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Prévia do material em texto
<p>Interpreting Violence</p><p>Representations of violence surround us in everyday life – in news reports,</p><p>films and novels – inviting interpretation and raising questions about the</p><p>ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we</p><p>understand the processes of meaning- making involved in interpreting</p><p>violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation</p><p>themselves be violent by reproducing the violence they represent? This</p><p>book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad</p><p>hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the</p><p>sense- making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from</p><p>blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or</p><p>in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different</p><p>ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms</p><p>that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical</p><p>potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of vio-</p><p>lence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute</p><p>to or benefit from practices of violence.</p><p>Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at UiT – The Arctic</p><p>University of Norway. She is the author of three books and the editor/</p><p>coeditor of three others: Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory</p><p>(ed., 2010), Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography,</p><p>1820– 1848 (2013), The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016),</p><p>Phenomenology of the Broken Body (coed., 2019), Wild Romanticism</p><p>(coed. 2020) and Global Human Rights Fiction (forthcoming). She</p><p>is the President of the American Studies Association of Norway and</p><p>leads both the English literature section at UiT and the Interdisciplinary</p><p>Phenomenology research group.</p><p>Victoria Fareld is Associate Professor of Intellectual History at Stockholm</p><p>University, Sweden. Her research focuses mainly on political philosophy,</p><p>theory of history and memory studies, with particular interests in the</p><p>connections between time, ethics, memory and historical justice. Her most</p><p>recent book is From Marx to Hegel and Back: Capitalism, Critique, and</p><p>Utopia (coed., 2020). Among her recent articles and book chapters are</p><p>“Time” (2022), “Framing the Polychronic Present” (2022), “Entangled</p><p>Memories of Violence” (Memory Studies, 14:1, 2021), “Coming to</p><p>Terms with the Present” (2019) and “History, Justice and the Time of the</p><p>Imprescriptible” (2018).</p><p>Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director</p><p>of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and</p><p>Memory at the University of Turku, Finland, and Principal Investigator in</p><p>the Academy of Finland research consortium “Instrumental Narratives:</p><p>The Limits of Storytelling and New Story- Critical Narrative Theory”</p><p>(2018– 2023). Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, cul-</p><p>tural memory studies and trauma studies. Her monographs include The</p><p>Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible</p><p>(2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014), and she has</p><p>coedited, with Colin Davis, The Routledge Companion to Literature and</p><p>Trauma (2020) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and</p><p>the Power of Narrative (2018) and the special issues “Cultural Memorial</p><p>Forms” (Memory Studies, 2021, with Eneken Laanes) and “Critical</p><p>Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” (Poetics Today, 2022, with Maria</p><p>Mäkelä).</p><p>“Can violence be narrated? Can language help us understand the pain of</p><p>others, of ourselves? Can words and images give shape to extreme bodily</p><p>and mental experiences? How do we ‘interpret’ violence and suffering –</p><p>and can these interpretations be violent themselves? This book raises fun-</p><p>damental questions about the reach and limits of language and human</p><p>imagination. At the same time, it urges us to radically think through –</p><p>supported by a rich repertoire of philosophical, narrative, and cultural</p><p>concepts – the nature of violence and the entire range of its brutal and</p><p>subtle forms.”</p><p>Jens Brockmeier, Professor of Psychology,</p><p>The American University of Paris, France</p><p>“The title Interpreting Violence immediately calls up the need for</p><p>witnessing, that crucial activity that is the only thing we can do. But</p><p>witnessing, as the first chapter of this book already intimates, is a socio-</p><p>cultural attitude that can counter the violence of ghoulish reveling –</p><p>remember Adorno’s warning. The authors, all renowned cultural analysts,</p><p>delve deep into the many different aspects of the presence of violence in</p><p>culture; the impossibility yet necessity to represent it. Erasure is no better</p><p>solution than voyeurism. This is a book that matters.”</p><p>Mieke Bal, Cultural Analyst and Video Artist</p><p>Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature</p><p>150 The Words of Winston Churchill</p><p>Jonathan Locke Hart</p><p>151 Islam as Imagined in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English</p><p>Literature</p><p>Clinton Bennett</p><p>152 The Politics of Remembrance in the Novels of Günter Grass</p><p>Alex Donovan Cole</p><p>153 The Words of Winston Churchill</p><p>Speeches 1933– 1940</p><p>Jonathan Locke Hart</p><p>154 The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies</p><p>Christopher Lloyd and Hilary Emmett</p><p>155 Digital Literature and Critical Theory</p><p>Annika Elstermann</p><p>156 Temporal Experiments</p><p>Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature</p><p>Edited by Bruce Barnhart and Marit Grøtta</p><p>157 Interpreting Violence</p><p>Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics</p><p>Edited by Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>For more information about this series, please visit: https:// www.routle</p><p>dge.com/ Routle dge- Interd isci plin ary- Persp ecti ves- on- Lit erat ure/ book-</p><p>ser ies/ RIPL</p><p>Interpreting Violence</p><p>Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics</p><p>Edited by Cassandra Falke,</p><p>Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>First published 2023</p><p>by Routledge</p><p>605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158</p><p>and by Routledge</p><p>4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN</p><p>Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business</p><p>© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and</p><p>Hanna Meretoja; individual chapters, the contributors</p><p>The right of Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja to be identified</p><p>as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual</p><p>chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,</p><p>Designs and Patents Act 1988.</p><p>All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised</p><p>in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or</p><p>hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information</p><p>storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.</p><p>Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,</p><p>and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.</p><p>Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data</p><p>Names: Falke, Cassandra, 1977– editor. | Fareld, Victoria, 1973– editor. |</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna, 1977– editor.</p><p>Title: Interpreting violence : narrative, ethics and hermeneutics /</p><p>edited by Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld, Hanna Meretoja.</p><p>Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |</p><p>Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature |</p><p>Includes bibliographical references and index.</p><p>Identifiers: LCCN 2022042234 (print) | LCCN 2022042235 (ebook) |</p><p>ISBN 9781032035727 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032438443 (paperback) |</p><p>ISBN 9781003188001 (ebook)</p><p>Subjects: LCSH: Violence in literature. |</p><p>Violence in popular culture. | LCGFT: Essays.</p><p>Classification: LCC PN56.V53 I58 2023 (print) |</p><p>LCC PN56.V53 (ebook) | DDC 809/.933552–dc23/eng/20221129</p><p>LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042234</p><p>LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042235</p><p>ISBN: 978- 1- 032- 03572- 7 (hbk)</p><p>ISBN: 978- 1-</p><p>in</p><p>Somalia, Algeria, and Liberia. This attitude demonstrates a racism so</p><p>complacent that it no longer even knows it exists.</p><p>(Diop 2004, 110)</p><p>He continues by adding that</p><p>having said all this, honesty compels me to admit that the Rwandan</p><p>tragedy provoked, if possible, even less interest in Africa than in the</p><p>22 Cassandra Falke</p><p>rest of the world …. The truth is, all of Africa’s failures have caused</p><p>the continent to lose its self respect.</p><p>(111)</p><p>In both of these examples, war in the Congo and genocide in Rwanda</p><p>registered with (at least some) American and African publics as normal.</p><p>The Humanitarian Dilemma</p><p>This leads us to the problem humanitarian organizations face in trying</p><p>to rouse support. How can violence that victims experience as world-</p><p>shattering be represented in a way that disrupts the day- to- day habits</p><p>of people not immediately effected? In globalized media spaces, infor-</p><p>mation can move nearly instantaneously. There are greater- than- ever</p><p>technological possibilities for communicating one person’s experience</p><p>of violence to another person, but how to break through the buzz of</p><p>everyday life to make someone hear it without being sensational or</p><p>exploitive? Humanitarian organizations rely on shock and the cultural</p><p>construction of sentiment to move potential donors and volunteers. As</p><p>Heide Fehrenbach and David Rodogno write in their introduction to the</p><p>Humanitarian Photography: A History, “Humanitarian imagery is moral</p><p>rhetoric masquerading as visual evidence” (2015, 6). It says (to expand</p><p>the rhetorical metaphor) this suffering is unacceptable. It is “unjust yet</p><p>amenable to remedy” (6). In order to compel action, it must display a</p><p>level of suffering that exceeds a viewer’s norms for acceptable levels of</p><p>suffering. The same is true of humanitarian narratives. And it is rare to</p><p>see humanitarian narratives not accompanied by the moral rhetoric of</p><p>images.</p><p>In a perverse adaptation of the Kantian sublime, the excess of suffering</p><p>can be qualitative or quantitative. Over 4 million textile workers in</p><p>Bangladesh work 75 percent of their waking life for somebody else’s</p><p>profit (Worker Rights Consortium 2020, 30– 32). Thirteen- and- a- half-</p><p>million Syrian refugees are internally or internationally displaced from</p><p>their homes (World Vision 2021). Nearly 43,000 Rohingya parents are</p><p>missing and presumed dead in Myanmar (Barron 2018). Civilian cas-</p><p>ualties in Iraq number 209,000 (Iraq Body Count 2021). In each of</p><p>these cases, an organization could zero in on one worker, one displaced</p><p>person, one orphaned child or other family member left behind and por-</p><p>tray the qualitative excess of his or her suffering. Most robust humani-</p><p>tarian campaigns online combine these numbers with individual stories,</p><p>or at least photos of individuals. In the following section, I analyze two</p><p>examples of this qualitative/ quantitative pairing and consider how each</p><p>relates to the normalization of violence.</p><p>My first example is the UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund)</p><p>“Children under Attack” campaign, which strives to represent a range of</p><p>conflicts, many of which have gone on for all or most of these children’s</p><p>Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 23</p><p>lives. The website opens with a photo of a girl in a refugee camp. She is</p><p>looking directly into the camera with a determined expression, balan-</p><p>cing herself on rocky ground against a tent, her ballet pink patent leather</p><p>shoes scrupulously clean. No information about her name, age, location</p><p>or background is given. Clicking the link to “Afghanistan” to see if there</p><p>might be more information there, I find another picture of a child about</p><p>the same age, this time a boy off- center, peering over a nest of fabric</p><p>around his neck, his shadow beside him on the wall and darkness in the</p><p>room behind. The other clickable country in the first paragraph of the</p><p>website is Yemen. The child pictured there, also a boy, is younger. He</p><p>is abstracted from his surroundings to the extent that one cannot guess</p><p>where he is. There are concrete steps behind him, but no hint of where</p><p>they lead. His eyebrows crease in the manner of concerned adults, and the</p><p>script beside his photo reads:</p><p>Access to education provides a sense of normalcy for children in even</p><p>the most desperate contexts and protects them from multiple forms</p><p>of exploitation. Yet more than two million school- age children are</p><p>now out of school as poverty, conflict and lack of educational oppor-</p><p>tunities disturb learning.</p><p>I click the link beneath the text, which says “Read ‘Education</p><p>Disrupted,’ ” presumably a report that will contain this boy’s story, but</p><p>instead find a photo of another unnamed boy in a decimated classroom.</p><p>In the organization’s “Ethical Reporting Guidelines: Key Principles</p><p>for Responsible Reporting on Children and Young People,” UNICEF</p><p>provides specific guidance regarding the use of names. “All children</p><p>should have their identity (name and nationality) respected in visual</p><p>representation.” This includes not publishing the names of children</p><p>victimized by or accused of perpetrating sexual abuse. Child combatants</p><p>and children charged with crimes must also have their names and visual</p><p>identity obscured. On the other hand, the guidelines suggest that using a</p><p>child’s identity may sometimes be in their best interest, for example, when</p><p>they are “engaged in a psychosocial program and claiming their name</p><p>and identity is part of their healthy development” or when the “child</p><p>initiates contact with the reporter.” The child in the decimated classroom</p><p>must belong to one of these categories because, as I continue my search</p><p>in the pages about educational needs in Yemen, I find his story. His name</p><p>is Ahmed, and he is 12 years old. He is pictured at Al- Hamzi school,</p><p>Hajjah, in 2021. The statistic of 2 million children being out of school is</p><p>repeated here, followed by statistical evidence of how the situation has</p><p>worsened since 2015 and a numerical account of teachers not being paid.</p><p>To the right is a link for multimedia materials, but Ahmed’s story is not</p><p>there. It is at the bottom of the general page about the Yemen crisis. The</p><p>video is one minute and 56 seconds long and shows Ahmed in a waistcoat</p><p>and white shirt discussing being frightened about attending school after</p><p>24 Cassandra Falke</p><p>a bombing in the same classroom in which he was photographed. The</p><p>video switches to a view from the back of girls running to enter a school,</p><p>followed by an interview with Yahya Al- Atr, the school’s principal. He is</p><p>sitting in a student desk in a classroom with standing walls, but rubble</p><p>is visible in the windows to his right. He mentions the students’ morale</p><p>being damaged, but also their determination to return to school. He</p><p>describes how they resumed school “in the rubble, inside the tents and</p><p>under the shade of the trees.” In the second minute of the video, Ahmed’s</p><p>father promises “I will do whatever I can to help my son complete his</p><p>education.” We see Ahmed writing and showing his writing to a younger</p><p>boy wearing a suit coat, while he states that his “dream is to graduate</p><p>from university.”</p><p>The video situates Ahmed in a discoverable history. It situates him in</p><p>a family and a school community. It highlights his hope for the future</p><p>without ignoring the psychological damage of his past. Taken as a</p><p>whole, the video foregrounds features of Ahmed’s life that establish the</p><p>norms for childhood flourishing (education, family, community, hope)</p><p>and highlights the agency of victims, including Ahmed and other chil-</p><p>dren, while also informing viewers about the bombing and showing its</p><p>consequences. Operating within the humanitarian dilemma, the video</p><p>succeeds as well as any two- minute piece of craftsmanship possibly</p><p>could, but if I step back from the video, I must recognize that I spent</p><p>several minutes reading statistics and looking at photos of nameless chil-</p><p>dren before I found Ahmed’s story. In the world</p><p>of the UNICEF website,</p><p>malnutrition and lack of access to education are the norm. Evidence of</p><p>political violence is present in the rubble outside the window or as part</p><p>of somebody’s past, but in the present, potential donors are asked to</p><p>deal with the practical problems of getting children fed and schooled.</p><p>The background, the violence itself, becomes the norm against which</p><p>the exceptional feat of educating children in tents and rubble must be</p><p>achieved.</p><p>My second example is the UK- based charity Survivors Fund (SURF),</p><p>which aids Rwandan genocide survivors. Websites attempting to render</p><p>violence violent, in Heidegger’s sense of something breaking through the</p><p>familiar, sometimes juxtaposes survivor testimonies with the larger image</p><p>of a violent world. The matter- of- fact language that survivors typically</p><p>use conjures the gap between the extremity of violence presented through</p><p>statistics or broader description and the language of one person whose</p><p>expectations for what is possible have been violently rearranged (Fassin</p><p>2011, 207). SURF collaborates with the UN on an “Outreach Programme</p><p>on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda” to collect testimonies</p><p>and make them publicly available in English. Mary Kayitesi Blewitt, who</p><p>lost 50 family members, initiated the Survivor Testimony project, and tes-</p><p>timonies are now available on the UN “Outreach Programme” website</p><p>under “Resources” as PDFs, with each testimony arranged by the victims’</p><p>Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 25</p><p>first names. One of the testimonies is from a woman named Donatha,</p><p>excerpted here:</p><p>On May 5 (1994), we heard many people singing in the road. They</p><p>were wearing banana leaves and when they arrived at our house, they</p><p>ordered us outside. I asked God to receive us into his kingdom. They</p><p>asked the old lady to go back into the house and sleep. They followed</p><p>her in, covered her with all the clothes that were in the room, poured</p><p>petrol on her and set her alight. I tried to run away, but at a road-</p><p>block I was caught by two men. They asked me if I was from the</p><p>house. I said no, but they nevertheless brought me back, raped me</p><p>and locked me in the toilet. When they left, I escaped and went to</p><p>the neighbors.</p><p>The full recorded testimony is a page- and- a- half long, presented on its</p><p>own in a plain black- and- white document with no commentary. No</p><p>pictures accompany individual accounts. The Survivors’ Fund has done</p><p>their best to let the testimonies stand forth unmediated. There is enough</p><p>here to learn something of Donatha’s world – her faith, her resilience</p><p>in moments of crisis. She describes the violence done to the old lady in</p><p>greater detail than her own suffering. But there is no way to know what</p><p>her world looked like before the attack when she was just Donatha, and</p><p>not Donatha the genocide and rape survivor. Only her status as a survivor</p><p>and witness could bring her to my attention at all although she is just about</p><p>my age. I was a junior in high school, May 5, 1994. It was a Thursday.</p><p>With a certain amount of imagination, I can set those Thursdays side</p><p>by side and link her world and mine. But inevitably she appears in my</p><p>world now as someone I could potentially help. I cannot imagine what</p><p>she would have done on the Friday if that Thursday had not happened.</p><p>Although she has come within the logic of visibility through which my</p><p>world operates, that generative logic flounders in trying to produce more</p><p>than a day in her life, the day she became a victim.</p><p>Worlds of Literature</p><p>Exceeding norms in an ethical way is also a challenge faced by contem-</p><p>porary authors trying to awaken their readers to histories of political</p><p>violence. Robert Eaglestone characterizes contemporary African litera-</p><p>ture in English as “ ‘engaged literature’ in a renewed Sartrean sense. That</p><p>is, they are not simply affective works; they are also aimed explicitly</p><p>at pricking Western consciousness” (2017, 136). They have a humani-</p><p>tarian goal. Much contemporary literature about violent histories glo-</p><p>bally is also “engaged literature” in this sense. Examples include Kamila</p><p>Shamsie’s Broken Shadows, which begins in Nagasaki and ends in</p><p>Guantanamo Bay, or Thi Bui’s portrayal of the Vietnamese– American</p><p>26 Cassandra Falke</p><p>War and the subsequent refugee crisis in her illustrated memoir The Best</p><p>We Could Do. The presence of novels about Biafra or the sufferings of</p><p>Afghanistan’s Hazara on the New York Times bestseller list indicates</p><p>that English- language readers are engaging with the problem of global</p><p>political violence to an unprecedented degree. But it is hard to know if</p><p>this engagement extends beyond a voyeuristic interest in other people’s</p><p>problems. Novels about political violence offer an elevation of emotional,</p><p>moral and intellectual intensity. Other people’s crises awaken us to the</p><p>joys of tucking the children in or a peaceful morning coffee. They invite</p><p>the safely sublime experience of knowing death is coming but not yet.</p><p>The fact that the violence narrated relates to actual flesh may heighten the</p><p>intensity of these joys further without a reader taking responsibility for</p><p>the fact that that violence happens in an actual shared world.</p><p>It is worth thinking for a moment about what it means to share a</p><p>world. Alain Badiou is convinced that we do not share a world anymore</p><p>(2012, 61– 62). To have a shared world would mean to share a “logic of</p><p>visibility,” but today “the world deprives the vast majority of human</p><p>beings of their visibility” (64). There are an endless multiplicity of worlds</p><p>in which what is present and what is possible follow independent and</p><p>irreconcilable logics or the fluctuating logic of meeting immediate needs.</p><p>Violence no longer occurs in a place or to a person with a past, not even</p><p>to a “refugee” or a “worker.” To designate victims in this way is to give</p><p>them a name. He says now their name is only “excluded,” and part of</p><p>what they are excluded from is a place in the visible world (64). Those</p><p>vast numbers of people embroiled in political violence are present for so</p><p>many of us as a kind of placeholder. We know that they exist, and we</p><p>know that we cannot know who they are or where, how many. Because</p><p>their existence and our confidence in their continual invisibility are</p><p>equally certain, they occupy an epistemological no man’s land, present</p><p>and comfortably indeterminant.</p><p>Novels, I think, are uniquely capable of granting visibility. To turn to</p><p>another essay by Heidegger, works of art manifest a world. He says that</p><p>“the unconcealedness of beings – this is never a merely existent state,</p><p>but a happening” (2013, 52). It occurs when a work of art manages</p><p>to “transport us out of the realm of the ordinary” (64). Art discloses</p><p>truth by “open[ing] a world and keep[ing] it abidingly in force” (43).</p><p>Heidegger’s rethinking of art begins with his rethinking of the world and</p><p>our relationship to it. When we wake up in the morning, we are not</p><p>merely ourselves, present in clean autonomous subjectivity. We are in</p><p>a bed, windows open or closed, with someone or without. We are in a</p><p>body – cold, warm, comfortable or in pain. When we hear a sound, it</p><p>is the coffee perking downstairs. It is not a sensual phenomenon that</p><p>we then secondarily interpret as coffee perking. We are, in every waking</p><p>moment, within a world already interpreted, whose presence provides</p><p>the terms through which we see ourselves. And this world, our world,</p><p>does not consist really of windows, beds and coffee percolators. “World</p><p>Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 27</p><p>is never an object that stands before us and can be seen” (43). Nor is it</p><p>“an imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such</p><p>given things” (43). Heidegger insists that the “world worlds” (43). It rises</p><p>up prior to our representation and shapes the way that representation</p><p>and all forms of decision- making become possible for us. It structures our</p><p>relationship</p><p>to time, space, other people and ourselves.</p><p>If Badiou is right that this process of worlding no longer unfolds with</p><p>a logic that succeeds in revealing truth, it is not because the coffee, bed,</p><p>partner and window are not there in the usual way. It is because along-</p><p>side the givenness of that world we are aware of other worlds so radically</p><p>different from our own that we cannot access the logic of that world’s</p><p>unfolding. It is not that if we met Ahmed in his shattered schoolroom,</p><p>we could not experience recognition of one another in love or hate and</p><p>thereby see that other person within our world as it unfolds. We could</p><p>do that. But that meeting does not seem part of our possible future.</p><p>Furthermore, there are 11 million children in Yemen with inadequate</p><p>food and shelter following the outbreak of war there in 2015. Even if</p><p>we did go, and Ahmed or his class of 30 children achieved visibility in</p><p>our world, there would be others who we would know to exist in some</p><p>nameless way, in some other country seeing other forms of violence, but</p><p>we would know that we do not even know how to name them in their</p><p>suffering. Literature cannot bring all of those worlds into force, but one</p><p>novel can stretch our capacity for thinking what’s possible enough to</p><p>bring one other world within the visible horizon and field of forces in</p><p>which we know ourselves to live.</p><p>Brought forth within a world that already contains a narrative logic,</p><p>with all the causal structures, fields of comparison and predicative pos-</p><p>sibilities that that entails, a fictional character based on Donatha would</p><p>bring the world that contains her into force in a different way, even if</p><p>no character by that fictional character’s name had ever existed. Because</p><p>we use the same habits of understanding characters that we use with</p><p>real people, we approach characters as having a past and future, a social</p><p>milieu and quirks, all while remaining aware of their fictionality. We</p><p>intuit that they possess motivations, which they may or may not under-</p><p>stand themselves, and we habitually attribute interpretive agency to</p><p>them so that in an imagined room full of imagined people, we direct</p><p>our attention to a field that contains multiple perspectives on the same</p><p>incident unfolding simultaneously. The contrast among these multiple</p><p>perspectives defamiliarizes the novel’s world even if the focalizing per-</p><p>spective seems very close to our own.</p><p>For comparison with Donatha’s story, I want to examine an example</p><p>of wartime rape from a contemporary work of literature. When Ugwu</p><p>rapes a girl in Adichie’s (2007) novel Half of a Yellow Sun, the scene has</p><p>been set. It is 1967, Igbo identifying as Biafrans have declared their inde-</p><p>pendence from Nigeria. Ugwu has been kidnapped from the home where</p><p>he lives with his employers and pressganged into fighting a losing war. He</p><p>28 Cassandra Falke</p><p>is in his mid- teens and has proven himself a decent soldier by this point</p><p>in the narrative and earned the respect of other conscripts. “Part of him</p><p>wanted to be here,” we learn (Adichie 2007, 453), but equally he felt “he</p><p>was not living his life; life was living him” (457). He is drinking home-</p><p>made gin with the other soldiers after his first successful mission.</p><p>He got up to urinate outside and, afterward, leaned against a tree</p><p>and breathed in the fresh air. It was like sitting in the backyard in</p><p>Nsukka, looking at the lemon tree and his herb garden …. When</p><p>he finally went back inside, he stopped at the door. The bar girl was</p><p>lying on her back on the floor, her wrapper bunched up at her waist,</p><p>her shoulders held down by a soldier, her legs wide, wide ajar. She</p><p>was sobbing, “Please, please, biko.” Her blouse was still on. Between</p><p>her legs, High- Tech [a younger child soldier] was moving. His thrusts</p><p>were jerky, his small buttocks darker- colored than his legs. The</p><p>soldiers were cheering ….</p><p>Ugwu does not initially want to take part in the group rape of the girl, but</p><p>by the end of the scene:</p><p>Ugwu shrugged and moved forward. “Who is afraid?” he said dis-</p><p>dainfully. “I just like to eat before others, that is all.”</p><p>“The food is still fresh!”</p><p>“Target Destroyer, aren’t you a man?”</p><p>The barroom, the fellow soldiers are here for us to imagine as they</p><p>would appear to Ugwu and the girl. We can think about the feeling of the</p><p>floor, the facial expressions. Because the story has followed Ugwu from</p><p>his rural village, to his employment in the university town of Nsukku,</p><p>through his frivolous exploratory sex life to this moment, we can imagine</p><p>what he might see as possible or impossible to do in the given situation.</p><p>The reader enjoys some freedom with regard to the perspective she takes</p><p>up, but the violence itself stands forth as something beyond all of those</p><p>perspectives, something whose uninterpretable excess is evoked and</p><p>preserved by the text. Readers of Adichie’s novel know almost as little</p><p>about this unnamed bar girl as readers of Donatha’s testimony know</p><p>about her. The fact that readers are affiliated with Ugwu during the scene</p><p>resonates with Heidegger’s insight that everyone bears the existential cap-</p><p>acity for violence. Still, we are 458 pages into Ugwu’s story by the time</p><p>the scene above occurs. Calculated at an average reading speed of 300</p><p>words per minute, we have spent over 12 hours imagining his life and</p><p>circumstances. Directing and populating our attention for all those hours,</p><p>Half of a Yellow Sun worlds as a work of art. It grants Ugwu’s world</p><p>greater visibility. It problematizes his renaming according to an act of</p><p>war and the namelessness of his rape victim. The novel also renders vis-</p><p>ible the processes that obscured the visibility of the Nigerian Civil War</p><p>Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 29</p><p>while it was occurring by featuring a white, British journalist living in</p><p>Biafra who wants to write the stories of what he is seeing. His stories</p><p>are not sensational enough for the British and American press, and as</p><p>his friends and his Igbo lover, Kainene, tell him, it is not his story to tell.</p><p>In both humanitarian material and literature, the subject experien-</p><p>cing violence appears before a background. On humanitarian website</p><p>or in mail- outs the figure of the subject may appear in a photograph, a</p><p>short narrative or a testimonial statement. The individual, perhaps with</p><p>his or her family, represents the truth of suffering (Fassin 2012: 8). The</p><p>background, which focuses on the facts of political economy and social</p><p>injustice, is presented as naturalized, uninterpreted. The reader is called to</p><p>witness the incident after the fact, deeming the victim worthy or unworthy</p><p>of assistance. We become responsible perhaps for reparations, but not</p><p>implicated in the situation causing the violence, which is clearly past and</p><p>finished. In contrast, the reader of a novel stands as a witness to action as it</p><p>unfolds, even as our own, often safe, surroundings provide a background</p><p>quite different from that in the fictional world. The fictional background</p><p>stands forth clearly as interpreted, evoking the already initiated process</p><p>that we as readers carry forward. It is interpreted by the narrative per-</p><p>spective, and the invitation to interpret the same scene differently, through</p><p>one of the other characters or in light of violent structures or politics,</p><p>stands always open. The narrative may draw attention to its own inter-</p><p>pretive processes to a greater or lesser degree through layers of conflicting</p><p>narration such as that we see in Half of a Yellow Sun (which features three</p><p>focalizers and a novel within the novel), or through an unreliable narrator,</p><p>but the reader is invariably reminded of the cultural processes that bring</p><p>violence to visibility through the layers of narration present in any novel –</p><p>reader, narrator, implied reader, implied author and so on.</p><p>Violence and literature are both strange in Heidegger’s use of the term,</p><p>both excessive and incapable of being fully determined. They both paradox-</p><p>ically</p><p>bring a world into force by defamiliarizing it. For a reader who has</p><p>suffered sexual violence, reading about Donatha’s or the bar girl’s rape may</p><p>reactivate trauma, the act standing forth in its awfulness, but for readers</p><p>without a personal experience of violence, altering the perception that war</p><p>and suffering are normal in some parts of the world demands a radical</p><p>readjustment of norms inadvertently promoted by humanitarian discourse.</p><p>Before violence can become violent in the sense of surpassing the familiar,</p><p>familiarity must be established by making the world of a particular violent</p><p>history visible. Adichie’s novel achieves this, affirming more broadly the</p><p>potential for novels as powerful actors in humanitarian discourse.</p><p>Note</p><p>1 In 2016, researchers at the University College of London published results</p><p>of a Milgram- style experiment involving real electronic shock and discovered</p><p>that “coercion … reduced the neural processing of the outcomes of one’s</p><p>30 Cassandra Falke</p><p>own actions. Thus, people who obey orders may subjectively experience their</p><p>actions as closer to passive movements than fully voluntary actions” (Caspar</p><p>et al. 2016).</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007. Half of a Yellow Sun. New York: Harper</p><p>Collins.</p><p>Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Adventure of French Philosophy. Translated by Bruno</p><p>Bosteels. London: Verso.</p><p>Barron, Laignee. 2018. “More Than 43,000 Rohingya Parents May Be Missing.</p><p>Experts Fear They Are Dead.” Time, March 8. https:// time.com/ 5187 292/</p><p>rohin gya- cri sis- miss ing- pare nts- refug ees- ban glad esh/ .</p><p>Caspar, Emilie A., Julia F. Christensen, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Haggard.</p><p>2016. “Coercion Changes the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain.” Current</p><p>Biology 26 (5): 585– 592.</p><p>Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro- Sociological Theory. Princeton, NJ:</p><p>Princeton University Press.</p><p>Derrida, Jacques. 2001. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought</p><p>of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass.</p><p>London: Routledge. 97– 192.</p><p>Diop, Boubacar Boris. 2004. “African Authors in Rwanda: Writing by Duty of</p><p>Memory.” In Literary Responses to Mass Violence. Translated by Jane Hale.</p><p>Waltham: Brandeis University Press. 109– 124.</p><p>Eaglestone, Robert. 2017. Broken Voice: Reading Post- Holocaust Literature.</p><p>Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p><p>Eichmann, Adolf. 1962/ 2016. “Letter by Adolf Eichmann to President Yitzhak</p><p>Ben- Zvi of Israel.” New York Times, January 27.</p><p>Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present</p><p>Times. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Berkley: University of California Press.</p><p>Fehrenbach, Heide, and Davide Rodogno. 2015. “Introduction – The Morality of</p><p>Sight.” In Humanitarian Photography: A History. Edited by Heide Fehrenbach</p><p>and Davide Rodogno Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1– 21.</p><p>Grossman, David. 2009. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill</p><p>in War and Society. New York: Back Bay Books.</p><p>Heidegger, Martin. 1959. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph</p><p>Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.</p><p>Heidegger, Martin. 2013. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language,</p><p>Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial. 15– 86.</p><p>Iraq Body Count. 2021. www.iraqbo dyco unt.org/ . Accessed September 8, 2021.</p><p>Johnson, Michael. 2010. A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism,</p><p>Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence. Boston: Northeastern</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Kamienski, Lukasz. 2016. “The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier.” The Atlantic,</p><p>April8.</p><p>Kennedy, Denis. 2009. “Selling the Distant Other: Humanitarianism and</p><p>Imagery – Ethical Dilemmas of Humanitarian Action.” Journal of</p><p>Humanitarian Assistance 28: 1– 25.</p><p>Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 31</p><p>Littell, Jonathan. 2016. The Kindly Ones. Translated by Charlotte Mandell.</p><p>London: Chatto and Windus.</p><p>Milgram, Stanley. 2017. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.</p><p>New York: Harper & Row.</p><p>OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs).</p><p>2021. Global Humanitarian Overview 2022. www.gho.uno cha.org.</p><p>UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund). 2021. “Children under Attack.”</p><p>www.uni cef.org/ child ren- under- att ack. Accessed September 15, 2021.</p><p>United Nations and SURF (Survivors Fund). 2021. “Outreach Programme on the</p><p>1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations.” www.</p><p>un.org</p><p>United Nations and World Bank. 2018. “Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches</p><p>for Preventing Violent Conflict.” Open Knowledge Repository. doi:10.1596/</p><p>978- 1- 4648- 1162- 3</p><p>Worker Rights Consortium (2020). “Worker Rights Consortium Assessment of</p><p>Bangladesh’s Home Textile Industry: Findings from Worker Interviews.” www.</p><p>framti den.no/ bil der/ dok umen ter/ Home_ T exti les_ Repo rt_ F INAL _ 36.pdf.</p><p>World Vision. 2021. “Syrian Refugee Crisis: Facts, FAQs, and How to Help.”</p><p>13 July.</p><p>Zimbardo, Philip. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People</p><p>Turn Evil. New York: Random House.</p><p>Zimbardo, Philip. 2009. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.</p><p>New York: Harper and Row.</p><p>Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-4</p><p>2 Violence, Encore!</p><p>Popular Music, Power and</p><p>Postwar Memory</p><p>Avril Tynan</p><p>Just Memory</p><p>In January 2021, historian Benjamin Stora published his report on “les</p><p>questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d’Algérie”</p><p>(“questions of memory relating to colonization and the Algerian War”).1</p><p>Produced at the request of French President Emmanuel Macron in</p><p>July 2020,2 what is more commonly called the rapport Stora, or Stora</p><p>report, proposed to synthesize the “travail de mémoire, de verité et de</p><p>réconciliation” (“work of memory, of truth and of reconciliation”)</p><p>(2021, 2) that had been achieved so far in public and private arenas, and</p><p>to recommend future strategies for progress. Above all, Stora highlights</p><p>the irrecoverable depth and diversity of memories, but he asserts the need</p><p>to find what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “juste mémoire” (“just</p><p>memory”) (2021, 92),3 an equitable balance of quantity and distribu-</p><p>tion that would avoid both excesses and poverties of memory (Ricoeur</p><p>2000, 1). As a result, Stora proposes that the future of memory work in</p><p>France and Algeria must involve the open circulation of divergent mem-</p><p>ories to foreclose the possibility of a conclusive judgment (2021, 92).</p><p>Yet, Ricoeur’s discussion of just memory precisely emphasizes the roles of</p><p>judgment and justice, claiming that memory has a truthful and pragmatic</p><p>duty to serve justice to the other (2004, 88– 92). The duty of memory,</p><p>for Ricoeur, is a productive endeavor situated at the intersections of past,</p><p>present and future that recognizes the transmission of heritage from the</p><p>other to the self. The settlement of debts owed to the victims of violence</p><p>does not propose to reconcile distinct histories but precisely to delineate</p><p>past from present and self from other.