid for them. Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries are underpinned by some underlying principles (for further discussion, see Davis 2010, 87–​88):

• The interpreter is inadequate to the task. As suggested above, this

•

•

•

•

should not be taken as an expression of false modesty on Levinas’ part. Rather, it stems from a deep conviction that the wisdom of the text exceeds the commentator’s ability to comprehend it exhaustively. Anything is interpretable. There is no rule for knowing in advance what can and cannot be interpreted, what does or does not bear a potential to signify. Even the word “or” might turn out to be supremely important. The only issue is: does it bring some interpretative gain? There is a unity and coherence to the text, it makes sense. We have to be careful here. This is not a glib conviction that the text is a kind of crossword puzzle that can be definitively resolved. Unity here does not mean homogeneity or consistency; if anything, it is the opposite. The belief in unity is an act of confidence and an interpretative presumption: any part of the text can be brought into contact with any other part, and something worthwhile might appear. The text speaks to us today, now. A biblical verse on the damage caused by fire is also concerned with the Holocaust; it is also concerned with the State of Israel. It speaks to you, to what you are thinking of now, if only you let it. The point comes when you have to stop interpreting and commit yourself to something. In the Talmud, Levinas believes, everything was thought, every opinion is recorded, everything is possible, and nothing is excluded. But in the realm of infinite possibilities, you have to choose. For Levinas, this means: do you support the State of Israel, now, today? We might agree, or we might disagree, but we have to make a choice.

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• Finally, you have to take responsibility for the choice you make.

Interpretation is a risk. It may be, in Paul de Man’s formulation, “nothing but the possibility of error” (1983, 141); but you have to do it, and you have to accept that you are responsible for its consequences.

Levinas and Hermeneutics In this final section, I shall briefly place Levinas’ hermeneutic practice alongside what are often taken to be the most important hermeneutic interventions of the last century, namely those of Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur. Despite studying under Heidegger in Germany in the late 1920s and writing some of the earliest important articles on his work in French, Levinas does not engage directly or extensively with the twentieth-​century strain of European hermeneutics. Ricoeur was his friend and colleague at Nanterre, but although Ricoeur wrote about Levinas, Levinas makes only passing references to Ricoeur’s work (see Ricoeur 1997; Malka 2005, 196–​ 207); and although Gadamer and Levinas almost certainly met, Gadamer mentions but never cites Levinas, and Levinas does not refer at all to Gadamer (see Vessey 2009, 69). In a rare reference to hermeneutics, Levinas appears to regard it as restricted to the interpretation of the everyday world rather than being capable of encountering the “otherwise than being” that his own thought pursues (1991, 81). Levinas shows little interest in hermeneutics, and a full engagement between his ethics and hermeneutic philosophy remains to be undertaken.5 What follows inevitably requires amplification and further reflection. Levinas’ teacher Heidegger built on work by German thinkers of the nineteenth century, preeminently Schleiermacher and Dilthey, placing interpretation right at the core of what it means to be human. Heidegger’s crucial intervention is to make of interpretation a defining feature of human existence: we are the being that endeavors to make sense of the being we are. In this perspective, the hermeneutic circle is our ineluctable habitat. We must interpret; and we can never fully escape the circle in which all understanding is always based on what we have already understood. Indeed, as Heidegger explains in section 32 of Being and Time, the issue is not to get out of the hermeneutic circle, but to understand ourselves as constitutively bound to it (1979, 153). In practice, Heidegger was also a brilliant (albeit sometimes wayward) interpreter of art and especially of poetry. One similarity to Levinas is the extreme authority he accords to the prestigious work, though for Heidegger that work could be a secular artwork, whereas for Levinas it is essentially only the Talmud or the Bible. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger insists that the artwork speaks to us if only we listen to it attentively; moreover, it unveils truth. There is in it what he calls “a happening of truth at work” (1971, 35). Heidegger’s secular texts have, then, the power to disclose truth that Levinas accords only to sacred

Reading Violence, Violent Reading  161 works. For Heidegger, poetry and thought are the twin peaks of human achievement, and the thinker and the poet are in dialogue with one another in the shared task of unveiling truth. However, there is an important distinction to be made between Heidegger and Levinas. Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries take place within a centuries-​long, ongoing tradition of interpretation in which numerous voices participate. Heidegger’s prestigious thinkers and poets are by comparison a very small and select group: mainly himself, some Ancient Greek philosophers and a few German poets, especially Hölderlin. A handful of major figures are in an exclusive conversation with one another in which others can participate only by listening. Moreover, despite the respect with which he treats his preferred poets, Heidegger sometimes hints at the priority of the philosophical interpreter over the poetic text. In an interesting slip –​which he subsequently failed to correct –​Heidegger once wrote that “The text [of one of Hölderlin’s poems] […] rests upon the following attempt at an interpretation” (2000, 74; for discussion, see Davis 2010, 20–​21). We might think that interpretations rest upon texts, but here Heidegger suggests that it is the other way around. The interpretation has priority over the poem; the thinker takes precedence over the poet. Despite his reverence for prestigious poets and poetic works, perhaps the thinker ultimately has the upper hand. Levinas, by contrast, repeatedly emphasizes his inadequacy as an interpreter of the texts he regards as prestigious. The text always says more than we can say about it. Drawing on Heidegger’s work and developing it in distinctive directions, Gadamer’s hermeneutics has some points of comparison with Levinas’. Gadamer shows decisively how interpretation always takes place within a specific context, and that it is part of a tradition of understanding even though it can position itself critically in relation to that tradition. Moreover, as Gadamer famously insists, understanding is not merely a reproductive but always also a productive activity (1986, 280): although it cannot fully elude the Heideggerian circle of understanding, it creates and produces new possibilities of meaning through the always-​different interaction of text and interpreter, and the fusion of ever-​ changing horizons. So Gadamerian interpretation, like the Levinasian version, is part of a multi-​voiced, context-​dependent dialogue that creates new meaning while also being rooted in a shared interpretative tradition. Gadamer, though, does not have Heidegger’s and Levinas’ extreme confidence in the truth contained in the prestigious work. Moreover, despite his theoretical insistence on the persistent productivity of interpretation, there is occasionally a surprising normativity about his reading practice. While maintaining that “conclusive interpretation simply does not exist” (1997, 146), Gadamer also sometimes does suggest that interpretation has gone far enough and is sufficiently “correct” to be curtailed. In his reading of some poems by Celan, for example, he retains a sense of their difficulty, openness and ambiguity, while occasionally insisting that some readings are “completely mistaken” and other points are “unambiguous”

162  Colin Davis and “clear” (1997, 87, 94, 107). And in an epilogue he asserts his conviction that he has reached something like correct understanding: “I believe I have more or less understood these poems” (1997, 128). The modest “more or less” holds back from claiming final, definitive understanding, but “I believe I have […] understood these poems,” nevertheless, suggests that he has come close enough, at least for the time being. Gadamer’s thinking foreshadows Levinas’ emphasis on dialogue and openness, but also retains a sense that, sometimes, interpretation may reach a satisfactory endpoint. Paul Ricoeur is the only one of the three great hermeneutic thinkers to have engaged directly with Levinas’ thought (see Ricoeur 1997), and much remains to be said about the similarities and differences between their work, and in particular about their shared reverence for sacred texts despite the different religious traditions from which they come. One of Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries was dedicated to Ricoeur on the occasion of his 65th birthday (see Levinas 1982, 107), and in his opening remarks to that commentary, Levinas suggests lines of agreement between himself and Ricoeur. He quotes Ricoeur on the issue of poetic language and extrapolates with apparent approval: In the poetic imagination, the unheard can be heard, called out to and expressed; a text can be opened out to the hermeneutic process more widely than the precise intentions which had determined it; metaphor can lead beyond the experiences which seem to have created it; and symbol would give cause for thought on a speculative level. (Levinas 1982, 107; translated in Levinas 1994, 86) Regrettably, Levinas goes no further in comparing Ricoeur’s conception of poetic language and hermeneutics with his own approach to the Talmud. There are, nevertheless, some important connections. In De l’interprétation, Ricoeur makes the distinction between interpretation as the recollection of meaning and interpretation as the exercise of suspicion.6 The first seeks to uncover the true meaning of a work; the second seeks to look behind that meaning and find its occluded determinants. The hermeneutics of suspicion appears to be in conflict with the hermeneutics of trust or faith, but in fact Ricoeur’s endeavor is to reconcile the two, to develop a practice of intelligent, contextual, suspicious reading that nevertheless maintains the confidence that the prestigious text has something important to say. This potentially provides an important avenue for comparison between Ricoeur’s and Levinas’ hermeneutics. Levinas’ relation to the Talmud is a complex combination of the hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion: the text speaks the truth, but that truth is never settled, and it can only be approached through dialogue, risk and audacity; it is not simply available, it has to be forced out of the text through a practice of daring reading.

Reading Violence, Violent Reading  163 The key problem in hermeneutics is how to guard against the unbounded proliferation of interpretations once it is accepted that there is no way out of the hermeneutic circle. Kleinberg, as quoted above, asks who or what will preserve us from “pure perspectivalism or subjective musing” (2019, 448). In the posttruth era, can we simply assert anything we like? Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries are underpinned by faith in sacred texts that anticipate all possible future contexts through the agency of the divine authority. Levinas does not extend this validation to profane texts; but any Levinasian hermeneutic that might be usable in nonsacred contexts requires something other than divine inspiration to preserve it from perspectivalism or subjective musing. Here again, Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur offer different ways forward. Heidegger appears to be unworried by the issue, confident in his own powers and those of his favored poets to attend to the disclosure of truth. More modestly and perhaps more democratically, Gadamer finds sufficient regulation of meaning in the ever presence of tradition, which is a component of the hermeneutic circle and can never simply be cast off. This resonates with Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries insofar as they depend on the traditional, dialogic nature of the text, in which all opinions are preserved and respected even if they are also rejected. Of the three great hermeneutic thinkers, Heidegger is closest to Levinas in conceiving of interpretation as inherently, necessarily violent. The “destruction” of the history of ontology that Heidegger seeks in Being and Time entails interpretive violence in order to rediscover phenomena in their primordiality. As John Caputo puts it, “Hermeneutics is able to ‘retrieve’ the primordial only insofar as it dismantles the accretions and derivative understandings of the world, of Dasein –​and of Being –​that have accumulated in the history of metaphysics. […] ‘Destruction’ is hermeneutic violence” (1987, 63). By contrast, both Gadamer and Ricoeur aim rather to expel violence from the scene of interpretation. Gadamer hopes to achieve this by engaging in an interpretive conversation that indefinitely defers the resort to violence even if it never achieves final consensus; and Ricoeur attempts to overcome the potential conflict of interpretations by reconciling apparently opposed practices. Although suspicion and faith may seem to be incompatible, Ricoeur nevertheless suggests that “perhaps extreme iconoclasm belongs to the restoration of meaning” (1965, 36). Despite everything that separates them, they turn out to be part of a single interpretive process. Overall, however, perhaps Ricoeur is most helpful for the possible development of a Levinasian hermeneutic relevant to secular contexts. Like Levinas, Ricoeur writes from a position of faith. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” associated with his thought is not an approach he embraces as the final word in interpretative practice. Rather, he endorses a hermeneutics grounded in faith, albeit a faith that is committed to rational interpretation:

