The Aesthetics of Violence: Art, Fiction, Drama and Film 178660504X, 9781786605047

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The Aesthetics of Violence

Futures of the Archive: Theory, Criticism, Crisis Series Editors: Arthur Bradley and Simon Swift What will be the future of critical theory’s past? This series offers a set of radical interdisciplinary interventions which explore how the history of critical theory can contribute to an understanding of the contemporary. By returning to classic critical debates in philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion and more, the volumes in this series seek to provide a new insight into the crises of our present moment: capitalism, revolution, biopolitics, human rights, the Anthropocene. In this way, Futures of the Archive shows that the past – and in particular critical theory’s own past – is not a dead letter, but an archive to which we still belong and which continues to shape our present and future. Titles in the Series The Labour of Subjectivity: Foucault on Biopolitics, Economy, Critique Andrea Rossi The Aesthetics of Violence: Art, Fiction, Drama and Film Robert Appelbaum

The Aesthetics of Violence Art, Fiction, Drama and Film

Robert Appelbaum

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © Robert Appelbaum 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:

HB 978-1-7866-0503-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Appelbaum, Robert, 1952– author. Title: The aesthetics of violence : art, fiction, drama and film / Robert Appelbaum. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd., 2017. | Series: Futures of the archive : theory, criticism, crisis | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017043451 (print) | LCCN 2017043966 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786605047 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786605030 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Violence in art. | Arts—Themes, motives. Classification: LCC NX650.V5 (ebook) | LCC NX650.V5 A67 2017 (print) | DDC 700/.4552—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043451 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America

To Meredith

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Prefacexi Acknowledgementsxxv 1

Playing with Violence

2

Hansel or Gretel

25

3

Winners and Losers

53

4

Revelry85

5

Puzzle115



Epilogue: Art without Violence, Violence without Art

1

137

Bibliography149 Filmography (Including Television and Videos)

159

Index163 About the Author

169

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List of Illustrations

Life Magazine (28 January 1952). Source: Photo and text public domain.  22 2.1. Attributed to Damiano Mazza, The Rape of Ganymede (1575). National Gallery, London.  35 2.2. Roy Lichtenstein, Detail from Whaam! (1963). Tate Gallery, London. Source: By permission of Bildupphovsrätt, Sweden.  39 2.3. Mark Rothko, Black 5 (1973). Source: By permission of Bildupphovsrätt, Sweden.  40 2.4. Still from The Longest Day. Courtesy: Twentieth Century Fox.  45 2.5. Nicolas Poussin, The Rape of the Sabine Women (1635). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Photo public domain.  46 2.6. Still from the final scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Source: Public domain.  48 3.1. Michelangelo Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599). Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Source: Photo public domain.  54 3.2. Still from The Third Man (1946). Courtesy: StudioCanal. 73 3.3. Still from Bonnie and Clyde. Courtesy: Warner Brothers. 78 3.4. Still from the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde. Courtesy: Warner Brothers.  81 4.1. Joe Pesci in a still from Home Alone (1990). Courtesy: Twentieth Century Fox.  88 E.1.1. Christ triumphing over the beasts (sixth century). Mosaic in the Archbishop’s Chapel, Ravenna, Italy. Source: Public domain. 144 1.1.

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List of Illustrations

E.1.2. Matthias Grünewald, The Crucifixion (1515) (Detail). Isenheim Altarpiece, Unterlinden Museum, France. Source: Public domain.

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For many of us, paradoxical as it may seem, violence will have begun with art. Maybe our mothers, in a rage at our tantrums, slapped us a couple of times. Maybe our fathers, frustrated at our stubbornness – we wouldn’t get into the car – abused us verbally and threatened us with a spanking. Maybe older siblings, unclear about the difference between play and aggression, pushed us around a bit too much. But that wasn’t violence – not yet. It was an expression of something for which we did not have a word, but which we more and more plainly understood, something we may now call the work of discipline, our being caused to submit to forces more powerful than ourselves, subjected to notions of right and wrong or yes and no that we did not ourselves create and an authority to which we did not originally consent – and being made to know of it, the slap, the abuse and the threat, the shove coming to us as well as against us, communicating as well as hurting. Piaget (1965) called this ‘moral constraint’. The child experiences it as neither real nor fanciful, neither defendable nor indefensible. The child experiences it as a structure in which he or she is confined. For me, outside of art, but also inside of it, real violence came for the first time when I was three years old. A playmate of mine, wielding a toy rifle, finding me leaning over, bent to the ground, thumped me on the back of the head with the metallic barrel of his make-believe weapon. He nearly knocked me out – or maybe he did knock me out – and he cut into my skull. There was blood in my hair, a blinding ringing in my head, a piercing ache as if a knife had cut into my scalp. I was apparently rushed to the hospital (though I do not remember being taken there), and my wound was stitched. I remember finding myself awake, the nurses pushing my face down into the cushioning of the operating table. I couldn’t breathe. I remember the pain of the needle suturing the open wound. In a panic I struggled against the nurses, crying and xi

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wriggling, and that made them push my face into the table all the more. I felt helpless and threw a tantrum. But the nurses weren’t violent. I knew then and there, whether or not I had the word at my command, that what my friend had done to me was violent, a transgression; that this had been my first taste of violence, and that what was happening afterwards was not violence in itself but the fruit of it – the force (parallel to moral constraint) of care. Yet that violence began with art. For what was my friend doing with a toy rifle? Already at the age of three we were watching television, where cowboys and GIs regularly sported rifles, and where commercials told us about those great toys for sale, including guns, rifles, holsters and cowboy hats and military-style helmets, in mimicry of our fictional heroes. We demanded that our parents buy these things for us. My friend probably didn’t know what he was doing. I don’t know if there was any real malice behind it. (Remember, he didn’t shoot me, and couldn’t have done so.) He was trying things out. But it was the art of television, along with commerce of television, that put a rifle in his hand, and encouraged him to experiment with what a rifle could do against another human being. I know people for whom violence was not a by-product of art, for whom violence began early as an unartful fact of life. Horribly so. I weep for them. I know people who have lived and suffered and lost loved ones in warzones; and others who have fought in warzones, risking their lives for causes that they found difficult to understand. I have known Holocaust survivors. When I was in my twenties, I was friendly with three different women who were sexually assaulted, two of them by gangs, one of them by I don’t know who except that after raping the woman he murdered her. There was nothing artful about any of their experiences. And I will have other incidents to report as we proceed. But for most of us, I think, most of the ‘us’ that may come to read this book, art came first, and the experience of violence was an expression of what art had first exposed us to. Did art – does art – cause this violence? Sometimes, yes. But not usually in a direct way, as I will many times argue in the book to follow, not in an imitative way. (My childhood friend was specifically not imitating what he saw on TV.) Art for that matter would seem even more frequently not to encourage us to be violent, but just the opposite. Art causes us many times to be appalled at violence, or to come to terms with it as an inevitable, grievous part of life, in the face of which we find ourselves both stalwart and aghast. Sometimes art simply displaces the language of banal everyday conflict into the language of extraordinary battle, not for the sake of promoting violence but for the sake of having something to say and of having a means of saying it. And then of course, there is the idea going back to the ancients that artists give us scenes of violence because they know we like it – some part of us wants (or learns to want) to see it, hear about it and formulate ideas about it. Some part of us is irresistibly (or is caused to be irresistibly)



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fascinated by imaginary scenes of violence, and feel the thrills, the anguish, the puzzlement, the moral dilemmas and the horror that go along with them. Violence gives artists something to do and their promoters something to sell. Art often needs violence as a subject matter, as language, as affect, as a springboard to invention and as an uncanny attraction to its audiences, spectators and readers. But more to the point, violence needs art. Or to put it more precisely, if we have art – and we have it – one of the things we require of it is to tell us something about violence, even if what it tells us is in some sense wrong, even if it ends up putting toy rifles in our hands. I say ‘art’, which is already, in the circle of cultural studies, a contested term. High art, low art and middlebrow art; elite art and popular art; fictional art and non-fictional art; visual art, acoustic art, verbal art, kinetic and kinaesthetic art, cinematic art; the arts of mass media; the art of video games; the art of historiography and other story-telling sciences. Art in the context of religious practices; art as ritual; art as in the ancient world of Apollo and Dionysus; art in the modern world, when the concept of ‘fine art’ was first invented and when art comes to play a role – sometimes complaisant, sometimes defiant – in capitalist economy (see Shiner 2001). Do all these manifestations really have anything in common? There are compelling reasons to say no, to say that the word ‘art’ encourages us to put under singlelabel activities that are essentially different from one another. What serious relation can we find between a classical symphony and a horror movie, or between a religious poem, recited as part of liturgy and the video game The World of Warcraft? After a good deal of thought about the matter, all the same, I decided that there was nothing wrong with calling all of these things ‘art’. It is true that the subtitle of this book, Art, Fiction, Drama and Film, uses the word ‘art’ to designate, as we do in common language, visual artefacts. But when I discuss varieties of art, fiction, drama and film (leaving aside other art forms, like music and lyrical poetry, which for lack of ability and insight I am unable to address in this context), though I acknowledge the serious differences between them, I see them all as expressions of the single form of action (or of communication) that we call ‘art’. Calling this practice ‘art’ means differentiating it from those techne, as the Greeks originally called them, those ‘crafts’ that were predominantly useful or instrumental – which is not to say that art has no uses, or that useful things cannot be beautiful, but that art as art begins as a form of action that exceeds the requirements of use. One way of explaining this excess is to say that it involves an appeal to the imagination, to a reality that isn’t real, to a world that isn’t the world. But I prefer to highlight this excess in another way. The primary dimension of what I call art, apart from formal qualities that vary from medium to medium and the institutions that support them, is, as I will argue, play.

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I am primarily a literary historian, with training in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and with a speciality – so my title as a professor asserts – in English literature. But I have had an unusual education, which has put me in touch with classical Greek philosophy and theatre, with Christian theology, with modern continental philosophy, with the history of Western visual art, with modern cinema, with anthropology and historical sociology (though I am rubbish in medieval and nineteenth-century studies, puzzled by the eighteenth century, and way behind in my reading of contemporary fiction) and with other such non-academic phenomena as underemployment, unemployment and capitalist enterprise, including my being involved for a number of years in businesses (including art dealing) that operated on just this side of fraud. I am not bragging. That’s just the way it is or was. (I am still ashamed of the perfectly legal businesses I was involved in.) In addressing the question of art and violence I have taken the liberty of bringing in as much as my education and experience would allow. Though I am clearly someone who writes from a perspective most familiar in literary and cultural studies, making many of the unspoken assumptions that literary and cultural studies inescapably entail, I venture (however modestly) beyond. I even (immodestly) talk about myself from time to time, and I never pretend that I am writing from a disembodied, objective point of view, or from the perspective of a science which can put a fence around its data, as if all the data is always already in, and which can explain the data by a theory which is at once complete and irrefutable. The reader will find that I take aim against some dominant trends in social psychology. I take aim against the consensus in behavioural science that art causes violence in a direct and measurable way. I accuse this trend in social psychology of vulgar Platonism, and of repressing the true nature of violence in art and life. To some readers that will not seem important. Let behavioural scientists do their thing; let us others, we band of brothers and sisters in the humanities, do ours. But that is not good enough. In the public sphere, the language of human experience has been co-opted by scientisms – behavioural, cognitive and neural – even as we continue to live in a human, all too human way.1 Even a number of humanists now say that we live in a posthuman condition, to which I can only say, as Jacques Derrida once said about theorists who said we were living in a ‘late capitalist’ society, that they are probably being overly optimistic. That is not in any case to say that the social sciences and the hard sciences have nothing to teach us. Quite the contrary. It is just to say that we have something to teach them as well. The reader will find that I begin with a question that is in the first place personal, although it has wide application. Why, I ask, has violence in art – whether in epic poems or gangster movies – made such an impression on me? Why has it so often seemed to me, whether in the case of Odysseus’s attack on the ‘suitors’ swarming around his wife, or the killing of Bonnie and



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Clyde in the film named after them, that something like a truth was revealed to me, the truth of the stories, and also something more important, the truth, or at least a truth, about human existence? Clearly the artworks themselves want me to respond this way. Clearly, there is much art, high or low, old or new, that sets me up to expect, desire, admire and learn from the violence it contains. And though I say ‘me’, my experience is certainly the experience of many others. I am not the first reader of Homer’s The Odyssey (I use an edition from 2006, but the real text comes from ca. 800 BC) or the first viewer of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and I will not be the last. I may be better informed than some readers and viewers (though not as informed as specialists in the classic epic or the modern cinema) but I am for the most part no different from the average person. I expect, desire, admire and learn. Just the other day I watched again Julie Taymor’s popular film version of Shakespeare’s extremely violent Titus (1999), a text (in its original theatrical version from about 1592) I discuss towards the end of this book. I expected, I desired, I felt, I admired and learned. So art ‘wants’, in effect; it wants to rouse me towards a state of consciousness where I find myself expecting, desiring, feeling, admiring and learning. Yet I must also say that in the course of researching for this book, I have watched many films and read many works of fiction that taught me nothing – except so far as they taught me how art can work not only to raise expectations, solicit desires, affect our emotions, inspire admiration and teach but also to dull our hopes, pervert our desires, corrupt our emotional life, inspire contempt and mislead our rational faculty: to make us not know violence. For a case in point I give you the film I Spit on Your Grave (2010), directed by Steven R. Monroe, a remake of a film by the same title released in 1978. No less a rape and revenge drama than Titus (for scene after scene a young woman is abused and raped, and then for scene after scene she abuses, tortures and kills her assailants) it nevertheless has nothing to offer. I cannot entirely explain why, except to say that this story is implausible (though so is the story in Titus), that it takes a grim delight in shocking its audience (though so does Titus), that it shows contempt for human dignity (though so does Titus) and that it led me towards awareness of a moral sensibility that was trite, self-satisfied and stupid (as Titus does not). It made me depressed. (Perhaps the nebulous concept of moral intelligence is in question. The late critic Roger Ebert, upon whose work I will often draw, called the movie ‘despicable’.2 But in any case several sequels have since been released.) So me, but hopefully also you. And in the realm of what I call, with a specific meaning, aesthetics. As I argue in what follows, though ‘aesthetics’ is commonly used to designate the philosophy of art, it is more useful to discuss aesthetics as the interaction of artworks and their audiences, readers and viewers. That is how Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Immanuel

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Kant initially used the term, with regard to the ideas of pleasure and sensual knowledge, the apprehension of beauty and the exercise of taste. By contrast, I call the theory of the production of art, following Aristotle, poetics. Poetics studies how and why artworks are made. And by contrast again, I call the theory of the artefact, taken by itself and in itself, the theory of art. The theory of art studies how artworks are.3 But I call the immediate reception of art (along with what used to be called the exercise of taste) aesthetics. The divisions between aesthetics, art theory and poetics are porous. Neither field can properly be discussed without reference to the other. You cannot completely talk about the experience of a thing without talking about the thing itself, and you cannot talk intelligently about the thing itself without also talking about how it was made, by whom and when and where. I take it as a limitation of critical reason, however, that we can never discuss all three things at once within the context of a single theory or a single reading. Maybe I will someday be proved wrong. But I have never seen a treatment of art that has managed to balance or synthesize all three. And I have seen a lot of theory that repeatedly conflates one with another. Why does Theodor Adorno call his theory of art, following Hegel, Ästhetische Theorie (English translation, Aesthetic Theory 1997; originally published 1970)? I am not sure, but it indicates to me a confusion. A literary historian, as I have said, I found my intellectual roots in structuralism, post-structuralism, new historicism and cultural materialism. It was the stunning work of structuralist- post-structuralist Roland Barthes that excited me with the idea that I might become a critic, a sceptical discerner of signs, with original things to say about them; it was the writing of the one-of-a-kind Michel Foucault that taught me to imagine I might become a historical critic, a tracer of the genealogies of texts, showing the descent of the structures of knowledge and communication; it was the literary criticism of Stephen Greenblatt (who came to be my doctoral supervisor) that showed me how I might engage in what he dubbed the New Historicism, which strives among other things to discern the historical and symbolic circumstances of what he called ‘the poetics of culture’. It was the work of Marxist Raymond Williams that taught me how to link artworks to the material conditions of an always emerging (or deteriorating) society. I have not abandoned my roots in this study, but I have found that to try to explain the phenomena at hand I had also to turn towards the tradition of German Romantic ‘aesthetics’, which begins, again, with Baumgarten and Kant and goes on to figures like Schiller, Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno, Gadamer and – very importantly for me – Freud.4 That tradition, which includes phenomenology, seems to be the only one that opens the way towards the experience of violence in art, towards what (in German-inspired English Romantics as among others) is sometimes called the sublime. The sublime: a quality of art that doesn’t simply please, but that



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will also shock, offend, assail, awe-strike, confuse, even terrorize as well as exalt, and in that way give us the impression that the incommunicable has been communicated to us. Let me say right away that I have never seen in the social psychology of art the concept of the sublime appear. The sublime is apparently something of a secret kept among humanists and psychoanalysts. To be sure, even among humanists and psychoanalysts today the concept seems a little off, a little mouldy and smelly, just like its twin concept the idea of beauty.5 But even without those old-fashioned words, what the sublime and the beautiful have long referred to need to be kept in mind, for they indicate important qualities of aesthetic experience. We turn to art in order to experience beauty, and we turn towards it as well to experience the incommensurable exaltation of the sublime. In any case, the subject of this book is aesthetic violence, violence that isn’t real, but that is experienced in the encounter with an artwork. As for which artworks, there I have taken liberties. I have tried to focus on works that are either well known or controversial or both. There is no need to reach back into relatively obscure plays like Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), about a woman unfairly incarcerated starving herself to death, or Robert Garnier’s Les Juives (1583), about a population under siege, seeing its culture die, when the plays of Shakespeare are available to discuss, and most readers are familiar with them. On the subject of fairy tales, an important subject for the field of the aesthetics of violence (since fairy tales, that innocuous art form, are also so notoriously violent) what better example exists than ‘Hansel and Gretel’? I could write about the Greek or Chinese versions of the Cinderella story, or Mesopotamian versions of ogre tales, or the seventeenth-century political allegories of Charles Perrault, for example, ‘Puss in Boots’ – but then I would be writing about something that required explanation, rather than something that could be taken more or less for granted. On the subject of the epic, also essential, why not begin and stay with Homer, the best known and perhaps still the most entertaining of the epic poets? (It hasn’t escaped my attention that Homer was also a preoccupation of two of the most important theoreticians of violence and non-violence in the twentieth century, Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas.) Thinking about slapstick comedy – still another very important genre for the aesthetics of violence, since it makes apparently grievous violence into something to laugh at – why not Home Alone (1990), which was once one of the highestgrossing films of all time? I watched a number of early silent slapstick comedies to come to an understanding of the history of the genre, finding myself particularly interested in the work of Buster Keaton and Fanny Arbuckle, but I landed upon the relatively obscure That Fatal Sneeze (1907) as the target of my discussion, partly because the short film was so influential, partly because it so distilled a model of cinematic slapstick, and partly because readers

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unfamiliar with it could easily look it up on YouTube. So I have chosen in the first place examples from the art of the past which are, by and large, well known and examples from the present that are also either well known or easily accessible or both. Yet controversy too was an important criterion for selection. Most social psychology of violence in art focuses on film, television, the media and video games, and that’s where most of the controversy is. About video games, however, I can say nothing because I have never played them, and will probably never do so, not even for the sake of science. About the media, with a few exceptions which call attention to how opinion journalists commonly fudge the question of the aesthetics of violence, I stay mostly silent; it has never been a systematic field of study for me, and there are far better candidates for speaking about it. Television is also a vast field that I am not competent to discuss with any expertise, although as I have said I grew up watching television, I still watch it, I think I know a thing or two about it and I have found myself led to allude to it now and then. But as for film, that is something I have studied, a subject about which I think I can make a contribution, and that is probably the most controversial area when discussions about art and violence are brought to the attention of the public. Home Alone I have mentioned, though the film was surprisingly uncontroversial when it came out. But the films of Quentin Tarantino, American horror movies, American World War II movies and the particular example of the new wave gangster film Bonnie and Clyde provide models of artistic representation that have often puzzled and exasperated and led to widespread public debate. So too have a number of mega-violent vigilante films. For that reason, in addition to the fact that they are well known, and form generic groups which seem to demonstrate inner consistency, I bring them up. It would be heartening to discuss films that question violence, or that question film violence – among the best known are Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937) and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997, with a remake in 2007).6 But that would be too easy. I may allude to pacific films and other pacific artworks along the way – we can’t pretend that all art is violent, much less pro-violence, or a goad to aggression. But I wanted to focus on films and other artworks where violence is in our faces, and in itself either unquestioned (as such – i.e., the films may be against violence but, like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch [1969)] express their opposition to it by pounding us with it) or else unmitigated, unreflected upon, adopted primarily for the sake of telling a story. We don’t see much violence in the World War I film La Grande Illusion, mainly only the consequences and the fear of it and a struggle towards peace; whereas in the World War II film Bataan (1943) there is little but preparing for fighting, fighting, suffering and dying. That made Bataan not only accessible and popular, but also made it critically puzzling. A film against violence



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is easy to understand today. A film that embraces the representation of violence while failing to condone or condemn what it refers to is much harder to understand: all the more reason to examine it. The same goes for literature, art and drama. Titus Andronicus instead of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sara Kane’s Blasted (a modern ‘in-yer-face’ play that not every reader is probably familiar with, but that was quite scandalous for its sex and violence when it was originally produced in 1995) rather than Brickman and Elice’s musical Jersey Boys (2005); Lichtenstein’s aerial firefights (1963 ff.) rather than Renoir’s nudes; Jerzy Kosinski’s dour Holocaust novel The Painted Bird (1965: another scandalous text) rather than Roth’s comic novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969: which was scandalous too, but not with respect to violence.) The former works – Titus, the Lichtensteins, Painted Bird – have all defied criticism precisely because of the violence that is integral to what they are. And yet they have a lot to tell us about what they are, or rather as what they require of us as readers, viewers or spectators. Some of the main theses developed in this book about violence, aggression and coercion could well be applied even to pacific artworks, even to Renoir’s nudes, not to mention ironic anti-war texts; but the theses could be developed, could be made legible, much more readily by way of the study of these violence-heavy and often controversial works of art which, unlike the German commandant in La Grande Illusion, played by Erich von Stroheim, seldom apologize for what they are doing. I use case studies to illustrate arguments, but I also use case studies to generate arguments. I have discovered things in the many of the texts I studied for this book that I did not anticipate. Who was to say that ‘Hansel and Gretel’ would be a key not only towards understanding the materiality and gendering of violence but also towards the dynamics of countless horror films, or more generally towards the relation in art between violence and non-violence, or between violence, violation, aggression and coercion? Who was to know that so many American and British World War II films, patriotic though they might have been, didn’t actually glorify violence in the way we (or I) remember them to have done? Who was to know that one of the prime messages of those films was that, as a movie directed by Frank Sinatra would put it, ‘Nobody ever wins’?7 Who was to know then that the matter of winning and losing in many combat films and other artworks is both risked and renounced? Violence can be either collective or individual or some combination of the two. And so, as I have paid attention to war, to conspiratorial violence and to mob violence (The Fatal Sneeze), so I have paid attention to criminal violence and its representation. Crime fiction is clearly an important subject for the aesthetics of violence, and so are its offspring, the film noir and the detective or police procedural television show. I focus here on the most classic and

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best known of crime fiction writers, Agatha Christie, and discuss the repetitions and transformations of crime fiction since the ‘Golden Age’ in which Christie originally thrived. But as I also note, the Golden Age still lives on, unapologetically, in British and American television, as well as in a whole lot of contemporary novels and films. Trying to understand the aesthetics of violence is something, the reader will see, I have been pondering for quite a long time. Violent art is not usually my favourite form of entertainment (often I would rather enjoy a peaceable, witty comedy, or a painting of an artist’s studio) and I normally recoil from the kind of mega-brutal business that I had to study for this book – gruesome vigilante and horror films, for example. I knew that I had to sample them, all the same, and so studied some of the most infamous examples, like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Saw (2004). (In the former, yes there is cannibalism, and in the latter, yes, someone is forced to saw off his own leg.) But in any case, I have been trying to understand the aesthetics of violence ever since the 1990s, when I was innocent of nasty horror and torture porn films but when America was seeing extremely high levels of street violence and I, a self-professed pacifist, found myself becoming a teacher (in America) of writers like Shakespeare, where war is sometimes glorified and victory made into a sign of honour. In 1995, after the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people and wounded over 600 others, I found myself trying to explain terrorism to my undergraduate students; and I found that I already had a good deal on my mind about it, having to do with my background reading, including European authors from Dostoevsky and Conrad to Malraux and Sartre, all of whom dealt with the terrorist imaginary in dark, frightening and sometimes heroic terms. Eventually I started working on literature and terrorism – a fact that may explain the first case study in the book, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1995; originally published 1955). But while working on understanding terrorism, I found that I had also to understand the problems of violence in general, and especially the problems of violence in art in general. Terrorism is only a sample expression of the human condition with regard to violence, and only one of many phenomena that violent art has had to contend with. How to begin? One day I came upon the idea of thinking about violent sport. I thought about the difference between real violence and the violence that is an inevitable part of sports like American football and professional boxing. (In both sports, there are, not so paradoxically, rules against violence, even while players are often badly injured in the course of playing.) From there I became alerted to the concept of play. My initial research took me back to social theory that began pretty much with Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias, with both of whom I was already familiar, and then to the thought of Roger Caillois, a twentieth-century French philosopher, and Friedrich



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Schiller, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German playwright, poet and aesthetician, neither of whom I had yet studied. Caillois had his eye on the diversity and necessity of play in life; and Schiller on the diversity and necessity of play in art. Both gestured towards the relation between play with freedom, as well as towards an idea that would come to be articulated by Gadamer (2004; originally published 1960), namely that the experience of art (like other forms of play) is ‘ontologically’ specific – neither an illusion about nor a disclosure of reality, but a process with an ontological life and meaningfulness of its own. Frankly I do not think that the ideas of illusion (going back to Plato) or disclosure (going back to Aristotle) can be excluded from discussions of aesthetics. One of the reasons is that art is almost invariably entangled with ideology. Art lies. Art inveigles. Art pulls out the stops to persuade. Art commonly expresses cultural values which go hand-in-hand with forces of domination and the imposition of oppressive norms, making it seem as if power and prejudice were a part of nature, and never to be undone. Another, contrary reason is that art is frequently involved in challenging ideology. Art attacks the lie, or provides an alternative version of the truth, or attacks the notion of truth itself. Still another reason is that art really does very frequently try to reveal something to us, something that was hidden from us before. If art is play, it is a play of the world, as the world both is and ought to be, and even as the world ought not to be, and it is a play of representation, of showing us something and causing us both to feel and to know it in a new way. But it is important to keep in mind that not all art is all that good, not to mention great. Aestheticians including Gadamer frequently assume that their subject is classic art, from Homer to Thomas Mann.8 A long tradition beginning with Aristotle talks about art with the models of either Oedipus the King or Antigone as the model. Even a lot of theoretically sophisticated film critics focus on the great films from the past and the present. But to limit the discussion of the aesthetics of violence to canonical works, however the canon is decided, is to overlook the social life of art itself, and close the subject.9 A theory of the aesthetics of violence that couldn’t explain both The Odyssey and Saw would not be much of a theory: it would only be a generalized interpretation of one text or the other.10 That which is at once aesthetic and violent is by no means limited to artworks which are easy to admire and that come readyto-hand with a seal of approval. Nor does it seem to me that the study of the aesthetic and the violence, conversely, would be fairly served by limiting itself to artworks that offend, or that stand outside the ranges of canonical or professedly serious artworks. So I don’t think that art is only play in the sense that it is not engaged in the real world of social struggle, and I don’t think a theory or art (or aesthetics)

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should only deal with the classics, as if aesthetic experience were limited to the Great Books and the Great Paintings, and what they may or may not disclose (or hide) about the human condition. Play itself is struggle. It is a tool of survival in the face of an often hostile world. (I don’t mean that in a Darwinian sense.)11 And aesthetic reception is a mode of perceptual and cognitive attentiveness that permeates all aspects of experience, from holding a hammer in your hand and admiring its heft, to sitting on the upper balcony in seat B7 straining to watch a tragic opera. The questions, however, are as follows: What is the difference between admiring a hammer and admiring an opera? What is the difference between watching someone get hit over the head by a hammer – or even a toy gun, for that matter – and watching Captain Pinkerton watching Madame Butterfly in her death throes, after she has just stabbed herself, while the orchestra in the pit metaphorically weeps for her? And what is the difference between any of those things and watching the Charlot character, in Chaplin’s The Pawnshop (1916), hit a customer over the head with a hammer, and then show us that although the hammer seems to have seriously wounded its victim it was only made of soft rubber? For one thing, The Pawnshop makes me laugh. For another, Madame Butterfly makes me cry. Yet why in any case should art force these distinctions upon us? ‘Force’ us it does, but that doesn’t mean that violent art is inherently ‘violent’. Play is a pretty powerful thing, even though it comes to us in a realm of non-violence. NOTES 1. For a classic statement on the notion of knowledge and the dangers of scientism to which I appeal see Feyerabend (1988). But Feyerabend could not have anticipated the flood of scientism, often wedded to neoliberalism, that has become so much a part of public discourse and public policy today. An interesting debate on the subject was entered into by Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic in 2013. Parts of it, with links to other parts, can be found at https://newrepublic.com/ tags/scientism. 2. ‘This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency. In the original, a woman foolishly thought to go on holiday by herself at a secluded cabin. She attracted the attention of depraved local men, who raped her, one after the other. Then the film ended with her fatal revenge. In this film, less time is devoted to the revenge, and more time to verbal, psychological and physical violence against her. Thus it works even better as vicarious cruelty against women’. Ebert (2010): http://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-2010. But some critics are on record for enjoying its artistry. See the Rotten Tomatoes website: https://www.rottentomatoes. com/m/i_spit_on_your_grave_2010/.



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3. I recall the famous line by Archibald MacLeish: ‘A poem should not mean but be’. 4. For a brief account of the history of German aesthetics, see Seel (1999). For a fascinating account of how German aesthetics began with the analysis of the conjunction of beauty and pain, see Richter (1992). 5. In Brinkema (2014), which dwells on affects like grief, disgust, dismay and anxiety in art, the word ‘sublime’ is mentioned only in passing, as a word that used to be helpful but is no more, and it goes unmentioned in the index. The word ‘beauty’ suffers a similar fate. 6. Grande Illusion comes to a climax when German soldiers stop trying to shoot down a pair of French soldiers, escaping into Switzerland. Common humanity wins out. Funny Games comes to a climax when an act of revenge and self-defence is carried out and then backtracked, the film unwound before our eyes. It never happens. A character, breaking the illusion of the fourth wall, turns to the audience and remarks on how much the audience itself had been caused to desire the violence of revenge that never happened. 7. See chapter 3. 8. This was a complaint convincingly registered by John Dewey in Art as Experience (1934). For an appraisal of Dewey’s standing in aesthetic theory today, see Leddy (2016). 9. Among the most influential texts on the social life of art today is Luhmann’s (2000). But I am not trying to construct a view of the social life of art as if it were a ‘system’. I actually agree with much of what Luhmann says, but the overall product of viewing art as a system, however interesting, begins by denying freedom, especially the freedom of play, that is so important to my analysis. See note 11. 10. My position thus jibes with Dewey’s (1934), who insisted that the category of the aesthetic had to be broad rather than narrow, and reach into popular life. 11. The reader will see that I reject all forms of cultural functionalism, including the functionalism of evolutionary psychology, and what the late Stephen Jay Gould called its ‘just-so’ stories. When in the pages that follow I discuss how individuals ‘use’ artworks, as for example using them as surrogate models of triumph and defeat, I am not alleging that this is the ‘function’ of those artworks. I am only saying that that is what a lot of people do with them, and have been taught to do with them, or find themselves impelled to do with them, with the instigation of the artists themselves. Surrogate models of triumph and defeat are built into the narratives of violence – sometimes. And we use them that way – sometimes. Sometimes we have other uses for them. Functionalism, by contrast, assumes that the matter is closed, that the society being studied is a closed book, with no alternatives except for specifically functional alternatives. ‘Use’ here, by the way, does not mean exploitation, or overtly economic or practical application. I follow Michel de Certeau (1984) here, who differentiates making from using and strategizing (the work of the culture industry) from tactical practices of consumers or uses, with an eye towards what he calls the ‘practices’ of users of the latter, or also, in French les arts de faire.

Acknowledgements

This project began, and its first results were presented, while I was a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. I am profoundly grateful to the Institute and the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation for providing me with the time to begin the project and such a stimulating intellectual environment to work in. I wish to single out the Director of the Institute, Hendrik Geyer, and the administrator, Maria Mouton, for all their help and hospitality. I also wish to mention several fellows at the Institute whose thoughts about violence, art and many other matters were such a help to me: alphabetically, Anne Allison, Alejandro Bendaña, John Dugard, Albert Goldbeter, Susanne Lundin, Njabulo Ndebele, Paul Nugent and Charles Piot. Audiences for later presentations of my work in progress were also very helpful: at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago University, New Zealand; at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities at Cape Town University, South Africa; at the International Association for University Professors of English Conference at Beijing, China; at the same association’s conference in London; at my own institution, the Department of English at Uppsala University; and at the Shakespeare Association’s Annual Meeting in Atlanta. Special thanks go to Lyn Tribble, Alistair Fox and Kevin Clements in Otago; to Sandra Young and John Higgins in Cape Town; to Yan Brailowsky in Paris, who organized our session in Atlanta; and to all my colleagues in Uppsala, with a special nod to Roberto del Valle Alcalá, Oscar Jansson and my student Median Hussein, who has himself pushed the boundaries of this topic. I am also grateful to Merja Kytö and Gernot Müller for helping me get a preliminary study, ‘Notes toward an Aesthetics of Violence’, published in Studia Neophilologica. And I must thank some other friends for their feedback and support: Andrew Hadfield, Vassiliki Markidou, Arthur Bradley xxv

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and, as always, Peter C. Herman. Thanks also go to the anonymous readers at Rowman & Littlefield, who provided some key suggestions for improvement. My wife, Marion Appelbaum, helped me collate the illustrations in the book and get permissions where needed to use them. Her continual support in this and all other things goes beyond saying, as does my love and gratitude towards her.

Chapter 1

Playing with Violence

1. ‘SUDDENLY INEXPLICABLY’ Art is a form of play, and one of the things it plays with is violence.1 Here is an example, a passage in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1994; originally published 1955). A middle-aged man named Thomas Fowler is sitting in a café in Saigon, drinking beer, ruminating. He has just lost the woman he loves to another man, the ‘quiet’ American of the title. At the table next to him sit ‘two young American girls . . . neat and clean in the heat, scooping up ice cream’. He instinctively despises them, as he despises all Americans, and all things American now. The quiet Alden Pyle has taken away Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress, on the premise that in all kinds of ways Pyle is better for her. He is younger and richer, healthier and happier, and unlike Fowler, who is already married and can’t get a divorce, he will be able to marry Phuong and make a proper housewife out of her. For Fowler such good intentions, and the sincerity that goes along with it, are delusory and hollow. And they are only too typical of what it means to be an American in the world of the early 1950s, or in the Vietnam of the 1950s, as French colonial rule is breaking down and the armed communists of the north try to take over. Also in the café is a ‘dowdy middle-aged Frenchwoman’ who is putting her make-up on. The American women get up and leave, and Fowler follows them with his eyes. Here then is the scene, as Fowler himself tells it: I watched them idly as they went out side by side into the sun-splintered street. It was impossible to conceive either of them a prey to untidy passion: they did not belong to the rumpled sheets and the sweat of sex. Did they take deodorants to bed with them? I found myself for a moment envying their sterilised world, 1

2

Chapter 1

so different from this world that I inhabited – which suddenly inexplicably broke into pieces. Two of the mirrors on the wall flew at me and collapsed halfway. The dowdy Frenchwoman was on her knees in the wreckage of chairs and tables. (209)

After attending to the Frenchwoman, Fowler goes outside to see the scene of the explosion. He thinks the explosion might be a prank, a ‘joke’ being played by one of the political parties contesting for control over the country, raising a little scare. But here again is the scene in Fowler’s words: when I got to the Place Garnier, I realised by the heavy clouds of smoke that this was no joke. The smoke came from the cars burning in the car-park in front of the national theatre, bits of cars were scattered over the square, and a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens. (210)

2. PLAYING WITH VIOLENCE Art is a form of play, and one of the things it plays with is violence. In the world of the novel the violence isn’t play. It is ‘no joke’. It could have been but it isn’t. This particular act of violence, a terrorist bombing, shatters. It breaks a world into pieces. It also kills. Fowler sees the dead and the dying from as close up as the police who have rushed into the scene will allow him, and he is outraged. Among other things, he believes he knows who the culprit behind the explosion is, exactly the same Alden Pyle who took away his mistress. But that is Fowler’s world, and it is all make-believe. We readers are unaffected. We readers are doing just fine. According to the philosopher Roger Caillois (2001), working on the basis of the earlier work by historian Johann Huizinga (1955), play is an activity that can be defined by its separateness. It usually has its own times and places. It isn’t ‘serious’. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t absorbing. Nor does it mean that it’s not important. Professional artists, like professional athletes, can take their ‘play’ very seriously indeed. It is their livelihood. What’s more, it is ‘no joke’. Their play demands commitment, effort, ingenuity and excellence. And as for we who experience their play, we too find ourselves committed and making an effort. We keep an eye out for ingenuity and excellence. We try to rise to the occasion of the play. We need to appreciate what the artist or the athlete is doing. And finally, all of us, athletes, artists and observers – readers, listeners, spectators, audience members, exhibition goers – are convinced that the play means something. In fact, it means something in at least two senses. As some literary theorists put it (especially Hirsch 1984) it has both a meaning and a significance. When you read that ‘a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens’, and you



Playing with Violence 3

understand that the man is a victim of the explosion and dead or dying, then you know the meaning of that part of the passage. But as for its significance, to grasp that you have to compare it to other passages in the book (and see who else dies in the book, for example, and how and why) and you have to measure it against other things as well, like what you know about the realities of political struggle and civil war in twentieth-century Vietnam. At the end of the novel, we find that due to a complex reaction to that terrorist bombing, from indignation at an atrocity to jealousy in an affair of the heart, Fowler has Pyle assassinated, in another act of terrorist violence, collaborating with the communist insurgents of Saigon. And to grasp the significance of that bit of aggression, you need to know something about morality too, the dilemmas at the time posed by existentialist philosophers and their counterparts in the arts, about the necessity of what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘dirty hands’ in the face of evil, and the rise of this kind of attitude towards violence (sometimes you have to get your hands dirty with it) as it arose in the experience of the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the rise of fascism.2 ‘Playing with violence’ is an unavoidably ambiguous expression, but I am trying to use it with some precision. I do not use ‘playing with violence’ in the sense of ‘playing with a playmate’, for violence is not a person; you cannot play with it that way. Nor do I mean it in the sense of ‘playing with fire’, for violence is not a thing or a form of energy. You cannot touch it or apply it to something else. Violence is action. So when you play with it, you are playing with an action which you are not actually performing; you are playing at doing it (‘rough and tumble’ is what ethologists call it when animals and children do it), or at experiencing the doing of it in some way (a kind of voyeurism is involved). The play I am referring to often has two sides, those who actively labour at it, and those who more or less passively or vicariously experience it. Graham Greene, the author of The Quiet American, actively plays with violence as the creator of the tale. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director and screenwriter of the first film version of the novel (1958), and Philip Noyce, the director of the second film version (2002), also play with violence as creators. So did the screenwriters for the second film, Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, as well as the actors in the films, including such megastars as Michael Redgrave as Fowler in the first film and Michael Caine as Fowler in the second. And then there were the cinematographers, the location managers, the stunt men, the costume makers, the editors and the many other members of the film crews, along with the producers and executive producers, the distributors and movie house managers and workers. The production and showing of a film involve a whole industry, international in scope. And lest we forget, much the same could be said about a book. Back in 1954 Greene sent his manuscript to an agent and then an editor who read it and

4

Chapter 1

possibly made suggestions or changes and then sent it on to copyeditors, printers, proofreaders, advertisers and distributors, so that copies of the book landed in book stores in a large part of the English-speaking world. It was soon translated into French, German, Japanese and many other languages; in 2001 it was translated into Vietnamese. It is selling around the globe to this day. (A small bookstore I visited in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2014, had four copies of it on display, and I have read that in Ho Chi Minh City today, formerly Saigon, the book is sold in any of several languages as a souvenir for tourists.) For a long time now most art has been the product of a capitalist industry. As such, it has also been the product of subsidiary-related industries (camera makers, paper makers, transporters) and the protégé of state institutions, law firms, financial firms and for that matter educational institutions, which have become responsible for making people capable of making and using art). This is the ‘culture industry’, as Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) called it. Whether or not it is as pernicious as those philosophers claimed, it is certainly a complex phenomenon, and even the most apparently privileged places in it, the places of the author, the producer or the director, are in many ways subordinate to the whole, elements of a machinery over which neither they nor anyone else in particular has real control (see Luhman 2000: 141). But still, all the people, processes and institutions are active in the production of art. All of them are directly or indirectly playing with violence too. But they are to be distinguished from the people, processes and institutions who are involved in it more passively, as consumers – or as I prefer to call them, users.3 I am a consumer or user with respect to The Quiet American, and always will be, even if I am also active as a critic, and even if, in some of my other occupations, as a university professor and writer, I am also a (minor) contributing member of the culture industry. I experience The Quiet American in a different mode. And so I play with the violence in it in a different mode. Production and consumption, creation and experience, are always interrelated. The writer of a book is also its first reader. The reader of a book is complicit in the production of a book’s meaning. But distinctions are nevertheless important, and there is a big distinction to be made between producers and consumers, or between the senders and receivers of artistic messages. I call the study of the production of artworks and similar objects poetics. I call the study of the experience of artworks and similar objects aesthetics. This distinction between poetics and aesthetics is not original with me. Aristotle (or at least the scribes who entitled his work on the subject) used the word ‘poetics’ in just this way, as the study of artistic production, and some of the originators of the field of what they called ‘aesthetics’ (based on the Greek word for sentience) in the nineteenth century, including the German



Playing with Violence 5

philosophers Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant, focused their studies, conversely, on the study of the subjective dimension of art. To Aristotle, poetics was the study of making an object or executing a performance, creating form and generating effects. To Baumgarten and Kant, aesthetics was the study of experience: sensation, perception, appreciation and the exercise of ‘taste’ (see Jay 2004).4 Still, many use the word aesthetics today to indicate the general study of the theory of art, production and consumption together, and I wish to keep them separate. Knowing about the production of violence in artworks is important. But I want to know, in this book, what it is that we do, we patrons of artworks, we spectators and readers, when we play with the violence that is in them.5 I can of course, in my capacity as a critic, praise Graham Greene for his artistry, or analyse how his artistry works. I can look at the novel as a thing in itself, an expressive form, a subject of the philosophy of art and formalist criticism. I can also account for how Greene examined the situation in the Vietnam of his day, how he predicted American intervention in the country’s affairs and disapproved of what he saw on the horizon. I can explore how Greene constructed an allegory of a love triangle – a European and an American, contesting over the love of a woman, that is a feminized Vietnam – and at the same time made a novel of intrigue out of his analysis of the situation. I could even write about the art of violence in Greene’s novel. But I am thinking about the aesthetics of violence. I am thinking of how the first time I read the book I was as surprised by the explosion in Place Garnier as the narrator of the story was. I am thinking about how every time I go back to the passage I am impressed by its ingenuity down to its choice of words (suddenly inexplicably) and also by what it seems to be telling me – which is what . . . in its violence, that is? What does it say to me, and why do I seem, contradictorily, to like it? Adorno, to whom I have already alluded, warns us not to confuse what we get from art with a kind of bodily pleasure, or something analogous to it, an ‘enjoyment’. Not that the body isn’t involved in art, or that there is anything wrong with bodily pleasure, but to identify the experience of art with something like bodily enjoyment is make it into a ‘source of pleasure that the consumer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself’ (Adorno 1997: 18). Presumably it would be possible to enjoy a scene of violence in a novel for the sake of the pleasure in it, just as one can enjoy a painting because of the intensity of the colour red one finds in it, or a scoop of vanilla ice cream for its cooling sweetness. But I am pretty sure that is not what happens when I read about the explosion at the Place Garnier. It makes me sad. It unsettles me, somehow. And that’s what I like about it. That is even what Adorno wants me to like about it.