</p><p>In this chapter, I suggest that memory of the violences committed in</p><p>Algeria necessitates expression in order to incite action that would embed</p><p>the past firmly into the world, not only as an episodic object of history</p><p>but as part of the interpretative structures through which the world takes</p><p>shape among and between others. As critics of the Stora report have</p><p>argued, memory may be manipulated to stall productivity by generating</p><p>parallels and commonalities between different parties;4 successful com-</p><p>munication, on the other hand, depends upon distinction and plurality.</p><p>Violence, Encore! 33</p><p>In recent affective trends toward memory as a form of labor, memory is</p><p>framed as a transformative activity that creates a “felt relation between</p><p>the present and the past” (Allen and</p><p>Brown 2011, 316). However, I argue</p><p>that such embodied acts of recollection that preserve traces of the past</p><p>in the present might – intentionally or otherwise – hinder the duty of</p><p>memory to serve justice to others by encouraging passive inertia rather</p><p>than action. Drawing on the distinctions between labor, work and action</p><p>as presented by Hannah Arendt (1958/ 1974, 1987), I suggest that framing</p><p>memory as a form of action, rather than labor or work, contributes an</p><p>important step in judicial, moral and social progress by furnishing and</p><p>maintaining the narratives through which we interpret the world (see</p><p>Meretoja 2018).</p><p>Turning to cultural representations of the Algerian War, I argue that</p><p>the futility of recollection as labor takes shape through entanglements of</p><p>violent memories and music. In Didier Daeninckx’s short story “Corvée</p><p>de bois” (2003), the explicit and even gratuitous presentation of war atro-</p><p>cities is enmeshed with popular culture and radio. Building on Jacques</p><p>Attali’s socioeconomic theory of music as a means to power, I argue that</p><p>narrative memories of the war are censored and silenced by the perform-</p><p>ance of monologic noise. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that</p><p>music may be exploited to arouse feelings of “distraction and inattention”</p><p>(1941/ 1998, 205) in the listener, I suggest that the atmospheric circulation</p><p>of memory pacifies and neutralizes the realities of the past as repetitious</p><p>and inauthentic commodities of everyday life. Through this entanglement</p><p>of violence and background music, or muzak, I suggest that memory of</p><p>the Algerian War has been diluted in public and private spaces. Memories</p><p>of the war return again and again – encore et encore – in political and cul-</p><p>tural consciousness as part of the “open door” memory policy advocated</p><p>by Stora (2021, 92– 94), but this laborious standardization of memory</p><p>derealizes historic violence as intangible background noise that evades</p><p>narrative action. To embed memories of violent histories into the human</p><p>world, we must not only delineate “what” took place through narrative</p><p>means but also how violence shapes “who” we are among others in the</p><p>world today.</p><p>Memory Labor, Memory Work, Memory Action</p><p>Memory work refers not only to the efforts of recollection but also, as</p><p>Ricoeur made explicit, to the exercise of memory as justice that bridges</p><p>the gap between the past and the future (2004, 363). What matters, as</p><p>Annette Kuhn has argued, is not simply what we remember but what we</p><p>do with these memories, “how we use [them] to give deeper meaning</p><p>to, and if necessary change, our lives” (1995/ 2002, 158). Following the</p><p>affective turn in cultural and social studies from the end of the twentieth</p><p>century (Clough 2008), processes of memory have been reframed as a</p><p>form of labor rather than work that brings recollection into dialogue</p><p>34 Avril Tynan</p><p>with the body. Building on the three vita activa or fundamental human</p><p>activities that Hannah Arendt identifies in The Human Condition (1958/</p><p>1974) – labor, work and action – memory labor has replaced memory</p><p>work as a resource for economic and biopolitical potential. For Arendt,</p><p>work designates a process with a definite and tangible end point – the</p><p>construction of a chair or a house, for example – while labor indicates</p><p>the production of goods for (immediate) consumption through a circular</p><p>process of “toil and trouble” (1987, 32) with “neither a beginning nor</p><p>an end … only pauses, intervals between exhaustion and regeneration”</p><p>(36). In memory studies, the inextricable connection between labor and</p><p>life means that memory holds cultural capital that may be circulated as</p><p>affective states to thereby commemorate the past through lived experi-</p><p>ence in the present (Allen and Brown 2011; Allen 2014). For Matthew</p><p>Allen and Steven Brown, the persistence of memory as a lived connection</p><p>to the past is only possible as an inexhaustive process of labor:</p><p>If we treat the production of a memorial as “work,” then we see it</p><p>as the production of an inert worldly artefact that has a determinate,</p><p>fixed meaning once it is complete. But to see this process as “labor”</p><p>means developing a sensitivity to a much more intimate and indeter-</p><p>minate relation between its producer and artefact, where the latter is</p><p>never really “finished” as such.</p><p>(2011, 316)</p><p>Yet, Arendt also qualifies labor as “ ‘unproductive’ and futile” (1987,</p><p>33) because it endlessly (re)produces the very lack that it strives to fill.</p><p>As a tireless process of (re)collection, memory as a form of labor cannot</p><p>fulfill its duty to settle debts of the past because it always consumes what</p><p>it produces.</p><p>Understanding memory labor as a process of perpetual repetition</p><p>brings into focus the frustrations over recycled memories of the Algerian</p><p>War and the stagnation of justice. Memory as work, on the other hand,</p><p>signifies distinct processes of “fabrication and usage” (Arendt 1987,</p><p>35) that produce stable and solid objects to be used and reused – without</p><p>significant alteration – over time (34). This is not to imply that memory</p><p>work fabricates only inert monuments to the past (Allen and Brown</p><p>2011, 323), but rather that it yields an objective and manmade end point</p><p>that may be exploited – either materially or immaterially – over time</p><p>and stand up to the “subjectivity of man” (Arendt 1987, 173– 174). If</p><p>it is abused, memory labor will only perpetuate inaction and contest-</p><p>ation through endless repetition; memory work, on the other hand, might</p><p>respond more effectively to the debts of the other and a duty to justice by</p><p>pursuing artificial, practical and durable outcomes, such as an acknow-</p><p>ledgment of responsibility, judicial proceedings and reparations. Yet, the</p><p>notion of objectivity in processes of memory work is contentious; can</p><p>we ever say that the past has truly been reckoned, or that it yields a</p><p>Violence, Encore! 35</p><p>discernible result? Indeed, is it not more fruitful to consider how the past</p><p>might come to effect change in different times and places, and between</p><p>different agential subjects?</p><p>Arendt’s third, and most misunderstood, human activity is action, an</p><p>activity often perceived purely in political terms but relating to a more</p><p>generic performance of speech and deeds that signals entry into the human</p><p>world (1958/ 1974, 175– 181). Like work, action is productive, but unlike</p><p>work, action does not know what it will produce: action initiates or sets</p><p>in motion a change to the existing pattern or fabric of understanding</p><p>(177– 178). Actions, unlike labor or work, cannot take place in isola-</p><p>tion but in a “web of human relationships … where their immediate</p><p>consequences can be felt” (183– 184), and it is because of this existing web</p><p>of human relationships, interconnecting a plurality of voices, intentions</p><p>and perspectives that actions are unpredictable, irreversible and limitless</p><p>(1987, 36– 41). While words and acts are themselves transient, they reveal</p><p>themselves in the presence of others to produce stories “as naturally as</p><p>fabrication produces tangible things” (Arendt 1958/ 1974, 184).</p><p>In order to become worldly things … they must first be seen, heard,</p><p>and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things</p><p>– into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into</p><p>paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and</p><p>monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for</p><p>its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of</p><p>others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second,</p><p>on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things.</p><p>(95)</p><p>Distinguishing memory as a form of action, as opposed to labor or</p><p>work, moves away from reiterative or functional outcomes of recollec-</p><p>tion and toward an understanding of how every act of memory “falls</p><p>into an already existing web, where it nonetheless somehow starts a new</p><p>process that will affect many others even beyond</p><p>those with whom the</p><p>agent comes into direct contact” (Arendt 1987, 40). At the same time, it</p><p>illuminates how actors may wish to prevent memory finding expression</p><p>that would lead to action in order to thwart the progression of uncertain</p><p>and irrevocable change. If action, as Arendt claims, reveals “who” rather</p><p>than “what” one is in the world, then individuals and communities may</p><p>prefer to remain “in complete silence and perfect passivity” (1958/ 1974,</p><p>179) rather than give voice to memories that will henceforth become</p><p>inextricably bound up with a collective social identity.</p><p>We cannot forget that memory is never neutral but is “intertwined</p><p>with power, interest, and resistance precisely because it is so vital and</p><p>fundamental to what we are as citizens and to what our society is as a</p><p>community capable of relations of justice” (Booth 2008, 259). In the case</p><p>of memories of the Algerian War of Independence, the need for action</p><p>36 Avril Tynan</p><p>that would embed memories of the past within the identity constructions</p><p>of contemporary Franco– Algerian relations is at odds with the desire to</p><p>perpetuate a specific and stable politico- historical image of the war. In</p><p>the following analysis of Didier Daeninckx’s “Corvée de bois,” I show</p><p>how memory fails to elicit action in the novel, disappearing as soon as</p><p>it appears through distraction and inattention. Entangled with popular</p><p>music, violent memories of the war are diffused into the background of</p><p>everyday spaces and situations where they may be dismissed or neglected</p><p>by social actors as futile background noise. As a result, memories of vio-</p><p>lence are instrumentalized in the impersonal, inert and indistinct spaces of</p><p>the narrative to homogenize, silence and subvert the plurality of human</p><p>stories.</p><p>Popular Music, Violence and Censorship in Didier Daeninckx’s</p><p>“Corvée de bois”</p><p>The Algerian War of Independence raged from 1954 to 1962, and it con-</p><p>tinues to spark heated debates, particularly concerning the uses of torture</p><p>and contentions over free economic movement between the two coun-</p><p>tries. As a colony of France, Algeria was considered a department rather</p><p>than a separate country, and terminology relating to war was minimized</p><p>to imply minor civil disorder.5 Although the war began as coordinated</p><p>terrorist uprisings of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), it</p><p>descended into a disastrous war of attrition that gradually alienated inter-</p><p>national support and deeply divided national opinion. The war eventually</p><p>ended in March 1962, when President Charles de Gaulle ceded inde-</p><p>pendence to Algeria in the Évian accords, but the topic remained – and</p><p>remains – controversial, not least because de Gaulle presented Algerian</p><p>independence as what he called a “victorious defeat.” Official memory</p><p>has been slow to accept the realities of the war – including systematic uses</p><p>of rape, torture and the murder of civilians – often reiterating that crimes</p><p>were committed on both sides6 or limited to an aberrant, unrepentant</p><p>minority. Cultural memory, however, was quick to pick up the gauntlet</p><p>and assume responsibility as a witness both to the events and to their</p><p>mitigation in collective French memory. Cultural works, such as novels</p><p>and films, laid bare the unsavory character of the campaign and helped</p><p>to expose French atrocities by dealing with the darker side of the war.</p><p>Gillo Pontecorvo’s historical film La Bataille d’Alger (1965; The Battle</p><p>of Algiers), Rachid Bouchareb’s controversial film Hors- la- loi (2010;</p><p>Outside the Law) and Didier Daeninckx’s detective novel Meurtres pour</p><p>mémoire (1983; Murder in Memoriam, 1991) are among the most well-</p><p>known of these works.</p><p>Although lesser known, Daeninckx’s (2003) short story “Corvée de</p><p>bois” continues to pursue themes of truth and deception in relation to</p><p>the Algerian War and to historical narrative more broadly. Published at</p><p>a time of renewed public interest in the Algerian War,7 “Corvée” is an</p><p>Violence, Encore! 37</p><p>explicit denunciation of the appalling acts of violence committed by the</p><p>French army, and also of the subversive measures of censorship and inter-</p><p>pretation used both during the war and afterwards. The title translates</p><p>literally to signify the collection of firewood, but the more sinister trans-</p><p>lation is a euphemism for the execution of prisoners during the war, usu-</p><p>ally using game- like tactics. It is in line with many of the themes typically</p><p>presented in Daeninckx’s work, such as Meurtres pour mémoire, which</p><p>unravels the history of the massacre of October 17, 1961, as a detective</p><p>fiction recounted from the perspective of a seemingly random present- day</p><p>murder in Toulouse, but interlinked with the history of the Occupation in</p><p>France. Although “Corvée” lacks the key polar or detective elements that</p><p>are present in the earlier work (see Gorrara 2003, 81– 89), it is similar</p><p>in that it aims to show how the truth of the past is concealed beneath</p><p>intersecting stories. As Donald Reid writes, Daeninckx’s obsessive play</p><p>on the relationship between supposedly different histories stems from</p><p>“the idea that there is a past hidden by those in power – and they seek</p><p>to keep it hidden” (2010, 40). He continues: “Daeninckx is primarily</p><p>concerned with revealing the power exercised through the policing of</p><p>collective memory narratives, predicated on what is excluded, as well as</p><p>on what is said” (40).</p><p>“Corvée” tells the story of an unidentified, 23- year- old French medical</p><p>student at the Sorbonne who is inadvertently caught up in a riot in Paris</p><p>and opts to avoid prison by joining the French campaign in Algeria. After</p><p>the protagonist’s military training, he is assigned to a paratrooper detach-</p><p>ment in Algeria where the short story portrays, in harrowing detail, acts</p><p>of rape, torture and the execution of civilians committed by the narrator</p><p>and his military colleagues. The narrator eventually returns to France</p><p>after an insurgent attack leaves him paraplegic, and here he performs</p><p>duties with the censorship bureau where he helps to prevent the truth</p><p>of the war filtering out into public consciousness. Popular music is a</p><p>curious trespasser into the narrative that is seemingly at odds with the</p><p>overwhelmingly historical tale of violence and censorship, and yet the</p><p>performance of music functions to silence the other and prevent commu-</p><p>nication as loudspeakers become instruments of censorship, reproducing</p><p>noise and seizing power.</p><p>The riot in which the protagonist becomes caught up occurs following</p><p>a Gilbert Bécaud concert at the Olympia in mid- 1950s Paris.8 When the</p><p>audience, enthralled by the enthusiasm of their idol, start to destroy</p><p>their concert seats, the narrator and his friend, Jacques, kick an arm-</p><p>rest across the room before breaking the glass of a display cabinet and</p><p>taking some pictures of Bécaud. Although their transgressions are minor,</p><p>they are arrested and held overnight, but avoid prison by agreeing to</p><p>sign up for military service in Algeria. Jacques is sent to the medical ser-</p><p>vice, while the narrator integrates a paratrooper regiment in southwest</p><p>France before he is posted to commence service in Algeria. In this brief</p><p>prelude to the narrative of Algeria itself, the popular music of Bécaud</p><p>38 Avril Tynan</p><p>performs a paradoxically inflammatory and extinguishing role. For eco-</p><p>nomic and social theorist Jacques Attali, music is a means of establishing</p><p>and maintaining social control through interrelations of economics, tech-</p><p>nology, politics and culture; it is a form of entertainment but a means to</p><p>power (1977/ 1985, 6– 9). The scene of the music concert, a site of (re)pro-</p><p>duction and repetition, is an instrument of power that can silence people</p><p>by “mass- producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring</p><p>all other human noises” (19). According to Attali, spaces of music and</p><p>dancing are little more than “a pretext for … noncommunication, …</p><p>solitude, and … silence” (Attali 1977/ 1985, 118), and</p><p>in places such as</p><p>popular music concerts and night clubs, where music is at its loudest,</p><p>Attali sees an ironic imposition of silence as “the music prevents people</p><p>from speaking – people who in any event do not want to, or cannot,</p><p>speak” (1977/ 1985, 118). In the vociferous repetitions of noise, all other</p><p>dialogue is silenced by the organized monologue of the performer, and</p><p>the words and deeds that Arendt defended in the production of action</p><p>become uniform, repetitious and oblique.</p><p>Of course, music has been shown to have strong connections precisely</p><p>with what Arendt would define as action, setting in motion unstoppable</p><p>and unknown operations (Hintjens and Ubaldo 2019; Pieslak 2015; Fast</p><p>and Pegley 2012; Anderson, Carnagey and Eubanks 2003), but it may</p><p>also be the case that music prevents action by subverting the words and</p><p>deeds necessary for new beginnings. In “Corvée,” Bécaud’s music silences</p><p>the crowd by reducing dialogue to a chorus of repetitions, firstly as the</p><p>audience scream his name when he appears on stage – “Bécaud, Bécaud,</p><p>Bécaud …” – and then throughout the performance as the crowd sing</p><p>along, repeating and echoing the words of their idol (Daeninckx 2003,</p><p>14). Bécaud’s lyrics are themselves reproduced and transcribed on the</p><p>page, generating an acoustic ekphrasis, or noiseless noise, that shows</p><p>nothing but repetition. Finally, the only attempt at spontaneous, dialogic</p><p>communication in this scene – when Bruno Coquatrix, the director of</p><p>the Olympia, appears alongside Bécaud on stage to congratulate him and</p><p>end the concert – is interrupted by the commotion of the audience as</p><p>they attempt to invade the stage (Daeninckx 2003, 14– 15). In all these</p><p>examples, music is the prelude to the disruption of communication, priv-</p><p>ileging repetition and meaningless noise over autonomous discourse.</p><p>In Algeria, repetition of Bécaud’s music again imposes a select silencing</p><p>as the screams of tortured civilians are drowned out by a powerful sound</p><p>system. As in the scene of the concert, this episode contains no direct</p><p>speech but reproduces, through acoustic ekphrasis, refrains of the popular</p><p>track “Quand tu danses” (“When you dance”) (Daeninckx 2003, 48).</p><p>The suppression of human voice by music both during the concert and in</p><p>Algeria demonstrates not so much the ways in which music itself may be</p><p>violent (such as at extreme volumes, Attali 1977/ 1985; Carvalho 2013)</p><p>but rather how it is used to cover up, interrupt or extinguish the words of</p><p>others. This theme is not in itself remarkable; throughout the narrative,</p><p>Violence, Encore! 39</p><p>instances of coverups, counternarratives and censorship are rife. Indeed,</p><p>the narrator’s presence in Algeria was itself a coverup, a way of avoiding</p><p>prison by feigning to volunteer for military service. When he is caught on</p><p>camera murdering an Algerian boy, the narrator kills the American jour-</p><p>nalist who took the photo to eliminate the evidence. These actions are in</p><p>turn covered up by the French army who dispatch him to carry out propa-</p><p>ganda work among the local community. In this capacity, he promotes</p><p>an alternative historical narrative that boasts the accomplishments of the</p><p>French in Algeria and portrays the rebel army as grasshoppers, a destruc-</p><p>tive, exploitative and thankless pest to be exterminated from the popu-</p><p>lation (Daeninckx 2003, 41). When the narrator is returned to France</p><p>in a wheelchair, he accepts a position in the censorship bureau where he</p><p>passes much of his time viewing films or reviewing books to note “les</p><p>scènes litigieuses, les dialogues faussement anodins qui cachaient un</p><p>double sens, les allusions à l’actualité, les atteintes à la dignité de nos</p><p>gouvernants” (“the litigious scenes, dialogues that were falsely benign</p><p>and hid a double sense, allusions to current affairs, attacks on the dig-</p><p>nity of our governing powers”) (Daeninckx 2003, 53). In this capacity,</p><p>he prevents the reprinting of the Marquis de Sade’s Histoire de Juliette</p><p>(Juliette), an explicitly violent text that weaves together sexual pleasure</p><p>and pain. In these examples, music becomes another instrument for the</p><p>silencing of discordant voices and a way of organizing political and social</p><p>masses according to a strict monologic view. As the narrator’s former</p><p>friend Jacques, who is heading up the printing team of de Sade’s Histoire,</p><p>exclaims: “Ce n’est pas ce que vous faites là- bas [en Algérie] qui vous</p><p>gêne … C’est quand on met des mots dessus!” (“It’s not what you are</p><p>doing over there [in Algeria] that bothers you… It’s when you see it in</p><p>writing!”) (Daeninckx 2003, 58). By silencing these narratives of vio-</p><p>lence, the novel shows that memory can fail to elicit action when it is</p><p>denied the tools of speech and expression.</p><p>Facing the Muzak</p><p>The most intriguing imposition of music as a force for silencing comes</p><p>much later, when Bécaud’s lyrics are entangled with memories of the</p><p>violences committed at the concert and in Algeria. In the final paragraph</p><p>of “Corvée,” the narrator presents a summative future past: “Je me suis</p><p>marié, quelques mois après la fin de la guerre. Et j’ai tout effacé. Ça revient</p><p>par bouffées que j’ai appris à maîtriser quand, par moments, Bécaud passe</p><p>à la radio” (“I got married, a few months after the end of the war. And</p><p>I erased everything. It returns in flashes that I’ve learned to control when,</p><p>every now and then, Bécaud plays on the radio”) (Daeninckx 2003, 58).</p><p>Beyond the disturbing composure of the narrator’s postwar return to</p><p>civilian life, this paragraph brings the reader back in a complete circle</p><p>to the beginning of the story and the Bécaud concert at the Olympia.</p><p>In doing so, it emphasizes the repetitive labor of recollection – whether</p><p>40 Avril Tynan</p><p>willed or unwilled – that is both traumatic and trivial. Through the radio,</p><p>this music enables the infiltration of memories into the home, where the</p><p>intimation of violence is domesticated and normalized. Despite the mass</p><p>transmission of music over the airways and the parallels created with an</p><p>everyday knowledge of the atrocities committed in Algeria, the entangle-</p><p>ment of this awareness with popular culture pacifies and suppresses these</p><p>narratives as repetitions and simulacra. Played over the radio, the music –</p><p>and with it the memories of the war – is at once pervasive and radically</p><p>ineffective, producing little more than a repetitive refrain or a background</p><p>sound for everyday living.</p><p>With the subversive intrusion of memory into the home, “Corvée”</p><p>begins to connect popular culture and music to the futility of memory labor.</p><p>In “On Popular Music,” Adorno establishes a critique between “popular”</p><p>and “serious” music that hinges on “the fundamental characteristic of</p><p>popular music: standardization” (1941/ 1998, 197). By standardization</p><p>in popular music versus nonstandardization in serious music – most</p><p>masterfully displayed, in Adorno’s view, in Beethoven’s symphonies and</p><p>sonatas – he argues that popular music conforms to a preestablished code</p><p>that ensures every hit will “lead back to the same familiar experience”</p><p>(1941/ 1998, 198). For Adorno, what he calls popular music is derivative</p><p>and predictable; a popular hit – however unique or free it attempts to be –</p><p>is merely a variation on the theme of another hit, one chorus substitutable</p><p>by any other.9 For the listener, this standardization of popular culture</p><p>means that a piece of music arrives “pre- digested” (Adorno 1941/ 1998,</p><p>201): “The whole is pre- given and pre- accepted, even before the actual</p><p>experience of the music starts” (198). While Adorno’s critique of popular</p><p>music translates poorly beyond the temporal and spatial specificity of</p><p>1930s Germany and has been subsequently resisted in contemporary ana-</p><p>lysis as elitist and dichotomous, overlooking the dynamics of consumer</p><p>and industry (Paddison 1982; DeNora 2003; Hamilton 2007), his theory</p><p>is useful in providing a pivot for notions of familiarity, domestication and</p><p>repetition. As</p><p>Daeninckx’s work suggests, the explicit (re)presentation of</p><p>atrocities in Algeria is not unexpected or unfamiliar: details are widely</p><p>available and frequently circulated. The problem is quite the opposite;</p><p>although the narrative is available, listening is no longer necessary or</p><p>even possible since it has already been heard so many times before; words</p><p>and deeds, if indeed they do find expression, no longer provoke actions.</p><p>In contemporary applications of functional background music, or</p><p>muzak, the instrumental, unobtrusive “easy- listening” music played in</p><p>workplaces, public transport, shops, elevators and on telephones, such</p><p>inattention is privileged to distract from activity and enhance product-</p><p>ivity and well- being (Vanel 2013; Lanza 1994; Jones and Schumacher</p><p>1992; LaBelle 2010, 171– 172). As a socially engineered aesthetic of dis-</p><p>traction, muzak incites a numbness that “[lulls] the listener to inatten-</p><p>tion” (Adorno 1941/ 1998, 206). For Simon C. Jones and Thomas</p><p>G. Schumacher, in their discussion of power and functional music: “By</p><p>Violence, Encore! 41</p><p>encouraging nonreflective, nonintentional listening, and by producing</p><p>low- level cognitive responses, functional music defies traditional notions</p><p>of musical reception, use, and meaning” (1992, 166). Yet, the inattention</p><p>that is both a presupposition and a product of muzak may distract or</p><p>mislead the listener for subversive gains. While historically viewed as a</p><p>contemptuous object of auditory inconsequence – the performative back-</p><p>ground to activity – Hervé Vanel notes that muzak is also a powerful</p><p>weapon for psychological stimulation: “Its pervasiveness is dreaded as a</p><p>powerful ideological tool” (2013, 5). For the American composer Roger</p><p>Reynolds, “Muzak is the single most reprehensible and destructive phe-</p><p>nomenon of Western music” (Peyser 1978, 253).10 In the manipulation</p><p>and deployment of sound as muzak, Vanel and Reynolds point to the</p><p>ways in which it is not innocent or anodyne but often representative of a</p><p>more insidious social agenda.</p><p>This is certainly true of the background music Adorno identified with</p><p>bars and cafés of the 1930s. “The first characteristic of background</p><p>music is that you don’t have to listen to it” (1934/ 2002, 507) he wrote,</p><p>even going so far as to suggest that such music was only evident when</p><p>it suddenly disappeared, replaced by silence (508). Like the sounds of</p><p>muzak that would follow, this background music performed a homogen-</p><p>izing or standardizing role as “a social cement” (Adorno 1941/ 1998,</p><p>206), binding customers together in a shared space. Although Adorno’s</p><p>reflections seem, here again, to speak to the insignificance and incon-</p><p>spicuousness of background music, there is a more subversive ideological</p><p>potential intermingled in the auditory anesthetic. As Vanel has suggested,</p><p>muzak is to be feared precisely because it escapes our attention. For</p><p>Adorno, background music in cafés and bars “seeps into the murmur</p><p>of the conversations” (1934/ 2002, 507), while radio music “serves to</p><p>keep listeners from criticizing social realities; in short, it has a soporific</p><p>effect upon social consciousness” (1945/ 1996, 232). Attali goes further,</p><p>suggesting that background music is “a means of silencing” (1977/ 1985,</p><p>111), not through noise – as he observed in concert halls and night clubs –</p><p>but through neglect. Like Adorno, Attali notes the inconspicuous infiltra-</p><p>tion of music into every aspect of life:</p><p>It has replaced natural background noise, invaded and even annulled</p><p>the noise of machinery. It slips into the growing spaces of activity</p><p>void of meaning and relations, into the organization of our everyday</p><p>life: in all of the world’s hotels, all of the elevators, all of the factories</p><p>and offices, all of the airplanes, all of the cars, everywhere, it signifies</p><p>the presence of a power that needs no flag or symbol.</p><p>(Attali 1977/ 1985, 111)</p><p>As memories seep back into the life of Daeninckx’s narrator and into his</p><p>home, they are – like the innocuous music that carries them – “percep-</p><p>tible but not intrusive” (Peyser 1978, 252). Intertwined with the music of</p><p>42 Avril Tynan</p><p>Bécaud played over the radio, these memories become as unnoticeable,</p><p>even inexistent, as the noise that transmits them, perpetuating inatten-</p><p>tion, ignorance and inaction.</p><p>Interpreting Violence</p><p>In the commercial advent of the radio that saw mass transmission of</p><p>popular culture, Adorno observed what he saw as the degradation of</p><p>music to repetition that was not listened to but rather assimilated by</p><p>the consumer (1945/ 1996, 231; 1941/ 1998, 203– 204). The memories</p><p>that return to the narrator in “Corvée” through Bécaud’s songs on the</p><p>radio are equally corrupted; they are repetitious and inconspicuous,</p><p>concealed within a seemingly inoffensive and unobtrusive musical inter-</p><p>lude. Narratives of the Algerian War, Daeninckx suggests, although (re)</p><p>presented again and again – encore et encore11 – fail to fulfill the duty</p><p>of memory to justice if they are automatically distilled into an anodyne</p><p>acoustic environment that “encourages passive hearing rather than active</p><p>listening” (Peyser 1978, 253). More than this, memory must go beyond</p><p>the functional instrumentalization enacted by work if it is to effect</p><p>genuine change and instigate new possibilities. This discussion has there-</p><p>fore argued that there is a need for some form of memory action that</p><p>not only conjures the past in the present but sets in motion a series of</p><p>unknown, uncertain and unstoppable operations. Certainly, it cannot be</p><p>guaranteed that any sort of action would be necessarily and objectively</p><p>good, since it inheres in the unreliability of the human condition, but it</p><p>would, at the very least, demonstrate a movement that breaks away from</p><p>homogenizing and generalizing discussions of the past. As Arendt writes,</p><p>“One deed, one gesture, one word may suffice to change every constella-</p><p>tion” (1987, 41).</p><p>As this discussion of musak in “Corvée de bois” has shown, simply</p><p>because memories are present and engaged in cultural parlance does not</p><p>inherently mean that they will elicit action. In the interference of recollec-</p><p>tion through music, “Corvée” reveals the potential inertia of individual</p><p>and collective memory when it is forced into the background as the indis-</p><p>tinct murmur of historic violence. Indeed, most telling is the unresolved</p><p>anonymity of the narrator who can never reveal “who” he is if not an</p><p>indistinct and atemporal specter of violent memories. Despite the explicit</p><p>evocation of violent acts, the narrator’s persistent anonymity reveals the</p><p>inaction of memory to give shape to identity if it is not taken up and</p><p>embedded within the narrative spaces of interpretation, rather than item-</p><p>ization. This task, Daeninckx suggests, cannot take place in isolation, but</p><p>necessitates the interconnections and interrelations of multiple others if it</p><p>is to succeed, and it will not only reveal the plurality of violent memories,</p><p>but more importantly and also distressingly the ways in which violence</p><p>enacted in the past shapes our relationships, our worlds and our indi-</p><p>vidual selves today.</p><p>Violence, Encore! 43</p><p>Notes</p><p>1 All translations from French are my own unless otherwise stated.</p><p>2 As leader of En Marche! and presidential candidate in 2017, Macron had</p><p>already staked his candidacy on the “reconciliation of memories” in Franco–</p><p>Algerian relations when he declared the French colonization of Algeria a</p><p>“crime against humanity” (Roger 2017). His comments enflamed political</p><p>opponents from right- wing and extreme- right- wing parties, such as François</p><p>Fillon, then presidential candidate for Les Républicains, who claimed that</p><p>Macron’s comment was little short of a hate crime against his own country.</p><p>See also Le Monde (2017).</p><p>3 The English translation does not allow for such ambiguity, claiming specific-</p><p>ally the author’s preoccupation with “the just allotment of memory” (Ricoeur</p><p>2004, xv,</p><p>emphasis mine).</p><p>4 Criticism of juridical stagnation between France and Algeria, and the inad-</p><p>equacy of the Stora report, builds on Algerian historian Noureddine Amara’s</p><p>presentation at an online discussion event (“Rapport Stora” 2021; see also</p><p>Amara 2021; Jordi and Pervillé 2021; Larkeche 2021; Le Monde 2021).</p><p>5 Euphemisms referring to security operations and enforcement were only offi-</p><p>cially replaced by “war” in 1999.</p><p>6 See Stora (1991). In September 2018, Emmanuel Macron became the first</p><p>president to admit the systematic use of torture during the war.</p><p>7 The trial of Maurice Papon (1997– 1998) played a significant role in this</p><p>revived consideration, particularly turning attention to the October 1961</p><p>massacre in Paris.</p><p>8 Daeninckx is most likely drawing on the events of February 17, 1955, when</p><p>a riot broke out at Bécaud’s concert at the Olympia (La Presse 2001, C3).</p><p>9 Jacques Attali makes a similar point when he argues against the “banalization</p><p>of the message” in popular music and rock (1977/ 1985, 109).</p><p>10 Reynolds’ comments are aimed at the Muzak Corporation, a company pro-</p><p>ducing ambient music for various situations. However, Muzak and muzak</p><p>are often used as synonyms, and his comments are here applicable both to the</p><p>company and to the product.</p><p>11 In live music events, the encore is often perceived as spontaneous but has</p><p>become increasingly ritualized as part of the structure of performance</p><p>(Webster 2012).</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Adorno, Theodor W. 1934/ 2002. “Music in the Background.” In Essays on</p><p>Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard</p><p>Leppert, new translations by Susan Gillespie, 506– 512. Berkeley: University</p><p>of California Press.</p><p>Adorno, Theodor W. 1941/ 1998. “On Popular Music.” In Cultural Theory</p><p>and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, 197– 209. Athens:</p><p>University of Georgia Press.</p><p>Adorno, Theodor W. 1945/ 1996. “A Social Critique of Radio Music.” Kenyon</p><p>Review New Series 18 (3– 4): 229– 235.</p><p>Allen, Matthew J. 2014. 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Chicago and London:</p><p>University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Arendt, Hannah. 1987. “Labor, Work, Action.” In Amor Mundi: Explorations</p><p>in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, edited by S. J. James and</p><p>W.Bernauer, 29– 42. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.</p><p>Attali, Jacques. 1977/ 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, translated by</p><p>Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.</p><p>Booth, James W. 2008. “The Work of Memory: Time, Identity, and Justice.”</p><p>Social Research 75 (1): 237– 262.</p><p>Carvalho, John M. 2013. “‘Strange Fruit’: Music between Violence and Death.”</p><p>Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (1): 111– 119.</p><p>Clough, Patricia T. 2008. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and</p><p>Bodies.” Theory, Culture and Society 25 (1): 1– 22.</p><p>Daeninckx, Didier. 2003. Ceinture rouge, précédé de Corvée de bois. Paris:</p><p>Gallimard.</p><p>DeNora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge:</p><p>Cambridge University Press.</p><p>Fast, Susan, and Kip Pegley. 2012. Music, Politics, and Violence. Middletown:</p><p>Wesleyan University Press.</p><p>Gorrara, Claire. 2003. The Roman Noir in Post- War French Culture. Oxford:</p><p>Oxford University Press.</p><p>Hamilton, Andy. 2007. Aesthetics and Music. London and New York: Continuum.</p><p>Hintjens, Helen, and Rafiki Ubaldo. 2019. “Music, Violence, and Peace-</p><p>Building.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 31: 279– 288.</p><p>Jones, Simon C., and Thomas G. Schumacher. 1992. “Muzak: On Functional</p><p>Music and Power.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9: 156– 169.</p><p>Jordi, Jean- Jacques, and Guy Pervillé. 2021. “Analyse critique du rapport</p><p>de Benjamin Stora.” February 17. http:// guy.pervi lle.free.fr/ spip/ arti cle.</p><p>php3?id_ arti cle= 460. Accessed June 8, 2021.</p><p>Kuhn, Annette. 1995/ 2002. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination.</p><p>London and New York: Verso.</p><p>LaBelle, Brandon. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life.</p><p>New York: Continuum.</p><p>Lanza, Joseph. 1994. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-</p><p>Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: St Martin’s Press.</p><p>La Presse. 2001. “Disparition d’un des deux derniers monstres sacrés de l’après-</p><p>guerre.” December 19. https:// numeri que.banq.qc.ca/ pat rimo ine/ deta ils/</p><p>52327/ 2216 419. Accessed June 18, 2021.</p><p>Violence, Encore! 45</p><p>Larkeche, Seddik. 2021. “Rapport Stora: le monde fantasmé de Benjamin Stora.”</p><p>TSA Algérie, January 31. www.tsa- alge rie.com/ rapp ort- stora- le- monde- fanta</p><p>sme- de- benja min- stora/ . Accessed October 18, 2021.</p><p>Le Monde. 2017. “En Algérie, Macron qualifie la colonisation de ‘crime contre</p><p>l’humanité’, tollé à droite.” February 15. www.lemo nde.fr/ elect ion- pre side</p><p>ntie lle- 2017/ arti cle/ 2017/ 02/ 15/ mac ron- quali fie- la- colon isat ion- de- crime- con</p><p>tre- l- human ite- tolle- a- dro ite- et- au- front- natio nal_ 5080 331_ 4854 003.html.</p><p>Accessed June 8, 2021.</p><p>Le Monde. 2021. “Pour Alger, c’est comme si le rapport Stora sur la réconciliation</p><p>des mémoires entre la France et l’Algérie ‘n’existait pas’.” March 24. www.</p><p>lemo nde.fr/ afri que/ arti cle/ 2021/ 03/ 24/ fra nce- alge rie- pour- alger- c- est- comme-</p><p>si- le- rapp ort- stora- n- exist ait- pas_ 6 0742 66_ 3 212.html. Accessed June 8, 2021.</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics,</p><p>History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p><p>Paddison, Max. 1982. “The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music.”</p><p>Popular Music 2: 201– 218.</p><p>Peyser, Joan. 1978. “Commentary: ‘The Phonograph and Our Musical Life.’”</p><p>Musical Quarterly 64 (2): 250– 254.</p><p>Pieslak, Jonathan. 2015. Radicalism and Music: An Introduction to the Music</p><p>Cultures of al- Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian- Affiliated Radicals, and</p><p>Eco- Animal Rights Militants. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.</p><p>“Rapport Stora: Quels impératifs éthiques pour l’histoire?” 2021. Discussion</p><p>organized by the Centre d’études françaises at Cornell University, April 9.</p><p>Reid, Donald. 2010. “Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History.” South Central</p><p>Review 27 (1– 2): 39– 60.</p><p>Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil.</p><p>Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey</p><p>and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Roger, Patrick. 2017. “Colonisation: Les propos inédits de Macron font</p><p>polémique.” Le Monde, February 16. www.lemo nde.fr/ elect ion- pre side ntie lle-</p><p>2017/ arti cle/ 2017/ 02/ 16/ pour- mac ron- la- colon isat ion- fut- un- crime- con tre- l-</p><p>human ite_ 5080 621_ 4854 003.html. Accessed June 8, 2021.</p><p>Stora, Benjamin. 1991. La Gangrène et l’oubli. Paris: La Découverte.</p><p>Stora, Benjamin. 