164  Colin Davis Which faith? Perhaps no longer the first faith of the ordinary man [la foi première du charbonnier], but the second faith of the hermeneut, the faith that has passed through critique, post-​critical faith. […] It’s a reasonable faith because it interprets, but it is still faith because it seeks, through interpretation, a second naivety. (1965, 36–​37, my translation) Ricoeur’s “second naivety” can also serve to characterize Levinas’ interpretative stance, which offers unyielding trust in the text without sacrificing reason and rigor. And through this second naivety, hermeneutics also brings us back to Levinasian ethics and its categorical demand to listen to the voice of the Other. So, what is distinctive about Levinasian hermeneutics? In brief, I would suggest that it entails a deep trust in the authority of the work, a sense of inadequacy of the interpreter, a realization that reading may do violence to both the text and its reader, an acceptance that the risk of error is inherent in any interpretative act, and an ethical imperative to assume responsibility for our interpretations and for the mistakes they might bring with them. Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries are an amazing display of interpretive brilliance, rooted in scholarship and faith. They draw on a long tradition of interpretation and push it ever further, occupying a tense position between making demands of the text and knowing that the text makes demands on us. The text addresses us even as we violently force it to deliver its knowledge. It pulls at us as we pull at it. It is obviously important to distinguish between the metaphorical violence of reading and the real violence of Auschwitz, the Yom Kippur war, and the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. As the consequence of a bad interpretation, no one dies, normally. Or perhaps they do, sometimes. The point comes when you must stop and take responsibility for the way you have construed a text or construed the world that the text helps to construct. The decisions we take and the real or figural fires we set raging may lead to violence, which is not merely metaphorical. To put it bluntly: interpretation may be, after all, a matter of life and death.

Notes 1 The overlap between the lifespans of Levinas, Gadamer and Ricoeur is striking. Levinas was born in 1906 and died in 1995; Gadamer was born in 1900 and died in 2002; Ricoeur was born in 1913 and died in 2005. 2 For Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries, see Levinas (1968, 1976a, 1977, 1976b, 1982, 1988, 1996). For discussion, see Aronowicz (1990, 2003), Banon (1987) and Kleinberg (2019). There are two versions of the Talmud –​the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. Compiled between the second and sixth centuries of the common era, both contain statements of Jewish law and doctrine based on the Hebrew Bible as well as voluminous Rabbinic commentaries on them. Levinas’ commentaries are based on the Babylonian Talmud.

Reading Violence, Violent Reading  165 3 The commentary is published in French in Levinas (1977, 149–​180). I use here the English translation in Levinas (1990). 4 On Halakhah and Aggadah, see Levinas (1982, 169–​171). 5 Interesting attempts to bring together Levinas and Gadamer are nevertheless made in Bruns (2004) and Vessey (2009). 6 For a thorough analysis of suspicion in Ricoeur’s thought, see Scott-​Baumann (2009).

Works Cited Aronowicz, Annette. 1990. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz and edited by Emmanuel Levinas, ix–​xxxix. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Aronowicz, Annette. 2003. “The Little Man with the Burned Thighs: Levinas’s Biblical Hermeneutic.” In Levinas and Biblical Studies, edited by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, Gary A. Phillips and David Jobling, 33–​48. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Banon, David. 1987. La Lecture infinie: Les Voies de l’interprétation midrachique. Paris: Seuil. Bruns, Gerald L. 2004. “On the Coherence of Hermeneutics and Ethics: An Essay on Gadamer and Levinas.” In Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited by Bruce Krajewski, 30–​54. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Caputo, John D. 1987. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Caygill, Howard. 2002. Levinas and the Political. London and New York: Routledge. Davis, Colin. 2010. Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. De Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition. London: Methuen. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas.” In L’Écriture et la différence, 117–​228. Paris: Seuil. Points edition. Gadamer, Hans-​ Georg. 1986. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 5th edition. Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. 1997. Gadamer on Celon: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Translated by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany: State University of New York Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 15–​86. New York: Harper and Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1979. Sein und Zeit, 15th edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. New York: Humanity Books. Kleinberg, Ethan. 2019. “Levinas as a Reader of Jewish Texts: The Talmudic Commentaries.” In The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, edited by Michael L. Morgan, 443–​457. New York: Oxford University Press.

166  Colin Davis Levinas, Emmanuel. 1968. Quatre lectures talmudiques. Paris: Minuit. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1974. Autrement qu’être ou au-​delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1976a. Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme. Paris: Albin Michel. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1976b. Noms propres. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1977. Du sacré au saint: Cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques. Paris: Minuit. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1982. L’Au-​delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques. Paris: Minuit. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. A l’heure des nations. Paris: Minuit. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-​ à-​ l’autre. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1994. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Translated by Gary D. Mole. London: The Athlone Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1996. Nouvelles lectures talmudiques. Paris: Minuit. Malka, Salomon. 2005. Levinas, la vie et la trace. Paris: Albin Michel. Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud. Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul. 1997. Autrement: Lecture d’Autrement qu’être ou au-​ delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Scott-​ Baumann, Alison. 2009. Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. London: Bloomsbury. Vessey, David. 2009. “Relating Levinas and Gadamer through Heidegger.” Levinas Studies 4: 69–​90.

11 Style and the Violence of Passivity in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is Amanda Dennis

Is it odd that a novel containing scenes of ritualized torture described with unflinching matter-​of-​factness has been said to participate in a project of reimagining subjectivity and community?1 Samuel Beckett’s experimental novel, written in French as Comment c’est and self-​translated by the author, has been called a “penetrating work of utopian writing” and the key to an “ethico-​politics” based on a “fundamental reorientation of sociality” (Bixby 2012, 243; see also Bersani 1993). Similarly, Alain Badiou, making much of the pun of the book’s French title –​commencer –​ argues that the novel is indeed a beginning insofar as it dramatizes an exit from solipsism and a genuine, if violent, encounter with the Other (Badiou 2003). What distinguishes the text in both languages, apart from its setting in a purgatorial underworld of mud, is the boldness of its style. The novel is composed not in sentences but in strophes from which punctuation is absent. As he was beginning work on the novel, Beckett wrote to his friend and lover, Barbara Bray, about “trying to find the rhythm and syntax of extreme weakness” (2014, 211). The work’s unexpected coupling of bodily violence and broken syntax is part of what makes it so difficult –​at times almost unbearable –​to read. And yet, the physical violence described in the novel, the aim of which is to extort speech and “stories” from the victim, feels eerily exacerbated by Beckett’s break with the grammatical status quo. Beckett’s provocative pairing of bodily violence with truncated, “weakened” syntax reveals a violence underpinning sociality, and if socialization is predicated on a differentiation between self and other that bears within itself the potential for violence, it’s necessary to ask what possibilities exist for working toward new forms of relationality and, perhaps, mutual recognition. Beckett’s How It Is seems invested in discovering how a reworking of language might participate in the effort to reimagine community, even as it reduces culture, artistic creation and language to a material setting of mud that isn’t exactly separate from the bodies crawling in it; the mud is described as shit and as vomit, traversing the border between body and world. In How It Is, the torture scene is chillingly pedagogical, especially insofar as each bodily injury is assigned a “meaning.” For example, a “blade in arse” means that the victim must speak, and a “pestle on DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-15

168  Amanda Dennis kidney” means louder (69).2 Further “teaching” is undertaken by the torturer as he inscribes messages on the skin of the victim’s back, bloodying it with his nails: “left to right and top to bottom as in our civilization I carve my Roman capitals” (70). The allusion to “civilization” and “Roman capitals” in this context ties the “civilizing” objective of education and pedagogy to unchecked and unethical uses of force. In a Europe still reeling from the effects of the Second World War, notions of “civilization” and even “culture” were invariably fraught, as evidenced by Theodor Adorno’s famous claim that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz (1997, 34). Beckett, like Adorno, was critical of the postwar humanist sentiment widespread in France after the Second World War; his critical essay, “Le Peinture des Van Velde ou Le Monde et le pantalon” (1945–​1946), for example, closes with a satirical targeting of Sartrean humanism.3 Written in the 1960s during a different war –​a colonial war in Algeria –​How It Is presents the human body in its vulnerable materiality as necessary to the transmission of culture. At the same time, the novel emphasizes the closeness between civilization and violence. Its critique takes the form of an interrogation of how meanings and culture arise and how they are informed and mediated by both the materiality of the physical body and the materiality of language. Early influential readings of How It Is describe the novel as exploring the complexity of its own signifying process, breaking down structures of narrative and grammar so as to suggest new possibilities for meaning (Blanchot 1993, 326–​331). More recently, such metatextual readings have given way to historical, political and archival analyses that register the influences of colonization (Beckett’s reading of Roger Casement’s Black Diaries, with their descriptions of colonial violence), the Algerian War of Independence (state-​sanctioned torture carried out by French soldiers) and the influence of Dante, Stoicism, Sade and a wealth of other philosophical, literary and theological texts and traditions (Bixby 2012; Caselli 2005; Cordingley 2018; Morin 2017; Rabaté 2016).4 The novel’s coupling of broken syntax with scenes of torture and difficulty of movement pairs a figurative “violence” to language with literal violence to the body. This makes us unusually aware of the ways in which the body is linked to language, of how, for instance, we must navigate tradition and convention to say what it is that we mean. The novel persistently and provocatively links the muddy matter through which bodies crawl to language and to cultural tradition. An offshoot from an early draft of How It Is, published as “L’Image” in A Quarterly Review, opens with a description of the tongue clogged with mud: “La langue se charge de boue…” (1988 (1995), 9).5 The meaning of tongue (langue) extends metonymically from the mouth’s organ to language more broadly, such that the novel’s interrogation of processes of signification sits uncomfortably with the body’s struggle to differentiate itself from and create meaning within its environment. The disarticulation of language in the novel (its eschewal of punctuation and sentence structure) and the dissolution of