6

Chapter 1

3. BEING SOLICITED I am being solicited by the explosion at Place Garnier. I am being called upon to see and feel it, but I am being called upon to see and feel it in play. The novel has its own time and space in two senses: first in the time and space represented, Saigon in the early 1950s; second in the time and space of my reading it, which is always a time and space set aside, for the duration of my reading it. I am not there when I am reading it. I am here, in this special zone, absorbed in the experience. It is make-believe. I am not reading about an actual bombing, and the bombing cannot threaten me or anyone I know or have ever known or could have known. And I am playing in several other senses. In the work of both the dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), art is a form of play in the sense of ‘free play’ – not free from the rules of playing, but free from all the other rules, the mandatory rules of the ‘serious’ world.6 So make-believe (the medium of mimetic play) is free, even if it is also bounded. And there are other kinds of play, all of which are also both bounded and free in these ways, according to Caillois. In addition to make-believe there is first of all the thrill. I play at getting thrilled, as I might also play at getting myself excited by riding a roller coaster or bungee jumping. Caillois calls this the game of ‘vertigo’, of making yourself dizzy or giddy up to a point – up to a point, it must be stressed, because if the danger is too real the game is not a game. At an amusement park one is always strapped in. When you jump off a bridge in a bungee, you are not really jumping off a bridge. (You are free from the rules of jumping off a bridge, beginning with the fatal rule of gravity – although, to be sure, jumping off a bridge without protection, if one is not trying to kill oneself or escape an assailant, can also be a form of play.) When you read in a novel about explosions in Saigon you are not really reading about explosions in Saigon. But when you ride or bungee jump or read, you are seeking excitement, a thrill that unbalances you somehow, even to the point of nausea. Play may also include an ‘aleatory’ element – that is, chance. When we play games we often take a chance; we gamble; we submit ourselves to situations (playing tennis with or without one’s back to the wind, for example) which we cannot control; we place ourselves in conditions where we cannot be certain of outcomes. There is an element of this submission to chance even in the act of being an audience member or a reader, though the submission takes place in the realm of make-believe. As I read about Fowler and Phuong and the political conflicts in Vietnam, I do not know, the first time, what is going to happen, or how. In fact, the novel has lots of surprises, one of the main surprises being a bomb going off so that a world ‘suddenly inexplicably’ breaks ‘into pieces’. So far as a narrative belongs to the category of fiction,



Playing with Violence 7

the reading of it entails not only an anticipation but also an uncertainty about what comes next. For the reader there is thus always a degree of chance in the reading, a kind of risk. If I allow myself to be absorbed in the world of Greene’s novel, I take a chance in it. I may end up surprised. I may end up rewarded or devastated, just like the characters in the fiction. But only so far: a character may risk his or her life and die, but reading a novel will never kill me (I am free from the lethal rules of chance, even as I play at them). It will only provide me with a kind of vicarious experience of being in danger of dying. In fiction, Sigmund Freud (1918) wrote, ‘we still find people who know how to die, who are even quite capable of killing others. There alone the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all the vicissitudes of life a permanent life still remains to us. . . . We die in identification with a certain hero and yet we outlive him and, quite unharmed, are prepared to die again with the next hero’. There is always the possibility, of course, that the chance I take vicariously is actually for the characters in a form of fate, especially in tragedy. There is even the possibility that the game of chance in itself becomes its opposite, the game of necessity. The articulation of chance events may turn out to have been ruled by either a cosmic or an artistic necessity, or both. But in any case, the game of chance for the user of art is commonly a construct that leaves the user both engaged in a simulation of chance and disengaged from its actuality. So there is the aleatory element of play and fiction: a riskiness but not a riskiness too far. A traditional way of speaking of this element is to call it ‘tempting fate’, and fate of course is the necessary obverse of chance. In addition, there is the agonistic element – competition. I am not in principle competing with anybody when I read, although I could be if I were trying to claim bragging rights over how many books I have finished. But I am absorbed into a fictional world where people, organizations and states are competing with each other for power, wealth, pleasure, ways of life and love, or even mere survival. As I read I am absorbed in a struggle where individuals may win or lose at the game of life, and I am having my loyalty appealed to. Whom do I want to win, Fowler, Pyle or Phuong, or some combination of them, or none of them at all? Who is the hero, or rather, who is my hero? And, though Freud doesn’t quite address this aspect, who is my victim? Whom have I, in identification with the characters of the fiction, defeated? Or whom have I been defeated with? There are forms of play that Caillois overlooks. Puzzle-solving is a form of play in its own right, and there is a make-believe version of puzzle-solving in many works of art, beginning with the detective novel. In addition, revelry seems to be a form of play in its own right, as when people attend a party, drink alcohol socially or take drugs and dance – or else find revelry in attending to the joy of art. This revelry is directly related to the Dionysian

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dimension of art that Nietzsche (1999) originally called attention to, the ‘intoxication’ through which life as it is – to the Greek mind itself a curse – momentarily becomes tolerable, even desirable. It is terrible to have been born; but still, only the born can sing; only the born can laugh at another person slipping on a banana peel. And sheer controlled kinaesthesia – not the kind that makes you dizzy or intoxicated but the graceful kind that you use when you throw a basketball towards the hoop, or jump rope, hopscotch or ice skate a figure eight, or for that matter dance for the sake of form, on a stage – is a separate category of play as well. Kinaesthesia plays little or maybe no role at all when I read a book or watch a dance, but it can be important in participatory art – not just as in certain forms of theatre, where members of the audience are given roles to play, but also in musical performance, where acoustics and positioning vis-à-vis the musicians may be important, or in a theatrical performance such as the Shakespeare’s plays produced on London’s Globe Theatre, in which where one sits or stands, and how, plays a role. Kinaesthesia plays a part when I go for a walk, when children climb trees, when sightseers hike to a mountain top or take a lift to the top of skyscraper: in these forms of play, participants seek to put their bodies in new relations with both themselves and with the outside world. That is the point of such games. And as it works in the leisurely activities of walking, climbing and otherwise travelling, so it also works when I attend to artwork having travelled to it, and having put myself in a physical relation with the world and my perceptions of it. In all cases – puzzle-solving, revelry and kinaesthesia – the experience of an artwork is again being free from the seriousness of circumstance and the rules that go along with it: solving a problem but not really (Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot is the real problem-solver), getting intoxicated but not really (the intoxications of attending a dance recital do not require alcohol), experiencing a new physiological orientation (as in attending a stage play), but only so far. I feel like I am moving through time and space when I listen to Mahler, but I am only moving through time. I feel like I am on top of the world at the top of the old Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower), but I am only 108 stories up. In English, we even use the word ‘play’ in sexual contexts, both in the word ‘foreplay’ and in the compound expression ‘sexual play’, sometimes aided by ‘sex toys’. Whether foreplay is always play in the way that bungee jumping is always play seems doubtful, for foreplay is usually understood to be directed towards a serious outcome. But art can involve a dimension of sexual play. Art can titillate without arousing or without bringing sexual feelings to a climax. It can make us play with the experience of having sex, or watching other people have sex, even watching people have dangerous sex, or being sexually assaulted. Obviously, art juxtaposes or unites sex and violence



Playing with Violence 9

in a number of ways, making violence titillating, frightening and so forth; and sexual violence in itself is a subject with which art frequently plays. Play is so central to human life yet so ambiguous a concept that invoking it to explain just one phenomenon, the aesthetic experience of violence, is to explain very little (see Sutton 2001). There is a hazard, moreover, in taking play to be a universal phenomenon at the expense of recognizing its historical dimensions. All societies play, but not all societies play in the same way. In what Spariosu (1989) calls ‘pre-rational’ societies, play often lacks that separateness that Caillois takes as a given. The very formula that I have assumed so far, where art is to not-art as play is to not-play, and where art is a species of play, is only possible under conditions where art and play can be undertaken as autonomous spheres of action: that is, under such conditions that the Greeks discovered in the fifth century BC, or that Western Europe seems to have rediscovered in the Renaissance. And in conditions of late capitalism, our conditions, the very autonomy of art and play that we like to take for granted, are thoroughly compromised by commercial considerations. We pay to play, and other people pay to cause us to pay to play – and then actually to play. There is as much autonomy in a football match as there is in a Hollywood movie. In conditions of late capitalism there is always a wellfounded suspicion that all forms of autonomy are illusions. Nevertheless, the ventures of play and art today are at the very least adventures towards autonomy. I do not play Monopoly in order to fill the coffers of the Parker Brothers Corporation. In fact, I play Monopoly in order to re-experience, in the realm of play, the greed and dangers attendant upon monopolistic capitalism, to see my play world competitors reduced to penury, and to take both pleasure and a certain ironic remorse in the spectacle. In the same way, I do not read The Quiet American out of concern for the estate of Graham Greene or the coffers of Penguin Books. In fact, I read it in order to re-experience, in the realm of play and aesthetic pleasure, the depravity of the twentieth century’s world system. Caillois’s four categories of play – mimesis, the agon, the vertiginous thrill and the embrace of chance – along with my own suggestions – puzzle-solving, kinaesthesia, revelry and sex – are probably not exhaustive. They cannot quite account for that ‘free play’ in itself dear to Schiller, even when applied strictly to aesthetic phenomena. Their historicity has been left unexplored. Moreover, they seem not to include any element of those most traditional of aesthetic concepts, the beautiful and the sublime. But the categories suggested here go a long way towards explaining both art and violence, towards seeing what happens when violence is turned into an object of aesthetic play, and consumers of those objects respond with emotion, thought and appreciation. Consider Caillois’s four forms in application to the experience of reading The Quiet American. Reading that novel, I am experiencing a form of

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make-believe or mimesis; I am experiencing in the realm of make-believe, what Nietzsche called ‘the dream’ of art. The ‘possible world’ of The Quiet American (as some theorists prefer to call it: e.g., Doležel 1998) is as intriguing as a dream, and like a dream, even if it also is based on an empirically verifiable historical reality and is read as what is commonly called a realistic novel. Then too, in experiencing this make-believe, I experience conditions of excitement, chance and competition. The novel excites me in a variety of ways, inciting a range of emotions from admiration to fear, from anger to indignation, as people get shot at, bombed, hijacked, ambushed and strangled, as bodies lie twitching in the street or floating in the river. At the same time, the novel drives me into an imaginary sequence of actions where I relive the contingency of events, where I am never entirely sure what will happen next. Even when I reread I can somehow relive the experience of suspense and uncertainty: will a bomb go off the way I remember, or some other way? Will Fowler later really signal that he wants Pyle to be killed? Will the communists really see it? Didn’t Fowler at the last moment change his mind? And finally, the novel causes me to experience degrees of allegiance or antipathy towards agents who compete with one another for happiness, for good fortune, for the achievement of political and cultural goals. Is Fowler my hero? Is Phuong? Neither? Do I care that Pyle gets killed? Do I care that Fowler is a murderer? Do I believe that either politics, ethics, fidelity or love justify the killing? Does Fowler come out a winner? Do I come out as a kind of winner, if I am on his side? Or do I not come out as loser, in a world where nobody ever wins? Thus in the novel there is make-believe, excitement, chance and competition – and there is violence in it all. 4. PLUNGED INTO VIOLENCE Was the violence always there – the terrorist bombing, and then the murder in revenge for the bombing – from the outset? Even if it surprised me, wasn’t I expecting it all along? If it is a novel written by a novelist who has already written thrillers, or written about life in a nation at war, I must have been expecting it. In fact, the novel has already depicted other scenes of violence, including an electrifying sequence where Fowler and Pyle are stranded in a contested stretch of land in the dark, and are assaulted by Viet Minh troops. Moreover, the novel adopts the tone early on of a world-weary detective novel. Most of the story is told in flashbacks and anticipations, jumping backward and forward in time. In the opening scene we learn that Pyle, who has recently stolen Phuong away from Fowler, is missing. The police come to inquire. Then we learn, from Fowler’s mouth, speaking in French to Phuong, that ‘Pyle is dead. Assassinated’. And we suspect that Fowler knows



Playing with Violence 11

something about it that he hasn’t admitted to the police. Maybe he has even had something to do with it. From the beginning of the novel we readers are plunged into a world of violence. We find ourselves imaginatively amid a situation where conflicts are aroused and resolved through violence. We are in Vietnam, a country at war, in the 1950s, and in a city where bombs are often exploded, where grenades are commonly thrown to injure people in the streets, shops and cafés. In addition, we are in a text of violence, belonging to a genre whose conventions most of us will already be acquainted with, where the representation of violence is part of the way the text communicates to its reader. In the terms of semiology, we could say that violence in The Quiet American is at once an assumption and a code. The assumption is as old as literature, and in many respects so is the code. We assume: the world is a violent place, and conflicts get stoked and resolved through violence. We adopt a code: when we read literature, we will follow the threads of a narrative about conflicts that arise and get resolved through violence. And we know how that works: we know what it means when a soldier draws a pistol, and we know what it means, in all kinds of ways, when it is said that a victim has been ‘Assassinated’. Sing, Goddess, sing of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus – that murderous anger which condemned Achaeans to countless agonies and threw many warrior souls deep into Hades, leaving their dead bodies carrion food for dogs and birds – all in fulfilment of the will of Zeus.

That is the opening of Homer’s Iliad (1992). It is the registration of a new code, which would be adopted again and again by writers and readers over the millennia. Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, many pains he suffered, heartsick on an open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home, But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove –

That is the opening of Homer’s The Odyssey (2006). Whether in a story of a military disaster or the story of a homecoming, Homer depicts a world that seems to correlate with a saying by the philosopher Heraclitus: ‘We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being through strife necessarily’ (see Weil 1965 and Levinas 1969: 21).7

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The assumption of a world of violence where conflict can be resolved only by more violence is not a universal of narrative poetry or any other art form. Nor is the exploitation of the corresponding code of violence a literary universal. Henry James writes of Americans looking for the meaning of their lives in what is for them a peaceful, luxurious Paris or London. Pierre-August Renoir paints boating parties, tranquil landscapes and calmly indulgent naked women. In James’s The Ambassadors (1903) the great thrill of the novel comes when an American man is espied in an intimate situation with a married Parisian woman. In Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1882), the thrill comes in the heavy sensuousness of the moment, when among a group of attractive young Parisians a repletion of food and drink and the warmth of the afternoon is mixing with an awakening of sexual desires. You can say that underneath the calm of impressionist art is a world of aggression and coercion and acts of violence – but what the artist is showing is mainly what is not underneath, what is not hidden behind the warm light of the here and now. It is one of the ironies of The Quiet American that its main character would in many respects rather inhabit the bright, leisurely, sensual world of James and Renoir. In the opening of the book Fowler recalls a passage from a poem by Baudelaire: My child, my sister . . . To love at leisure, To love and die In the country you resemble. (14)

But Fowler is in troubled Vietnam, and he works as a foreign correspondent, increasingly as a war correspondent. He is in a world where ‘loving at leisure’ does not appear to be an option, even if he is in the country that ‘resembles’ the woman from it, Phuong, whom he loves. And he is in a text where warfare, murder and terrorism, rather than romance, give us the thrills, the contestation and the danger we are seeking. There is no hiding in Vietnam in the early 1950s, and no possibility of indifference. Fowler and Pyle alike, it turns out, beneath their civility, are men of rage, just like Achilles. Yet both, too, are seekers like Odysseus, trying to survive and save the lives of others, having themselves thrived on the plunder of lost lives: Fowler the beneficiary of the fading British Empire, Pyle the rising star of a rising empire, which has established its new dominance through, precisely, the detonation of bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the inaugural events of the American half-century of world domination. 5. THE NEED FOR A THEORY The aesthetics of violence: it has a history; it is intrinsic to a form of play; it depends on certain kinds of assumptions; it communicates by way of a code.



Playing with Violence 13

And finally, it is revelatory. ‘A man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens’. That is something I needed to see. That is something I wanted to see, even if I didn’t know that until I saw it. Violence in The Quiet American rips away masks of complacency: the American girls with their ice cream and deodorants, the French woman with her make-up, the great glass walls of the café, the legs of a passer-by, and for Fowler, any illusion that his rival the quiet American is not a very dangerous man. Is this fair? The novel is a fiction. There was a bombing in 1952 in Saigon that Greene based his account on, but Graham had not been an eye witness, and he changed a number of details (Sherry 1994: 421–36; see Figure 1.1). This bombing, the one Graham depicted, never occurred. Nor did the assassination to follow. And yet I feel that I am seeing something true. That it is unexpected has something to do with my feeling. Again and again, when I think about scenes of violence in narratives, dramas or films, unexpected violence seems to have moved me the most. Even when I see, for the umpteenth time, a performance of Hamlet, I am gratified when the actors have made the final scene seem contingent, an accident that might have been avoided, the stabbing of Hamlet with the poisoned foil a surprise, the killing of Claudius a spontaneous act of rage. In paintings, too, when I see violence, I am impressed most when what is happening before my eyes surprises: the victim is in shock, the culprit is amazed at his or her own audacity. There are times, of course, when violence does not surprise, when violence is all too easy to anticipate, and such anticipated violence has its uses in art as well. But it doesn’t seem as true to me as unexpected violence; that is, it doesn’t seem to reveal something beneath or beyond the text that needed to have been revealed. Or to put it another way, when violence is unexpected (however much foreshadowed, rhythmically built up to, metaphorically prefigured or atmospherically dressed) then it seems to have the ability to interrupt the fiction of the text in the interest of something which is non-fictional in origin. Many philosophical arguments could be marshalled against this feeling of mine, but rather than argue for or against it I wish to interrogate it, and see what, for better or worse, lies behind it. My feeling about the violent explosion and the assassination in The Quiet American or the final scene of Hamlet is akin to what aestheticians, as I have said, traditionally call the sublime. But why? How? Is this fair? The sublime is supposed to be a good thing to feel. It is supposed to give us a sense of greatness. Edmund Burke, in the eighteenth century, wrote that the sublime was ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’, and approved of it without qualification (2008: 39). But that doesn’t mean that I have to accept the argument, or not inquire further into my attraction towards the violence in art. What am I doing when I, as it were, assent to this bombing, or that sword fight, and hence to all that destruction? And how shall I account for the differences of different kinds of violence, in different kinds of texts, not to mention the different kinds of that

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violence in art can evoke? For the sublime is not the only feeling that violence in art can evoke. Violence can be ridiculous too. Most children in America and many other countries first learn about violence by watching it in cartoons, and being encouraged to laugh about it. But if violence can be funny, it can also be repulsive, boring, inspiring, pulse-racing, heart-rending, puzzling or insultingly stupid. Is some violence ‘true’ and other violence ‘false’? Do my responses to violence in art reveal anything apart from something about myself? One evening, in Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1991, I went to see the newly released film Thelma and Louise. It ends when Thelma and Louise, driving across America, chased by the police and finding themselves unable to escape, decide to kill themselves. They drive over a cliff in the Grand Canyon, and that’s the end of the story. ‘Great ending’, I found myself remarking to my companion as the lights came up. It had put me in mind of the ending of the Truffaut film Jules et Jim (1962), where two of the characters drive off a bridge to their deaths, as well as the ending of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) where the two title characters are ambushed and killed while driving along a road. A woman standing to my other side, a stranger, then glared at me in anger. ‘What do you mean it’s great?’, she said. How could I be impressed at the ending of the film, she implied, where two women, exploited by sexism, victimized by sexual assault and turned by lawmakers into criminals have no option but to kill themselves? In 1991, the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area was a dangerous place. Gang violence and drug violence were rampant. Killings and sexual assaults were constantly in the news. In the middle of the night, from the quiet of my bedroom in a three-story apartment building in what seemed to be a safe part of Oakland, near Piedmont, I would hear gunshots firing and echoing. One summer evening, taking a nap, I was awakened by gunfire at a very close range. A woman two doors down from my own apartment had been stabbed to death by her estranged boyfriend, the father of her threeyear-old son, a shy boy with a thick mop of blonde hair. Neighbours, hearing the ruckus, had called the police, who had stormed into the building and seen the estranged boyfriend actually at work, in the hallway, on his knees, leaning over the naked body of the woman and stabbing her repeatedly in the belly. When he ignored the police yelling at him to stop, a policeman shot him, twice, and the boyfriend fell over dead. It was a few seconds after that, awakened, that I rose and went to the door, and reluctantly opened it to see what had happened. I saw the two bloody bodies on the floor, the dead naked woman, face up, her legs spread, her black bush exposed to the air, and lying next to her face down, the dead-clothed former boyfriend. There were about half a dozen police officers in the hallway, volubly communicating by



Playing with Violence 15

walkie-talkie to headquarters and among themselves. Someone said something about going inside the apartment and searching. Another neighbour called out to the police, ‘She has a son’. A few moments later a policewoman came back into the hallway from the apartment, carrying in her arms the three-year-old boy. He was naked to the stomach and covered with blood; he had been repeatedly stabbed in his torso, and he too was dead. In those days people were beginning to talk about ‘social dysfunction’, the end of America’s ability to govern itself. There were riots in Los Angeles that some people (wrongly, over-romantically, I thought) were calling an ‘insurrection’. The drug wars – ‘crack’ was the intoxicant of choice – went on. In the newspapers I read a lot of complaints about violence in the media, the idea being that violence on television and in films was causing people to act violently. In a local Berkeley paper I read letters on the subject of Thelma and Louise, complaining about its anti-feminist fatalism, and I read another by a self-professed feminist who expressed contempt for all the violence in films today, describing acts of murder and mayhem that were the common fare of films those days. Thelma and Louise was no different, in that respect. And we had to put a stop to it. I read that letter and sympathized with the writer’s dismay, but I thought to myself that the writer’s description of the contemptible violence in film today could also be applied to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth is after all the story of a ruthless serial killer. But Macbeth is a lot more than that too. At that moment, over twenty years ago, I realized that we needed a theory of the aesthetics of violence. Among other things, we needed a theory of what it was that violence in art seemed to reveal to us – or else what we did with it which had nothing to do with revelations, but rather our inclinations towards aggression. We still need such a theory. The epidemic of violence in America is long since over. The rate of violent crime in America has dropped precipitously since then, although it is still the highest of any of the advanced countries of the world, and the post-2008 America is seeing the rise of new kinds of problems, including rising rates of cybercrime and suicide.8 I live in Sweden, where lethal violence is rare, as it is in most of Europe, as well as Japan, much of the Middle East (outside the war zones), most of Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, Australia, North Africa and parts of West and East Africa. But I recently spent several months in the nation of South Africa, where the rate of violent crime is very high; it is dangerous to walk the streets at night almost anywhere you go, and in many urban areas it can even be dangerous to walk the streets during the day. Of every 100,000 people in this country 30 will be murdered this year. That’s nine times more than in New York City, ninety times more than in Tokyo. A number of other undeveloped or unevenly developed countries are experiencing extremely high rates of violent crime, like Guatemala, Jamaica and Uganda. But in the developed world,

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violent crime is well down from levels in the 1990s and earlier. Many social scientists still investigate whether exposure to violence in art or the media causes people to act violently or aggressively, and many still claim to have discovered solid evidence to that effect, calling upon their fellow citizens to do something about the epidemic of violence in art and the media. But their evidence usually depends upon experimental protocols involving university undergraduates, who can be challenged to act aggressively or not after watching a few films or TV shows; and the evidence from these experiments has absolutely no confirmation in the real world.9 The social scientists who still decry violence in the media have nothing to say about the fact that the most constant and fiercest media violence in the world is probably to be found in Japan, which is also one of the least violent countries in the world, and also one of the developed countries most committed to pacifism (see Goldstein 1998; Potter 1999; Everitt 2001; Waldman 2013). Nor have they anything to say about the fact that, though the volume of violence in Hollywood films continues to rise, physical violence in America has dramatically fallen since the 1990s. All over the world, in largely peaceful societies, people are playing with violence, and I am sure there is something significant about that. Maybe there is even something wrong about it. But what they are not doing when attending to violence in art, except in very rare cases, is rehearsing violence, getting ready actually to do it. 6. AESTHETICIZATION A social scientist – I am afraid I do not remember who – once told the story of his being on an airplane. Seated next to him was a man about thirty years old, intently studying the screen of his laptop computer, and listening to what was playing on the computer through earphones. The man had put together his own video of violent scenes in movies. He was watching car crashes, explosions, pitched battles, one after the other. That was all. There were no story lines to follow, no characters to become acquainted with, just scenes of violence without context, and the man was calmly but attentively taking it in. This absorption in violence without context is an extreme case of what is usually called aestheticization. The man took delight in scenes of cinematic violence for their own sake. And maybe there is nothing absurd about it. After all, there are many specialists in cinematic violence, people who design and direct scenes of violence. The making of the representation of violence for its own sake is an art. Why should there not also be connoisseurs of the art of violence?10 You can compare the way Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight 2008, etc.) shoots violence with the way Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction 1994, etc.) shoots it. You can admire the combination of light, movement



Playing with Violence 17

and sound in either director’s work. You can compare the way Bruce Willis punches a villain with the way Daniel Craig punches a villain, or the way different directors show Willis or Craig punching villains – from above or below, from close up or far away, in a continuous shot or a montage of movements and reactions. In video game circles, the appreciation of the art of killing and avoiding being killed is a primary object of discussion. People praise a game because the killing is inventive, challenging, well timed, well depicted, well scripted, ‘realistic’ and ultimately ‘fun’ . . . the killing is usually beside the point.11 In 1827 Thomas de Quincey (2004) wrote a series of comically pedantic essays he called ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. As a ‘fine art’ murder could be assessed not as a matter of morality but as a matter of taste. Here is the key passage: When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense – not done, not even (according to modern purism) being done, but only going to be done – and a rumour of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it morally. But suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it, Τετελεσται, It is finished, or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) Ειργασται. Done it is, it is a fait accompli; suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off like a shot nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs, to trip up the fellow in his flight, but all to no purpose – ‘abiit, evasit, excessit, erupit’, etc. – why, then, I say, what’s the use of any more virtue? Enough has been given to morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts. A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but we can’t mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purpose, let us treat it aesthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way. Such is the logic of a sensible man; and what follows? We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.

De Quincey is joking, but he is calling attention to something real: the popular fascination with violence for its own sake. There were famous cases of murder in de Quincey’s day that newspapers reported on repeatedly, and crime fiction was being born (see Black 1992; Rabaté 2007; Noys 2013). But de Quincey is suggesting that we admire the murderer apart from the moral consequences of his act. And that is only one of the things we often do when we adopt an aesthetic attitude to violence. Take the case of Quentin Tarantino. I find that I am an admirer not of his violent characters but of two particular scenes of violence in his often violent films.12 One is in Reservoir Dogs (1992), where the character played by Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde, a criminal) tortures a captured police officer while dancing to the catchy tune of the Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’. The climax

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comes when he slices off the policeman’s ear (see Bacon 40). The other is the conclusion of Django Unchained (2012), where Django, a freed slave played by Jamie Foxx, gets his revenge on Candieland, a slave plantation. In the main house, he guns down four people, shoots another (an Uncle Tom, played by Samuel Jackson) in both his kneecaps and then blows up the house with dynamite (even though dynamite had not been invented yet). The music happily comes up, the theme song from the Spaghetti Western, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966). What have I and countless other Tarantino fans admired in these scenes? I once heard the late moral thinker Susan Sontag say how appalled she was by the gratuitous violence in Tarantino’s films, that is, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But I can imagine other people replying that Sontag just didn’t get it. The absurdity of the situations, the combination of the physically gruesome with comical histrionics, the superposition of whimsical popular music, the ingenuity with which Tarantino engages the viewer from the points of view of both culprits and victims, the tensions of the scenes, which are both predictable and surprising – all that and many more details besides could be cited in defence of one’s admiration for Tarantino’s work. But I think a response to the moral consequences of violence is also part of what may or may not delight us. Those who claim that there is nothing ‘moral’ in the appreciation of a work of art have not thought about what they are actually doing when they appreciate most works of art, especially those with a narrative content. Those who argue, as film theorists sometimes do, that in film it is not the story (and therefore character, moral action, allegory, etc.) that is important but rather the moving image13 are forgetting that the moving image is of something rather than nothing, and that spectators are responding to that something as well as to its movement in time and space: a knife poked through an eye is never morally equivalent to a knife cutting through a bar of butter; nor is it, of course, the affective equivalent either. In his public statements, Tarantino has tried to have it both ways. In one interview he said that violence was pre-eminently cinematic. ‘That’s why Thomas Edison created the motion picture camera – because violence is so good. It affects audiences in a big way. You know you’re watching a movie’ (Anonymous 2010). The implication is that violence in film is not only playful but also a sign of playfulness, a sign of participating in a cinematic fantasy. But in another interview, Tarantino appealed to the moral purpose of the representation of violence. In Django Unchained, he said, he wanted to confront Americans with the horror of slavery, and so he showed slaves, on a plantation in the Deep South in the 1850s, being brutally treated by their masters. But precisely because what he was showing was so horrible, Tarantino said, the movie had to have ‘a happy ending’. The happy ending



Playing with Violence 19

came in a scene where Django ruthlessly gunned down his enemies. ‘Sometimes, film can right the wrongs’, Tarantino said.14 In a subsequent notorious television interview, Tarantino claimed that film violence can be ‘cathartic’, and implied that cathartic violence was what he was aiming for in Django Unchained.15 Another attribute commonly assigned to play is moral neutrality. It doesn’t matter from a moral point of view whether the Jets or the Giants win the game, although it may matter a great deal in other respects. There is no particular morality to bungee jumping, dressing up in your parents’ clothes, or solving a crossword puzzle. But our response to artworks is often different. Whether Django wins or loses his fight against slaveholders matters to us (even if only in play) because we know that Django is right and the slaveholders wrong. (We ‘know this’ not only by our knowledge of the history of slavery and our moral education but also because from the start the film reproduces an anti-slavery point of view, sometimes by exaggerating the cruelty of slavery and the brutality of slave masters.) It matters to us that the slaveholder tortures his slaves because we know that what he is doing is wrong, and we wish (on the level of the imagination) that we could stop it. We are immersed in what Antonin Artaud (2010, first published 1964) called the ‘theatre of cruelty’. This would be a theatre which would provide ‘the audience with truthful distillations of dreams where its taste for crime, its erotic obsessions, its savageness, its fantasies, its utopian sense of life and objects, even its cannibalism, do not gush out on an illusory make believe but on an inner level’ (65). There are affects being experienced – I am afraid, I am frustrated, I am shocked, disgusted, I am hopeful – as well as moral decisions being made and innermost wishes being experienced (though there is to my mind no need to distinguish between the ‘illusory’ and the ‘inner’). A filmmaker like Tarantino deliberately plays with our emotions and wishes, manipulates us into imagining and feeling one thing or another. But such a filmmaker also challenges us to think about what we are seeing and feeling, and to try to make moral judgements about it. That making judgements might be difficult sometimes, either because the filmmaker deliberately makes it so or because the filmmaker is incompetent, confused, cynical, mercenary or malicious, does not alter the fact that our moral faculties are appealed to again and again, and that this appeal to morality is part of what we go to films for. If I go to films or read books or look at pictures in art galleries for a lot of different purposes, one of those purposes is playfully to think about right and wrong. It is even to think about how my ideas about right and wrong correspond or do not correspond with how I feel with what is going on in the film, the text or the picture. I may find myself enjoying an act of cruelty: important information that my moral consciousness will have to process.

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7. EFFECTS: ART ON VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE ON ART When I play with violence by experiencing an artwork, I am, in effect, playing with myself. I am playing a spectator sport where the only possible favourable outcome is the outcome that comes to me and through me and my spectatorship. And yet, although I have a choice in what I experience, although I can pick what I like and avoid what I do not like and although the end product of my experience is the experience itself, private to me, I am aware that artworks also connect me to others. Many of us experience the same things, though in our own ways; we discuss or read about what we experience; we all think about the same mass-produced objects of the imagination. We share these artworks. And we share a sense that what we experience is often mythic. Not just the Iliad and the Odyssey, but any kind of effective representation of life and the violence in it may swell into the consciousness of the society in which it is experienced. Unlike my dreams, no artwork in the world has ever been made just for me. The attempt to measure the ‘effects’ of violence in art is to attempt the impossible. It may be easy to measure elements of aggressive feeling experienced shortly after university undergraduates are exposed to aggressive behaviour in movies. But it is impossible to do what social scientists call a ‘longitudinal’ study of it: that is, it is impossible to measure the long-term effects of exposure to violent art for different people in different circumstances, and study what people actually do from day to day. Such an experiment simply could never be set up. It would require monitoring all of life itself.16 It would require, in advance, figuring out the moral context of scenes of violence, and then figuring out, over the course of any individual’s life, what would count as ‘aggressive’ or ‘destructive’ behaviour – as opposed to, say, pragmatic activities. It might even require us to consider the differences and correlations between the menacing aggression of the bully, the passive aggression of the office manager, the predatory aggression of the Wall Street trader and the tactical aggression of a soldier. Is all aggression a mistake, an inexcusable response to conflict and desire, subject to preconditioning by cultural influences like video games? Isn’t aggression rather, like Heraclitus’s ‘strife’, a primary element of life? And isn’t it sometimes necessary? Isn’t it more necessary for some rather than others, in some situations rather than others? If intra-species aggression is in our biology, as the ethologist Konrad Lorenz long ago pointed out (2002; originally published in 1963), it is first of all because aggression is adaptive; it helps us survive. And it is probable that aggression helps us survive in the midst of the most peaceful of societies. As the Greeks used to say that one should not judge persons happy until they are dead, so perhaps (apart from criminals caught in the act) we should not judge if people have led violent lives until they are dead.



Playing with Violence 21

But even to ask whether violence in art leads to violence in life is probably to ask the wrong question. Yes, there have been and will continue to be mentally disturbed individuals who will copy the violence they will have seen in the movies, but this is an extremely small number of people, and if they are headed towards violence they could well find their inspiration in other ways. For the 99.99 per cent of the rest of us, there are many more other kinds of violence to worry about, and little cause to worry that we too will become mass murderers pretending to be Batman. More killings have inspired by military parades and political propaganda than by any Hollywood movie – except perhaps movies that have served the purposes of political propaganda. So the question to be asked might be opposite to the one posed by social scientists. Instead of asking what is the effect of art on violence, we might rather ask, what is the effect of violence on art? What must art be because of the existence of violence? What must art do because of the existence of violence, and what must it do in order to make violence into art? One thing an artwork must do, surely, is aestheticize violence, making it into the kind of spectacle the man on the airplane enjoyed. But for most of us, an artwork also needs to put violence into a context. It may need to make a myth out of the violence in it. Certainly it needs to make a moral point about it. It needs to make violence useful to us from a moral point of view (or what is the same thing, a preferred amoral or anti-moral point of view). People object to violence in art, as Susan Sontag objected to Pulp Fiction, because they don’t see the moral usefulness of it, when instead the violence seems morally harmful or just plain useless – ‘gratuitous’ being our usual word for the latter. But even the gratuitous may have its uses. Excess, as the philosopher George Bataille often argued, is vital to us (e.g., Bataille 1991). Excess is vital to our moral health. Feeling not just indignity but also shock, frustration, disgust, pity and terror, or for that matter a triumphant if uncomfortable joy in the suffering of others or the defeat of an enemy – that excess of feeling may be in some sense necessary to us, who have to cope with the idea that whether suppressed or expressed, aggression is part of our genetic and cultural make-up. So is the sheer insolence of excess; the excess that says no to pragmatism and convention, that says no to limitation for the sake of the benefits of limitation, may be a part of us that requires continual acknowledgement. But excess is also dangerous. What an artwork must be because of the existence of violence may well be this: it must be a form of play where danger is confronted at the edge of excess. Forget about the ‘functions’ of art. Art has its own responsibilities, its own mandates, its own indeterminacies, its own unknown future, and we must do what we will when we come into contact with it. Let me conclude by saying something about this danger. Normally, of course, when we think about being, as we say, in danger, we mean being

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personally vulnerable. ‘Precarity’ is a big word in social thought these days.17 For most of us, even in this age of eighty-year-long life expectancies, life seems to be ‘precarious’, but this precariousness is unevenly distributed. And so, if what I have said earlier is true, aesthetic violence is one of the ways we learn about our precariousness, and the unevenness with which it is experienced – or also, the way we might mislearn about it. In play, we may

Figure 1.1.  Life Magazine (28 January 1952). Source: Photo and text public domain.



Playing with Violence 23

find ourselves working through an anxiety. In play, we may come to experience and reflect on a condition of precariousness that in serious life is often hard to bear, if that is what we are driven to do, and if that is what an artwork encourages us to do. But the danger I am thinking of is not only personal. It is not only an individual’s vulnerability. It is also social. And it is not only about vulnerability. It is also about a person’s dangerousness to others. When I experience violence in art I not only experience what could happen to me if I were to be assaulted. I also experience what I could do and feel if I were to assault another. And I do not experience these things just so far as I am me – a pacific man, let us say, largely conflict-averse, who nevertheless cannot help but harbour hostility towards this person or that. I experience dangerousness as an expression, on the one hand, of my impulsive pre-social self, and, on the other hand, of my willing participation in society. I am in danger. But I am also dangerous to others. I am alone in the world. But I am a man with strength and courage and probably more aggression and hostility inside me than I am capable of consciously acknowledging. I am a danger to others as well as to myself. I am also the citizen of a world power, the one that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that started a second war in Vietnam after the first one against the French ended. I am one among the many of whom the world’s military systems have been designed to take account. My very existence is a menace to others, just as my country and my world are a menace to others. Maybe that is the core of the ‘truth’ I think I apprehend at the moment of an effective incident of aesthetic violence. I am, like everyone else in the world, an unavoidably aggressive being, housed in a universe of strife. And art has been made to show me that – or else mislead me about it. NOTES 1. Perhaps the most comprehensive study of the subject of art as play in recent times is to be found in Spariosu (1989), who hearkens back to Kant (1987), Schiller (2014) and Nietzsche (1999), among others. The concept is dominant in Gadamer (2004) and often referred to in Adorno (1997). Also of interest are Freud (2001a), Winnicott (1971), Bateson (1987), Walton (1990), Currie and Ravenscroft (2002), Upton (2015) and Fox (2016). A brief philosophic account of the freedom implicit in play is found in Fink (1968). I will be discussing and developing the concept throughout. 2. See Coady (2014) for an expansive discussion of this problem. 3. See preface, note 11. 4. As I mentioned in the preface, I also have a term for the study of the art object in itself: the theory of art. 5. A similar distinction is made in Iser (1978), and for that matter a whole range of criticism that has gone under the name of ‘reader response theory’ or ‘reception aesthetics’.

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6. See note 1. 7. Interestingly, Levinas retranslates ‘strife’ as ‘war’. That would not be my interpretation, for war implies an identifiable conflict between two foes whereas strife is a more general condition, with many more sides or agents being possible. I comment on this issue in chapter 2. 8. Among the sources for the statistics quoted here and elsewhere are the websites of the FBI, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-us; The European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics, http://www.europeansourcebook.org/ob285_full.pdf; and the Global Peace Index, http://static.visionofhumanity.org/. 9. One different kind of study (Dahl and Della Vigna 2008) has pretty convincingly established that crime in America drops when violent blockbusters are released in movie theatres: evidently young people who might otherwise be engaged in violence-provoking activity, like drinking together or hanging out in the streets, are in the theatres. But the effect lasts for several days after the movie is watched. 10. Reviewing the new film version of Godzilla, film critic A. O. Scott (2014) has this to say: ‘Appreciation of a movie like this requires an almost morbid degree of connoisseurship, which may, in practice, be hard to distinguish from bored acquiescence. Evaluating its components is a little like scoring gymnastics or figure skating. You factor in degree of difficulty, technical accomplishment and various subjective responses, and it is always helpful to have points of comparison. How does the obliteration of, say, Honolulu stack up against the smashing of Chicago in that “Transformers” movie?’. 11. See for example http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/. 12. I am not, however, an admirer of the violence in the Kill Bill films. 13. This is the fundamental principle in Deleuze and many of his followers. I hate to come out as a critic of a great philosopher, and I have learned much from his work, which I will cite at a later point, but I believe he misses (perhaps deliberately) a fundamental point of storytelling. My own leaning is akin to that developed in Chatman (1980, 1990). 14. http://www.wmagazine.com/people/celebrities/2013/02/quentin-tarantinodjango-unchained-director/. 15. http://www.channel4.com/news/tarantino-uncut-when-quentin-met-krishnantranscript. 16. Lesser (1993) puts it another way: ‘The kind of experiment needed to demonstrate a causal connection between spectatorship and violent behaviour would, if accurately conducted, be so morally reprehensible as to invalidate results’ (2–3). 17. Most famously in Butler (2004). But a recent search of the JSTOR database of academic journals shows 258 entries, the vast majority of them published after 1997.

Chapter 2

Hansel or Gretel

A blind, scheming, cannibalistic witch, inhabiting a cottage in the woods, captures a pair of children, a brother and a sister. The brother she incarcerates, keeping him behind bars. The sister she has forced into servitude; the girl has no choice, it appears, but stay in the cottage and do the witch’s bidding. One day the witch orders the girl to inspect the inside of a burning oven, but the girl, rightly sensing that events are coming to a head, tells the witch she can’t figure out how to get in. The witch starts to show the girl how, putting her own head inside. The girl shoves the witch all the way in and slams the door shut, leaving the witch to burn to death in her own fire. I once wrote an update of the story of Hansel and Gretel (Appelbaum 1995). This was back in the early 1990s, again a time when internal violence in America was reaching its highest level of the century. It was also a time when I was a postgraduate student at Berkeley. The theory wars and culture wars were at their peak – non-violent wars, but ‘wars’ all the same in the minds of many people, where the future territories of humanist study and cultural values were being contested. A ‘mature’ male student, thirty-seven years old, returning to university after many years of absence, I was attracted to the post-structuralist, post-Marxist school of literary criticism, and I studied under a leading self-professed ‘New Historicist’. But the biggest, hottest thing going among my fellow students at the time was feminist criticism, a school of thought that was itself divided into various mutually antagonistic camps but that, as a whole, made it seem as if the decisive category of humanist thought and cultural value was and always would be gender, especially as viewed through the lens of the perennially oppressed gender, woman. I rewrote ‘Hansel and Gretel’ as a text in two voices, the first in the voice of a very male, post-Marxist Hansel, the second in the voice of a very female, psychoanalytically inclined feminist Gretel. I staged the text as a kind of 25

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competition. Whose version of events would win, Hansel’s or Gretel’s? I also staged the story as an example of what I thought of as textual violence. Hansel begins. He is authoritative. He has an understanding of his own story that conforms to the master narrative of the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. Hansel insists that the story is an allegory about capital formation, money and technology. It is a story where shiny, durable objects like pebbles and coins triumph over non-durables like bread crumbs and cake. The family starts out poor, barely subsisting in what appears to be a barter economy. It ends up rich, and it does so because, metaphorically speaking, it comes to master the system of money. Hansel’s interpretation is not altogether implausible. There is an economic subtext in the original story; there is an economic subtext to the career of the Grimm Brothers themselves; and there is even an economic subtext in the writing of the story. From 1812 to 1857, the Brothers Grimm issued five different versions of the story, each more elaborate than the preceding one, the final version being the classic most of us are familiar with now. The story began for them with a brief tale told to them by one of their friends, Dortchen Wild, an educated young woman with a Huguenot background whom Wilhelm Grimm would eventually marry. There are elements of traditional folktales in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ – children on a quest, an ogre in the woods – but Dortchen may well have invented the bulk of the story (Tatar 1987; Zipes 1988). And as ‘Hansel and Gretel’ looked backward to folk tradition, according to my Hansel, it also looked forward to the world of the Brothers Grimm and Dortchen Wild. The Brothers Grimm are rightly known as romantics, interested in the volk of the German principalities as a source of meaning and value, and interested in the tales as evidence of a German national identity. But their careers, during which they rose from poverty and obscurity to prosperity and fame, also coincided with Germany’s industrial revolution. My Hansel tells the story of how Hansel, Gretel and their father themselves rise from destitution. They struggle in a subsistence economy subject to periodic dearth (as did the Germany of the Brothers’ early years), which causes the family order to fall apart. But in the end, having overcome an ordeal, the children return from the forest with a trove of coins and jewels: thanks to their labours, their lives are miraculously transformed. This is a revolution, in short. The world, my Hansel implies, doesn’t change from traditionalism to capitalism or from subsistence to wealth by slowly accumulating enough dry logs to accommodate it; the world moves into the future by leaps and bounds. And so, having taken the leap, the family will live happily ever after. For all his confidence as an interpreter of his own story, however, Hansel confesses that he cannot quite come to terms with the means through which the transition from poverty to wealth was made: Gretel’s violence. And this is where Gretel’s voice comes in, her text interrupting and overwhelming



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Hansel’s. She has once upon a time turned to an act of violence that Hansel cannot understand. She is angry at Hansel’s obtuseness. She resents the fact that she had to be the violent one. She is frustrated that no one understands this. Unlike Hansel, she conceives of their story tragically, and she conceives of her own fate as a woman in a tragic frame of mind. For the violence Gretel had to commit in order to liberate herself and her brother and bring wealth into their family was nothing less than symbolic matricide. In order to be free, Gretel had to kill, and the person she had to kill was a symbolic stand-in for her mother. This has been no secret to the fairy tale interpreters. For when Gretel kills the witch, the killing turns out to have a magical effect. When the two children arrive home, the mother who was the cause of their misery also turns out to have recently died. There is no explanation for her death, but her removal ensures the happiness of the father, son and daughter. Not just gruelling poverty but also the corruptness of the mother was responsible for destroying the family unit, and so for the family to live, the mother must somehow disappear. By the magic of fairy tale logic, as my Gretel puts it, one death equates with and amounts to the other: Killing the witch means killing the mother. Or even a stepmother: it was one of the major changes the Grimm Brothers made to the original story that the mother figure was transformed from a natural mother to a stepmother, no doubt in order to make her cruelty more palatable, and, since evil stepmothers were already a familiar part of European folklore, more conventional. But whether a real mother or a stepmother, the figure who dies in the end has always already been an antimother. And in that she finds a counterpart in the anti-mother figure of the witch. The mother at home, instead of nourishing and protecting the children, wishes to abandon them and starve them. The mother in the woods, instead of nourishing and protecting the children, as she first promises to do, wishes to imprison them, fatten them up and eat them. These anti-mothers have to be killed off in order that the family will prosper – but notably, then, they are never replaced by real mothers. Instead, Gretel implicitly becomes the chief woman of the family. That too my Gretel resents, because it seems then that for her, as for any other girl, there is no way forward but to kill off the mother figure inside of her. My Gretel claims to have heard the magic white duck at the end of the story tell a myth of universal matricide. Just as, in Freud’s speculative myth in Totem and Taboo (2001c), human society begins when brothers band together to kill the dominating woman-monopolizing father, so that they too can have access to women and become fathers, here in Gretel’s version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, according to the duck, human society moves forward only when women, separately or together, kill the men-monopolizing mother, to the end that they too can have access to men and be mothers.