2021. “Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation</p><p>et la guerre d’Algérie.” Vie publique, January 20. www.vie- publi que.fr/ rapp</p><p>ort/ 278 186- rapp ort- stora- memo ire- sur- la- colon isat ion- et- la- gue rre- dalge rie.</p><p>Accessed June 8, 2021.</p><p>Vanel, Hervé. 2013. Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-</p><p>Plus.</p><p>Urbana and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.</p><p>Webster, Emma. 2012. “‘One More Tune!’ The Encore Ritual in Live Music</p><p>Events.” Popular Music and Society 35 (1): 93– 111.</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-5</p><p>3 Rethinking Planetarity in the</p><p>Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence</p><p>The Strangler Vine and “Thugs” in</p><p>America</p><p>Amrita Ghosh</p><p>This chapter focuses on two distinct discourses of violence and textuality</p><p>that have larger consequences for how we imagine structures of power,</p><p>race and citizenship. To this end, I examine Miranda Carter’s adventure</p><p>novel and historical thriller The Strangler Vine (2015), set in 1840s colo-</p><p>nial India. The novel revisits the history of Thugs through the heroic</p><p>narrative of the historical figure of William Sleeman, “the slayer of</p><p>Thugs” in the British Empire. In the same year the novel was published,</p><p>the word Thug emerges dominantly in American political imagination.</p><p>President Obama used the term during his speech on the Baltimore riots</p><p>(April 2015), and President Trump uses it again in 2020 to represent the</p><p>race riots occurring in the United States after the murder of George Floyd.</p><p>I juxtapose the novel with this concurrent emergence and inclusion of</p><p>the “Thug” in American political memory to showcase how the slippage</p><p>of the term confirms a concatenation of political, (neo)colonial violence</p><p>that constructs a certain historical legacy of criminality and ultimately</p><p>seeps into a normalized racial discourse in contemporary America. The</p><p>Strangler Vine, thus, raises important questions on the notion of colonial</p><p>violence to show how power and discourse are updated in asymmetrical</p><p>planetary intersections and contexts that have dangerous reverberations</p><p>at the present time.</p><p>Carter’s novel begins as a Kiplingesque adventure with the central</p><p>characters, William Avery and Jeremiah Blake, employed by the British</p><p>Raj, pursuing the missing poet Xavier Mountstuart who was kidnapped</p><p>by Thugs in the heart of colonial India. On the surface, the novel seems</p><p>to deconstruct the usual colonial adventure text and to question the dom-</p><p>inant colonial discourse, which associates Thugs with a narrative of mon-</p><p>strous criminality. Using the metaphor of the “strangler vines,” Carter</p><p>revises the idea of the Thugs in nineteenth- century India; however, as the</p><p>essay argues, the novel presents an aporia that poses serious questions</p><p>for the decolonial narrative it aims at, which ultimately points to larger</p><p>ramifications of epistemic violence in the present time.</p><p>Cut to May 2020, the brutal murder of George Floyd by the</p><p>Minneapolis police in the United States led to nationwide protests and</p><p>outrage among people. Cities were under curfew, and the National Guard</p><p>Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence 47</p><p>was deployed in various states to mitigate the riot- like conditions on the</p><p>streets. The New York Times (Lai, Marsh and Singvi 2020) reported</p><p>widespread arrests of protestors and the use of teargas and rubber bullets</p><p>to disperse the crowds. Philip V. McHarris described the protests and</p><p>violence as a “rebellion against an unjust system” after Floyd’s death</p><p>was determined to be a homicide by the medical examiners. As tension</p><p>escalated, President Trump tweeted in late May 2020 about the protestors:</p><p>“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd,” followed</p><p>by “When looting starts, shooting starts” (Twitter, May 29, 2020). Soon</p><p>after, in August 2020, Trump gave his presidential nomination acceptance</p><p>speech to the Republican National Convention and once again called the</p><p>protestors “Thugs” – as he stated, “Those weren’t friendly protestors.</p><p>They were thugs” (Reuters 2020). Interestingly, this was certainly not</p><p>the first time the term “Thugs” was used in American political imagin-</p><p>ation. In the American history of racial brutality by police, the word</p><p>has casually emerged often, denoting criminality. In April 2015, civic</p><p>unrest rocked the nation after the 25- year- old Black American man from</p><p>Baltimore, Freddie Gray, went into a coma and died from the injuries</p><p>inflicted by the police. Reports say violence continued in the streets of</p><p>Baltimore; over 300 businesses were damaged, and fires broke out in</p><p>buildings and vehicles. President Obama, at the time, used the same rhet-</p><p>oric later used by Trump, calling the rioters “criminals and Thugs who</p><p>tore up the place” (qtd. in Henderson 2015).</p><p>The word Thug comes from the Sanskrit origin “Thag,” which means</p><p>a deceiver or con person. Later, the term gains a colonial signification</p><p>within British imagination from the nineteenth- century Thugee culture,</p><p>or bandits who were known to kill people on the roads. The discourse</p><p>on Thugs is not without complexities and exists alongside a debate in</p><p>postcolonial scholarship that ties a novel like The Strangler Vine with</p><p>the reemergence of the term in US politics. Thus, I suggest that colo-</p><p>nial violence represented in the novel is tangled with the asymmetrical</p><p>planetary relations leading to present- day America and acts within the</p><p>larger “social field of violence” (using Daniel Neep’s phrase; 2012, 2) that</p><p>recreates itself in the normative imagination. I connect Carter’s novel to</p><p>concerns of the present times to show how colonial legacies of violence</p><p>link to present conditions of Black criminalization as well as construct</p><p>a national imaginary of exclusion and inclusion in India that has a long</p><p>complex history. The intersection of these two seemingly unrelated his-</p><p>tories reveals the structures of (neo)colonial violence that relates “Thugs”</p><p>to a larger continuum, now symbolizing Black men and justifying incar-</p><p>ceration within the United States, as well as forming a casteist social hier-</p><p>archy within Indian history.</p><p>A note on asymmetrical planetarity and how this essay uses the phrase:</p><p>In “The Planetary Condition,” Amy Elias and Christian Moraru (2015)</p><p>define the term planetary as “a new structure of awareness.” According</p><p>to them, “planetariness is a fast expanding series of cultural formations”</p><p>48 Amrita Ghosh</p><p>that is defined by “relationality.” They define this planetarity as having</p><p>“a thrust towards coming together and the vision being ethical.” Thus,</p><p>planetarity means to rethink our relations with each other, to think of</p><p>“the planet as a living organism, as a shared ecology” (xi). Elias and</p><p>Moraru also state that Gayatri Spivak coined the word to mean a kind</p><p>of “collective responsibility to reimagine the planet” and to rethink the</p><p>“subject as planetary.” In another definition, Jennifer Gabrys (2018)</p><p>defines the concept of the planetary as “a way to figure, de- figure, and re-</p><p>figure collective responsibility to the other in postcolonial and decolonial</p><p>circumstances.” I take these understandings of planetarity and probe</p><p>the notion of “asymmetrical planetary” to rethink how relationality</p><p>can problematically trickle into vast formations of neocolonial violence</p><p>that have grave implications for unequal belongings within a national</p><p>imaginary. So, I am emphasizing the phrase “asymmetrical planetarity”</p><p>to show complications within the planetary itself.</p><p>Political scientist Daniel Neep (2012) discusses the “micro- practices”</p><p>of colonial violence that continue to act as “workings of power that</p><p>tend to be overlooked” (2). In the context of tracing the French colo-</p><p>nial regime over Syria, Neep suggests these “micro- practices” have sig-</p><p>nificant impacts on space, time and meaning (2– 3). In Carter’s novel,</p><p>the text presents such “micro- practices” of symbolic violence and</p><p>portrays critical erasures of native subjects. Using a mélange of historical</p><p>(famous, nondescript) and some fictionalized characters, Carter builds a</p><p>narrative through an unreliable narrator William Avery, lieutenant in the</p><p>British colonial system, posted in Calcutta. Avery’s encounter with India</p><p>is initially replete with stereotypical orientalized discourses</p><p>032- 43844- 3 (pbk)</p><p>ISBN: 978- 1- 003- 18800- 1 (ebk)</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003188001</p><p>Typeset in Sabon</p><p>by Newgen Publishing UK</p><p>Contents</p><p>List of Contributors ix</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations:</p><p>Introduction 1</p><p>CASSANDRA FALKE, VICTORIA FARELD AND HANNA MERETOJA</p><p>PART I</p><p>Representing Violence, Violent Representations 15</p><p>1 Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian</p><p>Discourse 17</p><p>CASSANDRA FALKE</p><p>2 Violence, Encore! Popular Music, Power and Postwar</p><p>Memory 32</p><p>AVRIL TYNAN</p><p>3 Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial</p><p>Violence: The Strangler Vine and “Thugs” in America 46</p><p>AMRITA GHOSH</p><p>4 Variants and Consequences of Violence in Iris</p><p>Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine 59</p><p>JAKOB LOTHE</p><p>5 Violent Appetites: Distaste and the Aesthetics</p><p>of Violence 72</p><p>TERO ELJAS VANHANEN</p><p>viii Contents</p><p>PART II</p><p>Understanding the Violence of Perpetrators 87</p><p>6 A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 89</p><p>BRIAN SCHIFF AND MICHAEL JUSTICE</p><p>7 Narrative Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-</p><p>Authored Documents: Interpreting Closure in</p><p>TheStroop Report 104</p><p>ERIN MCGLOTHLIN</p><p>8 Space of Murder, Space of Freedom: The Forest as a</p><p>Posttraumatic Landscape in Holocaust Narratives 119</p><p>HELENA DUFFY</p><p>PART III</p><p>Articulating Inherent Violence 135</p><p>9 Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence: The</p><p>Problem of Narrative in Karl Ove Knausgård’s</p><p>MyStruggle 137</p><p>HANNA MERETOJA</p><p>10 Reading Violence, Violent Reading: Levinas and</p><p>Hermeneutics 154</p><p>COLIN DAVIS</p><p>11 Style and the Violence of Passivity in Samuel Beckett’s</p><p>How It Is 167</p><p>AMANDA DENNIS</p><p>12 Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence 179</p><p>VICTORIA FARELD</p><p>Index 192</p><p>Contributors</p><p>Colin Davis is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature</p><p>at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously held posts</p><p>at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Warwick in the UK.</p><p>His books include Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in</p><p>Twentieth- Century French Writing (2018), The Routledge Companion</p><p>to Literature and Trauma (coedited with Hanna Meretoja, 2020) and</p><p>Silent Renoir: Philosophy and the Interpretation of Early Film (2021).</p><p>Amanda Dennis is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at</p><p>The American University of Paris, France. Her book, Beckett and</p><p>Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency (2021), explores how the physical</p><p>body’s integration within its natural and built environments suggests</p><p>alternative possibilities for agency. Her articles have appeared in the</p><p>Journal of Modern Literature and the Journal of Beckett Studies,</p><p>among other places, and she recently coedited a journal special issue,</p><p>“Beckett and the Non- Human” (2020). She is also the author of the</p><p>novel Her Here (2021).</p><p>Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is Professor of French</p><p>at the University of Wrocław in Poland and Fernandes Fellow at</p><p>the University of Warwick (UK). She has also lectured French lan-</p><p>guage and literature at the University of Queensland (Australia), the</p><p>Université Blaise- Pascal (France), the University of Turku (Finland)</p><p>and Royal Holloway (UK) where she held the prestigious Marie</p><p>Skłodowska- Curie Fellowship. Her research interests lie with con-</p><p>temporary French literature, with a particular focus on Holocaust</p><p>fiction. She is the author of two monographs and many journal articles</p><p>and essays, which have been published in Holocaust Studies, French</p><p>Studies, French Forum and Forum for Modern Language Studies. Her</p><p>latest book, The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction: Aesthetics,</p><p>Politics, Ethics, was published in 2022 by Legenda.</p><p>Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at UiT – The Arctic</p><p>University of Norway. She is the author of three books and the</p><p>editor/ coeditor of three others: Intersections in Christianity and</p><p>x List of Contributors</p><p>Critical Theory (ed., 2010), Literature by the Working Class: English</p><p>Autobiography, 1820– 1848 (2013), The Phenomenology of Love and</p><p>Reading (2016), Phenomenology of the Broken Body (coed., 2019),</p><p>Wild Romanticism (coed., 2020) and Global Human Rights Fiction</p><p>(forthcoming). She is the president of the American Studies Association</p><p>of Norway and leads both the English literature section at UiT and the</p><p>Interdisciplinary Phenomenology research group.</p><p>Victoria Fareld is Associate Professor of Intellectual History at</p><p>Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses mainly on polit-</p><p>ical philosophy, theory of history and memory studies, with particular</p><p>interests in the connections between time, ethics, memory and histor-</p><p>ical justice. Her most recent book is From Marx to Hegel and Back:</p><p>Capitalism, Critique, and Utopia (coed., 2020). Among her recent art-</p><p>icles and book chapters are “Time” (Routledge, 2022), “Framing the</p><p>Polychronic Present” (Bloomsbury, 2022), “Entangled Memories of</p><p>Violence” (Memory Studies, 14:1, 2021), “Coming to Terms with the</p><p>Present” (Bloomsbury, 2019), “History, Justice and the Time of the</p><p>Imprescriptible” (Berghahn Books, 2018).</p><p>Amrita Ghosh is an assistant professor of South Asian literatures in</p><p>the English Department at University of Central Florida, USA. She</p><p>has previously worked as a postdoc and research fellow in Sweden’s</p><p>SASNET at Lund university and Linnaeus University. Her recent</p><p>coedited collection, Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re- envisioning,</p><p>was published with Brill in 2022, and she is working on a monograph</p><p>on literatures from and on Kashmir.</p><p>Michael Justice earned his Bachelor of Arts with honors in Psychology</p><p>at The American University of Paris, France. During his time at The</p><p>American University of Paris, he collaborated on research projects</p><p>with Brian Schiff on the psychology of pro- environmentalism and</p><p>perpetrators of mass shootings. He was also a fellow of The George</p><p>and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights</p><p>and Conflict Prevention.</p><p>Jakob Lothe is Professor of English Literature at the University of</p><p>Oslo, Norway. Lothe’s books include Conrad’s Narrative Method</p><p>(1989), Narrative in Fiction and Film (2000), Joseph Conrad (2003),</p><p>Litteraturvitenskapelig leksikon (with Christian Refsum and Unni</p><p>Solberg, second ed., 2007), Titanic (with Per Kristian Sebak, 2012) and</p><p>Etikk i litteratur og film (2016). The author of numerous essays and</p><p>reviews, he has edited/ coedited many books, including four volumes in</p><p>the series “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” published by Ohio</p><p>State University Press. He is also the editor of The Future of Literary</p><p>Studies (2017), Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust</p><p>(2017) and Research and Human Rights (2020).</p><p>List of Contributors xi</p><p>Erin McGlothlin is Professor of German and Jewish Studies and Vice</p><p>Dean of Undergraduate Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis,</p><p>USA. She is the author of Second- Generation Holocaust Literature:</p><p>Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (2006) and The Mind of the</p><p>Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021) and coeditor</p><p>of After the Digital Divide? German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of</p><p>New Digital Media (2009, with Lutz Koepnick), Persistent Legacy:</p><p>The Holocaust and German Studies (2016, with Jennifer Kapczynski)</p><p>and The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and</p><p>Its Outtakes (2020, with Brad Prager and Markus Zisselsberger).</p><p>Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director</p><p>of SELMA Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and</p><p>Memory at the University of Turku, Finland, and Principal Investigator</p><p>in the Academy of Finland research consortium “Instrumental</p><p>Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story- Critical Narrative</p><p>Theory” (2018– 2023). Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative</p><p>studies, cultural memory studies and trauma studies. Her monographs</p><p>include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History,</p><p>and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Narrative</p><p>Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan,</p><p>of “dirty,”</p><p>“uncivilized” natives needing colonial order. The initial sections of the</p><p>novel fit the genre of any colonial adventure novel, built on the model</p><p>of adventure series by Kipling, or popular colonial adventure works by</p><p>George A. Henty, such as In Freedom’s Cause (1885) and The Dragon</p><p>and the Raven (1886). Kipling’s colonial adventure texts, of course,</p><p>become a focal point in their complexity and representation of colonial</p><p>life in India, whereas Henty’s works are more direct in their justification</p><p>of the Empire.</p><p>The Strangler Vine, too, initially falls into the usual conventions of</p><p>tone, rhetoric and imperial production in service of the Company. The</p><p>novel officially begins in 1837, Calcutta, at a time when colonialism in the</p><p>Indian subcontinent was at its zenith. Calcutta and its surrounding areas</p><p>are described in a typical colonial narrative with associations of “disease</p><p>lurk[ing] in its miasma” (Carter 2015, 4) and “infernal heat” (3), making</p><p>it unbearable for the Company people residing in the “Whitetown” part</p><p>of the city. William Avery’s memory of England is set starkly against this</p><p>diseased tropical Calcutta with heat, mud and dust, as he remembers</p><p>the England he left behind with, “summer heat that was never excessive,</p><p>snow on the moors, the soft grass of the hay meadows” (Carter 2015,</p><p>34). Even Jeremiah Blake, the mysterious Company man who had “gone</p><p>Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence 49</p><p>native” and been entrusted to find poet Xavier Mountstuart is assumed to</p><p>have “gone astray” with radical views against the British Raj. Avery and</p><p>Blake embark on their journey from Calcutta, under the machinations</p><p>of the Company, on an espionage mission to find Mountstuart, who</p><p>has stumbled upon some secrets on the Thugee that could destroy the</p><p>Company’s image. During this journey, Avery’s imperial point of view</p><p>collapses, especially in the second half of the text. Avery, the dutiful</p><p>Company man, who believes “whatever happened I would do my duty”</p><p>(62), who despises everything Blake stands for with his “Hindoostaane”</p><p>language and “native” ways, and who believes that the Empire stands</p><p>for “peace, order, roads and trade to all” (71), begins to dismantle his</p><p>colonizer’s self slowly by questioning the colonial technologies of violence</p><p>dominating the lives of the native people. As Blake challenges William</p><p>Sleeman’s ideas of imperial control and order into the Thugee world,</p><p>Avery for the first time experiences his “head is full of contradictions”</p><p>about the British empire (173). Avery’s self- fragmentation has begun and</p><p>the novel has exploded into questioning structures of colonial violence</p><p>and what the metaphor of the “strangler vines” really means.</p><p>The first time the novel’s title and its literal meaning are introduced is in</p><p>the novel’s second part when Blake, Avery and their native collaborators</p><p>reach Jubbalpore, within the heartland of India, where Thugs originate</p><p>from. Blake describes the place:</p><p>The heat was oppressive and we passed thicket upon thicket in which</p><p>the trees had been encircled by other sinisterly twisting gray trunks.</p><p>‘It is as if one would squeeze the life out of another, and then another,</p><p>and then another,’ I said aloud.</p><p>(Carter 2015, 102)</p><p>In his inquiry to Blake, he learns for the first time that they are called</p><p>“strangler vines” slowly squeezing the life breath out of trees in repeti-</p><p>tion. The chapter ends there with the group entering Jubbalpore, the Thug</p><p>world, managed by the very capable Sleeman and his Company men.</p><p>From this stage of the text, Avery’s narrative is a deconstructed colonial</p><p>adventure novel that demystifies everything one assumes about facilitators</p><p>of the Empire and the dangerous Thugee violence in nineteenth- century</p><p>India. The latter parts of the novel present Avery, Blake and Mir Aziz, the</p><p>Company’s secret informer, leaving the Company territory into Doora,</p><p>King Rao Viswanath’s region, further into the search for Mountstuart.</p><p>They ultimately get ambushed and kidnapped by Thugs and find</p><p>Mountstuart “living with them” (258). It is in this section of the novel</p><p>that Mountstuart makes the claim, “There is no such thing as Thugee”</p><p>(261). Mountstuart, himself, a secret Company espionage man who was</p><p>appointed by London to find out about the rumors and misdemeanors</p><p>of the Empire, announces that “Thuggee exists only in the mind and</p><p>writings of Major William Sleeman.” There is no secret fellowship of</p><p>50 Amrita Ghosh</p><p>Thugs that acts across Hind. “There is no Thug language. There is no</p><p>common method of killing. There is no Thuggee cult of Kali” (261). It is,</p><p>hence, revealed that the whole Thuggee department constructed by the</p><p>Empire is, in fact, a concoction based on a lie.</p><p>It is important to note that within postcolonial discourses there is a</p><p>huge scholarly debate on the Thugee and whether they really existed.</p><p>Subramaniam Shankar (2013) traces the origins of the concept of</p><p>“Thugee” and compares it with the standard dictionary meaning. As</p><p>Shankar states, in the Oxford English Dictionary “the commonly used</p><p>word, thug, means … a cutthroat, ruffian, rough. It is a word with</p><p>common associations of criminality, violence and loutishness” (98).</p><p>Shankar traces the origins of the word and argues that before the English</p><p>dictionary’s common association of criminal activity with Thug, the word</p><p>“had a more adventurous history originating in nineteenth- century colo-</p><p>nial India, in a discourse inaugurated by an East India Company official,</p><p>named William Henry Sleeman” (98). Tracing the etymology and signifi-</p><p>cation of the word, Shankar also points out that</p><p>the discourse on thugs … played a key role in defining the shape of</p><p>British power in colonial India. As the OED indicates, thug entered</p><p>the English language in India in the early nineteenth century from</p><p>Hindi, where the word meant, “a cheat, a swindler” …. In the OED,</p><p>the entry after thug is for the related word thuggee, whose meaning</p><p>is given as “[t] he system of robbery and murder practiced by the</p><p>Thugs.” “With Capital T,” the OED notes, the word indicates “[o]ne</p><p>of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India who</p><p>strangled their victims; a p’hansigar.” Thuggee and thug, entered the</p><p>English language, then, as identifications of a monstrous and criminal</p><p>“system” and of those who were members of it. … Thuggee, then, is</p><p>the name given to the activities of certain robbers called Thugs.</p><p>(99)</p><p>Shankar, however, articulates his suspicions about the discourse on</p><p>Thugs from colonial India, as he points to a “growing doubt” (2013, 99),</p><p>whether Thuggee, “defined as a specific, ritualized, and gruesome form</p><p>of criminal activity” (99), existed at all, much like the doubt posed in</p><p>Carter’s novel. This is because the word’s association, from the dictionary</p><p>definition, with gruesomeness or ritualized killing and its larger discourse</p><p>were created by the British (99). What then becomes of this “Thuggee”</p><p>association, as Shankar argues, is “not a criminal practice, but a discur-</p><p>sive colonialist construction of criminal behavior in nineteenth century</p><p>India” (99). The Strangler Vine even adds an “afterword” to the text, in</p><p>which it mentions that the Thuggee department “made Sleeman’s career”</p><p>(Carter 2015, 358) and confirmed his status as “very effective public</p><p>administrator” (358) in the Company. Carter goes on to state, “It seems</p><p>Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence 51</p><p>likely that ‘Thuggee’ emerged from an amalgam of stories, colonial fears,</p><p>moral panic and Sleeman’s own dark imaginings” (359).</p><p>In a more recent study of Thugs and colonial imagination in the</p><p>Indian context, Sagnik Bhattacharya (2020) asks “how can we explain</p><p>the sudden appearance of thugs in the colonial archive in the 1830s</p><p>and the disproportionate interest of the administration in eradicating</p><p>them?” (1). Bhattacharya makes an incisive case that explains how the</p><p>creation of Thugs</p><p>by the colonial state has wider consequences on the</p><p>present postcolonial nation- state and citizenship. This is crucial because</p><p>it also shows planetary concurrences with the present American polit-</p><p>ical imaginary regarding Thugs and how a certain exclusionary politics</p><p>plays out in the Indo- American intersections of the term. According to</p><p>him, the “discovery” of Thugs in the way known to the British colo-</p><p>nial regime had far- reaching implications in “othering tribal and anomic</p><p>populations in the new Weberian state that the colonial and postcolonial</p><p>regimes envisioned to establish” (1). This is of particular significance not</p><p>only for texts like The Strangler Vine that set out to modify the colonial</p><p>discourse and the mystification of Thugs, but also in its larger planetary</p><p>relations to present- day politics of the nation- state and its inherent vio-</p><p>lence toward marginalized people, including tribal people and nomads.</p><p>For Bhattacharya, such a discourse reveals “flaws in the epistemic frame-</p><p>work that gave rise to it” (2), another form of colonial, epistemic violence</p><p>that has serious implications on the present.</p><p>Similar to Shankar, Bhattacharya (2020) also points to a faulty colo-</p><p>nial epistemology that constructed a certain framework for Thugs as</p><p>monsters. His study particularly focuses on problems in discursively</p><p>explaining Thugs with the lack of knowledge – which, he emphasizes,</p><p>“often result[ed] in the ethnogenesis of new ‘tribes’ and ‘nations’ in</p><p>regions, which lacked them completely” (5). Thugs came from both</p><p>Hindu and Muslim backdrops, and the British colonial “cataloguing”</p><p>under caste or religion was problematic (5). Bhattacharya also focuses</p><p>on the marginal spaces that the Thugs inhabited and came from. From</p><p>the perspective of colonial India, Thugs originated from beyond the</p><p>control of “Company or their collaborators.” Rather, they were from</p><p>forests, highways and their “position was beyond the epistemic reach</p><p>of the empire” (5). These areas were ruled by “tribal, nomadic or local</p><p>chiefs” and were not easy areas to rule even in precolonial times (Luiz</p><p>qtd. in Bhattacharya 2020, 6). Thus, if we understand the necessity of</p><p>the thuggee discourse as a justification of colonialism that posed as law</p><p>and order through the structured establishment of the Thuggee depart-</p><p>ment, the violence the colonial state needed for the “monstrous Thugs”</p><p>to be erased from thecolonial state tells a larger story of who that vio-</p><p>lence was wreaked on. Bhattacharya also remarks, “The colonial state, in</p><p>suppressing the thug was essentially trying to establish itself by monopol-</p><p>izing forms of organized violence in Weberian tradition” (6).</p><p>52 Amrita Ghosh</p><p>This same structure of violence seeps into the symbolic use of Thugs</p><p>in American political frame. The word Thug first entered American lingo</p><p>in1852 with a New York Times article titled “The Thugs of New York,”in</p><p>which the scary Indian Thugs were compared to the “rowdies of New York”</p><p>(Kutner 2015). Max Kutner traces the etymology of the word in Western</p><p>and specifically American culture and claims that Mark Twain’s trav-</p><p>elogue on Indian Thugs, Following the Equator in 1897, bolstered the</p><p>popular imagination on Thugees. A century later, American pop culture</p><p>and entertainment included Thugs in the now- famous Indiana Jones and</p><p>the Temple of Doom film, in which Thugs were represented as terrifying</p><p>specimens wrapped in orientalist and exotic fare. Later, the war on terror</p><p>mobilized the word as President Bush used the term to refer to insurgents</p><p>in Iraq (Wagner qtd. in Kutner 2015). Kutner also reminds us that the</p><p>word’s inclusion in hip- hop culture occurred with Tupac Shakur’s pro-</p><p>moting his famous phrase “Thug life,” which came to be associated with</p><p>transformation from “signifying disgust, rebellion to coolness and power</p><p>…. The label was attached to black and brown people, impoverished</p><p>people, living in urban communities, regardless of their behavior” (Jeffries</p><p>qtd. in Kutner 2015). Michael Jeffries also connects the dots and explains</p><p>that “it’s not a coincidence that the rise of this word in public sphere</p><p>coincided with the uptick in the punishment and hyperincarceration</p><p>of black and brown people living in late 20th century urban America”</p><p>(qtd. in Kutner 2015). Elsewhere, Shari Stone- Mediatore (2019), in her</p><p>work on American incarceration and state- organized violence, makes the</p><p>argument that underlying the “social imaginary of criminal- justice” lie</p><p>underpinnings of colonial violence (542). She calls this a “recurring colo-</p><p>nialist patterns of state- violence- disguised- as- righteousness” (543). Stone-</p><p>Mediatore’s work focuses on the state technologies of violence perpetrated</p><p>on incarcerated individuals in the United States, but what is significant in</p><p>her argument here is that she connects present political and socio- justice</p><p>discourse back to a colonial machinery.</p><p>The idea of “Thugs” carries a vision of criminality that projects bar-</p><p>baric natives and rioting Black youth needing corrective measures. It is</p><p>the same kind of colonial violence that enables a rhetoric of “Thugees” –</p><p>marginalized, othered people who need to be folded into under a colonial</p><p>“civilized order” of justice, a process that ironically reveals the torture</p><p>and violence that the state is based on. This is something Stone- Mediatore</p><p>(2019) characterizes as “an imaginary of righteous violence” (544), a</p><p>social imaginary that sustains a “transmitted myth of certain social iden-</p><p>tities” (544). In “Reflections on Violence, Law and Humanitarianism,”</p><p>Talal Asad (2015) also makes a similar point in explaining a certain kind</p><p>of colonial violence that the nation- state requires in order to sanction state</p><p>technologies of violence. Asad’s work is based on the post- 9/ 11 world and</p><p>the neocolonial mechanisms of warfare and violence. Yet, his argument</p><p>is particularly germane here, as he questions any easy understandings of</p><p>moral standards and benevolence of the modern nation- state. Asad states:</p><p>Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence 53</p><p>What the modern world has inherited from the Enlightenment is not</p><p>simply the moral standard that universal suffering should be reduced</p><p>but a complex genealogy that is partly older than the eighteenth cen-</p><p>tury in which compassion and benevolence are intertwined with vio-</p><p>lence and cruelty, an intertwining that is not merely a co- existence of</p><p>the two but a mutual dependence of each on the other.</p><p>In other words, Asad is offering a different lens to understand the nation-</p><p>state that uses violence “in paradoxical ways” in the way it is written into</p><p>its law and morality.</p><p>Asad emphasizes the form of colonial violence intrinsic to a notion of</p><p>humanitarianism that developed during the peak era of European coloni-</p><p>alism and still trickles down into varied forms of violence built into the</p><p>notion of imagining the human based on difference. Columnist Jeffrey</p><p>Barg (2019), who is interested in the way language and rhetoric shapes</p><p>the world around us, writes that the word Thug “has had a checkered</p><p>history but it always held a patina of otherness.” Barg also explains that</p><p>“labeling people as Thugs is about painting them as savage, animalistic,</p><p>unable to be tamed – and therefore subject to retributive violence.” This</p><p>is “violence that can be excused in a court of law or public opinion” (Barg</p><p>2019). This configures the idea of colonial violence apropos to the two</p><p>different contexts intersecting in this essay and points to an embedded</p><p>memory of this discourse in envisioning the nation and its “rightful”</p><p>citizens. Here I point to a line spoken by American football star Colin</p><p>Kaepernick’s mother to a young Colin reprimanding him to “fix” his</p><p>braided hair in a scene from the recent Netflix series that documents his</p><p>life, career and race relations. “You look like a Thug,” she says. In that</p><p>one moment, the registers of otherness and embedded notions of crim-</p><p>inality are framed as subtexts related to belonging within the family, the</p><p>football team and, ultimately, the nation. Ironically, the line registers the</p><p>compassion of a white mother who tells a young Black boy how to be</p><p>accepted within the nation’s fold, whose other side is violence.</p><p>While the novel The Strangler Vine initially attempts to explode this</p><p>colonial violence by exposing the historical figure William Sleeman’s role</p><p>as a capable imperial administrator and suppressor of Thugee culture,</p><p>the ending of the novel does pose a peculiar problem, one that upsets</p><p>the novel’s grand deconstructive gestures and connects to the political</p><p>imaginary of the present. The text sadly reinforces the same colonial</p><p>machinations of embedded violence in varied ways. As discussed earlier,</p><p>the novel meticulously sets out to question the idea of Thuggee sav-</p><p>agery and showcases the hushed- up colonial violence at the heart of it.</p><p>It symbolizes colonial violence as the “strangler vines” within the forests</p><p>of India, oozing life out of subjects, suffocating them to death (an eerie</p><p>reminder of police violence in Eric Garner’s death, when he repeatedly</p><p>cried “I can’t breathe”). Yet, as mentioned before, a radically challen-</p><p>ging text such as this reveals a metanarrative of embedded violence that</p><p>54 Amrita Ghosh</p><p>subscribes to the same power structures the writer tries to undo while</p><p>rewriting a colonial fantasy and questioning the violence of the Empire.</p><p>The ending of the text underscores this in the way it imagines power</p><p>relations and the interactions (or lack thereof) with the Thugs.</p><p>Carter’s novel originally came out in 2014 and is set in peak colonial India</p><p>of the nineteenth century. A quick look at the Western reviews of the novel</p><p>reiterates Carter’s decolonial aims. The New York Times review by Susan</p><p>MacNeal states, “With gorgeous historical detail and deft characterization,</p><p>Carter creates a rip- roaring detective romp – while also casting a gimlet eye</p><p>on the effects of British imperialism and colonization of India” (Carter 2022).</p><p>A. N. Wilson from the Financial Times calls it an “enlightened modern book</p><p>that has a properly skeptical view of imperialist propaganda” (Carter 2022),</p><p>and finally the Guardian review claims that the novel “has a smirking sense</p><p>of the absurdity of the whole colonial project.” Of course, these reviews are</p><p>not claiming anything outrightly untrue about the text. But since the text’s</p><p>goal is clear – to question easy understandings of the colonial enterprise and</p><p>the gigantic machinations of colonial violence – I want to closely read the</p><p>ending of the novel in the context of its reviews and analyze what it means</p><p>for the representation of Thugs and for colonial violence.</p><p>As the denouement of the text occurs in Part Four of The Strangler</p><p>Vine, Blake and Avery are asked to meet with the Governor General,</p><p>Lord Auckland. Avery’s exclamation about the colonial technologies of</p><p>violence and fear, “It is all so dirty,” is met with Blake’s rather interesting</p><p>statement, “The Company is a vast creature of many heads and many</p><p>arms. It is not all rotten, at least I am not sure it is” (Carter 2015,</p><p>327). Intriguingly, all of Blake’s other very serious admonitions against</p><p>the Empire and the violence it wreaks on people come to a halt as one</p><p>encounters this hint of doubt about the nature of the “Company” and</p><p>that it might not all be “rotten.” Later, when Avery and Blake have their</p><p>final meeting with the Governor General and explain what they have</p><p>learned about the Empire’s workings and Thuggees, the mighty General</p><p>of the British Raj is portrayed as someone who is naïve and shocked at</p><p>the machinations of the Empire. As he states, “This is very shocking. I can</p><p>hardly believe it;” these are “very serious, very unpleasant accusations”</p><p>(Carter 2015, 332). The novel, thus, represents the upper echelons of</p><p>colonialists to be benevolent benefactors “for” the natives; they are</p><p>portrayed as not knowing the evils of colonialism and inhabiting a space</p><p>removed from it – a rather strange turn in the so- far- scathing decolonial</p><p>narrative. What the ending of the text then offers is just a semblance of</p><p>sad disagreement within the Raj, where the subjectivities that are upheld</p><p>are those of British heroes like Avery and Blake, who are “good” British</p><p>subjects critiquing the rotten system. There is no native subject, not even</p><p>one Thug figure that appears noteworthy or worthy of proper represen-</p><p>tation in this grand scheme of the text.</p><p>The denouement of the novel is also secure with Blake returning to</p><p>England and Avery getting more job offers in colonial India, engaged to</p><p>Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence 55</p><p>his love interest and deciding to stay back in India. The focus on Thugs,</p><p>the critique of Company, is finished, and the ending posits a valorization</p><p>of the British self, one that is sympathetic to the natives and critical of</p><p>colonialism. So, what happens to the Thugs and the natives in the text?</p><p>A novel that is aimed at decolonizing the myth of Thugees and so crit-</p><p>ical of the epistemic violence and the erasures in the colonial history of</p><p>Thugs could have easily included an alternative frame of representation</p><p>for the native subjectivity in the text’s ending. The Thugs in the novel,</p><p>despite every decolonial gesture, remain in a confounded space – they are</p><p>still “monsters in the dark” toward the end (using Sagnik Bhattacharya’s</p><p>phrase). The novel’s attempt to rewrite the Thug story needed an epistemic</p><p>shift in which the Thugs should have been written back into the story</p><p>correcting the faulty imaginary. It fails in doing precisely that. The novel</p><p>ultimately recreates the same kind of epistemic violence where Thugs are</p><p>written out of the story, and the British self is pivotal. The novel, thus,</p><p>becomes a symbol of this embedded symbolic violence that connects to</p><p>the larger unequal planetary relations of race and legitimate belonging of</p><p>certain subjects through significations that are carried within the subtexts</p><p>of the layered text.</p><p>As previously mentioned, Bhattacharya’s (2020) article is signifi-</p><p>cant in the way it reminds readers of the colonial state’s first entry into</p><p>forests and highlands, the margins of the Empire where it encounters the</p><p>Thugs, tribal and nomadic people. This, according to Bhattacharya, has</p><p>critical implications for how the postcolonial Indian nation- state is still</p><p>imagined with respect to the tribal populations. As he states, “the dis-</p><p>covery of the thug fundamentally attempted to rewrite the teleology of</p><p>Indian history that has consequences to this day in the understanding of</p><p>tribal populations by the post- colonial state” (6). That the “Thug” was</p><p>a nomad, and thus not clearly “identified” by the “European notions of</p><p>territoriality” or as legitimate native subjects of princely states, becomes</p><p>a marker of unidentifiability for which the Thugs were pushed toward</p><p>erasure or met with (epistemic) violence. Two things are key here in this</p><p>discussion: first a radical text demystifying the thuggee myth completely</p><p>erases Thugs toward the end; what we still get is that a criminal group of</p><p>Thugs had kidnapped Mountstuart and kept him, Avery and Blake hos-</p><p>tage before they flee in the end. That plot is never returned to in the text.