Style and the Violence of Passivity  169 the world into mud suggest a relationship between the work of signification (in language) and the physical body’s way of orienting within its surroundings, including, perhaps, its encounters with others, violent and otherwise. This linkage between meaning in language and the physical body’s orientation of its surroundings has been theorized by the French philosopher of embodiment Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, as “style.” Traditionally, style signals humanist values; its link to artistry and form implies power over nature, and insistences like de Buffon’s “le style, c’est l’homme même” (style is the man) link it to individuality. But Beckett subverts this ideal, portraying the human as joined to its other in sadistic dependence, a move that reveals the violence underpinning desire for individuation. Style, as Merleau-​Ponty redefines it, is not active, nor is it a flourish, nor is it intentional. Rather, style describes the bodily process of making articulations within a system, carving it into perspectives, making the right cuts. Merleau-​Ponty’s emphasis on a material “kinship” between bodies reveals in Beckett’s novel the possibility –​perhaps still latent –​of recognition based on an awareness of style as provisional differentiation from a common element. I argue that How It Is interrogates the work of signification as style in Merleau-​Ponty’s sense, where our initiation as speaking subjects is predicated on our material belonging to our surroundings. Meaning becomes less an act of will than a question of how we orient ourselves within an existing linguistic environment. Yet, while Merleau-​Ponty’s vision of intersubjectivity mediated through style is largely harmonious, Beckett’s is more painful, flickering between tenderness and horror. How It Is is a fable set in a purgatorial underworld of darkness and mud. At the start, we find the narrator reciting “scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine” that contain fragments from his life above in the light (7). In this respect, the “I” of the novel is both narrator and narrated, insofar as he recites merely what the “ancient voice” tells him.6 The novel insists repeatedly on its tripartite structure, perhaps parodying Aristotle’s three-​act structure of narrative. In place of Aristotle’s setup, confrontation and resolution, we find before Pim, with Pim and after Pim (7). The text insists on the constructed nature of its narrative: “divide into three a single eternity for the sake of clarity” (24). And from the present, situated in Part 3 –​“part three it’s there I have my life” (27) –​the narrator/​narrated recounts the rest. In Part 1 of the novel, before Pim, the narrator/​narrated crawls through the mud, which is described not only as shit and vomit but also as something elemental: “warmth of primeval mud impenetrable dark” (11) or “tiédeur de boue originelle” in the French (Beckett 1961, 16). If the narrator/​narrated has been returned to a creative chaos, a prima materia where meanings first arise, he also inhabits a purgatorial underworld cut off from life above in the light: “life life the other above in the light said to have been mine on and off no going back up there no question no one asking that of me never” (8). In Part 2, the narrator/​narrated finds a companion, Pim, to whom he

170  Amanda Dennis gives “lessons” in the form of tortures organized into a “table of basic stimuli” (69). The tortures, which include clawing the armpit and carving messages into the skin of Pim’s back, are designed to make Pim speak and sing. In Part 3, the narrator/​narrated, abandoned by Pim, waits for his own torturer, Bom, to inflict upon him the same suffering he meted out to Pim. In Part 3 the narrator/​narrated imagines a cosmology (perhaps based on the mechanistic universe of seventeenth-​century rationalism), a massive circular chain where everyone passes eternally through four stages: traveling alone, torturing another, being abandoned and being tortured by another. He throws the existence of the novel’s world into question in its last pages: “all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false yes” (144). How It Is insists on the physical body’s inherence in a material environment that includes language. The mud through which the I of the novel moves and murmurs is both elemental and malleable: “the mud never cold never dry it doesn’t dry on me” (26). Drawing attention to the aural similarity between one of the novel’s refrains, “quaqua on all sides,” and the French caca, Anthony Cordingley argues in his 2018 study of How It Is that the novel’s mud represents the detritus of learning in the humanist tradition. He describes the mud as “the voice of past experience and learning materialized into excremental residue (quaqua/​ caca)” (2018, 204). In a similar vein, Jean-​Michel Rabaté reminds us that Beckett is developing Leopardi’s line, e fango è mondo (and the world is filth), to make mud and slime the substances of “an excremental world that extends to verbal matter” (2016, 55). He writes: “if the world is mud and if language is slime, one can barely distinguish them” (2016, 55). Mud, then, seems to figure for both physical environment and language (in particular the linguistic and cultural traditions into which we are born). The fact that the mud moves through the narrator’s body (as he moves through it) implicates the physical body’s movement in processes of signification, and one of the novel’s refrains emphasizes the body’s role in the production of speech: “brief movements of the lower face” (26). The narrator/​narrated also refers to his utterance as “a fart fraught with meaning issuing through the mouth” (26), further linking language to the body and excrement. These readings echo –​albeit in a more earthy register –​Blanchot’s early discussion of the narrative voice in How It Is and his suggestion that the novel’s oddly resonant language is malleable to reshaping. For Blanchot, the open-​ended resonance of the narrator’s voice causes a crisis in reading, a désoeuvrement or “un-​working” that opens a creative space in which radically new forms might arise. The voice in the novel could be “the voice of all of us, the impersonal, errant, continuous, simultaneous and alternating speech in which each of us, under the false identity we attribute to ourselves, cuts out or projects the part that falls to him or her” (1993, 330). Blanchot further describes how the novel brings together author and reader, “each nearly merged with the other” (1993, 329),

Style and the Violence of Passivity  171 such that discrete identities are held in abeyance, enabling new relations to take shape. Anthony Cordingley suggests that Blanchot’s metatextual focus has discouraged scholars from piecing together Beckett’s source material and uncovering the novel’s buried intertexts. His own work, attentive to Beckett’s draft manuscripts, impressively fills this gap, identifying a dizzying array of philosophical and literary allusions embedded in the novel. This leads him to call How It Is a “fragmenting of Western philosophy’s grand narrative, which inhibits the ‘I’ from transmitting a fiction of the Enlightenment but frees him to arrange its fragments anew” (2018, 5). I find this a convincing proposition, but note its similarity to Blanchot’s initial one. Cordingley further describes the mud as “signifying boue” and writes of the genesis of “new poetic relations from inherited sense” as the narrator delivers himself into “new fictions of the present” (2018, 11). These readings –​in part due to Blanchot’s early influence –​ overwhelmingly emphasize the extent to which the novel opens space for new possibilities, for “new poetic relations,” but my aim is to consider whether and how the descriptions of violence and syntactical constraint contribute to this poetic possibility. Other readers, associated with an “ethical turn” in Beckett Studies, consider violence more explicitly in their readings of How It Is. Inspired by Badiou’s (2003) claim that How It Is achieves an exit from solipsism and an encounter with the Other, critics situate Beckett within a framework of postmodern ethics based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas (Bixby 2012; Gibson 2006; Weller 2006; Smith 2008).7 More pertinent to the present argument, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit read the novel as suggesting new possibilities for relationality. But Bersani and Dutoit’s reading (as opposed to Badiou’s) hews closer to the emotional tenor of Beckett’s work in its suggestion that How It Is reveals the deep structure of “reciprocal torment that originally made the social possible” (1993, 63). They connect this to language, explaining, “The torture consists in the fact that as soon as we begin to listen to voices we can’t help hearing an injunction to speak” (1993, 62). For Bersani and Dutoit, Beckett’s novel exposes the violence at the heart of sociality and implicitly critiques the status quo (how it is) by laying bare the brutal mechanisms of subject formation. But resistance is possible: “to be lost or disseminated in a space that cannot be dominated, and to register attentively how relations are affected by a shattered ego’s displacements within that space” may open the way toward renegotiating relations between the human and its environment (including other humans), “a joyful self-​dismissal giving birth to a new kind of power” (1993, 9). A Merleau-​Pontian optic emphasizes that the mud of How It Is not only is the repository of tired, used-​up forms (excrescence or waste) but also the mineral element from which forms arise in the first place. The “primeval” mud never dries; it remains, in a sense, plastic. As a substrate on which style acts (passively), mud represents both language –​its raw possibilities at our disposal –​and the surrounding space that responds to

172  Amanda Dennis a body’s movement. A parallel between language and space suggests that the field of existing significations (language) might be revitalized by the body’s work of style. Merleau-​Ponty’s conception of style is given most succinctly in his 1952 essay, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.”8 The essay draws heavily on Saussure’s theory of linguistic difference and describes language as a variant of physical space. Meaning arises from a particular negotiation of the field of existing significations, much as the physical body orients its spatial surroundings. In Merleau-​Ponty’s thinking, style is what enables signification as well as the possibility of novelty.9 “There is meaning,” Merleau-​Ponty writes, “when we submit the givens of the world to a ‘coherent deformation’ ” (1993, 91, translation modified). This is a refined version of a stronger claim Merleau-​Ponty makes in an earlier draft of this essay, when he describes style as the foundation of signification: “le style est ce qui rend possible toute signification” (1969, 81). Merleau-​Pontian style, which is linked to the perspective and movement of a particular body, rearticulates space and language to create meaning (sens). Style’s way of recombining givens to produce new meaning is pertinent to Beckett’s artistic process. The early Beckett adopted the technique of “grafting” his extensive reading into his literary work (Gontarski 2002, 19–​ 20). This is consistent with Anthony Cordingley’s claim, on the basis of manuscript notebooks, that Beckett revised Comment c’est by paring away explicit references (2018, 2). A Merleau-​Pontian reading reveals a material agency in Beckett’s prose that operates by “taking up” and reworking “what is.” But How It Is also reveals in the work of style possibilities for both intimacy and violence that Merleau-​Ponty does not address. When we write and speak, we impose our articulations on others, and we submit to others’ styles in turn. It is insofar as style reminds us of our material connectedness to our environment that it presents us with possibilities for renegotiating our modes of relation. How It Is strips away the sentence as unit of organization, along with punctuation that tells us how to group words together. The text’s organizing feature, its strophes, were added relatively late, in the fourth full-​length version of the Comment c’est manuscript (Magessa O’Reilly 2001, xv). Édouard Magessa O’Reilly calls the strophes “narrative units of breath,” places where a speaker might pause for air (2009, ix). The idea is convincing, since the strophes don’t maintain their discreteness; ideas extend over them, across them. The abolition of syntax returns language to a more malleable state, like raw material, but the text still teaches us where its articulations lie. Certain word groups become familiar through repetition, enabling us to orient within the text and make the correct cut. A line from early in the novel may serve as an example: “Voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops tell me again finish telling me invocation” (7). We don’t