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Obviously, I do not bring all this up only because of my interest in this fairy tale over the years. It is also because it is a story about violence: a violence, in fact, that even the story’s most rigorous interpreters have tried to avoid.1 1. GRETEL’S VIOLENCE – AND ALL THE OTHERS’ ‘A’ violence, I say, because for me that is the key act of the story, and the best example (among others) of what an aesthetics of violence might be on the lookout for. Even if Gretel is seldom given the credit for what she has done, it is through her killing the witch that the dreamwork of the fairy tale delivers a miraculously happy ending. We might not like it. In Engelbert Humperdinck’s operatic version of the story (1893), Gretel and Hansel perform together a stylized pushing of the witch into the oven. In a 1987 American film version of the story, directed by Len Talan and made for children, Gretel wishes that harm may come to the witch, and only watches from a distance as her wish is fulfilled when the witch accidentally falls into the pit of her furnace. Many of us would prefer that some other way beside a violent shove and a violent slamming of the oven door, undertaken by a young girl, would solve the problems in the story; or that the outcome would be something less unpleasant than a person being burnt alive in a terrifyingly confined space. ‘Oh!’ says the original story, ‘then [the witch] began to howl quite horribly, but Gretel ran away and the godless witch was miserably burnt to death’.2 The story reminds us that the traditional punishment in Europe for witchcraft was to be burned alive; and many supposedly ‘godless’ women died that way. There is something very unpleasant here. But there it is. Only on further reflection we may discover that Gretel’s signature act of witch-burning is only one violence among many. Is not the abandoning of children in the woods a form of violence? Child abandonment is a common theme in Western literature, going back to the ancient Greeks, and in this version the stakes are clear. ‘How could I bring myself to abandon my own children alone in the woods?’ the father at first objects, in the 1857 version. ‘Wild animals would soon come and tear them to pieces’. Child abandonment is not violence in the same sense as first-degree murder is violence, but it is understood that abandonment, morally reprehensible as it already is, may amount to murder all the same. Our polite term for what would happen if a child died from exposure or animal attack after having been abandoned is ‘negligent homicide’ or even ‘imminent hazard’. It is unlikely that courts today would show much mercy to an offender like the stepmother. But there are other sorts of violence in the story. The stepmother brings one of them up in her argument about child abandonment. When the father



Hansel or Gretel 29

objects to her idea of abandoning the children, she says, ‘Oh, you fool, then all four of us will starve. All you can do is to plane the boards for our coffins’. Thus another insidious form of violence shows its face. If child abandonment is violence, so too, the stepmother suggests, is abject poverty; for poverty too can kill; it can impose horrible life or death choices upon us, and it sometimes leaves us no choice at all. In a condition of utter deprivation, trying to save the children would end up meaning killing both the children and those who are trying to save them. And then comes what seems to be the most sinister violence of all. Alone in her cottage, the witch practices child imprisonment, murder and cannibalism, forms of violence that are utterly abhorrent. Nowadays ‘child abuse’ is a sensational crime, as is ‘child slavery’ and, in general, ‘unlawful detention’ or ‘false imprisonment’. Here is something worse: all those things connected with an intention to slaughter and cannibalize. Nor is this the end of it. Less insidious, but apparently blameworthy too, is the witch’s hidden violence of hoarding wealth, a violence, in the midst of famine, of withholding goods from others. If the people of the countryside had just a little bit of that money, they could afford to import grain from abroad. We may be reminded of Amartya Sen’s theory of famine (1990), according to which famine is caused not by a lack of food but by inequalities in the entitlement to food, and the inequality in the woods is a perfect illustration of the theory. Abandonment, starvation, imprisonment, murder, cannibalism, hoarding: these things do not belong to the same categories of action usually, and yet they all can be understood to border upon or actually represent a form of violence. And to them the original story asks us to consider adding still another form, the violence of nature itself. The animals of the woods, to which the story draws our attention partly by contrasting them to Hansel’s pet white cat, are out there to tear the children into pieces if the latter cannot protect themselves. Meanwhile, the birds of the forest, doing what comes naturally, eat up Hansel’s bread crumbs, and so condemn the children to being lost. The birds have done violence to Hansel’s language of return. If you are not sure that language-eating birds are violent, the story provides the counter-example of the white duck (whiteness here as in the case of the pet cat being a sign of non-violence in this text) who understands the discourse of the children and accommodates them by carrying them one by one across a lake, taking them back to where the crumbs were originally supposed to lead them. The earlier birds do what they do without malice, of course; but even in their innocence they sabotage Hansel’s best-laid plan, and sabotage by nature is as much a threat to survival as any other in the world of Hansel and Gretel. The white duck, by contrast, is willingly generous, helping Hansel and Gretel when they cannot help themselves. In the technical terms of

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folktale studies, the duck is a ‘helper’ or ‘donor’; the other birds are agents of a ‘lack’ (Propp 1977). Abandonment, starvation, imprisonment, murder, cannibalism, hoarding, hungry nature itself, in its untamed, anti-linguistic form – what are we to make of all these? In contrast with these other violences, Gretel’s signature act is not only justifiable as an act of self-defence but even commendable; it is an act of resilience and (so far as Hansel’s life is at stake as well) sisterly compassion. The other forms of violence threaten survival. This one other violence brings about life. If Gretel’s act is what turns the world around, and solves the general problem of affliction that haunts the story, it is therefore in some way a form of good violence. We normally distinguish, of course, between justifiable and unjustifiable violence, as we also distinguish between planned and unplanned violence, between coercive circumstances and deliberate acts of coercion, and between symbolic violence and physical violence. Abandonment, imprisonment, murder and cannibalism are, in the context of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, unjustifiably unfortunate, yet planned and deliberate, and so even all the more in the wrong. They are morally obnoxious; they have been accomplished in keeping with malicious aforethought; and they are meant to be deliberately (wilfully and rationally) carried out. Meanwhile, Gretel’s act is something else again: it is justifiable violence, unplanned (no forethought is involved) and yet also deliberate, an act of spontaneous wit. Gretel has thought on her feet. Her violence is ‘good’ in the special sense of being heroic, self-defensive and unpremeditated, not the outcome of a harboured resentment or an agenda of aggression but a bold and necessary grasping of an opportunity. It is how many of us would hope to behave ourselves in a similar circumstance. As for poverty, the hoarding of wealth or the hostility of nature to human intentions, however, in such cases the distinctions do not seem to be helpful. None of those phenomena are usually associated with any of these categories of criminal intent. Nor is the symbolic violence of message-breaking. They are neither justifiable nor unjustifiable, neither spontaneous nor planned. Yet if Gretel’s story, as told by my Gretel, focuses on the usual kinds of violence to which moral and criminal categories are assigned, from abandonment to murder, Hansel’s story, as told by my Hansel, focuses on those unusual forms of violence, violences of circumstance, social convention, the natural world and language, which create the world in which the violences of abandonment, imprisonment and murder take place. Hansel or Gretel, then? The Grimm Brothers’ story asks us not to think of the situation as an either/or but as a both/and: Hansel and Gretel. It asks us to think not only about people making bad decisions, but about people forced into bad circumstances. It also very much asks us to think about what Hansel has so much trouble with, the problem of gender. It is well known that most



Hansel or Gretel 31

violence is committed by men, and usually by young men. Young men do not invent the world into which they have been born, but they are much more likely than any other human beings to respond to it with acts of violence, and most likely to take other young men as the targets of their violence. That seems to be a human universal. Yet here, in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the women are the prime agents, as well as the prime targets. The stepmother, the witch and then Gretel take the lead, even if only to hand the safety of the world back to the ineffectual father and the hapless son. The most sexual moment in the story comes when the blind witch tells Hansel to stick his arm through the bars of his prison, so that she can tell if he has been fattened up enough. ‘But Hansel stuck out a little bone’, says the original, ‘and the old woman, who had bad eyes and could not see the bone, thought it was Hansel’s finger, and she wondered why he didn’t get fat’. ‘Innocent my brother!’ expostulates my Gretel, suspecting that Hansel doesn’t get the joke. Hansel doesn’t know that sex and gender are defining conditions of life, and therefore of the violence in it. Circumstances: poverty, hunger coming from an unequal entitlement to food, untamed nature, lack of economic and social development, and also gender, then, which is to say gender inequality, a structure that seems to qualify these other circumstances, to force them into a certain fatal direction, that is what ‘Hansel and Gretel’ requires us to think about, no less than about the specific details of the life of a particular family. In addition, of course, the story asks us to think about responses to circumstance: cruelty, abandonment, cannibalism (the worst form of the sin of gluttony since the witch has plenty else to eat) and greed (a greed so egregious it has the power to kill), in contrast with a pair of spectacularly triumphant responses. The boy and the girl stick together. They take care of one another. And when the decisive moment comes, the girl acts. She kills and liberates herself and her brother. 2. THE MANY MEANINGS OF VIOLENCE An aesthetics of violence, I have said, would probably most want to be on the lookout for incidents like the killing of the witch. This is violence we visualize and respond to viscerally. It is violence, moreover, we are encouraged to condone, even if we are inclined not to dwell too much on Gretel’s role in committing it. There would seem to be no greater task for an aesthetics of violence than to come to terms with spectacles of vindicated violence. And it occurs to me, in retrospect, that my Hansel ought to have appreciated that more, since after all he is an admirer of revolution, and by his own terms Gretel’s violence was a revolutionary gesture. But the killing of the witch is only one violent act among many others. The story requires us to see the slaying of the witch in relation to other facts of

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aggression, coercion and endangerment. The relation, however, is two-sided. On the one hand, the killing is vindicated because of its relation to these other conditions, because of its development from these other conditions. On the other hand, it is successful precisely because it causes a rupture; it breaks a chain of conditions and causalities, leading the story in a fresh, redemptive direction. There is something at once general and exceptional to this act of violence. From the Hansel point of view, the violence is meaningless except as a consequence of other, less dramatic obstructions. But from the Gretel point of view the act is an ineffable yet necessary sacrifice, breaking with conditions of the past. And such considerations may lead us to ask fresh questions. When is violence really violence? Are all forms of aggression, coercion and endangerment really violence, or only some of them? Or to put it another way, are all such examples of force violent in the same way? We admit that the killing of the witch is violence, but what about other parts of the story? Is poverty really violence? Is hunger? Is hostility? Is threatening language violence? And again, if they are, are they all violent in the same way? Does talking about them as if they belonged to one category of thought and action help us to understand them better, or does it perhaps get in the way? And if one is focused on the aesthetics of violence, does it help to put hunger on the same footing with murder, or is some other way of sorting through the alternatives of force a more practical approach? In a journal in which I myself have published an essay, in a passage I have quoted before, the editors write about violence in this way: ‘violence is everywhere’, they say. In fact, it could be argued that we are in one of the most violent eras in human history. The scope of violence today is global and its magnitude immense. It is seen in the death counts from perpetual wars and the injury reports from fierce protests; it is found in the oil-soaked waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the radiation-contaminated earth of Japan; it is heard in the screams of women subject to sexual violence and the children who are the victims of predators. It is in the blood we are served by televised news and the brutal visions of an increasing violence-driven entertainment industry (DiLeo and McClennan 2012: 241).

The text is statistically incorrect. Just as violent person-on-person crime has dropped considerably in most of the world in the past thirty years, the extent of warfare (outside the exception of such lamentable civil war zones as Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan) is down as well.3 Nor is it evident that sexual violence or child abuse has increased, only perhaps the recording of it. In addition, the language of the text seems deliberately obfuscating. Pollution is equated with violence, and the extent of our exposure to violence in entertainment is equated with the extent of violence too. Even so, one can see the



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authors’ point. If we think about violence today, the first thing that may come to mind is that ‘violence is everywhere’ – everywhere in several different senses, to be sure, but everywhere all the same. It is as much in what we do to the earth as in what we do to each other, and it is as much in how we communicate as in how we deploy our weapons. If we harm the earth today, we are causing harm to future generations of human beings, not to mention those people of the present day who died on the oil platforms or who will die before long from radiation-related cancers in Japan – and not to mention the harm to future generations of plants and animals. If we communicate violently, we create an atmosphere of hostility and fear that harms all of us as human beings and as creatures of nature; we hurt ourselves by our aggressive technologies and we wound ourselves by our own language. But still, it would seem that if so many things are ‘violence’, then the term becomes unusable. If almost everything is violence, everything is the same in that respect and nothing is really violent. Or to put it another way, as Grace Jantzen puts it, ‘If we say that every exertion of force is violent, then the effect is to evacuate the term “violence” of all specific meaning, and with it all power of moral evaluation’ (2004: 18). There is in fact a strain in modern philosophy where it sometimes seems as if everything is violence (see Liebesch 2013). It begins perhaps in Jacques Derrida’s early essays, collected in Writing and Difference (1978) where he several times indicates – in response especially to Emmanuel Levinas (1969) – that language itself is violence, that writing is violence, that law and order and morality, that even intersubjectivity and society are violence.4 The thought reappears in Lorenzo Magnani’s recent book Understanding Violence (2011). Magnani approves of Derrida’s analysis and adds to it the following; ‘violence is constitutive of politics, of thought, of knowledge, because all these practices are based on and justified by moral options and orientations that institute more or less constrained or preferred choices, conflicts and possible dominant relationships of power, and in turn favour (against others) certain behaviour followed’ (63). Magnani’s point is that violence is not so much, most of the time, the confrontation of an immoral force with a moral victim, as we usually think of it, but rather of two opposed moralities, each with its own quotient of force. And the history of human world is a history of opposed moralities. Magnani is in agreement, too then, with such thinkers as Judith Butler (2004) and Philippe Braud (2004), according to whom simply the use of language can be inherently violent, for language, that moral weapon (‘exactly like a knife’, Magnani says) can hurt, humiliate and subjugate. The very words for certain things – in Tarantino’s Django that word nigger gets endlessly repeated, like a series of stabs in the heart of the people who suffer the designation – can violate and hence re-create conditions of oppression and pain.

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These are somewhat recondite thoughts, however, and it is not immediately clear what they can contribute to an aesthetics of violence. For it would seem to be a necessary premise for such an aesthetics that artworks can distinguish between violence and non-violence. Pushing the witch into the oven is violence. Riding on the back of a white duck is not. In the imaginary world of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, violence is not everywhere, and violence is not everything, not even in thought and knowledge. In fact, the answer to the question ‘What must our artworks do because of the existence of violence?’ may well be that they have to generate representations where violence can be distinguished from non-violence. But the word violence is already part of the problem. In Latin, English and the Romance languages, violence is linked etymologically and phonetically with violation. In some of these languages, it is further linked with what in English is called rape. In French, the word for rape is le viol. In Spanish, all three terms are nearly identical: la violencia, la violación and, for rape, again la violación. This link between violence and violation and hence potentially with rape is a peculiarity of English and the Romance languages, along, to some degree, with Latin; I have not been able to find it in any other languages. (In Germanic languages the root is wal, which has similarities to the Latin root but is not usually associated with violation or rape. See Derrida 1990.) And one of the consequences of these links between violence with violation and rape is that the word violence has come to have an inevitably disturbing connotation. In that respect, it is to be contrasted with such other words, also available in the Romance languages along with English, as force, coercion, aggression and exaction, which may denote similar phenomena but have less emotional impact, and perhaps less ambiguity as well. And so when Derrida alludes to violence, even in such contexts as metaphysics, there would seem to be something deliberately alarming about what he is saying. When birds gathered in the trees spot a cat on the loose, they swarm and cry out to one another, alerting one another to take care, and either stay in the swarm or leave the area. When a philosopher on the subject of metaphysics and ‘phenomenality’ talks about an original ‘violence’, it seems to me that the philosopher is deliberately and maybe even melodramatically crying, ‘Watch out! Something wicked this way comes!’ Language is not only forceful; it violates; maybe it even rapes. But we should remember that in English, the Romance Languages, German and a number of others, rape itself has a double meaning: on the one hand, the physical violation – an unwanted penetration, an invasion – of a person’s body; on the other hand, the physical taking of the person. When the Trojan Paris ‘rapes’ Helen, the wife of Menelaus, he takes her away from where she belongs – in most versions of the story certainly with her consent. When Zeus in the form of an eagle ‘rapes’ the young Shepherd, Ganymede, again, though sexual possession is hinted at, the actual rape



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is a taking away, as Ganymede is brought to the peak of Mount Olympus to become a cup-bearer to the gods Figure 2.1. So if language is forceful and violates, it may be involved either in a kind of invasion or in a kind of seizure. Either language invades us, penetrates us, or language seizes us, takes hold of us, possibly with something like our consent. Of course, it may also simply hinder us – prevent us from expressing our freedom, our movement in time and space, our speech and our thought. Yet another point to remember is that in Latin, English and the Romance languages, violation has still a third meaning: offense or transgression. A weak form of the idea appears in the American expressions, a ‘traffic violation’ or a ‘moving violation’. Stronger forms include such expressions as a ‘violation of the sacred’ or a ‘violation of the law of God’. To commit a violation is to break a law, to commit an offense against law, and the law in question can range from a penal code, an unspoken code of proprieties (‘you

Figure 2.1.  Attributed to Damiano Mazza, The Rape of Ganymede (1575). National Gallery, London. Source: Photo public domain.

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have violated my trust’), or a Holy Writ. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible has a heading in Leviticus 20 it calls ‘Penalties for Violations of Holiness’. In Ecclesiastes 5.8 the same edition translates the original Hebrew into the following: ‘If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and right, do not be amazed at the matter; for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them’. Interestingly, in a demonstration of the porosity of the terms involved, the King James Version translates the same passage in this way: ‘If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they’. Some Italian, French and Swedish Bibles use the same strategy, and make this perverting of justice a violazione, a violation or a justice kränks (i.e., violated). (The Hebrew by the way is ‫לֶזֵג‬: a pillage.)5 This other notion of violence may be what Derrida originally meant – language neither invades nor seizes nor hinders, but transgresses, transgresses in effect the order of nature, and brings us along in that transgression, brings out of the world where there is no symbolic order, transporting us into a world where real violence, physical violence, is finally possible, since real violence is always also symbolic. That which is violent is that which means something. In any case, in critical studies the ideas that violence is everywhere (not ‘aggression’ or ‘force’ but always ‘violence’) and that language itself is violence has led to some extreme developments. In a collection entitled The Violence of Representation (1989), the editors Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse explain that literary works may not only be about violence but also violent in themselves. And they are not only talking about incendiary works, like Céline’s anarchistic Voyage au bout de la nuit, or Henry Miller’s misogynistic Tropic of Cancer. (The common word for a woman among the narrator Miller and his friends is ‘cunt’.) They are talking about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. There is a distinction, according to the editors, between ‘two modalities of violence: that which is “out there” in the world, as opposed to that which is exercised through words upon things in the world’ (9). Leaving aside Derrida’s transcendental interpretation of what language is, if words in the sub-transcendental world of human phenomena can make things happen, if words can violate – seize, invade, impede, offend – then words are potentially, or maybe always already violent. And if a literary work is made out of words, then . . . but here the question gets sticky. Call a woman a cunt, and you have deeply offended her. Shout ‘Fire!’ in a theatre and you may criminally cause a stampede. But have a character in a novel call a woman ‘a cunt’ or shout ‘Fire!’ in a theatre, and something else is happening. And is it violence?



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I have already spoken a little about the vulgar mimetic theory, which originates (unfortunately) with Plato, according to which an artwork causes something to happen in the real world, as if when people encounter violence in artworks they are rehearsing something in play which they will later repeat in earnest. I will have to keep speaking about that idea, I believe. Not too long ago, a young man went wild in Santa Barbara, California, killing six people and injuring thirteen others. He had made a video the day before which he posted on YouTube, and had written a manifesto about his resentments, largely having to do with the fact that he was lonely, that women didn’t like him and he had never had sex. He was going to get revenge. Sure enough, newspaper pundits immediately piped in that the killing spree was encouraged by ‘misogyny’ (Valenti 2014) (although the majority of his victims were men, three of whom he brutally stabbed to death), our culture of sexual ‘Hefnerism’ (Drouhat 2014) (although the perpetrator was probably too young to know who Hugh Hefner was) and even ‘Hollywood movies’, all of which constructed the world which the madman, in his madness, so well expressed. Said the film critic, ‘Movies may not reflect reality, but they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it’ (Hornaday 2014). And so it was the movies that created the monster. (It didn’t help that the monster’s father was a respected cinematographer who had worked on a number of violent films, including the much beloved Hunger Games.) We need to think more deeply about these things. But that means making a few necessary distinctions. A Derridean philosopher, Hent de Vries, opens a book on violence by saying that the concept of violence ‘entails any cause, any justified or illegitimate force, that is exerted – physically or otherwise – by one thing (event or instance, group or person, and, perhaps, word and object) on another’ (2002: 1). But notice how indistinct this is. Violence is just about anything. Even a kiss might be violent. The only escape is apparently to follow Levinas (an idea de Vries himself develops) for whom too, in several works, everything is violence – except for that ‘force’ which is used on behalf of the other, that is, for the good of the other, without reference to the good or the interest of the one who is operating on behalf of the other. Violence is what I do to others on behalf of myself; non-violence is what I do on behalf of the Other. But I am not sure about that idea. Perhaps it is workable in an ontology or a negative theology, especially one with messianic intentions. But how can thinking that violence is everything and everywhere help us understand works of art, which operate by principles of differentiation and repetition, of division and synthesis, of emphasis and omission, of gradation and rupture? How can we work through the moral and affective thicket aesthetic violence leaves us with, given the nature of both aesthetic violence and violence itself? Again, we need to make some distinctions.

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3. DISTINCTIONS And fortunately, we don’t have to make the distinctions entirely on our own, since artworks already make these distinctions. And necessarily so: as I have already suggested, one of the first things most artworks on the subject will do is distinguish between violence and non-violence. Not all artworks will make the distinction in the same way, of course, and often there is ambiguity or even undecidability in the way artworks distinguish among the phenomena. Maybe there are artworks that are all violence – like one of Mark Rothko’s all-black or nearly all-black paintings,6 or the 1963 version of Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’, or like the famous performance piece where artist Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm (see Nelson 2011). Maybe there are artworks that confuse violence and non-violence, rendering the differences between them inconsistently. But representation usually requires contrast with a measure of consistency: poking someone’s eyes out is always violence, wiping someone’s brow – or even one’s own brow – with a handkerchief probably never. And for that matter, the plain white walls upon which a Rothko or a Lichtenstein is hung or the space from which a performance shooting is observed provides an essential contrast: museums, art galleries and homes are safe places in which the violence of art finds an essential negation, putting a frame of fictionality around an otherwise dangerous utterance. Whether an artist wants to horrify us with a spectacle of violence, or make us angry and aggressive or sad and indignant, the artist will also have to show the non-violence, which involves a norm against which violence shows itself for what it is. We, observing or reading, will have to respond to violence in terms of the non-violence and vice versa. In some cases we may come to prefer violence to non-violence, or think of violence as a solution to a problem that non-violence can never solve. When Odysseus returns home to Ithaca after ten years of wandering through the Mediterranean, he finds his house overcome by moochers (officially known as ‘suitors’), who help themselves to his food, his house, the labour of his servants and the goodwill of his wife. Their behaviour is presumptuous and aggressive; it violates (invades, seizes, offends, and also, importantly, hinders), something Odysseus holds dear (see Heffernan 2014); and the only way to get rid of the moochers, apparently, is to undertake a spectacular massacre and kill every single last one of them. In all, 108 are killed. But though the moochers’ behaviour is aggressive and wrong, it is not ‘violence’ in the same sense that the massacre is violence. The moochers presume; Odysseus and his helpers attack. The moochers, it is true, are armed and dangerous. And they exercise a kind of force by inviting themselves to take advantage of Odysseus’s estate in the latter’s absence. But there are two differences between the intimidating force of the moochers and the violent retribution



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Figure 2.2.  Roy Lichtenstein, Detail from Whaam! (1963). Tate Gallery, London. Source: By permission of Bildupphovsrätt, Sweden.

of Odysseus. These are fundamental differences that get repeated in all sorts of literature and drama and that challenge the often-assumed and sometimes asserted idea that all violence is violation. First of all, circumstance and action are two different things; between a situation, even an intolerable situation, imposed upon one by an indirect threat of force, and the resort to direct and bloody force in order to change the situation, a leap has been made into action. We can say, in common language, that someone ‘gets violent’, just as we can say that someone ‘gets even’ or ‘gets revenge’, or, simply, ‘fights’ or ‘attacks’. The French refer to a passage à l’acte. Second, there is the difference between violation, in the sense of having one’s well-being or integrity abused by an invasion or a seizure, or an awareness that a fundamental moral law has been transgressed, and a violent response to violation. Odysseus’s violence is used to overcome a violation – a seizure, an invasion, an offense and a hindrance. It is a violence we are meant to desire and applaud, a violence of retribution and restoration. The situation in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ is similar. Like Odysseus, Hansel and Gretel confront circumstances where a homestead has turned hostile and rules of hospitality have been violated. And the only way to overcome the circumstances is violence. There the affinities between the situations perhaps end,

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Figure 2.3.  Mark Rothko, Black 5 (1973). Source: By permission of Bildupphovsrätt, Sweden.

and it may be more accurate to say that Hansel and Gretel’s story is parallel to Odysseus’s episode with the Cyclops, where to earn his freedom Odysseus also has to trick and kill a cannibal. But since the ordeal in the woods at the witch’s house is symbolically a contest over repossession of their own house, when Gretel takes on the witch she is also doing something like what Odysseus does when he takes on the moochers: fighting to get back a home. In all



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cases the same fundamental distinction is made. On the one hand, something has been violated, that something being the security of a habitation, a home; on the other hand, in order to undo the violation, one or more people must be killed. To think about violence only as violation in these cases, however, is to underestimate it. Going back to the original Latin root vi, meaning something like ‘outgoing force’ or ‘excessive motion’, the idea seems to have been that violence was an excess of the subject of violence, a ‘vehemence’, to use a word with the same root. In other words, when Odysseus or Gretel gets violent they exceed something in themselves, a state of repose, quiescence, temperance, sufferance or patience. Of course, there may be artworks that differ on this head and represent violence in some other way – exclusively, for example, as something suffered by victims. There may be artworks that concentrate not on seizure, invasion, hindrance or offense but rather on somewhat subtler forms of violence like abjection and exclusion. But the two classic stories here both feature a form of proactive violence which improves the world, undoing a violation and bringing back a condition of well-being and peace. A secondary reflection is implied in the stories: yes, from our point of view, killing the moochers or the witch was a very good thing; but from the point of view of the moochers or the witch, there has been a violation. Once they were alive and well; now they have suffered pain and died. But this secondary reflection is absorbed into the redemption and restoration that ridding the world of such villainy, and such villains, in the first instance brings about. 4. DISTINCTIONS AND DEGREES Examining the aesthetics of violence means, among other things, tracing the defining distinctions through which artworks separate violence from nonviolence and violation from redemption and restoration. It is also to examine distinctions among the kinds of violence established or assumed by the work, for artworks insist on gradations. A distinction of kind is immediately suggested by the comparison between Odysseus and Gretel. In the first case, Odysseus plans his attack, and recruits helpers to perform it. In the second case, Gretel acts spontaneously, in self-defence, and does so, according to the Grimm Brothers, alone. This kind of distinction is usually very important. Narratives are in the business of assigning agency to actions, and of qualifying agency according to gradations of effect, responsibility, forethought and either culpability or heroism. We need to know what in legal language are called the ‘degrees’ of the violence. Moreover, narratives assign and qualify agency in view of the difference between such conditions as oppression and

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coercion. For readers like my Hansel, conditions of oppression and coercion may be the real violence. For Hansel, Gretel fights against conditions of economic life, asserting her ‘subjective violence’, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2008) calls it, against the ‘objective violence’ of economic and political marginalization. But these are distinctions that writers and readers will make one way or the other, as they decide on the difference between violence and nonviolence, between violation and redemption, between various kinds of effects, and between justifiable and unjustifiable behaviour, while also responding to the emphases and omissions in texts. In the tradition of writing that spans both the Odyssey and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the degree of personal responsibility is usually the key: not that violence is always a wrong, a violation, which someone or other is guilty of to one degree or other but that violence is an action, right or wrong, which human agents must decide to have recourse to or not, and must take responsibility for. We are meant to admire Odysseus, among other reasons, because he has chosen to be violent for a good cause – as also because the narrative has been leading us to such a conclusion.7 There are other important distinctions that artworks and their appreciators have to come to terms with. One is the distinction between aggression and violence. Aggression, in my terminology – and I think of it as an empirical rather than a pre-empirical concept – is what de Vries (non-empirically) calls violence, an action which changes something, forces a change from one state to another. Leaving aside the question of whether what is at stake is empirical or pre-empirical, I suggest pace de Vries that not all acts of aggression are necessarily forms of violence. For example, the woman bolts and locks her door at night. Aggression, yes, and justifiable aggression, but not violence. Or to give another kind of example, the salesperson on the phone tries to badger me into switching my electricity carrier. Aggression, yes, and probably unjustifiable, but not violence. Or to give still another, the teacher insults the student in the middle of class. Aggression, probably unjustifiable, bordering on harassment or bullying, and depending on what the teacher said possibly actionable. But not yet violence. We know this because, were the teacher to hit the student in the middle of class, we are sure that that would be violence; the teacher’s behaviour would be considered to be worse than harassment, and it would certainly be actionable. There was a time in Western society when a teacher could hit a student as an expression of his or her right to aggression for the sake of maintaining discipline. (It was similar to Piaget’s ‘moral constraint’, which I referred to in the preface.) But now, though we may still support (within limits) the teacher’s right to aggression for the sake of discipline, we do not tolerate what we call, in a word, violence, that is in this case an act of physically striking a student. (The only time most of us would hold this to be justified would be when the student struck first.)8



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Aggression, I think it should be plain, is a concept with a much wider range of application than violence. Aggression is a fundamental energy of human life (and of course of animal life as well), a correlate of the struggle to survive. (I do not mean this ontologically; I mean it empirically.) Violence, meanwhile, is one among several expressions of aggression. The same goes, most likely, with coercion. In this, I take issue with my own Hansel, as well as with Žižek. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of the idea of coercion, or of aggression either; nor do I wish to contradict my Hansel’s interpretation of his story, where coercive circumstances (Žižek’s ‘objective violence’) are a cause for much of what happens. But if we focus on the aesthetics of violence, we need to focus on distinctions that texts themselves will exemplify, and that separate Žižek’s ‘subjective’ violence from more general conditions of life. Like aggression, then, coercion is a general condition, though a sub-species of the even more general condition called aggression; coercion is aggression used to compel or arrest the behaviour of another. But then again, coercion need not be physically violent. It can take the form of a command. The teacher commands the student to sit down and be quiet. The child sits. The policeman stops me on the street, and, obeying, I stop. Coercion can also be structural, fairly or unfairly: I have to pay my taxes (that’s fair), I have to show up at court if summoned (that’s fair), I have to accept the pain and indignity of being evicted from my apartment because someone with more right to it (financial or territorial) wants to move in and can legally evict me (not fair, as far as I am concerned, but justifiable). Coercion can be structural just in the sense that a system provides no alternatives to action: I have to live according to the norms of late capitalist society if I am to feed and shelter myself (possibly not fair, since the norms involve inequalities of opportunity and privilege, but justifiable); the legendary Odysseus had to live for seven years as a prisoner of Calypso (not fair but necessary, since the gods willed it); Hansel and Gretel had to obey their parents, even to the point of finding themselves being abandoned by them (not at all fair but the way of the world). All these forms of coercion may be thought of as structures of aggression. Or to put it in other words, these forms of coercion are expressions of aggressive systems of domination. But they are not yet violence. When the policeman stops me, and I complain, and the policeman beats me, then we have violence. If I refuse to live according to the norms of late capitalist society, steal food from a supermarket and break into an empty apartment for shelter, I have begun to act violently according to the laws and norms of my society; if I physically resist eviction, I have certainly committed an act of violence; if an arresting officer has to restrain me physically in order to carry out his duties, since I am resisting him, his right to coercion is expressed, legitimately, within the limits of the doctrine of ‘reasonable force’.

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That lines between aggression, coercion and violence, not to mention brutality or cruelty, can be drawn in a variety of ways, that what counts as violence can therefore differ depending on circumstances and legal structures, does not means that that aggression, coercion and violence cannot be distinguished, or that aesthetic texts do not themselves draw lines and reckon among aggression, coercion and violence. I am not trying to suggest that violence is worse than aggression or coercion. I am only saying that it is distinguishable from them. Although it is often argued that violence requires a victim (based on the hidden assumption that violence is the violation of an other), from the point of view of representational art, as from a general theory of the aesthetics of violence, it is more helpful to remark that violence requires a subject. There are many kinds of subjects, just as there are many varieties of violent acts. There are many ways in which force, in the form of aggression or coercion, whether or not backed up with the threat of violence, openly enforced by threatening individuals or only institutionally or structurally compelled, can have terrible consequences for victims. I have mentioned abjection and exclusion, for example, which can take both objective and subjective forms, that is, either institutional marginalization or specific acts of marginalization. But still, violence requires a subject. And it is characteristic of representational art in the West that, when it represents violence, it represents the subjectivity responsible for it, and all the degrees of engagement, forethought, passion, interest, justifiability and culpability that go along with it. Those who, like Žižek, in the Gramsci tradition, want to make most subjective violence into an expression of a more general objective violence contradict the terms that most Western art employs when representing violence. That doesn’t make the theories wrong. It does make it as difficult for the theorists involved, however, as it is for my Hansel, to understand the disruptive violence of game changers like Gretel. It also makes it difficult to understand the history of violence outside of a very narrow, deterministic frame of reference. Keeping to the side for the moment the question of degrees, from robbery to massacre, from recklessness to deliberate assault, from insult to injury, it may be observed that the impulse in the Gramsci tradition (which pays little attention to degrees) is to see violence as an outcome of domination and the resistance to domination. But following Magnani, again keeping the question of degrees to the side, and taking a longer view of the history of violence, one can see that violence can also be an outcome of the two contraries of domination and resistance, which is to say cooperation and submission. Violence comes when a witch tries to eat a child, and when a child resists being eaten. But violence also comes when a child is caused to be subservient to a stepmother, doing her evil bidding, or when two children (as in the opera) league together in order to kill the witch and construct a



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new order of family life. In many important ways, violence is cooperative, and even operates with a view towards what appears to be a negation, which is to say submission. Collective violence is usually treated differently from individual violence by theorists of the subject. Stories, dramas, films and visual art usually treat collective violence differently too. The terrible irony is that collective violence involves cooperative behaviour. And even worse: collective violence on many occasions is a pretext for cooperation, even a foundation for cooperation. Derrida (1990) thus refers to the ‘force of law’. Yet conversely, collective violence can be a tool of submission; ritual sacrifice is the prime example, where violent means are chosen to signal submission to the higher authority of the gods. And contrarily, collective violence can be a tool of resistance. The name for that is rebellion. Like individual violence, collective violence is a form of action which may be either useful to or constitutive of any of the four polarities of human struggle being discussed: domination, submission, cooperation and resistance. But clearly the phenomenon of collective violence is in most instances categorically different from individual violence; groups coerce differently than individuals, resist differently, cooperate differently, submit differently. In any case, artworks have to take these distinctions into account in order to render what they represent intelligible, and distinguish

Figure 2.4.  Still from The Longest Day. Courtesy: Twentieth Century Fox.

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Figure 2.5.  Nicolas Poussin, The Rape of the Sabine Women (1635). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Photo public domain.

collective from individual forms of behaviour. To act together may be a very complicated business. One need only think of one of the two most revered movies about D-Day, The Longest Day (1962) to grasp how complicated it is. (The other film is Saving Private Ryan (1998).) What do we see in these pictures? We see violence used as tools of domination and resistance, of cooperation and submission. We see the collectivity of the violence emphasized, the coordination of a multitude of subjects in movement, within a frame of joint aspiration (signified in two of the cases by diagonal movement) even as the individuality of perpetrators comes to our attention as well. We see the strain between fighting and suffering. We see assemblage and individuality, a multitude of gestures of aggression and injuries, swept up into an unresolved whole of forward motion. So here are a number of distinctions that the aesthetics of violence must account for, since artworks themselves make the distinctions: Violence – Non-violence Subjects of violence – Circumstances of violence Violence as such – Degrees of responsibility and justifiability for violence Violence that violates – Violence that redeems Violence – Aggression Violence – Coercion Individual violence – Collective violence



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We can even distinguish between violence as a means to an end and violence as an end in itself. When the Roman soldiers attack the Sabine women, they do so with an end in mind: getting a hold of women with whom they can procreate. Poussin lets us see that his soldiers are fulfilling an obligation, to themselves and to their state, and acquiring a necessary resource. There is no joy in the mass abduction, not even for the abductors. The only joy resides in the spectator, as he or she looks on in awe at Poussin’s orchestration of the violence, the wilful, collective, dominating, dutiful violation of the Sabines, so that the cause of Rome will be redeemed, along with the agony of the resisting Sabines and the helpless children knocked to the ground.9 And then again there are the degrees: The United State penal code, for example, distinguishes between murder in the first degree and murder in the second, and between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. It also distinguishes between attempted and successful murder, between different kinds of victims (children, military officers, heads of state, foreign heads of state), between assault and imminent hazard, between excessive and proportional force in an act of self-defence, and so forth. And that’s only homicide. The ‘violence’ that is much on the minds of feminists ranges from forcible rape to date rape to ‘objectification’, and from open harassment to the hidden marginalization of the woman’s voice in political and social life. Some are illegal, some are discouraged, and some are legal but wrong. To the metaphysician these differences might be subsumed under a category of Being itself, but to the artist and the user of art these differences are a dominant subject of art, and there can be little art without them. 5. SLASHERS AND VICTIMS The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was one of the first ‘slasher’ films, horror films where one or more monstrous murderers on the loose go after a community of victims. The story is actually a lot like ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and deliberately so. The final two victims are a brother and a sister, who find themselves, while looking for several lost friends, lured into what seems to be a fine, safe house in the middle of the country. It is actually inhabited by a family of cannibals, including Leatherface, who does most of the killing, using a chainsaw, and an elder brother who does most of the butchering and cooking. According to Carol J. Clover, who wrote a paradigm-shifting book (1992) on the subject of slasher films, Texas Chainsaw articulates a common generic structure, which includes the following elements: a killer (or killers), a terrible place, weapons, victims, a final girl, a foregrounding of ‘body’. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre first the friends of the brother and sister are killed in the environs of the terrible place; then the simple-minded brother,

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who is paraplegic and moved about in a wheelchair, is killed; and a bloodsoaked and terrified sister escapes, having seen two members of the terrible family seriously injured and impaired, partly as a result of her resistance to them. Blood-soaked and hysterical, and helped towards the end by the driver of a rig, she hops on the back of a pickup truck, driven by an all but unseen man, playing the role of the white duck. Clover’s innovation consisted not only in isolating the slasher film as a genre but also in calling attention to the genre’s gender dynamics. The films seem to take pleasure in terrifying young women; they seem to encourage the enjoyment of male-against-female sadism. But Clover points out that the hero of the slasher film is almost always the figure she calls the ‘final girl’. It is the final girl’s point of view the filmgoer is most encouraged to adopt, which is to say the point of view of the lone female victim who survives by resisting and escaping from her sadistic pursuers. Clover further points out that the majority of the fans of slasher films are men, especially young men. She posits that the pleasure of horror in the slasher films is a pleasure acquired when male filmgoers identify with the agony of female victims, a pleasure which is at once gender-bending and masochistic.10 Clover’s analysis of the slasher correlates with my Gretel’s analysis of ‘Hansel or Gretel’. The violence in either case is a gendered violence, where the female is the vehicle of abjection and resistance and also the voice of survival. Gretel’s point of view is the more salient, then. The aesthetics of violence in stories like hers (obviously, the case is much different in the otherwise

Figure 2.6.  Still from the final scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Source: Public domain.



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similar story of Odysseus) is the aesthetics of terror and endurance – of what philosopher Adrian Cavarero calls ‘horrorism’.11 We readers and filmgoers play at undergoing terror and horror, with the grim satisfaction of knowing that in playing the game we, like our final heroine, also survive. We ask the folk tale or the slasher film to bring us, vicariously, in play, to the terrible place; put us face-to-face with an uncontrollable figure of violence wearing a repulsive mask of evil; show us memorials of victimization; and then, survive. Whether or not Clover or my Gretel has it exactly right about the gender dynamics involved, the folk tale and the slasher film surely gratify a desire to be unsettled, and to see our own discomfort in a world where conventional (male) heroism cannot be counted on (anymore). It is not for nothing that the Hansel figure in Chainsaw is both a paraplegic and a simpleton. He is no help for the final girl. In fact, he is a burden. But maybe Hansel’s point of view is salient too, sometimes. The folk tale and the slasher film alike move us quickly into a world in which the relations of domination, resistance, cooperation and submission are being viscerally disrupted and redirected through violence: violence which has both collective and individual characteristics. Where there is collective violence, my Hansel insists, there must also be collective responsibility. And where there is individual violence, he insists, there might also be collective responsibility. In ‘Hansel and Gretel’, however, collective culpability is made clear; it is explained, vilified and overcome. The mother, father, the witch and the society in which they live are all at fault, and in the end get what they deserve, or in the case of the father something better than they deserve. In the slasher films, meanwhile, collective responsibility is muddled; it is vilified but left unexplained. Some people are like that is all the slasher film says. Like what? Well, like monsters, killing for the sake of killing or, if killing isn’t enough, for the sake of collecting human hides and eating human flesh. They are even like that collectively, as it is a family, literally a family of murderous cannibals that the innocent have to contend with. Some places are like that. Like what? Well, they are terrible. Fortunately, some victims are like that too. Like what? Like traumatized survivors. In the end we have come to see the cannibal killers from the same point of view as the infants in the Poussin painting. There is nothing for us to understand. For we are faced with an irrationality against which we are helpless: a rage, a hunger, a hatred for the existence of others, a demand for destruction. Yet we are doing all this in passive play. We are not really faced with irrationality; the final girl is faced with it. We will leave the movie theatre, but we imagine that from the fright she has received the final girl will never recover. Luckily, she is not a real person, and her story has come to an end. ‘Safe!’ yells the umpire when the base runner successfully slides into what is called ‘home base’. (There have been cases when baseball players have

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broken their legs while sliding safely into home.) What the genre of slasher film tells us, and many other more exalted forms of art, is that pace Levinas, looking out for oneself can be non-violence too. And even more disturbing is experiencing pain or horror or terror, whether in real life or in the confines of a theatre – that can be non-violence as well. In fiction as in life, non-violence also has its degrees. Non-violence can even be either individual or collective, not to mention either passive or active. Maybe what is most disturbing about slasher films, from a critical point of view, is that they engage us in a collective, vicarious form of non-violence – horror – for which there is no explanation, and no evident outlet but passivity. Unless, that is, we engage, as my Hansel and Gretel did, in an analysis which explains the horror by critiquing it. NOTES 1. There are, of course, many exceptions with regard to other fairy tales, as in the work of Kolbenschlag (1979) and Carter (2015). I discuss this dimension of response to traditional stories in the Epilogue. 2. Here and throughout I cite an excellent online translation by D. L. Ashliman, http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm015.html. 3. Global Peace Index (2016). Important exceptions include an increase in terrorist violence (though terrorism is much less destructive than war, which has decreased) and a disturbing increase of violent crime in Mexico. 4. For a useful discussion see Wyschogrod (1989). 5. My source for these translations are the Bible Gateway, www.biblegateway. com; and the Hebrew Interlinear Bible, http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlin ear/Hebrew_Index.htm. 6. To ‘those who think of my pictures as serene’, Rothko once said, ‘I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every square inch of their surface’ (Breslin 1993: 358). For a general discussion of how form, execution and interpretation work together in violent painting see Crowther (1996). 7. At the end of The Odyssey (Homer 2006) the people of Ithaca are ready to seek revenge on Odysseus. For family members of the fallen, Odysseus was just igniting or reigniting a cycle of violence. It is only the intervention of the gods that prevents them from attacking Odysseus, and Odysseus from attacking them back. ‘Athena handed down her pacts of peace / between both sides for all the years to come’ (Book 24, lines 599–600). 8. I write this thinking about ethics in a university setting. In fact, there are nineteen states in the United States that still allow corporal punishment for students in primary and secondary schools. http://www.businessinsider.com/19-states-stillallow-corporal-punishment-2014-3. 9. It bears noting that there are two versions of this same painting, and only in the one hanging in the Met are the babies added.