</p><p>Secondly, as Bhattacharya once again rightly claims, the Criminal Tribes</p><p>Act that was institutionalized to control the Thugs in British India in 1871</p><p>had not been “entirely abrogated in the Republic of India after independ-</p><p>ence, but only repealed by the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952” (2020, 7).</p><p>This led to far- reaching consequences in the imagination of postcolonial</p><p>India, which treats the tribal populations as “iterant populations that are</p><p>not only persecuted by the state but also continue to suffer from human</p><p>right violations that in many cases go unchecked by the law enforce-</p><p>ment authorities – the police” (Bhattacharya 2020, 7). Bhattacharya</p><p>also cites Ganesh Devy’s important work on the problematic continued</p><p>56 Amrita Ghosh</p><p>teaching of the Criminal Tribes Act in police training in the Indian police</p><p>system. Sachin Jadhav (2018) also points out that the tribes who were</p><p>“de- notified from the Act are officially referred today as the De- Notified</p><p>Tribes (DT) or the Vimukta Jati (VJ) (freed).” They still belong to one</p><p>of the most alienated spaces of society, away from any development and</p><p>modernization in postcolonial India, and as Jadhav states, “stereotyping</p><p>continues to haunt them, with reports now and then of these people being</p><p>considered the prima facie suspects of any theft and robbery nearby.”</p><p>Documenting the profiling and discrimination by the police and media,</p><p>Quleen Kaur Bijral (2017) also emphasizes the “violence of colonial</p><p>legacy” that continues to shape the lives of tribal people in present- day</p><p>India. According to Bijral, the “De- Notified” tribal people are huddled in</p><p>a “spectre of stigma” where they continuously face scapegoating and are</p><p>forbidden from joining the mainstream.</p><p>Apart from two quick mentions of native subjects toward the end of</p><p>the novel, the Thugs remain in marginal othered spaces in the text that</p><p>sadly endorse that very hegemonic imagination they set out to critique.</p><p>The novel ends with Blake mentioning his Bengali wife Anwesha, who</p><p>had died of child birth, and the last paragraph at the very end of the novel</p><p>literally lumps together laboring natives – “all around me the natives</p><p>pressed, rolling barrels, lifting sacks” (Carter 2015, 356). Literally, The</p><p>Strangler Vine becomes a reminder that a good native subject is either</p><p>dead (Anwesha) or erased: the Thugs are still an unidentified group of</p><p>criminals that cannot possibly be represented within the novel’s universe.</p><p>This frame of representation brings us back to the reemergence</p><p>of “Thugs” in the present time – what the word denotes and how it</p><p>symbolizes a systemic contemporary violence. For the American political</p><p>discourse, critical race theorists Calvin Smiley and David Fakunle (2016)</p><p>argue that there is a shift in imagining Blackness as coded with notions of</p><p>brutality and criminality:</p><p>The synonymy of Blackness with criminality is not a new phenom-</p><p>enon in America. Documented historical accounts have shown how</p><p>myths, stereotypes, and racist ideologies led to discriminatory policies</p><p>and court rulings that fueled racial violence in a post- Reconstruction</p><p>era and has culminated in the exponential increase of Black male</p><p>incarceration today.</p><p>(350)</p><p>Smikey and Fakunle’s work highlights the historical trajectory that led to</p><p>constructing the “brute” image of Blackness. The image of the “brute,”</p><p>according to them, germinated during the period of reconstruction</p><p>after the Civil War. There was a fear within dominant white ideology</p><p>that Black people would acquire freedom and political power. Hence,</p><p>the earlier image of a compliant, submissive slave shifted to the image</p><p>of a savage brute. But as Smiley and Fakunle also emphasize, in recent</p><p>Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colonial Violence 57</p><p>sociopolitical imagination, this media history– led imaginary has given</p><p>way to the “negative connotation” of the “Thug.” It is not that the myth-</p><p>ical construct of the brute and its concomitant punishment in the form</p><p>of death (lynching in history) is erased, but its place has been taken by</p><p>“Thugs” in recent political discourse. What is interesting in Smiley and</p><p>Fakunle’s argument is the emphasis on language that becomes a coded</p><p>determinant of creating a certain value of life itself – to be certain, black</p><p>life – that is of less value and more prone to criminalization (2016, 351).</p><p>In 2014, the sports news channel DeadSpin published an article that</p><p>pointed out that the word “Thug” had been trending in the sports world,</p><p>and just that week in January 2014, it had been used 625 times in one day</p><p>(Wagner 2015). Kyle Wagner states that “the word ‘thug’ [is] really more</p><p>of a shorthand. It means a black guy who makes white folks a little more</p><p>uncomfortable than they prefer.” What is fascinating in this linguistic</p><p>codification is the “repackaging” of the word “Thug” back in American</p><p>sociopolitical imagination for Black youth. Smiley and Fakunle argue</p><p>that historically Black figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King</p><p>Jr. “were vilified while alive and then sanitized in death to be repackaged</p><p>as an acceptable part of the United States historical narrative” (2016,</p><p>351), whereas in contemporary America, the “thugification” of Black</p><p>men in the United States points to a specific kind of demonization; that</p><p>is, “Thugs” are criminals whose deaths are justified, or for whom incar-</p><p>ceration and violence are legitimate.</p><p>This essay connects Carter’s novel along with present political</p><p>manifestations of the Thug in America to point to similar structures of</p><p>(neo)colonial violence that are coded with linguistic, epistemic and literal</p><p>violence and create spaces of extreme otherness. The notion of thuggee</p><p>from the colonial adventure novel to our present times has not changed</p><p>much. It is not just a racial slur; a murky colonial history on Thugs</p><p>connects with the present criminalization of Black youth in America and</p><p>trains a majority to dismiss certain people from the legitimate order of</p><p>existence within the nation- state. This essay also cautions against using</p><p>easy positioning of planetarity as forms of alliance and coming together</p><p>and questions relations of power and inequality that lurk within it. Novels</p><p>like The Strangler Vine create asymmetrical planetarity of relations for</p><p>both the marginalized in India and for Black youth in American contexts</p><p>where they are trapped under the same yoke of symbolic violence and</p><p>pushed to a space of radical alterity. Even now, the Thug reveals a vio-</p><p>lence generating narrative that normalizes institutionalized violence.</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Asad, Talal. 2015. “Reflections on Violence, Law and Humanitarianism.” Critical</p><p>Inquiry 41 (2, Winter): 390– 427.</p><p>Barg, Jeffrey. 2019. “The Problematic History of the Word ‘Thug.’ ” Philadelphia</p><p>Enquirer, April 17. www.inqui rer.com/ opin ion/ com ment ary/ thug- tupac- rac</p><p>ism- langu age- reap prop riat ion- 20190 417.html</p><p>58 Amrita Ghosh</p><p>Bhattacharya, Sagnik. 2020. “Monsters in the Dark: The Discovery of Thuggee</p><p>and Demographic Knowledge in Colonial India.” Palgrave Communications</p><p>6 (78): 1– 9.</p><p>Bijral, Quleen Kaur. 2017. “The Violent Legacy of Stigma: Ex Criminal Tribes</p><p>in India.” The Logical Indian, 11 May. https:// thelo gica lind ian.com/ opin ion/</p><p>ex- crimi nal- tri bes/ .</p><p>Carter, Miranda J. 2015. The Strangler Vine. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.</p><p>Carter, Miranda J. 2022. “Praise for The Strangler Vine.” http:// mj- car ter.com/</p><p>books/ the- strang ler- vine</p><p>Elias, Amy J., and Moraru Moraru. 2015. The Planetary Turn: Relationality</p><p>and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty- First Century. Evanston: Northwestern</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Gabrys, Jennifer. 2018. “Becoming Planetary.” E- Flux, October, www.e- flux.</p><p>com/ archi tect ure/ accum ulat ion/ 217 051/ becom ing- planet ary</p><p>Henderson, Nia- Malika. 2015. “Riots Test Obama’s Power to Heal Racial</p><p>Divide.” CNN Politics, 29 April. https:// edit ion.cnn.com/ 2015/ 04/ 28/ polit ics/</p><p>obama- and- race/ index.html</p><p>Jadhav, Sachin. 2018. “The Real Thugs of India and Their (Unfortunate) Legacy.”</p><p>Medium, September 30. https:// med ium.com/ @sac.jadha v93/ the- real- thugs-</p><p>of- india- and- their- unfo rtun ate- leg acy- e02d8 d605 30e</p><p>Kutner, Max. 2015. “A Brief History of the Word ‘Thug.’ ” Newsweek, April 29.</p><p>www.newsw eek.com/ brief- hist ory- word- thug- 326 595</p><p>McHarris, Philip V. 2020. “The George Floyd Protests Are a Rebellion against</p><p>an Unjust System.” The Guardian, June 4. www.theg uard ian.com/ commen tisf</p><p>ree/ 2020/ jun/ 04/ geo rge- floyd- prote sts- riots- rebell ion</p><p>Neep, Daniel. 2012. Occupying Syria under the French Mandate. Cambridge:</p><p>Cambridge</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Rebecca Lai, K. K., Bill Marsh and Anjali Singhvi. 2020. “Here Are the 100</p><p>U.S. Cities Where Protesters Were Tear- Gassed.” New York Times, June 20.</p><p>www.nyti mes.com/ inte ract ive/ 2020/ 06/ 16/ us/ geo rge- floyd- prote sts- pol ice-</p><p>tear- gas.html</p><p>Reuters. 2020. “Trump Says People Protesting in Washington Thursday Were</p><p>Thugs.” Reuters, August 28. www.reut ers.com/ arti cle/ us- usa- was hing ton-</p><p>trump- thugs- idUSKB N25O 359</p><p>Shankar, Subramaniam. 2013. “Thugs and Bandits: Life and Law in Colonial and</p><p>Epicolonial India.” Biography 36 (1) (Winter): 97– 123.</p><p>Smiley, Calvin John, and David Fakunle. 2016. “From ‘Brute’ to ‘Thug’: The</p><p>Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in</p><p>America.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26 (3– 4):</p><p>350– 366.</p><p>Stone- Mediatore, Shari. 2019. “How America Disguises Its Violence: Colonialism,</p><p>Mass Incarceration, and the Need for Resistant Imagination.” Critical Review</p><p>of International Social and Political Philosophy 22 (5): 542– 561.</p><p>Wagner, Kyle. 2015. “The Word ‘Thug’ Was Uttered 625 Times on TV on</p><p>Monday.” DeadSpin, January 1. https:// deads pin.com/ the- word- thug- was-</p><p>utte red- 625- times- on- tv- yester day- 150 6098 319</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-6</p><p>4 Variants and Consequences of</p><p>Violence in Iris Murdoch’s The</p><p>Sacred and Profane Love Machine</p><p>Jakob Lothe</p><p>Taking its cue from Emmanuel Levinas’ claim that as human beings we</p><p>are bound in networks of responsibility to known and unknown others</p><p>whose vulnerability bids us not to commit violence,1 this chapter discusses</p><p>how the main characters in British novelist Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred</p><p>and Profane Love Machine (1974/ 1976) variously engage in or become</p><p>entangled in acts possessed of aspects of violence – even though Murdoch</p><p>does not often use that word. These aspects are, as I will attempt to</p><p>show, inseparable from, and constituent elements of, the ethics presented</p><p>through the novel’s narrative discourse.</p><p>My approach is a variant of narrative analysis that, concentrating on</p><p>narrative ethics, is inspired by narrative hermeneutics. A tenet of narrative</p><p>hermeneutics is that while as readers we are engaged in interpretative</p><p>acts, “narratives themselves – and literary narratives in particular – are</p><p>forms of interpretation: they are about interpreting human possibilities</p><p>and modes of being in the world” (Meretoja 2017, 135– 136; cf. Meretoja</p><p>2018 and Gadamer 1960/ 2013, 307). In the fictional narrative under con-</p><p>sideration here, these forms of interpretation are closely linked to, and</p><p>utterly dependent on, the way in which Murdoch makes her third- person</p><p>narrator present not just the characters’ actions, thoughts, perspectives,</p><p>experiences and values but also their interpretations of them.</p><p>My understanding of narrative is indebted to definitions given by</p><p>Mieke Bal and Ernst van Alphen. For Bal, storytelling is “the presen-</p><p>tation in whatever medium of a focalized series of events” (2018, 37).</p><p>Emphasizing narrative’s temporal dimension, Alphen finds that “narrative</p><p>can be seen as an existential response to the world and to the experi-</p><p>ence of that world” (2018, 68). I link both these definitions to Hanna</p><p>Meretoja’s conceptualization of narrative as “a culturally mediated</p><p>practice of sense- making that involves the activities of interpreting and</p><p>presenting someone’s experiences in a specific situation to someone</p><p>from a certain perspective or perspectives…” (2018, 48). I argue that</p><p>this is exactly what the main characters in The Sacred and Profane Love</p><p>Machine do or, more precisely, what Murdoch as implied author makes</p><p>the third-person narrator tell us that they do.2</p><p>60 Jakob Lothe</p><p>In order to establish a basis and reference point for the discussion,</p><p>I give a summary of the novel’s plot: The psychotherapist Blaise Gavender</p><p>lives with his wife Harriet and their 16- year- old son David in a com-</p><p>fortable home near London. Blaise has been having an affair with Emily</p><p>McHugh, and they have an eight- year- old son named Luca. Even after</p><p>he has been forced to tell Harriet about Emily, Blaise vacillates between</p><p>the two women, hoping to continue relations with both. Forced by Emily</p><p>to choose, he leaves Harriet, who, increasingly distressed, turns to the</p><p>detective novelist Monty Small for support. Although it turns out that he</p><p>was complicit in her death, Monty is grieving his wife Sophie, with whom</p><p>his friend Edward Demarnay was also in love. Taking Luca with her on</p><p>a trip to Germany, Harriet is killed fortuitously by a terrorist in Hanover</p><p>airport, but she saves Luca’s life by covering him with her body. Rejected</p><p>by Monty, Edward tries to help David to come to terms with the loss of</p><p>his mother.</p><p>Murdoch’s uses a third- person narrator to present ethical questions</p><p>that arise at different stages of the novel’s plot. She introduces these</p><p>questions by identifying them as issues that, though linked to the main</p><p>characters’ ethos, are relatively general. As the plot develops, these issues</p><p>are perceived by the characters to become not only more relevant but</p><p>also challenging in new and unpredictable ways. Variants of violence</p><p>form an essential part of Murdoch’s fictional exploration of these eth-</p><p>ical issues, which, assuming the form of questions rather than approxi-</p><p>mating to stable positions, encourage a dialogue between Murdoch as</p><p>implied author and the reader. Constituting an ethical crisis in the novel,</p><p>the characters’ dissimilar responses to the ethical challenges have ethical</p><p>consequences that are linked to and, in no small part, contribute to the</p><p>plot’s resolution at the end of the narrative. The terrorist attack in which</p><p>one of the main characters is killed highlights physical violence in a way</p><p>that, particularly on a second reading, makes facets of psychological vio-</p><p>lence more apparent throughout. I concentrate on the key functions that</p><p>Murdoch’s third- person narrator and four of the characters – Harriet,</p><p>Blaise, Emily and Luca – play in the author’s narrative exploration of</p><p>ethical questions.3</p><p>The introduction of each of the main characters adds new ethical</p><p>issues. Harriet is morally committed to her family in a way reminiscent</p><p>of sacred love; Blaise is caught up in a long- lasting affair of profane love</p><p>that forces him to routinely lie to his wife; Monty is engaged in a pro-</p><p>cess of grief that, while at one level understandable, makes the reader</p><p>wonder about his motives and choices. When as a reader I reach the stage</p><p>of the narrative where Murdoch abruptly makes her narrator introduce</p><p>me to Emily, I arrive at the point where narrative beginning blends into</p><p>narrative middle, prompting an ethical crisis in which different values are</p><p>played out against each other. The crisis becomes apparent when, fearing</p><p>that Harriet may be told about his affair by somebody else, Blaise decides</p><p>to write Harriet a letter:</p><p>Variants and Consequences of Violence 61</p><p>My darling Harriet and my dear wife. I am too cowardly to tell you</p><p>what follows face to face, so I am telling you it in a letter. I shall try</p><p>to explain clearly because clarity and truthfulness are of the utmost</p><p>importance here …. Some years ago (over nine years ago to be pre-</p><p>cise) I took a mistress. Her name is Emily McHugh and she is now</p><p>over thirty. I was physically attracted and I succumbed to tempta-</p><p>tion. This, I know, is indefensible …. I am profoundly ashamed, and</p><p>in now confessing this can only cast myself onto your love as a reli-</p><p>gious person casts himself onto God …. I deserve punishment, but I</p><p>ask for grace.</p><p>(139– 140)</p><p>Confessing to Harriet what I know already as a reader, Blaise uses words</p><p>that the narrator has made me expect he would use. This includes his</p><p>strategic employment of the word “grace,” which appeals to Harriet’s</p><p>enduring love and, Blaise hopes, readiness to forgive. The second aspect</p><p>follows from</p><p>the first: Blaise focalizes the affair in a way that, seen from</p><p>his perspective, will maximize the chance of an understanding and for-</p><p>giving response. Without necessarily making his writing insincere, this</p><p>kind of calculated effort is ethically dubious. Reaching the end of Blaise’s</p><p>letter, I tend to conclude that he wrote it because he had to, not because</p><p>he felt ethically obliged to do so.</p><p>This reading is supported by the third- person narrator’s observation</p><p>that, writing the letter, Blaise found himself “unexpectedly inspired ….</p><p>He moved himself” (141). The narrator here signals a notable attitudinal</p><p>distance from Blaise. For the narrator, and for Murdoch as implied author</p><p>behind her, being moved by one’s own confession of betrayal is not par-</p><p>ticularly laudable; the sentence is tinged with irony. Harriet’s reaction to</p><p>the letter is in consonance with her ethos as presented by the narrator</p><p>until now, that is, until this turning point of the novel’s plot. Though</p><p>“devastated and defiled Harriet did not for a second doubt Blaise’s love</p><p>for her” (144), and when he asks “Do you forgive me?” she replies “Yes,</p><p>of course” (145). Apparently, then, Blaise’s strategy of writing the letter</p><p>has worked, and he can continue living in his self- contained world. That</p><p>he thinks he can do this becomes evident when the narrator reports that,</p><p>“with a sudden deep surge of joy,” Blaise reflects that “she had forgiven</p><p>him, she had said she loved him” (147). His intention not to break with</p><p>Emily becomes even clearer as the “surge of joy” he feels is accompanied</p><p>by another lie: that the only person he has told about the affair is Magnus,</p><p>the fictitious patient invented as an excuse to spend time with Emily. Both</p><p>Blaise’s intention and his following action, which is consistent with his</p><p>intention, involves a form of psychological violence related to, and in one</p><p>sense following from, his failure to act responsibly in his marriage.</p><p>The narrative of a novel by Murdoch tends to challenge the self-</p><p>contained world that the characters of the fictional universe are inclined</p><p>to construct for themselves. This stage of The Sacred and Profane Love</p><p>62 Jakob Lothe</p><p>Machine illustrates this characteristic feature of her fiction: Marking a</p><p>dramatic narrative turn, Blaise’s letter to Harriet not only changes the</p><p>plot but also entails, and dramatizes, a series of ethical consequences for</p><p>the characters, and for Harriet in particular.</p><p>For Blaise, Harriet’s first response indicates a “moral force” that comes</p><p>as a genuine surprise to him. Enabling her to forgive, her ethos gives her</p><p>a “new strength” that, to Blaise’s great surprise, even makes her insist to</p><p>see Emily. In a significant act of reaching out to her rival, in one sense</p><p>even her enemy, Harriet makes Blaise take her to Emily’s home. The scene</p><p>that follows includes the following dialogue:</p><p>“I don’t want any relation,” said Emily. “As far as I’m concerned you</p><p>don’t exist.” “Oh but I do exist,” said Harriet. She said it in a quiet</p><p>explanatory tone, her face very grave, her eyes huge.</p><p>(158)</p><p>A significant variation on Murdoch’s narrative method, this dialogue</p><p>juxtaposes, and contrasts, Harriet’s ethical values with those of Emily.</p><p>For Harriet, there is an ethical obligation to reach out to those around</p><p>her even, and indeed especially, when she might want to distance herself</p><p>from them. This kind of ethical obligation is affiliated with the ethical</p><p>responsibility toward others highlighted by Levinas (1991; Davis 2007,</p><p>83). That Emily does not feel this ethical obligation – which for Harriet,</p><p>concerned as she is with “duties” (159), extends to include Luca, the</p><p>personification of her husband’s infidelity and betrayal – does not mean</p><p>that Emily has no ethics, however. It is true that, contrasting herself with</p><p>Harriet in a conversation with Blaise a few pages later, she claims that</p><p>“I’m not a moral being, or a person of principle” (177). Yet Emily too has</p><p>values – values that are so different from Harriet’s as to render commu-</p><p>nication between these two characters virtually impossible. It is a gain of</p><p>Murdoch’s narrative strategy that, in one sense in common with Harriet,</p><p>as a reader I find it difficult to identify Emily’s values beyond sensing</p><p>that they are closely associated with her feelings for Blaise. Seen from</p><p>Emily’s perspective, one ethical consequence of making her prolonged</p><p>affair with Blaise known to Harriet is emotional confusion. Emily asks</p><p>herself, “What could be the matter with her, with Harriet, with Blaise,</p><p>that this could happen at all?” (179). Yet it is to Emily as though, after</p><p>the disclosure of the affair, “the love between her and Blaise seemed</p><p>strangely renewed and made innocent. Innocent: was that the important</p><p>thing?” (180).</p><p>The question is illustrative of the way in which Murdoch makes eth-</p><p>ical questions explicit in the novel. This particular question is, it seems,</p><p>prompted by a combination of making her affair with Blaise known to</p><p>Harriet and the latter’s surprising visit to her. Although it would be over-</p><p>simplified to claim that Harriet’s first response (which leads to her visit)</p><p>makes Emily ask this question, it underlies it and is curiously linked to it.</p><p>Variants and Consequences of Violence 63</p><p>There is an element of irony in that Emily, rather than Harriet, uses the</p><p>word “innocent.” If, as Murdoch invites me to do, I link “innocent” not</p><p>just to Emily but also to the third- person narrator, the tinge of irony in</p><p>the sentence becomes more apparent. And yet Emily, whose “simple faith</p><p>[in the] enduring nature of her own sexual link with her lover” (180) is</p><p>emphasized by the narrator, could perhaps have used it herself. Is there</p><p>perhaps a sense in which “innocent” does not apply to the profane love</p><p>represented by Emily the way it does to Harriet’s sacred love – a love that,</p><p>reaching out even to her rival, suggests a remarkable innocence?</p><p>It is both an aspect of plot and an ethical aspect of plot development</p><p>that Harriet cannot, as Blaise hopes, remain “absolutely there in the</p><p>background” (329). On the contrary, fearing “some new appeal from</p><p>Blaise” (333), she flies to Germany. It is significant that she takes Luca</p><p>with her: Feeling rejected by all those around her – including her son</p><p>David, whose “disappearance” (333) she finds particularly cruel – the</p><p>only person she feels she has left, left to spend time with and care for, is</p><p>the son of her rival Emily. Murdoch presents Harriet’s decision to leave</p><p>as both rational and irrational, as “a matter of principle” (332) and yet</p><p>perhaps not. Asking herself whether principles are “just feelings” (332),</p><p>she reflects that “resentment and hatred are forms of strength” and that,</p><p>had she not fled, “I would become weak and spiteful and demoralized</p><p>and crazed with humiliation” (333). It seems Harriet is now considering,</p><p>or at least not ruling out, the possibility of acting violently.</p><p>In historical reality, a massacre in an international airport is contin-</p><p>gent; it is an event that can happen anywhere at any time and that I may</p><p>or may not be part of. In one sense the massacre at Hanover airport in</p><p>Murdoch’s novel is also contingent. And yet, as an integral part of the</p><p>author’s design, it serves a twofold purpose of which a real- life massacre</p><p>is not possessed: First, it is an effective – surprising and dramatic – turn</p><p>in the novel’s plot; second, it enables Murdoch to make her protagonist’s</p><p>final action illustrative of her ethics: “Harriet had perished in the mas-</p><p>sacre at Hanover airport. She had saved Luca’s life, shielding him with</p><p>her bullet- riddled body. Blaise … had flown out to bring home his wife’s</p><p>remains and his shocked alienated child” (336).</p><p>Just before the massacre, while waiting for the luggage to arrive from</p><p>the plane at Hanover airport, Harriet reflects that “I am not the good</p><p>person I used to think that I was” (333). Yet her desperate, and successful,</p><p>attempt to save Luca shows that</p><p>she is, at least in one elementary, and</p><p>important, sense of the word “good”; she dies as she literally reaches out</p><p>to help and protect the human being nearest to her. To make this point is</p><p>not to argue that while the massacre at Hanover airport is contingent, the</p><p>part that Murdoch makes her protagonist Harriet play in it is coherent.</p><p>But it is to suggest that while Harriet is increasingly possessed of thoughts</p><p>and feelings that take her in different directions and appear worryingly</p><p>irreconcilable, her care for others – manifested in her repeated acts of</p><p>reaching out to those around her – gradually establishes a pattern that,</p><p>64 Jakob Lothe</p><p>though not coherent in the strict sense of the word, is remarkably con-</p><p>sistent, and from which I can glean an ethics presented as preferable to</p><p>those who survive Harriet, particularly Blaise and Emily.</p><p>Discussing the novel that Murdoch published one year before The</p><p>Sacred and the Profane Love Machine – The Black Prince (1973) – Paul</p><p>Fiddes notes that:</p><p>if the novel dramatizes the tension between the search for coher-</p><p>ence and the test of contingency, it also dramatizes Murdoch’s con-</p><p>viction that love can be a means of releasing the person from the</p><p>self- enclosed cage of the self, and of turning the person outwards to</p><p>notice the details of the world and the reality of others.</p><p>(2012, 101)</p><p>Without making these two major Murdoch novels more similar than</p><p>they actually are, I find that, forming an essential part of her ethos, love</p><p>enables Harriet to turn outwards to notice, and then respond to, “the</p><p>reality of others.” I am not sure this love is “sacred,” though there is a</p><p>sense in which this key word of the novel’s title invites me to think it is.</p><p>Yet it is certainly not “profane;” there is a great contrast between the love</p><p>represented by Harriet, on the one hand, and that experienced and lived</p><p>by Blaise and Emily, on the other. Only the first variant of love can, in</p><p>Fiddes’ phrase, produce that “loss of self” that can set the character “on</p><p>the road to the higher Eros, or the Good” (Fiddes 2012, 101).</p><p>To emphasize this point is not to claim that Murdoch as implied author</p><p>establishes a clear and stable difference between sacred and profane love.</p><p>Both are constituent elements of the “love machine” that infiltrates the</p><p>characters’ lives, including Harriet’s. Reflecting on the disappearance of</p><p>those she loves, she finds that “that too was part of a machine from</p><p>which she had not, for all her ‘feelings’ and her ‘principles,’ the spirit or</p><p>the courage really to escape” (333). Yet, although the difference between</p><p>sacred and profane love is unclear, it becomes clearer, and more sig-</p><p>nificant, after Harriet’s death. To put this another way, Harriet’s death</p><p>enables Murdoch to reiterate, and sharpen, some of the novel’s key eth-</p><p>ical questions by linking the values of characters still active in the plot to</p><p>those of the main character she has killed off. I will illuminate this aspect</p><p>of the novel’s ethics by briefly discussing Murdoch’s concluding presenta-</p><p>tion of three characters, Emily, Blaise and Luca.</p><p>As regards Emily, the narrator comments:</p><p>The fates had done Emily an amazingly good turn, and she could</p><p>afford to be generous …. She did not pretend any sorrow, nor did she</p><p>trouble her imagination about Blaise’s sufferings which she regarded</p><p>as strictly temporary. She concealed her satisfaction under a gentle</p><p>cool tact, though every now and then she would murmur something</p><p>Variants and Consequences of Violence 65</p><p>like: “How awfully considerate of Mrs Placid to go off and get herself</p><p>massacred.”</p><p>(338)</p><p>Although the cynicism of this thought is striking, Emily’s satisfaction</p><p>is not inconsistent with her attitude to Harriet earlier on in the plot.</p><p>Clearly, the narrator (and Murdoch behind her) distances herself from</p><p>this kind of cynicism, and as a reader, I am asked, or expected, to do</p><p>so too. More effective, and surprising, is the way in which Murdoch</p><p>makes her narrator suggest that Emily does “not pretend any sorrow”</p><p>for Luca either. As her son barely survived the massacre, how is it pos-</p><p>sible that “the fates had done [her] an amazingly good turn”? Does</p><p>she really believe this, or does the comment just reflect the narrator’s</p><p>opinion? I am inclined to think it does not, and to me there is something</p><p>appealing in the way the narrator here expresses her bewilderment, her</p><p>inability to understand Emily. This kind of inability to fully understand</p><p>the characters whose actions and thoughts she reports makes the third-</p><p>person narration more credible. Signaling a humbler attitude on the part</p><p>of the narrator, it suggests that my own interpretation may similarly</p><p>profit from a degree of humility in my attempts to understand the com-</p><p>plexity of the human psyche.</p><p>Although the narrator distances herself from Emily’s lack of “sorrow,”</p><p>and probably also of remorse, she appears to find her brutally honest</p><p>stance more consistent than that of Blaise. That Emily “did not pre-</p><p>tend any sorrow” implies that he does pretend, and, seen from an eth-</p><p>ical perspective, Blaise’s attitude after Harriet’s death is just as, if not</p><p>more, dubious than Emily’s. The remorse he feels for his wrongdoing is</p><p>expressed through, and limited to, his dreams about Harriet: “How could</p><p>I have done that to my dear wife who is so kind and good”? (338). An</p><p>effective narrative variation, this question is an example of free indirect</p><p>discourse: Rather than quoting a question Blaise asks himself in a dream,</p><p>the narrator reports it, perhaps paraphrasing it and making it more</p><p>explicit, and thus potentially more challenging, than Blaise is able, or</p><p>willing, to do. Just after the question, the narrator comments, “Waking,</p><p>he soon put away these refinements of pity and terror …. With swift</p><p>mechanical efficiency his egoism took its own counter- measures” (339).</p><p>The narrator’s attitudinal distance from Blaise incorporates an element of</p><p>irony. Reporting, and asking the reader to believe, that egoism is a strong,</p><p>perhaps dominant, motivating factor not only for Blaise’s actions but also</p><p>for his conscious thought, the narrator presents him in an ironic light by</p><p>implicitly contrasting his actions and thoughts with those of Harriet, who</p><p>is dead, and those of Luca, who,</p><p>conceived as a burdensome problem, had remained one for Blaise.</p><p>The strange child, as it grew, inspired guilt and fear. It was a relief to</p><p>66 Jakob Lothe</p><p>have it officially classified as subnormal and taken away to be looked</p><p>after by experts.</p><p>(341)</p><p>In a thoughtful essay titled “The Many Faces of Platonism,” David</p><p>Tracy has argued that “like Plato’s ancient dialogues – [but] unlike the</p><p>realist novel Iris Murdoch’s novels both so resemble and dissolve, her</p><p>novels’ characteristic open- endedness demand an active questioning</p><p>response on the part of the reader” (1996, 68– 69). Although I dissent</p><p>from Tracy’s qualification about the realist novel (a novel such as George</p><p>Eliot’s Middlemarch clearly demands an active response from the reader),</p><p>his important point is supported by ethical questions that the reader is</p><p>prompted to ask at the end of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine,</p><p>including that considered above. As I have aimed to show, since my</p><p>“active questioning response” as a reader is my response, other readers’</p><p>responses may differ from mine. Yet, as I have also attempted to demon-</p><p>strate, my questioning response is influenced and shaped by questions, not</p><p>least ethical questions, that Murdoch presents in, and intensifies through,</p><p>her narrative discourse. Critics of Murdoch have emphasized the key role</p><p>of dialogue in her novels: As the characters reveal their ethos in their</p><p>contributions to dialogues in the discourse, different ethical positions and</p><p>questions are linked to different characters who often function as doubles</p><p>or contrastive pairs. Just as importantly, the characters’ ethos is shaped</p><p>by their actions, decisions and responses to the plot</p><p>events – most reveal-</p><p>ingly, in my reading of the novel, to the event I have described as “ethical</p><p>crisis.”</p><p>For me, some of the most though- provoking consequences assume</p><p>the form of ethical questions linked to, and prompted by, the fate of</p><p>Luca. There is a strong sense in which Luca, a minor character, becomes</p><p>the novel’s ethical core or center, not because of what he does himself,</p><p>but because of what the three main characters on whom this discussion</p><p>has focused do to him. In an extreme, desperate act of reaching out to</p><p>another person – a fictional representative of a human being – Harriet</p><p>saves Luca’s life while losing her own. That those left to take care of</p><p>Luca – who is, inevitably, deeply traumatized by the event – are unwilling</p><p>or unable to do so is an ethical consequence that makes me pause as a</p><p>reader. Why does responsibility and care seem to be absent from Blaise’s,</p><p>and in a different way also from Emily’s, attitude to Luca? Even though</p><p>Blaise and Emily did not particularly care for Luca before the massacre,</p><p>how can they continue not caring for him afterwards?</p><p>This ethical question becomes more urgent because, seen from the</p><p>perspectives of Blaise and Emily, there are extenuating circumstances.</p><p>After the massacre at Hanover airport, it is difficult for them to relate to</p><p>and care for Luca in a meaningful way: “Since that appalling moment</p><p>Luca had not spoken, had not uttered a word or a sound, looking mutely</p><p>out at the world with terrified eyes which seemed bright with pain as</p><p>Variants and Consequences of Violence 67</p><p>if bright with tears” (336). Yet “he recognized Blaise and his mother,”</p><p>and the psychiatrist at the “special institute for mentally disturbed chil-</p><p>dren” to which he is taken “did not regard his case as hopeless” (337).</p><p>As a reader I am asked to believe that, had she been alive, Harriet would</p><p>have done more for Luca than Blaise and Emily do or care to do. The</p><p>ethical challenge represented by Luca generally, and after the mas-</p><p>sacre in particular, calls Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of the face strikingly</p><p>to mind.4 I hasten to add that, for Levinas, the Other’s face is not an</p><p>object; rather, it is, or represents, an expression that “affects me before</p><p>I can begin to reflect on it” in a face- to- face encounter.5 Seen from</p><p>Levinas’ phenomenological perspective, human beings, and characters</p><p>who represent them in narrative fiction, are involved in projects directed</p><p>toward other human beings, and toward the world. This kind of rela-</p><p>tional project – which assumes the form of intentional orientation in</p><p>the world, and which thus expresses a desire to achieve or accomplish</p><p>something – is challenged in the face- to- face encounter. For Blaise and</p><p>Emily, there is a defenseless quality about Luca that, in the narrative</p><p>analysis presented here, is illuminated by the combination of nudity</p><p>and paradoxical force or impact that Levinas associates with the face</p><p>of the Other. Both Blaise and Emily sense the ethical challenge of Luca’s</p><p>face, but, reorienting their projects in accord with their desires, they</p><p>shy away from it. Revealingly, Blaise uses the word “face” not about</p><p>Luca but about Emily: “he felt that she too was relieved when that ter-</p><p>rible incomprehensible silent suffering was taken away from before her</p><p>face” (341).</p><p>This facet of the novel’s ethics depends on, and follows from,</p><p>Murdoch’s narrative strategy. There is a strong sense in which the part</p><p>of the narrative subsequent to Luca’s death becomes an epilogue with a</p><p>dual function: first, to bring the plot to conclusion, and, second, to high-</p><p>light the novel’s ethical dimension by revealing the ethical consequences</p><p>of earlier actions and decisions, as well as asking further ethical questions</p><p>linked to, and prompted by, these consequences. As noted already, the</p><p>third- person narrator plays a key role here: presenting the final events of</p><p>the plot, the narrator comments on them by identifying and asking eth-</p><p>ical questions, particularly as regards Blaise, Emily and Luca. Referring</p><p>to Levinas’ idea of the face, I have indicated how, in spite of feeling both</p><p>“guilt and fear,” Blaise and Emily are unable, or unwilling, to encounter,</p><p>and in the next instance respond to, Luca’s face the way Harriet would</p><p>probably have done.</p><p>Because Luca does not speak, we cannot know what he thinks. I would</p><p>like to suggest, though, that Luca is not just traumatized by the massacre</p><p>in Hanover; he is also engaged in a lasting process of grief. For me, Luca’s</p><p>silent mourning for the loss of the person who cared for him to the extent</p><p>of saving his life significantly strengthens the novel’s ethical dimension.</p><p>Luca’s silence constitutes an ellipsis, a gap, in the narrative. The gap is</p><p>linked to mourning as described in Jacques Derrida’s late work, including</p><p>68 Jakob Lothe</p><p>The Work of Mourning and Mémoires: For Paul de Man. In the latter</p><p>book, Derrida suggests that</p><p>Mourning is impossible, and for us most of all. The “trace of the</p><p>other,” the other who has died and that remains other, is at once</p><p>inside and outside of us, marking a gap that moves in “us,” as “us”</p><p>– living who sign our name.</p><p>(1989, 49)</p><p>It is a distinctive feature of Derrida’s late work that, as Pamela Osborn</p><p>puts it, “the multiple losses described become gaps which both simul-</p><p>taneously imply meaning and deny narrative stability so that the text</p><p>becomes haunted by absence and undecidability” (2012, 113). The con-</p><p>cluding part of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is haunted by the</p><p>absence of Harriet. Variously experienced by all of the novel’s characters,</p><p>Harriet’s absence is felt most acutely by Luca, who, however, is unable</p><p>to express his feelings. While admitting that his inability to speak makes</p><p>this last point somewhat speculative, I note that there is a sense in which</p><p>Luca’s grief, in common with Derrida’s, is also iterative: although his pri-</p><p>mary object of grief is Harriet, he may also be mourning the loss – the</p><p>gradual and apparently unstoppable distancing process – of Emily and</p><p>Blaise. The loss of Harriet, his dearest friend, comes in addition to the</p><p>loss of his parents. In The Work of Mourning, Derrida, writing of the loss</p><p>of a close friend, notes that</p><p>I have already lost too many friends (and the discourse of mourning</p><p>is more threatened than others, though it should be less, by the gen-</p><p>erality of the genre, and silence would here be the only rigorous</p><p>response to such a fateful necessity).