Style and the Violence of Passivity  173 know at first how to group these words, since the phrase might be read and the words grouped together in any number of ways. But as we read on in the text, we start to recognize groupings of words as units of meaning, such as “voice once without” and “quaqua on all sides.” We make the following cuts: [Voice once without] [quaqua on all sides] [then in me when the panting stops] [tell me again] [finish telling me] [invocation]. Throughout the novel we are aware, at least subliminally, of our learning process, as the text teaches us how to read it by repeating its refrains. We witness the emergence of signification in language that is both malleable and material, and which “means” not at the behest of a speaker or author, but by a self-​articulating process of repetition and variation The novel’s opening lines announce it as a citation or imperfect regurgitation –​“I say it as I hear it” –​of a voice that is within the narrator/​ narrated, yet not his. The refrain, “scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine,” indicates how we as speaking subjects inherit a language not of our making and perpetuate the social order through the act of speech. The idea that one’s voice is one’s own is further challenged by the rotation of roles and contagion of voices in the novel. Even as he extorts speech from Pim, the narrator/​narrated recognizes that he has been and will again be in the position of victim –​Pim’s position –​and that a torturer, Bem or Bom, will elicit from him speech and memory: “Bem come to cleave to me where I lay abandoned to give me a name his name to give me a life make me talk of a life said to have been mine” (109). The voice with its fables seems to travel from victim to torturer, so that the narrator/​narrated is influenced by Pim’s voice: “I talk like him I do we’re talking of me like him little blurts midget grammar” (76) (petits paquets grammaire d’oiseau) (1961, 120). These “little blurts” or, in the French version, parcels of bird grammar, seem to refer to the syntax of the novel itself, a metanarrative observation that draws our attention to the unusual rhythm of the language we’re reading, truncated in transmission, reflecting, perhaps, the violence of that transmission. Not only is there increased influence among voices, but each voice is a variation on “the voice of us all” (la nôtre à tous) (1961, 120), and the “voice of us all” is “where we get our old talk,” though “each his own way” (76). The body’s belonging to its material environment enables reciprocity and exchange between bodies, and Part 3 describes bodies joined “one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure” (140). As the narrator/​narrator is torturing Pim, extorting speech, he bends his ear to Pim’s mouth to create “a slight overlapping of flesh” (140). This “overlapping” of flesh underscores, by its reference to common materiality, the contingency, if not interchangeability, of their positions: “linked thus bodily together each one of us is at the same time Bom and Pim tormentor and tormented pedant and dunce wooer and wooed speechless and reafflicted with speech” (140).10 For Merleau-​Ponty, belonging to a common flesh affords a reversibility between subject and object positions,

174  Amanda Dennis and it is this reversibility that conditions subjectivity. The “overlapping” flesh in How It Is also founds a reversibility, but one that enables bodies to alternate between the roles of tormentor and tormented. The (ex)changing of positions in the novel is regulated by a force that emerges under the ominous heading of “justice.” The narrator knows that the torture he visits on Pim will be visited upon him in (re)turn, not by Pim but by Bom. Part 3 imagines an infinite community of Boms and Pims kept in movement by a “justice” that ensures the cycle of torture and victimhood will have no end. Justice keeps the wheel turning because, if the procession were stopped, “the traveler to whom life owes a victim will never have another and never another tormentor the abandoned to whom life owes one” (141). Jean-​Michel Rabaté describes how Dante’s contrapasso inflects Beckett’s disturbing description of a “justice” indistinguishable from injustice (2016, 56). Rabaté further argues that this allegory of human relations as an attempt to “even scores” echoes Adorno’s reading of Kantian reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “For Adorno, Kantian reason leads to the calculating rationality of a totalitarian order. Its counterpart is the systematic mechanization of pleasures in Sade’s perverse utopias” (2016, 114). Such an idea would have had particular resonance in postwar Europe; rationalism taken to an extreme becomes so deferential to its own laws that it not only ignores the human but perpetuates human suffering to serve these laws. For Adorno, Sade’s ritualization of suffering pushes Kantian reason to its logical, horrific extreme. “Justice,” a rational force that directs the movement of bodies, operates in tension with an alternative cosmology in the novel. Bodies “glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure” most likely derives from Beckett’s reading of the Ancient Stoics, for whom there existed “one material and cosmic body” (Cordingley 2018, 99). It would seem that agency is compromised as much by subsumption in a Stoic materialist “world body” as by submission to a rational system. But if we allow ourselves to read the flesh in Merleau-​Ponty’s sense –​later applied by Christian phenomenologists to union in the body of Christ –​we find that it supports the possibility of recognition, a possibility imperiled by the threat of forgetting. The narrator/​narrated pauses his torture of Pim to speculate about what Pim is thinking: “but this man is no fool he must say to himself I would if I were he what does he require of me or better still what is required of me that I am tormented thus” (63). Empathy in this instance seems perversely instrumental, used to boost the efficacy of the narrator’s torture teaching. Pim learns the “basic stimuli,” singing when clawed in the armpit, speaking when he feels a blade in his arse, falling silent when thumped on the head, and so on. He also responds to volume controls: pestle in the kidney for louder, a finger in the arse for softer. It is only later, presumably looking back on his torture of Pim, that the narrator/​narrated seems to regret a lost opportunity: “Pim to speak he turns his head tears in the eyes my tears my eyes if I had any it was then

Style and the Violence of Passivity  175 I needed them not now” (75). “Tears in the eyes” seems to apply first to Pim’s body, then to the body of the “I,” establishing rapport by way of embodiment. The narrator questions whether he had eyes at the moment he was torturer, whether he saw what he was doing. Yet, this wish that he had recognized Pim’s humanity when it mattered suggests that fellow feeling comes too late for the narrator/​narrated. Regret fixes him to that earlier moment: “his mouth to my ear our narrow shoulders overlapping his hairs in mine human breath shrill murmur if too loud finger in arse I’ll stir no more from this place I’m still there” (75). The narrator fixes himself in time in part so as not to forget. For, according to the rules of the novel’s cosmology, “one knows one’s tormentor only as long as it takes to suffer him and one’s victim only as long as it takes to enjoy him if as long” (121). The mud, then, is like the river Lethe; all is forgotten in its materiality. With this scene of recognition, Beckett stages a harsh critique of automatization, an unthinking, unfeeling, blind march of a “progress” that could murder millions in its name. The tension between memory (linked with recognition and meaning) and forgetting (which enables the cycle of torture and victimhood to continue) also animates one of the strangest and most unsettling aspects of the torture episode: the narrator/​narrated’s tenderness for Pim. He wonders “if Pim loved me a little yes or no if I loved him a little in the dark the mud in spite of all a little affection” (74). The narrator/​narrator then issues a surprising imperative: “find someone at last someone find you at last live together glued together love each other a little love a little without being loved be loved a little without loving answer that leave it vague leave it dark” (74). However parodic this exhortation might be (“live together glued together”), it seems to suggest an alternative to “justice” insofar as it flaunts a rationalist ideal of fairness (“love a little without being loved be loved a little without loving”). An association between “love” and what is vague and dark also contrasts with the brutal exposure of eliciting speech from Pim and with the bright lamps held up by note-​taking scribes. Love is presented in opposition to an automatic “justice,” its vagueness an embodied respite from the harsh light of rationalized sociality. But the novel parodies any kind of “submission” to a higher order, as its horrific vision of “Stoic love” makes plain: no other goal than the next mortal cleave to him give him a name train him up bloody him all over with Roman capitals gorge on his fables unite for life in stoic love to the last shrimp and a little longer. (62) “No other goal” seems to mock Aristotelian teleology –​“a rationalist cosmic vision unfurling towards its final ends” –​as much as it does a Stoic acceptance of one’s humility in the face of a materialist eternity (Cordingley 2018, 104, 33). Beckett parodies this logic, insofar as the “I”

176  Amanda Dennis hopes to learn the natural order through will-​less listening (“I say it as I hear it natural order”) (Cordingley 2018, 115). The will-​less submission of the Stoics to a higher body is not ultimately a viable alternative, since even the uncomfortable cleavage of mortals described above involves a bloodying with Roman capitals –​that is, initiation into language by means of “cuts” in the flesh. Meaning or signification, in Beckett, is always made through a torturous process of differentiation. The horror of sociality in the novel reaches its apex in the same moment that language and the body are coupled in yet a different way, as the narrator uses his nails to carve writing onto Pim’s back, “intact at the outset” (70): “from left to right and top to bottom as in our civilization I carve my Roman capitals/​arduous beginnings then less he is no fool merely slow in the end he understands almost all” (70). This writing on the body is similar to that in Kafka’s 1914 story, “In the Penal Colony,” in which a prisoner’s sentence is written on his body by a harrow in a slow process of execution. The idea is that the criminal will come to understand in the moment just before his death the meaning of his sentence (the double meaning of sentence as condemnation and semantic unit cannot have escaped Beckett). The inscriptions on Pim’s back are names, YOU PIM, directives to speak about YOUR LIFE ABOVE or YOUR LIFE HERE BEFORE ME and disturbing couplings of love and violence: DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT. This writing on the body, situated within a torturous pedagogical setting that calls itself “civilization,” not only underscores the necessity of the body to the work of style but also demonstrates the closeness between style, desire and violence. How It Is interrogates the work of style, which, at the most fundamental level, demonstrates how relations and meanings arise. Style, as the passive activity of partitioning surroundings, is far sharper and more violent here than according to Merleau-​Ponty’s idea of it as a bricolage of other styles, harmoniously reassembled in each iteration, repetition with a difference. In Beckett, the transmission of language, culture and learning entails violence, and we find in How It Is a critique of social institutions that perpetuate violence and subordination of others in the name of progress. I have suggested that How It Is goes deeper even than this critique; it interrogates the work of signification as an effect of style, a highly creative, bodily process that, if understood in its radical sense, implicates us (as bodies) within our material environment and within language. Style reveals the extent to which relationality and language develop from articulations within a substance that encompasses self and other, and our initiation as speaking subjects depends on our material belonging to these surroundings. This environment is not just the mud of the earth but systems of language and culture that, having rigidified, are softened in the novel, so as to open possibilities for renewal.