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10. Since 9/11, it has often been argued the conventions of horror films have gone through a sea change. (See Kerner 2015.) On the one side, the slasher film has been co-opted by parody. On the other side, the female-centred suffering has been replaced with the male-centred suffering of what is called ‘torture porn’. Saw (2004), mentioned in the preface, is an example. Male subjects are the primary victims (usually of male antagonists), and very frequently, at the end of the film, no one is left standing. 11. An alternative version appears in Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (1990) where the defining feature of horror is its mixture of fear with aversion or disgust. Carroll’s concept only explains monsters, however; it cannot explain what happens in the movies Clover discusses.

Chapter 3

Winners and Losers

1. JUDITH AND THE AGON As a competition, violence in art is driven towards the making of winners and losers. No less than actual participants in competitive violence, then, when we observe or read about such violence in a work of art we become engaged, vicariously, in the distribution of winners and losers. We see to it – putting our powers of observation, empathy, anticipation and evaluation in play – that some triumph and some fail, that some survive and some die, that some win such spoils as they might have sought – a prized possession, vengeance, territorial control – and some have them taken away from them. According to the chivalric code of honour, there are situations where a fight to the death between two disputants will express the will of God: the winner is not only the better fighter but also the combatant whom God has chosen to triumph, because all along the winner’s cause was in the right. And by a law of poetic justice, whose origins go back to the origins of storytelling, the heroes who were always in the right win, either because they were always in the right or else because by going through the ordeal itself they have earned their righteousness and the rewards that go along with it. As spectators, listeners or readers, we find ourselves in the middle of conflicts where violence not only resolves a conflict but also determines right from wrong, handing out rewards to the good and punishment to the bad. Nevertheless, there are cases where winning and losing are not so distinct from one another. It is possible that all parties to a violent competition are equally in the right or equally in the wrong – that’s the stuff of much classical tragedy, associated by Hegel above all with Sophocles’s Antigone, where valid claims of conscience (Antigone’s) are put into deadly conflict with valid claims of law (the ruler Creon’s). It is possible that the disputant who is bad 53

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Figure 3.1.  Michelangelo Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599). Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Source: Photo public domain.

will triumph over the disputant who is good (Iago over Othello), in spite of the latter’s goodness, or that the good disputant will commit a fundamental error of judgement that will bring about his or her demise (Lear defeating his own purposes by dividing his kingdom). Those outcomes are the stuff of tragedy. Instead of surviving an adversary or an ordeal, a hero succumbs to one or the other. Violence may bring about an evil judgement, even though we spectators, listeners or readers know that the judgement is evil. Yet while we must concede, we must not assent to the judgement in the text. As Schiller once said, ‘suffering in itself can never be the last end’ of art. There are several ways of interpreting that remark, and several ways it would be easy to go about rejecting it – beginning with its prescriptive certainty – but Schiller has a point: in experiencing vicariously the suffering of others, we also need to find it in ourselves to object to the suffering, to respond to it with the ‘resistance of morality’ (2014: 96–7). Anxious triumph has its place in art too, as comes in the case of Caravaggio’s great painting of Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599), in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (See Figure. 3.1). In Renaissance Italy, Judith was conventionally a figure of victory (see Appelbaum 2014). A statue by Donatello of Judith beheading Holofernes, ceremonially displaying her sword and the



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head she has struck off with it, had long since been erected, provocatively, in one of the Florence’s main public squares, and many other representations of Judith appeared on the walls, ceilings and canvasses of the county. Almost all of them are representations not only of a beheading or the immediate aftermath of a beheading but also of what Vivaldi would call, in his oratorio by that name, Juditha triumphans (1717). They are apparently not only recollections of an astonishing scene in the Apocrypha (any of several Jewish religious narratives not included in the Hebrew Bible, but included in some Christian Bibles as an appendix to the Old Testament) but also developments of allegorical themes. In the Bible, Judith was the woman who saved her native Bethulia, forsaking the town to visit the camp of the invading Assyrians, charming Holofernes into inviting her to a drinking fest, and then, once Holofernes had passed out drunk, killing him with his own sword. Nothing of the kind ever happened; the story is entirely fictional and anachronistic. But the story signified ideas about Jewish nationhood and autonomy, and Judith herself represented Judea, her name meaning ‘Jewish woman’. In the context of Christian Europe, the story acquired new allegorical associations. One was the triumph of virtue over vice – Judith, in spite of her seductive appearance, being a chaste widow, and Holofernes a representative of drunken disorderliness and blasphemy. Another, as in Donatello’s statue, was the abiding triumph of a republican city-state (Florence, Venice, Siena) over its foreign and domestic enemies, even against enemies who like Holofernes and the Assyrians were militarily superior. The story of Judith was meant to rouse a citizenry against potential violations of their autonomy, and warnings against would-be invaders or tyrants that they were in danger of having their heads cut off. A third theme was the right of the weak to defend themselves, and possibly even to rebel when a condition of tyranny warranted it. Stories about Judith written in sixteenth-century France specifically correlate Judith with monarchomach theory, that is, the idea that a people have a right to arm themselves against oppression and depose tyrants. In some representations, in addition, images of Judith become overtly sexualized. According to the Bible she had used her sexual attractiveness to gain admission to Holofernes’s tent – so why not emphasize the sexuality? Although many interpretations had toned down the issue, as does the original Book of Judith, some, for example, a series of paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder (ca. 1530), made overt sexuality – imperious yet raw, at once tempting and menacing – into a secondary sign of Judith’s military triumph, as well as into a kind of naughty sign of itself, a signifier of the power of female sexuality. Judith poses for us triumphant and fetching. Before Caravaggio artists limited themselves to showing Judith with the head, not actually in the process of cutting it off. She poses in those paintings as if triumph over Holofernes has either been cautionary or orgasmic.

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The frisson of sexual fulfilment in murder is eschewed by Caravaggio. He is, among other things, showing us not Judith triumphant, but Judith, uncertainly, in the act. (So too is this frisson eschewed in the Caravaggioinfluenced painting of the same scene by Artemisia Gentileschi [ca. 1618].) But there is more to the avoidance of triumph and sexuality here. In Caravaggio’s work Judith is rendered somewhat younger than the story requires. She could be mistaken for an adolescent virgin, although she was in fact a widow, getting on in years. And in the beheading, instead of triumph, the viewer sees an apposition of horror and aversion. The horror is in the agony of Holofernes, in the moment of the sword reaching into the centre of his throat and of his recognizing what has just, irreversibly, happened to him; he is caught in the exact moment of passage from sleep to wakefulness and also from life into death. He is in agony. The aversion is Judith’s, who seems to want to look away but can’t, since she has to finish the job of beheading her victim and is inadvertently curious about the whole thing, even in awe of it. If all of this painting was taken from life – that is, by models posing the scene he was recreating – the model for the wounded Holofernes, in addition to a real male model for the face (who resembles the artist) was probably a calf or lamb. Caravaggio has watched a woman, who had never done such a thing before, slaughter an animal. He has observed how the animal’s head pivots with the sword cut, how the victim screams out and its blood spills, and how the unpractised butcher recoils at what she has done, even though she knows she has done the right thing, has to keep on doing it, and wants to see it through.1 Mixtures of horror and aversion, though in somewhat different keys, are registered in other paintings by Caravaggio: The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599), in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome; The Sacrifice of Isaac (1603), in the Uffizi; Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (1608), in the National Gallery in London; and David with the Head of Goliath (1610), in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, where David the hero seems almost sad, and the head he holds aloft is the (terrifying) head of Caravaggio himself. Caravaggio is a painter of ‘the moment’, an occasion when a sequence of actions finds its purposes about to be completed, captured as if a snapshot of the flight of time; that moment is frequently a mixing of the anticipation, commission and aftermath of violence, a clashing of triumph and defeat, left at the point of the clash. Michael Fried (2010) argues that this ‘moment’ is predominantly a joining of absorption and detachment, where Caravaggio at once brings us in and pushes us away from the scene. And it is true: paintings like Judith absorb us in a scene from which we would prefer to keep away. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have long noted an affinity between Caravaggio’s tableaux and the cinema, in that Caravaggio puts the viewer at the onset of an action.2 And there we have Judith beheading Holofernes,



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bringing us into a nearly impossible moment: a moment of pure violence. It is not just a formal violence that Caravaggio confronts us with. It is violence from the Bible, about an episode that had become iconic in Italian art, and it is a ‘pure violence’ in Benjamin’s sense (2007), purifying, divine and arbitrary. Caravaggio confronts us – as none of his predecessors in the art of Judith had – with the paradox of Christianity, and of Christianity’s interpretation of Judaism: that at the heart of its message of redemption is a necessary cruelty, in which we, no less than Judith, with no less aversion, curiosity and determination than Judith, are inevitably complicit. Or to put it another way, at the heart of Christianity lies the horrifying, ecstasy-inducing experience of sacrifice. Caravaggio reproduces the sacrificial moment polyvalently, making both triumph and loss coincide, awaiting a resolution that has to come from another source. If the victory is real – a terrible tyrant being put to death for the good of the Jewish people, or a martyr being executed for the ultimate good of Christianity – so is the horror, the exercise of cruelty required to commit the act and the reality of suffering caused made all too visible in the spectacle of the agony of the cut head or the prostrate body and the aversion either incites even among those responsible and hopeful. The sacrifice of a living being is intrinsically violent and woeful; but like the massacre of the suitors in the Odyssey, it is also ritually redemptive.3 Sometimes sacrifices are morally justified and even heroic, as in the case of Judith (according to convention). Sometimes they are morally wrong and regrettable, although they still have redemptive value, as in the case of martyrdoms. (What to Saint Matthew’s detractors – legend has it that he was killed on the orders of the King of Ethiopia – is an execution for wrongdoing is to devout Catholics a martyr’s self-sacrifice to God.) Caravaggio seems both to respect redemptive value and to dwell, uncannily, in the repulsiveness of the cruelty and suffering needed to achieve it. And Caravaggio’s point of view is not exclusive to the artist or even to post-Reformation Catholics, who were encouraged to take to heart the sufferings of God’s people, and the importance of suffering for faith. This point of view, which values suffering without the consolations of unambiguous piety or pity, and forefronts agony as well as triumph, is common to post-Christian tragedy, both on the stage and on film. 2. AT THE MOVIES: WHO WINS? To someone like me, raised on Hollywood films and television shows in the 1950s and 1960s, winning and losing can seem to be what aesthetic violence is always about. A conflict unfolds, where bad guys are guilty of doing bad things, and good people need to do something about it. In the end, the good

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triumph over the bad, killing or seizing and indicting them. On television there were guarantees, first of all because the shows were serials where the good guys had to reappear in episode after episode (they could not be knocked off); second, because the television morality of my childhood, enforced by censors working under the Television Code, insisted on the triumph of good and the punishment of evil.4 In movies main characters could die, but the good hero (as opposed to an anti-hero) usually survived in the act of killing a villainous enemy, in the act of arresting him, or merely in surviving an assault. The Production Code for motion pictures encouraged the pattern.5 Even most Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1950s and 1960s follow its imperative for poetic justice. From Dial M for Murder (1953) to Topaz (1969), Hitchcock reliably rewards virtue, even if only after terrorizing it, knocking off a few supporting victims and toying with menacing ideas of sexuality and aggression that the Hays Commission people could never have imagined. The only Hitchcock films of this period which completely undermine the pattern is Vertigo (1958), where damning, Faustian terror comes as the conclusion of the story, and perhaps also Psycho (1960), where capturing the bad guy is unsettling rather than rewarding. To live in the media world of the 1950s and early 1960s of America, even in Hitchcock’s crime stories, was to live in a world constantly replaying a fantasy where good triumphed over evil, and bad violence was overcome by good violence. In terms of the notion of aesthetic violence as play, these texts exemplify a rigging of risk. To enter a fictional world where victory or defeat is in question, and where the exercise of violence is essential to the settling of the question, is to come into imaginative contact with a condition of contingency, spontaneity and hazard. I may endeavour, in my lifeworld, to stick as much as possible to habit, to the safety of the ordinary and the predictable. There is undeniable comfort in banality. But in my contact with fiction, I experiment vicariously with the unhabitual, with the story-going-forward whose conclusion (not known in advance, however much anticipated) must be imaginatively tried, contingently and spontaneously, albeit playfully. This experiment with contingency, spontaneity and hazard is modified by genre and generic expectations, of course. In a fictional story a game is being played with chance; yet in the genres of the popular culture of my childhood, in the genres of romance, suspense, comedy and usually drama, the house, as it were, always won, and was always meant to win. Often this was because of the character of the protagonist, who was shown to be more skilled at competitive violence than his or her adversaries. James Bond was more talented and resourceful than the enemies he defeated, as was, surprisingly, the Cary Grant character in North by Northwest (1959), an ordinary if extremely welldressed and handsome advertising executive who managed to foil an armed conspiracy.



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But more is at stake in these kinds of works, or in most any works devoted to competitive violence, than who is better or luckier at competitive aggression, or even what kind of genre the competition is taking place in. Except in rare cases of aesthetic anomie, that moral stake of narration or drama – that perplexing encounter with choice – is involved. A set of values is joined to luck, skill and genre, and those values can even override what happens because of luck, skill or genre, trumping both contingency and convention. There is an individual or group of individuals whose victory we are caused to desire: a person or a social group with whom we sympathize, perhaps with whom we identify, and almost certainly then in whose survival, prosperity and victory we ourselves are invested. We have affection for the character. That is not the essence of morality, in a Kantian sense, but it is a foundation of it; it is what Kant’s Scottish predecessors (Adam Smith and David Hume) called moral sentiment. We are concerned for the others; we give our allegiance to them; we give them our emotions and our hopes.6 Even if only in fiction, and even if only on the level of affection, we have made a primitive moral choice. We have chosen that one side or one person ought to win rather than the other. Moreover, we have made this choice not in the context of winning a card game or a bet on a sports match, where the stakes are symbolically trivial (or trivially symbolic) apart from the money involved, but in a life game, where survival, well-being and other real-world advantages, ideologies and ethics are at stake. We may like James Bond because we are attracted to the actor who plays him and enjoy the fantasy of virility he performs for us. But we are also expected to like him morally because he represents the power of law and order mixed with impish, roguish fun and hedonism – in other words, because he represents the Western way of life, in conflict with forces that would destroy it. (Those who do not like a given James Bond film or book will be moviegoers or readers who probably do not accept what Bond is supposed to represent, or the morals and codes by which he lives.) Bond is set up as the West’s masculinist standard-bearer, as are all the thriller heroes who have followed in his place, from Jason Bourne to Jack Bauer (note the initials). All the better that in the ordeals the Bond or Bond-like character goes through in order to protect the West, even in spite of what may be taken to be moral peccadilloes (too much womanizing), he demonstrates talent, resourcefulness, proficiency, bravery, loyalty, perseverance and selflessness. (If he is the very British Bond of the original books and early movies, he also exhibits fair play. Bourne and Bauer and the later Bonds are willing to cheat.) Our hero: we desire his success because we desire our own success and because we desire to achieve that success by way of that which we most want to find and admire in ourselves. Our villain, by the way, is the opposite: we desire his failure because we desire the failure of others and because we desire to cause that failure by

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exploiting that which we want to find and hate in others. And our anti-hero is the negation: we do not know what to desire, and we desire to remain uncertain. And note that our ally, not the hero but the indispensable ‘helper’ or ‘donor’, as folklore poetics calls this being, is complimentary: we desire the best for him or her, because we like and need our friends, but we are ready to see them die so long as the hero lives and succeeds. One area of the media which especially impressed upon me the dominant pattern of triumph, in the mid-twentieth century, not surprisingly, was World War II movies.7 I saw only a selected sample of them, to be sure, usually as reruns on TV: until I was in my thirties I was unaware of films like the Oscar-winning Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which dwell, morosely, on the human costs of World War II, even if they also provide happy endings. And I had not seen, or at least do not remember being impressed, by more morally demanding mainstream films like Bataan (1943) where all the good (and bad) American soldiers die in the end, and the call is for Americans to persevere in the face of loss. The last shot of that movie (which Warner Brothers will not permit me to reproduce) is a harrowing confrontation with deathly defiance: Robert Taylor about to go down shooting, facing the enemy in the midst of a cloud of smoke, after all his fellow soldiers have been killed. But from my childhood I remember films like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), with John Wayne as the hero, The Halls of Montezuma (1950) with Richard Widmark and Sink the Bismarck (1960) with Kenneth More, which are unabashedly jingoistic and triumphalist, the Yanks taking over the Pacific island by island, the Brits eliminating a dangerous war machine. They have their bad moments. The hero Wayne plays has his problems and ends up dead. Sink the Bismarck ends in a conundrum. The Brits have won, yet not only at great cost, the lives of many people, but also as a failure of sentiment. ‘I thought I would feel exhilarated’, says one character as the news comes that the Brits have destroyed their target and won the battle. ‘Instead I feel empty’, she goes on to say. ‘You always do’, says her experienced commanding officer. Nevertheless, the films impressed upon me that pattern of inevitable victory, which also inspired in me a belief that I was fortunate to have been born an American in the second half of the twentieth century. But what about the more anguished movies I also saw, The Desert Fox (1951), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Train (1964), which focus more on failure than success? They never changed my mind about popular imagination and the popular attitude towards war, or about my own good fortune, accomplished by the sacrifice of others, perhaps, but all the same accomplished. Maybe it was because, even when movies focused on tragic or ironic outcomes in the War, Americans and Brits, myself included, knew that the War had been won unequivocally, and they had the luxury of being able, through the agency of fiction, to celebrate sacrifice and admit to grief. (The



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condition of filmgoers when the War was on, of course, was very different.) In retrospect, for the likes of me, victory had been inevitable; therefore it was plausible and maybe even therapeutic to commemorate the traumas experienced along the way, and honour the heroes who suffered. Yet what happened next, in America, is well known (see Prince 2000a). At the same time as filmmakers increasingly defied the Production Code and violated its taboos, America experienced the stalemate of the Korean War, the anxieties of the Cold War and then the massive, tragic lunacy of the Vietnam War. The story has often been told: pro-war movies, and ambivalent movies about war that honoured heroism and sacrifice were replaced, little by little, with anti-war movies, going back to the earlier tradition of World War I movies like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Many of the anti-war movies were not set in World War II, to be sure, for the obvious reason that that seemed to be the one war where there could be no doubt that it should have been fought, or where at least it would be harder to earn anti-war sentiment from an audience. Who would not, given what we have been made to learn about the Axis powers and the Holocaust, be proud of military intervention on the Western front, or the Japanese-dominated Pacific? Anti-war movies like Dr. Strangelove (1964), Oh, What a Lovely War! (1969) and MASH (1970) took, respectively, the Cold War, the Great War and the Korean War as their targets. But already in 1965 there appears Frank Sinatra’s film, None but the Brave (1965), about World War II, in which squadrons of both Japanese and American combatants find themselves marooned on the same island in the Pacific, and the conflict is perceived from both sides. In fact, the voice-over narrative is provided by one of the Japanese soldiers, although more of the film focuses on the Americans than the Japanese. For a while the Japanese and the Americans cooperate, but the story ends badly for everyone. Mistakes are made. An American warship comes to the rescue and touches off a fierce battle. The Americans triumph, though at considerable cost, and superimposed on the screen, as the American warship sails away, are the following words: ‘Nobody ever wins’. It is an astonishing conclusion to come to. Nobody? Ever? The Allies triumphed over the Japanese in this episode and would triumph over them entirely after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So what does it mean to say, ‘Nobody ever wins’? Like the film itself, the tag line represents an experiment in recontextualization, where a familiar narrative pattern is displaced into a new field of understanding. The film is not an unmistakable success: the critics panned it, ignoring what was radical about it, focusing on its flaws. But seen from the point of view of the Japanese as well as their American adversaries; seen in a such a way that both Japanese and American soldiers are shown to be good men forced into a bad situation (for the most part, at least: the main heavy is a rigid and sadistic American sergeant); seen therefore in retrospect

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as a time when the Japanese suffered a national catastrophe, and in a contemporary context when, though World War II is a fond memory, the Korean War has intervened, and the more immediate worries at hand are the Cold War and Vietnam War – nobody ever wins, and war itself is always a loss. In 1965 Sinatra released four albums, which included recordings of songs like ‘Luck Be a Lady’ and ‘It Was a Very Good Year’. One of the albums, a big hit and a Grammy winner, which included ‘Very Good Year’ as well as Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, was called September of My Years. Fifty years old, at a second or third peak in his career, Sinatra was singing moving songs about getting old and the vicissitudes of any life and releasing a violent film that ended with the tagline ‘Nobody ever wins’. None but the Brave would appear to have been an inspiration behind Clint Eastwood’s more impressive accomplishment, the twin films Flags for Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both from 2006. The first Eastwood film gives a cynical account of the taking of Iwo Jima and its aftermath from an American point of view: it is a direct repudiation of The Sands of Iwo Jima, showing chance, showmanship and racism to be behind the apparently iconic event of the raising of the American flag on Japanese territory. The second film tells the story of the tragic loss of Iwo Jima from the Japanese point of view. Together the films seem to make a definitive statement about the absurdity and sorrow of war, and again because of re-contextualization; as the first film shows the iconic victory in Iwo Jima as public relations stunt, the second film shows Japanese troops from various walks of life for whom war and its sorrowful aftermath could never be a stunt, since they are too grave, too spiritually challenging and gruesome. But then in early 2015 Eastwood released American Sniper, a film which Eastwood has said is also anti-war but which to many viewers apparently was a glorification of war and America’s role in hunting down jihadists in Iraq (Leigh 2015). American Sniper tells its story almost entirely from the point of view of its protagonist, the real life war hero Chris Kyle, a sniper who had 160 confirmed kills. It mixes tense action sequences in the Iraq War with sequences back home, in Texas and California, where Kyle finds adjusting to civilian life difficult. On his fourth tour of duty in Iraq Kyle comes to an emotional impasse; he can’t do what he is doing anymore. He returns home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and as a way of treating himself gets involved with helping other distressed veterans cope. (Doing so would eventually lead to Kyle’s death, as he was shot by a fellow former combatant, in what was supposed to be a therapeutic moment, on a firing range.) In an interview with The Star (Howell 2015) Eastwood indicates that he thinks the movie is really about how wounded Kyle became. In essence, he says, the film shows how painful war is. But it is not for that reason political, Eastwood adds, since the movie doesn’t take sides about the justification for the war.



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It merely shows what happens when a man takes on what he thinks to be a necessary but dangerous job, and suffers for it. The scenes that linger in the mind, however, are the battle scenes; the psychological drama barely registers, and when it does, it has to stick with the drama of a man who was not only a man in service but also a man who believed in service. Says Eastwood on this subject: This picture was interesting, because I’m seeing it from the point of a person who was sort of an American hero, as far as his ability to be this ultra-sniper. And his family and his beliefs were very strong about defending the country and defending the guys who are defending the country, as a sort of an oversight warrior. It was an important story, but you have to embrace his philosophy if you’re going to tell a story about him. (Galloway 2014)

The director of Flags for Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima doesn’t seem to know how relativistic he makes himself out to be, and how limited his abilities as an artist. But he omits to mention a fact that came out in the press, that Eastwood and the screenwriter Jason Hall had planned, after Kyle’s death (which occurred shortly after production of the film began), to end the film with Kyle getting shot, the sniper sniped, not in a gesture of poetic justice but more in the frame of mind of the expression, ‘Nobody ever wins’.

3. THE POINTS OF VIEW OF WINNING AND LOSING Point of view works in tandem or in tension with the agon of aesthetic violence. The sniper’s scope, the cautious determination in the sniper’s eyes, the steadiness of his aim all work with the bloody war with which the film as a whole is engaged. But point of view can be so complex a phenomenon that it might be better to refer to assemblages, even collages, of points of view. In film, point of view is literally the point from which action is observed, the camera eye, frequently suggested to be identical with a certain character’s eyes, although often the camera eye is relatively objective or impersonal, whether limited or omniscient. But then there is the point of view of knowledge: of what we know about characters and sequences of action, and how we know them. There is also the point of view of sympathy, empathy, identification or affection, a point of view of feeling and moral sensitivity. In addition, there is a point of view of expectation and hope. We watch the soldier in battle expecting and hoping that he will survive. Moreover, all of these points of view can be modulated by phenomena like focalization (which characters get the preponderance of our attention, or in narrative through whose mind experience is processed), irony, historical context, intertextuality and that

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rarest of qualities in dramatic artworks, surprise. In the last act of Marvel’s The Avengers (2012), starring Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson, a superhero named Hawkeye shoots an explosive arrow towards an enemy alien, which is descending in the air murderously towards earth. We watch Hawkeye (played by Jeremy Renner) prepare and aim and release the arrow; we follow the arrow in its trajectory towards the alien; we watch the alien shift course, dodging the arrow’s flight, but then see the arrow change course too. The arrow makes its hit, pierces the shell of the alien and explodes; the alien explodes. So we know the violence from Hawkeye’s perspective, on whose struggle to win we have had our attention focalized; we feel and morally evaluate the violence as a supporter of Hawkeye and an adversary of the alien; we expect and hope that the arrow will hit its target but are just a little uncertain, and we are made still more uncertain when the alien shifts position to avoid the arrow. Irony is neutralized in this case, since the film, though it is not without a sense of humour, has been selling us the seriousness of the situation. The future of earth is at stake, right now. Among other devices, the background music keeps us focused on the perilousness of the situation, even as the hideousness of the alien causes us to desire its removal from our line of sight. Historical context is largely neutralized as well, since the story is unmistakably the fantasy of something that could never happen. This is a magical comic book world, although some historical nuance arrives since the climatic episode takes place in contemporary Manhattan, with reminders of 9/11. Intertextuality, meanwhile, is supercharged. This movie refers to other superhero movies, including not only other Marvel movies which have served as prequels to it (Iron Man 1 and 2, for example) but also the non-Marvel Batman: The Dark Knight (2008). It also alludes to World Trade Center (2006), Godzilla (1954) and for that matter any number of movies about disasters in New York City, as well as any number of science fiction blockbusters, including some of the Star Trek movies. (The plot depends on interplanetary travel, Star Trek-like, through a ‘worm hole’ that Star Trek episodes have been imagining for years.) This intertextuality, it could be argued, takes the place of irony. It brings a doubleness to our experience: we know this violence is serious, but we also know that we are watching a movie which takes content and situational structure from other movies and so the violence isn’t serious at all; it is movie violence. The neutralization of irony and context, combined with the return of irony through intertextual reference, modulates our expectations. Because the moment is serious, we are afraid; the arrow may fail to hit its target, and someone (a human being) will get hurt. But because the moment is intertextual, we know how moments like these get resolved; we know that the superheroes are going to win this battle. We expect either a hit or a follow-up act of aggression that will take out the target.



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The bow-and-arrow moment in Marvel’s The Avengers can be compared to a similar moment in American Sniper. The sniper Kyle is positioned on a rooftop overlooking an apartment block where suspected insurgents or terrorists are holding out. A convoy of soldiers on the ground is cautiously advancing towards the building, with foot soldiers beside a tank. Out comes a woman in a black hijab and chador and a boy, seemingly her son, carrying something metallic in the shape of a cylinder. Kyle gets the woman in his sights. She hands the cylinder to the boy. The sniper announces through his speaking gear to his fellow soldiers that the boy apparently has a grenade, which the sniper can identify by type. He asks whether he ought to shoot. It’s your call, says a commander over the air. A companion says that if the sniper shoots and what the boy is holding is not a grenade, the sniper is in big trouble. The boy takes the cylinder and runs towards the American troops. Kyle shoots him in the chest and he goes down, dropping the cylinder as blood spurts in the air. The woman cries out in grief, runs towards the boy, picks up the cylinder, hurries towards the troops, and starts to throw it. Just as she is about to hurl the cylinder Kyle shoots her, also in the chest; she falls but the cylinder has been released, though not as vigorously as she had intended. The cylinder explodes, just a little short of the troops, who cower, protecting themselves, and survive. In this case the violence is known from the point of view of the sniper; it is largely felt and expected from the point of view of the sniper as well. There is uncertainty: Kyle might miss. But more important is the uncertainty we share with the sniper about the nature of his targets: are they innocents, a mother and child, or deadly enemies? Moreover, even if they are the deadly enemies, the sniper and we along with him may have moral reservations: a mother and child. Again, there is no irony, or only a very complex irony that few filmgoers are apt to catch at first viewing. But we are incongruously confronted with a true story and an incident we take to be fact; and if we are Americans, we are further confronted with a theatre of violence for which we Americans ourselves (collectively, if not personally) were in large part responsible. We cannot take that away from our experience of the film, at least if we know anything and are honest about our relation to it. Hawkeye and the aliens are make-believe and wear silly outfits stamped with excessive fictionality. Chris Kyle looks and acts real and was real, and so were we when the shooting of Iraqis took place in our name. Neutrality is an option only by way of bad faith or obliviousness. The fictionalized characters, meanwhile, the woman and the boy, because of Eastwood’s craft, come to us as if real too, as living and human, that is, as people whose existence and whose right to life are absolute. As for intertextuality, the informed viewer will know that the film takes its place in the mythologization of American military adventure that Hollywood has been involved in for so long. But where the film stands with respect to

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the myth is something about which we are at that moment uncertain. Part of the experience of the film involves trying to anticipate not only what will happen but also how the mythic dimensions of the story will be worked out, and where therefore it stands with respect to the Iraq War, American military ambitions and the idea of war itself. At the end of Marvel’s The Avengers we feel pretty good; our heroes have done their job with selfless grace in the face of a merciless and vicious enemy, and the world has been saved. At the end of American Sniper we are a little unsure, though not as unsure as many critics would have wanted us to be. We do not really know who the woman and the boy are. We do not know their names or their stories. We only know that they have become dangerously ambitious. And then we know that they are dead. They have lost the competition. But have we not seen in them not only humanity but also a sort of heroism that the American troops have eschewed? Have we not seen a woman and a boy directly face their adversaries and charge them, while the adversaries themselves cower beside a tank, or aim at their targets from the safety of rooftops? In the book by Kyle (2012) on which the film is based, the story is somewhat different; no boy grenade-thrower is involved, and Kyle claims that this woman was the only person he ever killed who was not a male combatant. But where the film may give us pause about the killing, Kyle claims otherwise: She was too blinded by evil to consider [bystanders who might get hurt by her grenade]. She just wanted Americans dead, no matter what. My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul. . . . I truly, deeply hated the evil that woman possessed. I hate it to this day. Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages’. (4)

The film has soldiers repeat this line about ‘savages’ but not actually in the case of the shooting of the boy and the woman. And in the hard-to-find irony that is actually right in front of us, we see the following: as the sniper gets ready to shoot, the camera zooms in on him with close-ups, producing what Deleuze (1992) calls the ‘affection image’. But to find his targets, the sniper, using his rifle scope, has to see his targets, as it were, in close-up. Eastwood’s camera follows that. We see the sniper zooming in, and then we follow a camera zoom-in, and we approach a close-up of the targets from the point of view of the sniper. What gets hard to bear is our getting close to victims, our seeing their faces from close in, our approaching the point of an ‘affection image’. Yet this is what a sniper must inevitably experience. Fortunately, in this case the sniper’s scope and the camera together get only as close as a medium shot to the victims as they get gunned down.



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Thinking about this, I note that the aliens being shot at by Hawkeye do not have human faces. They hardly seem to have faces at all. And I note too that point of view is not only about affection and its correlates, but it is also about antipathy and denunciation. 4. COMPETITION, RISK, AND THE VICTIM IN FLIGHT Conflict: everybody understands it as a principle of narrative and drama. And in a spirit similar to Quentin Tarantino’s, in the interview already cited, Eastwood said that he liked filming war (and therefore violence) because it lent itself to the depiction of conflict. The conflict of doing tough jobs is much more interesting than if I did something about a businessman or something. You have to have some kind of conflict, and pro and con for doing a story . . . war is sort of the ultimate conflict and conflict is the basis of drama, so they’re kind of natural.

But is choosing war, or any other sort of collective violence, ever innocent? Eastwood must know that it isn’t. Yet at the same time, I think, he has been attracted to the idea that art is less a representation of something outside of itself than an autonomous articulation of codes, images and actions, placed in the service of aesthetic effect. Either that or he has aimed for a kind of objectivity within subjectivity in the making of American Sniper, a subjective point of view that undermines itself and shows its objective context, and he may have succeeded, at least for some viewers. Meanwhile, a second principle, less well known, is competition. Conflict does not have to be competitive. It can be expressed through domination and submission, or else through a condition of latent hostility, where adversaries hate one another but do nothing about it. Conflict can be expressed as an unchallengeable necessity, where purposes and wishes come against insuperable barriers, like the inevitability of death. But conflict can certainly become competitive, and its character changes accordingly. Confronted in person with Death, the Knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) proposes a game of chess. In Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1986; originally published 1748), manipulated by forces at least partly beyond their control, the chaste Clarissa and the rake Richard Lovelace enter into a competition for the possession of Clarissa herself: a competition that leads to abduction, rape and death, death being the only way, finally, that Clarissa can win. When conflict is expressed in the form of an agon, a competition, as it so often does, then a conflict can be won, lost or drawn to a tie. This is not an economic principle,

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though economics can be drawn into the battle, but rather a moral one, for it has to do first of all with value, with ideas of the good and the bad and the choices made between them. The morality of winning or losing may itself be a subject the story puts into question. Victory may be hollow. Defeat may be ennobling. The competition may be so hollow that in the end, ‘Nobody ever wins’. But conflict is shaped into the form of a competition. And as readers, spectators or audience members we are drawn into a provisional uncertainty, the vicarious condition of risk in the pursuit of good and evil. In storytelling, the agonistic is also aleatory and needs to be dramatized in the aleatory dimension. Without that dimension, though there may be conflict, there is no competition, only domination, submission or deadlock. World War II did not have to take place. Treaties could have been signed and observed. (In fact, a number of treaties were negotiated and signed, but they were not observed). Lovelace did not have to try to win the heart, mind and body of Clarissa; he could have left her alone after the first time she said ‘No’. The Knight did not have to try to outwit Death; he could have succumbed. But adversaries embarked on aggression and took risks. One of the main functions of storytelling – and this idea is related to Freud’s notion of the subject – is to provide a play space where wars, intrigues and manoeuvres get started, and risk is experimentally undergone. We are not at risk, but we feel like we are, we perform acts of cognition and emotion as if we are, we engage vicariously in anticipation, hope and fear as if we are. Is the sniper going to pull the trigger? If so, will his shot succeed? If the shot succeeds, will that be a good thing? Will it represent a form of victory? The power of storytelling, whether in narrative, film or drama, is such that even when we know the outcome, even when we have seen the film or read the text before, we can again experience the tension of competition and risk. For a number of years I have taught the Shakespeare play Henry V, where Henry triumphs over the French at the Battle of Agincourt, and I have shown the Kenneth Branagh film version (1989) to students. The film is thrilling every time I see it. One of the most thrilling experiences is seeing Henry and his soldiers openly agonizing about the outcome of the battle ahead, a confrontation in which they will be vastly outnumbered. I know they are going to win, but they don’t, and they suffer for it. And even though I know the outcome, I still feel their uncertainty and dread. Some soldiers fear that if they die in battle, regardless of whether the battle is part of a just war, they will never get to heaven. The effect of violence thus depends on how risky and competitive it is shown to be, as well as to the aspects of point of view that solicit our understanding, our sympathy and hopes, our antipathy and our sense of justice, and modulated by such factors as irony, history and intertextuality. Further variables are scale and balance. The scale of the conflict has an important impact on how we respond: is the conflict a great war, the battle a great



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confrontation, like D-Day, which was to determine the future of Europe, or is the conflict a quarrel between a pair of minor rivals, whose motivations are petty – for example, thieves arguing over their share of stolen goods? Conversely, the scale of what is otherwise a great conflict can be deflated, either comically or romantically. Deflation comes when war stories are made into comedies, as in the television series Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971), a farce about prisoners of war in Germany, or when the stories are made into romantic tales, as in the novel and film The English Patient (1992 and 1996: the film is even more romantic than the book), about convalescents and caregivers towards the end of World War II. It is also possible to inflate the scale of a personal quarrel: that happens epically in The Iliad, as Achilles and Hector face off, and presumably in all epics worthy of the name. But scale is coordinated with balance, as the adversaries measure up against one another: in Hogan’s Heroes the American good guys are captives of the German war machine, though the machine is in this case manned by risible incompetents who are continually outsmarted by the prisoners; in The English Patient (Ondaatje 1992) individuals like the title character are caught up in lethal conflicts that are well beyond their control and understanding; in The Iliad the two heroes, Achilles and Hector, are not just individuals but also chief symbols of their clashing empires and the honour codes that dominate them, as well as instruments of conflict among the Olympian gods. Balances and imbalances among antagonists control a large part of the meaning of violence conflict. And then there are the cases of conflicts which open and close on the scale of the ridiculous. In Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), regardless of how impressive it is, the violence is undertaken by comically drawn criminals, most of whom are stupid, egotistical and just plain greedy, and one of whom at least is an outright psychopath. By balance I refer to the distribution of authority, magnitude and power between the parties to a conflict, as well as to the form of aggression that results. The main character may be a vengeful hero whom no enemy can withstand; but he or she may also be a meek victim of mistaken identity or cruel injustice. The hero may be up against a supervillain, whose power seems unassailable; the victim may be up against other victims, each of them struggling for the last crust of bread in a prison cell. But some of the most striking confrontations are between heroes and incompetent enemies, and between victims faced with powerful, merciless authorities. In the former case, heroes mow down their enemies, all but singlehandedly. There is a brutal pleasure in having a hero or group of heroes or even anti-heroes (like Hannibal Lecter) overwhelm their adversaries, although the pleasure might also be ironic, modulated with hints of counter-factuality, as in the ending of Django Unchained, or as in the ending of Tarantino’s earlier film, Inglourious Basterds (2009), where French resistance fighters manage to assassinate

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Hitler and his top officers in a movie theatre – and bring World War II to a premature end. A bonfire of celluloid does the job. In the alternative case, when victims are faced with an overpowering enemy or an overwhelmingly oppressive situation, all that the victim may be able to do is to try to escape and survive; and this is the core of an indefinite number of escape narratives. In such a narrative, winning is surviving. What Francine Prose (1989) calls the ‘Holocaust picaresque’ is an example: stories like Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965), Aharon Appelfeld’s For Every Sin (1989), Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist (2002), based on the memoirs of Władysław Szpilman (1946). In stories of this kind there is no fighting back, and presumably no surrendering either. The hero simply has to escape or manage to hide and survive in a territory of oppression or persecution. But escape narratives go back to the ancient Greeks as do elements of picaresque adventure (such is much of The Odyssey, in both regards). Escape narratives require a great imbalance of power between adversaries; and through that very imbalance, in addition to whatever cruelties the stronger adversary wishes to exact against his captive or would-be captive, the narrative generates a moral construction: the pursuer against the pursued, or the system against the hapless individual. The victim in these kinds of stories is always in the right, not because of his or her character or beliefs, or because his or her adversaries are morally deficient, but because he or she is a victim in flight. This is one of the most important secrets of fiction of this kind, especially in film. Out of it a whole world view might emerge. Out of it a story on a spectacular scale, for example, any story about World War II, may be turned into a story of victims escaping: Stalag 17 (1953), Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956), Von Ryan’s Express (1965), The Great Escape (1963), Victory (1983) – all of them owing something to the World War I escape movie, La Grande Illusion (1937). We sympathize with the would-be escapees mainly because they have been captured and they are trying to escape. The situation is very similar in the case of the ‘final girl’ in horror movies, or movies about escaping from prison, like Papillon (1973) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979). The dystopian film Children of Men (2006), based on the 1992 novel by P. D. James, provides a powerful example of how the escape-and-survive story can propose a moral outlook, as does the dystopian novel Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), which was made into a film in 2009: the escape from a dying futurepresent into a reborn life of possibility calls all of us to hope for life to conquer death, without aggression. In the escape narrative, a world is divided into the pursuers and the pursued, or else into the oppressive situation and the would-be eluders of the situation. The moral implications for this are astounding, since the pursued, the victim and the would-be escapee, is always in the right (even if the



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character may in other respects be flawed). The ideological implications can be astounding too. Compare The Longest Day, recounting D-Day from multiple perspectives, including those of Germans (although in crucial battle scenes it is always the Allied side that dominates attention and behaves with valour), to Saving Private Ryan (1998), which is told mainly from the point of view of one soldier (played by Tom Hanks) trying to ‘save’ another, the private (played by Matt Damon), and allow him to elude combat (see Toplin 2008). The tale of winning the war against fascism, responsible for the death of millions, gets contracted into a tale of saving a single soldier, who is meant to flee and prosper. Ryan actually resists the effort to make him escape; he wants to fight beside his band of brothers. And most of the people trying to save him end up dead. But still, he escapes. And so he and the movie along with him end up both prosperous and sadly thankful. The real-life implications of the moral point of view of the escape narrative would seem to be a real-life distortion in attitudes towards power, violence and victimization. A real-life naval officer, Captain Roger Lee Crossland, has publicly asked the question, ‘Why Are Victims Our Only War Heroes?’ (2004). He has in mind the case of Jessica Lynch, the soldier who was taken captive by Iraqi forces in 2003, and then saved by a special forces operation, the story of her rescue becoming a media sensation, and Lynch herself a celebrity. ‘The individual heroes of the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan’, Crossland writes, ‘ are generally unknown’. And he adds, ‘Everyone knows the name Jessica Lynch. She wore her country’s uniform, went willingly to her duty in Iraq and suffered grievous injuries, but does she qualify to be known first among those who served in this war? We have brushed aside battlefield resolution and action – which should be foremost – and allowed the image of victimization and suffering to take its place’. Crossland’s point is that instead of celebrating real heroism and victory, we celebrate mishaps in the line of duty and romanticize victimization, escape and survival, which in Crossland’s opinion actually aids ‘the enemy’.8 Of course, there is more to the morality of the escape narrative than Crossland wants to accept. The escape narrative is foundational to both Judaism and Christianity (from Noah and Moses to Jesus), no less than the narrative of sacrifice. Captivity is both a false condition and an essential one. It is false because nobody, or nobody on our side, or my side, ought ever to be captive: captivity is a violation, a raptus, a seizure. But captivity is essential because it is in discovering oneself or ourselves as captives, as victims who have been seized by forces beyond our control that we discover (by this common logic) our moral worth. In other words, we discover our moral being by recognizing our ontological helplessness, and our need for something besides ourselves – other people, other values, other social and economic conditions, a big Other, God. (This is an explicit theme in the writings of John Calvin, following the

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lead of Augustine; and it is recovered by the French existentialists of the twentieth century.) A Nietzschean might quip that the captive’s morality is the morality of resentment. And in some contexts the Nietzschean is probably right. But the escape narrative frequently eschews resentment. It is not about revenge. It is about escape. The avenger takes a perceived injustice and reacts with what can be taken for another injustice, or at the very least an unseemly expression of resentment, which he or she hopes is actually retribution, the wild justice of revenge. The escapee simply escapes. That is why the escapee is always in the right. There are variants of the escape story which introduce complications. There are prison breakout stories – a common feature of Hollywood westerns and gangster films, and in some respect, a motif that gets repeated in Saving Private Ryan – where one or more characters try to force the escape from captivity of another character or characters. Huckleberry Finn (1884: a book I read in my teens, at the same time as I was watching Hogan’s Heroes) provides several variations of this motif. There are also stories where captivity cannot be escaped, and a character may well end up being brutalized by authority, or otherwise destined to incarceration and either degradation or some sort of redemption through suffering. Winning or losing becomes modified as goals in such stories. In the first type, agency (and goal achievement) gets shifted to the would-be saviours rather than the saved. It is not the element of flight that determines the morality of the drama but the value that the jail breakers place upon the person who is supposed to be saved. (The Western Rio Bravo [1959] and the World War II film Where Eagles Dare [1968] are cases in point.) In the second type, of failure to escape and brutalization (the novels Darkness at Noon [Koestler 1959] and 1984 [Orwell 1949]), though many goals can be achieved, the victory of freedom is not one of them. Escape stories, where agency is concentrated in the escapees, provisionally generate an exceptional reduction of moral life, as if a chemical had burned off some of its complicating oxygen and was there in a more elemental state of itself. Doubt, repulsion, confusion, mixed allegiances, mitigation and detachment are all but automatically neutralized by the narrative trajectory. Even in the famous scene in the Vienna sewers, in Caroll Reed’s The Third Man (1949), when the character played by Orson Welles is pursued by a posse and trapped in the glaring torchlights, although we know that Welles’s character, Harry Lime, is a ruthless war profiteer responsible for the death of innocent children, at that moment something else happens; at that moment a very bad man has become a victim, trying to outrun an inescapable force (See Figure 3.2). At that moment, Harry Lime becomes one of us. He doesn’t deserve to escape, we know; and he won’t escape. But he shares with us the horrible, morality-founding condition of finding himself trapped and helpless, symbolically crucified yet longing for escape. Something similar happens in the



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iconic film M, by Fritz Lang (1931), where a serial murderer who preys on young girls, played by Peter Lorre, becomes a fugitive and then a captive, judged by the criminal underground of Berlin. He has been the most horrible person imaginable, but suddenly he is a victim, trapped, and so he is one of us. When he then declares, sorrowfully, that he ‘can’t help’ himself, that something out of his control causes him to behave the terrible way he does – in other words, that he is his own victim as well as the captive of the underworld – he wins us over entirely. A morality of the victim is what these fictions construct. This is a special kind of morality of victim, for it is the morality of the victim who flees, and who may or may not get away. Flight itself re-creates the subject into someone who is at once vulnerable and proactive. The victim who flees needs help; he or she may not get it, and is always in danger of succumbing either to pursuers or to new perils (perils of accident like a vehicle going out of control, perils of necessity like running out of food and starving). But the victim is also in action. So far as flight is an ordeal, it may provide opportunities for proving inner worth, for growth, for sacrifice, for beatitude. Yet in so far as flight is simply flight, it is sheer emptiness. The victim in flight has no goal but his or her own safety and freedom. This minimal yet absolute goal, this animal-like striving towards a condition that ought to be taken for granted, constitutes the moral power of the victim and flight. I do not know of any philosophers who actually believe that victimization, combined with flight, constitutes a basis for moral reason, but it is the common, if unacknowledged, assumption of a good deal of fiction. Said Kosinski about his initial plans for

Figure 3.2.  Still from The Third Man (1946). Courtesy: StudioCanal.