</p><p>(2001, 95)</p><p>That Luca does not choose to be silent does not make his silence less</p><p>significant, and the ethical questions furthered by the narrative discourse</p><p>become more urgent, and more haunting, as a result.</p><p>One such question is this: How do I mourn – what are, for me, the con-</p><p>stituent elements of mourning? And a related question: How do I wish to</p><p>remember the deceased? And how may I wish to forget him or her?6 The</p><p>reader may counter that these questions are not, strictly speaking, ethical,</p><p>and neither are they directly linked to the problem of violence. Yet, there</p><p>is not a great difference between asking, for example, how I wish to, or</p><p>can, remember a friend or relative who has died and asking about, or</p><p>reflecting on, the values that person has possessed – and which may make</p><p>me want to remember, or forget, him or her. I hope to have shown that,</p><p>for Harriet in Murdoch’s novel, one such value was that of reaching out</p><p>to those around her. Though laudable, it does not follow that this value,</p><p>or ethical priority, is ethically unproblematic: The narrative challenges</p><p>Variants and Consequences of Violence 69</p><p>all the characters choices, including Harriet’s, which have increasingly</p><p>dramatic, even disastrous, consequences. Yet, in a more consistent, and</p><p>stronger, fashion than any other character in the novel, Harriet aspires</p><p>toward the good. And in spite of her values’ defects and the unforeseen</p><p>consequences of choices that they prompt her to make, this aspiration</p><p>toward the good sets her values apart from those of the characters around</p><p>her. Although Murdoch does not often use the word violence, it is remark-</p><p>able how closely the different values identified, presented and interpreted</p><p>in the narrative are related to, and serve to illustrate aspects of, psycho-</p><p>logical and physical violence, thus also demonstrating how closely these</p><p>two facets of violence are interlinked. I find there is a sense in which</p><p>elements of violence are lurking underneath, infiltrating the narrative dis-</p><p>course and coloring the narrator’s presentation of all the characters and</p><p>the actions in which they are involved.</p><p>Creating a “synthesis of textual and readerly dynamics,” the progres-</p><p>sion of a narrative “is crucial to its effects and purposes” (Phelan 2017,</p><p>10). It certainly is in the novel discussed here. As Murdoch, via her third-</p><p>person narrator, constructs a narrative discourse in which ethical issues</p><p>become visible and through which ethical questions are asked, I engage in</p><p>a readerly dynamics in which, responding to the ethical questions arising</p><p>from the discourse, I ask my own ethical questions. That some of these</p><p>questions and reflections, including those on my own egoism, may keep</p><p>troubling me is a measure of the uncompromising intensity of Murdoch’s</p><p>ethical exploration in the novel.</p><p>Finally, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is an illustrative</p><p>and thought- provoking instance of Hanna Meretoja’s conceptualiza-</p><p>tion of narrative (2018, 48). Attempting to make sense of their lives,</p><p>the main characters in this novel by Iris Murdoch are engaged in activ-</p><p>ities of interpreting and presenting their experiences in specific situations,</p><p>each from their own perspective. The third- person narrator plays a key</p><p>role here, presenting and interpreting the characters’ activities. That</p><p>Luca, after having been saved by Harriet, does not or cannot narrate</p><p>strengthens, rather than reducing, the importance of narrative as a cultur-</p><p>ally and historically mediated practice of sense- making.7</p><p>Notes</p><p>1 This idea is presented, discussed and defended in several of Levinas’ works,</p><p>including Levinas (1991). See also Davis (2007, 81– 84) and the entry on</p><p>Levinas in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https:// plato.stanf ord.edu/</p><p>entr ies/ levi nas/ #LogTot Inf</p><p>2 I thus distinguish between the author of a narrative and the narrator (or</p><p>narrators) in that narrative. The implied author is “the streamlined version of</p><p>the actual author responsible for the construction of the narrative, including its</p><p>ethical and thematic commitments” (Phelan 2017, 26). However, regardless of</p><p>whether the reader locates the implied author inside or outside the text, “our</p><p>70 Jakob Lothe</p><p>knowledge and evaluation of the implied author are entirely dependent on our</p><p>reading of the text …. An unread novel has an author but not (yet) an implied</p><p>author” (Lothe 2019, 359).</p><p>3 Although there are few studies of Murdoch that link ethical issues, including</p><p>that of violence, explicitly to her narrative strategies, several Murdoch</p><p>critics incorporate comments on various aspects of these strategies into their</p><p>discussions of other topics. Purely aesthetic considerations of Murdoch’s</p><p>fiction are, unsurprisingly, rare. For example, the novelist A. S. Byatt’s early</p><p>study of the author identifies freedom as a central theme in Murdoch’s fiction;</p><p>discussing this theme, Byatt also makes perceptive comments on Murdoch’s</p><p>interest in the thought of, among others, Plato and Simone Weil (Byatt 1965).</p><p>Three helpful collections of criticism are edited by Antonaccio and William</p><p>Schweiker (1996), Rowe (2007) and Rowe and Horner (2012).</p><p>4 See, in particular, Levinas (1991, 194– 219). As Colin Davis notes, Levinas has</p><p>become “an almost obligatory reference point in what is sometimes called the</p><p>‘ethical turn’ of poststructuralism and literary criticism.” In a way this is para-</p><p>doxical because, as Davis points out, in an article published in 1948 titled “La</p><p>Réalité et son ombre” (“Reality and Its Shadow”), Levinas launches an attack</p><p>on art that echoes Plato’s discussion in Book 10 of the Republic. See Davis</p><p>(2018, 25).</p><p>5 Quotation from the entry on Emmanuel Levinas in Stanford Encyclopedia of</p><p>Philosophy: https:// plato.stanf ord.edu/ entr ies/ levi nas/ #LogTot Inf</p><p>6 This last question could be seen as applying to both kinds of forgetting</p><p>discussed by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History and Forgetting: actively, forget-</p><p>ting as a deliberate erasing of the traces of the past; passively, forgetting “held</p><p>in reserve” (2004, 414– 416).</p><p>7 I thank Paul Fiddes and Cassandra Falke for their critically constructive</p><p>comments on earlier versions of this chapter.</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Alphen, Ernst van. 2018. “The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive.”</p><p>In Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative,</p><p>edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis, 68– 83. London: Routledge.</p><p>Antoniaccio, Maria, and William Schweiker, eds. 1996. Iris Murdoch and the</p><p>Search for Human Goodness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Bal, Mieke. 2018. “Is There an Ethics to Story- Telling?” In Storytelling and</p><p>Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, edited by Hanna</p><p>Meretoja and Colin Davis, 37– 54. London: Routledge.</p><p>Byatt, A. S. 1965/ 1994. Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch.</p><p>London: Vintage.</p><p>Davis, Colin. 2007. Levinas: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.</p><p>Davis, Colin. 2018. “Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge.” In</p><p>Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative,</p><p>edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis, 23– 36. London: Routledge.</p><p>Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Mémoires: For Paul de Man, translated by C. Lindsay</p><p>et al. New York: Columbia University Press.</p><p>Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The Work of Mourning, edited by Pascale- Anne Brault</p><p>and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Variants and Consequences of Violence 71</p><p>Fiddes, Paul. 2012. “Murdoch, Derrida and The Black Prince.” In Iris Murdoch:</p><p>Texts and Contexts, edited by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 91– 109.</p><p>New York: Palgrave Macmillan.</p><p>Gadamer, Hans- Georg. 1960/ 2013. Truth and Method, translation revised by</p><p>J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury.</p><p>Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.</p><p>Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.</p><p>Lothe, Jakob. 2019. “Narrative Communication as a Rhetorical Act: James</p><p>Phelan’s Poetics of Narrative.” Poetics Today 40, no. 2 (June): 355– 365.</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. “Narrative Hermeneutics and the Ethical Potential of</p><p>Literature.” In The Future of Literary Studies, edited by Jakob Lothe, 135–</p><p>147. Oslo: Novus Press.</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics,</p><p>History, and the Possible. New York: Oxford University Press.</p><p>Murdoch, Iris. 1974/ 1976. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. New York:</p><p>Penguin Books.</p><p>Osborn, Pamela. 2012. “Minding the Gap: Mourning in the Work of Murdoch</p><p>and Derrida.” In Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts, edited by Anne Rowe and</p><p>Avril Horner, 110– 125. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.</p><p>Phelan, James. 2017. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of</p><p>Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.</p><p>Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History and Forgetting, translated by Kathleen</p><p>Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Rowe, Anne, ed. 2007. Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. New York: Palgrave</p><p>Macmillan.</p><p>Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds. 2012. Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts.</p><p>New York: Palgrave Macmillan.</p><p>Tracy, David. 1996. “Iris Murdoch and the Many Faces of Platonism.” In Iris</p><p>Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, edited by Maria Antoniaccio</p><p>and William Schweiker, 54– 75. Chicago: Chicago University Press.</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-7</p><p>5 Violent Appetites</p><p>Distaste and the Aesthetics of</p><p>Violence</p><p>Tero Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>Think back on the last time you flicked through the channels on your tele-</p><p>vision or scrolled through the recommendations on your favorite online</p><p>media service. How many of the shows and movies you saw featured acts</p><p>of violence? I’d imagine quite a few.</p><p>In fact, a few years back, media scholars Brad Bushman and Rowell</p><p>Huesmann calculated the average amount of characters featured on a</p><p>night’s programming of American television. They then set out to deter-</p><p>mine just exactly how many of those characters ended up being murdered.</p><p>A quick calculation showed that if Americans were as homicidal as their</p><p>fictional counterparts on TV, murder rates would increase by 2400 per-</p><p>cent. Every single person in the United States would be murdered in less</p><p>than 50 years (Bushman and Huesmann 2001, 226).</p><p>Violence seems to be a part of human behavior that gets represented</p><p>quite regularly in the stories we tell each other, whether on Netflix or in</p><p>true crime podcasts or gathered around the campfire. The masses’ interest</p><p>in violent entertainments has usually been discussed in worried tones.</p><p>But as Bushman and Huesmann’s findings remind us, there does not seem</p><p>to be any straightforward correlation between the popularity of violent</p><p>representations and the prevalence of violent behavior in a society.</p><p>Nevertheless, in the field of aesthetics, violence in art and entertain-</p><p>ment has long been met with suspicion. Many of the great philosophers</p><p>of art from Aristotle on have warned against excessive violence in art. The</p><p>representation of violence, while often exciting and in the proper context</p><p>even sublime, can all too easily go too far and venture beyond the bounds</p><p>of propriety. Importantly for aesthetics, this means venturing beyond the</p><p>bounds of good taste. Typically, aesthetic theories about represented vio-</p><p>lence focus on distinguishing between tasteful representations of sublime</p><p>violence from distasteful scenes of gore and carnage.</p><p>This chapter focuses on the role of distaste in the aesthetics of violence.</p><p>I begin by outlining how classical aesthetics has contrasted and evaluated</p><p>tasteful and distasteful representations of violence. Interpolating from the</p><p>reasonings of David Hume, I argue that excessive graphic violence forms</p><p>the standard of distaste that falls outside the scope of traditional aesthetic</p><p>inquiry.</p><p>Violent Appetites 73</p><p>Hume’s reluctant attitude toward the representation of violence has</p><p>not completely curbed the development of aesthetical theories on the</p><p>subject. To illustrate this, I examine an exceptional oddity in aesthetics,</p><p>Thomas De Quincey’s set of semi- satirical essays on murder as art,</p><p>which aim to formulate the guidelines of both tasteful homicide in reality</p><p>and its sublime representation in narrative. Finally, I criticize the long-</p><p>standing idea of the sublimity of violence that De Quincey establishes</p><p>in his essays. Through an analysis of the roles of distaste and disgust</p><p>in aesthetic theory, I argue that the kind of tasteful representation of</p><p>violence that Hume or De Quincey would approve of is in some ways</p><p>more ethically problematic than an openly distasteful approach to the</p><p>representation of violence.</p><p>Achilles’ Tummy</p><p>Not all representations of violence are necessarily distasteful. As with</p><p>any term beginning with a negation, to define distaste, it is useful to first</p><p>examine its opposite. Let’s consider a canonical example of purportedly</p><p>tasteful violence: swift- footed Achilles, a proto- superhero from a culture</p><p>that didn’t yet divide characters neatly into heroes and villains. In Book</p><p>20 of The Iliad, Achilles is raging about the battlefield, driven into deadly</p><p>fury by the death of his beloved friend Patroclus:</p><p>...As Tros grasped his knees,</p><p>desperate, begging, Achilles slit open his liver,</p><p>the liver spurted loose, gushing with dark blood,</p><p>drenched his lap and the night swirled down his eyes</p><p>as his life breath slipped away.</p><p>And Mulius next –</p><p>he reared and jammed his lance through the man’s ear</p><p>so the lance came jutting out through the other ear,</p><p>bronze point glinting.</p><p>(Homer 1990, 518; Hom. Il. 20.468– 474)</p><p>Admittedly, this is pretty gruesome stuff. Thrusting a spear through a</p><p>man’s skull from one ear to the other won’t make for an easy PG- 13</p><p>adaptation. But, while there have been plenty of concerns about all the</p><p>blood and gore in this classic of classics about war, there have not really</p><p>been many serious doubts about the aesthetic value of the epic. Among</p><p>works that feature scenes of explicit violence, The Iliad is unimpeachable,</p><p>a cornerstone of our culture. If explicit violence can ever be represented</p><p>tastefully, Homer’s epic should by all accounts be one of the best examples</p><p>of tasteful representation of violence that we can find.</p><p>Even so, a couple of books later, Homer gives us a hint about what</p><p>distasteful representation of violence might be like. In Book 22, Achilles</p><p>74 Tero Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>has gone berserk on the Trojan forces, killing and mauling warriors left</p><p>and right, when he finally comes face to face with Hector, the champion</p><p>of the Trojans and the killer of Patroclus. Achilles will have his revenge.</p><p>He screams at Hector that if he could only stomach it, he would carve</p><p>Hector’s flesh raw and devour it in revenge for what Hector has done.</p><p>This is one of the more difficult passages to translate in the poem. There’s</p><p>a sense of Achilles almost vomiting at the thought of eating human flesh,</p><p>as he lacks the beast- like nature geared for it.1</p><p>Here, Achilles’ delicate stomach lets us know where the limits lie. He is</p><p>the reaper of men, practically bathing in the blood of his enemies, ready</p><p>to skewer his opponents from ear to ear, tear out their livers, hack off</p><p>their heads with one fell blow – but there is a line he cannot cross. No</p><p>matter how he would love to disgrace Hector and turn his enemy literally</p><p>into excrement, Achilles cannot bring himself to feast on Hector’s flesh.</p><p>This is the line that separates good taste from bad when we’re dealing</p><p>with represented violence. Achilles hesitates not because of pride or</p><p>because he holds himself above such savageries, but because he is physic-</p><p>ally disgusted by the idea of tearing beast- like into a fellow human being</p><p>with his teeth. Homer is onto something here. Disgust marks the final</p><p>dividing line between the tasteful and the distasteful. Somatic disgust ori-</p><p>ginally developed in humans in part to keep us from eating spoiled food</p><p>(Rozin et al. 2008, 759). What’s disgusting is distasteful by definition.</p><p>And we find the same structure in aesthetics and the discourse on taste.</p><p>If a scene in a novel or film manages to turn your stomach, it’s a safe bet</p><p>we’re dealing with a work that’s in bad taste.</p><p>In particular, the representation of graphic and extreme violence has</p><p>been a problematic issue for thinking about stories and art from the</p><p>very beginning. Extreme violence is no longer heroic, no longer funny.</p><p>It goes too far, becomes unsettling and unseemly. It’s hard to imagine</p><p>that the Greeks would have related to Achilles in the same way had the</p><p>swift- footed hero actually dug in and feasted on Hector’s innards, face</p><p>slathered in dark arterial blood.</p><p>Warnings against distastefully violent scenes and stories have been par</p><p>for the course for thousands of years. In the Poetics, Aristotle warns that</p><p>some plays might go too far and become too tragic. He expressly condemns</p><p>stories where a genuinely good man comes to a bad end. This sort of tra-</p><p>gedy would no longer incite pity and fear in spectators, he argues, but</p><p>would rather be only repulsive and shocking. Tellingly, Aristotle calls</p><p>plays like this μιαρός, often translated as “shocking” or “polluted,” but</p><p>literally meaning “stained with blood” (2012, 184; Poet. 1452b34– 37).</p><p>Tragedy requires the negative emotions of pity and fear to generate the</p><p>proper response of pleasure for the play’s</p><p>2014), and she has</p><p>coedited, with Colin Davis, The Routledge Companion to Literature</p><p>and Trauma (2020) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts</p><p>and the Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018) and the special issues</p><p>“Cultural Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies, 2021, with Eneken</p><p>Laanes) and “Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” (Poetics</p><p>Today, 2022, with Maria Mäkelä).</p><p>Brian Schiff is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology and</p><p>Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of</p><p>Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention at the American</p><p>University of Paris, France. Schiff is the author of A New Narrative for</p><p>Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2017), the editor of Rereading</p><p>Personal Narrative and Life Course (New Directions for Child and</p><p>Adolescent Development, 2014) and Situating Qualitative Methods</p><p>in Psychological Science (Routledge, 2018) and coeditor of Life and</p><p>Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience</p><p>(Oxford University Press, 2017). He was awarded the 2016 Theodore</p><p>Sarbin Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division</p><p>24: Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.</p><p>Avril Tynan is a researcher in comparative literature at the University</p><p>of Turku in Finland and associate researcher at the Open University,</p><p>UK. She has previously held positions at the Turku Institute for</p><p>Advanced Studies and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the</p><p>Humanities (KWI), Essen, Germany. She has published widely on</p><p>representations of history, memory and trauma in post- Holocaust</p><p>xii List of Contributors</p><p>French literature, including in Modern Language Review, French</p><p>Forum and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. Her</p><p>current research examines the intersections of narrative and ethics in</p><p>literary representations of ageing, illness and death. She is coeditor of</p><p>Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies.</p><p>Tero Eljas Vanhanen is a literary scholar specializing in affective nar-</p><p>ratology and popular fiction studies. Currently, he is a researcher at</p><p>the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has worked as a lecturer and</p><p>university teacher at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku and is a</p><p>member of Young Academy Finland. Previously, he was a Fulbright</p><p>Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. He is the coeditor of</p><p>When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow and The Art of Artertainment. His</p><p>articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophy and Literature,</p><p>SubStance, The Journal of American Studies and in several scholarly</p><p>collections.</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-1</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent</p><p>Interpretations</p><p>Introduction</p><p>Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and</p><p>Hanna Meretoja</p><p>Interpreting violence has a twofold meaning. It refers both to the process</p><p>of meaning- making involved in understanding representations of violence</p><p>and to the potential violence involved in interpretive acts themselves.</p><p>Narratives can be violent interpretations as representations of violence</p><p>or as interpretations by which we understand ourselves or others. While</p><p>poststructuralist thinkers, in particular, contend that language, narratives</p><p>and understanding (which involve naming and categorizing the other)</p><p>are inherently violent, from the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics</p><p>it can be argued that genuine understanding is inherently nonviolent,</p><p>receptive and self- altering. Some hermeneutically inclined thinkers argue</p><p>that in a pursuit of understanding, “We engage in dialogue with others</p><p>to allow their being to unfold. We try to allow the world around us</p><p>to speak” (Mootz & Taylor 2013, 1). Some see a difference in explan-</p><p>ation and understanding in terms of their ethical implications: explan-</p><p>ation allegedly limits our perception of violence as much as it opens it up</p><p>because the analytical categories on which explanations are predicated</p><p>imply mastery and appropriation of something singular, whereas</p><p>understanding allegedly implies dialogical relationality. Etymologically,</p><p>ex- planus (Barnhart 1988, 357) means to lay something out flat and vis-</p><p>ible, to equalize difference. Conversely, understanding derives from the</p><p>Old English “to stand in the midst of, stand between” (Barnhart 1988,</p><p>1185). Although it may be an accident of history that “understanding”</p><p>retains this relational connotation while “explanation” implies a singular</p><p>dominant agency, the difference between these concepts points toward</p><p>the ethical importance of dialogical relationality as opposed to one-</p><p>directional acts of appropriation. Thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas</p><p>(1988) and Jacques Derrida (1997), however, assert that not just explan-</p><p>ation but also understanding and interpretation, due to their reliance on</p><p>language and its categories, are inherently violent. In contrast, the her-</p><p>meneutic tradition suggests that there are different ways of using lan-</p><p>guage and that an understanding guided by openness to the singularity</p><p>of the other can be nonviolent. Instead of saying that interpretation is</p><p>inherently violent, it may be better to acknowledge that there is a spec-</p><p>trum from violent to nonviolent processes of interpretation, that is, from</p><p>2 Cassandra Falke,Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>what Hanna Meretoja calls “subsumptive” to “nonsubsumptive” inter-</p><p>pretations: while the former subsume singular phenomena under fixed</p><p>categories, the latter acknowledge the need of categories to expand and</p><p>transform in the temporal, interpretive process in order to do justice to</p><p>the singularity of the interpreted phenomena (2018, 107– 8).</p><p>The tendency of explanations to concentrate on what preceded (motiv-</p><p>ation, circumstances) or what followed (justification, response) means</p><p>that the experiential elements of violence easily escape. It is these experi-</p><p>ential elements, excluded or marginalized by explanatory frameworks,</p><p>that narratives of violence often try to evoke, and by emphasizing the sin-</p><p>gularity of those experiences, as well as the interpretive processes at work</p><p>by multiple actors, including those interpreted as victim, perpetrator</p><p>or witness, they can invite further interpretive acts with no implication</p><p>that such interpretation will ever be complete. Narratives representing</p><p>complex experiences of violence can furthermore reframe the notions</p><p>of victims and perpetrators by focusing on those who are not directly</p><p>involved but privileged by structures that they inherit, those who are</p><p>“implicated” (Rothberg 2019) in a history of violence and injustice and</p><p>who sustain the inherited structural injustices, not by being perpetrators</p><p>in a conventional sense, but by being either the silent and passive “bene-</p><p>ficiaries” (Robbins 2017) of these structures, or by using unmotivated</p><p>violence in the name of self- defense. Through the figure of the implicated</p><p>subject and the beneficiary, attention is called to forms of violence that</p><p>are not really visible within certain economies of representations, often</p><p>conceptualized as structural, symbolic or systemic violence (Dodd 2017;</p><p>Žižek 2008), but which exacerbate and perpetuate poverty and inequality</p><p>around the globe.</p><p>Violence can assume myriad forms. Individual instances of violence</p><p>accumulate in the never- ending and unwritable history of violent acts.</p><p>Even as we type, prisoners in Myanmar are tortured, wives and children</p><p>are beaten around the world, the Russian army bombs Ukrainian cities to</p><p>rubble and teenagers in Chicago indoctrinate one another in gang loyalty.</p><p>In every instance – every contact with a lived body, every threat or fear</p><p>of another strike – the individuals involved are changed in an interplay</p><p>of circumstances, decisions, receptions, responses and interpretations.</p><p>Explanations of violence tend to absorb a violent act into a system that</p><p>fits the act itself into a framework, the explanatory power of which arises</p><p>from its ability to deem some factors and experiences less relevant than</p><p>others; thereby much</p><p>audience. But if tragedy goes</p><p>too far, if it becomes too tragic, it runs the risk of becoming unappealing</p><p>and repellent. Excessively tragic, blood- soaked plays can’t lead to cathar-</p><p>sis, leaving the audience to deal with the decidedly unpleasant feelings of</p><p>disgust and shock all alone and unpurified.</p><p>Violent Appetites 75</p><p>The same attitude pops up a few millennia later in David Hume’s</p><p>“Of Tragedy” (1757a). Hume’s essay points our attention to something</p><p>strange: Aristotle takes it for granted that pity and fear lead to pleasure</p><p>in the context of tragedy. But pity and fear are in themselves disagreeable</p><p>emotions. How can they lead to a pleasurable experience? Hume offers an</p><p>elegant solution to this paradox of tragedy that’s still influential today: the</p><p>positive aspects of the work – the elegance, force and beauty of expres-</p><p>sion – overpower its negative elements.2 If a tragic scene is sufficiently</p><p>well- written, Hume argues, its artistic merits give us so much pleasure</p><p>that the displeasure we might feel from our negative emotional response</p><p>is eclipsed. Importantly, the affective charge of the originally negative</p><p>response then merges with the pleasurable aspects of the aesthetic experi-</p><p>ence and strengthens our enjoyment. In a well- written tragedy, the valence</p><p>of our negative emotional response inverts and ultimately adds to the</p><p>overall pleasure the work affords. Hume compares it to how love reaches</p><p>its “full force and violence” only when combined with some amount of</p><p>jealousy, which in itself is a “painful passion” (1757a, 191– 195).</p><p>There is just one exception. Extreme violence can be so disgusting and</p><p>disturbing that no amount of elegance of style or forcefulness of expres-</p><p>sion can salvage the story:</p><p>An action, represented in tragedy, may be too bloody and atrocious.</p><p>It may excite such movements as will not soften into pleasure; and</p><p>the greatest energy of expression, bestowed on descriptions of that</p><p>nature, serves only to augment our uneasiness.</p><p>(Hume 1757a, 198)</p><p>When a tragic scene is too violent, Hume argues, the conversion of</p><p>the affective charge works in the opposite direction. All the emotional</p><p>force, including our admiration for the artistic merits of the work,</p><p>adds to the overall negativity or painfulness of the experience. The ele-</p><p>gance, force and beauty of expression in an overly violent work serve</p><p>only to augment our uneasiness. Following Hume, no matter how</p><p>accomplished the work is in skill and eloquence, if it is too bloody</p><p>and atrocious – think of blood- spattered Achilles hungrily digging into</p><p>Hector’s steaming innards – it should be wholly unpleasant for the audi-</p><p>ence. The more skilled and eloquent this kind of writing is, the more</p><p>unpleasant the work will be.</p><p>We could call this the standard of distaste of Humean aesthetics.</p><p>Depictions of extreme violence, blood and guts, viscera and gore defile</p><p>even the most accomplished feats of artistry. Not only does the represen-</p><p>tation of excessive and graphic violence lead to a work being disgusting</p><p>and distasteful, but good writing, or the greatest energy of expression, as</p><p>Hume puts it, only serves to make us even more disturbed. The bloodier</p><p>the scenes of violence are and the more skillfully they’re depicted, the</p><p>more distasteful the work is bound to be.</p><p>76 Tero Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>Amusing Murders and Other Deathly Delights</p><p>Hume never defines what he means by too bloody and atrocious. He never</p><p>explicitly states where the line is drawn. But for the aesthetics of violence,</p><p>this is a crucial question. At what point does our appetite for violence</p><p>turn into distaste? At what point does our stomach start turning, like</p><p>Achilles’ does when he considers ripping Hector into bite- sized morsels</p><p>and munching down on the results? We find some important early answers</p><p>to these questions in the February 1827 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine,</p><p>which featured an essay titled “On Murder Considered as One of the</p><p>Fine Arts.” While originally published anonymously, the essay was soon</p><p>attributed to literary provocateur Thomas De Quincey, already infamous</p><p>for his Confessions of an English Opium- Eater (1821). Over the years,</p><p>“On Murder” began to take an increasingly central role in De Quincey’s</p><p>oeuvre. He returned to the subject several times, penning a sequel in</p><p>1839 and adding a long explanatory postscript to the two essays in 1854.</p><p>Tellingly, the postscript is a bit longer than both of the original essays put</p><p>together. A quarter century later, De Quincey clearly felt that he still had</p><p>a lot to clarify about his thoughts on the aesthetics of violence.</p><p>At first glance, “On Murder” is just a juvenile piece of over- the-</p><p>top irony aiming for shock value. The essays seem to be an extended</p><p>spoof on the idea of the criminal as an artist. The idea had been vaguely</p><p>thrown about in Blackwood’s Magazine before, but De Quincey’s essay</p><p>is the first full- fledged treatment of the subject (see Schoenfield 2013).</p><p>Nevertheless, behind the pitch- black comedic façade, De Quincey</p><p>formulates a surprisingly coherent theory on the aesthetics of murder</p><p>that had a considerable influence both on true crime writing and the</p><p>nascent genre of detective fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, was</p><p>heavily influenced by De Quincey, especially in his detective fiction (see</p><p>Morrison 2001). While De Quincey’s essays may have borrowed their</p><p>satirical bent from Swift, the essays on murder are not as outlandish as</p><p>the good Irish Dean’s famous proposal. People are really not likely to</p><p>start eating newborns no matter how hungry they may get, but people</p><p>are interested in murders, and they do talk about them in evaluative</p><p>tones. Murders and violence are regularly considered from the perspec-</p><p>tive of aesthetics, he argues. Once the initial moral shock has quieted</p><p>down, “inevitably the scenical features (what aesthetically may be called</p><p>the comparative advantages) of the several murders are reviewed and</p><p>valued” (De Quincey 1854, 62).</p><p>Although De Quincey’s ideas had a profound impact on fiction writers</p><p>like Poe, he is primarily interested in real murders rather than in fiction.</p><p>Accordingly, De Quincey bases his aesthetic theory on an examination of</p><p>a series of real murders that shocked London in December 1811. Known</p><p>as the Ratcliffe Highway murders, they consisted of two violent break-</p><p>ins 12 days apart in Wapping, a poor riverside district in East London.</p><p>In both cases the attacks seemed unmotivated, and the murderer brutally</p><p>Violent Appetites 77</p><p>bludgeoned and then slit the throats of his seven victims, including a baby</p><p>only a few months old. There seemed to be no motive. No valuables were</p><p>taken, and the victims were ordinary people with no ties to local crime.</p><p>The attacks were by far the most infamous crime of the era, only eclipsed</p><p>by Jack the Ripper’s murders in the neighboring district of Whitechapel</p><p>at the end of the century (see James and Critchley 1971).</p><p>At the time, it was quickly assumed that the killer was one John</p><p>Williams, although the evidence seems inconclusive by today’s standards.</p><p>Nevertheless, De Quincy paints the murderer as a rare genius: “Williams’s</p><p>murders [were] the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever</p><p>were committed” (1827, 211). In evoking the concept of sublimity in</p><p>connection with the Ratcliffe murders, De Quincey makes a shrewd move</p><p>that ties his thinking about the representation of violence to the funda-</p><p>mental issues of aesthetic theory. He is drawing on an idea endorsed in</p><p>classical British aesthetics from Lord Shaftesbury to Edmund Burke: some-</p><p>thing overwhelming or terrifying can be a source of aesthetic pleasure.</p><p>In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the</p><p>Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke defines the sublime as a sort of</p><p>negative pleasure that we feel whenever we come across something that</p><p>excites the ideas of pain, danger or terror. He argues that while pain and</p><p>danger are disagreeable</p><p>emotions, when we encounter them “at certain</p><p>distances and with certain modifications,” they can result in “a delightful</p><p>horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror” (Burke 1990, 36– 37,</p><p>123). Burke doesn’t explicitly mention violence or murder as potential</p><p>sources of the sublime, but they easily fit his criteria. They are undeniably</p><p>dangerous and painful, and people are fascinated and excited by sen-</p><p>sational murders. Straightforwardly applying Burke to the aesthetics of</p><p>violence, De Quincey argues that murder and violence can be experienced</p><p>as pleasurably sublime if we come across them at the proper distance and</p><p>with the right modifications. The aesthetics of violence that he sets out</p><p>to outline are essentially a survey of this proper way of looking at – and,</p><p>more or less satirically, performing – murder.</p><p>Using the Ratcliffe murders as a shining example of sublimity, De</p><p>Quincey goes on to formulate guidelines defining the aesthetic value of</p><p>an act of murder. The guiding principle for De Quincey is that murder</p><p>should be a feat of genius. The act should be as spectacular and bloody</p><p>as possible, committed in broad daylight and out in the open – but an</p><p>ingenious murderer should manage to slip away, nonetheless. Even more</p><p>importantly, the act of murder should be disinterested. Its motive should</p><p>be pure desire for murder. Not profit as in robberies, or strife as in feuds</p><p>between criminals, but simple desire for murder for murder’s sake (De</p><p>Quincey 1827, 211– 213). The key words here, of course, are “genius”</p><p>and “disinterested,” concepts pointing straight to another great aesthet-</p><p>ician of the eighteenth century, namely Immanuel Kant. Importantly,</p><p>from De Quincey’s perspective, the disinterested genius is the murderer,</p><p>not the writer. The killer is the true artist; the writer is exposed as an</p><p>78 Tero Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>impostor, a lesser artist, a mere recorder of true art (Black 1991, 39). For</p><p>De Quincey the reality of murder is impossible to represent adequately</p><p>in narrative form: it’s sublime. De Quincey’s view on the sublimity of</p><p>violence prefigures the now common idea of the unspeakability of vio-</p><p>lence that views violence somehow so powerful that it exceeds human</p><p>comprehension and cannot be adequately represented in a narrative (see</p><p>Bachner 2011, 3).</p><p>Nonetheless, there is an art to telling stories about murder. Looking</p><p>at De Quincey’s three essays as a whole, we find an aesthetic theory of</p><p>representing violence as well. In The Aesthetics of Murder (1991), literary</p><p>critic Joel Black formulates a hierarchy of four types of representation of</p><p>murder based on De Quincey’s essays. The hierarchy is based on the per-</p><p>spective from which the murder is represented:</p><p>1) Lowest of all is to tell the story of the murder from the victim’s</p><p>point of view. This way of representing murder offers nothing</p><p>but shock value, leading to a crass and sensationalistic narrative.</p><p>The victim’s perspective is wholly distasteful, as the audience is</p><p>asked to imagine the victim’s suffering, and indeed to imagine</p><p>what it feels like to die in the hands of a murderer. In Hume’s</p><p>terms, this would be where a narrative becomes too bloody and</p><p>atrocious, precluding any possibility of aesthetic pleasure.</p><p>2) Less distasteful, but still a pointedly banal and tedious way of</p><p>representing murder is to tell the story from the perspective of</p><p>the detective. This leads to a murder mystery or a case file.</p><p>3) A better and more interesting way of representing murder is to</p><p>tell the story from the perspective of the murderer. This is the</p><p>psychological confession, familiar from many classics of litera-</p><p>ture. Think of Macbeth or Raskolnikov – or Maximilien Aue</p><p>from Jonathan Littell’s Kindly Ones (2006), for that matter.</p><p>From De Quincey’s perspective this type of a murder story can</p><p>be aesthetically valuable but runs the risk of making the audi-</p><p>ence identify with the murderer. For all his boisterous exultations</p><p>of murder, De Quincey still maintains that murder is morally</p><p>wrong. Excessive identification with the murderer can lead to</p><p>excusing the crime – or even worse, emulating the murderer in</p><p>real life.</p><p>4) Finally, best of all is to represent murder from the point of view</p><p>of the witness. The witness functions as a stand- in for the audi-</p><p>ence, modelling the properly horrified response that we should</p><p>have while keeping us at a safe distance from the actual terri-</p><p>fying spectacle. Notably, this distance allows for a pleasurable</p><p>aesthetic experience.</p><p>Black argues that for De Quincey the act of murder will only become</p><p>“an aesthetic experience of the sublime when it is mediated by a witness”</p><p>Violent Appetites 79</p><p>(1991, 66– 67). In short, for murder to be represented aesthetically, there</p><p>must be a buffer or a distance between the murderer and the audience.</p><p>The witness as the narrator or focalizer supplies this mediating buffer.