Style and the Violence of Passivity  177

Notes 1 I gratefully acknowledge permission from Edinburgh University Press to reprint material that first appeared in Beckett and Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency (2021). 2 All references to How It Is are to the Grove Press edition (1964) and are cited by page number only in the text. 3 For further discussion of Beckett’s writings of the mid-​to late 1940s as a “counterblast to the new, Gaullist heroic moralism,” see Gibson (2014, 107). 4 Roger Casement was an Irishman who, on consular missions to Africa and South America, documented the atrocities of colonial violence in private diaries, where he also gave accounts of his sexual encounters with native men. Casement was executed by the British for his involvement in the 1916 Easter rising, and the diaries were used against him. Beckett read the diaries in 1959, as he was beginning work on How It Is (Bixby 2012). 5 I refer to Edith Fournier’s translation, “The Image,” in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–​1989, 165–​168. 6 Beckett describes the narrator/​narrated in a letter to Hugh Kenner dated April 8, 1960 (Kenner 1973, 94–​95). 7 For Levinas, ethical action is grounded in the recognition of an absolute Other, “who issues an a priori demand for responsibility that structures all sociality” (Bixby 2012, 245). 8 This was Merleau-​Ponty’s last essay published in Les Temps modernes, prior to his break with Sartre and his resignation from the journal. It was reprinted in Signes (1960). 9 Hugh Silverman describes style in Merleau-​ Ponty as “[announcing] the arrival of the ‘new;’” “Style is the tendency toward signification in the lived language” (1980, 139). 10 In the French, “reafflicted with speech” is “théâtre d’une parole retrouvée” (1961, 127). A theater of rediscovered speech emphasizes the performance of taking up given language, an active–​passive repetition, where “reafflicted” connotes pain and passivity.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 1997. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 17–​34. Badiou, Alain. 2003. On Beckett. Ed. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power. Trans. Bruno Bosteels, Nina Power and Alberto Toscano. London: Clinamen. Beckett, Samuel. 1961. Comment c’est. Paris: Minuit. Beckett, Samuel. 1964. How It Is. New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel. 1989. Le Monde et le pantalon suivi de Peintres de l'empêchement. Paris: Minuit. Beckett, Samuel. 1988. L’Image. Paris: Minuit. Beckett, Samuel. 1995. The Complete Short Prose, 1929–​1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel. 2014. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. III, 1957–​1965. Eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

178  Amanda Dennis Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. 1993. Acts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bixby, Patrick. 2012. “The Ethico-​politics of Homo-​ness: Beckett’s How It Is and Casement’s Black Diaries.” Irish Studies Review 20:3, 243–​261. Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Caselli, Daniela. 2005. Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Cordingley, Anthony. 2018. Samuel Beckett’s How It Is: Philosophy in Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gibson, Andrew. 2006. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, Andrew. 2014. “French Beckett and French Literary Politics 1945–​52.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 103–​116. Gontarski, S. E. 2002. “Style and the Man: Samuel Beckett and the Art of Pastiche.” Samuel Beckett Today/​Aujourd’hui 12, 11–​20. Kenner, Hugh. 1973. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames and Hudson. Magessa O’Reilly, Edouard. 2001. Samuel Beckett Comment C’est How It Is and/​et L’image: A Critical-​Genetic Edition Une edition Critico-​Génétique. New York and London: Routledge. Magessa O’Reilly, Edouard. 2009. “Preface”. In How It Is. London: Faber and Faber. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. 1960. Signes. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. 1969. La prose du monde. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. 1993. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” Trans. Michael B. Smith. In The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Ed. Galen A. Johnson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 76–​120. Morin, Emilie. 2017. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabaté, Jean-​ Michel. 2016. Think Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human. New York: Fordham University Press. Silverman, Hugh. 1980. “Merleau-​Ponty and the Interrogation of Language.” Research in Phenomenology 10, 122–​141. Smith, Russell. 2008. Beckett and Ethics. London: Continuum. Weller, Shane. 2006. Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. New York Palgrave.

12 Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence Victoria Fareld

Introductory Remarks The vulnerable body has been a recurrent motif in public debates in recent years, not least during the Covid-​19 pandemic, which has challenged the default understanding of our bodies as singular and self-​sufficient. The pandemic as a global threat has made us aware of our interconnectedness and shared vulnerability, as well as of our capacity to harm each other only by breathing the same air. Yet, the pandemic also made explicit how vulnerability, although experienced by us all as a human predicament, nevertheless follows the lines of socioeconomic inequality, which makes some of us clearly more vulnerable than others. The ambiguity of vulnerability, as universally shared yet unequally distributed, has in recent years been brought to the fore in connection with questions of systemic violence, by movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. It has also been raised in terms of geopolitical injustice in relation to a worsening climate change that exacerbates structural poverty around the globe. Correspondingly, research addressing human exposure –​to a deadly virus, to domestic or police violence, to intense drought, storms or heat waves –​has gained momentum with the common goal to protect people and prevent disasters. In this chapter, I will explore another approach to vulnerability recently put forth in contemporary feminist philosophy. In contrast to the dominant understanding of human vulnerability as openness to threat, injury, loss and violation, I will focus on vulnerability as an ability and argue for a conception of the vulnerable body as the center of an ethics of responsibility. By exploring the connection between the concept of vulnerability and the language of violence in contemporary feminist philosophy, I claim that such an ethics has the potential to reshape the violence that constitutes us as human beings through nonviolent ways of responding to our vulnerability.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-16

180  Victoria Fareld

The Reemergence of Vulnerability In recent times we have seen a rapidly growing interest in the concept of vulnerability in different fields of research within the humanities and the social sciences –​in human rights studies, global studies, environmental and resilience studies, ethics of care, developmental psychology and leadership studies (Ford et al. 2018; Beattie and Schick 2012; Turner 2006; Kirby 2006). As a way to coordinate the vast and differentiated research going on, an interdisciplinary field of its own has emerged –​vulnerability studies (Vulnerability Studies Network 2022). The goal of vulnerability research, whether it has to do with societal vulnerability to environmental hazards or political disempowerment, is to prevent disasters and violent events. It revolves around reducing human vulnerability through controlling and mastering a threatening or hazardous environment by focusing on risk management, security and resilience (Cutter 2006, 2008). This conception of vulnerability corresponds well to our everyday understanding of being vulnerable, referring to “a person in need of special care, support, or protection […] because of age, disability, risk of abuse or neglect” (OED Online 2022), as well as to the conventional dictionary definition of the term as “the fact of being weak and easily hurt physically or emotionally” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionaries Online 2022). There is another strand, however, of renewed interest in vulnerability, particularly in ethics, feminist and political philosophy (Oliver 2007; Murphy 2011; Bergoffen 2001, 2012; Drichel 2013; Ziarek 2013; Cole 2016). In contrast to the above understanding of vulnerability as a condition that has to be reduced in human life and which is primarily equated with disempowerment, passivity and injurability, several feminist scholars call for a reconceptualization of vulnerability as generative and enabling (Fineman 2008, 2013), emphasizing “the ‘-​ability’ facet of the concept” (Gilson 2014, 179), or its “ambivalent potentiality” (Murphy 2012, 86), making us open to both “wounding and caring” (Cavarero 2011, 20). “Vulnerability is not just a condition that limits us,” as Erinn Gilson puts it in her book The Ethics of Vulnerability, “but one that can enable us” (2014, 310). This shift of focus from defense and protection as adequate responses to vulnerability, to an emphasis on vulnerability as an openness to change and to experiences of love, care and community, as “the capacity to affect and be affected” (Athanasiou 2016, 285), characterizes the reemergence of the concept within feminist philosophy. We are vulnerable, it is argued, because we exist in relation to others (Butler 2004, 2009). The relational character of human life and identity requires, it is said, a more complex and multifaceted view on vulnerability, one that explores it “as a space to work from as opposed to something only to be overcome” (Hirsch 2016, 81).

Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence  181 Vulnerability is, of course, not a new theme in feminist philosophy. One could argue that it is as old as feminist philosophy itself. Over the decades, feminist scholars have addressed the issue of vulnerability in dealing with embodied subjectivity (Braidotti 1993), ethics of care (Held 1997; Kittay 1999), philosophies of love and sexuality (Benjamin 1988, Irigaray 1996), just to mention a few important fields and well-​ known works. And still, as a concept or analytical construct, vulnerability has been clearly undertheorized until its recent reemergence. In its most current guise, two traits appear as particularly significant. First, theorizing vulnerability within feminist studies is, as mentioned above, characterized by an effort to transcend an assumed understanding of vulnerability as susceptibility to violence and injury in favor of a double-​ edged conception of it as both enabling and limiting. And secondly, the feminist interest in vulnerability goes hand in hand with a critique of the assumed ideal –​dominant in contemporary political theory as well as in vulnerability studies –​of the human being as an independent and autonomous subject, an ideal that, it is emphasized, disregards the constitutive relational character of human life and identity. Through a redefinition of the concept of vulnerability shaped by feminist scholars, a systematic critique is thus articulated targeting the normative idea of independence and autonomy that underpins and sustains the paradigm of liberal individualism. Or otherwise put: the vulnerable body is located at the heart of an alternative understanding of the subject that is more attuned to experiences of interdependence and relationality in human life. Following prevalent accounts of vulnerability in various domains, individuals are pitted against different kinds of threats and, as a consequence of being injured, depend on the help of others. As Rosalyn Diprose has argued, such an individualist conception of vulnerability as susceptibility to injury assumes by default that the body is a well-​bounded unit before being injured and could be restored to a state of assumed autonomy and self-​reliance. What an alternative conception of vulnerability could offer, Diprose argues by referring to Judith Butler’s bodily ontology, is “put[ing] matters the other way around: we are fundamentally interdependent in such a way that ‘injury’ involves not being cut or opened to a world, but losing that relatedness or having that openness and exposure exploited” (2013, 187–​188). Judith Butler has given us one of the most sustained rearticulations of what it means to be vulnerable by way of a renewed understanding of what it means to be an embodied, relational subject (2003, 2004, 2009). Our bodies are defined by the social and material relations that make our lives possible: “the body is less an entity than a relation, and it cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living” (Butler 2016, 19). But, as they put it, “we also undergo linguistic vulnerability, and in this sense who we are, even our ability to survive, depends on the language that sustains us” (16). Our lives are from

182  Victoria Fareld the very start bound up with and conditioned by these social, material and discursive infrastructures. By disconnecting, however, the experiences of constitutive interdependence from ideas of passivity and victimhood, vulnerability is not only claimed as a counterimage to prevalent individualist ideals of autonomy, but more importantly, it is taken as constitutive for our capacity to act at all, a condition for agency and political resistance. Vulnerability is, more clearly put, situated at the heart of political agency (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016; Butler 2020). The connection between vulnerability and the idea of a relational self is here understood in a twofold way, as a constitutive openness that makes us dependent on others and the world into which we are born, and yet also a capacity to respond to this world and to others. As Athena Athanasiou puts it, “the inescapable capacity to be affected, which amounts to our responsiveness, is in fact inextricably enmeshed with our capacity to ‘act’ ” (2016, 285). Although the abovementioned scholars share a commitment to rethinking vulnerability, they also show points of divergence. Their attempts to redefine vulnerability as an enabling and anti-​individualist concept are marked by a fundamental split in at least two important respects, namely the view of vulnerability as an essential feature of human life and the role of violence in understanding human vulnerability. Let me begin shortly with the first point of divergence. In line with Martha Fineman’s important article “The Vulnerable Subject,” which emphasizes vulnerability as “universal and constant, inherent in the human condition” (2008, 1), several scholars elaborate vulnerability as an essential feature of human life (Vulnerability and the Human Condition 2022; Hesford and Lewis 2016; Gilson 2014). Yet, others criticize the appeal to vulnerability as a human condition for overlooking aspects of power and privilege, by pointing to the unequal distribution of vulnerability as a result of socioeconomic situations (Cole 2016; Oliver 2015), which creates a “tension between constitutive vulnerability and unequally shared vulnerability” (Ferrarese 2017). Instead of emphasizing vulnerability as an essential and universal feature of human life, defining every human being as always already such, scholars argue for the need to be attentive to its appearing only “in the context of specific social and historical relations that call to be analyzed concretely” (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016, 4). Some scholars clearly attempt to escape an either–​or logic with regard to vulnerability understood as essential or relational, by distinguishing between different sources of vulnerability: one “inherent” in the human condition, one “situational,” specific to contexts and power relations, and one “pathogenic,” caused by abuse and direct oppression. Different states of vulnerability are also emphasized, between being “dispositionally” (potentially) or “occurently” (actually) vulnerable (Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds 2013, 7–​8). Taxonomies such as these aim to avoid problematic

Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence  183 assumptions at work in attempts to address the unequal distribution of vulnerability by focusing on “vulnerable groups” (Peroni and Timmer 2013), as if they were already constituted as vulnerable or invulnerable from the outset. The challenge, however, it is critically argued, is not primarily to distinguish between or correctly identify inherent and situational vulnerability, but rather to articulate an understanding of vulnerability as a shared condition. A condition that is understood not as foundational in the sense of preexisting subject constitution and political life but rather as something that appears “in light of an embodied set of social relations, including practices of resistance” (Butler 2020, 192; Athanasiou 2016). The second point of divergence concerns the role of violence in this reclaimed understanding of vulnerability. I will now turn to and address this at some length.