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The Painted Bird and the world view he hoped to construct by it, ‘Man would be portrayed in his most vulnerable state, as a child, and society in its most deadly form, in a state of war. I hoped the confrontation between the defenceless individual and overpowering society, between the child and war, would represent the essential anti-human condition’ (xii). We are all vulnerable, and universal ‘precarity’ is taken, as it were, as the essential human condition, in opposition to the essential anti-human condition of persecution. Victims in flight are not merely vulnerable: they are under assault, and often under systematic assault. They are unable to end the onslaught of danger and evil; they cannot counterattack their antagonists or the system that oppresses them; they can only try to escape. That makes them helpless ontologically; they cannot unmake the conditions that oppress them. But they have the agency of their legs, their wits, and their fear. Escapees are subjects who have recovered the innocence of the infant, not just the child but the infant – the only human subject who is biologically as well as ontologically helpless. The innocence of escapees may be fleeting; it is certainly contingent; it may well be undeserved. Yet it is an innocence to which artworks continually draw our allegiance. The strongest cases are made in narratives like The Painted Bird or J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) where the main characters are already mainly innocent creatures, forced to flee through terrible war zones (in the end, both characters survive); or in films like Ingmar Bergman’s Vietnam War–inspired Shame (1968), where a sophisticated and loving couple find themselves pursued by both sides of a war about which they have no understanding, and die in the open sea, in an escape boat that doesn’t sail anywhere; or in an opera like Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893), where another couple wander in an American desert trying to flee penal servitude, and die for lack of water. In Gothic and Romantic fiction, the flight of the main character is a standard plot component, and a main inspiration behind our sense of the character’s moral worth. The same could be said of adventure novels, like Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886). A common motif in modern thrillers, whether in novels or films, includes the person who escapes the law in order to prove his or her innocence; another is the innocent person who is stalked by a thief, a killer, a sexual predator or, again because of a case of mistaken identity, a criminal organization or by the law itself. And then there are the cases of the Hollywood action film, which early on institutionalized the chase scene as well as the escape narrative: anybody could be chased, anybody could try to escape, any film with any action in it had to have at least one chase scene, preferably in cars – and anyone, however briefly, could recover innocence. Thriller fiction has now adopted the same convention. The list could be expanded indefinitely. But in sum, it seems that winning or losing, and the stake of the reader or spectator in the fiction of winning or



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losing, may also be modified by scale and balance. And one of the main tricks in the establishment of balance is establishing whether those who are trying to win are the pursuers or the pursued. Although when a boy I came away with the impression that violence in American popular culture, especially in war films, was all about America’s destiny of triumph, and the inevitable victory of the power of good over weak-kneed evil, I was at the same time taking an interest in stories of flight (from Huckleberry Finn to The Great Escape) where to win was merely to survive, and to be moral was to be a victim in flight. I found my culture encouraging me to adopt a very different point of view from the triumphalism I had taken for granted. 5. FROM EFFECTS TO THE EVENT: BONNIE AND CLYDE One of the better known studies of the effects of aesthetic violence is entitled ‘Effects of Prolonged Exposure to Gratuitous Media Violence on Provoked and Unprovoked Hostile Behaviour’ (Zillman and Weaver 1999). Ninetythree college students were shown either of two sets of films over a course of four days, and on the fifth day they were unknowingly observed for signs of hostile behaviour. The movies were either ‘innocuous’, as the researchers put it, or ‘excessively violent’. The word ‘gratuitous’ appears nowhere in the content of the essay, and ‘excessive violence’ is determined pretty by how much screen time is devoted to ‘maimings and killings’ – an average of 18.4 per cent of screen time. In the blind testing of hostility on the fifth day, results indicated not only that those who watched the violent films were more likely to harbour hostile feelings towards individuals they had met who were now absent but also that this emotion on the fifth day was evidence of ‘long-term’ effects of ‘prolonged exposure to media violence’. The difference between the two groups was actually quite small, although ‘statistically significant’, and, to the researchers’ surprise, women were more likely than men to show more hostility after watching violent movies over four days than after watching non-violent films. The ‘innocuous’ films were Little Man Tate (1991) starring and directed by Jodie Foster; Driving Miss Daisy (1989) starring Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy; Rich in Love (1993) starring Albert Finney; and Postcards from the Edge (1990) starring Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep. The violent films were Universal Soldier (1992) starring JeanClaude van Damme and Dolph Lundgren; Under Siege (1992) starring Steven Seagal and Tommy Lee Jones; The Hitman (1991) starring Chuck Norris; and Excessive Force (1993) starring Thomas Ian Griffith. No assessment of the films is offered apart from their being either ‘innocuous’ or ‘excessively violent’. In point of fact, all of the violent films feature individuals with exceptional – indeed, implausible and risible – talents for violence, from extremely

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clever tactical aptitude to superhuman physical prowess. All of them show their heroes winning big, and all of the movies, even by the standards of action movies, are at best mediocre.9 Meanwhile, all of the ‘innocuous’ films include effectively rendered stories of reconciliation, the renegotiation of the characters’ relations to themselves and to others. Although the researchers claim that a quantity of ‘excessive violence’ has affected the aggressiveness of at least some of their subjects to a statistically significant degree, they did not figure that the intelligence and moral clarity of the ‘innocuous’ films might have an opposite effect, inhibiting hostility and encouraging conciliation – and that what they were measuring was as much the positive effect of gracious and effective artworks, all of which were contenders for major film awards and some of which actually garnered Oscars, as the negative effect of dubious superhero vigilante movies. The most important error in this study is probably its reductive quantification of violence, along with its carelessness with the subject of the quality of violence.10 Violence is taken to be just a physical action, an ‘injurious act’. And it is said that ‘seventeen protagonists and thirty-three antagonists per film came to harm. If scenes of mass violence are included, these figures jump to eighty-six protagonists and thirty-six antagonists, or one hundred twenty-two combined’ (151–2). But the researchers have chosen four films, all from the early 1990s, which show violence (at least the violence of the good guys, with whom we are obliged to sympathize) as being at once justified, vindictive, satisfying and victorious. Yet if they wanted to keep their pick to extremely violent movies of the 1990s, they could have picked from a list that includes any of these critically acclaimed works of popular cinematic art, all of which look at violence in a very different way: Goodfellas (1990) (which includes one of the most disturbing scenes of violence I have ever seen, a savage beating at a bar); Terminator 2: Judgment Day, fundamentally an escape movie (1991); Unforgiven (1992); Reservoir Dogs (1992); Schindler’s List (1993); Pulp Fiction (1994); Seven (1995); L.A. Confidential (1997); The Thin Red Line (1998); The Matrix (1999); Fight Club (1999); and The Limey (1999). Among violent horror films, it may be worth adding, there were Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). The researchers were not testing for ‘violence’. They were testing for violence of a certain kind, placed in a context of a certain kind, bespeaking an ideology of belligerent vindictiveness and making the subjects of movies with little intelligence. They weren’t even testing for the effect of acting violently. They were testing under controlled conditions for a willingness to express hostility towards strangers, in the absence of the strangers they were cued to be hostile to. That, in brief, is not violence. But let it pass. There is something else going on. Among the movies I have mentioned, with the exception of The Matrix and,



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in a queer way Schindler’s List, and even including the horror films, all might be said to add up to Frank Sinatra’s motto: Nobody ever wins. And some of them even include moments of main characters in flight from persecutors. But the researchers seem to have assumed that very violent movies are always about winning, which means making someone else lose and doing whatever it takes to win. (‘Fair play’ is not a principle often observed in action films of the kind the study uses.) Show the students All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), where one by one a small team of German soldiers die in battle, and see how they feel the next day. Or show them Bonnie and Clyde, which ends with the horrendous death of the violent killers. For that matter, show them Caravaggio’s painting of Judith and Holofernes. Bonnie and Clyde is an especially interesting case, not only because, along with The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch, it was a film that opened the Pandora Box, but also because it was a film that changed attitudes towards violence and violence in film. The producer and star Warren Beatty and the director Arthur Penn were both especially keen to do something new. There was first of all the influence of New Wave Cinema, films like Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1962), which coupled violence with a variety of estrangement effects, making a sequence of violent acts into a kind of grim, self-referential comedy.11 Beatty and Penn repeated those kinds of gestures, for example, in showing Bonnie and Clyde making their murderous getaways to the tune of Flatt and Scrugg’s sprightly bluegrass number, Foggy Mountain Breakdown. But the producer and director also had another agenda. ‘The trouble with the violence in most films is that it is not violent enough’, Penn once told an interviewer (Hoberman 1998: 125). Beatty and Penn, given a clever New Wave–inspired script by David Newman and Robert Benton, wanted to make a ‘violent enough’ film, and that meant solving at least two cinematic problems, which were related to problems Caravaggio tackled in his painting of Judith and Holofernes. These problems might be considered to be, first, the representation of the moment of violence, a matter among other things of absorption and detachment, of triumph and aversion; and second, the representation of the consequences of violence, which in Bonnie and Clyde no less than in Caravaggio’s violent paintings involves the viewer in sacrificial cruelty. The moment of violence: up until the time of Bonnie and Clyde, according to film historian Stephen Prince (2000b), a violent death on the screen (at least in Hollywood movies) was a matter of ‘clutch and fall’. Dying almost always came quick and easy; there was no blood; there was seldom any agony. Dying looked like fainting or falling asleep. It registered on a scale of winning and losing: either the right person died or the wrong person died, and what counted above all was simply that: who won or lost. When a Japanese

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soldier goes down, the American military scores a point. Moreover, the killer and the killed, or the weapon and its victim, are seldom in the same shot of the killing – much as Judith and Holofernes were treated before Caravaggio, where the actual violence, as it were, has happened off camera. But in Bonnie and Clyde wounding and killing are frequently gruesome and the killer or the killer’s weapon and the killed are frequently shown together (See Figure 3.3). Showing how violence works, how weapons do their damage, was expressly forbidden by the Production Code, with the result that up to the time of Bonnie and Clyde guns and the gunned down were very seldom framed in the same shot. And there is sound, too, not just the sound of bullets but also the sound of screams. One of the harrowing touches of the film is what it does with the character of Blanche Barrow, Clyde’s sister-in-law. Unlike in real life, the Blanche character, played by Estelle Parsons, is a shrill hysteric, and in the midst of gunfire screeches with horror. Those screams link the character to the filmgoer, signalling the wrongness of the violence, the brutality and suffering it effects. It communicates the incommunicable, the actual pain being suffered by victims of violence, and when Blanche herself is shot in the face, her screeches, ‘My eyes!’ are at once ridiculous and terrifying. They both bring us into the violence and push us away.12 Sacrificial cruelty comes too. In the film we see the young, gallant, feckless Clyde making a choice of violence without understanding the consequences. He imagines crime without punishment, the brandishing of weapons without harm, the choice of a lifestyle of transgression that will make him into more of a man, more of a ‘somethin’, and thus in fact a prominent member of the society he would offend. He sees himself and Bonnie becoming rich and famous. It soon occurs to him that his choice of crime, if the crime is bank

Figure 3.3.  Still from Bonnie and Clyde. Courtesy: Warner Brothers.



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robbing, will also put him on the side of the people. Clyde robs an institution that robs the people, and in that there is supposed to lie virtue, even if Clyde’s main impulse is to distinguish himself and rise above his lowly social position. Anti-heroes like Bonnie and Clyde, who negate our desires for them, whose fate we do not know how to care about but from whom we cannot retract our best wishes, place themselves in a situation where making a choice of violence means not only making victims out of others but also becoming themselves victims in flight. ‘At this point’, says Clyde to Bonnie’s family members late in the film, ‘we ain’t headin’ to anywhere, we’re just runnin’ from’. By choosing a life of violent crime, the two anti-heroes have doomed themselves to being under systematic assault. Writes Bonnie in her famous poem, which would circulate in the newspapers around the country, If they try to act like citizens And rent them a nice little flat About the third night They’re invited to fight By a sub-gun’s rat-tat-tat. Some day they’ll go down together; They’ll bury them side by side; To few it’ll be grief – To the law a relief – But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde. (Newman and Benton, 1967, 114.)

The famous ending of the movie is a somewhat faithful reproduction of what really happened, an ambush by a posse, as Bonnie and Clyde drove down a country road in Louisiana. About 130 rounds of ammunition were fired at the vehicle in real life, and Bonnie and Clyde each received about 25 lethal bullet wounds all over their bodies. The lead up to the ambush, the two outlaws being happy together like newly-weds, thinking about their friends, eating fruit, is all fiction. So is the part where Clyde stops the car and steps out to help a friend on the side of the road before the firing begins and he shares a glance of recognition and affection with Bonnie. But then come the rounds of gunfire and the destruction of Bonnie and Clyde. Whatever else this scene represents, it above all shows the eruption of catastrophic violence as a fundamental truth that has been, as it were, lying in waiting. It comes first by perfectly separating violence from non-violence, non-violence being Bonnie and Clyde driving aimlessly in their car, joking with one another, Bonnie eating a peach, Clyde wearing broken sunglasses and having a shirt tail loose, Bonnie happy when she sees their friend on the side of the road, the harmless chicken farmers driving towards them from the other side of the road, Clyde trying to help the driver with a flat tire. That’s how to distinguish between violence and non-violence in the movie. That’s

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how to settle the question, asserting that not everything is violence, that violence isn’t everywhere, that violence isn’t the air we breathe or the language we inhabit. But second, then, violence comes as the truth of non-violence. The magnitude of the infamous shooting, the overkilling and the re-killing that comes with repeated rounds of fire, explains the structure of the system that Clyde thought he could at once violate and succeed in. The violence is the wrath of the machine, aimed against its own children, who thought they could have peace even after trying to use the machine against itself. One of the reasons why the historical Clyde was gunned down in an ambush is that he proved impossible to capture by ordinary means of arrest: Clyde had killed nine police officers trying to apprehend him. But clearly vindictiveness was involved as well, as also was a kind of necessity. Bonnie and Clyde had to be stopped. And in the film, Bonnie and Clyde are given their moment of innocence before they meet their vindictive fate. The technical tour de force of the ending, where fifty-nine seconds of apparently continuous action, sometimes in slow motion, is built from a montage of fifty shots, brings to the screen, more powerfully and gruesomely than perhaps in any other American film until then, the reality of violence. As Clyde crumbles to the ground, a piece of his head is shot off, a deliberate allusion to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As Bonnie gets shot her body responds like a marionette, pulled by the force of the bullets as if by too many puppet strings in too many directions at once. The film at once humanizes the violence, showing (so far as it is possible to show this) the pain of its consequences, and un-humanizes the victims, showing them to lose their humanity by the mechanical cruelty of their killing. In fact, the mechanical killing is shown to perform in tragedy what violence was said by Henri Bergson to perform in comedy: the gunfire causes the pair of anti-heroes, after a very brief agony, to be reduced to their bodies as mechanical objects. This ending of the humanity of two people by a machinery of execution, this reduction to the breathless body, is the reality with which the screen goes black and then shows the words, ‘The End’. Yet it is not just a ‘reality’ of violence that gets exposed. For the scene juxtaposes real time with film time, the unfolding of a cinematic image which both insists upon and undermines the reality of clock time: machine guns ripping in real time, bodies being pierced and bounced around in various combinations of slow motion and regular motion, the cinematic event coming with a rhythm that both follows clock time and overrides it. This cinematic image is also an affection image. And the truth that the image evokes is at once historical, allegorical and cinematic. Historically, this is what happened, more or less.13 Allegorically, this is what happens. Non-violence comes to be a product of the system of violence, and transgression is impossible. Cinematically, this is what the fictional moving image can do. It can show us not only a face of violence, but the many faces of violence, from a variety of



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Figure 3.4.  Still from the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde. Courtesy: Warner Brothers.

angles; it can speed it up and slow it down. It can prolong the pain – for us, if not for its victims – and it can pull away from it, making a ballet out of it. It can provide a context, an affection and a critique. It does not merely show us what was already in the history of Bonnie and Clyde, however; it shows us a coming forth of sacrificial cruelty that could only succeed in a film, and in fact in this very film, at the very time in the film, a second or two before ‘The End’. Bonnie and Clyde had to die, and the movie kills them for us. Such is a kind of ‘effect’ that no behavioural study could ever measure. It is not even an ‘effect’. Violence on this scale, even if only in art, is rather an event. 6. STAR WARS In late 2015 Star Wars: The Force Awakens, directed by J. J. Abrams, was released worldwide, and within a few weeks it became the most financially successful movie in history. Very likely, it contains as much violence as those films of ‘excessive violence’ discussed in the study on ‘effects’: about 18 per cent of screen time devoted to murder and mayhem. In the opening scene, a village is massacred. In a scene not long after, whole planets are destroyed. Still to come are invasions, dog fights in the air, laser beam sword fights and lots of dead bodies.

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I have seen nothing in the press about this violence, however. And the reason is because the violence is so fictitiously rendered that spectators are responding to it as if it weren’t violence at all. Not even the conflict behind the violence is rendered with any credibility. There are some stock allusions to Nazism, but mainly, the movie depends on the premise that there is a conflict between an evil force and a good force in the universe – just because. In this episode of the franchise, the seventh (with more to come), the leader of the bad, dark guys appears to be supernatural. Meanwhile, civilians and military personnel get shot, lasered, bombed, even stabbed to death – and there is no understanding of why this is happening except that it happened before; and that is what happens in a Star Wars film. There are three streaks of blood in the whole film – which are meant to be symbolic but which are so obvious, it is less a question of symbols than a question of shorthand. Death isn’t nice – it can mean three streaks of blood – but it isn’t painful, and suffering is beside the point. All that matters is being a nice guy, being on the right side and winning. From one point of view, what the latest Star Wars episode expresses is a simulacrum of twentieth-century cinema. In other words, it imposes a twentieth-century framework, itself devised in response to phenomena like World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, on twenty-first-century movie screens. Free of the legacy of anxiety that inspired George Lucas in the first place to produce his original space extravaganza but bathed in the joys of nostalgia and return (for the 1970s and 1980s), the new Star Wars is neither anxious nor dramatic. It is just a flash of lights, a tumbling of bodies, a sky of competing fighter planes and cargo jets shooting each other down. What it brings to the screen is a reduction of the messages of the war films of the previous century – a reduction, not a distillation. – The idea (which is the idea I got as a child, not really understanding the films) is that all that matters is winning, and winning is inevitable, even if the rewards of winning are unclear. Another way to put this is to say that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a completely neo-liberal film for a neo-liberal age – a computer game of a film that adds up the scores of deaths and destructions as if of profits and losses. But that is only one way of looking at the phenomenon. Another one, which may be more disturbing, is that the film represents an imaginary world where violence is no longer an expression of aggression and a cause of dread, but rather a form of revelry. NOTES 1. Ebert-Schifferer (2012) claims, however, that Caravaggio’s main models (aside from Judith, who was a local prostitute he used in several paintings) were classical, and points out that the blood spirting from Holofernes’s neck is not quite



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right – though if an animal slaughter was the model, the slaughterer would have been careful to control the blood spill, just as is shown in this painting. 2. Martin Scorsese: ‘Initially I related to the paintings because of the moment that he chose to illuminate in the story. The Conversion of Paul, Judith Beheading Holofernes: he was choosing a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action, it’s during the action, in a way. You sort of come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it’. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/ jul/25/caravaggio-scorsese-lachapelle-peter-doig. 3. I comment on the nature of sacrifice, conceiving it as a form of symbolic exchange, in Appelbaum (2015: 171–80). 4. The Code itself can be accessed, as of this writing, at http://www.tvhistory.tv/ SEAL-Good-Practice.htm. 5. ‘The first principle of the Production Code is this: No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin’ (Prince 2003: 293). 6. I am not only talking about empathy, the way people like Martha Nussbaum (2012) and Derek Attridge (2004) talk about it – that is, the way fiction makes us conscious of others as others and by causing us to imagine ourselves as others – but also about identification, desire, hope and anticipation, which together make us not only to feel what the character feels but also to want something for the character, namely success. Still, I do not believe that we ‘care’ for fictional characters in the way we care for real people. See chapter 5. (For what it’s worth – this will be of interest at least to some readers – ‘empathy’ is precisely not what Levinas has in mind when he writes about the ethical demand of the Other.) 7. On the genre itself see Basinger (2003) and Wetta and Novelli (2008). 8. http://www.military.com/0,13190,NI_Why_0404,00.html. To her credit Lynch has also repudiated the media sensation, and the apparent embellishments of the story of her rescue put forward by the American military. http://www.boston.com/news/ nation/articles/2003/11/12/capture_and_rescue_tale_embellished_lynch_says/. But see Tackas (2005), who argues that the ‘heroization’ of Lynch was actually a feminization of her, with the power of making her rescuers into proper masculine heroes. And see Gallagher (2007), who sees the whole affair as a Baudrillard-like simulation. 9. The Hitman has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 13 per cent as of this writing, the lowest score I have ever seen. Universal Soldier is apparently not that much better with the online critics, at 19 per cent. Excessive Force comes in at 36 per cent and only Under Siege, which to my mind too is not a total waste of time, gets a respectable score: 75 per cent. Characteristic reviews of these films include this one by Roger Ebert, of Universal Soldier: ‘The centrepiece of the action is a chase between a prison bus and the armoured UniSols van, along narrow desert roads on the edge of deep precipices. I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences. I have gotten to the point where the obligatory climax (vehicle hurtles over edge, bursts into fireball) is exciting only because it means the damn chase is finally over’. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/universal-soldier-1992. Perhaps the students

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expressed hostility towards absent strangers because they were angry at having to watch such mindless movies. 10. Potter (2003) makes similar points throughout his 11 Myths of Media Violence, esp. pages 85–96. 11. It is worth noting the original choice for a director was François Truffaut, whose Shoot the Piano Player (1960) also self-reflexively stylized gangster violence, though not to comic effect. On Breathless, see epilogue. 12. We get a similar effect when Bonnie is later shot. How the screenwriters ask for sight, sound and feeling to be correlated is interesting in its own right: Close-up. BONNIE. Day – as she is struggling through the water. A bullet hits her in the shoulder. We must see this bullet clearly, we must see it go in her flesh so that we can feel it. Tight close-up of BONNIE’s face as she screams. It is the first time she has been hurt, and the scream is pure animal pain. She cries out. (Newman and Benton 1967: 99)

13. In fact, rather than stopping to help a friend, the real-life Clyde was driving at eighty-five miles per hour and attempting to ram into the posse waiting for him. Or so the official version of the story has it. (How anyone knew at what speed he was driving is not clear.)

Chapter 4

Revelry

I did a search for the word ‘revelry’, on 19 September 2015, in Sociological Abstracts, the main database for sociological research. I came up with nineteen hits, including several duplications, and several that associated ‘revelry’ either with its opposites, like repression, or with radical outgrowths, like ‘riot’ and ‘rebellion’. I then did a search of the word ‘leisure’ and came up with 12,956 hits. Leisure, we all know, is an invention of modern society – going on a holiday at the beach, watching a football game on TV, enjoying a restaurant meal – a correlative of that other capitalist activity known as work; it is something invented rather than natural, and it is probably (to read most sociological accounts of it) undertaken in a spirit of bad faith: leisure is to work as work is to exploitation, a link in the system of malady and deception that Zygmunt Bauman calls, derisively, ‘liquid modernity’. So sociologists like to study it. Revelry, by contrast, the Greek word for which is kōmos, and hence ‘comedy’, is apparently beyond sociological categorization. Teaching literary theory to young literature students I have often come to discuss the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of ‘the carnivalesque’ stemmed from his study of Rabelais and the culture of medieval festivity. (‘Carnival’, by the way, gets 428 hits in Sociological Abstracts, and unlike ‘revelry’ and ‘leisure’, frequently has positive connotations.) Students perk up when you talk about carnival. And surely one of the reasons is that they themselves, undergraduates at a residential university, are experiencing the carnival of their lives: parties and raves, alcohol and drugs, sexual freedom, a feeling of released from the strictures of everyday morality and from being under the eye of everyday (parental) authority, at least when they are not studying, working, taking classes, drowning themselves in social media or wallowing in post-adolescent depression. In Bakhtin’s notion of 85

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carnival, college students find an intellectual justification for the craziness of the dorms. But Bakhtin’s carnivalism features a difficult dichotomy: on the one side, the institutions of carnival, where structures of time and space are placed around the transgressive practices of the ritual, and the ritual period is itself socially condoned; on the other side, artistic expressions of the ‘carnivalesque’, where transgressive practices are re-codified into artistic language. It turns out that carnival is at bottom a narrow activity, confined to festive occasions and fiction. If I try to discuss in class a conventionally ‘carnivalesque’ work like Thomas More’s Utopia, I do not at the same time require students to take off their clothes, drink beer and insult me for being an authority figure. Not even teaching Rabelais would inspire me to do such a thing. Meanwhile, I have been made to know by students in England that I was not a welcome figure at their discos – nothing personal, but I was too old to get silly with them. Revelry is an old-fashioned sounding word. How about carousing, merrymaking or amusement? How about plain fun? Those words might be better except for the fact that revelry is also related to ‘revels’, which reminds us that revelry is also a part of festivity and, yes, the bounded rituals of carnival. (Thus Levin [1994: 16] defines revelry as ‘licensed disorder’.) Revelry seems to be the most general of the terms, the one that includes everything from carousing to holding a festival, and maybe the most useful. Suppose we thought of revelry as a kind of first degree of separation from seriousness, that ‘licensed’ degree where the serious business of the world is first challenged and lightened by levity – by flouting the gravity of life, as it were. Revelry could begin, even in a classroom, with a shared joke, or a bottle of wine. Revelry would come whenever, in a social situation, there arrives a shared, transgressive suspension of seriousness. The transgression could be ritualistic and hence involve a toast to begin a new school year, or a new marriage – or else it could be offensive, literally an offence against the proprieties of serious life. The transgression can fall flat – no one gets the joke, or some people are offended by it, or some people are offended by the fact that whether or not the joke is funny, humour has been allowed to obtrude into a serious situation. (I used to get into trouble in job interviews because I would crack jokes: the people would laugh and admire my wit, but they would resent my making such a serious procedure as a job interview into a laughing matter.) Revelry and seriousness are enemies. That doesn’t mean that they can’t interpenetrate one another, where revelry becomes a serious business, or seriousness is rendered festive, but in the terms of sociologist Erving Goffman (1974) they are antithetical ‘keys’. Don’t clown around in the middle of a business meeting. And don’t scold people – like Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – for being drunk in the middle of a party. To violate the key of a social situation, whether in the spirit of fun or the spirit of seriousness, is to



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violate a condition of sociality itself. And more important, if the two modes are antithetical keys, and can be used to violate the condition of sociality, there is a danger that instead of coexisting one would swallow up the other. You see that in one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare, spoken by Prospero in The Tempest: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (Shakespeare 2015, 4.1: 147–158)

On the one hand, the ‘revels’ are over; Prospero has the serious business of putting down a rebellion to attend to, and the actors who have been performing the revels leave the stage. On the other, serious business itself is nothing but a revel, an insubstantial dream. A countervailing temptation, of course, is to take seriousness – the struggle for survival, the will to power, the pursuit of self-respect, community, God, love, procreation, family, pleasure or bliss – as the foundation of human activity, and to read revelry as the imaginary representation or appeasement of real and serious conflicts. That is a stance that many interpreters of Bakhtin have taken: the revelry of carnival is interpreted as an expression of class conflict or cultural oppression, and thus as an activity with a serious social function.1 ‘We are such stuff as dialectical materialism is made of’, would be tag line then. Or, ‘We are such stuff as the maximization of pleasure for the highest number of people is made of’. Such was not Bakhtin’s meaning, I think. Even if carnival is bounded, it is not reducible to the rules of the serious social order. If it were, it would not be carnival. Instead, carnival is irreducibly dualistic. On the one hand, carnival involves the inversion of social convention, so that it follows its logic inside out or upside down; it mimics structure in reverse. But on the other hand, carnival involves a dissolution of social convention; out of order comes a chaos, where nothing is mimicked, nothing is structured and no social function (whether revolutionary or reactionary) is ever really served. Carnival is somewhere in between inversion and chaos, and cannot be contained by the structure it doubly flouts.2 And what about violence, then? Like Graham Greene’s protagonist in The Quiet American, most people who have encountered violence first-hand

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Figure 4.1.  Joe Pesci in a still from Home Alone (1990). Courtesy: Twentieth Century Fox.

know that it is ‘no joke’. Those who think of real violence as a joke are apt to be deranged, or very good soldiers. But in art, violence can be festive. It can even be funny. 1. THE JOY OF VIOLENCE Aesthetic violence is a matter of revelry above all when the violence delights. It is out in the open. It is not to be feared. It comes with joy, with resplendence or laughter, and it is very likely impressively clever: stylized, scored and choreographed. It is probably hoped for – something that the reader or the spectator has been expecting. That doesn’t mean that the violence might not also be shocking, dreadful, alarming or horrifying. But the joyous fictionality of aesthetic violence modulates the shock, the dread, the alarm or the horror. And aesthetic violence becomes both a means and an object of celebration – even if also, sometimes, a celebration of revulsion. In slapstick, comedy is enabled because the violence is inane; but at the same time, violence is enabled because the comedy is inane, and requires us to respond in kind.3 The violence is either inconsequential (nobody really gets hurt) or incongruous (it doesn’t matter if anyone really gets hurt, since the violence doesn’t matter apart from the sense of incongruity it evokes). The first victim of comic violence is seriousness itself. It is as if the burden of having to struggle to survive is temporarily lifted. The burden isn’t forgotten – if



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it were forgotten then the violence would be without meaning – but the burden doesn’t weigh upon us. In other words, at a signal, the representation of violence becomes a release from violence. Represented violence is nonsense, and therefore the violence being watched isn’t violence. Freud’s theory of the joke (2001b) anticipates this idea. For Freud, humour begins with the child’s discovery of nonsense, which comes soon after the child discovers sense, that is, the rational symbolic order and a preliminary version of the reality principle. The child easily discovers that it is possible to negate sense, to invent sounds that aren’t words, to engage in gestures that don’t signify. This freedom from sense is enjoyable on its own account, a taste of freedom; it is funny. When adults engage in comic revelry, Freud argues, they are in the first place reverting to the infantile pleasure of free negation. Of course, jokes might also have tendencies, as Freud puts it, in other words, ulterior motives, whether conscious or unconscious. In fact, much humour has motives that include aggression, exhibitionism and seduction. But in the first place, humour is an intellectual enjoyment of the intellect’s own freedom from the demands of sense. If we then place slapstick humour in the context of regression to the freedom of nonsense, it becomes plausible to maintain that the violence in slapstick is a key to just the opposite of what serious-mindedness might suppose it to be: instead of indicating the gravity of the world, it indicates its levity; instead of indicating danger and harm, it indicates the opposite of danger and harm: violence becomes the sign of the nonsense, though this nonsense is itself (again) clever, signifying through style, rhythm, tonality and kinetics. Failure to appreciate the joyous aspect of violence in film can lead to critical tendentiousness. In the 200-page study called The Fascination of Film Violence, the critic Henry Bacon (2015) devotes fewer than three pages to comic violence; and in his four-page filmography he includes only two works of comedy, a pair of films by Woodie Allen (which are not very violent). The reason, I believe, is that Bacon is determined to see film violence as serious business, fulfilling various kinds of biological, cultural and psychological ‘functions’. But violence in film (and other art forms) is often a form of controlled nonsense, of wonder and laughter at the expense of understanding and dread, aimed in opposition to functionality. It will be clever, as I have said. But it will be clever in the service, in the first instance, of nothing but itself. Consider the classic, early slapstick film That Fatal Sneeze (1906).4 Sneezes aren’t fatal, of course; so the very premise of the film is nonsensical. It is nonsensical in the direction of physical danger, though: something that is not dangerous is miscategorized as something dangerous, and in the end (sorry to give it away) the miscategorization is proved correct. Or rather, it is proved correct in play. Because the dangerousness of the sneeze is so obviously outrageous (in his final sneeze, the subject in question blows himself

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up in a cloud of smoke and vanishes) the violence of his death is comic. His demise is an example of a death that doesn’t matter. Aggression, wished for or realized, is never absent from the story of the main character’s death. The uncle has got himself into trouble playing a cruel joke on his hapless nephew, making him sneeze by throwing pepper in his face. In response, the nephew gets his revenge, showering his uncle’s clothes and other belongings, while the uncle sleeps, with large doses of pepper. On waking and beginning to wash, the uncle finds himself irresistibly sneezing. The sneezing is so powerful that the walls shake, pictures swing on their hooks; eventually his bed is blown over. As he goes into the street to get to work, unknowingly followed by the boy, who continues surreptitiously to throw pepper in his way, the uncle goes on sneezing. Items on display in a shop get blown over. At another shop the windows explode. A policeman walking on patrol gets knocked down, taking a picket fence and a lamp post down with him. A woman has her wig blown off. At every incident the uncle makes at least one person irate at the damage he has done. Soon, in one of the earliest scenes of its kind, which would be repeated in scores of slapstick films, a growing posse of indignant citizens chases after him, along with the nephew, who laughs heartily and vindictively at each succeeding disaster. The chase becomes the main impetus behind the plot – for now the uncle has to both try to stifle his sneezing and run away from a mob. Eventually escaped and alone, on a quiet residential street, the uncle sneezes so hard that the earth starts to shake, and he can hardly hold himself upright against the temblor. When that’s finally over, the uncle finds him again struggling to stifle himself, and the fatal sneeze comes, the uncle disappearing in the cloud of smoke, possibly mixed with some pepper. The fatal sneeze is revenge. The uncle has acted contemptibly (though out of a desire to laugh at his nephew which we filmgoers may share) and he has died contemptibly (the victim of his laughing nephew). There is no denying the undercurrent of aggression, anger and indignation. But we feel the undercurrent in the key of laughter, and follow the plot not to see a resolution of conflict but to observe a growing immensity of outrageousness, as one form of the main gag follows another. The end – a death – comes as an ending but not as a real death, since what it really signifies is the amplification of the gag itself to the bursting point. A further paradox here is that such utter nonsense has to be appreciated by our wits, that is, our capacity of understanding. We laugh not only because something is absurd but also because we understand that it is absurd, and we know that the performer or storyteller wants us to comprehend the matter so well that we are logically as well as emotively convinced that it is absurd. When in Home Alone (1990) Joe Pesci is attacked by a flame-throwing device we laugh at his scream and his facial expression, and we do so because we



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know that Pesci is making funny noises and faces at a presumably intolerable situation. Children above a certain age know this. They know that being singed by a flamethrower hurts; that fire is destructive; that one should never play with fire. They even know that hurting people is bad. But still they, along with adults, laugh. For here is a fire that hurts, that is bad, that is out of place, that is inappropriate, that is destructive – and the result is a scream, a funny face, and a victim who is not really hurt, a victim who only makes as if he were hurt. This is not that. The joke comes when the identity of this and that is perfectly convincing, yet perfectly absurd as well. And lest it be forgotten, the joke comes: a certain placement of subjects and objects and a certain timing of their movements or of the language that recounts them are required to make the absurd not just absurd but also an object of laughter. Incongruity is probably a necessary but not a sufficient condition of humour; without the right timing, the right key, the right set-up of tone and mood and the right recognition of incongruity, the joke fails. The observer may not even respond to it as a failed joke but as something else: a bit of unfunny nonsense, maliciousness, insensitivity, unwarranted childishness and the like. The incongruity effect is not limited to film. Try out this excerpt from a story by Mark Twain, ‘Cannibalism in the Cars’ (1868), when a traveller relates what happened one time when he was stuck on a train in snowdrift, in the middle of an empty countryside, with a number of other passengers. With no supplies and starvation pending, the passengers decide to vote on who among them is to be sacrificed and eaten; they form into ‘factions’ and keep manoeuvring their parliamentary rules. But eventually the first on the list is a gentleman named Harris, followed by a gentleman named Messick: The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then, when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr. Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds. We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our vision for seven torturing days. How changed we were from what we had been a few short hours before! Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger, feverish anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep for utterance now. That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful life. The winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house, but they were powerless to distress us any more. I liked Harris. He might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree of satisfaction. Messick was very well, though rather high-flavoured, but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fibre, give me Harris. Messick had his good points – I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish to do it but he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be, sir – not a bit. Lean? – why,

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bless me! – and tough? Ah, he was very tough! You could not imagine it – you could never imagine anything like it. (Twain 1868: n.p.)

There may be some people who don’t or wouldn’t think this funny.5 It is not a direct representation of an act of violence but a mediated representation, as one character tells his story to another, the narrator. It isn’t visual, it is verbal. It concentrates not on the blows given to the unfortunate victims, or on the repulsive act of feeding on them but on an incongruous response to the violence, observed in retrospect, and it operates by way of a complex irony, where ‘liking Harris’ appears to mean one thing and actually means another. But it has at least this much in common with Home Alone or Fatal Sneeze. The form and tone of the representation displaces that which is supposed to be unmediated – the blow of the torch, the explosion of the house – into a form of self-consciously playful mediation. The real thing, the violence, ought to be frightful. Instead, the real thing is only the real thing mediated, the real thing in jest, presented through the verbal equivalent of what in filmmaking is called ‘special effects’. And hence it becomes a subject of revelry. Aggressive impulses and the taboos of acting them out are no less present in the story of the train car cannibal than in the stories of hapless burglars raiding a private home or a vengeful nephew making an uncle sneeze to death. And yet, all the stories are funny, styled with wit and in that respect really harmless.

2. THE PAINTED BIRD Again, it’s all about a first degree of separation from a reality principle, the point where the seriousness of violence is mocked. In principle, the seriousness of violence can no more be mocked than the seriousness of death, but mocking is an option, a defiance, a fictionalization of that which in reality cannot be fantasized away. But this jeering can also be sad, angry, troubled, horrid. Not only in comedy can violence be a subject of stylized mockery but also in Gothic fiction and the horror movies, as also in war satire, going back to Rabelais, Cervantes and Grimmelshausen. Many of these include escape narratives and thus concentrate on the experience of heroic victimage. Picaresque fiction can do this too, all by itself or in combination with Gothic, horror or satiric motives. The victim-hero, on the way to freedom (or else disaster), encounters atrocities; and there is an anxious pleasure (of mockery or defiance) in that. Some fictions bring all of these genres and circumstances together – Gothic horror, war satire, heroic victimage. An important example is a previously mentioned work, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird.



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I don’t think I have anything to say about strictly sadistic fiction. Here my analysis of the aesthetics of violence must falter. Even if I am no stranger to the sadistic impulse, I am a stranger to most of its aesthetic attractions. I understand the appeal of seeing the enemy suffer, and so I have and will continue to examine that subject of revenge. I even understand the appeal of consensual sadistic sex (within limits). But seeing innocence suffer and enjoying it in sadistic bliss is something that is beyond my powers of explanation. Perhaps I should construct here a box that I have to leave empty. Here ought to be an explanation of the joys of sadistic violence, as experienced in art. A number of vigilante and revenge films, including I Spit on Your Grave, mentioned in the preface, possibly belong in my empty box – although such films take a further step and equate sadistic violence with justice. If I cannot understand the point of view of the self-righteous sadist, however, I think I do understand, however inadequately, the joy of seeing the victim suffer, from the point of view of the victim. I am astonished at this development, but I am hardly alone in this. Vicariously experiencing suffering and being in some way amused by it – that is, finding pleasure in pain is a common form of aesthetic experience. I think of my first reading of The Painted Bird, sometime while I was still in high school, in the late 1960s. I loved that book, as I did the next, similarly melancholic work by Kosinski, Steps (1968). The Painted Bird seemed to speak to so many things, the nature of racial prejudice and hatred, the indifference of the universe to human suffering and of course the disaster of the Holocaust, which Kosinski personally survived, and which I, an American Jew growing up in peace and prosperity, believed I had to always hold before myself as a measure, a caution, a humbling, a catastrophe in which I was somehow included without the privileges that came with experience. But what was I thinking when I came across passages like this, where a halfwitted young woman, who lives in the woods and regularly consorts with the men of the nearby village, is attacked by the village women? The women held Stupid Ludmila down flat against the grass. They sat on her hands and legs and began beating her with the rakes, ripping her skin with their finger nails, tearing out her hair, spitting into her face . . . Then the women killed Ludmila’s dog with vicious shovel blows. Stupid Ludmila lay bleeding. Blue bruises appeared on her tormented body. She groaned loudly, arched her back, trembled, vainly trying to free herself.