</p><p>Fittingly, the witness as a buffer corresponds to the “certain distance and</p><p>modifications” that Burke was writing about in his theory of the sub-</p><p>lime (1990, 36– 37). By mediating the violence through the perspective of</p><p>the witness, violence becomes a source of an aesthetic experience of sub-</p><p>limity. In her study on the representation of violence in American litera-</p><p>ture, The Prestige of Violence (2011), cultural critic Sally Bachner argues</p><p>that this sort of mediated representation of violence is often considered</p><p>a tasteful way of representing violence, typical to distinguished works of</p><p>high artistic value (Bachner 2011, 4). Thus, when violence is depicted</p><p>indirectly in a mediated fashion, it should be sublime and tasteful.</p><p>But here lies the problem.</p><p>By upholding the distance between violence and the audience, we run</p><p>the risk of sweeping the ethical repercussions of represented violence</p><p>under the rug. Distancing softens the affective force of the violence and</p><p>makes it more palatable, lacking real impact and real consequences. When</p><p>we represent violence in a tasteful, distancing way, it may be exciting,</p><p>but it may also ignore the pain and suffering that violence causes. For</p><p>instance, enchanted by Homer’s remarkable eloquence and soothed by</p><p>the unfocalized, witness- like narration, we might see Achilles’ rampage in</p><p>The Iliad as an example of ferocious heroism, downplaying the horrific</p><p>death of the Trojan soldiers. Tasteful representation of violence runs the</p><p>risk of celebrating violence, of dismissing its ugly consequences.</p><p>How, then, should violence be represented, or should we just side with</p><p>the moralists and ban violent stories and images altogether? I suggest that</p><p>the type of representation of violence that might sidestep the problems</p><p>that sublimity poses is in fact De Quincey’s lowest, most distasteful type:</p><p>representing violence from the point of view of the victim. Sure, we typ-</p><p>ically find this sort of narration in lowbrow contexts that are considered</p><p>in poor taste, in trashy gothic novels, shock shlock B- movies, extreme</p><p>horror or exploitation films, all the stuff that Hume would find much</p><p>too bloody and disturbing. But in these kinds of violent works, we are</p><p>not keeping violence at an arm’s length, we’re not elevating it to the lofty</p><p>heights of sublimity. Violence from the victim’s perspective can never be</p><p>sublime in the sense that Burke defines it.</p><p>It is no coincidence that this kind of anti- sublime representation of</p><p>violence appears mostly in lowbrow genres. Class distinctions underlie</p><p>aesthetic preferences, and as Pierre Bourdieu famously argues, the cen-</p><p>tral distinction between high and low aesthetics is the elite’s “capacity</p><p>for sublimation” (1984, 6). Thus, violent works that deny the possibility</p><p>of sublimation tend to be disregarded in highbrow culture. For instance,</p><p>when academic discourse – highbrow by definition – tackles works that</p><p>feature anti- sublime violence, the violent aspects of the works tend to be</p><p>overlooked or minimized (Vanhanen 2017, 209, passim).</p><p>80 Tero</p><p>Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>Highbrow concerns over anti- sublime representations of violence</p><p>are hardly unfounded. Representing murder from the perspective of the</p><p>victim aims for transgression and shock value and can make violence into</p><p>a spectacle, which opens a whole new can of worms (see Vanhanen 2016,</p><p>20– 22, 155– 156). Nevertheless, the victim’s perspective treats violence</p><p>in a way that upholds its shocking, disturbing and frankly disgusting</p><p>aspects. Maybe we shouldn’t be feeling aesthetic pleasure when we</p><p>encounter violence in art. When we see representations of violence, isn’t</p><p>it more appropriate to flinch rather than to have a pleasurably sublime</p><p>aesthetic experience?</p><p>De Quincey’s aesthetics of murder sketch out the ways that violence</p><p>has been typically represented tastefully, in ways that are not offensive</p><p>or unpalatable to high- or middlebrow audiences. In keeping the victim’s</p><p>truly horrifying experience at a safe distance, De Quincey’s aesthetics</p><p>mark the boundary between attraction and repulsion, between taste and</p><p>distaste. The reality of violence, however, is inherently distasteful and dis-</p><p>agreeable. Perhaps, then, some aspects of violence are best represented in</p><p>distasteful and disagreeable ways as well.</p><p>Don’t Trust Your Disgust</p><p>One of the problems with graphic and shocking representation of vio-</p><p>lence is that it is literally repellent. When Hume discusses works that revel</p><p>in the atrocity of violence and confound “the limits of vice and virtue,” he</p><p>falls back on the vocabulary of disgust and monstrosity. Works that are</p><p>too bloody and atrocious, he argues, must be condemned as “deformed”</p><p>and “disfigured” (Hume 1757b, 236). The repulsion we might feel when</p><p>faced with scenes of graphic violence is tantamount to disgust. On the</p><p>level of content, bloody violence is distasteful; on the level of affect, dis-</p><p>taste manifests as disgust.</p><p>A few decades after Hume’s work on taste, the problem of disgust in</p><p>art appears once more, but this time the problem of disgust is formulated</p><p>even more forcefully. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), one of the ori-</p><p>ginating texts of modern aesthetics, Immanuel Kant argues that art may</p><p>represent disagreeable or ugly subjects, but real art can never depict the</p><p>disgusting:</p><p>Fine art ... describes things beautifully that in nature we would</p><p>dislike or find ugly …. There is only one kind of ugliness that</p><p>cannot be presented in conformity with nature without obliterating</p><p>all aesthetical liking and hence artistic beauty: that ugliness which</p><p>arouses disgust.</p><p>(Kant 1987, 180, italics in original)</p><p>Disgust is antithetical to aesthetics, Kant argues, since it destroys all aes-</p><p>thetic satisfaction – it contaminates aesthetic experience. Paying close</p><p>Violent Appetites 81</p><p>attention to this passage, Jacques Derrida argues that disgust, rather than</p><p>the sublime, is the absolute other of the beautiful in Kantian aesthetics</p><p>(1975, 88– 89). The etymology of the word supports this. Dis- gust is lit-</p><p>erally dis- taste: gustus is Latin for “taste.”3</p><p>Here’s the interesting part of Kant’s take on the disgusting: he goes on</p><p>to argue that while the disgusting offers only displeasure, it nevertheless</p><p>forces itself upon us. The disgusting object insists “on our enjoying it even</p><p>though that is just what we are forcefully resisting” (Kant 1987, 180).</p><p>Disgust forces us to enjoy it, Kant concedes. This is an uncharacteristic</p><p>passage in Kant, but he recognizes something very human: we are in some</p><p>strange way attracted to the disgusting. Somatically, this is connected to</p><p>the way that disgust, like fear, tends to direct our attention to the object</p><p>that we’re reacting to (Miller 1997, x). We have a hard time averting</p><p>our eyes from a piece of roadkill we pass by; we laugh at fart- jokes in</p><p>Rabelais and South Park; and we might enjoy a grisly scene of violence</p><p>in a slasher film or a horror novel. Disgust, then, is inherently paradox-</p><p>ical. A disgusting object is unpleasant, but it tends to trigger a strange</p><p>sense of fascination as well. Sara Ahmed notes that our fascination with</p><p>the disgusting is based on its repellent nature, that the disgusting attracts</p><p>precisely because it pulls away (2004, 96). Without this pulling away, the</p><p>repellent would not be alluring.</p><p>For Kant, this fascination with the disgusting is a threat to all aesthetic</p><p>satisfaction. Or, to put it another way, the disgusting is a threat to good</p><p>taste. Disgust is the emotion of contamination, and from the perspec-</p><p>tive of classical aesthetics, it has the ability to contaminate the entirety of</p><p>an aesthetical experience. As Hume puts it, if a work is too bloody and</p><p>atrocious, it is wholly disfigured and deformed, no matter its possible aes-</p><p>thetic accomplishments. For classical aesthetics, and Kant in particular, this</p><p>poses an ethical problem as well. For Kant, ethics and aesthetics are irrev-</p><p>ocably linked. Beauty is “the symbol of the morally good” (Kant 1987,</p><p>227); the sublime is only appealing because it reveals how our mind is able</p><p>“to rise above … obstacles of sensibility by means of moral principles”</p><p>(Kant 1987, 132). What’s aesthetically good, Kant implies, is connected</p><p>to what’s morally good. Since disgust precludes any possibility of aesthetic</p><p>pleasure – whether through the experience of the beautiful or the sublime –</p><p>it marks the point where the aesthetical object is ethically suspect.</p><p>And it’s not just Kant. Empirical research affirms this idea as well. In</p><p>an extensive Australian sociological survey on taste, most respondents</p><p>defined bad taste in ethical terms. Respondents tended to describe things</p><p>they considered in bad taste mostly in ethically loaded terms such as</p><p>“upsetting” or “disgusting” (Woodward and Emmison 2001, 312). In</p><p>ethics the feeling of moral disgust influences our ethical guidelines and</p><p>is often used as a regulating principle in legal practice (which is highly</p><p>problematic: see Nussbaum 2004, 14– 16; Johnson 2010, 151– 156). It’s</p><p>the same situation in aesthetics: what’s disgusting is usually considered</p><p>distasteful, aesthetically suspect.</p><p>82 Tero Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>Let’s go ahead and apply all this to the representation of violence.</p><p>Here’s an example from a little- known niche of horror fiction usually</p><p>labeled extreme horror. The passage is from Poppy Z. Brite’s (1996)</p><p>novel Exquisite Corpse, an acknowledged classic among horror fans</p><p>and considered quite disturbing even by seasoned devotees of extreme</p><p>horror (see Vanhanen 2016, 245– 246). In this scene, Jay, a cannibalistic</p><p>serial killer from New Orleans, has finally managed to ensnare his ideal</p><p>victim, a 17- year- old beautiful boy called Tran, who’s now tied up at Jay’s</p><p>apartment in the process of being tortured to death:</p><p>Jay thrust the knife into the incision again, and Tran’s head fell back.</p><p>The cold blade twisted inside him, severed some tough membrane</p><p>with an agonizing crunch, sank into vital softness. Tran heard his</p><p>own blood pattering onto the table, felt it pooling warmly beneath</p><p>his back and buttocks. Blood filled his throat, welled past the gag and</p><p>trickled out of the corners of his mouth.</p><p>Jay unfastened the gag and pulled it out. A freshet of blood and</p><p>bile followed it. Tran coughed, retched, tried to scream. It sounded</p><p>like somebody attempting to gargle boiling water.</p><p>(Brite 1996, 227– 228)</p><p>The disgusting aspects of this passage don’t necessarily come out well in</p><p>a short passage quoted in a scholarly article, but I don’t think it’s too far-</p><p>fetched to say that the scene might make somebody uneasy and disgusted</p><p>in the context of reading the entire novel. From an ethical perspective,</p><p>violence is at first glance presented here as entertainment, reduced to a</p><p>sexualized spectacle for the giddy consumption of horror fanatics hungry</p><p>for blood and gore. From a narrative perspective, there are several aspects</p><p>in the passage that are apt to trigger a disgusted bodily response in the</p><p>reader.</p><p>For instance, compared to the passage</p><p>from The Iliad we looked at in</p><p>the beginning, Brite’s murder scene is much more detailed and contains</p><p>more sensory description. There’s the description of the sounds of a</p><p>knife piercing Tran’s body, the dripping of blood and the final auditive</p><p>and tactile simile of gargling boiling water. And, of course, all of this is</p><p>described with disturbingly sexual overtones, the knife thrusting, Tran’s</p><p>head falling back and so on. From the perspective of De Quincey’s aes-</p><p>thetics of murder, this passage exemplifies the most distasteful way of</p><p>representing violence. The scene is told from the point of view of Tran,</p><p>the murder victim. This kind of representation of violence, then, should</p><p>be ethically suspect, in exceptionally poor taste and thus unable to pro-</p><p>vide pleasure for readers. But for all this, Exquisite Corpse is a popular</p><p>text, one still in print more than 20 years later, one still revered in fan</p><p>circles and argued about in scholarly publications (see, e.g., Cook 2006;</p><p>Mueller 2007; Wright 2014; Vanhanen 2016, 2017). All in all, it’s a well-</p><p>written novel – just one designed not to please and amuse but to disturb</p><p>Violent Appetites 83</p><p>and repulse readers. It easily passes Hume’s criteria for being bloody and</p><p>atrocious, and it exhibits a force of expression that should make it even</p><p>more disturbing.</p><p>Regardless of the book’s distasteful nature, I don’t think fans of</p><p>Exquisite Corpse are all simply blood- thirsty brutes displaying deplor-</p><p>able tastes in fiction, nor are they perverts looking for one- handed reading</p><p>(at least not all of them). It’s not just that the extreme violence of the</p><p>book is simply perceived as cool or exciting by thoughtless degenerates.</p><p>Rather, it’s precisely because admirers of Exquisite Corpse are disgusted</p><p>and shaken by it that they enjoy reading fiction like this. Compared to</p><p>the passage from The Iliad, Brite’s novel works along a different logic, an</p><p>anti- aesthetic of distaste, where disgust, unease and shock are desirable.</p><p>Typically, though, fans of extreme horror describe their fascination</p><p>with the genre as a guilty pleasure (see, e.g., Wisker 2002; Svehla 2018).</p><p>Particularly with extreme horror, there is a sense of going against some-</p><p>thing they shouldn’t, of breaking the rules. This implies that readers are</p><p>at least somewhat aware of the ethical and aesthetic transgressions of</p><p>works like Exquisite Corpse. They know that the genre is often dismissed</p><p>as lowbrow trash and that enjoying grisly sexualized murder scenes is</p><p>ethically suspect. With extreme horror, there’s a guilty pleasure of going</p><p>too far, of going against good taste and against good ethical judgment.</p><p>This resistance to aesthetic and ethical norms forms a big part of the</p><p>appeal of extremely violent narratives. Extreme violence triggers distaste</p><p>and disgust that we enjoy precisely because extreme violence transgresses</p><p>the boundaries of good taste. Disgust functions here as the affective</p><p>marker of crossing these ethical and aesthetic boundaries. The joy of</p><p>transgression, of going too far, of the illicit is a crucial part of the enjoy-</p><p>ment of extremely violent narratives. But transgression isn’t just a form</p><p>of juvenile rebellion against set norms. Transgression is inherently para-</p><p>doxical. When we transgress beyond the boundaries and limits we’ve set</p><p>for ourselves (for instance, the boundaries of good taste or the ethics of</p><p>fiction), transgression affirms those limits as well. Transgression needs</p><p>limits to overstep them. There can be no transgression if there are no rules</p><p>or limits to transgress (Jenks 2003, 2). So, if there’s no good taste, there</p><p>cannot be distaste either.</p><p>While Kant sees the disgusting as an existential threat to aesthetic</p><p>value, the anti- aesthetics of distaste do not destroy the limits of good</p><p>taste – but reaffirm them by transgressing them. If horror aficionados find</p><p>themselves enjoying their disturbed and disgusted response to a particu-</p><p>larly bloody and violent scene, it doesn’t mean that they condone vio-</p><p>lence, find violence pleasant or that their disgust suddenly has a positive</p><p>valence. Rather, they are enjoying their disturbed and disgusted response</p><p>to the scene and the ambivalent, guilty pleasure that it triggers in them.</p><p>So- called tasteful representations of violence – whether in fiction or</p><p>in true crime writing – sidestep this naturally repellent response to vio-</p><p>lence. If we approach violence only at a distance, as a source of some</p><p>84 Tero Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>sublime contemplation, we risk aggrandizing violence. Tasteful violence</p><p>can seem heroic, exciting, elevated. Conversely, Exquisite Corpse stays</p><p>more truthful to the horrific forcefulness of violence. The murder scene in</p><p>Brite’s novel is in some ways more ethical than the description of Achilles’</p><p>rampage in Homer. It does not occlude the suffering of the victims, and</p><p>it forces us to face and affirm the distasteful and the physically and mor-</p><p>ally disgusting aspects of violence. And, perhaps, to face our own guilty</p><p>attraction to it.</p><p>Strangely, then, the fact that we might enjoy a scene of extreme vio-</p><p>lence reveals that we still perceive violence as horrifying, disgusting and</p><p>ethically problematic. To appreciate these kinds of scenes of extreme vio-</p><p>lence, one must enjoy that which repels and disgusts. And to do so, one</p><p>must be repelled and disgusted in the first place. If we aren’t repulsed by</p><p>the shocking nature of a particularly disturbing scene of represented vio-</p><p>lence, we’re ultimately sidestepping the ethical ramifications of violence</p><p>and its representation. The aesthetics of violence must come to grips with</p><p>the role of distaste and disgust in the allure of violence.</p><p>Notes</p><p>1 In literal terms, Achilles says that he wishes that his animal fierceness and</p><p>appetite would spew out of him, he would tear off Hector’s flesh and eat it:</p><p>“αἲ γάρ πως αὐτόν με μένος καὶ θυμὸς ἀνήη / ὤμ᾽ ἀποταμνόμενον κρέα ἔδμεναι”</p><p>(Hom. Il. 22.346– 347).</p><p>2 Of course, Hume’s conversion theory is not the only solution to the paradox of</p><p>tragedy in circulation, see Smuts (2009).</p><p>3 The argument pops up again in more recent affect theory as well: Sianne</p><p>Ngai focuses on this passage in Kant’s Critique of Judgment in her book Ugly</p><p>Feelings (2005) but makes no mention of Derrida’s work from 40 years earlier,</p><p>even though she echoes the exact same arguments.</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Aristotle. 2012. Poetics. Ed. Leonardo Tarán and Dimitri Gutas. Leiden: Brill.</p><p>Bachner, Sally. 2011. The Prestige of Violence. Athens: University of Georgia Press.</p><p>Black, Joel. 1991. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and</p><p>Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p><p>Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979/ 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of</p><p>Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.</p><p>Brite, Poppy Z. 1996. Exquisite Corpse. New York: Simon & Schuster.</p><p>Burke, Edmund. 1757/ 1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our</p><p>Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Bushman, Brad, and Rowell Huesmann. 2001. “Effects of Televised Violence on</p><p>Aggression.” In Handbook of Children and the Media, Ed. Dorothy Singer</p><p>and Jerome Singer, 223– 254. London: Sage.</p><p>Violent Appetites 85</p><p>Cook, Susan. 2006. “Subversion without Limits: From Secretary’s Transgressive</p><p>S/ M to Exquisite Corpse’s Subversive Sadomasochism.” Discourse 28, no. 1:</p><p>121– 141.</p><p>De Quincey, Thomas. 1827. “On Murder as Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”</p><p>Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February: 199– 213.</p><p>De Quincey, Thomas. 1854. “Postscript.” In Selections Grave and Gay, Ed.</p><p>Thomas De Quincey, 60– 111. Edinburgh: J. Hogg.</p><p>Derrida, Jacques. 1975. “Economimesis.” In Mimesis: des articulations, Ed.</p><p>Sylviane Agacinski, 57– 93. Paris: Aubier- Flammarion.</p><p>Homer.</p><p>1990. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Press.</p><p>Hume, David. 1757a. “On Tragedy.” In Four Dissertations, 185– 200. London:</p><p>A. Millar.</p><p>Hume, David. 1757b. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Four Dissertations, 203–</p><p>240. London: A. Millar.</p><p>James, P. D., and T. A. Critchley. 1971. The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe</p><p>Highway Murders 1811. London: Constable.</p><p>Jenks, Chris. 2003. Transgression. New York: Routledge.</p><p>Johnson, Paul. 2010. “Law, Morality and Disgust: The Regulation of ‘Extreme</p><p>Pornography’ in England and Wales.” Social & Legal Studies 19, no. 2:</p><p>147– 163.</p><p>Kant, Immanuel. 1790/ 1987. Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner Pluhar.</p><p>Indianapolis: Hackett.</p><p>Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Morrison, Robert. 2001. “Poe’s De Quincey, Poe’s Dupin.” Essays in Criticism</p><p>51, no. 4: 424– 441.</p><p>Mueller, Monika. 2007. “ ‘A Wet Festival of Scarlet’: Poppy Z. Brite’s (Un)</p><p>Aesthetics of Murder.” In The Abject of Desire, Eds. Konstanze Kutzbach and</p><p>Monika Mueller, 255– 270. Amsterdam: Rodopi.</p><p>Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.</p><p>Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the</p><p>Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.</p><p>Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt and Clark R. McCauley. 2008. “Disgust.” In</p><p>Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edition, Eds. Michael Lewis et al., 757– 776.</p><p>New York: Guilford Press.</p><p>Schoenfield, Mark. 2013. “The Taste for Violence in Blackwood’s Magazine.” In</p><p>Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine, Eds. Robert Morrison and Daniel</p><p>Roberts, 187– 200. London: Palgrave Macmillan.</p><p>Smuts, Aaron. 2009. “Art and Negative Affect.” Philosophy Compass 4,</p><p>no. 1: 39– 55.</p><p>Svehla, Gary J., and Susan Svehla, eds. 2018. Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Film.</p><p>Albany: Bearmanor Media.</p><p>Vanhanen, Tero Eljas. 2016. Shock Tactics and Extreme Strategies: Affectivity</p><p>and Transgression in Late Twentieth- Century Extreme Fiction. Helsinki:</p><p>University of Helsinki Unigrafia.</p><p>Vanhanen, Tero Eljas. 2017. “The Good, the Bad, and the Nobrow: Structures of</p><p>Taste and Distaste in the Nobrow Age.” In When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow:</p><p>Popular Culture and the Rise of Nobrow, Eds. Peter Swirski and Tero Eljas</p><p>Vanhanen, 207– 233. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.</p><p>86 Tero Eljas Vanhanen</p><p>Wisker, Gina. 2002. “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Women’s Horror.” Femspec 4,</p><p>no. 1: 1.</p><p>Woodward, Ian, and Michael Emmison. 2001. “From Aesthetic Principles to</p><p>Collective Sentiments: The Logics of Everyday Judgements of Taste.” Poetics</p><p>29, no. 6: 295– 316.</p><p>Wright, Laura. 2014. “Post- Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and</p><p>Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood.” Journal of</p><p>the Fantastic in the Arts 25: 347– 365.</p><p>Part II</p><p>Understanding the Violence</p><p>of Perpetrators</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-9</p><p>6 A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics</p><p>of Violence</p><p>Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>Shock. Disgust. Astonishment. Terror. These are some of the possible</p><p>reactions to the violent spectacle produced by extremists taking up arms</p><p>in order to murder innocent and defenseless persons and their laudation</p><p>of these acts in words and images. But, perhaps, even more than these</p><p>raw emotional reactions, we feel a sense of disbelief or unreality. How</p><p>are such crimes possible? How could a human be so brutal, callous and</p><p>inhuman?</p><p>Understanding the motivations of perpetrators is not an easy task.</p><p>Extreme violence challenges our ability to understand. Because their</p><p>actions are so extraordinary, we believe that perpetrators must somehow</p><p>be extraordinary too; they must be sadistic, insane or biologically flawed</p><p>(Waller 2002). But historical (Browning 1992; Straus 2006) and social</p><p>science investigations (Milgram 1963; Zimbardo, Maslach and Haney</p><p>2000) show that everyday persons are capable of committing heinous</p><p>acts and are the primary source of manpower in atrocity crimes. Still</p><p>when confronted with acts of extreme violence, understanding seems</p><p>elusive.</p><p>In this essay, we analyze the accounts, self- published “manifestos,”</p><p>distributed on the internet by five mass shooters, or so- called lone wolf</p><p>terrorists: Anders Behring Breivik, Dylan Roof, Brenton Tarrant, John</p><p>Earnest and Patrick Crusius. In each case, an act of symbolic violence</p><p>is part of and accompanies the act of physical violence. Although the</p><p>manifestos are different in focus and tone, each documents the motiv-</p><p>ations of the killer for their deeds. Accompanying their murderous</p><p>actions, they articulate a crafted identity and symbolic context, which</p><p>includes a racist subversion of reality. Playing on the word manifesto,</p><p>we offer our own manifesto on how to understand these texts differently.</p><p>In our analysis, we make no presuppositions of their actual motives,</p><p>but rather investigate the discourses they harness and propagate. Although</p><p>we find their opinions contemptible, we attempt to explore the world</p><p>from the perspective of the killers and to understand their reasoning. In</p><p>other words, we work from the stance of a hermeneutics of restoration</p><p>in order to describe the voice and world of the killer (Ricoeur 1970). Of</p><p>90 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>course, interpreters are always telling the stories of others in a “double</p><p>hermeneutic” (Meretoja 2017) and are unable to free themselves com-</p><p>pletely from prejudice in order to reach the meanings of others. Still we</p><p>explore these textual constructions examining who the authors say they</p><p>are, how they intend for their crimes to be understood and how they por-</p><p>tray other groups, history and the world.</p><p>One of the central obstacles to understanding is that we impose our</p><p>ideas about what is moral onto others and, falsely, believe that they</p><p>are operating on similar assumptions. The manifestos frame the moral</p><p>reasons for mass shooters’ actions to the public and those who might be</p><p>influenced to commit similar actions. Chillingly, from their perspective,</p><p>killing is a rational action that rests upon irrefutable evidence. Pernicious</p><p>lies and mischaracterizations of other groups are part of the symbolic</p><p>vocabulary where the other is libelously portrayed as being in violation of</p><p>the natural or sacred order. Murder is, therefore, seen as a moral and even</p><p>a heroic project. As Fiske and Rai (2015, xxii) argue, “When people hurt</p><p>or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they</p><p>feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.” Likewise,</p><p>as Welzer (2004, 16) asks, “What if the perpetrators did not violate their</p><p>moral code, but rather, within the framework of their Weltanschauung,</p><p>acted according to the highest moral standards?”</p><p>Following Shweder et al. (1997, 125– 126), we find it helpful to</p><p>consider moral reasoning from a pluralistic standpoint, which argues</p><p>that interpretations of the right and good are multiple and “unequally</p><p>distributed around the world.” Importantly, Shweder et al. (138) dis-</p><p>tinguish three clusters of moral explanations: (1) an ethics of autonomy</p><p>concerned with “harms, rights, and justice” that “aims to … promote the</p><p>exercise of free will in the pursuit of personal preference;” (2) an ethics</p><p>of community concerned with “duty, hierarchy, interdependency, and</p><p>souls” that “aims to protect the moral integrity of the various stations</p><p>or roles that constitute a ‘society’ or a ‘community;’ ” and (3) an ethics</p><p>of divinity concerned with the “sacred order, natural order, tradition,</p><p>sanctity, sin, and pollution” that “aims to protect the soul, the spirit …</p><p>from degradation.” For Shweder et al. (1997), these ethical discourses are</p><p>found across the globe and coexist, but different cultures have preferred</p><p>ethics to explain actions.</p><p>In the context of mass murder, one can only speak about the ethics</p><p>of community or divinity as moral goods in a perverse sense. But, in</p><p>order to understand,</p><p>we need to look at matters from the perspective of</p><p>the perpetrator. Understanding requires interpreting their explanations as</p><p>expressions of an alternate moral ontology that must be recovered on its</p><p>own terms in order to view the rationale for their violent actions.</p><p>The manifesto is their argument for the moral virtue of their actions.</p><p>They sanctify the task by positioning themselves as the right person</p><p>carrying out the attack for the right reasons. As we will argue, there is</p><p>a dangerous combination of being both a victim and a hero. They are</p><p>A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 91</p><p>victims, as part of an unjustly persecuted group, and they are the self-</p><p>anointed hero who will contribute to the rectification of this injustice</p><p>through purifying violence. In essence, they are proclaiming themselves as</p><p>an active agent in the restoration of the world. These tasks are perceived</p><p>as good because they are intended to restore what they see as the natural</p><p>or sacred order.</p><p>Lone Wolves</p><p>Lone wolf terrorism is a relatively new term that, because of its</p><p>origins, we are somewhat reticent to apply. As Mattias Gardell (2021,</p><p>11) writes, “ ‘Lone wolf’ is a metaphor that began to be used by white</p><p>radical nationalists in the 1970s to connote unorganized individuals</p><p>who committed violent crime to further white racist/ white nationalist</p><p>aims.” Furthermore, as Gardell (2021) points out, lone wolf terrorism is</p><p>promoted as a strategy for initiating and accelerating a race war. Despite</p><p>these reservations, lone wolf is the term most researchers use to describe</p><p>the phenomenon of single- actor terrorism.</p><p>A lone wolf can be defined as a self- radicalized, unaccompanied per-</p><p>petrator who acts outside the direction of a terrorist cell. However, they</p><p>are only alone in their actions; they participate in relationships, either</p><p>online or face to face, and share systems of beliefs with communities</p><p>(Schuurman et al. 2019). Self- radicalization is commonly encouraged by</p><p>right- wing extremist groups in an effort to spread their ideology while</p><p>staying undetectable and hard for governments and antihate groups to</p><p>counter (Gardell 2021; Bates 2012).</p><p>In 2010, the use of this term came onto the world stage when the</p><p>Department of Homeland Security declared that lone wolves represent</p><p>the greatest threat to the national security of the United States (Capellan</p><p>2015). Shortly after the 2011 attacks of Anders Breivik, President Obama</p><p>stated on CNN that the biggest concern for the country is “the lone wolf</p><p>terrorist” who is capable of carrying out wide- scale massacres with a</p><p>single weapon (Bates 2012, 2). However, for decades, groups such as</p><p>the Ku Klux Klan, Posse Comitatus and Identity Christian have inspired</p><p>solitary terrorists and provided the means for radicalization through</p><p>exposure to their writings (Bates 2012).</p><p>Lone wolves have been studied by psychologists, sociologists and</p><p>criminologists, but there is no consensus on their profile or how they</p><p>become agents of murder. For instance, Capellan (2015) argues that a</p><p>general model of lone wolf perpetrators can be created – white males</p><p>who are isolated, unsuccessful in life – and even suggests that some form</p><p>of mental illness is common. However Gill, Horgan and Deckert (2014)</p><p>argue that mental illness is not a strong- enough identifier to include</p><p>in a universal model. Using a fully automated method of analysis, the</p><p>LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), Baele (2017) has identi-</p><p>fied distinctive patterns in the writings of lonewolf terrorists. Examining</p><p>92 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>the writings of 170 lone actor terrorists from 1940 to 2013, Baele</p><p>(2017) finds cognitive sophistication and flexibility in combination with</p><p>extremely high levels of negative emotions, in particular, anger. Others,</p><p>such as Gill, Horgan and Deckert (2014), have argued that there is “no</p><p>uniform profile of lone- actor terrorists” (433). However, in their study of</p><p>119 journalistic accounts of lone wolf terrorists from the popular press,</p><p>they observe useful markers of their intentions that could help identify</p><p>terrorists. For example, lone wolves have a more extensive network of</p><p>contacts than the term would suppose, and “evidence suggests that other</p><p>people generally knew about the offender’s grievance, extremist ideology,</p><p>views and/ or intent to engage in violence” (434). Lone wolves participate</p><p>in various social networks and an “observable range of activities with a</p><p>wider pressure group, social movement, or terrorist organization” (434),</p><p>and furthermore their acts are fairly well planned out and are “rarely</p><p>sudden and impulsive” (434).</p><p>Methods</p><p>In the following, we analyze five manifestos by lone wolves written from</p><p>2011 to 2019. On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik attacked government</p><p>offices in Oslo, killing eight people, before killing 69 participants of the</p><p>Worker’s Youth League summer camp on the island of Utøya (Lewis and</p><p>Cowell 2012). Before his attack, Breivik disseminated 2083: A European</p><p>Declaration of Independence to 1,003 email addresses and attached a</p><p>link to a YouTube video. On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof killed nine</p><p>worshipers in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in</p><p>Charleston South Carolina (Blinder and Sack 2016). Before the attack,</p><p>Roof created a website, www.lastrh odes ian.com, where he posted his</p><p>manifesto. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant murdered worshipers</p><p>at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch</p><p>New Zealand, killing a total of 51 people and injuring 40 others (Martin</p><p>and Smee 2019). Tarrant emailed his manifesto to the prime minister</p><p>of New Zealand, government officials and international media outlets</p><p>(Holcombe 2019). On April 27, 2019, John Earnest killed one person</p><p>and injured three others in the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego,</p><p>California. Prior to the attack, Earnest posted his manifesto, “An Open</p><p>Letter,” to a message board commonly used by right- wing extremists,</p><p>8chan (Parvini 2019). On August 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius killed 23</p><p>people and injured 23 others at a Walmart in El Paso Texas (Del Quentin</p><p>2019). Like Earnest, Crusius also posted his manifesto to 8chan (Arango</p><p>et al. 2019).</p><p>In our analysis, we conceive of these manifestos as interpretive actions</p><p>(Schiff 2017), narrative framings that attempt to take a stance or craft</p><p>an identity position within a conversational context (Bamberg 2004).</p><p>Although the conversation is not face to face, but mediated through</p><p>platforms such as social networks or the internet and the format of the</p><p>A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 93</p><p>manifesto allows for a longer conversational turn, it is helpful to think of</p><p>these documents as intertextually related to one another and other textual</p><p>resources both in real life and online. As small story theory suggests, these</p><p>manifestos are drafts, bids for attention, influence and alignment that</p><p>are potentially circulated, contextualized and recontextualized into other</p><p>discursive contexts (Georgakopoulou 2020). Although we are concerned</p><p>with the projected self- identity of lone wolf shooters, we are equally</p><p>interested in their portrait of the world and other groups, or what can be</p><p>thought of as their self- in- the- world.</p><p>In the following, we analyze and compare these manifestos for the</p><p>rationale and justification for their actions. What self- in- the- world does</p><p>the author project? By what means do they make the case for their actions?</p><p>2083</p><p>Anders Behring Breivik’s 2083: A European Declaration of Independence</p><p>is massive – over 1,500 pages long. However, one should not imagine that</p><p>Breivik is, otherwise, exceptional. The text harnesses concepts and genres</p><p>from established resources, large portions of which are plagiarized. Still,</p><p>like any other narration, Breivik arranges these resources in his own</p><p>fashion and discursively positions himself, and his views, in a world.</p><p>One striking example of resource borrowing is stylistic. Near the end</p><p>of his manifesto, Breivik inserts a simulated interview where he poses</p><p>questions from an imagined interviewer. Although there are other possible</p><p>sources for this stylistic choice, it was also employed by the Oklahoma</p><p>City Bomber Timothy McVeigh (Gardell 2021). And, interestingly, the</p><p>staged interview is echoed in the manifestos of several mass shooters that</p><p>we consider. Because of the length of the document and the fact that large</p><p>portions of Breivik’s writings are uncited quotations, we limit our ana-</p><p>lysis to Breivik’s “Interview with a Justiciar Knight Commander of the</p><p>PCCTS, Knights Templar” (1350– 1413).</p><p>Breivik’s style is rambling, egocentric and written in heavy- handed</p><p>prose. Even the relatively short 63 pages of questions and answers is a</p><p>challenge to read. But the persistent reader is to learn Breivik’s lessons,</p><p>his worldview and is invited to see the world as he sees it. Apparently in</p><p>irony, Breivik begins the interview by stating that it “was conducted over</p><p>three sessions” and that he decided to include it because he “personally</p><p>would enjoy reading a similar interview with another resistance fighter”</p><p>(1350). The interviewer takes the role of a sympathetic fan, attempting to</p><p>understand but also to amplify his ideas and actions. Breivik’s imagined</p><p>interviewer wants to know how others will interpret the atrocity that he</p><p>committed, about his political views and his personal life as if Breivik</p><p>is a celebrity. Although there are many inconsequential or self- serving</p><p>details, the interview provides an opportunity for Breivik to recapitulate</p><p>the themes he has already developed but also to put these ideas in his own</p><p>voice and a less formal style.</p><p>94 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>In Breivik’s manifesto, there is a discomforting presentation of self- in-</p><p>the- world, what we describe as the victim- hero narrative, which is also</p><p>found in the other manifestos analyzed. Similar to a religious conver-</p><p>sion, the victim- hero narrative is predicated upon a fundamental shift</p><p>in the perception of reality. Each lone wolf offers a story of their own</p><p>revelation and enjoins the reader to follow in their footsteps in order to</p><p>understand that what they take to be real is but illusion due to forces,</p><p>heretofore, either unnoticed or too uncomfortable to fully ingest. There is</p><p>something enticing and seductive about the logic of this way of thinking.</p><p>With various levels of sophistication, each manifesto intends to shred the</p><p>veil that blinds us and, just as the author has, to take the red pill – the</p><p>metaphor drawn from the film The Matrix and used by extreme right</p><p>ideologues to connote stripping illusion to see the truth. In this vein,</p><p>Breivik responds to the putative interviewer that “I can totally under-</p><p>stand that most people will condemn people like us because they do not</p><p>‘yet’ understand what is going on” and that “people live in denial and are</p><p>suffering from historical amnesia” and “fail to identify or comprehend</p><p>what the Western European governments are doing to Europe” (1350).</p><p>Breivik’s red pill enjoins the reader to “understand the situation,” as</p><p>Breivik does, as a dystopian world conspiring to destroy white European</p><p>Christian culture. The path is set for destruction and can only be redeemed</p><p>through spectacular acts of violence of the kind that Breivik carried out</p><p>himself. This narrative arc from passive victimization to awakening and</p><p>redemption of the world through self- sacrificing heroic action is his dom-</p><p>inant presentation of self- in- the- world.</p><p>Breivik portrays a vast array of forces conspiring to establish an Islamic</p><p>Europe: immigration policies of the European Union, the liberal plural-</p><p>istic ethos of multiculturalism and what Breivik terms cultural Marxism,</p><p>birthrates in Muslim communities, and so on. Certainly, Muslims are the</p><p>feared and hated others, but, for Breivik, the oppressive and conspira-</p><p>torial system that welcomes these others is to be equally despised and</p><p>is literally his first line of attack. In response to his question about why</p><p>he didn’t take the “easy way,” Breivik first states “I know what has to</p><p>be done” and outlines his duty to make “a small crack in the discrimin-</p><p>ating and genocidal multiculturalist system” (1359). Appropriating and</p><p>contorting concepts such as genocide and Indigenous rights, Breivik casts</p><p>white Christian Europeans as the true victims of an oppressive system.