Vulnerability and Violence in Subject Formation In a key passage in Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler writes: The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, the body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. (26) In this passage, we recognize the double meaning of vulnerability as an openness both to wounding and caring. Present is also dispossession as a constitutive dimension of embodied life: I am not in full possession of myself; my body is never fully my own. Although only mentioned once, violence appears in three forms. Firstly, the physical violence directed at our exposed bodies, the use of violence to inflict injury and damage, the fact that someone can harm us at any place, anytime, or that we can harm someone. Secondly, the violence of being “constituted as a social phenomenon” beyond one’s control, that is, a silent, invisible violence without any physical blows or recognizable agents, a violence that operates as implicit standards of normalization within social practices, in the discursive space in which we appear as beings with distinct identities. These practices make us into who we are and continue to do so throughout our lives. And thirdly, the violence involved in being “[g]‌iven over from

184  Victoria Fareld the start to the world of others,” of inheriting a world with political and socioeconomic systems and institutional practices that frame our space of possible actions and life choices and govern, so to say, who we can possibly be at a certain place in a certain time. These forms of violence partly correspond to Johan Galtung’s classical distinction between personal and structural violence (Galtung 1969), as well as to Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) more recent one between subjective and systemic violence, emphasizing the importance to conceptualize a kind of violence that is inherent in our ways of life in a political and economic sense. For our purposes, also James Dodd’s (2017) distinction between structural and symbolic violence is useful (Dodd 2017), to highlight the violence inherent in our ways of life in a more discursive, or if you will, constitutive sense. If the concept of structural violence captures how phenomena like poverty, social inequalities or institutionalized racist policies can inflict significant harm and suffering upon us within the dynamics of concrete situations, understood as “the social, political, and economic ‘structures’ that organize the context of relations within which all individual or collective action is set” (Dodd 2017, 18), the symbolic dimensions of violence have more to do with the “systemic, background structures […] that constitute a society or culture […] a condition, a positionality in social relations […] something that we are effectively born into” (Dodd 2017, 26). These different forms of violence express a condition of vulnerability that both confirms and questions the universality and sharedness of our human condition. As embodied, relational and discursive beings, we are all vulnerable to violence of these kinds. Yet, some of us are more vulnerable than others, to borrow Alyson Cole’s concise expression (2016). We are all vulnerable, but not to the same extent. The conditions of vulnerability are maximized for some and minimized for others: a poor person who cannot get a job, a refugee who cannot find a safe place to live can be considered as victim to a certain violence as a consequence of how our economic and political systems work. Scholars engaged in rethinking vulnerability diverge in the view on the place and role of violence in their reclaimed understanding of vulnerability. As mentioned above, an important aspect of the feminist critique of the conventional understanding of vulnerability as a problem to be solved targets this very entwinement (Fineman 2008; Gilson 2014). Murphy criticizes it by questioning the dominant imagery of violence in contemporary philosophical conceptualizations of subject constitution. An overemphasis on violence obscures, she argues, the double nature of vulnerability, or its “ambivalent potentiality,” making us available to both care and abuse, love and violence (Murphy 2012, 86). In a similar vein, Gilson points out that vulnerability makes us “open to being affected and affecting in ways that one cannot control” (2014, 2). She argues for the need to move beyond “the framing of vulnerability

Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence  185 as negative” (Gilson 2014, 64), calling for a reimagination of vulnerability beyond dominant imaginaries of violence. Only by dissociating it from violence, she argues, can the concept of vulnerability become the link that unites a relational theory of human dependence with an ethics of responsibility. At this point, however, the opinions diverge. Whereas Gilson rejects the entwinement of vulnerability and violence, Butler affirms it. Their disagreement revolves around the question of how much weight should be given to violence, in its different manifestations, in our understanding of ourselves as vulnerable. It also has to do with the role ascribed to violence in their articulation of vulnerability as an ethical concept. Let us return to the kind of violence called symbolic or constitutive, that is, a violence to which we are exposed through our radical dependence on others –​the fact that we are our relations. It is a kind of normalizing and discursive violence inflicted upon us in the social space in which we appear to each other as persons with distinct identities. As such, it warrants a social life together with others, as it turns us into recognizable human beings: “there is a certain violence already in being addressed, given a name,” Butler points out, as “[n]‌o one controls the terms by which one is addressed” (2004, 139). This violence is coercive as much as it is enabling, as it shapes us into social subjects and ethical agents. It is, otherwise put, constitutive of ethical relationality, that is, of the way we relate to each other as vulnerable beings. Our ethical responsiveness, our ability to respond and assume responsibility and to act nonviolently, is thus, Butler maintains, itself founded on this kind of violence. Indeed, our very resistance to other kinds of violence –​personal as well as structural violence –​seems to be, according to Butler, grounded in this violence, constitutive of who we are: Precisely because … one is formed in violence, and that formative action continues throughout life, an ethical quandary develops about how to live the violence of one’s constitution …. How does one live the violence of one’s formation? In what sense can it be redirected, if it can? And can one work with the violence against certain violent outcomes and thus undergo a shift in the iteration of violence? (2007, 185) Butler is here performing an analytical separation between different forms of violence while at the same time keeping them tightly connected. Their distinction between “the violence through which the subject is formed” from “the violence with which […] we conduct ourselves” (Butler 2009, 50, 169) opens an analytical space in which they anchor a call not to live the violence from which we emerge as subjects. If we cannot escape the violence that is our own condition of possibility, we should redirect it in ways that make nonviolent responses to vulnerability possible. By turning our attention to how these different forms of violence interconnect, Butler

186  Victoria Fareld (2009, 2020) argues that we can rearticulate the meaning of vulnerability as a condition that not only limits us but also enables us to engage ethically in a practice of nonviolence. Critique has been raised against such an intertwinement of vulnerability and violence: “if the appearance of the ethical subject is […] dependent on violence,” as Catherine Mills points out, “then it is unclear in what sense an ethics could be nonviolent” (2007, 135). Gilson has a similar objection: “If vulnerability is always bound up with violence, as it seems to be in Butler’s work, can we conceive of vulnerability apart from violence?” (2014, 63). No matter what we do, even in our efforts to develop a nonviolent ethics, we seem to be hopelessly trapped in a logic of violence. Gilson argues instead that the terminology of violence should be reserved to harmful actions by distinct agents. Violence, she emphasizes, should not be the name for “the diverse, complex, repeatable practices through which we become who we are” (Gilson 2014, 68n6). From her perspective, the very usefulness of vulnerability as an ethical concept lies in its power to make us see how we “are brought into being through relations that exceed us and are beyond our control,” precisely without having to recur to a language of violence (Gilson 2014, 68n6). If we connect vulnerability to violence, she argues, we keep reproducing the conventional meaning of vulnerability as susceptibility to injury. And we thereby only repeat prevalent discourses of security and passivity in which vulnerability is something to be avoided or actively rejected. In order to reframe vulnerability as an openness to the world and to the realm of action, Gilson emphasizes, we should avoid thinking the formation of the self through the nexus of violence but instead through that of vulnerability. Only by so doing can we resist a logic of repeating the very violence that we want to avoid. Vulnerability, for Gilson (2014), is thus conceptualized as an alternative to violence, or at least as a turning away from a vocabulary of violence in our shared language of self-​ understanding (Gilson 2014). We have seen that the contemporary reemergence of vulnerability in recent feminist works can be described as attempts to conceptualize anew questions of justice and responsibility by relating them to an ethical bodily ontology or a relational ontology of human dependency. A point of divergence, however, is the role ascribed to violence in the ethical potentiality of vulnerability, conceptualized as a link between such a relational ontology and an ethics of nonviolence. Indeed, both Gilson and Butler argue for an understanding of vulnerability as a condition of possibility for an ethics of nonviolence. Yet, while Gilson argues for the need to move away from violence, Butler (2020) stresses the constitutive role of violence for such an ethics. Let us now leave the critique of a concept of vulnerability too invested in a language of violence, to address a critique targeting the link made between vulnerability and nonviolence. Taking this critique into account,

Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence  187 I will, following Butler, argue for the constitutive role of violence in the ethical potentiality of the concept of vulnerability as a theory of nonviolence.