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One of the women now approached, holding a corked bottle of brownish-black manure. To the accompaniment of raucous laughter and loud encouragements from the others, she kneeled between Ludmila’s legs and rammed the entire bottle inside her abused, assaulted slit, while she began to moan and howl like a beast. The other women looked on calmly. Suddenly with all her strength one of them kicked the bottom of the bottle sticking out of Stupid Ludmila’s groin. There was the muffled noise of glass shattering inside. Now all the women began to kick Ludmila; the blood spurted round their boots and calves. When the last woman had finished kicking, Ludmila was dead. (Kosinski 1976: 54–55)

One might wonder how much worse or not such a scene might be if translated into film. (My guess is that it would be worse in the sense of being less morally offensive.) But more important, what was I thinking when I first read this? And what ought I to think now? Among the controversies that arose after the publication of the first edition, in 1965, was the matter of whether the book was fiction or non-fiction. Kosinski hinted that it was a true account of his life while a refugee from his hometown in Poland, staying among peasants while hiding from the Nazis. Another controversy was his portrayal of east European peasants, as here, where even the women are capable of the grossest outrages. (In other episodes the boy himself is beaten, abused and humiliated by peasants, and animals are treated abusively too. And so the novel was banned from Poland for many years.) Kosinski in real life was never so much on the run as was the nameless main character of The Painted Bird. There is no evidence that he was treated cruelly by the people who looked after him. And it is doubtful that incidents like the brutal gang murder of Ludmila ever took place. Here is my question, then: even if you start from the premise that the whole work is fiction, as I probably did when I read it the first time, what do you get from this episode? I thought of this book as extremely ethical, a tale that took the high ground. (The moral piquancy of even this scene is underscored by the suffering of the one villager who loves Ludmila, a bird catcher who is unable to save her, and is inconsolable after her death.) But what kind of high ground is occupied at the recounting of an incident such as this, or in reading about it, in feeling vicariously abused by this incident and appalled by the conduct of fictional scoundrels? What kind of pleasure does occupying this high ground afford? What kind of pleasure comes with the displeasure I must at the same time feel? It is plausible to conclude that a naïve reading of this text would involve a logic such as the following: ‘Some people are like that: capable of committing the abominable. Some people are like that: capable of cruelly punishing someone who committed no offence apart from being half-witted, loving, and sexually wanton. But I – I am not like that’. This is a logic according to which the reader is taught about the nature of evil both by witnessing it and



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by realizing that he or she is not evil, and must not be.6 It is even a logic according to which the reader is taught about the nature of innocence and summoned to take the side of innocence. Innocence suffers; I suffer; I am indignant in my suffering; and so, innocent or not, I am on the side of innocence. Such is how early reviewers of the book responded to it as a whole. ‘Things like these happen to people we know’, said a headline in the New York Times. ‘It happened before, it can happen again’, wrote Charles Poore (1965). ‘If ever we needed proof that Auschwitz was more a concept than a name’, wrote Elie Weisel (1965), ‘it is given to us here with shattering eloquence in The Painted Bird, a moving but frightening tale in which man is indicted and proven guilty with no extenuating circumstances’. Note that in both cases the importance of this book is that it reveals something real and true – Weisel uses cognates of the word ‘proof’ twice – as something that happened then and may happen now, even though the book was marketed as a novel. It would be unfair to take the reviewers to task for conflating fiction with reality. Art asks us in some respects to conflate the two, even if, in another respect, it also asks us to respect the difference between them. All is true, says the narrator of the entirely fictional story by Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot. This is not a pipe, says the famous painting by René Magritte. And violence in art, as I have been suggesting from the beginning, frequently summons us to experience both the conflation and the rupture, to get real about violence in life by experiencing it in the realm of aesthetic play. But what about the half-witted girl, killed by a bottle shoved up her vagina and repeated blows to her body, struck by the village women, while the men of the village stand by and do nothing, except for the one who loves her and can only weep? In his preface to the revised second edition of the novel (from which I have been quoting) Kosinski (1976) tries to put the controversy to rest by insisting that while the work is a novel, and a novel is a work of the imagination, he was ‘not overstating the brutality and cruelty that characterized the war years in Eastern Europe’ (xii). And he concludes by saying, in defence of some of the grotesquery of the book, that the ‘imagination’ should not be ‘held prisoner’ (xxvi). To me, going back to the book fifty years later, the violence in this and several other episodes seems gratuitous, especially in this respect: it shows extreme violence committed not by the soldiers and officers of the Third Reich but by non-militarized peasants. It shows that violence moreover as a form of depravity, expressing the damaged, hateful, even psychotic character of people who are not known, in real life, ever to have behaved in this way.7 The logic always seems, gratuitously, to be this: that evil is out there – ‘Look at it!’, as Lear might say, ‘Look! Look!’ – but it is not in here, in me. The pleasure of the text, much like the pleasure of horror films noted by Carol Clover, is that it both puts me in contact with my fears for my own safety,

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allowing me to experience them in a zone of safe masochistic fascination, and, even more to the point, that it confirms the fact that I am not like them, those who do those terrible things. I am innocent, along with the characters who suffer on my behalf. My own innocence can even be confirmed when an intellectual of experience and standing says, ‘man is indicted and proven guilty’. Using the word ‘man’, Weisel implies that all of us are guilty; but those who can say ‘all of us are guilty’ are also innocent, precisely because they can say it, taking the side of the victim. Free of sentimentality, free of optimism, free of moral superiority and condescension, free of the privileges of egoism – such as the experience of the Holocaust must force me to be – I am nevertheless not guilty. In knowing, really knowing, that all of us are guilty, I know that I have nothing to apologize for. I have done nothing wrong. And thinking this, however dimly, I have crossed the border from seriousness to jest. But still, what about Ludmila? At one point Kosinski confessed that what he created was a ‘metaphor’ for his experience during World War II. Suppose Kosinski is right. But what is our experience in reading this metaphor, in being shocked, horrified, sorrowful and outraged by it – and at the same time saying to ourselves (perhaps) ‘things like these happen’. In Brechtian terms, the problem would be that the Ludmila episode evokes emotions without clarifying the reasons for it. Sure, we know that the villagers assault Ludmila because of certain things: because she is different (single, simpleminded, living in the woods), because she is voluptuous in a world where sexuality is commonly repressed, because she does something for the village men that the village women cannot do, because, at bottom, they are jealous of her, intolerant and fearful. The assault on Ludmila is a kind of revenge killing. But is this enough of an explanation? In the post-Brechtian world of absurdist aesthetics, from Kafka and Ionesco to artist Paul McCarthy (his performance works include Family Tyranny [1987], where a father shoves goo into an artificial son’s mouth as if violently sodomizing him with a funnel); all that seems to be necessary to the artist’s purposes is the metaphor itself. The narrative or drama becomes emblematic or allegorical without a legible source – or, in the case of the Ludmila story, with only an incredible source, a source that seems to violate our understanding. After all, we have a story of one woman shoving a bottle filled with manure up another woman’s vagina, and other women responding with ‘raucous laughter’ as still another kicks it up her vagina and kills her. It cannot be. But still, Kosinski says that his book is a metaphor of or for something. Unpack the metaphor, and you get a chain of associations. Living through the Holocaust was for Kosinski, among other things, equal to watching a woman being attacked with brutality and laughter. (It made him feel helpless in the face of an intolerable atrocity.) Living during the Holocaust was for



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the unnamed main character equal to watching a woman being attacked with brutality and laughter. (It made him feel helpless in the face of an intolerable atrocity.) Reading about life during the Holocaust, even in fiction, is equal to watching a woman being attacked with brutality and laughter. (It makes you too feel helpless in the face of intolerable atrocity, although you are absent from it.) But what is this ‘equal to’ I have had to summon, this metaphorical equation of one thing to another? The question returns us to one of the original problems of the aesthetics of violence. What is the relation between violence in the real world and violence in fiction? What are the obligations of the latter to the former? The Painted Bird, on its own terms, provides an answer, or at least a metaphorical answer. Late in the novel, the boy is rescued by the Red Army, and a pair of high-ranking soldiers take the boy under their wing, an officer and a sharpshooter. The men are idealists and kind to the boy, but they are also capable of evil. The sharpshooter teaches the boy a lesson on the subject of self-worth and revenge, saying that the former is dependent upon one’s ability to commit the latter: A person should take revenge on every wrong and humiliation. . . . A man should consider every wrong he had suffered and decide on the appropriate revenge. Only the conviction that one was as strong as the enemy and that one could pay him back double enabled people to survive. . . . A man should take revenge according to his own nature and the means at his disposal. It was quite simple: if someone was rude to you and it hurt you like a whiplash, you should punish him as though he had lashed you with a whip. If someone slapped you and it felt like a thousand blows, take revenge for a thousand blows. The revenge should be proportionate to all the pain, bitterness, and humiliation felt as a result of an opponent’s action. (Kosinski 1976: 214)

One of the key expressions here is ‘means at his disposal’. For the implication is that The Painted Bird is a form of revenge, symbolic revenge. In devising a ‘metaphor’ for his experience during the war, Kosinski has found what T. S. Eliot called an objective correlative for the misery he experienced. Scenes of beatings, rape, humiliation and murder are the emblems through which so deplorable an experience as living through the Holocaust, alone, as a child, in a foreign place, can be imagined. And they are the emblems through which readers find themselves attracted as they enter into the subjects raised by the novel, from the memory of the Holocaust to injustices still experienced today. ‘Things like these happen’. Consider what I take to be one of the main tenors of the metaphor that is Ludmila’s story: I feel helpless at the sight of the suffering of others. And consider too that this tenor is not only cognitive but also emotional. I feel helpless. I feel helpless just as I also feel aghast, horrified at a crime so

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complete that it challenges the meaning of my humanity. The implication for the aesthetics of violence is that one of the things we are driven to revel in, given the appropriate occasion, is the experience of ghastly helplessness. We want to feel it. Maybe we even need to feel it. But today, fifty years later, though I still find much of The Painted Bird effective, I find scenes like the Ludmila incident over the top. A later episode of mass rape and pillage (a scene which Kosinski actually defends as being based on fact) seems over the top as well. Kosinski re-creates a scene where a cavalry of Kalmuks, German-allied warriors from the Caucasus, raid a village while the Germans retreat, pillaging and raping the peasants. Such incidents as this really did happen. But then the raping gets ludicrous, the Kalmuks fucking each other as well as the women, some of them fucking women while riding a galloping horse, one from the front and one from behind, and so forth, and doing so while roaring drunk. I have experienced too much life in order to be convinced by such narrative excess, told with a straight face. I will accept being shown a scene where women are gassed in the chambers or tortured and abused by conquering soldiers, but not, at least this time, a scene where a woman is raped and beaten by other women in the woods, for having had sex with their husbands, or a scene of women being raped at both ends on galloping horses by drunken soldiers. Yet that makes me an example of how the aesthetics of violence may often work today, so far as it is inclined towards revelry. Objective correlatives are allowed to be exaggerated to the point where they are no longer objective, and come as a sort of joke. The imagination should not be held prisoner. Of course not. If it were, we should never come face-to-face with the fatal sneeze, bringing on an earthquake. We also wouldn’t have any stories of giant ogres and cannibal witches or princes who can gallop through a field of thorns. We wouldn’t have allegories. We wouldn’t have Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. For that matter, we wouldn’t have dreams. But there would seem to be points where images and dramas of violence fail us. One of them is verisimilitude. There the break point might lie where the violence clearly violates the limits of likelihood, where likelihood of some sort is necessary to the integrity of the event and even where likelihood has already been modified to suit the imaginary world of the representation. Many Hollywood action movies fall into this category. Main characters are faced in the beginning with what seems to be an intractable problem; but the problem gets resolved by a series of violent and implausible stunts which have little to do with the problem itself, or the conditions under which the problem initially presented itself. Parts of The Painted Bird may fall in that category too. A logic of revelry takes over where verisimilitude had seemed to rein. (In fact, the Kalmuk episode is not without humour.) But another break point comes in the morality of the fiction. The



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point comes where the fiction proves my innocence in the face of violent events. I do not mean to say that stories should not distinguish between innocent and culpable beings, or, as earlier, between non-violence and violence. It may very well be an important part of many stories that certain figures are entirely innocent, and therefore all the more worthy of our compassion – and terror – when they get victimized. But when the fiction distinguishes between innocence and guilt and between non-violence and violence as the Ludmila story does, I am left off the hook as a witness to violence. I have been allowed to enjoy a moment of what amounts to learned helplessness – the other side of the empowerment a child feels when laughing at nonsense. It does not seem that that was Kosinski’s intention. He wanted, as we saw, ‘to represent the essential anti-human condition’. And towards the end, the boy on the run gets involved in anti-human behaviour too, cooperating in the murder of one of his minor adversaries. We are all in an anti-human condition, Kosinski seems to suggest, even though we are not all in an ‘essential’ one. But I am innocent of the rape and murder of Ludmila. I am helpless in front of it. I can do nothing about it. And there is joy in that, even a sort of festivity in it, for I have been able, momentarily, in the licensed arena of the aesthetic, to shout down reality, to invert it and flout it, to be both anti-logical and unlogical in the face of violence. In defiance of what may be perceived as a world whose grotesqueries have no limit, I enjoy my own innocent fascination and worthless disgust. If there is anything redeeming in this condition, it is that I seem to enjoy the horror in solidarity with others, both with fictional beings and other readers. And I get that. I know what is going on. I am among those who understand this aesthetic rule of thumb, where I can participate in atrocities while being at a distance from them, and learning from them something about innocence and guilt. But then again, one can worry about this solidarity. The semi-masochistic culture of imaginary victims is not a culture of generosity or courage. It is a culture of simulated pain, which joins pain to an illusion of moral self-righteousness – an illusion for the sake of which I can willingly conspire.8 3. FOUR MORE DIMENSIONS OF THE FUN Of course, I have suggested that excess is vital and necessary for human beings, and horrorism or self-righteous masochism may be forms of excess. But I have also said that excess can be dangerous. One’s response to violent revelry may be determined by one’s thresholds; to my sixteen-year-old self the Ludmila killing was inside the line, a symbolic projection of what I took to be the horror of the world I lived in; to my sixty-five-year-old self it is going too far. Nowadays the Ludmila killing seems to me a violation of a

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principle of verisimilitude that it is important to keep in place, especially when thinking about so important a case as the Holocaust; and it seems to me to stretch the limits of self-righteousness too far. But the subject arises as to how artworks of different kinds themselves may either stay within bounds of certain limits or try to defy them. Certainly, The Painted Bird tries to cross narrative boundaries. And when Paul McCarthy symbolically abuses a boy on camera he is deliberately crossing a boundary. He is trying at once to shock and mock. The video is funny even if it is also alarming. In its excess the video creates a dramatic space in response to which it is possible both to recognize the terror of power and to laugh at its absurdity. Black comedy is a common name for art of this kind, and shocking excess – whether a sneezer blows himself up or, more unpleasantly, a parent abuses a child – is one of its tools. In non-comic cases like The Painted Bird we use similar rubrics. We call such works ‘dark’, ‘portentous’, noir. In journalistic criticism, it is common to see a work praised precisely because it is ‘dark’, as if a work that is ‘light’ is not to be admired. And ‘dark’ usually refers not only to tone but also to the excesses that siphon the lightness out of a representation, even as it also adds any number of pleasures to it. The levity of violent revelry – I have made a claim about it that some may find objectionable. I have claimed that it is exhilarating. I have claimed that it is exhilarating even when it is ‘tendentious’, in Freud’s sense, and even when it is aimed towards causing us to feel sympathetic pain and to agonize along with an innocent victim. Let’s not be lured by the charms of moral rectitude: if we are right, or in the right, we enjoy being so. In real life being right or in the right can have disastrous consequences: good people often get hurt in the name of someone else’s justice. But in aesthetic play, when good people get hurt, and I understand the discrepancy in their getting hurt, I achieve a satisfaction: a grim satisfaction but a satisfaction all the same. Not all artworks playing at the revelry of violence achieve even this unpleasant pleasantness. For not all artworks, again, are successful. And many, successful or not in other respects, can make foul hay with their own deliberate excessiveness. Many are predominantly excessive only. There are both silly and intelligent examples of this, to be sure, where violence is excessive for its own sake and where excessiveness is (either stupidly or smartly) precisely the point, the revelry of the artwork as such. In forgetting about verisimilitude, in forgetting about the mimetic equivalent of the reality principle, there is bliss – the sheer enjoyment of violent play, play at once rule-bound and free, structured and chaotic, functional and perverse, controlled and nonsensical. I have not, however, said enough about the game of mimesis in and of itself so far. I think I will probably never say enough. There are elements of the game of mimesis which seem to override the sub-elements of the agon,



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of thrill-seeking, of revelry and so on. There is delight in mimesis for its own sake, as Aristotle first observed; there is vital relief in the ordering of sensations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings that John Dewey (1934) was particularly concerned to explain. Any artwork of quality can at once transport us and ‘actualize’ us (in Dewey’s sense – make us aware of what we are), take us away and take us back, disturb us and reassure us. One of the purposes of art is to form and relish an experience. I am only adding here that one dimension of mimesis is that which comes from revelry. I am suggesting that this revelry can come in bad faith as well as good. There are no guarantees. I am also suggesting that revelry can come in sorrow as well as joy, in fright as well as laughter. The reason is not that sorrow and joy are emotions of a certain kind which bear a necessary relationship to one another: I do not know whether or not that is the case. The reason is that in mimetic experience revelry comes, however strongly or mildly, when that experience finds us as it were, getting the joke. In other words, the revelry of fictionality itself: not just the general pleasure of mimesis but the specific pleasure of the witty negation of seriousness. In that frame of mind I conclude this chapter with four other dimensions of revelry in art, so far as it touches upon violence. The dimensions are in part formalistic, in part inspired by Freud. They are qualities of representation, whether the representation of violence or any other thing, that at once detach and attract us to what the representation represents. They detach us so far as it makes us free to observe and delight in the representation as a representation: a performance of wit, and by and large a performance of wit for its own sake. They attract us, however, for much the same reason. The fatal sneeze that isn’t a sneeze is more interesting than a real sneeze all by itself. And I get that. I am transported into a kind of revelry with it. The four dimensions are these: estrangement, displacement, condensation and arousal. Estrangement. Victor Shklovsky’s theory of de-familarization, Freud’s theory of the uncanny and Brecht’s theory of alienation effects all bear on aspects of this dimension of art – the way that art can deliberately evoke, at one and the same time, fascination and detachment. The effect involves the doubleness of mimesis: I see what I see, but I am not seeing what I see. For Plato, this was one of the chief problems of art. For Calvinists it was one of the main problems of the image, whether in art or in religious worship. But in much mainstream European art estrangement, whether theorized or not, whether self-consciously adopted or not, is all but a given. Take, for example, this well-known passage in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) where a woman, Winnie Verloc, kills her husband, the so-called secret agent, because of his complicity in killing her half-witted brother, Stevie. The scene is the parlour-dining room of the Verloc home. Verloc is lying

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on his back, on the sofa, having beckoned his wife to come to him and have sex – at just the wrong moment. She started forward at once, as if she were still a loyal woman bound to that man by an unbroken contract. Her right hand skimmed slightly the end of the table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish. Mr. Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor and was content. He waited. Mrs. Verloc was coming. As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes. But Mr. Verloc did not see that. He was lying on his back and staring upward. He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on the wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a carving knife. It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely. They were leisurely enough for Mr. Verloc to recognize the limb and the weapon. They were leisurely enough for him to take in the full meaning of the portent, and to taste the flavour of death rising in his gorge. His wife had gone raving mad – murdering mad. They were leisurely enough for the first paralyzing effect of this discovery to pass away before a resolute determination to come out victorious from the ghastly struggle with that armed lunatic. They were leisurely enough for Mr. Verloc to elaborate a plan of defence involving a dash behind the table and the felling of the woman to the ground with a heavy wooden chair. But they were not leisurely enough to allow Mr. Verloc the time to move either hand or foot. The knife was already planted in his breast. It met no resistance on its way. Hazard has such accuracies. Into that plunging blow, delivered over the side of the couch, Mrs. Verloc had put all the inheritance of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of caverns and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of barrooms. Mr. Verloc, the secret agent, turning slightly on his side with the force of the blow, expired without stirring a limb, in the muttered sound of the word ‘Don’t’ by way of protest (Conrad 1907, chapter 9, n.p.).

Conrad called his method in this novel ‘ironic’. But irony in The Secret Agent is not a matter of saying one thing and meaning another, for in this passage as in most of the book the narrator says exactly what he means. It is in part a dramatic irony. The narrator and the reader frequently know more than the characters being observed; and here the narrator seems to know more about what Verloc is thinking than Verloc himself. But more importantly, the ironic method here is a form of distancing, of estranging, and yet, by way of distancing and estranging, of coming back to the subject, of observing it afresh. It is akin to what Kierkegaard discussed as Socratic irony. It is a way of seeing by looking away and not seeing. I am perhaps being imprecise, but the concept of irony may well defy precision (de Man 1996). And as for violence, here too the violence is made distant, even as its gruesomeness is magnified, and the pained consciousness of a man being victimized is magnified too.



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Today, the scene seems cinematic, in anticipation of expressionism, noir and Hitchcockian suspense. We do not see Winnie pick up the knife (although we have known for a while that the knife was there). As if from a camera’s limited but objective view, we watch a figure moving, a figure moving out of the frame and behind the figure a missing knife. As if from a camera’s limited subjective point of view (Verloc’s), instead of seeing this figure, or seeing the figure who is being knifed to death, we look up at the ceiling to the shadow of an arm with a knife in its hand. As if by way of clever editing, Mr. Verloc’s thoughts are delivered in slow motion, from a seemingly omniscient perspective. But there comes comment too, seen not from any point of view but deduced and inserted into the narrative sequence: ‘Into that plunging blow, delivered over the side of the couch, Mrs. Verloc had put all the inheritance of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms’ (Conrad 1907, chapter 9, n.p.). The estrangement does not lead to misunderstanding. It leads to clarity – an insight into the perennial violence of human nature – although the clarity is ill at ease. It seems to lead towards something uncanny, strangely familiar yet by the lights of the familiar entirely strange. And so the violence being represented is at once excessive (it takes longer to read the passage than it took Winnie to kill her husband) and contained within a fine structure of storytelling. And the great pleasure of the passage is the realization that such a paradoxical representation has been achieved, accomplished as a representation. The effect is, or at least ought to be, a mixture of terror, dissonance, admiration, humour and insight. ‘The flow of action in The Secret Agent’, writes William Bysshe Stein, ‘erodes in meaning under the insidious counter-flow of language’. The language, the choice of perspectives and the choice of details abort the ‘incidents of their suspense or seriousness. The recourse to detail, either patently redundant, absurd, oxymoronic, or superfluous, constantly invites laughter in the midst of supposedly portentous plotting and counterplotting’. What results is an ‘incongruity’ and ‘smacks of parody’ (1978: 523–24). And all this in a gruesome scene of murder! But there is more than one way to skin the cat of estrangement. Consider by contrast a passage from A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), a Man Booker Prize Winner, written by Marlon James. The scene is Jamaica in the 1970s. A fourteen-year-old boy witnesses the murder of his father and mother by gangsters: They grab my father the three of them, but my father fight, fight them like a man, even punch them like John Wayne in a movie, like how a real man supposed to fight. But he is one and they is three and soon four. And the fourth one come in only when they beat me father like a smash tomato and he say me

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name Funnyboy, me next in line to be the don but you know what you name? You know what you name? Me say if you know what you name, Pussyhole? And my mother laugh . . . And he you know why them call me Funnyboy? ‘Cause me no take nothing fi joke. Even in the dark Funnyboy lighter than nearly everybody else, but him skin always red, like blood always right under the skin or like white people who in the sun too long and him eye grey like a cat. And Funnyboy tell me father that he going die now, right now, but if he make him feel good he can live like lion in Born Free only he would have to leave the ghetto. And he only one way you going live and he say other things but he pull down him zip and he takes it out and he say you want to live? You want to live? And my father want to live and my father spit and Funnyboy hold the gun right near my father ear. . . . And he groan and groan and groan and fuck my father head then pull himself out and hold my father head steady and fire. Pap . . . My mother run back in and start to laugh and kick my father and Funnyboy go up to here and shoot her in the face. She fall right on top of me. (12–13)

Another cinematic narrative, and this time also a narrative that repeatedly refers to cinema, A Brief History of Seven Killings tells the story based on a true incident, the attempted murder of Bob Marley, which seems to be too absurd to have ever happened. That absurdity is writ small in this murder scene. What happens seems absurd. How it is narrated seems absurd. Grisly, scary and fascinating as it is, written with the gothic energy of a William Faulkner novel (many of which are also cinematic, though also with this same focus on the dialect and ideolect of individual characters, the language bespeaking not only idiosyncrasy but also the whole history that has gone into the making of this unique person), it pushes us away. It reminds us: John Wayne, Born Free, the Funnyboy who isn’t funny. This is and isn’t a joke. And we are supposed, again, to get that. The failure of the narrator’s mother is that she understands only one half of the formula. We are supposed to get both halves, and while reading passages like this we may find ourselves vacillating between horror and incomprehension, indignation and laughter, sympathy for the boy and his father and admiration for the artistry that mocks them and the world they inhabit. Displacement. A major example is the first of The Matrix films (1999). The film begins with an interesting premise, that the world as we live it is actually an illusion, a simulacrum run by a race of machines, organized by software programmes into a ‘Matrix’. But soon the idea of trying to confound the power of the simulacrum gets translated into a hectic, baroque (if clever) series of physical fights. I’ll let the late Roger Ebert speak for me, once again: The Matrix is a visually dazzling cyberadventure full of kinetic excitement, but it retreats to formula just when it’s getting interesting. It’s kind of a let down



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when a movie begins by redefining the nature of reality, and ends with a shootout. We want a leap of the imagination, not one of those obligatory climaxes with automatic weapons fire. I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of these exercises in violence, which recycle the same tired ideas: Bad guys fire thousands of rounds, but are unable to hit the good guy. Then it’s down to the final showdown between good and evil – a martial arts battle in which the good guy gets pounded until he’s almost dead, before he finds the inner will to fight back. Been there, seen that (although rarely done this well).9

Pace Ebert, there may be some people who nevertheless believe that the movie says something original and interesting about – well, philosophy, life, consumerism, the messianic, simulacra.10 But mainly, the film displaces a presumably metaphysical problem into a relentless, ‘kinetic’ yet predictable sequence of violent acts perpetrated and suffered, and then perpetrated and suffered again. And then again. To those who would nevertheless persist in maintaining that the movie is not just stupidly violent, it could be answered, well yes, there is also the play of winning and losing and chance in the movie, as well as the play of mimesis, vertigo and puzzle-solving. There is a work in the movie of separating good from evil, of establishing moral conditions and allegorical configurations of those conditions, of distinguishing between coercion and resistance, of finding visual metaphors equivalent to the social malaise and discontent the film wants to call our attention to, as well as of creating a mythical, fantastic universe. The last movie, Matrix Revolutions, ends on a note of peace, after the hero, Neo, sacrifices himself in a Christlike gesture, in the course of an apocalyptic (hand-to-hand, good against evil martial-arts-collision-explosion-meltdown) battle. But first things first: The Matrix and its sequels displace an intellectual and social problem into a violent conflict between supernatural beings. The movies operate first of all on the basis of a displacement to a world of thrills (they are ‘kinetic’) and, even more important, of revelry, of freedom from seriousness. Critics who overlook this kind of revelry may still have interesting things to say about films and dramas of this kind, focusing on other aspects of the text. But then again, they may have to offer things that only look like they are interesting, as in this comment by South African critic Deidre Byrne, commenting especially on the last instalment of the three-part series, Matrix Revolutions (2003): A hidden reason for the success of the films (shared by many Hollywood films) is their covert vision, which provides them with narrative closure and conveys a much more conservative and consoling (that is, ideologically normative) vision of U.S. society than that which the movies initially declare. (62)

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Read as myth (in Barthes’ sense), the ending of Matrix Revolutions is not revolutionary, but conservative. It suggests that the solution to conflict between individual rights and uniqueness and an undifferentiated Other/enemy is not to resort to violence, although there is a great deal of it (justly criticized for its machismo) in all three films in the Matrix trilogy. Harmony comes, not through the victory of one side over the other, but by their integration with one another, thus annihilating difference. I view this as a typically U.S. answer to conflict: it signals a return to the myth of the U.S. as a cultural melting-pot in which any kind of lifestyle, personal choice or ethnic background can find a home. The image is underpinned by the promise of equality of personal rights and freedom to all. In praxis, of course, this is not true, as the fate of minority groups within U.S. society attests. (71–2)

Byrne does not seem to know much about America, on a number of different levels. I hardly need to cite them. And she suggests that conquest is better than reconciliation, and the preservation of ‘difference’ better than the construction of a unity, when of course the real challenge to social thought for a long time has been how to preserve and construct both. She overlooks the theme of sacrifice, which is so much a part of the drama of winning and losing in Hollywood films, including this one. She overlooks the fact that peace comes when the forces of evil, represented by apparently omnipotent Smith, are annihilated, along with Neo. She even overlooks the fact that, at the end of the film, it turns out that the dominance of human beings by computer programs is not over – the victory is a simulation of victory, and a new programme will soon dominate the hapless human race, though with a little more freedom of choice thrown in. Perhaps she is too sceptical of the multiracial, multi-ethnic, female-character-rich casting of the film, written and directed by two brothers who would both soon come out as transgenders and begin dressing as women. Certainly she has misinterpreted the title of the film, which is put in the plural, Matrix Revolutions, indicating a kind of eternal return rather than a revolutionary break with the past. (We are in fact informed that it is likely that the dead and annihilated Neo may some day come back to life.) But her fundamental error is to level an ideological critique without appreciating the play of the film. The play, first of all, of displacement: for better or worse, one kind of conflict has come to be developed, elaborated, amplified into another kind of conflict, a conflict of controlled and witty nonsense. (Combined with this displacement into mythical violence comes a message from the agonistic world of certain kinds of Hollywood films, the message that Nobody ever wins.) Condensation. Condensation is different from displacement in much the same way as, for the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the symbol is different from the allegory.11 Allegory is detached from its subject, according to Coleridge; it is an abstraction, removed from its own objects. It is a hollow



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fiction, where images mechanically represent ideas. Una, in The Fairie Queene, stands for the one true Church, Protestantism, but she is not in or of the Church. The symbol, by contrast, ‘always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible’ (Coleridge 1816: 37). Ozymandias, in Shelley’s famous poem by that name, not only symbolizes tyranny but also embodies it: he is, or was, a tyrant. Coleridge’s idea has been much commented on and argued over, especially in a famous essay by Paul de Man, ‘Rhetoric and Temporality’ (1983). And de Man, I believe, is right that the distinction between the symbol and the allegory is unreliable, since each figure implies the other. Temporality demands it. What I want to say is that displacement and condensation are like allegory and symbol in both ways; first, that the one genuinely implies detachment, while the other genuinely implies inclusion; second, that in artistic language they nevertheless imply one another. No condensation without displacement, and vice versa. But most important: the symbol is included in the reality which it symbolizes. The symbol is synecdochic. And condensation is by and large synecdochic too. When, as in The Matrix, a conflict of the mind is displaced into a conflict of time and space, and antagonism becomes violence, a detachment occurs without which the film itself would be impossible. This displacement often aims at condensation; that is, a cinematic drama which in Coleridge’s formulation would be a mere allegory, an abstraction, is meant to become a symbol, which returns the representation to its reality. For this viewer, most of the action in The Matrix fails: it is been there, seen that; it is violence following its own film logic, rather than violence typifying the nature of the conflict at hand, and thereby ‘partaking’ of it. So the violence releases the conflict into story, and the pleasures of cinematic combat. But it seldom symbolizes – which is also to say, it seldom condenses. An incidental sign of that is that for this viewer the violence almost always goes on way too long, well past the point the violence seems to make. But condensation can fail even in pithy scenes. (In Matrix Revolutions, after a long and arduous episode of racing a spaceship through a tunnel and destroying an enemy installation, the co-pilot Morpheus turns to the pilot Niobe and says, ‘You did it’. To this, with feeling, Niobe replies, ‘No, we did it’.) It is not brevity alone that makes an artistic moment into a successful figural condensation. The conjunction of several elements that are normally separate into a single image or narrative event, often with the inclusion of what Freud calls ‘substitute formations’, is what condensation fundamentally names. Consider the case, then, of Shakespeare’s most violent play, Titus Andronicus (1592). The title character orders the ‘sacrifice’ of a captive Goth. Then, in a fit of pique, Titus kills one of his own sons. The brothers of the sacrifice captive conspire to kill the beloved of Titus’s daughter; the Gothic brothers then rape the daughter, chop off her hands and cut out her tongue. As the play goes on, in a weird gesture of diplomacy, Titus chops off his own hand. Later

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he cuts the throats of the brothers who raped his daughter, and bakes pieces of their corpses in a pie which he serves to their mother, Tamora. Then he kills Tamora. Then he himself is killed. And then Titus’s killer is killed. All of this, with the exception of the sacrifice and the rape, is meant to be performed on stage, with spurting blood and falling, death-rattled victims. At the end, order is restored when Titus’s son Lucius takes charge. He orders the death of Aaron the Moor,12 who has been behind the scenes conspiring with Titus’s enemies, and who has admitted that he is pledged to do evil for the sake of evil: Set him breast-deep in earth, and famish him; There let him stand, and rave, and cry for food; If any one relieves or pities him, For the offence he dies. This is our doom [i.e., judgement]: Some stay to see him fastened in the earth. (Shakespeare 2015, 5.3.178–82)

And this, I propose, is a condensation. It is not violence witnessed, but violence pronounced. It is not meant, as the earlier spectacle of the maiming Titus’s daughter was, to horrify us. But it does something. What? The speech includes the message that order has been restored, that a criminal will be punished, that nothing can be done to mitigate the punishment or to take pity on the transgressor. It is, overtly, a spectacle of sovereignty, in Foucault’s sense, where the sovereign makes himself known (and obeyed) through the public, judicial humiliation of one his subjects. But what about the details? The punishment is a form of torture. Its purpose is to make the victim feel pain, mortification and shame. We are back in the territory of revenge, as explained in The Painted Bird. Not an eye for an eye but your suffering in proportion to my pain – that is the formula being followed. But it is revenge in the hands of the sovereign, and it has politically symbolic as well as personal psychological purposes. In this play of many deaths, this one may be the worst: a slow death in a condition of unrelievable suffering. A condensation: all kinds of experiences, memories and motivations are joined into one commandment. Pity itself has become a crime. And there is still more. For Aaron has what may be a single redeeming feature: love for his infant son, a black child fathered in adultery with the white Goth empress. Aaron has agreed to surrender himself and confess all the crimes that he and his allies have committed in return for keeping the baby alive. When Lucius commands that Aaron be buried alive, he symbolically condemns Aaron to occupy the position of an infant in swaddling clothes. (Swaddling was customary in sixteenth-century England.) ‘Breast-deep in the earth’, Aaron will have no use of his arms, and will be entirely dependent, like an infant, on the kindness of others. Aaron indirectly reminds us of this second meaning of the punishment in the words with which he responds to his condemnation:



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O, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb? I am no baby, I, that with base prayers I should repent the evils I have done. (5.3.183–5)

Condensation couples a sentence to torture and death with a reversion to infantile helplessness. Again, we are in the territory of The Painted Bird. This figural gesture has in common with Coleridge’s notion of the symbol the fact that it cannot be reduced to something outside of itself, for it is already contained and must remain contained in the reality it represents. A criminal with no redeeming features but one shall die a death that exploits and subverts his one redeeming feature – except that unlike a child, Aaron will not cry, or assert that he is sorry. Here as elsewhere in Titus, violence gets compressed into an image – Titus’s serving up a cannibalistic pie being the most infamous one – where several latent thoughts are recombined into a single manifest content. And this too is play. In Freud, the parallel process is either the dreamwork or the jest. But hearing Aaron being condemned to death, imagining what it will be like for him to be buried and forced to starve – this is not our ‘work’. This, in the realm of tragedy, is our getting the joke. Such jokes are everywhere in violent art. In literary criticism (de Man’s essay also comments on this) getting the joke in this way is called recognizing irony. It is the same with the other arts. The paintings reproduced in chapter 2 provide examples in the graphic arts. A war novel like Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom Bells Toll (1940) provides another kind of example. Violent scenes in the novel are not only stages of conflict resolution, but are also tests of human dignity and expressions of the costs of fidelity to political principles, even good and necessary principles. When violence comes as a condensation, it means more than just itself. And in that there is a liberation: violence understood, in the dimension of irony, is a momentary triumph over violence. In comparing a suite of popular movies to a play by the Bard, associating the one with displacement and the other with condensation, I am not suggesting that displacement is only the product of minor talent and condensation of the great. Nor am I suggesting (though Coleridge might) that one is better than the other. I have just chosen what I consider to be clear examples. Displacement is the order of the day in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, filled with deadly battles, rape, incarceration and torture but meant to inculcate lessons about gentility. Condensation – especially with regard to substitute formations – is the order of the day in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, not to mention a whole lot of cartoons for children, from Tom and Jerry to Toy Story. Yet both strategies still rely on one another: displacements require condensation, and vice versa. What they don’t rely on, however, although they all but inevitably involve it, is arousal.

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Arousal. In Freudian theory arousal is more or less taken for granted, in view of a deeper concern with the drives that are lying in wait, ready to be aroused, and even arousing themselves without a direct stimulus on many occasions. It is also more or less taken for granted in view of its opposite, tranquillity, and its contraries, repression and inhibition. In Freudian theory, pleasure comes from the discharge of energies built up in the course of arousal, and arousal itself, paradoxically, is an aggravation rather than a pleasure. Pleasure comes from the release of an excitement, not excitement itself. But in aesthetics, arousal cannot be taken for granted or considered a mere occasion for a pleasure to come later: for in the first place, what readers and spectators go looking for is the arousal of emotions (see Matravers 2001). Attending to an artwork is optional; being aroused by an artwork, once it has been attended to, is not. Either the artwork is an occasion for arousal, or the art goer will turn away, close it, shut it off or get bored. In the context of the game of revelry, it is easy to see that art goers seek out artworks that arouse their sense of joy and playfulness even in the face of ostensibly serious subjects. But then the question comes, why go to get aroused by horrific violence? Since 9/11, a newish genre has come to dominate the world of exploitation films, ‘torture porn’. In a film like Saw (2004) the main characters are men incarcerated and tortured for reasons they do not understand. Torture challenges them not only to withstand punishment but also to betray their fellows, and even perhaps to betray themselves. (At a climactic moment, as I m entioned in the Preface one of the victims saws off his own leg in order to free himself and try to save his wife and child.) The film frightens. It is gory and at times frantically dramatic. Critics have by and large dismissed it. But as Aaron Michael Kerner (2015) notes, films like Saw address what are commonly called cultural anxieties, in this case about terrorism, the War on Terror and the practice of torture itself, which all of a sudden seemed to have become part of American policy and popular fascination. But one doesn’t have to turn to post-9/11 texts to find similar kinds of arousal at work. One doesn’t even need to turn to horror. Consider the case of the work of the late Sarah Kane, a star of the English theatre in the 1990s. She was a practitioner of what critic Aleks Sierz (2001) dubbed ‘in-yer-face theatre’ – theatre that seemed designed to violate the amity between a representation and its audience. One of the characteristics of in-yer-face theatre – a creature of Britain in the 1990s, a period of peace and post-Thatcherite relaxation – is its frequent violation of the audience’s sense of its own safety. Far more powerful than horror and torture porn in this respect, in-yer-face deliberately annoys, challenges and disgusts. The safety of the audience in the sense of its security, its knowing that violence on stage is not really violence and will not harm either them or the actors before them, is still sustained. But the way the action is presented, the action itself, the language, the tone – these



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qualities impinge upon the moral security of the audience. Significantly, the battle zones of this kind of theatre are sexual as well as political. Kane’s first and most famous play, Blasted (1994) comes in two parts. In the first, a middle-aged man dying from lung cancer, a tabloid news reporter, invites a young woman who used to be his lover to a tryst in an expensive hotel room in Leeds. The tryst is a disaster, and we the audience observe it from not very far away (Blasted was originally staged upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, which seats eighty-five people). The gun-toting, abusive, racist Ian masturbates in front of the girl, Cate; he threatens her to the point where she is brought into an epileptic fit. Then in the night he apparently rapes her. The next day, the girl fellates him, only to end by biting him as hard in the penis as she can. And soon, the whole world of the tryst collapses, as another world – of war from we don’t know where – obtrudes upon it. A soldier (from where we don’t know) armed with a sniper’s rifle comes into the room. Cate escapes, but Ian in effect becomes his prisoner. The soldier eats Ian’s food and urinates on his pillow. A bomb explodes, and a wall of the room is blown off. The soldier rapes Ian, then sucks out and swallows his eyeballs. The soldier blows his own brains out (between acts, but we see him there, dead, his brain tissue splattered). Cate returns with a baby. Ian tries to kill himself by sticking a gun in his mouth, but the gun is empty. Then Cate notices that the baby is dead, buries him in the floor and leaves to get some food. Critic Helen Iball can do a better job summarizing the end of the play than I: While [Cate] is away, Ian is alone and tormented. Passing time marked by desperate actions punctuated by darkness: masturbation, self-strangulation, defecation, hysterical laughter, crying, hugging the soldier’s body, lying still, eating the baby and culminates in Ian occupying the baby’s grave, until at last he ‘dies with relief’ . . . Rain is coming through the roof, falling on his head. Cate enters, blood seeping between her legs, but carrying bread, sausage and gin. Her reaction to Ian could be interpreted as fondness or ridicule: ‘you’re sitting under a hole’, ‘get wet’, ‘stupid bastard’. She eats and then she feeds him. It is the resurrected Ian who, with his ‘thank you’ in the closing moment, is at last able to show gratitude (Iball 2008: 5:60–61).

Blasted was highly controversial when it first appeared, reviled by a number of London critics – ‘A disgusting feast of filth’, the Daily Mail infamously called it – but it has now been received into the mainstream of modern theatre. One critic now argues that, far from being disruptive and revolting, ‘the violence in Blasted is profoundly aestheticized and essential to the play’s significations, which are centred around the political function of dramatic tragedy in the contemporary moment’ (Carney 2005: 276). This may be. But does the critic, Sean Carney, mean that violence, being ‘aestheticized’,

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is rendered beautiful in the play? Does he imply that we watch or read the play at a safe distance? Does he imply that we are not in fact aroused by the violence, and meant to be aroused, excited into feelings of discomfort, fear, anger, horror and disgust, and possibly also sexual titillation? It is with Blasted as it is with Seven Killings, The Matrix and Titus Andronicus. You can imagine the action taking place in its own diegetic world, removed from yours, obeying its own laws, and then you can construct a critical account of it which sees ‘the tragedy of history’ (e.g., Jamaica’s) or (as with The Matrix) the philosophy of simulation, or again (as with Titus) a reflection on political decadence, past and present. These thematic contents are certainly woven into the stories. Thematic content is one of the things we desire from narratives and plays and films, and the narratives and plays and films we like are generally ones that satisfy us in that regard. But Blasted is meant to deny us satisfaction, to leave us disturbed and challenged. In other words, it is meant to leave us in a state of arousal. It refuses to lead us towards catharsis. One can imagine an audience that would not be so aroused by the sex and violence in the play, one where characters masturbating in front of one another, or raping or eating one another would not be offensive. This would be an audience not anesthetized to sex and violence but anesthetized to sex and violence in art. When this audience comes into being, Blasted will have lost much of its impact; it will be a curiosity rather than a moving experience, much as medieval pageant plays are unmoving to most of us today. But today, still, even if it is no longer as shocking as it initially was, the play leaves us in a state of uncomfortable arousal. We do not find a discharge of the energies the play builds up. And the discomforting comes not just from the spectacles of violence and suffering but also from the way the play refuses to resolve the action that gives rise to the spectacles. If this is revelry, it would seem to be, on the part of the spectator, masochistic, and, on the part of the writer, director and actors, sadistic. I don’t mean real masochism and sadism. I have said that I don’t understand the latter, at least in its purest form. But I mean masochism and sadism in play, which is another way of saying that we go to this kind of theatre in order to be seduced into suffering, or perhaps more accurately, to be seduced into experiencing some combination of suffering and harming. That Kane so frequently combines violence with sex is part of the thematic content of her plays: the message is about a continuity between the two, and hence as well a continuity between war, rape, humiliation, sadism, general gender relations, sexuality and murder, a continuity which is never ambiguous, even if it is sometimes enigmatic and (for this critic) unwarranted – the message becoming a demand that we see and, in suffering, approve of this continuity. But that is the theme. What the connection of sex and violence makes us feel is a state of uneasy seduction, of being led away into pleasures we don’t want to have. Of course,



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the feelings we get from this sort of play cannot be discharged. The feelings cannot be put into action, even passively. There will be no release. But there is our revelry. Aroused without appeasement, seduced into a space of foreplay without end, and with very ugly pleasures, we have escaped the realities of institutional controls, of seriousness and work. If we reject the experience, if we allow ourselves to be disgusted and appalled and indignant, we can get back to work. But if we don’t reject it, even then we have work to do. The question is whether we are going to continue doing that work in play. NOTES 1. For example, Lozica (2007). 2. See Eco et al. (1984) for apposite discussions of these issues. 3. For a good recent study, which my argument here is not entirely in accord with, see Peacock (2014). 4. For background, see Scheide (2012). 5. In a good analysis of the story, the comedy is nevertheless apologized for rather than embraced: ‘What lies behind “Cannibalism in the Cars,” then, is not a particular source, but an environment of socially and culturally amorphous anxieties. The grand practical joke here is precisely to give form to those human impulses most alien to civilized form. The frame of the narrative provides a somewhat safe isolating distance for the reader’s comfort, to be sure, but the insulation is required by a very special kind of squeamishness, whose unnamed and unnameable objects are more profoundly troubling than issues of politeness, decorum’ (Davis and Hurm 1998: 52). 6. It is perhaps this dimension of the ‘must’ that Critchley (2008) is speaking of when he talks about the ethics of art. 7. There may have been exceptional cases of cruelty, of course. But in this novel almost all the Polish peasants are morally defective, and inclined towards extreme behaviour. Only towards the end does the boy encounter kindness, but even that comes in a compromised form. 8. Apparently, the field of children’s literature has come to embrace this culture. According to Kenneth Kidd, there is now a widespread ‘expectation that young readers must find history personally traumatic in order to know it’. And again: ‘My sense is that historical fiction for children has become more than ever a metadiscourse of personal suffering that in turn demands pain from readers as proof of their engagement’ (2005: 133–4). 9. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-matrix-1999. 10. For a particularly strident analysis in these terms see Constable (2009). 11. For background on this distinction see Halmi (1999). 12. For an especially good examination of Aaron’s Moorishness and blackness, see Bartels (1990). On the violence in the play, see Barker (1993).