</p><p>He continues:</p><p>How can I procreate knowing that we are heading for cultural sui-</p><p>cide? … How could I silently watch while Islamic demographic war-</p><p>fare is being waged against our societies, diminishing our numbers</p><p>and the influence over our very own lives? I feel compelled to act,</p><p>even though I know that very few will dare to become one of the</p><p>pioneers, one of the first martyrs.</p><p>(1359)</p><p>A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 95</p><p>Indeed, in his eyes, Breivik’s path is the way of the hero, of active selfless</p><p>sacrifice and bravery. “I choose selflessness, to resist a tyrant oppressor</p><p>by all means necessary” (1360).</p><p>Breivik fashions himself as a modern- day crusader. Evoking the sect of</p><p>monastic knights protecting Jerusalem and pilgrims from Muslims after</p><p>the First Crusade, he calls himself one of the Knights of the Templar. He</p><p>imagines and details a support network across Europe that helped orches-</p><p>trate the planning and execution of this crime. Although the Knights of</p><p>the Templar was, likely, tactical in order to stoke fear of other attacks,</p><p>the trope of the crusader is interesting in the sense that he offers him-</p><p>self a heroic persona heavy with Christian symbolism and a readymade</p><p>enemy. Rather than taking the fight to Jerusalem, the battleground is the</p><p>homeland, protecting it from a supposed invasion of alien others. In this</p><p>regard, it is noteworthy that Breivik instrumentalizes another historical</p><p>memory, the centuries- long wars against Muslims in Europe and their</p><p>late fifteenth- century defeat and expulsion from Europe, by analogy, as</p><p>another Reconquista.</p><p>To the last question, “What would you say to your European brothers</p><p>and sisters?” Breivik responds, “know that you are not alone in this</p><p>struggle” (1412) and recapitulates his particular brew of propaganda and</p><p>advocacy of extreme violence. He gives some encouraging words to those</p><p>who might follow him. Finally, he ends with the statement:</p><p>A single successful “Operation Regime Ender” after Jan. 1st 2020</p><p>will lead to a chain of events that eventually ensures that the multi-</p><p>culturalist EUSSR hegemony collapses. Support the reconquista,</p><p>support the PCCTS, Knights Templar!</p><p>(1413)</p><p>No doubt, the logic is bizarre and contorted. But, from the perspective</p><p>of Breivik, his actions are warranted and rational. If we accept his dark</p><p>portrait of the world, they are even necessary and moral.</p><p>The Last Rhodesian</p><p>Dylann Roof’s manifesto is a short, poorly written document that ends</p><p>with an apology for the text’s shortcomings: “Please forgive any typos.”</p><p>Still, Roof does manage to describe his views on many groups, but he</p><p>reserves his opprobrium, mostly, for African Americans. He also details</p><p>his worldview and positions himself within.</p><p>Roof’s manifesto begins with his awakening to the violence and vic-</p><p>timization of whites at the hands, mainly, of African Americans. Roof</p><p>claims that he was not aware of race until the shooting of Treyvon</p><p>Martin by George Zimmerman. He says that he kept on hearing the name</p><p>Trayvon Martin and decided to “see what the big deal was” and immedi-</p><p>ately decided that “it was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right.” He</p><p>96 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>continues, “But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words</p><p>‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since</p><p>that day.” Roof discovers a litany of injustices committed by African</p><p>Americans against white Americans. Roof writes, “I was in disbelief”</p><p>and “how could</p><p>the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while</p><p>hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”</p><p>Roof’s answer to this question rests on an unnerving analogy:</p><p>Say you were to witness a dog being beat by a man. You are almost</p><p>surely going to feel very sorry for that dog. But then say you were to</p><p>witness a dog biting a man. You will most likely not feel the same pity</p><p>you felt for the dog for the man. Why? Because dogs are lower than</p><p>men. This same analogy applies to black and White relations.</p><p>Roof seems to be saying that we don’t pity the violence committed by</p><p>African Americans against white Americans because white Americans</p><p>enjoy higher status than African Americans. A second way to understand</p><p>this analogy is that we don’t notice the violence of the dog biting the</p><p>man, but it is a subversion of the natural order of things and unjust.</p><p>Dogs aren’t supposed to bite men, and men are justified to retaliate if</p><p>they do. From Roof’s perspective, whites bear no responsibility for the</p><p>injustices of slavery and discrimination, but “we are told to accept what</p><p>is happening to us because of ancestors wrong doing, but it is all based on</p><p>historical lies, exaggerations and myths.” The natural hierarchical order,</p><p>what Shweder et al. (1997) termed community, is being subverted and</p><p>white Americans are being victimized. “I have tried endlessly to think of</p><p>reasons we deserve this, and I have only came back more irritated because</p><p>there are no reasons.”</p><p>Referencing a discourse on divinity, Roof writes that “segregation was</p><p>a defensive measure” and that “it protected us from being brought down</p><p>to their level. Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to</p><p>level of brute animals.” In response to this victimization, Roof positions</p><p>himself as an active agent willing to take the necessary “drastic action.”</p><p>He is the self- elected savior of his hometown:</p><p>I have no choice …. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one</p><p>doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have</p><p>the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.</p><p>The Great Replacement</p><p>Brandon Tarrant’s manifesto is a grab bag of different genres. It contains</p><p>poetry, short political tracts and, following in Breivik’s footsteps, an inter-</p><p>view with himself. The document is blunt and straight to the point. Tarrant</p><p>is interested in converting readers to his worldview and encouraging</p><p>attacks. For example, in “Section II: Thoughts and Potential Strategies,”</p><p>A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 97</p><p>styled as political tracts, Tarrant often writes in the second person, pla-</p><p>cing the reader in the position of a potential terrorist considering their</p><p>reasons and tactics for committing violent action.</p><p>As the title, “The Great Replacement,” indicates, Tarrant is peddling</p><p>in the dangerous conspiracy theory that a disaster is looming through the</p><p>replacement of white ethnics by Muslim immigrants. Tarrant begins, in</p><p>the form of a stanza, with the words “It’s the birthrates” written three</p><p>times (4). For Tarrant, the problem boils down to the belief that Muslim</p><p>immigrant communities are reproducing faster than white European</p><p>communities. He erratically shifts his anger from New Zealand, where he</p><p>murdered 51 Muslim worshipers, to France, Britain, Sweden, Australia</p><p>and the United States. For Tarrant, the story is clear, everywhere that races</p><p>are mixed, conflict, moral degradation and cultural decline are inevitable.</p><p>The genre of the faux interview isn’t the only gesture to Breivik. Tarrant</p><p>mentions Breivik’s name three times. The first time his name is noted</p><p>alongside the names of other mass shooters, including Dylann Roof, who,</p><p>in his words, have taken “a stand against ethnic and cultural genocide”</p><p>(24). Shortly after, Tarrant writes, “But I have only had brief contact</p><p>with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission” and</p><p>that he “only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik”</p><p>(24). From these passages, two important observations can be made.</p><p>First, Breivik’s manifesto and those of others were important intertextual</p><p>resources for Tarrant in the development of his own positionality and</p><p>sculpting his worldview. Such referential nods are useful for creating visi-</p><p>bility on the internet and establishing a network of linked texts, but there</p><p>are other intertextual resources that Tarrant inserts into his manifesto. In</p><p>the self- interview, Tarrant brushes aside his mock interviewer’s questions</p><p>about whether or not he is a Nazi or a neo- Nazi. However, there are</p><p>slightly rephased versions of neo- Nazi David Lane’s fourteen words, “We</p><p>must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children”</p><p>(Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.), found at multiple points in Tarrant’s</p><p>manifesto. For those in the know, there is no mistaking his sentiments.</p><p>Second, it is difficult to gauge whether or not Breivik’s “blessing” is</p><p>meant to be taken as truthful, figurative or satirical. Similar to other far-</p><p>right internet bloggers, trolls, Tarrant adopts an ironic posture (Greene</p><p>2019) and there are many instances where he calls attention to the fact</p><p>that he may be, or actually is, joking. Tarrant claims that he was a Navy</p><p>Seal with “over 300 confirmed kills” (27) before threatening to kill the</p><p>mock interviewer. And, there is the offensive quip that Tarrant has “been</p><p>working part time as a kebab removalist” (7).</p><p>Although Tarrant sometimes presents himself as a jokester, his aim to</p><p>foment and accelerate a race war in order to create ethnically homoge-</p><p>neous states is deadly serious. Tarrant details numerous violations to the</p><p>sacred and natural order of the world that his actions endeavor to rectify.</p><p>In his view, the combination of immigration and higher birthrates in</p><p>Muslim communities threatens the natural hierarchy of whites in Europe</p><p>98 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>and lands they have colonized. To his question, “Why did you carry out</p><p>the attack?” Tarrant responds, “To most of all show the invaders that</p><p>our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that</p><p>… they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our</p><p>people” (7). The words “our lands” are key. Positioning himself within a</p><p>group using the first- person plural, “our” group possesses a right to power</p><p>and dominance that is being violated by another group. In his view, not</p><p>only is this an infraction of the natural hierarchy, but it has consequences</p><p>in the sacred realm. Tarrant links immigration and birthrates to the deg-</p><p>radation of the natural environment.</p><p>Because they are the same issue, the environment is being destroyed</p><p>by over population, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not</p><p>over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating</p><p>the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so</p><p>save the environment.</p><p>(29)</p><p>Also, recounting his awakening, Tarrant invokes the story of Ebba</p><p>Akerlund, a Swedish girl who was killed in a terrorist attack in 2017,</p><p>writing: “I could no longer ignore the attacks. They were attacks on</p><p>my people, attacks on my culture, attacks on my faith and attacks on</p><p>my soul” (10). Finally, in one of the tracts oddly titled “The Rape of</p><p>European Women Invaders” (40), Tarrant lists the Wikipedia links to</p><p>child sex rings and gang rapes in the United Kingdom, Finland, Germany</p><p>and Australia involving, apparently, Muslim men. The sanctity of white</p><p>women is taken to be threatened by the inversion of the natural order.</p><p>Like the other mass shooters, Tarrant projects himself as a hero in the</p><p>quest to restore the world to moral order:</p><p>Strong men do not get ethnically replaced, strong men do not allow</p><p>their culture to degrade, strong men do not allow their people to die.</p><p>Weak men have created this situation and strong men are needed to</p><p>fix it.</p><p>(39)</p><p>From the perspective of Tarrant, his actions are the actions of a strong</p><p>and good man and thought to be</p><p>a corrective force to the victimization</p><p>of his group.</p><p>An Open Letter</p><p>Although John Earnest titles his manifesto “An Open Letter,” there</p><p>are relatively few paragraphs that resemble the genre of letter writing.</p><p>Following Breivik and Tarrant, most of the document is styled as an inter-</p><p>view with himself. At the beginning of the manifesto, Earnest positions</p><p>A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 99</p><p>himself within his “European ancestry” and “magnificent bloodline.” He</p><p>also addresses “family and friends” who might pose questions such as</p><p>“how could you throw your life away?” Earnest answers them by situ-</p><p>ating his life in a racialized group conflict in which Europeans are the</p><p>victims of Jews. “What value does my life have compared to the entirety</p><p>of the European race? Is it worth it for me to live a comfortable life at the</p><p>cost of international Jewry sealing the doom of my race?” And he casts</p><p>his planned actions as resistance and rectification of this purported vic-</p><p>timization. As he writes: “I sacrifice this for the sake of my people. OUR</p><p>people. I would die a thousand times over to prevent the doomed fate that</p><p>the Jews have planned for my race.”</p><p>Earnest begins the faux interview with the question, “How does killing</p><p>Jews help the European race?” Earnest’s response is chilling: “Every Jew</p><p>is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European</p><p>race.” Earnest then goes on to accuse Jews for virtually every stereotype</p><p>and conspiracy theory that have led to Jewish persecution over the past</p><p>2,000 years. He concludes that “every Jew young and old has contributed</p><p>to these. For these crimes they deserve nothing but hell. I will send them</p><p>there.” Earnest views his manifesto as spreading the truth and his actions</p><p>as defending the European race with the hope of inspiring others to take</p><p>up his mantle and to “take a stand as well.”</p><p>Earnest’s manifesto is a strange brew of traditional Christian anti-</p><p>semitism mixed with snarky, conspiracy- fueled, internet- savvy, new- right</p><p>antisemitism. He assumes both stances. From his stance as a Christian,</p><p>Earnest quotes several passages of the New Testament that have inspired</p><p>Christian hatred of Jews over centuries. In light of the racist violence he</p><p>is about to commit, he defends his Christian identity, reasoning that even</p><p>from a Christian perspective his actions are not immoral but committed</p><p>in self- defense. Even “a child can understand the concept of self- defense.”</p><p>Furthermore, Earnest frames his actions as a justified rectification of the</p><p>natural order of the world, community, by saying: “It is unlawful and</p><p>cowardly to stand on the sidelines as the European people are genocided</p><p>around you …. The Jew has forced our hand, and our response is com-</p><p>pletely justified.” From his stance as a new- right antisemite, Earnest spews</p><p>vile racist slurs and conspiracy theories using lingo from the dark corners</p><p>of the internet, such as “glow- niggers,” “sandniggers,” “normalfags”</p><p>and a “Jewed- media.” Like Tarrant, he adopts the stance of the jokester.</p><p>He speaks about the extreme violence that he is about to commit as if it</p><p>is a game of Minecraft. He writes, “If your goal is strictly carnage and</p><p>the highest score – I’d highly recommend you look into flamethrowers</p><p>(remember kids, napalm is more effective than gasoline if you want Jews</p><p>to really light up like a menorah).” After this twisted racist insult, Earnest</p><p>adds, “Again, I’m talking about Minecraft.”</p><p>Though their target groups and scorned others are different, the</p><p>manifestos of Tarrant and Earnest are interlinked. Earnest mentions other</p><p>inspirations such as Robert Bowers, five times, who murdered worshipers</p><p>100 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, as well as Adolf Hitler, Jesus</p><p>Christ and Ludwig van Beethoven. But, Earnest mentions Brenton Tarrant</p><p>a total of ten times. Importantly, Earnest quotes a passage as inspiration</p><p>for his actions:</p><p>Tarrant was a catalyst for me personally. He showed me that</p><p>it could be done. And that it needed to be done. “WHY WON’T</p><p>SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING? WHY WON’T SOMEBODY DO</p><p>SOMETHING? WHY DON’T I DO SOMETHING?” – the most</p><p>powerful words in his entire manifesto.</p><p>Earnest proclaims his path as that of action, bravery and courage in</p><p>defending his group against victimization at the hands of Jews. In his</p><p>eyes, it is a moral task for which he feels no remorse, but “I only wish</p><p>I killed more. I am honored to be the one to send these vile anti- humans</p><p>into the pit of fire – where they shall remain for eternity.”</p><p>The El Paso Shooter Manifesto</p><p>In the first words that he writes, Patrick Crusius marks the intertext-</p><p>uality of his manifesto with a reference to Tarrant: “In general, I support</p><p>the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” And, once again, although</p><p>the victimizing group changes, the narrative pattern is identical. Crusius</p><p>writes, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They</p><p>are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cul-</p><p>tural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” “My motives</p><p>for this attack are not at all personal. Actually the Hispanic community</p><p>was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”</p><p>After this brief introduction, Crusius divides his points into sections:</p><p>political reasons, economic reasons, gear, reactions and personal reasons</p><p>and thoughts. For political reasons he writes: “America is rotting from</p><p>the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impos-</p><p>sible.” Like Tarrant, Crusius believes that the Hispanic population will</p><p>change the demographics in Texas and shift the balance of power toward</p><p>the Democrats. Also like Tarrant, Crusius links together immigration and</p><p>the environmental crisis:</p><p>I just want to say that I love the people of this country, but god damn</p><p>most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the</p><p>next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using</p><p>resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can</p><p>become more sustainable.</p><p>Unlike Tarrant, Crusius adds an economic factor, automation is shrinking</p><p>the labor market, and second- generation immigrants will take the scarce</p><p>jobs that remain. The reaction to his crime, Crusius surmises, will be a</p><p>A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 101</p><p>return of migrants who came to the US for economic reasons to their</p><p>home countries and for corporate America to realize that they are “on the</p><p>wrong side of history.” And as personal reasons and thoughts, he writes:</p><p>My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t</p><p>exist. The job of my dreams will likely be automated. Hispanics will</p><p>take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas,</p><p>changing policy to better suit their needs. They will turn Texas into</p><p>an instrument of a political coup which will hasten the destruction</p><p>of our country. The environment is getting worse by the year. If you</p><p>take nothing else from this document, remember this: INACTION IS</p><p>A CHOICE. I can no longer bear the shame of inaction knowing that</p><p>our founding fathers have endowed me with the rights needed to save</p><p>our country from the brink of destruction.</p><p>In response to this claimed victimization, Crusius also chooses the path of</p><p>action, which he views as moral and just. “This is why I see my actions as</p><p>faultless. Because this isn’t an act of imperialism but an act of preserva-</p><p>tion.” After, bizarrely, declaring that “the idea of deporting or murdering</p><p>all non- white Americans is horrific” and defending their history and role</p><p>in building the United States, Crusius rails against “race mixing” and</p><p>advocates for ethnically pure territories. Still he argues that “it is not cow-</p><p>ardly to pick low hanging fruit” and ends by declaring, “I am honored to</p><p>head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.”</p><p>Conclusion</p><p>In this essay, we have argued that the manifestos of</p><p>lone wolf terrorists</p><p>should be understood as expressions of an alternative moral reasoning.</p><p>In no uncertain terms, their words and actions are racist, ugly and dan-</p><p>gerous. But we believe that the only way to design effective measures for</p><p>countering such symbolic violence, and the acts of physical violence that</p><p>follow, is first by understanding, from the perspective of the perpetrator,</p><p>how and why they are appropriated and used. These five intertextually</p><p>linked manifestos provide insight into the circulation and movement of a</p><p>narrative pattern of victimization and rectification through heroic action.</p><p>Although the othered group differs, each portrays a dystopic inversion</p><p>of the natural or sacred order of the world and, purported, suffering at</p><p>the hands of these alien others. With heavy handfuls of lies, distortions</p><p>and conspiracy theories, the other group is portrayed as being an urgent</p><p>threat to the future health, integrity, existence, well- being of the perpet-</p><p>rator group. From this perspective, it is perceived as a moral task to bring</p><p>the world back into order. These manifestos employ a moral vocabulary,</p><p>mischaracterizing vulnerable groups as threats and making violence – in</p><p>the eyes of those who carry it out – right, good and necessary to bring the</p><p>world back to moral order.</p><p>102 Brian Schiff and Michael Justice</p><p>Although we have analyzed each of these cases individually, we do not</p><p>view them as separate phenomena. Rather than focusing on individual</p><p>lone wolves as distinct cases and looking for characteristics about each</p><p>lone wolf, we believe that the literature could benefit from a more critical</p><p>analysis of the development, circulation and appropriation of meanings.</p><p>In other words, the narrative and hermeneutic tools we have employed</p><p>are essential in restoring the realms of meaning in their words and for</p><p>understanding their circulation and recirculation. After all is said and</p><p>done, these lone wolves write and act as members of a community of</p><p>beliefs that must be understood and, somehow, addressed to make real-</p><p>world progress. Of course, we don’t have the magic solution to these</p><p>problems, but only incomplete thoughts about how we can engage with</p><p>extremism. But, as we have argued, understanding the dynamics of the</p><p>problem must come first.</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Arango, Tim, Bogel- Burroughs, Nicholas and Benner, Katie. 2019. “Minutes</p><p>before El Paso Killing, Hate- Filled Manifesto Appears Online.” New York</p><p>Times, August 3. www.nyti mes.com/ 2019/ 08/ 03/ us/ patr ick- crus ius- el- paso-</p><p>shoo ter- manife sto.html</p><p>Baele, Stephane. 2017. “Lone- Actor Terrorists’ Emotions and Cognition: An</p><p>Evaluation Beyond Stereotypes.” Political Psychology 38, no. 2: 449– 468.</p><p>Bamberg, Michael. 2004. “‘We Are Young, Responsible, and Male’: Form and</p><p>Functions of ‘Slut Bashing’ in Male Identity Constructions in 15- Year- Olds.”</p><p>Human Development 47, no. 6: 331– 353.</p><p>Bates, Rodger. 2012. “Dancing with Wolves: Today’s Lone Wolf Terrorists.”</p><p>Journal of Public and Professional Sociology 4: 1– 14.</p><p>Blinder, Alan and Sack, Kevin. 2016. “Dylann Roof Found Guilty in Charleston</p><p>Church Massacre.” New York Times, December 15. www.nyti mes.com/ 2016/</p><p>12/ 15/ us/ dyl ann- roof- trial.html</p><p>Browning, Christopher. 1992. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and</p><p>the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Collins.</p><p>Capellan, Joel. 2015. “Lone Wolf Terrorist or Deranged Shooter? A Study of</p><p>Ideological Active Shooter Events in the United States, 1970– 2014.” Studies</p><p>in Conflict & Terrorism 38: 395– 413.</p><p>Del Quentin, Wilbur. 2019. “FBI Struggles to Confront Right- Wing Terrorism.”</p><p>Los Angeles Times, August 11. www.lati mes.com/ polit ics/ story/ 2019- 08- 10/</p><p>fbi- strugg les- to- confr ont- domes tic- terror ism- by- right- wing- gro ups</p><p>Fiske, Alan Page and Rai, Tage Shakti. 2015. Virtuous Violence. Cambridge:</p><p>Cambridge University Press.</p><p>Gardell, Mattias. 2021. Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide.</p><p>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</p><p>Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2020. “La Small Stories Research: Une Analyse</p><p>Narrative pour le XXI ͤ Siècle Essai de Cartographie.” In Small Stories: Un</p><p>Nouveau Paradigme pour les Recherches sur le Récit, edited by Sylvie Patron,</p><p>17– 53. Paris: Hermann.</p><p>A Manifesto on the Hermeneutics of Violence 103</p><p>Gill, Paul, Horgan, John and Deckert, Paige. 2014. “Bombing Alone: Tracing the</p><p>Motivations and Antecedent Behaviors of Lone- Actor Terrorists.” Journal of</p><p>Forensic Sciences 59, no. 2: 425– 435.</p><p>Greene, Viveca S. 2019. “’Deplorable’ Satire: Alt- Right Memes, White Genocide</p><p>Tweets, and Redpilling Normies.” Studies in American Humor 5, no. 1: 31– 69.</p><p>Holcombe, Madeline. 2019. “New Zealand PM’s Office Received Shooter’s</p><p>‘Manifesto’ Minutes before Attack.” CNN, March 16. https:// edit ion.cnn.</p><p>com/ 2019/ 03/ 16/ asia/ chris tchu rch- new- zeal and- mos que- shoot ing/ index.html</p><p>Lewis, Mark and Cowell, Alan. 2012. “Norway Killer Is Ruled Sane and Given</p><p>21 Years in Prison.” Pittsburg Post- Gazette, August 24. www.post- gaze tte.</p><p>com/ news/ world/ 2012/ 08/ 24/ Nor way- Kil ler- Is- Ruled- Sane- and- Given- 21-</p><p>Years- in- Pri son/ stor ies/ 20120 8240 183</p><p>Martin, Lisa and Smee, Ben. 2019. “What Do We Know about the Christchurch Attack</p><p>Suspect.” The Guardian, March 15. www.theg uard ian.com/ world/ 2019/ mar/ 15/</p><p>rightw ing- extrem ist- wrote- manife sto- bef ore- livest ream ing- chris tchu rch- shoot ing</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna. 2017. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics,</p><p>History, and the Possible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.</p><p>Milgram, Stanley. 1963. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal</p><p>and Social Psychology 67, no. 4: 371– 378.</p><p>Parvini, Sarah. 2019. “Poway Synagogue Shooting Suspect Linked to Anti- Semitic</p><p>Internet Manifesto.” Los Angeles Times, April 28. www.lati mes.com/ local/ lanow/</p><p>la- me- ln- synago gue- shoot ing- john- earn est- san- diego- 20190 428- story.html</p><p>Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (trans.</p><p>D. Savage). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.</p><p>Schiff, Brian. 2017. A New Narrative for Psychology. New York: Oxford</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Schuurman, Bart, Lindekilde, Lasse, Malthaner, Stefan, O’Connor, Francis, Gill,</p><p>Paul and Bouhana, Noemie. 2019. “End of the Lone Wolf: The Typology That</p><p>Should Not Have Been.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 8: 771– 778.</p><p>Shweder, Richard A., Much, Nancy C., Mahapatra, Manamohan and Park,</p><p>Lawrence. 1997. “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity)</p><p>and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering.” In Morality and Health, edited by</p><p>Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin, 119– 169. Florence: Taylor & Francis.</p><p>Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d. “David Lane.” www.splcen ter.org/ fight ing-</p><p>hate/ extrem ist- files/ ind ivid ual/ david- lane. Accessed February 15, 2022.</p><p>Straus, Scott. 2006. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda.</p><p>Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.</p><p>Waller, James. 2002. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide</p><p>and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press.</p><p>Welzer, Harold. 2004. “Mass Murder and Moral Code: Some Thoughts on an Easily</p><p>Misunderstood Subject.” History of the Human Sciences 17, no. 2/ 3: 15– 32.</p><p>Zimbardo, Philip G., Maslach, Christina and Haney, Craig. 2000. “Reflections</p><p>on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, Transformations, Consequences.”</p><p>In Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm,</p><p>edited by Thomas Blass, 193– 237. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-10</p><p>7 Narrative Mastery over Violence</p><p>in Perpetrator- Authored Documents</p><p>Interpreting Closure in</p><p>TheStroop Report</p><p>Erin McGlothlin</p><p>Introduction: Interpreting Documents of Violence</p><p>One of the most formidable challenges posed by the legacies of the</p><p>Holocaust and other genocides and mass traumas is the ethically fraught</p><p>task</p><p>of the experiential and interpretive excess of these</p><p>acts of violence will be rendered invisible through the process of explan-</p><p>ation. Nevertheless, many attempts to explain violence serve practically</p><p>ethical goals. They can clarify circumstances that encourage one person</p><p>to harm another. Insofar as they clarify motivations for past violent acts,</p><p>explanations facilitate decisions about punishment in line with legally</p><p>codified principles of justice. It is primarily the assertion of the complete-</p><p>ness of any explanation that renders such acts interpretively violent.</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations 3</p><p>Philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes that, in contrast to an explan-</p><p>ation, an act of understanding is never definitive. Hans- Georg Gadamer</p><p>describes understanding as a dynamic interplay of possible meanings</p><p>that in their forthcoming reveal invisible preconceptions (2004, 269).</p><p>As these preconceptions are revealed, they change, and reflective per-</p><p>sons learn about themselves and approach new singular events with a</p><p>more subtle capacity to receive them. Gadamer compares the otherness</p><p>of a text to the otherness of a person whose position differs from us, but</p><p>whom we want to understand (271). That understanding encompasses</p><p>an always inadequate but nevertheless necessary attempt to see a person,</p><p>a text or a situation holistically, knowing that the partial data an inter-</p><p>preter has to work with will bias the interpretive act in specific ways and</p><p>knowing, in the case of a text, that the process of understanding creates</p><p>as much as discerns connections between a written or filmic narrative and</p><p>shared, lived reality. Standing among possible interpretations or between</p><p>an event and the language we bring to it, one who seeks understanding</p><p>knows herself to be in the midst of categories she did not create, events</p><p>she did not initiate, possibilities she cannot foresee. One knows oneself</p><p>to be confronted with others whose differences from oneself can never</p><p>be exhaustively known. While the “hermeneutics” of our volume’s title</p><p>means theoretical reflection on interpretation and understanding and does</p><p>not entail a commitment to a certain conception of these phenomena, the</p><p>contributions in this volume share the idea of the infinalizable nature</p><p>of interpretation, which Paul Ricoeur formulates as follows: “The key</p><p>hypothesis of hermeneutic philosophy is that interpretation is an open</p><p>process that no single vision can conclude” (Ricoeur 1991, 33; see also</p><p>Marion’s idea of “infinite hermeneutic,” 2013, 59). While Richard</p><p>Kearney defines hermeneutics in terms of an “art of deciphering multiple</p><p>meanings,” especially “the practice of discerning indirect, tacit or allusive</p><p>meanings, of sensing another sense beyond or beneath apparent sense”</p><p>(Kearney 2011, 1), Rita Felski (2015) emphasizes that hermeneutics</p><p>does not entail the idea of unearthing a singular “hidden meaning” –</p><p>rather, as Gadamer and Ricoeur also stress, it is a process of coproduc-</p><p>tion in which meaning arises ever anew in the encounter between the</p><p>world of the text and the world of the reader (see also Gadamer 2004;</p><p>Ricoeur 1988; Meretoja 2018). The process of interpretation need not</p><p>be motivated by suspicion (Ricoeur 1970; Sedgwick 2003) and need not</p><p>claim to find a meaning that excludes further interpretations. In conse-</p><p>quence, and somewhat paradoxically, an approach to violence that aims</p><p>to be interpretively ethical must aim at a relationally grounded dialogical</p><p>form of understanding, which must, in order to remain nonviolent, never</p><p>hope to entirely, conclusively succeed.</p><p>Contributors to this volume pursue understanding of a violent act</p><p>or event, not because we will arrive at an explanation that will exhaust</p><p>the possibility to know it and not because our efforts at nonviolent</p><p>understanding will ever offset the propagation or performance of violence</p><p>4 Cassandra Falke,Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>in some imaginary ethical scale of value, but in order to contribute to the</p><p>proliferation of nonviolent understanding, which in turn can, in its small</p><p>way, reduce the circumstances in which violence is likely to be (always</p><p>unpredictably) committed. In their 2020 book, The Force of Nonviolence,</p><p>Judith Butler says nonviolence is neither “a means to a goal nor is it</p><p>a goal in itself.” They call it “ungovernable,” “ongoing,” and “open</p><p>ended,” “an active mode of thought or understanding, unconstrained</p><p>by instrumental and teleological logics” (125). In this spirit, scholars</p><p>featured here attempt to practice and encourage nonviolent forms of</p><p>reasoning. We share the goal of disrupting the often- unquestioned inter-</p><p>pretive acts that make it possible for people to see violence as justifiable.</p><p>We ask instead how violence can be narrated, read or viewed in ways that</p><p>encourage mutual recognition, solidarity, even love, rather than indif-</p><p>ference or hatred. Contributors also discuss the extent to which acts of</p><p>interpretation can themselves be violent. They discuss phenomenological-</p><p>hermeneutic and other contemporary conceptualizations of knowledge</p><p>that call for new reconfigurations of intersubjectivity. By foregrounding</p><p>the tension between discursive and embodied violence as well as their</p><p>complex entanglements, contributors explore the relationship between</p><p>these different forms of violence. Can stories direct our attention to that</p><p>within the human that evades designation but nevertheless calls for pro-</p><p>tection? Can certain narratives of violence instead turn our attention to</p><p>why some lives are considered worthy of protection, while others are</p><p>not? Or to the violence immanent in the category of the human, directed</p><p>at the nonhuman, animal or nature, in ways that challenge their human</p><p>centered or intersubjective framing? (Wolfe 2012)</p><p>We are not working with a shared definition of violence or interpret-</p><p>ation but, instead, the contributors discuss different forms and levels of</p><p>violence and explore the possibility of nonviolent interpretation in relation</p><p>to a range of different ways of narrating violence. In Hannah Arendt’s slim</p><p>1969 volume On Violence, she notes that “violence and its arbitrariness</p><p>[have been] taken for granted and therefore neglected” in the history of</p><p>Western philosophy (8). “There exists,” she continues, “a large literature</p><p>on war and warfare, but it deals with the implements of violence, not with</p><p>violence as such” (8). Since then, much research into violence has been</p><p>performed. In 2020, when Scott Straus and Michel Wierviorka launched</p><p>their publication Violence: An International Journal, they observed that</p><p>violence is “a major theme in the humanities and social sciences” (3),</p><p>and the titles of publications concerned with violence bear this out,1 but</p><p>the study of “violence as such” remains fragmented among multiple dis-</p><p>ciplines, multiple categorizations of types of violence and multiple con-</p><p>textual foci. It is not possible to express concern about this fragmentation</p><p>without evoking the possibility that violence as such can be defined, but</p><p>such a definition will always be impure and available for the violence-</p><p>promoting act of declaring something not to have been violent. To adapt</p><p>a phrase from Derrida, “The purity of the question” of what violence</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations 5</p><p>as such is “can only be indicated or recalled through the difference of a</p><p>hermeneutical effort” (1978, 99). Within scholarship on the representa-</p><p>tion of violence and the interpretations of such representations, which</p><p>is the special focus of this volume, disciplinary fragmentation reinforces</p><p>generic differences in written and filmic texts. Historians, criminologists</p><p>and psychologists work with terrorist manifestos and violent institution’s</p><p>bureaucratic narratives of their own abuses. Literary analysts work with</p><p>memoir, fiction and poetic narration, media scholars with film. There</p><p>are, of course, scholars</p><p>of interpreting the historical documents of violence that both</p><p>catalyzed and responded to the events in question. In such cases, the</p><p>demands of interpretation require those of us who wish to understand</p><p>such narratives to situate ourselves – as far as that is possible – within the</p><p>emotional, ideological and experiential frameworks of those directing,</p><p>participating in or suffering the violence, as well as those recounting it,</p><p>and at the same time it asks us to cultivate an attitude of remove that</p><p>allows us to evaluate those documents from an exterior perspective. Such</p><p>a hermeneutic exercise thus necessitates both empathy and distance and</p><p>predicates an ethically grounded method of reading that simultaneously</p><p>considers the motivating impetus for narratives of violence and reads the</p><p>documents against the grain to identify and analyze the specific strategies</p><p>they adopt to achieve their rhetorical and ideological aims.</p><p>While the critical practice of reading from both within and without</p><p>is peremptory for engaging with any text that represents historical vio-</p><p>lence – whether penned by victims or survivors, by perpetrators or other</p><p>complicit parties, or by persons entirely external to the events – it is par-</p><p>ticularly imperative in the case of documents produced and circulated by</p><p>agents of violence. In their attempt to represent their own commission of</p><p>violence and, indeed, to justify its necessity to the world and to themselves,</p><p>such perpetrator- produced texts frequently mobilize specific narrative</p><p>devices to achieve what Hanna Meretoja terms “narrative mastery” in</p><p>order to paradoxically “conceal their own nature as narratives – as per-</p><p>spectival interpretations that can always be contested and told otherwise”</p><p>(2018, 302). In other words, perpetrator- authored historical documents</p><p>often work to efface their own rhetorical positioning and deemphasize</p><p>the deliberate narrative strategies they employ in order to claim for them-</p><p>selves the status of transparent accounts of the apparently self- evident</p><p>character of the events they represent; as the Holocaust historian Yehuda</p><p>Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents 105</p><p>Bauer argues, “Documents of the perpetrators were very often designed to</p><p>mislead rather than to inform, to hide rather than to reveal” (2001, 23).</p><p>For that reason, such texts demonstrate – over and above their historical</p><p>import as evidence of atrocity, which historians often are forced to estab-</p><p>lish through a hermeneutics of skepticism – the ways in which narrative</p><p>can be mobilized to engender and justify violence as necessary and nat-</p><p>ural. This is particularly the case of the perpetrator- authored texts and</p><p>bureaucratic documents that, beginning especially with the work of Raul</p><p>Hilberg in the 1960s, have formed the foundational corpus of research</p><p>on the Holocaust. Such texts not only are of interest to historians, who</p><p>are tasked to engage with them as a means for reconstructing the char-</p><p>acter of the crimes, they are also increasingly the object of analysis of cul-</p><p>tural and literary critics – particularly narrative theorists like me – who</p><p>can bring to bear their own disciplinary methodologies in order to shed</p><p>light on the documents’ rhetorical construction as well as the narrative</p><p>techniques through which perpetrators naturalize their presentation of</p><p>their violent acts.1</p><p>Employing a narratological approach that illuminates the strategies</p><p>through which bureaucratic texts work to achieve narrative mastery, this</p><p>essay investigates a particular perpetrator- authored document that has</p><p>obtained canonical status in Holocaust Studies for its representation of</p><p>a particularly brutal chapter in the history of the genocide, namely the</p><p>ferocious suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by German forces.