Vulnerability and Nonviolence In contemporary political claim-​making, vulnerability has become somewhat of a buzzword. A “vulnerability discourse” is growing among American populists on the right who argue for protection against what are perceived as external threats and foreign elements (Fax 2012). In a similar vein, the vocabulary of vulnerability is used by movements like the Ku Klux Klan and the US National Rifle Association, which see themselves as protecting vulnerable groups (Oliviero 2018). Such an inverted political production of vulnerability can be seen as a phenomenon similar to the rhetorical turn from hate to love speech that has occurred in the last decades, by which extremist and nationalist groups declare themselves to act out of love for some group or nation against another (Ahmed 2005). In light of this, the question of how to get from vulnerability to nonviolence and not even more violence –​motivated or legitimated by a language of self-​defense and, ultimately, “vulnerability” –​is an urgent one. Indeed, the contemporary use of vulnerability discourse to promote and legitimate violence could at first sight be taken as convincing evidence of the shortcomings of an ethics of nonviolence based on an ontology of bodily interdependence. It could easily be raised as a critique of the contemporary “return” to vulnerability among feminist scholars, questioning the ethical potential they ascribe to the concept of vulnerability. The underlying assumption of such an ethics is that attending to one’s own vulnerability would motivate us to attend to the vulnerability of others. But how will acknowledging our shared vulnerability lead to nonviolence rather than to more violence, critics ask. Why would it enable care, rather than abuse, when in daily political life we see the opposite? In our contemporary world, interdependency does not seem to give rise to nonviolent responses as much as it incites all kinds of violence, from territorial wars to different forms of state violence (Murphy 2012; Drichel 2013; Diprose 2013). These are adequate and important objections. Yet, they don’t offer us more convincing alternatives in the struggle for nonviolence. Rather than seeing the current inverted manifestations of vulnerability discourse as expressions of a failure of vulnerability theories linked to nonviolence, I argue for a perspective that would take the interrelation between violence and nonviolence seriously into account, focusing on the potential of a conception of nonviolence as requiring work with violence. Let us return to the underlying assumption that informs the contemporary interest in vulnerability among feminist scholars, namely that a greater attentiveness to our own vulnerability, and readiness to accept it, would generate a greater understanding for the vulnerability of others.

188  Victoria Fareld This assumption is intimately tied to the core argument that we need to debunk autonomy and self-​sufficiency as harmful fantasies rather than as desirable ideals. This argument, in turn, is part of a greater call to transform our language for self-​understanding in an attempt to make it more adequate to the interrelational character of human life. Against this background, vulnerability has less to do with protection and restoring independence than with the acknowledgment of interdependence. However, in order to make us more willing to attend to our own vulnerability to violence with something other than violence, a change of vocabulary would not be enough. Such a change would have to be accompanied by an effort to realize nonviolent practices, acknowledging that violence is always a concrete possibility when attending to one’s vulnerability. The above-​cited manifestations of how a discourse of vulnerability can be used to promote violence point, in my view, neither to the shortcomings nor to the inadequacy of an ethics of vulnerability. They rather indicate the urgency and importance of a theory that works precisely with the intertwinement of vulnerability and violence. Only when understood as dissociated from violence does vulnerability as an ethical concept fall short. Butler’s strong claim stating that “nonviolence as an ethical ‘call’ could not be understood if it were not for the violence that persists in the making and sustaining of the subject” (2007, 185) is revelatory not only for their view on violence as intrinsic to self-​constitution and relational ethics. It is also an articulation of an ethics of nonviolence that is not opposed to violence, but works from the assumption that “[t]‌he struggle against violence is one that accepts that violence is one’s own possibility” (Butler 2007, 186). In Butler’s most recent book, The Force of Nonviolence (2020), we find a more elaborated and concentrated argument about the violence operating within a nonviolent approach. If we follow this line of thought, nonviolence cannot be adequately understood nor practiced as the opposite of violence, but “becomes an ethical issue within the force field of violence itself” (Butler 2020, 27). Thus, instead of proclaiming an ethics of nonviolence as a virtue or a set of principles, the challenge involved would be to articulate such an ethics as “an open-​ended struggle with violence” (Butler 2020, 56), that is, a conflicted position of someone who struggles against violent action as an available means within a given situation. And it is this struggle with violence against violence that captures the core of the ethics. In light of the above, an understanding of our shared vulnerability may indeed be used to mobilize violent action. Attending to one’s vulnerability, acknowledging our interdependency, does not warrant nonviolence, but is rather to be conceived as a possible starting point for a work with violence. In her book Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Ann Murphy claims that “violence is not only that which we see, but it is that which we now see through” (2012, 14), criticizing the omnipotence of images of violence in contemporary continental philosophy. There are certainly

Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence  189 a variety of images of violence operating in feminist philosophy today –​ from Butler’s account of the inherently violent normative constitution of embodied subjectivity to Adriana Cavarero’s representation of the horror spread by suicide bombers who blow themselves up in order to rip other bodies to pieces (Cavarero 2011). At the center of these representations stands a body, both vulnerable to and capable of violence. As such, the body is represented as the uniting link between a relational ontology of vulnerability and a social and political practice of nonviolence –​a practice located in (the struggle against) violence itself. In light of this, representations such as Butler’s and Cavarero’s could easily be said to promote narratives that are silently complicit with the violence they seek to examine and openly reject. In another sense, however, they could be seen as aiming at narrating violence in ways that not only encourage nonviolence, shared vulnerability and solidarity. They can also be said to capture the double movement involved in interpreting violence: that the language we use to deal with violence often also makes visible the violence we use to deal with language. Interpreting violence in this twofold sense has to do to with the meaning-​making involved in understanding experiences of violence, as well as expressing and understanding the violence often involved in the meaning-​making process itself. As interpretative acts, the narratives of violence at the center of our self-​understanding have the capacity to both represent and generate a reality of a certain kind. If we borrow Ann Murphy’s question of what kind of work the language of violence does in contemporary philosophy and ask what the language of violence does to our understanding of ourselves as vulnerable, a tentative answer would be that it does not only, or even primarily, make visible how we are brought into being through relations that are beyond our control; or that it makes visible the norms that form the categories through which we understand ourselves or govern the language that we use. Most importantly, I think, it makes visible that we cannot turn away from violence in our attempts at finding nonviolent ways of understanding subject formation and embodied life, as representations of violence are at the heart of our very ability to be nonviolent, of responding to our vulnerability in nonviolent ways.

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Index

Note: End of chapter notes are denoted by a letter n between page number and note number. adjustment disorder 139 Adorno, Theodor W. 5, 33, 40–​42, 168, 174 adventure novel see novel aesthetics of violence see violence Afghanistan 23, 26 agency 15, 24, 27, 125, 128–​29, 140, 143, 155, 163, 172, 174, 182; moral 143; narrative 143, 145, 148–​49 Algeria 32, 36–​40, 43n2, 43n4, 168 Algerian War of Independence (1954–​1962) see war Antigone (Sophocles) 17 Antigone 20 Appropriation 1, 102, 140–​42 Arendt, Hannah 4, 33–​35, 38, 42, 142 Aristotle 72, 74–​75, 169 asymmetrical planetarity 47–​48, 57 Athanasiou, Athena 180, 182–​83 Attali, Jacques 33, 38, 41, 43n9 Auschwitz 119, 124, 130n9, 157–​59, 164, 168 author 7, 21, 25, 60, 69n2, 70n3, 90, 93–​94, 110, 143, 149, 151, 155, 167, 170, 173; implied 8, 29, 43, 59–​61, 64, 69–​70n2 Badiou, Alain 26–​27, 167, 171 battle narrative see narrative Beckett, Samuel 10, 167–​72, 174–​76, 177n6, 177n3–​4 beneficiary 2, 128 Bielski brothers 119 Black life 57 Blanchot, Maurice 168, 170–​71 bloodlands 119 Blut und Boden 126

body 26, 34, 60, 63, 82, 121, 144, 168–​70, 172–​73, 176, 181, 183, 189; lived 2; perpetrator’s 123; narrator’s 170; world 174; vulnerable 179, 181, 189 Brite, Poppy Z. 82–​84 British Raj 46, 49, 54 Brockmeier, Jens 5 Brothers Grimm see Grimm Brothers Bruner, Jerome 5 Butler, Judith 4, 137, 140, 180–​83, 185–​89 cancer 139, 141, 150 care 63, 66–​67, 139, 180, 184, 187; ethics of 180–​81; objects of 140 Caruth, Cathy 9, 120–​25, 128–​29 caste 51 categorization 4, 138 Cavarero, Adriana 142, 180, 189 character 8, 27, 29, 36, 46, 48, 59–​62, 64–​69, 72–​73, 104–​05, 108, 141, 143, 149, 151, 180–​81, 188 Claudel, Philippe 9, 120, 126–​29 closure 9, 105, 108, 110–​16 Cole, Alyson 180, 182, 184 collective 146–​47; action 184; commitment 107; identity 35; memory 36–​37, 42; responsibility 48; suicide 128 colonial violence see violence colonialism 5, 7, 48, 51, 53–​55 commentary 10, 25, 121, 154, 156–​59, 162, 165n3 Congo 22 continental philosophy 140, 188 counterviolence 140

Index  193 Daeninckx, Didier 7, 33, 36–​42, 43n8 De Quincey, Thomas 8, 73, 76–​80, 82 Derrida, Jacques 1, 4, 20, 67–​68, 81, 84n3, 140, 154 Desbois, Patrick 119 Descartes, René 140 destructibility 10, 140 dialogical 1, 3, 10, 142, 148, 151 Diprose, Rosalyn 181, 187 discursive practices 138–​39 discursive violence see violence disgust 52, 73–​75, 80–​84, 89 distaste 8, 72–​76, 78–​84 distress 42, 60, 139 Dodd, James 2, 184 ecocriticism 120 Einsatzgruppe 119, 130n2 epistemic violence see violence ethics 5, 8, 10, 11, 59, 62–​67, 81, 90, 137, 180, 186, 188; of autonomy 90; of care 180–​81; of community 90; of fiction 83; of honesty 148–​49; Kantian 80; narrative 59, 142; of nonviolence 187–​88; nonviolent 186; postmodern 171; relational 188; of representation 179, 185; of vulnerability 188 ethos 60–​62, 64, 66, 94, 142, 146, 149 everyday life 22, 33, 41, 149–​50 evil 127, 130n9, 147, 158 explanation 1–​3, 90, 111, 170 faith 10, 25, 63, 98, 162–​64 father 24, 144–​46, 149 Felski, Rita 3 feminist philosophy 11, 179–​81, 189 Fineman, Martha 180, 182, 184 Floyd, George 46–​47 France 32, 36–​37, 39, 43n4, 97, 122, 126, 168 Freud, Sigmund 120–​21, 123 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg 3, 59, 141–​42, 154–​55, 160–​63, 164n1, 165n5 Galtung, Johan 184 Garner, Eric 53 Gilson, Erinn 180, 182, 184–​86 Grimm Brothers 126 guilt 65, 67, 149; and attraction 84; and pleasure 83 Habitual Offenders Act 55 Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) 27–​29