Chapter 5

Puzzle

What are the most common characteristics of puzzles? The word itself, originally used as a verb, responds to forms of perplexity, bafflement and uncertainty. ‘That puzzles me’, I say, when I don’t have an answer to a problem. But in the past two centuries the noun ‘puzzle’ (pretty much the same word in a number of European languages) has usually come to indicate a problem to which it is assumed that a solution is possible by the terms of the problem itself. There are games that feature ‘impossible puzzles’, but those are exceptions depending on the original formulation. If I try to solve a puzzle, I do so in the knowledge that a solution is possible. If it were to be found out that a crossword puzzle had squares which no answers could fill, or a jigsaw puzzle whose parts could not be put together, then players would be rightly piqued. A puzzle has to be fair: in other words, it has to have a genuine solution, however difficult, and the solution has to be achievable without violating any rules of the game. Enter then detective fiction. Including the most mythic of detective stories, Oedipus the King, it has a well-known affinity with psychoanalysis.1 Detective fiction in its primary form (some prefer the term ‘detection fiction’, since an official ‘detective’ isn’t necessary) traces back the clues to the scene of a traumatic transgression. The clues may be inadvertent, but they are treated as signs leading back to the nature of the transgression; they are symptoms of it. The clues may also be intentionally left behind, in which case they are the products of deception; the criminals either deceive themselves or, more likely, try to deceive everyone else. Either way, what might become evidence is suppressed or distorted. Or else false evidence is concocted – the red herring – pointing away from the actual crime to a crime of another sort. Detectives have to work through the evidence, discriminating between literal symptoms (a footprint) and manipulated symptoms (signs of a footprint 115

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erased, or a false footprint left behind to incriminate someone else) and signs of intangible psychic motives. The primary formation is open to considerable variation and even selfdeconstruction. The discovery of the agents and purposes of a transgression may lead to the discovery of more transgressions. While examining the traces of a crime, detectives are alerted to the commission of another similar crime. The procedure may develop from the detection of a transgression to the prevention of other transgressions – frequently that leads from understanding what happened in the past to identifying a predictable pattern, and possibly then (this is especially common in TV dramas like Midsomer Murders [1997 – present]) catching the criminal in the act of attempting another murder. Then again, the discovery of single transgression may lead to the discovery not just of a pattern but also of a system. What starts out looking like a single crime committed by a single individual turns out to be one crime among many being committed by a criminal syndicate, or even by a corrupt government. The formula may undergo still more variation when it turns out that looking into one sort of crime exposes detectives to other sorts of crimes. And there is the variation already evident in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and a common feature of thrillers, when a crime has already been solved, in principle; the problem is catching and convicting the criminal. All these variations have counterparts in the world of psychoanalysis, as I have suggested, and have been used by such in a number of texts – the films of Alfred Hitchcock being the most salient examples but the psychoanalytic use of the Oedipus story being the main source of the idea. A project of analysis can turn into a search for the criminal within, perhaps a repressed and forgotten criminality, and the job of the analyst is to bring that criminality into conscious evidence, even in the face of the criminals’ resistance. The idea is that in doing so certain patterns, systems and inclinations will be exposed for what they are and hence what they overcome. A repetition compulsion will have been undone. The whole project of detection can at the same time deconstruct itself by calling attention to the limits of the representation of detection. The most famous case of this comes in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (2011; originally published 1926) where the murderer turns out to be the narrator, a village doctor ironically named Shepherd, and in retrospect it appears that the narrator has been unreliable all along, omitting essential facts, distorting others, laying down red herrings in the pathway of detection and concealing his feelings and intentions. Another case, Christie’s Curtain (1975), has the detective (Poirot) turn out to be the murderer, though not in the same way that detective Oedipus is the murderer in Oedipus the King, and the narrator (Hastings) is complicit in crime as well. We rely on our narrators to tell us the truth, but narrators may well be trying to deceive us. In a sense, all narrators are trying to deceive, since they are attempting to persuade us



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to accept a certain point of view, a certain narrative agenda, a certain set of fictional facts, even though other points of view and agenda are always a possibility, and the fictional facts, after all, aren’t facts.2 The limitations of narration are especially acute in Golden Age crime fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, of which Christie is the foremost representative. ‘The tenor of each piece of information’, writes Tzvetan Todorov about the classic detective novel, ‘is determined by the person who transmits it. No observation exists without an observer; the author cannot, by definition, be omniscient as he was in the classical novel’ (Todorov 1978: 46). That sounds right. An omniscient narrator would have no excuse for withholding information from the reader; only a narrator, from whom the information has also been withheld, would be attuned to withholding it from the reader too. But is omniscient fiction really omniscient? It may come to mind that all fictional representation is unreliable, since after all no fictional representation can represent everything; there is always something omitted; there is always a filter of subjective and objective purposes; there is always a design causing some phenomena to be accented, other phenomena to be ignored, distorted, suppressed or even not considered, not imagined. (We still don’t know how many children Lady Macbeth had.) Intelligibility, as it requires the coherence and determinacy of fictionality, thus paradoxically requires unreliability. But there is a distinction to be made. Some sophisticated authors and filmmakers may make unreliability a point of departure – Alain Robbe-Grillet in The Erasers, Nabokov in Lolita, Roman Polanski in Chinatown – whereas, in the case of a writer like Christie, the premise seems to be that unreliability is reliable. That is, unreliability itself becomes a clue to decipher, an index to the solving of the puzzle and thus a means through which the narrative finds closure. Once you understand unreliability, then you understand deception, and then you understand what the deception has been trying to hide: and, in the case of an Agatha Christie novel, you know how and why you have been deceived, who did the deceiving, why he or she did it and ultimately, then, who is guilty. No doubt this list of variations is incomplete. An important qualification arises when we consider the doubleness of detective narration: on the one hand, the detective is trying to solve a puzzle; on the other hand, the reader is trying to do that too. The narrator might well throw red herrings in the way not so much of the detective as the reader. The detective in the story struggles against deception, but the reader also struggles against it, and their struggles may not be the same. And so variations come not only from elaborations of a narrative trajectory but also from elaborations of a narrative rhetoric, the one challenging the protagonists, the other challenging the reader. But in any case, in this argument I appear to be basing my thesis on a premise that not everyone will accept, namely that detective fiction has a primary form of which all other forms are variations. I am prepared to accept

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the idea that there are detective stories that entirely transcend the genre – maybe Hamlet is one of them – so that the primary form is not really primary anymore. And there are many crime stories that are not about detection, including stories that make us sympathize with criminals, and even many stories where successfully committing a crime is the narrative goal. The caper story is a main example. But if there is a genre, or at least a pattern of fictional development, where solving a crime is the main impetus of the action, then I think it is clear that a primary formation of detection is in play. And it amounts to a fictional version of a fundamental attitude towards violence. For violence is what is at stake in these stories, even when homicide is not the chief crime. (Hardboiled stories often start out with a kidnapping, a missing person, or a case of blackmail, the kinds of suspect violence that a private detective might be called on to handle, though the problem at hand usually soon escalates to homicide.) The detective story takes an example of violence and subjects it to an exemplary procedure where coming to terms with violence means solving the puzzle that arises because of it. Jurisprudence would seem to demand such an approach to crime. The concept of justice would seem to demand it. When violence erupts and people are harmed, our sense of justice requires that we find the culprit and punish him or her. But it is noteworthy that considerations of jurisprudence and justice aside, when crime is approached as a puzzle to be solved, it is approached from a scientific or quasi-scientific point of view. Psychoanalysis, as I have rather conventionally suggested, is the obvious parallel. But discourses of history, criminology, social psychology and even evolutionary psychology are parallel as well. Forensic science is an assembly of theories, methods, predictive models and technological devices, all of which answer to the criteria of falsifiability but which start out with the notion that crime is a puzzle to be solved. 1. ‘SOLVING’ A CRIME In play, I solve a crime, or try to, though the detective and the story almost always get the better of me. I am not interested in reading this narrative or watching that TV programme except so far as, in addition to other pleasurable elements of mimesis – character, ambience, emotion, suspense and the like – I wonder who the criminal is, why the criminal committed the crime and whether the detectives are going to catch him or her. I am interested, first, in the challenge of an open conundrum, and second, in finding closure, although I admit that I am sometimes pleased when the criminal gets away. That’s either because it may mean that a sequel is on the way or because I sympathize with the criminal as an enemy of authority.



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Who done it, and why? In the Golden Age of detective fiction, the enigma is in the individual (see Loth 2014; Walton 2016). The general conditions of the society that has nourished outbreaks of violence are of only minor interest; they are mainly decorative; the deviance of the individual is what really matters. For the society, though flawed, is fixed. Its very fixity may tempt individuals to deviate – would-be criminals usually want a better place in the social order, and their violence is usually instrumental, a means to the end of a better life. But why? Jealousy, greed, fear, lust, revenge – these are the usual motives driving people to violate their own moral scruples, and commit a crime whose seriousness is unmistakable, even if, as is often the case, the person murdered is an unattractive human being, and perhaps criminally inclined as well. In other words, the Golden Age of detection iterates a pseudo-Christian criminology. The poet W. H. Auden gives an especially persuasive version of this idea in his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, where he sees catching the criminal as a form of scapegoating (Auden 1948). The simulacra of Christian ethics gets confirmed in that most characteristic of resolutions: cornered by the detective’s ingenuity, the criminal confesses his or her sin. ‘I did it’. Confession, it may be recalled, was traditionally required in Catholic European law, though not in Protestant common law in Britain, in cases of capital crime. The fixity of this Christian world – where confession is demanded – gets mirrored in what is called the ‘closed circle of suspects’ who are privy to the crime. It is imagined – usually by way of plausible narrative circumstances – that the murder of an individual had to have been committed by any of a half dozen bystanders or so, already close to or inhabiting the scene of the crime, a country house, or an island, or a pleasure cruise. And it is imagined that once the culprit is found out, the problem – for now – is solved. Since the Golden Age, new forms of fiction seem to have come to dominate the field – ‘crime fiction’ and the ‘thriller’, where the lines between normativity and deviance are often challenged, and finding a culprit may be the least of the problems faced by detectives and authorities. In fact, the proliferation of crime fiction antedates the predominance of the whodunnit. For a long time in the West writers and readers have been fascinated with criminality less as a problem to be solved than as a failing in social life which cannot be made to go away, a failing which has its attractions as well as its dangers. Picaresque fiction from de Tormes to Fielding presents a case in point. Post–Golden Age crime fiction often returns to previous forms of fictional violence where puzzle-solving is irrelevant, although, attuned as it is to the contemporary world, it also innovates, finding new forms of crime and new forms of detection, as well as new kinds of detectives and criminals. Still, the primary form and the Golden Age model linger. It dominates modern television, from all those old-fashioned British whodunnits like

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Midsomer Murders and Lewis to apparently more sophisticated shows that go under the name of CSI or Law and Order: SVU or Wallander or Criminal Minds or The Killing or The Bridge or Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders – the list goes on. The international television industry is enormous. And the primary form helps keep it that way. As for literature, a look at the New York Times’s Bestsellers list for 2015 shows twenty-seven different titles holding onto the number one spot over the year; almost all of them are novels about criminal violence (the pornographic Grey was the main exception); fifteen of them appear to be variations on the primary form of detective fiction. Among the titles are Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, 14th Deadly Sin, Make Me, X and Tricky Twenty-Two. These figures are only about the United States, to be sure, but they indicate the extent of a cultural investment, first in stories about criminal violence, second in the primary form of representing them. It has been said that one-third of all works of fiction printed in English in any given year are crime novels. I would guess that in peaceful Scandinavia the ratio is even higher. It does not escape me that one of the main reasons for the attraction of detective fiction is its familiarity. When I turn on NCIS I know what I am going to get, more or less. That suits me. My brain is tired yet bored. It needs stimulus, but not too much, and I cannot afford to go the opera. Watching the show from the comfort of home, I enjoy the characters and the wit. I like knowing that the narrative arch is going to take me from a puzzle to a solution, even if the solution in the end brings sadness or surprise. But the drama is about violence, and it is about violence as a puzzle to be solved. More likely than not, on NCIS and similar programmes the Golden Age formula of detective fiction is not going to be followed in every detail. Modern detective stories include the use of an art of autopsy that Hercule Poirot could never have dreamed of, as well as a weary cynicism that would have appalled him, coupled with a proliferation of surveillance and communication techniques of law enforcement – computerized identity files, blood spatter and DNA analysis, drones and GPS locators – that Poirot would have taken for dystopian science fiction. As the hard-boiled detective stories of writers like Raymond Chandler (see Chandler 1988) switched the scene of crime and criminal investigation from the country house to the mean streets of big cities, and from fanciful criminals to real ones, so more recent crime fiction, though it may also dwell on the more sordid elements of modern life – losers turning to desperate crimes, sexual deviants preying on the innocent, serial killers trying to undo their Oedipus complexes, homophobes attacking the gays they secretly desire, alcoholic police officers on the take, feckless prosecutors more interested in making names for themselves than in understanding the truth – often simulates the global condition of discipline and surveillance, of Google Earth, of advanced communication systems that in fact threaten



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the very idea of communication, of a deadly virtual world whose first victim may be privacy itself. To my mind bringing this dystopia to the attention of the public is all to the good. Poirot would have been right! But to get at this interesting psychological and sociological material, it imposes on the world the domination of predictability, which makes the terrors of criminal assault into a digestible after dinner treat. Back in the 1940s, responding to the lingering craze for Golden Age detective fiction, the critic Edmund Wilson wrote a famous article called ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ (1945), a follow-up to an article called ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories?’ (1944). Interestingly, in ‘Who Cares?’ Wilson never comments on Agatha Christie and her novel about Roger Ackroyd, and leaves us wondering whether Wilson, a close friend of Vladimir Nabokov, would have found something to admire in Christie’s writerly ingenuity in that particular case. He had said, in the previous article, having read one of Christie’s less accomplished books, that ‘her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own, even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion’ (Wilson 1944). Then Wilson, in his follow-up article, leaves us with this: ‘my final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles’ (Wilson 1945). A vice. Nobody uses that word anymore in that sense: a vice, a disposition towards regularly or habitually experiencing a pleasure which has no value, and may be harmful. Curiously, I have heard people using the word ‘addiction’ to describe what Wilson called vice.3 ‘I am addicted to Ben and Jerry ice cream’. But a ‘vice’? Wilson writes as a critic establishing standards. I don’t have such a luxury. Instead, I have to make sense of what people do. 2. WHO CARES? Beginning with me, of course. And I confess, I didn’t much care who killed Roger Ackroyd either. Why would I? I didn’t much care that he was dead and didn’t much care that his killer was on the loose. But the word ‘care’, used colloquially by Wilson, needs to be considered more closely. Caring, in the most important sense of the word, is a form of doing. And if we keep to this sense of the word, we can also say beyond doubt that it is not true, except in cases of delusion, that we care about

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fictional characters. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, to care is to be actively ‘solicitous’ towards the being of ourselves and others. But fictional characters, in an important sense, aren’t. When I see someone on the sidewalk fall and hurt herself, I am summoned to care about her, to help her if I can. Even if she is a stranger I am summoned to volunteer myself (though other feelings may hold me back from intervening in the fate of someone I don’t know). If the person is a friend, especially an intimate, I will feel compelled to care. I have to do something for this person. But in fiction, I cannot intervene. I cannot warn Roger Ackroyd that, having read the title of the book in which he appears, I believe he is going to be murdered. And if, after the murder, I hope the culprit is discovered, I cannot intervene in the investigation. I cannot communicate with Poirot about a clue I believe he has overlooked. To care is to be aware of at once a disposition and a responsibility, but I am not responsible for the lives and deaths and successes or failures of fictional characters, and I cannot therefore be disposed towards them in a real-life way either. To care, moreover, is also actively to need. Not only can I not warn Roger Ackroyd about his impending death, but I also do not need him to stay alive, and once he is dead, not having needed him, I cannot mourn his loss. I will never miss him. To care is to be so disposed towards the being of another that I am aware of my disposition, my responsibility and my need for him and her. To care is to be protective and needy. (I protect my child; I need my child.) If the object of my care is lost, I feel like a failure and I mourn. But I cannot care about Roger Ackroyd that way. What Wilson must really mean by the word ‘care’, as must others who think that we ‘care’ for fictional characters must really mean, is ‘to take a dynamic intellectual interest in’. So the question must be rephrased: not who cares if a fictional so-and-so is murdered, but who takes a dynamic intellectual interest in the murder and the people who it affects, and why? That too is worth asking. Why do we take an interest in the fictional people involved in murders about whom we can do nothing? In comes a journalist to answer our question in 700 words: ‘Why women are hooked on violent crime fiction’, writes journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett of the Guardian (Cosslett 2014). ‘Hooked’ is another word for having a vice or becoming addicted. Cosslett was responding to a detective novel by American author Becky Masterman, Rage against the Dying (2013), whose main character, a retired female FBI agent, finds herself unwittingly back on the trail of a serial rapist and murderer. According to the Guardian headline writer, Cosslett’s main point is that ‘reading about grisly sex murders and mutilation is a safe way to explore the threats we sense in the world around us’ (Cosslett 2014), ‘us’ of course being women. Men are apparently thought to be immune to this anxiety – an interesting notion. In any case, I read Rage against the Dying. It was a clichéd and unspooky detective story, written



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(competently, it must be said) in an unsubtle variation of the primary form of detective fiction: a retired FBI officer, with an unsolved crime on her hands from many years ago, finds evidence of a similar crime, and hunts down the killer. She catches the killer red-handed by offering herself as a victim, and being saved by an accomplice, her husband. There was nothing in this novel that awakened my own sense of the terrors of violence and victimhood. The writing was too formulaic. Instead of that ‘truth’ I felt when I read that passage in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, I found myself in the hazy déja vu. It was the déja vu of a puzzle whose solution was solved by conventional and predictable means, even by way of predictable twists and surprises. It may well be true that fiction enables its users a way of safely coming to terms with violence. I have argued that myself. But note that here the safety comes from the violence being turned into a puzzle that has to be solved – and that it in fact gets solved. Cosslett hasn’t in the least grasped that. Rather, she goes on to say that the game she vicariously plays when she reads crime fiction isn’t the game of solving a puzzle but of winning and losing. ‘I have to admit, I do prefer it when the female victims, having finally had enough of all the torture and the rape and the violence, turn vigilante and embark on some hatred-fuelled murdering’. This is an interesting admission; it is evidence for the singular subjectivity of reading. But it is also troubling – first, in its embrace of fictional vigilantism, second, in its embrace of cliché and third, in its assumption that reading is a form of direct psychological compensation.4 Reverse the gender, and the idea is even more troubling. ‘I do prefer it when male victims, having finally had enough of all the torture and the rape and the violence, turn vigilante and embark on some hatred-fuelled murdering’. Such is what happened in Mickey Spillane novels and Charles Branson Death Wish movies. I doubt Cosslett would approve. But back to the puzzle that Cosslett does not realize that she is solving when she reads books like Rage against the Dying. To be a puzzle, as I have said, a challenge has to be resolvable by following the rules of the game; otherwise it is a different kind of challenge. The difference between a whodunnit or hard-boiled thriller and a vigilante story is that in the former, two rules of conduct are followed. The classic detective is scrupulous in this. The hard-boiled detective may, as the saying goes, play by his or her own rules, but still, they are rules, and correspond with a moral code. But the vigilante breaks all rules. He or she has no code of honour, except the honour of getting even. Detective fiction is much more scrupulous about means, although that does not let detectives entirely off the hook. One of the most interesting things about detective fiction is that it so frequently presents detectives with moral dilemmas, which follow from the fact that criminals and corrupt accomplices – members of the police department, for example – are rule-breakers.

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How does one solve a crime following the rules and a moral code when criminality is imagined as nihilism and anarchy, a rejection of the rules? A common solution is psychology. The nihilism and anarchy of villains are taken to be pathologies, and pathologies are taken to be systematic. From the talented Mr. Ripley and Norman Bates to Hannibal Lecter, terrible criminals are shown to be obeying the rules of their own disorders. (This is in fact how the killer in Rage against the Dying is found out: he keeps repeating himself, and hence his behaviour is predictable.) To find a culprit is to find, besides the forensic clues left behind, a motive, and if the motive is not strictly instrumental, the key is then finding that which irrationally or pathologically compels the culprit to misbehave. One of the tricks of the trade is having a culprit being manipulated into a situation where it is supposed that he or she will act out the criminality again. (That is pretty much how Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) ends, as well as Rage against the Dying.) Although it is not nearly so easy to get a criminal confess to a crime as Poirot consistently shows it to be, with a little extra work a criminal can be made to repeat the crime, in full view of the detective. That is one of the reasons why serial killers are so popular: they can be relied on to keep repeating themselves. In the real world, of course, seducing a criminal into committing a fresh crime is entrapment. And if entrapment works so far as it predicts a psychology and its outcomes, given a certain stimulus, it nevertheless brings up its own legal and moral problems. Psychology thus solves one problem while raising another. And it brings us to one of the main dilemmas faced by detectives in fiction, a dilemma that is even become a cliché: to catch a criminal one has to think like a criminal, but only so far. The detective has to flirt with crime but to draw a line between flirting and copulating. In hard-boiled fiction and thrillers, flirting with crime doesn’t always work. And so we come to another problem: the puzzle is not a puzzle but something much more menacing than that. Whatever the underlying analysis – and this applies to a line of poetical thought that begins with Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins and proceeds through such writers as Graham Greene and John Le Carré – violence is not then just an intellectual challenge. It is an unavoidable mystery, it is an inexplicable force from which escape is both necessary and impossible. But the primary form of detection – embraced by a cultural industry and its consumers, with their demand for serialized fiction (always the same detective) and serialized crimes (almost always criminals who can be relied on to repeat themselves) – can thus be seen to be another type of displacement. Or perhaps the better word would be not Freudian but Deleuzian: the primary form of detection is a form of territorialization. Detective fiction territorializes. It makes violence into another country, and then it conquers it, little by little, submitting it to its laws, inhibiting its force and policing its mysteries.



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3. TERRITORIALIZING VIOLENCE Auden has made an additional distinction between the puzzle of the detective story and the mystery of more ambitious form of crime fiction, the crime fiction he is unhesitant to call ‘art’, and among whose great examples is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In puzzle stories, Auden says, the reader is dissociated from the criminal. The reader is on the side of the lawabiding detective. In other forms of crime fiction, including some thrillers and the great novels like Crime and Punishment, the reader is associated with the criminal.5 In much detection fiction, as I have said, the reader even has the comfort of triumphing over the criminal from which he or she has been dissociated. (Consider the case of Cosslett, again.) In vigilante fiction, the reader not only triumphs, vicariously, but also avenges and destroys. But in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s dilemmas are also our dilemmas. Considered in itself, at the root of all detection fiction is a territorialized violence. It is a domain over which detectives and readers have already triumphed because it is already theirs. They already own the rights to it, and they have a system of rules to back them up. Is it thus then ‘the recreation of noble minds’, as the sinister detective novelist in Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth puts it (1971), or is it not something, in Freud’s terms, a little bit more ‘tendentious’ than that? Is it a ‘vice’, a ‘hook’, an ‘addiction’, or is it itself a defence mechanism, the defence mechanism of a culture that both will and will not come to terms with its own violence? The question is worth asking not only because the primary form of detective fiction is still dominant, even with that addition of female, gay and black detectives that crime fiction scholars often regard as a redemption of the genre – that is, even with what seems to be a deconstruction of the form by way of identity politics, although it is usually nothing of the sort – but also because the game that detective fiction plays is pretty much the same game as many social scientists play with respect to violence. 4. VIOLENCE AS A ‘PROBLEM’ In a word, the dominant approach to the subject in the social sciences today is that violence is a problem in the form of a puzzle. No doubt, that approach makes a lot of sense. Violence is a problem; and it is puzzling too. We ask social scientists to solve the problem, following the rules of the trade. Similarly, when it comes to violence as represented in the media or art, social scientists still approach the subject as a problem. Violence in the media and artworks, too, is a problem. Please solve it for us. Please solve it as if a

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solution were actually forthcoming, using the methods of your science. In other words, please solve it as if violence in life or in art were a puzzle.6 There are both synchronic and diachronic approaches. Among the most impressive synchronic approaches is ‘interactionist’ sociology. Interactionism (as in, e.g., Randall Collins 2008) focuses on individuals in the process of reduplicating or improvising social codes while fashioning a social life for themselves; and in the study of violence it leads towards understanding the phenomenon as a ritual or practice. It shows us individuals in the act, confronted or being confronted. And so we have learned about the variations in competency among people involved in a violent situation – information which has been of great use to the American military, as it weeds through its recruits and looks for the best people to be involved in difficult situations. But competency aside, we have also learned about how other social rituals and practices impinge on violent behaviour. A very simple and obvious example is this: if someone confronted on the street by hostility believes that being subjected to hostility is insulting, and does damage to his or her honour, and if that person also believes that responding to hostility with violence is proof or his or her honour, even if he or she loses the fight, then that person will (a) more likely be violent and (b) believe that violence is meaningful and admirable. (For some reason, I never learned that idea, and so, even as an adolescent, I never responded to hostility with physical violence if I could help it. I learned, in fact, that the resort to violence was shameful, and so I avoided it when possible – and I resorted instead to insult, which showed my adversary that if I wasn’t stronger at least I was smarter.) Other forms of the sociology of violence have searched for other factors of causation: gender, age, race, poverty, habitat and, yes, exposure to violence in media and art. It has become very clear to me, looking at the evidence, that gender, age, race, poverty and habitat are key indices of the prevalence of violence: if you live in a makeshift hut in a township of South Africa, if you are young, male, black and poor, and badly educated, and connected to a gang, you are more likely to engage in violence than someone living in a sumptuous high-rise overlooking the Atlantic ocean in Cape Town, and especially if you are old, female, white, well educated, rich and a member of a private yachting club. This is important information. I am pretty certain that exposure to violence in the media has little to do with it, but that being enculturated with a code of honour, where displaying aggression is admirable – as many young people in townships apparently are – will increase one’s chances of engaging in violent behaviour (Brancovic 2012). Yet there is an important rider to this claim: the ‘chance’ of any individual’s engagement in violence is not a prediction that any individual will engage in it. There are many peaceful, loving young, male, black, poor and badly educated individuals living in townships. It would appear that a large majority of them are.



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Diachronic sociology (along with social history) can take insights from synchronic approaches and apply them across phases of time and stretches of space. And thanks to diachronic sociology we are confronted with the grand paradox: never, in the modern developed world, has violence been so salient as a factor of social life, and yet, not since 1960 has the prevalence of violence been so low. New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (2016) reports that 31 per cent of American adults are ‘high authoritarians’, and that among them ‘57 percent . . . worry that they or a family member will be a victim of terrorism’ – this is in spite of the fact that people are more likely to be struck by lightning than be victims of terrorist violence. In fact, people are far more likely to be killed by the police, or by a loved one, than by terrorist violence – and be it noted, for all the publicity of late, both police killings and homicidal crimes of passion have declined in most of the United States over the past fifteen years.7 It is clear that many people, even in peaceful countries, are fearful for their security today. It is also probable that concerns about security merge with factors like xenophobia, economic deprivation and disappointment, distrust of authority and so forth. Many feminists claim that misogyny is a chief cause of violence, omitting the fact that most victims of violence are male (though most victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, to be sure, are women). It may be too that not just the media but art, especially the popular arts of television and cinema, are contributing factors towards fearfulness. Yet in many respects it is the fear itself, not the violence, that is something like a problem today. If there was less fear of violence in America, there would probably less gun ownership, and probably fewer shootings. Meanwhile, the sociological evidence and analysis point towards another enigma. For all the factors that can be isolated that contribute to violence behaviour, we cannot explain the recent decline in violence. In South Africa, today, you are less likely to engage in violent behaviour even if you are young, male, black, poor and so forth, than you would have been fifteen years ago. Similar patterns can be found in the more developed world. And there is no explanation for it. None. I believe that one of the contributing factors towards the decline of violence in the developed world is the proliferation of smartphones and social media, which among other things (a) replace physical social contact with virtual social contact and (b) reduce the anxiety of alienation, while perhaps inducing inhibition. A corollary factor would be the outlet for aggression that social media provide, so that physical violence gets replaced by verbal violence, from cyberbullying and trolling to cyberterror. Another corollary would be the fact that criminal larceny has been shifted from physically violent assault to non-violent cybercrime. Once upon a time, intelligent gangsters hijacked cargo trucks. Now they can hijack credit card databases. There is no sure evidence for any of this, however, and certainly

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other factors have to be kept in mind, such as enhanced security measures and a decline, in certain areas, of drug wars and gang affiliation. Maybe we have become in some ways better. In New York City, where I was born, one simply doesn’t sense that people are on the streets are keen on hostility any more. They keen on enjoyment, which requires peace, even open goodwill. And maybe too – the point cannot be proven either – the proliferation of violence in the entertainment media has actually had the effect of lessening real-life personal violence. But again: I have never seen any convincing theories about the decline of violence in an age of fear. Nor have I seen any discussion of how the decline of violence on the streets may or may not be related to documented rises in suicide rates or cybercrime. It would be helpful if we had one. But the question arises as to whether violence is really a problem in this sense. Is violence a puzzle that could admit of a solution? I do not doubt that there is a need for micromanaging violence, which includes providing milieu where anti-social gangs are discouraged, replaced with more hopeful and humane forms of life and certainly, reducing the availability of guns and cutting back the global arm trade. Arms manufacturers and arms dealers have much to answer for. I do not doubt that there is a need to macro-manage violence either: making peace work, for as many people as possible, aiming towards justice. But every time one looks into causes of violence, it turns out that it is not violence in itself that is the problem but rather the cause of the violence: neighbourhoods that nurture gangs, laws, manufacturers and commercial agents that encourage a proliferation of lethal weapons, failing states that implode into gangsterism and civil war, imploding economic systems that lead to increases in suicide. You can say, we need to make our societies more equitable and better governed in order to decrease violence. We need to provide better social services, better opportunities and better recognition of what is required for people to live their lives in harmony, all in order to decrease violence. But that is merely an instrumental argument. Equity, justice, social services, opportunities, recognition – these are things that are desirable for their own sake, and they are just as important for peaceable societies as they are for moderately violent and very violent ones. As for the public understanding of violence, here again it seems that it is misleading to begin with the premise that violence is a puzzle – which means, it should be clear by now to proceed with the assumption that violence can be intellectually territorialized, shaped into a problem requiring solution and detached from the puzzle-solver, the way the Golden Age detective and his readers are detached from the criminals. The most notorious exponent of this misguided approach is Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). Celebrated by the press, reviled by many historians and sociologists, Pinker’s book argues that the decline of violence we see today is continuous



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with a decline of violence that began in Europe during the late Middle Ages. The causes that lay behind the original decline in violence – called by historical sociologist Norbert Elias ‘the civilizing process’ – are pretty much the same that have continued to reduce violence into the twenty-first century, most of which has to do with the rise of the liberal state and such benefits as education. The pitfalls of Pinker’s study are so notorious that they need not be examined at any length.8 Suffice it to say that Pinker not only amasses a great amount of evidence, some very useful, but also plays games with it. World Wars I and II, according to his approach to the evidence, are only statistical ‘outliers’; the twentieth century was actually quite peaceful. And we need not take into account acts of violence like robbery, sexual assault and selective arrest. According to his approach to the evidence, homicide alone is a sufficient indicator of the level of violence in society as a whole, and, since it is the easiest form of evidence to collect and count, it is the only form of violence we really need to worry about for scientific purposes. The liberal democratic state, for his purposes, is a great solution to the problem of violence, and an achievement rightly to be proud of; but among the states today boasting the lowest amounts of violent crime are China and Saudi Arabia, neither of which is liberal or democratic. Such another outlier Pinker does not discuss. If modern liberalism cannot explain a phenomenon, Pinker’s study is blind to it, and many of his critics have taken special exception to his Cold War outlook on history, where liberalism is not only triumphant but also altogether benign. (The wars and civil wars and coup d’états the West incited were always just, undertaken in the interests of peace or statistically no big deal.) From the current perspective, however, it may be said that although much of what Pinker documents is worth keeping in mind, the primary weakness of his approach is that he studies violence as if it were a puzzle. Pinker’s detractors have noticed that too, although using different languages. Pinker territorializes violence. In doing so he places himself, and the readers he hopes to convince, outside of violence, except so far as they are able to solve it: that is, explain it away. The problem with this approach is summarized in an offhand remark Pinker makes early in his study, talking about changes since the 1960s. ‘The flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s reshaped American culture. . . . The section of downtown Boston not far from where I live was called the Combat Zone because of its endemic muggings and stabbings’ (Pinker, 2011: 128). ‘Downtown Boston’ – yes, today it is a very wealthy and peaceful area, the gangs are gone and Steven Pinker lives in it. He has posed for photographers to show off his fashionable loft apartment with ‘14-ft-high ceilings and exposed brick walls’, mentioning by the way that his sister, an artist, used to live in the same building but cannot afford to anymore: ‘At some point the developers came in, young urban professionals started pricing them out and

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by sheer coincidence, decades later, we bought an apartment here, by which point all the artists had been driven out. This is a common urban sequence’ (Berglof 2014). I envy such an apartment and do not blame Pinker for living there. I would move in tomorrow if I could. But taken together with the book he was promoting while being interviewed, the picture is of a student of violence who is detached from violence, including the structural violence (‘driven out’) that has been necessary to give him his home. I have been urging caution about the concept of structural violence, and symbolic violence as well. For my purposes, looking at art, it has been important to focus on physical violence, and to assert that violence is not necessary in order to express aggression or to undertake coercion. If we want to understand the ‘aesthetics’ of violence, the reception of violence in art (whether in terms of what social psychologists call its ‘effects’ or what an aesthetician might call ‘appreciation’), we need to isolate the phenomenal violence we find in art; only then can we even begin to explore that violence in relation to the more general problems of aggression and coercion. But this violence has different uses. As mimetic violence, it articulates sequences of action; it expresses character; it unveils the forces of conflict, making them into a perceptible and interpretable image; it differentiates between good and evil, between perpetrators and victims and between high and low degrees of culpability; it creates milieus of behaviour which simulate are own but are not our own; and it does all this while differentiating between violence and non-violence, all those behaviours and situations where conflict is at rest, appeased or transcended. In addition, as the simulation of the joys and agonies of competitive games, aesthetic violence unveils and explicates the ways in which the challenges of life can be won or lost, or the ways in which societies form entities of cooperation and aggression, whether internally or externally. It summons allegiance, empathy, elation, anger, antipathy, indignation and shame in relation to representative individuals and the imagined communities they inhabit. In either Dewey’s sense or Artaud’s, it actualizes our humanity. This may be hazardous – humanity itself is hazardous – but it may also be instructive. Moreover, as an expression of the mechanisms of chance, of the aleatory dimension of life, the violence simulates danger and opportunity; it places the observer or reader in an imaginary position of uncertainty, of what Heidegger calls thrownness, and it thereby alerts us to the problems of power, of being forced into relations with it, of having it and not having it, of wanting it and fearing it, of being capable of deploying it or having it deployed against oneself. A Lacanian might add that the effect of such art is not only imaginary but also symbolic, symbolic in the deep sense of the linguistic order of life, and the Lacanian would probably be right. In addition, as a stimulus to thrills, aesthetic violence excites, seduces, orients



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and disorients; it makes us emotionally dizzy, but only so far, since the thrill is also legible as an effect of artifice, whose cleverness – either in itself or in its uses as allegory – is an object of our intellectual appreciation. And again, as an occasion of revelry, aesthetic violence is the negation of authority, of seriousness, of reality itself, but sometimes for the sake of reality, seriousness and authority. As with thrills, the revelry of violence may alert us most of all to wit for the sake of wit, which is also wit for the sake of free play and thus for freedom itself. The key to the revelry of violence is nonsense – and art is a guardian of nonsense. I put this as morally and historically neutral as I can. I call attention to varieties of violence in art, not to what is common to all of it, or to how it has developed over time. Not all art plays with violence in the same way, for the same purposes, and exceptions are important. Violence in Blasted does not differentiate between good and evil. Violence in Cervantes’s Don Quixote only occasionally expresses character; usually it expresses the limits of the will to character. In Rothko’s ‘violent’ paintings there isn’t any character, only an encounter with abstract order. In the most revered English language play of the 1990s, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), there is very little violence: but as death from AIDS looms over the characters, there is plenty of negotiating with chance, and a good deal of dizziness and grief. Violence in art can be these things and probably must be at least one of them – at least so far as that it is situated in the traditions of Western art that I have had to take for granted in this book. But most of these things can be represented without violence. If, moreover, there are uses of violence in other traditions, which do not exemplify any of the play I have been discussing, I am not aware of them but I would not be surprised to learn about them. As for entirely gratuitous violence, a violence that does not involve any of the games I have been discussing, or some other similar games, I remain sceptical, unless it were a case of an image or incident of violence that absolutely failed to communicate anything at all. Mimesis, competitive sport, the dimensions of the aleatory and the thrilling, revelry, seduction, kinaesthesia – these perhaps are only some of the games that art plays when it plays with violence. But when violence becomes a puzzle, something new is added. Violence is intellectualized – and all but intellectualized away. That is the trouble also with a good deal of social science, as I have said. Violence is in fact a problem. Societies need not just to deal with violence but to try to solve the problem that arises because of it. But violence is not only a problem. Violence is an outcome from an expression of or a reaction against aggression and coercion. If you think you have solved the riddle of an incident of violence, or even, so far as possible, of violence in general, you still haven’t solved the riddles of aggression and coercion. The artist ‘driven out’ of her home is a sign of this. The sixty-five million

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wandering refugees in the world today do not make much of a contribution to the statistics of global homicide, which remain low, and so they do not add to our statistical counts of violence, but they do contribute to our shame. And they are proof of the powers of aggression and coercion. To put it another way, if violence is in some sense a problem, it is also in a sense a mystery, inscrutable to its very core. Art is concerned with this mystery too. And it is probably very important that it puts us in contact with this mystery, this ineffable aspect of life against life. It is probably this mystery that so affects me when I read The Quiet American or watch Bonnie and Clyde. I can learn important lessons from both texts – about the nature of crime, about the nature of pride and love, about injustice, about the social conditions of Vietnam in the 1950s and America in the 1930s. But in the context of learning about these things, and also of enjoying a couple of good stories shaped with suspense and desire, I also come in contact with this mystery, this absurd but potent darkness at the heart of my own struggle to survive and live in harmony with others. What I take for ‘truth’ is really a convincing encounter with a necessary absurdity. The clue-puzzle novels of the Golden Age of detection fiction deny me the truth of this unsolvable mystery. In that sense, whatever be their other admirable qualities, they fail to accomplish what would seem to be the primary task of artworks in the face of violence. From W. H. Auden and Edmund Wilson to Slavoj Žižek, critics have not been shy of differentiating between detective fiction and ‘art’. And I think this is the reason. It is not that Crime and Punishment is more ‘artful’ than the conventional whodunnit, or it is not only that; it is that the Russian novel of ideas exposes its readers to a mystery which the whodunnit disavows. When positivist social scientists examine the ‘problem’ of violence, or when they examine the ‘problem’ of the ‘effects’ of violence in art, they begin by assuming that this mystery is either non-existent or not important. After all, they are scientists, and their job is to solve problems. That this other form of knowledge, the knowledge of being confronted and challenged with a force that cannot be known, may be important to human understanding is rejected out of hand. It is not part of the territory. 5. SOCIAL SCIENCE AND AGGRESSION A recent ‘Report of the Media Violence Commission’ (Krahé 2012) concludes that ‘exposure to media violence is [a] risk factor for increased aggression in both the short run and the long run’. How is this so, and why? There have been hundreds of studies and fifteen meta-analyses, and the results seem to be conclusive. But of what? The report deliberately



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fudges the problem that comes from the variations of the studies and their evidence: some studies are of children, some of adolescents, some of young adults and some of the general population. It also deliberately fudges the difference between artworks (films, TV shows – nothing is said about books or paintings), news broadcasts and video games. It says that although there is no evidence that media violence causes actual violence, it also says that there is plenty of evidence that media violence causes ‘aggression’, and therefore, it must be assumed, violence. But what is aggression, or ‘aggressive behaviour’? Is all of it bad? I have asked this question before. Though we may assume (using today’s standards) that it is wrong to hit someone who has angered you, we also admire people who ‘stand up for themselves’, who won’t tolerate being insulted or abused. Though we don’t like the idea of people setting up barriers against one another, we often are happy that our borders are policed, and we condone the person who bolts her door at night to keep out intruders. Though we may assume that it is wrong to steal someone’s lunch money, we admire or envy bankers, the wealthier the better. A few years ago I was £5,000 in debt to Barclays Bank at a rate of 9.9 per cent interest per annum. I then received a letter saying that because of the nature of my account, I would now be charged a graduated flat fee for the money I owed, which raised my effective interest rate to 24 per cent per annum. For this switch, in violation of what I took to be my agreement with Barclays and my well-being as a long- term customer, at least one person in the bank has surely been praised for doing a fine job. Such is aggression and coercion. Aggression is not violence until it becomes or erupts from its own sources and joins with aggressive instincts or intentions. Meanwhile, specific acts of non-violent aggression may well be useful – even in a moral sense. Interest in the welfare of children is vital. And no, I would not show a violent film to a three-year-old, who would not be intellectually or emotionally prepared. My own daughter was fed on a steady diet of Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins. But at some point she had to have seen some Warner Brothers cartoons, and laughed at punches and pratfalls, or a police procedural for adults, and thought about the nature of crime, evil and justice. At some point she was aware of fairy tales and slapstick comedies like Home Alone. I remember the time I showed her (at about the age of eleven), the Zeffirelli film version of Romeo and Juliet (1968), which like all Romeo and Juliets includes three homicides and a good deal of fighting besides. She was devastated by the deaths of the two main characters. But she learned something too. It is fair to say that by the age of three she knew the difference between fiction and reality, even if fiction impinges on reality, does things with it, asserts things about it. And by the age of eleven she understood that art is something that challenges and moves us.

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If you look at the arguments of social psychologists on the subject of media violence, you find contradiction after contradiction. In one prominent study, media violence is critiqued because it generates aggressive feelings in their viewers. Two paragraphs later it critiques media violence because it does not generate aggressive feelings; on the contrary, it habituates viewers to scenes of violence, and so desensitizes them. In other words, it makes them feel less annoyed and hence less aggressive. So it is bad to see a little bit of violence and okay to see a lot of it? The studies will have none of it. It is bad whatever. And on what basis? Study after study reiterates a simplistic model of cognitive science, or rather behavioural cognitive sciences, where viewing violence in the knowledge of ‘the brain’ and the many discoveries of ‘cognitive science’. Here is a passage from the report: When children (and adults) experience something new, such as a novel colour or object or feeling, a cluster of cells in the brain is allocated to recognize that thing again and differentiate it from other things we know. These ‘nodes’ are activated whenever we experience that thing another time. Importantly, when two things are experienced together, they start to become ‘wired’ together (such as a rose and its distinctive smell). Things that we experience together frequently become more and more strongly linked in our neural network of known concepts, feelings, and memories. Eventually, activating one node partially activates the other, a process called spreading activation. Consequently, even in very young children, a lot of different indicators of aggression and violence have neural paths linking them (guns and fighting, verbal insults and hitting, etc.). As a result, any time a person is exposed to a violent scene, the resulting activation of nodes spreads out to linked nodes and activates them, at least a little. This neural process is called priming. When nodes associated with a behavioural tendency are primed, it makes it more likely (but not certain) that the behaviour will occur. This behaviour is more likely to occur if other stimuli simultaneously prime the node.