Hecht, Anthony 119 Heidegger, Martin 10, 17–​21, 24, 26–​29, 154–​55, 160–​61, 163 hermeneutics 1–​5, 102, 104, 137, 141; double 90; hermeneutic circle 141, 160, 163; Levinas and 10, 154–​55, 158, 160–​64; narrative 5, 59; philosophical 1, 3, 141; of restauration 89; of skepticism 105; strategies 116 Hitler, Adolf 100, 106, 130n13, 147 Holocaust 6, 9, 104–​07, 116, 119–​26, 129, 130n8, 147, 157–​59; by bullets 119, 130n4; literature 9, 126; memory 107, 120, 123; metanarrative 124; perpetrators 9; studies 6, 9, 105, 125 Homer 73–​74, 79, 84 honesty 21, 149 humanitarian discourse 18, 21, 29 Hume, David 72–​76, 78–​81, 83, 84n2 identity 23, 42, 89, 93, 111, 122, 145, 147–​48; Christian 91, 99; construction 36; false 122, 170; national 129; narrative 147; position 92; relational 129, 180–​81; social 35 illness 91, 139–​41 implicated subject 2, 5, 128 Indiana Jones 52 individuality 140, 169 injustice 2, 29, 91, 96, 174, 179 interdependence 181–​82, 187–​88 interpretation 1–​5, 37, 42, 59, 90, 104, 110–​11, 142, 154, 156, 160–​64; Gadamerian 161; moral 90; of narrative 104; narrative as 59; narrative spaces of 42; nonsubsumptive 2, 163; nonviolent 4; perspectival 104; rational 163; self-​interpretation 143; selective 149; violent 1, 154 intersubjectivity 4, 169 Jews 19, 99–​100, 109, 112–​15, 119, 122–​23, 127–​28, 130n2, 138, 147 justice 2, 7, 32–​35, 42, 52, 90, 141–​42, 149, 174–​75, 186 Kaepernick, Colin 53 Kant, Immanuel 77, 80–​81, 83, 84n3, 140, 151n3, 174 Katyń Forest 124

194 Index Kearney, Richard 3 Knausgård, Karl Ove 10, 137, 143–​51 labor 33–​35, 39–​40; market 100 language 1, 3, 10, 24, 53, 128, 140–​41, 146–​47, 167–​73, 176, 186, 188–​89; descriptive 129; of fascism 107; Knausgård’s 148; materiality of 11, 168; nonviolent 141–​42; poetic 162; of self-​defence 187; of violence 11, 179, 186, 189; as violent 140 Lanzmann, Claude 119 Levinas, Emmanuel 1, 8, 10, 59, 62, 67, 69n1, 70n4–​5, 140, 154–​64, 164n1–​5, 171, 177n7 linguistic difference 172 listening 40–​42, 121, 141, 151, 161, 176 Littell, Jonathan 9, 20, 78, 120, 122–​25, 129, 130n7–​8 masculinity, masculine culture 144, 146 mass violence see violence masterplots 111 memory 7, 32–​37, 39–​40, 42, 47, 48, 53, 108–​09, 127, 144, 156–​57, 173; action 33–​35, 42; collective 37, 42; cultural 36; culture 7; duty 32, 42; and forgetting 175; historical 95; Holocaust 107, 123; just 32; labor 33, 40; political 46; studies 6, 34; traumatic 123; work 33–​34 Meretoja, Hanna 2–​3, 5–​6, 10, 33, 59, 69, 90, 104, 111, 130n7–​8, 137, 140, 142–​43, 146, 148, 151n1–​5 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 169, 172, 174, 176, 177n8–​9 monological 149 mother 53, 60, 67, 144 Murphy, Ann 140, 180, 184, 187–​89 music 7, 33, 36–​42, 43n9–​11 muzak 33, 40–​41, 43n10 Myanmar 2, 22 My Struggle (Karl Ove Knausgård) 10, 137, 143, 146, 148–​49 narrative 1–​10, 19, 22, 27–​29, 33, 36–​40, 42, 46, 48–​49, 54, 57, 59–​61, 65–​69, 69n2, 73, 78, 82–​83, 92, 94, 102, 104–​08, 110–​13, 115–​16, 120, 123–​24, 129, 137–​40, 142–​44, 146–​48, 150–​51,

151n1, 168–​69, 172, 189; agency 33, 143, 145, 148–​49; analysis 59, 67; autobiographical 143; battle 139, 151n2; closure 105, 110–​12, 116; counter 39, 148, 151n5; desire for 142; ethics 59; grand 171; hermeneutics 59; mastery 104–​05, 111, 113, 115–​16; memory 33; meta 53, 124, 173; models 144–​46; pattern 100–​01; spaces 42; strategy 62, 67, 70n3, 104; technique 105; theorist 105, 111; turn 62, 137, 151n1; voice 170 narrator 10, 20, 29, 37, 39, 41–​42, 48, 59–​61, 63–​65, 67, 69, 69n2, 79, 124, 143, 149, 151, 169–​71, 173–​76, 177n6 Nazi Germany 138, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich 140 NKVD 123 nonfictional 5, 111, 116, 150 nonsubsumptive 2, 10, 137, 142, 145, 150; ethos 142; narrative practices 137, 142 nonviolence 4, 11, 141, 148, 186–​89 normative, 18, 47, 139, 181, 189; normativity 161 not-​knowing 141 novel 18–​19, 26, 29; adventure 7, 46, 48–​49, 57; experimental 167; gothic 66; historical 19; horror 81; realist 66 openness 1, 142, 161–​62, 179–​83, 186; dialogical 10, 151 other 1, 37, 59, 67–​68, 90, 94, 120–​21, 137–​38, 140–​42, 147–​51, 158, 164; absolute 81; alien 95, 101; encounter with 142, 169; justice to 32–​33; responsibility towards 62; self and 137, 167, 176; vulnerability of 151, 187 othered, othering 51–​52, 56, 101 otherness 3, 53, 57, 112, 121, 126, 128, 142 pathologization 139 performative 7, 9, 41, 105, 113–​16, 141 performatives 115 perspective 27, 59, 148–​49, 151, 172; ethical 5, 65, 82; perpetrator 90, 101, 124, 129; phenomenological 67; victim’s 78–​80, 129; witness 79

Index  195 phenomenological 4, 5, 67 planetarity 47–​48, 57 plot 55, 60–​67 postcolonial 47–​48, 50–​51, 55–​56 posttruth era 163 power relationship 112, 140 privilege/​privileged 2, 6, 40, 125, 129, 150, 182 race 46, 95, 97, 99; Aryan 138; critical race theory, 56; mixing 101; relations 53, 55; riots 7, 46; war 91, 97 racism 21; systemic 138 relational ethics see ethics relationality 11, 48, 143, 167, 171, 176, 181; dialogical 1; ethical 185 responsibility 7–​8, 26, 34, 36, 59, 62, 66, 96, 123, 156–​58, 160, 164, 177n7, 179, 185–​86; collective 48; ethics of 185; infinite 158 Ricoeur, Paul 3, 5, 10, 32–​33, 70n6, 89, 154, 160, 162–​64, 164n1, 165n6 riot 7, 37, 43n8, 46–​47 Rothberg, Michael 2, 124, 128 Russia 16 Rwanda 21–​22, 24 Rybakov, Anatoly 120 self-​reflexive 10, 149–​51; self-​reflexivity 151 shame 101, 144–​45, 148–​50 signification 10, 47, 50, 55, 140, 168–​70, 172–​73, 176, 177n9 Sleeman, William 46, 49–​51, 53 Snyder, Timothy 119 sociality 11, 167, 171, 175–​76, 177n7 space 21–​22, 27, 33, 36, 38, 41, 42, 48, 51, 54–​57, 119, 125, 127, 148, 170–​72, 180, 183–​85; sylvan 129, 130n14 speech act theory 115 stigmatization 138 Straus, Scott 4, 11n1, 89 stressor 139 style 29n1, 75, 93, 148, 167, 169, 171–​72, 176, 177n9 subjectivity 11, 26, 34, 55, 167, 174, 181, 189 sublime 8, 22, 26, 72–​73, 77–​81, 84, 124 subsumptive 2, 10, 137, 142, 150, 151n3 suspicion 3, 50, 72, 117n3, 162–​63, 165n6

Talmud/​Talmudic 10, 154–​64, 164n2 Tasso, Torquato 120–​21, 123–​24 taste 72, 74, 79–​83 temporality 141–​42 terrorism 5, 91 The Strangler Vine (Miranda Carter) 7, 46–​48, 50–​51, 53–​54, 56–​57 Thuggees 54 Thugs 7, 46–​47, 49–​57 torture 11, 36–​38, 43n6, 52, 167–​68, 170–​71, 174–​75 transgression 37, 80, 83 trauma 9, 29, 104, 120–​25, 127–​29, 130n6; studies 6, 121; theory 120 uncertainty 115, 141, 183 understanding 1, 3, 137, 140–​42, 160–​62; fabric of 35; nonsubsumptive 142; nonviolent 3, 4, 10, 140, 141; perpetrators 89–​90, 101; of trauma 122, 129 Ukraine 2, 122 violence 1–​11, 18–​22, 24–​29, 32–​33, 37, 40, 42, 47, 50–​53, 56–​57, 59–​60, 68–​69, 70n3, 72–​80, 82–​84, 89, 91–​92, 94–​96, 99, 101, 104–​06, 110, 112, 114–​16, 120–​25, 127–​29, 137, 139, 140, 143–​48, 150–​51, 154–​55, 157–​58, 163–​64, 167–​69, 171–​73, 176, 179, 181–​89; aesthetics of 72, 76–​77, 84; colonial 7–​8, 46–​49, 51–​54, 56–​57, 168, 177n4; conceptual 140; discursive 4, 10–​11, 137–​41, 146, 148–​49, 183, 185; embodied 4, 11; emotional 10, 137–​39, 144–​45; epistemic 46, 51, 55, 57; hermeneutics of v. 10, 163; inherent 10, 51, 140, 148, 184, 189; mass 5–​6, 8–​9; memory of v. 32, 36, 39; narratives of 2, 4, 39, 104, 107; philosophical 140; physical 10, 20, 60, 69, 89, 101, 137–​138, 144–​45, 167, 183; psychological 60–​61, 69; racist 11, 56, 99, 128; representations of v. 1, 5–​8, 18, 46, 72–​77, 79–​80, 82–​84, 104, 171; sexual 29; state 52–​54, 187; structural 2, 11, 138, 184–​185; symbolic 2, 20, 48, 55, 57, 89, 101, 138, 184–​185; systemic 2, 179, 184 vulnerability 8, 10–​11, 59, 151, 179–​89

196 Index war 4–​5, 11, 21–​22, 27–​29, 73, 95, 123, 147, 157–​58; Algerian 7–​8, 32–​37, 39–​40, 42, 43n5–​6, 168; atrocities 7, 33; civil 28, 56; crimes 124, 158; race 91, 97; Second World War 8, 106, 119, 127, 137, 168; on terror 52; Vietnamese–​American 26; Yom Kippur 156–​59, 164 Warsaw Great Synagogue 106, 113–​14

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 9, 105–​06, 113 Wierviorka, Michel 4 work (as opposed to labor and action) 34–​35, 42 Yemen 23, 27 Yom Kippur War see war Žižek, Slavoj 2, 20–​21, 184