This appeal to cognitive behaviourism takes it for granted that people are devoid of critical self-awareness and unable to experience ambivalence or doubt, or for that matter to inhibit themselves. It takes for granted that people do not know the difference between fiction and reality, or that a story may make a connection between violence and pain, immorality or injustice. Take the case of the reader of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. The implication of the report is that the reader of the story is more likely, by way of her ‘nodes’ to couple grandmothers and cannibalism, and hence to act it out given enough priming. (‘I don’t know, Officer, but somehow, whenever I see a grandmother waiting for her granddaughter to come by, I feel like eating her’.) The report goes on: ‘The other important neural process that causes a person’s observation of violence to be followed in the short run by an increased risk



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of aggressive behaviour is mimicry. Humans, like a number of other primates, are wired in to mimic others’ behaviours’. Here is a return to the vulgar Platonic theory that people imitate what they see in art – that that is pretty much all they do – and that overlooks the difference between seriousness and play. Cognitive science is nowhere near so well developed that it can make explanations of this kind. Cognitive science at this point cannot explain how the content of the human mind develops on the cellular level. (And no, semantic nodes are not activated whenever we experience that thing another time. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. Memory is never perfect. That ‘thing’ is not always that ‘thing’. Neurons create networks in response to multiple stimuli in any case of perception. And the mind inhibits as well as activates. It makes mistakes as well as correct observations.) The science cannot explain why an eleven-year-old girl can weep at the ending of Romeo and Juliet and ask her father, ‘Why is there so much sadness in the world?’ But the writers of these studies use what little we know about the brain and cognition to invent fairy tales of their own. The brain becomes what Hannah Arendt, in another context, called a ‘God term’ – an absolute premise added to a theory that has no absolute premises. 6. VIOLENCE WITHOUT VIOLENCE It is true that one of the things we look for in art is a modelling of the world, a simulation whose patterns and ideas help us make sense of the real thing. But we do so in play. And another thing we look for in art is abstraction. Abstract visual art and lyric-free music take this dimension to an extreme, but even the most realistic of art, of fiction, of drama and film engage us in abstraction – of removing the concreteness from the concrete. That is why art has ‘form’. In engaging with art we find that something has been taken away from us – the real world – and replaced with something else. When it comes to violence, all art has taken the violence out of itself: the real danger, the real harm, the real consequences. (Snuff films and performance art where violence is committed are both exceptions and confirmations – the latter so far as the fourth wall of illusion is maintained.) But art thus also abstracts violence, and in this abstraction it informs us. One of the things it informs us of is a mystery, an ineffable force that cannot go away, and that in reality cannot really be solved. It can be attenuated, prohibited, controlled, channelled, mitigated, organized, sublimated, depreciated and punished. But it cannot, as some criminologists would put it, be cleared. Thus when crime fiction and social science make violence into a puzzle, they are already abstracting violence, taking violence out of the violence. That may be useful. We can have a need for the pleasures of solving a problem – the

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domain of comedy as well as detection. We certainly need to know how we can prevent violence, understanding from where and why it is most likely to come, and under what conditions it is least likely to thrive. But we also need to be informed of violence in other ways. We need to be terrified, delighted, shocked, goaded, thrilled, appalled and assured. We need to know how to take sides. We need to see the violence in ourselves, as well as the violence of others. And we need to be confronted by the mystery of violence, a mystery too awful in reality but perhaps just awful enough in an artwork that speaks it to us and shakes us up. Maybe there will come a time when we don’t have this need anymore. But that will only be when we achieve a society, or rather a world, without violence. That, however, would probably be a world not only without people as we know them today but also without biology as we know it as well. NOTES 1. Most impressively, in Žižek (1991). Also see Bayard (2008), Knight (1980, 2010), Horsley (2005), Rzepka (2005) and Rzepka and Horsley (2010). Walton (2015) gives a nuanced account of the relation between Golden Age detective fiction and the psychology (popular and professional) of the period. 2. In The Rhetoric of Fiction Wayne Booth (1983) gives a more comprehensive and nuanced description of reliability in narration than I do; and he would not accept my main point. I am determined to stick with it, however. 3. And so, W. H. Auden (1948) too: ‘For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol’. 4. To quote Auden (1948) again: ‘the magical satisfaction [detection fictions] provide (which makes them escape literature not works of art) is the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer’. 5. For an important development of this topic see Lesser (1993), esp. pages 79–85, where Crime and Punishment is discussed. 6. ‘An emphasis on cause is part of modernity’s problem with violence’ (Reemtsma 2012). 7. It is to be noted too that terrorism is a keen worry even for 24 per cent of those ‘who have a highly autonomous orientation’. 8. See Aaronson (2013), Ferguson (2013), Herman and Peterson (2014) and Snyder (2012).

Epilogue: Art without Violence, Violence without Art

That art does not require violence would seem to go without saying. That art has required violence, however, goes without saying too. Art gets not only a perennial subject matter from violence but also a condition of possibility. Violence comes; art may therefore follow. Violence invades, seizes, hinders or offends. Art may therefore imitate and modulate. Art, having to be art, creates a zone of harmlessness where violence in a separate ontological zone can be observed; art gives its aestheticized violence characteristics; it attaches ideas and affects to it; it provides it with a licence to be seen or felt. The title of this epilogue raises yet another question, though, which comes with the semantic imbalance of the chiasmus that forms it. We can imagine an art without violence, we can even cite examples, but can we imagine violence without art? The question is ethical, poetical and historical; it impinges on the responsibility of art, of the artist, of the users of art, of representation. What would happen if artists ignored the openings, the prods and demands for representation presented by violence? What would happen if we users turned away from violence in art, refusing to experience violence in that way? Or in aesthetic terms, the question would be something like this: can we live in a world of violence without what artworks do with it, without the transformation of violence into a game of mimesis? In a purely functional sense, a model answer comes in Bruno Bettelheim’s book about fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment (1976). Many objections can be raised against Bettelheim’s theory, and have been raised, especially by folklorists (see Heisig 1977). But when we think of what the uses of violence in art is for us, whether children or adults, at least one valuable insight can be derived from Bettelheim’s work, namely that it provides a space within which we can 137

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think what would otherwise be unthinkable. It makes the dangers of the world symbolically and emotionally available. It thus helps integrate the mind with the world it inhabits. So from a functionalist standpoint, the answer is no: we cannot live in a violent world without violent art. But aesthetics, again, is about more than psychological utility. For one thing, to think of art as having a psychological function is to assume that art works. For another, it is to assume that the socio-psychological world in which art operates works too. But both assumptions are doubtful. Sometimes – many times – art fails to achieve its goals, or achieves mistaken goals, or compromises what might be taken for its goals. Or art succeeds to the extent that it misrepresents reality or promotes a view of the world that is hurtful, hateful or deranged. Sometimes – many times – societies fail, in ways large and small. Societies are unjust. Societies deteriorate or progress in ways that are harmful for many of their members. What kind of social function would an artwork fulfil in a society that fails its members? Consider the objections raised about fairy tales in Madonna Kolbenschlag’s Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye (1979). Time and again Kolbenschlag finds that traditional fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella propagate myths about femininity that are harmful to women. Rather than working, they unwork. Or perhaps better, they do the work of internalizing oppression. In the very same year Angela Carter published her groundbreaking retelling of fairy tales from a feminist perspective, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, where the manifest prettiness of best-loved stories is turned inside out. ‘I was taking . . . the latent content of those traditional stories and using that’, she told an interviewer, ‘and the latent content is violently sexual’ (Carter 2015: ix). As a fictional poet is quoted as saying in the title story, ‘There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer’ (28). That is a horrible idea, and it is not shared by the author or her heroine, but Carter has put it out there for us to consider and to wonder what our ‘traditional stories’ have been leading us to believe. The obvious point is that rather than being a field of functions, the aesthetic is a field of contestation. We fight (non-violently, in open societies) over the stories we tell one another and the images we circulate. And we fight to the extent that the socio-psychological world we inhabit is not working as well as it should. If it seems that we cannot live in a violent world without violent art, our violent art is all the same, not a consolation. It is a domain of struggle. This is a paradox, apparently: we fight over our playthings. We fight over the objects of our imaginations. But maybe it is not so much of a paradox: if we appreciate the importance of play and the work of the imagination in human life, then we may well appreciate why it is worth fighting over. Crucially, in an open society it is not the play itself that is in question. Our play is both bounded and protected. What is in question is the content of play, and



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sometimes the form it takes as well. Such a fight begins with Plato, goes on in the struggle of Christendom and Islam to eradicate paganism and continues today in review columns; in social psychology studies; in art galleries; in movie theatres; in literature and art and film departments; and in literature, art, film and drama themselves. How shall we play, with what materials, with what meanings? As for playing with violence, the struggle over it is undertaken on many different fronts. Censors and censurers against art. Critical thinkers against art. Artists against art. The users of art against the art they are using. I have myself engaged a little in that struggle in these pages. I have complained about The Painted Bird and I Spit on Your Grave. Perhaps controversially, I have complained about works like those by way of the category of success. And that may be unfair. Clearly, to assess a work of art according to whether it succeeds or not is to martial a number of ideas, not all of them openly acknowledgeable, about what constitutes ‘success’. Such is the nature of critical discourse, however, which shows that it too is part of the struggle over the imagination and the games it plays. And in that context I repeat what I consider the essential idea that not all representations are ‘successful’. I have not much bothered (though I could have, were I so inclined) to critique works of art in view of identity politics, and (say) negative portrayals of minorities or the reinforcement of power relations. But I have alleged that many works of art falter when it comes to representing violence. They lie to us, in effect. The violence, as Arthur Penn said, isn’t violent enough. Or it is insufficiently contextualized. Or the violence is glorified, unthinkingly. It encourages us to imagine ourselves as vigilantes. Or it prompts us into being vicarious jingoists. Or it confirms certain myths about social life (American heroism in America’s war against Native Americans, for example) that it would be better to do without. Or it consoles through the exaltation of surrogate heroes, and even worse, through the degradation of surrogate victims. Or it is just plain stupid, a squalid diminishment of the imagination. It displaces conflict from the plane of social life and the intellect onto a plane of violent spectacle. And I have complained about the users of art as well, who may find themselves reacting to the violence in art without sufficient self-reflection, or critical thinking, or moral sympathy, or intelligence, users who may come out of a film like American Sniper thinking. ‘Boy, did we give it to those . . .!’, or who may come out of a showing of Thelma and Louise thinking, ‘This – this movie – is intolerable! They shouldn’t show things like that’. We may not be equal to the achievements of art, or we may be all too equal to the failures of art, cheering on lies and mistakes. But in alleging these things I have to have faith in my own critical acumen, while also realizing many of my judgements may be wrong, or incompletely justified. An aesthetics of violence, while it must be confident enough to make plausible statements about the nature of

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aesthetic violence, can never be free of assumptions and value judgements that are not entirely self-transparent or ontologically grounded. It too must tentatively be taking a stand, or maybe rather taking a leap (and not a rational step or two) into the field of value judgement and contestation. It too must be part of the struggle. It is gratifying for me that I find myself so often agreeing with the late Roger Ebert, and can cite him as a witness to my case. (Many film studies professionals may dissent from me there, since Ebert was not a professional in their sense of the word, and his criticism shows it.) But Ebert aside, how really am I supposed to respond when a journalist of good reputation in the Guardian confesses to having a taste for revenge murder, at least when it is the woman who is doing the revenging? Is a taste for revenge murder on the same moral level as W. H. Auden’s self-professed addiction to crime fiction? Am I supposed to think that a good-natured non-violent journalist has uses for violence in art that are private to herself and therefore harmless? Or am I supposed to respond to her tastes as a symptom of a deeper social problem, afflicting us all? Or should I suppose that it is a demonstration of how Artaud’s aesthetics works, as when he writes (to repeat an assertion quoted in chapter 1) that the role of the theatre is that it should provide ‘the audience with truthful distillations of dreams where its taste for crime, its erotic obsessions, its savageness, its fantasies, its utopian sense of life and objects, even its cannibalism, do not gush out on an illusory make believe but on an inner level’? Maybe I should look at this case of using revenge torture aesthetics as the journalist’s own way for encountering the sublime. A complication arises from the fact that violence is not just a subject matter but a part of artistic language. Violence comes; art translates. Violence is action, and the art of violence, even in paintings and sculptures, is an art of action exposed, narrated or dramatized. It is also an art of pulsation. The mimesis of art in the face of violence is not just the likeness of a thing, an object of representation, but also a simulation of subjectivities and actions in time, where the pulse of representation repeats, in modified form, and for strictly artistic purposes, the rhythm of violence itself – or at least, the rhythm of violence so long as it is translated into mimetic play. Frequently that means not only giving violence a beginning, a middle and an end (such as it may not have in real life) but also producing an emotional sequence of tensions and discharges, of aggressions and sufferings, of surprises and consolations. The language of all these rhythms and sequences is a joyous lingua franca, where violence is expressed as something that it is not: an aesthetic object of experience, with which it is our privilege to entertain ourselves. But art, as a lingua franca, does not only follow violence. It also follows other art. And in almost any artistic culture the representation of art follows a code – an assumed system for the making of meanings, derived from traditions which often have no discernible beginning. The code is there, from who



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knows where or when: more art follows. Of course, making meaning by following a code involves not only repetition but also variation and invention: free play. And what we users of artistic representations of violence do with the representations is participate, vicariously, in the play of repetition, variation and invention. You may object to the idea that this repetition and variation of violence is a pretence for inciting emotion only if you think that art is not supposed to incite emotion. But who thinks that? Or else, you may object that the emotional life of art is hollow, the shadow of a shadow, but only if you object to mimesis itself. And who does that, outside of totalitarians? Violence in art, it is true, frequently becomes a language of its own, with only the simulacrum of a referent in the outside world. This is especially prominent today in Hollywood action films. The plot becomes a sequence of violent episodes, following the rules of three-act structure, without much meaning beyond themselves, or with the meaning of the story – the search for a McGuffin – subordinated to the visual effects of movement, light and pace and the sound effects of volume, tone and rhythm, jolting and soothing its audience. But again, you can only object to this excess of aesthetic excitement for its own sake if you object to aesthetic excitement. On the subject of cinema, it is worth noting that in the work of directors like Kurosawa, Godard, Leone and Tarantino, and so many other directors of violent films besides, something is added to aesthetic excitement. The plot becomes a referentially weighted sequence of violent episodes – where irony, allegory, intertextuality and comic (or tragic) exasperation (or victory) become part of what the violence expresses. Is there any reason to reject that a priori? I think not. It is better to consider what work of that kind actually accomplishes. Take Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), for example, one of the inspirations for Bonnie and Clyde and for the works of Tarantino too. Violence in Breathless is overtly rendered as a cinematic cliché. So for that matter is love. The characters and the film itself (and therefore too the audience) struggle against the invasions of cliché in the conduct of life, cinematic or otherwise, often enough embracing their adversary, the kitsch cliché, with affection. David Sterritt (1999) calls the two main characters ‘cultural kleptomaniacs’. But Godard shows us that their kleptomania is uneasy, ambivalent. Although the agon of the film appears to be the struggle of a criminal against law enforcement and the struggle for or against love, the real agon is the struggle for and against cliché, our mutual attraction towards and revulsion against that which all too obviously precedes us, challenging our sense of what is serious about ourselves. A note of sadness sometimes underlies the antic struggles of the film. The Jean Seberg character, an American in Paris and a femme fatale, reads aloud from the last line of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: ‘Given

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a choice between grief and nothing, I take grief’. But in the end of Breathless, grief both wins and loses; it too is uneasy and ambivalent. At the conclusion of the film, the Seberg character, having found, as she says, that she doesn’t really love her lover, betrays him. That lover would be the gangster played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, an amorous French crook who is himself an aficionado of American gangster clichés. She turns him over to the police. After a brief chase (another example of the victim in flight) they shoot him in the back. Lying on the ground, fatally wounded, face up, surrounded by the police, accompanied by his American lover, the gangster makes funny faces. In his death throes he blurts out, looking at the American, ‘This is really disgusting’, using a word for disgusting that she doesn’t understand (dégueulasse). ‘What did he say?’, she asks a cop. ‘He said that you’re really disgusting’, the cop replies in English. ‘What does “disgusting” mean?’, she asks, in English again. More irony and estrangement, but they come on the back of a plot of violence, of crimes committed and investigated, of a criminal pursued and in the end shot down. The film is structured by the conventional language of film violence even as it repudiates it. The film is a self-reflexive example of how art at once takes violence earnestly and toys with it, making it mean both more than what it is and less than what it is. In the hands of master, in cases like this, the doubleness of representation is rendered transparent. But the doubleness does not go away. Even in films and other artworks produced in less masterly hands, or in the hands of artists uninterested in self-reflexivity, the doubleness is inherent to the work, and the aesthetic experience, even the experience of absurd or nihilistic violence, is the experience of a duality. Is it always thus? Even in other art forms, like narrative and drama? The history of folk tales and myths inclines me to answer yes, except for the fact that it is not always clear that folk tales and myths are ‘art’ in our sense of the word. (But the fabrications like ‘Hansel and Gretel’, especially in its 1852 version, probably are.) The Bible and the Quran are artful, but they probably aren’t ‘art’ as such. The distinction between art and other forms of representation is seldom cut and dry, to be sure, and it may be right to follow Adorno in distinguishing art from other forms of representation and expression, not in terms of essential qualities that art may exhibit but in view of its place in the system of cultural production. The Bible, with its parables and decrees, has one main system behind it; Mission Impossible, with its three acts of chasing and being chased, has another. But however one decides the matter, our ‘art’ has characteristics of its own, including what it does with violence. The duality I have referred to, the is and is not of art, does not indicate indeterminate vacuity. It has its reasons. As I have argued, if violence in art alerts us to the phenomenal and cognitive dimensions of aggression – even making more abstract or symbolic forms of aggression into the tangible language of physical force – it also alerts us to suffering. And knowledge



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of suffering, of what it is and what it feels like, of where it comes from and where it goes – even in speculation or simulation – is a value that is both personal and social. We social beings make symbolic spaces for the experience of suffering – symbolic spaces that are both assertive and contained. And art is crucial to this. Art is – or has been – a fundamental form of life where the experience of suffering has become symbolically and emotionally available. But art is not one-sided on the subject. Let’s not forget the idea of Schiller, according to which the aesthetic witness to suffering is called upon to respond to it with ‘the resistance of morality’. And there is still another side. One of the things art frequently expresses is the relation between the suffering and what would appear to be its opposite, harming. Here we see a fifth-century representation of Christ, from the Archbishop’s Chapel in Ravenna, ca. 500 AD (See Figure E.1.1). Here is another, from the early sixteenth century, by Matthias Grünewald (See Figure E.1.2). Not only do the two pictures represent different regimes of art, but they also represent different attitudes towards the meaning of suffering and its relation to harmful aggression. The first transvalues suffering into coercive triumph, the victims getting their deserts: the Apocalypse will resolve our troubles and Christ will reign as the warrior king he is. The second isolates suffering into an object of painful contemplation, where Christ both takes our suffering upon himself and then gives it back to us in the form of his image. The second work asserts that the contemplation of suffering is a value – as it was of course, officially, in much of medieval and early modern Christianity – so valuable, in fact, that we have to keep reminding ourselves of it. In modern Western society, the value of suffering is officially abolished.1 The aim of life is happiness, and suffering is a condition to be overcome, cured, dismissed or suppressed. It is not to be tolerated except when absolutely necessary, and even then it is to be endured only in the forms of a temporary state of mourning or melancholic indignation. There are religious groups that still uphold the value of sorrow, but they are a minority, and in secular life even the religious must conform to a culture without suffering. There is no room for mental pain in the boardrooms of global corporations, or in the back offices, factories, warehouses and retail outlets that serve them. There is not even much room for mental pain in the modern university. And as someone who has attended a few Catholic and Anglican services, I can say that there does not appear to be much room for mental pain in churches today either. I once participated in a well-attended Anglican funeral service for a woman who died before her time where no one (except me) cried. But art high and low, popular or arcane, complacent or committed, even today returns us to suffering. Not always directly, of course, and not only in the guise of sorrow: the art of suffering also turns us to laughter, to thrill, to

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Figure E.1.1.  Christ triumphing over the beasts (sixth century). Mosaic in the Archbishop’s Chapel, Ravenna, Italy. Source: public domain.

the exhilaration of victory, to anger and indignation, to intellectualization and the catharsis of finding a solution. But the return to suffering, even in the guise of a game, is an insistent aspect of art even in an era that denies the value of suffering. And would we want it otherwise? If we live in an era where suffering still persists, and where violence is a part of much of the suffering, or where violence itself can be understood as form of suffering, would we want our art to tell us otherwise? Utopianism apart, would we want art to represent the world not as it is, but as it should be? Would we want art to ignore the violence in the world to which it responds?



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Figure E.1.2.  Matthias Grünewald, The Crucifixion (1515) (Detail). Isenheim Altarpiece, Unterlinden Museum, France. Source: Public Domain.

Simulations of suffering, in my view, are more important for the users of violent art than prods towards empathy, although suffering and sympathy (along with antipathy!) are commonly joined together in the experience of art. Suffering is what we feel, what maybe we want to feel, at a distance, whether in laughter, in anger or in tears. But especially in the case of artworks that dwell on violence, suffering is matched by that other quality of life that is more or less banned in modern society: harming. Just as suffering is rejected from the neo-liberal frame of life, although people continue to suffer, so is the harming of others banned from it, and yet people continue to harm one another all the time.2 (And the Jean Seberg character harms the Jean-Paul Belmondo character. Very likely she harms her lover in order to exonerate herself, cosy up to authority and move on with her career as a journalist.) Late capitalism enjoins us to harm one another, although it asks us to be discreet: not to beat each other over the head but to betray one another and win the game of capitalist production and social ambition; not to cheat or steal but

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to fabricate and falsely promote products that no one needs and that may be harmful to our health or our common social life; not to defraud but falsely to acquire position and wealth because that is how position and wealth are acquired; not to wage war, if it can be avoided, but to wage covert war; not to kill but to harass, or to kill only in the cause of harassment. Our dominant system insists we must not hurt one another. Bad for business. But we must do harm. And ours is not the only dominant system that has sustained this logic of suffering and harming. What dominant system has not? I said before, as a modern subject and a citizen of the most powerful country in the world, I find myself – I find a part of myself – to be in a state of danger. But by the same token, I find myself living in a state of being dangerous. I try not to suffer, I find myself by and large comfortable and safe, but at every moment my survival is at stake – and will not too long from now come to an end. I am in danger because I am mortal. At the same time, though I try to do no harm, and in fact I try to do good, I am a danger to others, mainly to others I will never know but sometimes also to people I live and work with, since all of us are in competition for the resources of happiness and the social goods that go along with it. There doesn’t seem to be enough to go around. And we can’t give up on happiness and social goods. We are doomed to desire them and seek them out even when we consider them to be intellectually hollow. Sometimes, when I am aboard an airplane taking off, I feel that I have come face-to-face with an inexorable power: the power of modern society to pull off so complex an operation as mass global travel; and more important, the power of modern society to harness such enormous propulsive energy as to make these heavy silver contraptions take off with 200 or 300 passengers, and rise on command into thousands of metres into the skies at hundreds of kilometres an hour. What kind of power is that? It is beyond our comprehension. We can take possession of that power. We can explain it scientifically. We can take advantage of it. In a couple of hours we will arrive in London. But we cannot fully comprehend it. This power, this power of force – we are in awe of it, which means, indirectly, that we are in awe of ourselves. Or so we should be. Yet we know that this power is not always or necessarily benign. Airplanes use the same physics as rockets, and both are excellent vehicles for bombs. Progress and danger are coupled; and that is no secret. It was already evident in the writings of the ancient Greeks. You might say: the power of force can be appropriated for good or evil, for pleasure and pain, for wisdom or stupidity. But it is more accurate to say, the power of force is the condition of the possibility of the good, the evil, the pleasant, the hurtful, the wise and the stupid. And we have to come to terms with that. ‘Man is the violent one’, says Heidegger



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in his interpretation of Sophocles’s ‘Ode on Man’ in Antigone. ‘In his fundamental violence, he uses power against the overpowering’ (1960: 89). ‘Man’ is that, fundamentally. He is a being who must use his power against power, and who in fact is this use of power against power. (Be it noted, Heidegger does not use cognates of our ‘violence’ but rather of the German gewalt, i.e., ‘force’.) For a long time now we have been stuck in a new era where progress and danger intertwine on a nearly unimaginable scale. With the coming of World War II, what it meant to be human entered a new phase. Some nowadays are apt to call this the phase of the ‘post-human’, since we have now become so reliant on our machines that machinery has overmatched us. I am not sure about that. But World War II brought its catastrophes, and every since then we have been in a defensive position in the face of our own potential. We cannot allow another Holocaust, we cannot allow another Hiroshima and we organize our politics and our state institutions around prevention. Still, we are armed. Still we find ourselves in our fundamental violence. There are wars, there is terrorism, there is ethnic cleansing, there is massive demolition, there is ‘shock and awe’, there are prolonged campaigns of bombardment, there are gun battles in the streets, there are campaigns of rape, torture and extermination. There is drone warfare too: a matching of technology to a cleansing of violence which is just as destructive as any other kind. Whatever the statistical body count, we are now the guardians of an immense, ineffable power of destruction we may not be able to control. And not just in our inevitable conflicts with our foes. The situation is even worse. For we know that we are capable of turning this power of force against ourselves. It is above all, today, this power that art can bring to our minds. This power, and thus this truth, however well or poorly revealed it is to us, is something that art can possibly better communicate to us than any other means, at least when the art really communicates, when the art, for lack of a better word, succeeds. Perhaps this involves the ‘utopian function of art and literature’ that Ernst Bloch once wrote of (1987), though that word ‘function’ still irks, still seems to assume that world system is closed, and that art by and large plays a normative role in it. But there is an important point in Bloch’s aesthetics. We struggle over our works of imagination, but we do so in the interest of finding consensus, and thereby the end of struggle. For a Marxist like Bloch, however, the world system is a system with a future: a future of completion. There are few who believe this anymore. And they are right not to believe it. We cannot imagine the completion of history anymore. As for violence, neither I nor most anyone else knows anything about its future, or the future of art, or the future of the society in which both appear anymore. All I know, or think I know, is that in the future there will

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be violence, and most likely there will be art as well. And in any case, I think I have made up my mind: given the choice between aesthetic violence and nothing, I take aesthetic violence. NOTES

1. See for example Bruckner (2010) and Davies (2015). 2. On the logic of this frame of life see Brown (2015).

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Filmography (Including Television and Videos)

All Quiet on the Western Front. 1930. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Universal. American Sniper. 2015. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Bataan. 1943. Dir. Tay Garnett. MGM. Best Years of Our Lives. 1946. Dir. William Wyler. Samuel Goldwyn. Bridge over the River Kwai. 1957. Dir. David Lean. Columbia Pictures. Cannibal Holocaust. 1980. Dir. Ruggero Deodato. F.D. Cinematografica. Children of Men. 2006. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Universal. Dark Knight, The. 1982. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros. Desert Fox, The. 1951. Dir. Henry Hathaway. Twentieth Century Fox. Dial M for Murder. 1953. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Warner Bros. Django. 1966. Dir. Sergio Corbucci. B.R.C. Produzione. Django Unchained. 2012. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Weinstein Company. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. 1964. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Columbia Pictures. Driving Miss Daisy. 1989. Dir. Bruce Beresford. Zanuck Company. English Patient, The. 1996. Dir. Anthony Minghella. Miramax. Escape from Alcatraz. 1979. Dir. Don Siegel. Paramount Pictures. Excessive Force. 1993. Dir. Jon Hess. Three Arts Entertainment. Family Tyranny (Modelling and Molding).1987. Dir. Paul McCarthy. http://www. ubu.com/film/mccarthy_family.html. Fatal Sneeze, That. 1907. Dir. Lewin Fitzhamon. Hepworth Manufacturing Company. Fight Club. 1999. Dir. David Fincher. Fox 2000 Pictures. Flags for Our Fathers. 2006. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Dreamworks SKG. Funny Games. 1997. Dir. Michael Haneke. Triange Film. Godzilla. 1954. Dir. Ishirō Honda. Toho. Goodfellas. 1990. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Warner Bros. Great Escape, The. 1963. Dir. John Sturges. Mirisch Company. United Artists. Halls of Montezuma, The. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Twentieth Century Fox. Hansel and Gretel. 1987. Dir. Len Talan. Golan-Globus Productions. 159

160

Filmography

Henry V. 1989. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. BBC Films. Hitman, The. 1991. Dir. Aaron Norris. Cannon Pictures. Hogan’s Heroes. 1965–1971. Alfran Productions. CBS. Home Alone. 1990. Dir. Chris Columbus. Twentieth Century Fox. I Know What You Did Last Summer. 1997. Dir. Jim Gillespie. Columbia Pictures. I Spit on Your Grave. 2010. Dir. Steven R. Monroe. Cinetel Films. Inglourious Basterds. 2009. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Weinstein Company. Iron Man. 2008. Dir. Jon Favreau. Paramount Pictures. Jules et Jim. 1962. Dir. François Trauffaut. Les Films du Carrosse/SEDIF. La Grande Illusion. 1937. Dir. Jean Renoir. RAC. Letters from Iwo Jima. 2006. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Dreamworks SKG. Limey, The. 1999. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Artisan Entertainment. Little Man Tate. 1991. Dir. Jodie Foster. Orion Pictures. M. 1931. Dir. Fritz Lang. Nero-Film AG. Marvel’s The Avengers. 2012. Dir. Joss Whedon. Paramount Pictures. Matrix, The. 1999. Dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Warner Bros. Matrix Reloaded. 2003. Dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Warner Bros. Matrix Revolutions. 2003. Dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Warner Bros. M*A*S*H*. 1970. Dir. Robert Altman. Aspen Productions. None but the Brave. 1965. Dir. Frank Sinatra. Warner Bros. North by Northwest. 1959. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. MGM. Oh, What a Lovely War! 1969. Dir. Richard Attenborough. Accord Productions. Papillon. 1973. Dir. Franklin Schaffner. Twentieth Century Fox. Pawnshop, The. 1916. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. Mutual Film. Pianist, The. 2002. Dir. Roman Polanski. RP Productions. Postcards from the Edge. 1990. Dir. Mike Nichols. Columbia Pictures. Psycho. 1960. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Shamley Productions. Pulp Fiction. 1994. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Weinstein Productions. Quiet American, The. 1958. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. United Artists. Quiet American, The. 2002. Dir. Phillip Noyce. Miramax. Reservoir Dogs. 1992. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Weinstein Productions. Rich in Love. 1991. Dir. Bruce Beresford. MGM. Rio Bravo. 1959. Dir. Howard Hawks. Warner Bros. Sands of Iwo Jima. 1949. Dir. Allan Dwan. Universal. Saving Private Ryan. 1998. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Dreamworks SKG. Saw. 2004. Dir. James Wan. Lionsgate. Schindler’s List. 1993. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Dreamworks SKG. Seven. 1995. Dir. David Fincher. Cecchi Gori Pictures. Seventh Seal. 1957. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. AB Svensk Filmindustri. Shame (Skammen). 1968. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Cinematograph AB. Sink the Bismarck. 1960. Dir. Lewis Gilbert. Twentieth Century. Stalag 17. 1953. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 1991. Dir. James Cameron. Carolco Pictures. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The. 1974. Dir. Tobe Hooper. Vortex. Thelma and Louise. 1991. Dir. Ridley Scott. MGM.



Filmography 161

Thin Red Line, The. 1998. Dir. Terrence Malick. Fox 2000. Third Man, The. 1949. Dir. Carroll Reed. London Film, British Lion. Titus. 1999. Dir. Julie Taymor. Fox Searchlight. Topaz. 1969. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal. Train, The. 1964. Dir. John Frankenheimer. Les Films Ariane. Un condamné à mort s’est échappé. 1956. Dir. Robert Bresson. Gaumont. Under Siege. 1992. Dir. Andrew Davis. Warner Bros. Unforgiven. 1992. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Universal Soldier. 1992. Dir. Roland Emmerich. StudioCanal. Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1958. Paramount. Victory. 1983. Dir. John Huston. Lorimar. Von Ryan’s Express. 1965. Dir. Mark Robson. P-R Productions. Where Eagles Dare. 1968. Dir. Brian G. Hutton. MGM. Wild Bunch, The. 1969. Dir. Sam Peckinpah. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. World Trade Center. 2006. Dir. Oliver Stone. Paramount.

Index

Note: Page references for figures are italicized. Films are indexed by title, all other texts by author. Adorno, Theodor, xvi, 4 – 5, 142 aestheticization, 16 – 19 aesthetics, definition of, xv – xvi; concept of, xxi, 4, 31 aesthetic violence, definition of, xvii aggression, 21, 41 – 43, 132 – 34 All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone), 77 American Sniper (Eastwood), 62 – 63, 65 – 67, 139 anti-hero, 60 Arbuckle, Fanny, xvii Aristotle, xvi, xxi, 101 Armstrong, Nancy, 36 arousal, 109 – 13 Artaud, Antonin, 19 Attridge, Derek, 83n6 Auden, W. H., 119, 125, 136nn3 – 4 Bacon, Henry, 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 85 – 86 Barthes, Roland, xvi Bataan (Garnett), xviii, 60 Bataille, George, 21 Baudelaire, 12

Bauman, Zygmunt, 85 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottleib, xv, 5 Beatty, Warren, 57. See also Bonnie and Clyde Benjamin, Walter, 57 Berkeley, California, 14 Bettelheim, Bruno, 137 – 38 Bible, 142; Ecclesiastes, 36; Judith, 55; Leviticus, 36 Bloch, Ernst, 147 Bond, James (fictional character), 59 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), xiv – xv, xviii, 77 – 81, 83n12 Booth, Wayne, 136n2 Branagh, Kenneth, 68 Braud, Phillipe, 33 Breathless (Godard), 77, 141 – 42 Burden, Chris, 38 Burke, Edmund, 13 Butler, Judith, 33 Byrne, Deidre, 105 – 6 Caillois, Roger, xx – xxi, 2, 6 – 9 Calvin, John, 71 Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato), xx 163

164

Index

Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 54 – 57; Judith Beheading Holofernes, 54, 54 – 57, 77, 82n1 carnival, 85 – 87 Carroll, Noël, 51 Carter, Angela, 138 Cavarero, Adrian, 49 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, Voyage au bout de la nuit, 36 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 131 Chandler, Raymond, 120 Christie, Agatha, xx, 8; Curtain, 116; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 116 – 17, 121 – 22 Christ triumphing over the beasts (Ravenna), 144 Cinderella, xvii Clover, Carol J., 47 – 49 coercion, 43 Coetzee, J. M., The Life and Times of Michael K, 74 cognitive behaviourism, 134 – 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 106 – 7 comedy, 85 condensation, 106 – 9 Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent, 101 – 3 Coslett, Rhiannon Lucy, 122 – 23 Craig, Daniel, 17 Cranach, Lucas the Elder, 55 Critchely, Simon, 113n6 Crossland, Roger Lee, 71 de Certeau, Michel, xxiiin11 Deleuze, Gilles, 66, 124 de Man, Paul, 107 de Quincey, Thomas, 17 Derrida, Jacques, xiv, 33, 36, 45 detective fiction, 115 – 25; Golden Age fiction, 119 – 21; modern crime fiction, 120 de Vries, Hent, 37 Dewey, John, xxiiin8, xxiiin10, 101 displacement, 104 – 6

Django Unchained (Tarantino), 18 – 19, 33, 69 Donatello, 55 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, 125, 132 Eastwood, Clint, 62 – 63, 67. See also individual titles Ebert, Roger, xv, xxiin2, 83n9, 104 – 5, 140 Ebert-Scifferer, 82n1 effects, art on violence, violence on art, 19 – 20. See also social psychology Elias, Norbert, xx epic, the, xvii escape narratives. See victim, the: the victim in flight estrangement, 101 – 4 excess, 21 Excessive Force (Hess), 75, 83n9 fairy tales, xvii, 137 – 38. See also Cinderella; Hansel and Gretel; Little Red Riding Hood Flags for Our Fathers (Eastwood), 62 – 63, 67 folktale studies, 30 Foucault, Michel, xvi Freud, Sigmund, 7, 27, 89 Fried, Michael, 56 Funny Games (Haneke), xxiin6 Gadamer, xvi, xxi, 6 Garnier, Robert, Les Juives, xvii Gentileschi, Artemisia, 56 Godzilla, 24n10 Goffman, Erving, 86 Gould, Stephen Jay, xxiiin11 Gramsci, Antonio, 44 Greene, Graham, The Quiet American, xx, 1 – 7, 9 – 13, 87 Grimm Brothers, 26 Grünwald, Matthias, The Crucifixion, 145



Index 165

Hansel and Gretel, xvii, 25 – 51 Hegel, G.W.F., xvi, 53 Heidegger, Martin, xvi, 122, 130, 147 Heraclitus, 11 the hero, 7, 59 Heywood, Thomas, A Woman Killed with Kindness, xvii Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 12, 23, 61, 147 Hitchcock, Alfred, 58 The Hitman (Norris), 75, 83n9 Hogan’s Heroes, 69 Holocaust, 96 – 97, 147 Home Alone, xviii, 88, 90 – 91 Homer, The Iliad, 11 – 12, 20; The Odyssey, xiv – xv, xxi, 11 – 12, 20, 38 – 43, 50n7, 57 Horkheimer, Max, 4 Huizinga, Johan, xx, 2 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 28 The Iliad (Homer), 11 – 12, 20 Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino), 69 – 70 I Spit on Your Grave (Monroe), xv, xxiin2 James, Henry, 12 James, Marlon, A Brief History of Seven Killings, 103 – 4 James, P. D., 70 Jantzen, Grace, 33 Judith (biblical hero), 54 – 55 Jules et Jim (Truffaut), 14 Kane, Sara, Blasted, 110 – 13, 131 Kant, Immanuel, xvi, 5, 59 Keaton, Buster, xvii Kerner, Aaron Michael, 110 Kidd, Kenneth, 113n8 Kohbenschlag, Madonna, 138 Kosinski, Jerzy, 74; The Painted Bird, 70, 73 – 74, 92 – 100

Kushner, Tony, Angels in America, 131 Kyle, Chris, 62 – 63, 65 La Grande Illusion, (Renoir), xviii, xix, xxiiin6, 70 Lesser, Wendy, 24n16 Letters from Iwo Jima (Eastwood), 62 – 63 Levin, 86 Levinas, Emmanuel, xvii, 37, 50, 83n6 Lichtenstein, Roy, 38 – 39; Wham!, 39 Little Red Riding Hood, 134 The Longest Day (multiple directors), 45, 71 Lorenz, Konrad, 20 Los Angeles, California, 14 Luhmann, Niklas, xxiiin9 Lynch, Jessica, 71 M (Lang), 73 Macleish, Archibald, xxiin3 Magnani, Lorenzo, 33, 44 Marvel’s The Avengers, 64 – 67 Masterman, Becky, Rage against Dying, 122 – 24 Matrix, The (Wachowski), 76, 104 – 6 McCarthy, Cormac, 70 McCarthy, Paul, Family Tyranny, 96, 100 media, the, xviii Miller, Henry, 36 More, Thomas, Utopia, 86 Nietzsche, Friederich, 8, 10, 72 Nolan, Christopher, 16 None but the Brave (Sinatra), 61 – 62 Nussbaum, Martha, 83n6 Oakland, California, 14 Odyssey, The (Homer), xiv – xv, xxi, 11 – 12, 20, 38 – 43, 50n7, 57 Ondaatje, Michael, The English Patient, 68

166

Index

Pawnshop, The (Chaplin), xxii Peckinpah, Sam, xviii Penn, Arthur, 10, 139. See also Bonnie and Clyde Pesci, Joe, 88, 90 – 91 Piaget, xi Pinker, Steven, xxiin1; The Better Angels of Our Nature, 128 – 29; interview with, 129 – 30 Plato, xxi, 37. See also vulgar Platonism play, art as, xiii; agonistic play (competition), 7, 53 – 84; aleatory play (chance), 6 – 7, 54, 130; concept of, xx – xxi; free play, 6, 131; kinesthesia, 8; mimetic play, 6, 100 – 13, 130; puzzle-solving, 7 – 8, 115 – 36; revelry, 7 – 8, 85 – 113; sexual play, 8; the struggle over, 138 – 39; thrill, 130 – 31; 136 poetics, definition of, xvi, 4 point of view (in film), 63 – 64 Poore, Charles, 95 Poussin, Nicolas, The Rape of the Sabine Women, 46, 46 – 47 power, physical and social, 146 – 47 precarity, 22 Prose, Francine, 70 Puccini, Giacomo, Manon Lescaut, 74 Pulp Fiction (Tarantino), 16, 18

Scorsese, Martin, 56, 83n2 Scott, A. O., 24n10 Sen, Amartya, 29 Seventh Seal (Bergman), 67 – 68 sex and violence, 8 – 9 Shakespeare, William, Titus Andonicus, xv, xx, 107 – 9; Hamlet, 13; Henry V, 68; Macbeth, 15; Twelfth Night, 86 Shame (Bergman), 74 Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut), 84n11 Sierz, Aleks, 110 Sinatra, Frank, xix, 62, 77. See also None but the Brave slapstick, xvii, 88 – 91 slasher films, 47 – 49 social psychology, xiv, xvii, xviii; effects of violence, 75 – 76, 81; treating violence as a puzzle, 125 – 28, 131 – 35 Sontag, Susan, 21 Sophocles, Antigone, 53, 147; Oedipus the King, 115 – 16 South Africa, 126 – 27 Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams), 81 – 82 Stein, William Bysshe, 103 sublime, the, xvi – xvii, 13 suffering, in art and life, 141 – 46

Rabelais, François, 85 rape, 34 – 35 Rape of Ganymede, The, 35 Ravenna, 143 – 44 Renoir, Jean, 12, xviii Report of the Media Violence Commission, 132 – 35 Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino), 17 – 19, 69 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 67 – 68 Rothko, Mark, 38, 50n6; Black, 5, 40

Talan, Len, 28 Tarantino, Quentin, xviii, 16, 18 – 19, 69. See also Inglourious Basterds; Pulp Fiction; Reservoir Dogs Taymor, Julie, xv techne, xiii television, xviii Tempest, The, 87 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 36 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 47 – 50, 48 That Fatal Sneeze (Fitzhamon), xvii, 89 – 90 theatre of cruelty. See Artaud, Antonin Thelma and Louise (Scott), 14 – 15, 139 theory of art, definition of, xvi Third Man, The (Reed), 72 – 73, 73

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3 Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg), 71 – 72 Saw, xx – xxi, 51n10 Schiller, Friedrich, xvi, xx – xxi, 6, 54, 143



Index 167

Titus (Taymor), xv Todorov, Tzvetan, 117 Truffaut, François, 14, 84n11. See also Shoot the Piano Player Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn, 72, 75; ‘Cannibalism in the Cars’, 91 – 92 Universal Soldier (Emmerich), 75, 83n9 victim, the, 7; the victim in flight, 70 – 75 video games, xviii villain, the, 59 – 60 violence, definition of, 34; collective violence, 45; and domination, 43; kinds of, 41 – 47; ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, 41 – 43; and violation, 34 – 36, 41

violent crime, rates of, 15 – 16 Vivaldi, Antonio, Juditha triumphans, 55 vulgar Platonism, xiv, 37 Weil, Simone, xvii Weisel, Elie, 95 – 96 Wieseltier, Leon, xxiin1 Wild, Dortchen, 26 Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah), xviii Williams, Raymond, xvi Willis, Bruce, 17 Wilson, Edmund, 121 – 22 World of Warcraft, xiii World War II films, 60 – 62 Žižek, Slavoj, 42 – 44

About the Author

Robert Appelbaum is Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. Born in New York City and raised in Cleveland and Chicago, he received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a PhD. from the University of California, Berkeley. He previously worked at the the University of Cincinnati, the University of San Diego, and Lancaster University in the UK. He is the author of many essays on literature, culture and society and of five previous books, including Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption, and Terrorism Before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland and France 1559-1642. In 2007 he won the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Aguecheek’s Beef, a book about early modern literature and food.

169