</p><p>As my analysis will demonstrate through hermeneutical attention to the</p><p>document’s rhetorical positioning and performative dimensions, the bur-</p><p>eaucratic text functions as an instrument of narrative closure through</p><p>which the perpetrator endeavors to obtain narrative mastery over the</p><p>violent events the text at once incites, depicts and justifies.</p><p>Reading The Stroop Report</p><p>In mid- May 1943, immediately following the officially proclaimed</p><p>successful suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, whereby the vio-</p><p>lent National Socialist effort to transport the remaining Jewish ghetto</p><p>population to the killing center at Treblinka was met with armed revolt</p><p>by beleaguered ghetto internees, SS commander Jürgen Stroop, assisted</p><p>by his chief of staff Max Jesuiter, began to assemble what Robert</p><p>R. Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor of the International Military Tribunal at</p><p>Nuremburg, later called an “almost incredible text” (1946, 143). Given</p><p>the correspondingly incredible title Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk</p><p>in Warschau mehr! (“The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!”), the</p><p>document Stroop produced contains three main sections: copies of daily</p><p>communiqués describing the militarized suppression of the uprising that</p><p>Stroop’s office dispatched to his superior Higher SS and Police Leader</p><p>Friedrich- Wilhelm Krüger; a collection of several dozen photographs</p><p>taken by an unknown photographer depicting combat actions and</p><p>106 Erin McGlothlin</p><p>captured ghetto fighters and residents accompanied by pithy hand-</p><p>written captions; and a 12- page narrative summary of the history of the</p><p>ghetto and the month- long military engagement. Appended to these main</p><p>sections is also a list of combat units deployed in the campaign along with</p><p>a record of German troops wounded or killed.2</p><p>Employing a lexicon of bureaucratic inventory and military conquest</p><p>and an “idiom of statistics” (Wyschogrod 2005, 212), Stroop’s text depicts</p><p>the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a roughly equally matched military engage-</p><p>ment between valiant German soldiers and opponents whom Stroop</p><p>calls “subhumanity, the bandits and terrorists” (“das Untermentschtum,</p><p>die Banditen und Terroristen,” missive from May 8, 1943). In contra-</p><p>distinction to Stroop’s representation of the German suppression of the</p><p>revolt as a military battle between equivalent forces, however, the actual</p><p>encounter involved a bitter, weeks- long resistance on the part of unevenly</p><p>trained, gravely unequipped and severely undernourished Jewish ghetto</p><p>fighters against what Joseph Wulf calls “superbly armed Waffen SS and</p><p>Wehrmacht battalions along with entire regiments of order and security</p><p>police” (“tadellos bewaffnete Waffen- SS oder Wehrmachtbataillone</p><p>sowie ganze Regimente der Ordungs- und Sicherheitspolizei”) (1984, 13).</p><p>Stroop’s text thus extols the German brutal suppression of the revolt,</p><p>which officially ended when he personally activated the explosives that</p><p>detonated the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, both as an act of German</p><p>military prowess, courageous endurance and heroic self- sacrifice for the</p><p>racial hygiene of the nation and as a glorious triumph and the ecstatic</p><p>culmination of violence toward a perceived mortal enemy.</p><p>Known today generally as The Stroop Report, the text chronicling the</p><p>German suppression of the uprising as a triumphal act was commissioned</p><p>by Krüger as a commemorative keepsake for SS- Reichsführer Heinrich</p><p>Himmler, who himself planned the final liquidation of the Warsaw</p><p>Ghetto – a process that was forecasted to require at the most a few</p><p>days – as a birthday present for Hitler. Four distinct copies of the text</p><p>were produced and assembled by hand; one copy remained on file with</p><p>Jesuiter; of the other three, all of which were prepared in what Wulf</p><p>calls “attractive packaging” (“netter Aufmachung”) (1984, 45), typed</p><p>on fine Bristol paper and bound in black pebble leather, one was gifted</p><p>to Himmler, the second was sent to Krüger, and the third retained by</p><p>Stroop. After the war, two of the copies were recovered and entered into</p><p>evidence at the trials in Nuremburg in 1946 and 1947 and at Stroop’s</p><p>trial in Warsaw in 1951, at which he</p><p>was convicted for crimes against</p><p>humanity and executed.</p><p>Since its discovery by Allied forces, The Stroop Report has become a</p><p>notorious document of the Holocaust primarily on account of the wide-</p><p>spread dissemination of the photographs produced for and included</p><p>in it, many of which have since achieved iconic status, particularly an</p><p>infamous one – “one of the most recognizable photographs ever taken”</p><p>(Magilow and Silverman 2020, 13) – that depicts a young boy with a</p><p>Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents 107</p><p>group of women and children, all of whom hold their hands up in sur-</p><p>render to armed soldiers. Divorced from the specific historical framework</p><p>of the report; reproduced perpetually in innumerable texts, contexts and</p><p>media; and read synecdochally for the entire events of the Holocaust or</p><p>as an unmediated or objective representation of the chilling brutality</p><p>of its perpetrators, the photographs have achieved an afterlife of their</p><p>own and are, as Richard Raskin writes in his 2004 monograph A Child</p><p>at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo, “often perceived as</p><p>though they had been intended as damning records of Nazi outrages,</p><p>rather than as celebrations of a genocidal project” (2004, 57). Via these</p><p>iconic photographs, The Stroop Report has thus entered into Holocaust</p><p>memory, but it subsists there only obliquely, ambivalently and incom-</p><p>pletely; as a larger, more comprehensive narrative of violence (in which</p><p>the photos play only a part), it operates in public discourse as a kind of</p><p>shadow text or overlooked archive, an important Holocaust representa-</p><p>tion that nevertheless, as Raskin argues, “remains relatively uncharted</p><p>territory” (2004, 25).</p><p>The imbalance in the relative notoriety of the component parts of</p><p>The Stroop Report, whereby the visual evidence garners the bulk of</p><p>public attention while the narrative report remains virtually unknown</p><p>(at least outside of the small circle of historians of the Third Reich and</p><p>the Holocaust), is echoed by the literary and cultural scholarship, which</p><p>has focused principally on the report’s photographic archive, particularly</p><p>the image depicting the capture of the young boy. Although a handful</p><p>of historians have investigated the historical context of the report, few</p><p>scholars have analyzed the structure of the report’s narrative or the nature</p><p>of the overarching text that emerges as a result of the interactive relation-</p><p>ship between its media. (One notable exception is Andrzej Wirth, whose</p><p>discerning analysis of the language of fascism in The Stroop Report is</p><p>included in his introduction to the 1979 published reproduction and</p><p>English translation of it.) My aim here is to fill in this gap in the scholar-</p><p>ship by attending to the generic framing of the text of the report alongside</p><p>its discursive function. In other words, my goal is not only to conceptu-</p><p>alize what kind of text The Stroop Report is, but also to illuminate what</p><p>it seeks to accomplish as a narrative and discursive act.</p><p>Determining Genre in The Stroop Report</p><p>As a hybrid mixture of discourse types and media and a spectacular</p><p>representation of the German military’s collective commitment to and</p><p>fervent participation in the National Socialist genocidal project, Stroop’s</p><p>report resists the conventional generic designations we have on hand to</p><p>describe it, a phenomenon demonstrated by the critical attempt to catalog</p><p>it. Chief Prosecutor Jackson’s depiction of it as an “almost incredible</p><p>text” alludes to its defiance of easy appellation, as does historian Peter</p><p>Fritzsche’s characterization of it as a “special narrative” (2010, 388).</p><p>108 Erin McGlothlin</p><p>Yet, despite its singularity, and as is perhaps understandable, scholars</p><p>endeavor to locate adequate existing text types, genres and metaphors</p><p>through which they can align Stroop’s seemingly unprecedented text with</p><p>known frameworks. A number of critics, in keeping with the popular</p><p>focus on the photographic evidence contained in the report, term the text</p><p>a “album,” a designation that alludes to Stroop’s clearly commemoratory</p><p>intent (as far as his intent can be determined) and the text’s reliance on</p><p>visual documentation as what Fritzsche terms “material for commem-</p><p>oration and celebration” (2016, 124). But, of course, the use of the</p><p>term “album” overlooks the fact that the section Stroop himself termed</p><p>the “pictorial report” (“Bildbericht”) is featured as an appendix rather</p><p>than as the main event; the pride of that place is given to Stroop’s own</p><p>narrative summary. Moreover, “photo album,” like another moniker fre-</p><p>quently used by scholars, “memento,” implies the documentation of a</p><p>fond private memory (an inference made even more explicit with Wirth’s</p><p>comparison of the text to a “family album” [part I of introduction]).</p><p>However, although Stroop, with his handcrafted production of only three</p><p>copies of the text, did not intend his report to be publicly available or</p><p>even widely disseminated within the Nazi leadership, it was clearly also</p><p>not simply the result of personal recollection or an instrument of private</p><p>archival memory (as was, for example, the photo album titled “Good</p><p>Times” [“Schöne Zeiten”] compiled by Kurt Franz, deputy and then the</p><p>last commandant of Treblinka; included in Klee, Dressen and Riess 1988,</p><p>206– 207).</p><p>Richard Raskin more aptly captures not only the multimedial nature</p><p>of the report but also the discursive work Stroop intended it to do by</p><p>referring to the photographs as “essentially trophies” and the collection</p><p>of daily dispatches as “score- sheets” that enabled “Stroop to relive what</p><p>he saw as his life’s triumph and to present it as such” (2004, 51– 54). But</p><p>these metaphors too – while evocative of the celebratory, vainglorious</p><p>character of the report and its representation of the uprising as an evenly</p><p>matched battle between archenemies – essentially connote a private act</p><p>of recounting and accounting on the part of Stroop of his own role in the</p><p>suppression of the uprising. As Raskin argues further,</p><p>For Jürgen Stroop, making a book about the operation was a way</p><p>of taking fuller possession of it, of turning it symbolically into his</p><p>own narrative, by ascribing to himself the role of the historian, pre-</p><p>siding over the telling and transmission of the story …. And making</p><p>the album was his way of achieving closure, of wrapping up the</p><p>sprawling and often uncontrollable event in one neat package.</p><p>(2004, 54– 55)</p><p>Raskin’s assessment of Stroop’s impetus for making his report is without</p><p>a question astute, particularly his observation that Stroop endeavored</p><p>to appropriate the narrative of the uprising through a gesture of closure</p><p>Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents 109</p><p>(an aspect of The Stroop Report that I will analyze shortly). However,</p><p>this characterization of Stroop’s motives implies that he wrote his text</p><p>chiefly for his own commemorative purposes and belies both the report’s</p><p>intended audience and the discursive objectives of the mixed media text.</p><p>In fact, the primary goal of Stroop’s text was not to declare Stroop’s</p><p>mastery over his own private experience and memory of the uprising;</p><p>had it been so, the result would have indeed resembled a private diary</p><p>appended by a photo album. On the contrary, as the very composition</p><p>and structure of The Stroop Report demonstrates, it was formulated and</p><p>compiled with an explicit audience in mind, namely Stroop’s superiors</p><p>within the SS hierarchy. It was meant not only to serve as documenta-</p><p>tion of the German military’s suppression of the Jewish uprising and,</p><p>as Stroop himself writes euphemistically, of its historic undertaking “to</p><p>remove the Jews completely from the city of Warsaw” (“die Juden aus</p><p>der Stadt Warschau ganz herauszunehmen,” p. 3 of summary report), but</p><p>also to function as evidence of Stroop’s own success as commander of the</p><p>campaign. Stroop, as Wulf writes, was an ambitious man, whose rapid</p><p>advancement in the</p><p>SS pecking order signified “a breathtaking, lightning-</p><p>fast career” (“[eine] atemberaubend[e] Blitzkarriere”) (1984, 33); his text</p><p>bears the stamp of that ambition, as it is meant to both impress his bosses</p><p>and make the case for his status as a “military leader” (“Heerführer”;</p><p>Wulf 1984, 33). According to Werner Angress, “For Stroop, the Ghetto</p><p>Uprising was an occasion to express, if only in outline form, his talents</p><p>as a commander, which up to that point had been untested” (“Für Stroop</p><p>… war der Ghettoaufstand eine Gelegenheit, seine bis dahin unerprobten</p><p>Fähigkeiten als Feldherr (wenn auch im Kleinformat) zum Ausdruck zu</p><p>bringen”) (1980, 243). Moreover, the report was also an opportunity, as</p><p>Israel Gutman argues, “to justify the lengthy military campaign he was</p><p>forced to undertake – tying up so many troops and arousing attention –</p><p>against an enemy that had no real weapons” (1984, 243); in this way it</p><p>represents Stroop’s “attempt to counteract [any] loss of prestige” (Raskin</p><p>2004, 55) that he experienced due to the unexpected stamina, courage</p><p>and fortitude of the resistance fighters.</p><p>The Stroop Report was thus in the main not simply an attempt to com-</p><p>memorate; rather, its aim was to convince. Created for and circulated to</p><p>the senior leadership of the SS, its primary purpose was to function as a</p><p>promotional exhibit for Stroop’s military accomplishments and leader-</p><p>ship. For this reason, the more suitable (if not comprehensively applic-</p><p>able) metaphoric and generic designation for the text is not that of the</p><p>memorial photo album, but of the strategic work portfolio. As a verbal</p><p>and visual text akin to the dossier that experts in a variety of professions</p><p>compile in order to showcase their work and disseminate it publicly, the</p><p>Stroop portfolio formulates its account of the destruction of the ghetto</p><p>and its inhabitants in the idiosyncratic, militaristic and antisemitic idiom</p><p>of the particular institutional context for which it was written, namely</p><p>the SS leadership Stroop hoped to impress. On the level of military</p><p>110 Erin McGlothlin</p><p>communication, it constructs the narrative of the German response to the</p><p>uprising as one of the inordinate heroism of the German troops, “who</p><p>tirelessly fulfilled their duties in true comradeship and stood together as</p><p>exemplary soldiers” (“die … in treuer Waffenbrüderschaft unermüdlich</p><p>an die Erfüllung ihrer Aufgaben herangingen und stets beispielhaft und</p><p>vorbildlich ihren Mann standen,” p. 10 of summary report). Within its</p><p>subtext, however, the report also makes the case for the consummate lead-</p><p>ership of the part of the operation’s commander, who in June 1943, mere</p><p>weeks after the report was delivered to his superiors, was awarded the</p><p>Iron Cross, First Class and promoted to Higher SS and Police Leader for</p><p>Warsaw. Stroop’s report is thus not only a fully bureaucratic document</p><p>that provides a definitive chronicle of the German suppression of a Jewish</p><p>armed insurgency, celebrates the ruthlessness of the German military</p><p>response and naturalizes the genocidal violence against the inhabitants of</p><p>the Warsaw Ghetto; as a work portfolio, it is also a textual performance</p><p>of its author’s own professional profile and careerist ambitions within</p><p>the SS and the German military hierarchy; it can thus be viewed, Bauer</p><p>writes, as Stroop’s “overt attempt to curry favor with Himmler by beau-</p><p>tifying – if that is the right word – German actions” (2001, 24).</p><p>Reading Narrative and Ideological Closure in</p><p>TheStroop Report</p><p>As the official German account of the abolition of the Warsaw Ghetto,</p><p>one that is meant to serve as the primary source for all future histories</p><p>of the ghetto and its destruction, The Stroop Report is thus what Todd</p><p>Carmondy calls “a document of narrative closure” that “closed the book</p><p>on the Jewish resistance” (2008, 99), a characterization echoed by Raskin</p><p>(2004, 55). Although neither scholar defines the precise nature of closure</p><p>in Stroop’s text or how it functions, both have identified an important</p><p>aspect of the report that bears further investigation. As I will demon-</p><p>strate, The Stroop Report functions as an example of closure within</p><p>narrative; it shows us how narrative – in this case, the portfolio of an</p><p>ambitious military officer – can construct and impose what is meant to be</p><p>an overarching, authoritative and conclusive interpretation of events. But</p><p>beyond that, Stroop’s text is also a document of narrative as closure, in</p><p>that Stroop uses the report itself to claim closure to what in reality were</p><p>ambiguous, unbounded and unresolved events. The report thus both</p><p>instrumentalizes the rhetoric of closure and itself operates as an instru-</p><p>ment of closure.</p><p>Closure in narrative, as H. Porter Abbott explains, “has great rhet-</p><p>orical power” in its promise to bring “satisfaction to desire, relief to sus-</p><p>pense, and clarity to confusion” (2008, 60). It occurs when a narrative</p><p>resolves a conflict, particularly in ways that fulfill the reader’s expectations</p><p>and produce a satisfying sense of completeness. Closure imposes order,</p><p>normality and meaning onto narrative; it also reifies what Abbott terms</p><p>Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents 111</p><p>“masterplots,” which he defines as “recurrent skeletal stories, belonging</p><p>to cultures and individuals[,] that play a powerful role in questions of</p><p>identity, values and the understanding of life” (2008, 236). Narrative</p><p>theorists are particularly interested in how fictional texts achieve, defer or</p><p>deny closure, but they point as well to the central role that closure plays</p><p>in a variety of nonfictional texts, especially those that revolve around</p><p>particular masterplots, such as battle chronicles or national histories. In</p><p>fact, as Abbott argues, following Hayden White, “History as practiced in</p><p>modern western culture is a narrative art in which closure plays a key role</p><p>of imposing ‘moral meaning’ on events” (2010). In its facilitation of dom-</p><p>inant masterplots, which aim to reduce complex phenomena to singular</p><p>renderings of the world that are tendered as objective, natural and value-</p><p>free but are, in fact, often the means through which hegemonic viewpoints</p><p>are propagated, closure functions as an instrument of narrative mastery,</p><p>which refers to the ways in which narratives, according to Meretoja,</p><p>“mask their own narrative, interpretive, and perspectival nature and pre-</p><p>tend to provide a totalizing narrative explanation” (2018, 245).</p><p>In all narratives to some extent, but particularly in those constructed</p><p>around formulaic masterplots, the role that closure plays is an ideological</p><p>one; through authorial strategies, readers are navigated toward a par-</p><p>ticular reading of events, an interpretation that conveys the illusion of com-</p><p>pletion, seamlessness, narrative mastery and, paradoxically, the absence</p><p>of an ideological message, and that precludes or discourages alternative</p><p>viewpoints. Indeed, the degree of coherence and sense of inevitability</p><p>of closure in such narratives point to their relative ideological dimen-</p><p>sion. Given that, as Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck explain, ideology</p><p>“translates power relations into natural, self- evident structures through</p><p>which we experience and interpret the world” (2007, 217– 218), closure’s</p><p>capacity to produce axiomatic unity, seemingly innate realities and com-</p><p>monsensical solutions makes it a powerful instrument of ideology. For</p><p>this reason, what narrative theorists call “narrative closure” is closely</p><p>related to the concept of “ideological closure,” particularly as theorized</p><p>by social scientists.</p><p>Moreover, while ideological closure appears to bring resolution to</p><p>an extant problem or conflict, it actually generates that problem in the</p><p>first place; according to political theorist Glyn Daly, “a central paradox</p><p>of ideology is that it can only attempt closure through simultaneously</p><p>producing the ‘threat’ to that closure” (1999, 220). As Daly further</p><p>argues, “Ideology subsists in</p><p>the fantasy of establishing a final consist-</p><p>ency, of suturing the unsuturable, by providing straw enemies – ‘fictional’</p><p>embodiments of a transcendental lack/ impossibility – which ‘if only they</p><p>could be eliminated’ would enable the realization of harmonious recon-</p><p>ciliation” (1999, 224). Closure, in Daly’s view, thus depends – for both</p><p>its appeal and its apparent efficacy – on the ideological production of</p><p>the very problem or dilemma it swoops in to unequivocally solve. Daly’s</p><p>work on ideological closure is primarily theoretical; however, he cites as</p><p>112 Erin McGlothlin</p><p>a notable example of its operations the National Socialist figuration of</p><p>Jews as the “retroactive construction of Otherness as such” (1999, 225),</p><p>an alterity against which the Nazi regime created and defined the Aryan</p><p>“Volksgemeinschaft” and which it then attempted to overcome through</p><p>the promised closure of a “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”</p><p>(“Endlösung der Judenfrage”).</p><p>Interpreting Performances of Closure in The Stroop Report</p><p>Abbott’s and Daly’s concepts of narrative and ideological closure help</p><p>us better apprehend the ways in which closure functions in The Stroop</p><p>Report both as an internal rhetorical and narrative mechanism and as dis-</p><p>cursive performance. In terms of the former, Daly’s account of closure as</p><p>the construction and then elimination of “straw enemies” provides a per-</p><p>spective from which we can analyze the organization of the report, whose</p><p>narrative summary begins not, as one might expect, with a description of</p><p>the armed revolt of the insurgents, which began on April 19, 1943, when</p><p>SS forces began what was designed to be a three- day final clearing of the</p><p>remaining ghetto residents. Rather, it commences with a description of the</p><p>creation of the ghetto in 1940 by German occupying forces, who found</p><p>the measure necessary “[in order] to protect the Aryan population from</p><p>the Jews” (“[um] die arische Bevölkerung vor den Juden zu schützen”)</p><p>and “[in order] to banish the dangers that continually emanate from the</p><p>Jews” (“um die Gefahren zu bannen, die von den Juden immer wieder</p><p>ausgingen,” p. 2 of summary report). Stroop thus justifies the program-</p><p>matic violence on the part of the SS that he chronicles in the report by</p><p>citing the original source of danger in the Jews themselves. Moreover,</p><p>he ties it to a longer historical trajectory of such ostensibly necessary</p><p>measures against Europe’s Jews:</p><p>The creation of Jewish quarters and the imposition of residential and</p><p>economic restrictions on the Jews are nothing new in the history of</p><p>the East. These practices began as far back as the Middle Ages and</p><p>have continued through the last few centuries.</p><p>(“Die Bildung jüdischer Wohnbezirke und die Auferlegung von</p><p>Aufenthalts- und Wirtschaftsbeschränkungen für die Juden sind in</p><p>der Geschichte des Ostens nich neu. Ihre Anfänge gehen weit bis</p><p>ins Mittelalter zurück und waren auch noch im Verlaufe der letzten</p><p>Jahrhunderte immer wieder zu beobachten,” p. 1 of summary report)</p><p>Further, Stroop inverts the power relationship between the Jewish ghetto</p><p>inhabitants and the German- occupying forces in Warsaw by character-</p><p>izing the ghetto as a site of lawless anarchy run by a sort of militarized</p><p>Jewish mafia, rather than as an atrophied community composed largely</p><p>of traumatized, terrified and malnourished residents and underequipped,</p><p>Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents 113</p><p>hardboiled ghetto fighters under no illusion about their likely fate. He</p><p>writes, “I cannot imagine another place as chaotic as the Warsaw Ghetto.</p><p>The Jews controlled everything, from chemical substances used in the</p><p>manufacture of explosives to items of clothing and equipment for the</p><p>Wehrmacht” (“Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, daß irgendwo anders</p><p>ein größerer Wirrwarr bestanden haben kann als in dem Warschauer</p><p>Ghetto. Die Juden hatten alles in ihren Händen, von chemischen Mitteln</p><p>zur Anfertigung von Sprengstoffen angefangen bis zu Bekleidungs- und</p><p>Ausrüstungsstücken der Wehrmacht,” p. 5 of summary report). In fact,</p><p>Stroop rhetorically reverses the culpability for the German offensive,</p><p>claiming, “The Jewish and Polish flags were hoisted on top of a concrete</p><p>building in a call to battle against us” (“Es wurden die jüdische und die</p><p>polnische Flagge als Aufruf zum Kampf gegen uns auf einem Betonhaus</p><p>gehißt,” p. 5 of summary report).</p><p>The Stroop Report thus constructs the embattled remnant of the</p><p>ghetto population, which had already survived the “Great Action”</p><p>(“Grossaktion Warschau”) of the previous fall, in which approximately</p><p>300,000 inhabitants were deported to and murdered at the Treblinka</p><p>killing center, as a threatening opponent fully deserving of the extreme</p><p>brutality of the German military response to its alleged provocation.</p><p>Concomitantly, it characterizes the German troops as upright and largely</p><p>blameless defenders of their own interests, who find themselves at the</p><p>mercy of “bandits and terrorists.” In this way, Stroop retroactively</p><p>substantiates the threat that his military operation was supposedly</p><p>activated to neutralize; using the operations of narrative mastery and the</p><p>rhetoric of ideological closure, he thus constructs out of the solution the</p><p>problem it ostensibly solved. By virtue of such authorial strategies, he lays</p><p>claim to the “last word” on the matter of the ghetto. Moreover, his text</p><p>also fulfills one of the criteria associated with closure, namely “mastery of</p><p>the material through its control of form” (Chandler and Munday 2020).</p><p>In other words, The Stroop Report achieves a kind of enforced closure</p><p>through its verbal and visual control of the official German chronicle of</p><p>the suppression of the uprising.</p><p>At the same time, however, Stroop’s text not only produces closure</p><p>within its narrative, it also performs it as a discursive act. Performative</p><p>acts, as critical readers of The Stroop Report, such as Paloff, Wirth and</p><p>Żbikowski, have argued, formed a key dimension of the German response</p><p>to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Stroop himself was certainly aware</p><p>that the significance of his operation lay not only in the defeat of the</p><p>ghetto fighters and eradication of the ghetto but also in the image of the</p><p>liquidation in the greater public arena in which the conflict played out.</p><p>For this reason, the German response was in part, according to Andrzej</p><p>Żbikowski, “a theatrical show of power” (qtd. in Jewish Historical</p><p>Institute 2013). Stroop himself is reported to have called the orchestrated</p><p>climax of his operation in the destruction of Warsaw’s Great Synagogue</p><p>on the last official day of the uprising “a fantastic piece of theater” (qtd.</p><p>114 Erin McGlothlin</p><p>in Moczarski 1981, 164), meaning that he keenly recognized the ways in</p><p>which that public act of violence would performatively connote the final</p><p>end of Varsovian Jewish existence.3 As Benjamin Paloff points out, this</p><p>culminating act was mostly symbolic, since at the time of the uprising, the</p><p>synagogue was located outside the bounds of the ghetto and thus did not</p><p>constitute a military target (2017, 431). But by destroying in what Stroop</p><p>reportedly termed “a suitably artistic manner” (qtd. in Moczarski 1981,</p><p>164) a building that not only functioned as the most recognizable signifier</p><p>for the city’s Jewish religious and communal life, but also at one time was</p><p>the largest synagogue in the world, Stroop performed a carefully stage-</p><p>managed act of closure whose meaning, as the culmination of violence in</p><p>one of the most important chapters of the Nazi genocide of the European</p><p>Jews, was to be unmistakably unambiguous. From his postwar Polish</p><p>prison cell, Stroop is said to have described the destruction with vivid</p><p>physical detail, exuberant pride and unmistakable awareness of its geno-</p><p>cidal consequences, claiming, “With a thunderous, deafening bang and</p><p>a rainbow burst of colors, the fiery explosion soared toward the clouds,</p><p>an unforgettable tribute to our triumph</p><p>over the Jews” (Moczarski</p><p>1981, 164).</p><p>In Stroop’s rendering, the violent performance of closure that</p><p>culminated in the destruction of the Great Synagogue was thus an expres-</p><p>sion of orgasmic, even transcendent joy. Moreover, this annihilative act</p><p>not only “punctuated” (Paloff 2017, 431) the end of the uprising, but</p><p>it also announced in no uncertain terms the Nazis’ genocidal intentions</p><p>both to the world outside the ghetto and to the remaining Jews within</p><p>(for, despite Stroop’s grandiloquent rhetoric about the complete annihi-</p><p>lation of the ghetto, an unknown number of Jews still remained hidden</p><p>in the ghetto after the officially declared suppression of the uprising, a</p><p>fact that Stroop was forced to admit at the end of his report). While,</p><p>on a linguistic level, the Nazis maintained a tightly controlled idiom of</p><p>euphemism to disguise to themselves and the world the methods and aims</p><p>of their genocidal project (a terminology that, as Wirth points out in</p><p>part III of his introduction, Stroop adopts in his report), the expression</p><p>of their plans for Poland’s Jews was made incontestably clear in this cli-</p><p>mactic act of violence.</p><p>In an analogous way to the orgiastic orchestration of violence of</p><p>the destruction of the Great Synagogue, The Stroop Report itself, as a</p><p>text, functions as an act of performative closure. Indeed, by virtue of</p><p>its very title – The Jewish Quarter Is No More! – the text performs dis-</p><p>cursively the violent physical erasure of the ghetto and the murder of its</p><p>inhabitants. Yet, Stroop proclaims the end of the ghetto not only ex post</p><p>facto, in the aftermath of the suppression of the uprising, but also during</p><p>the conflict itself in his daily dispatches to Krüger, in which he itera-</p><p>tively describes the ghetto as the “former Jewish quarter” (“ehemaliger</p><p>jüdischer Wohnbezirk,” missive from May 10, 1943). These paradox-</p><p>ical references to an allegedly nonexistent entity that Stroop and his</p><p>Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents 115</p><p>forces are nevertheless struggling to annihilate express the reverse of</p><p>what Andrzej Wirth, in part III of his introduction to the English transla-</p><p>tion of the report, describes as “[t] he absurd logic of totalitarian wishful</p><p>thinking (‘only what should exist does exist’)” (1979). In this case, Stroop</p><p>proclaims that only what should not exist does not exist, a rhetorical</p><p>strategy that instantiates the erasure of the ghetto as a measure to right</p><p>a radical wrong.</p><p>Moreover, Stroop’s repeated insistence throughout the report on the</p><p>expiry of the ghetto is meant, at least in part, to function as an illo-</p><p>cutionary act in the sense of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. According</p><p>to Austin, an illocutionary act is an utterance (whether a declaration, a</p><p>command or a promise) that accomplishes the deed to which it refers. The</p><p>most explicit of illocutionary acts are performatives, which are sentences</p><p>that not only describe a given social reality but also change the social</p><p>reality they are describing. Such declarations, according to John R. Searle,</p><p>“chang[e] the world in such a way as to bring about the truth of [their]</p><p>propositional content” (2001, 103). Of course, it would be absurd – not</p><p>to mention historically disingenuous and ethically obtuse – to claim that</p><p>Stroop’s report operates primarily as an illocutionary act; after all, the</p><p>destruction of the ghetto proceeded not merely from Stroop’s words but</p><p>more concretely from the violence committed by the troops under his</p><p>command. To insist that the violence he wrought was exclusively discur-</p><p>sive would be to deny the actual suffering and death experienced during</p><p>the uprising by the many thousands of Jews (by Stroop’s own count,</p><p>over 50,000 [p. 10 of the summary report]). At the same time, however,</p><p>Stroop’s report aimed not simply to recount and justify the violent events</p><p>of the uprising; rather, it also endeavored to shape the reality it claimed</p><p>to merely describe, meaning that the rhetoric of closure was intended to,</p><p>in fact, seal the victorious finality of the operation by claiming for itself</p><p>hegemonic control over the narrative of the events. As part of a particular</p><p>rhetorical strategy that aimed continually to claim narrative mastery</p><p>over an event that exceeded Stroop’s control, namely a ghetto liquid-</p><p>ation operation that was originally envisioned to be a easily accomplished</p><p>three- day event and that ballooned into a protracted insurgency in which,</p><p>according to Stroop’s numbers, 17 German troops were killed and 93</p><p>wounded, Stroop’s performative declarations function to induce forcibly</p><p>a sense of closure into a situation rife with uncertainty and incomplete-</p><p>ness, with which the German forces did not – at least initially – make</p><p>notable progress. As Daly argues, “The driving force behind closure is the</p><p>attempt to resolve a fundamental experience of lack” (1999, 236); in the</p><p>case of the report, Stroop attempts to performatively overcome his lack of</p><p>military success and to rewrite the narrative of his initially inept response</p><p>to the uprising with recurrent and insistent closural gestures.</p><p>Seen in this light, The Stroop Report reveals itself to be not quite</p><p>the seamless triumphal text and impressive portfolio of professional</p><p>achievement that Stroop intended it to be. Rather, its manifest narrative</p><p>116 Erin McGlothlin</p><p>celebrating the joys of violence, with its forced inducement of closure</p><p>through the construction of a straw enemy deserving of the full bru-</p><p>tality directed at it and through symbolic and performative declarations</p><p>of the vanquishment of that enemy, is shadowed by a tenacious subtext</p><p>of deficiency, insecurity and inadequate military leadership. In this way,</p><p>Stroop’s portfolio not only celebrates military success and narrative mas-</p><p>tery; it also obliquely narrates his failure.</p><p>Conclusion: Reading Perpetrator- Authored Documents</p><p>through the Lens of Literary Methodologies</p><p>As my reading of The Stroop Report demonstrates, scholarship that</p><p>focuses on Holocaust- era documents produced by perpetrators can – and</p><p>should – avail itself of methodologies and hermeneutic strategies that are</p><p>more conventionally applied to literary texts, whether fictional or non-</p><p>fictional. While such documentary texts can certainly be mined by those</p><p>who endeavor to establish the historical record for empirical evidence</p><p>of the crimes they document and the ways in which those crimes were</p><p>enabled, planned and executed, they also should be read through an eth-</p><p>ical and narratological lens for the narrative practices they marshal in</p><p>their attempt to discursively legitimize, mobilize and justify the violence</p><p>they sanction and engender. Further, perpetrator- authored documents</p><p>should also be interpreted for the ways in which they bolster the truth</p><p>effect of the events they describe, meaning strategies, such as narrative</p><p>and ideological closure, through which they naturalize their hegemonic</p><p>perspective on the violence. Such documents implicitly or explicitly seek</p><p>to tell a story about the brutal events they represent, and at the same</p><p>time they work to efface such narrative positioning in their attempt to</p><p>discursively produce a stance of objectivity and self- evident truth. By</p><p>employing a methodological approach that attends to the narrative con-</p><p>struction of documentary texts, we can provide an alternate reading of</p><p>the events they convey, puncture the truth effect they produce and posit</p><p>narrative possibilities that challenge their hegemonic control over the</p><p>historical record.</p><p>Notes</p><p>1 For a good introduction to the ways in which methodologies of literary criti-</p><p>cism can be fruitfully brought to bear on analyses of historical documents, see</p><p>Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and</p><p>Twentieth Century History, edited by Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann</p><p>(2020), especially Christoph Reinfandt’s chapter, “Reading Texts after the</p><p>Linguistic Turn: Approaches from Literary Studies</p><p>and their Implications”</p><p>(41– 58). For a discussion of a hermeneutical approach to nonfiction, see</p><p>“Narrative Strategies and Nonfiction” in my monograph, The Mind of the</p><p>Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (58– 65).</p><p>Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents 117</p><p>2 The Stroop Report was published in English in 1979 as a collection of facsimiles</p><p>of the original report in German accompanied by superb facing- page transla-</p><p>tion and annotation by Sybil Milton and an astute introduction by Andrzej</p><p>Wirth. Unfortunately, however, the volume includes pagination for neither the</p><p>report itself nor its excellent paratextual apparatus, which makes referring to</p><p>particular parts of the text quite difficult. Yet, Stroop himself did paginate his</p><p>introductory summary report, and his daily missives are identified by their</p><p>respective dates; I will therefore cite this information when quoting from the</p><p>report. Furthermore, Wirth’s introduction is divided into seven sections, each</p><p>of which is designated by a Roman numeral; when citing his text, I will indi-</p><p>cate the section in which the quote originates.</p><p>3 Kazimierz Moczarski, an officer of the Polish Home Army who was imprisoned</p><p>by the postwar Polish Communist regime on suspicion for having been aligned</p><p>with the Nazis and who shared a cell with Stroop for nine months, wrote an</p><p>account of Stroop’s daily disquisitions about his past, particularly his role in</p><p>the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, in their shared cell. In 1977, Moczarski</p><p>published Rozmowy z katem, which appeared in English translation as</p><p>Conversations with an Executioner in 1981.</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edition.</p><p>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</p><p>Abbott, H. Porter. 2010. “Closure.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative</p><p>Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie- Laure Ryan.</p><p>London: Routledge. http:// libpr oxy.wustl.edu/ login?url= https:// sea rch- proqu</p><p>est- com.libpr oxy.wustl.edu/ docv iew/ 213 7942 966?accoun tid= 15159</p><p>Angress, Werner T. 1980. “Review of The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter</p><p>of Warsaw Is No More. A Facsimile Edition and Translation of the Official</p><p>Nazi Report on the Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.” Militärgeschichtliche</p><p>Mitteilungen no. 2 (January): 243– 244.</p><p>Bauer, Yehuda. 2001. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Carmondy, Todd. 2008. “The Banality of the Document: Charles Reznikoff’s</p><p>Holocaust and Ineloquent Empathy.” Journal of Modern Literature 32,</p><p>no. 1 (Fall): 86– 110.</p><p>Chandler, Daniel, and Ron Munday. 2020. “Closure.” In The Oxford Dictionary</p><p>of Media and Communication, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p><p>www.oxfo rdre fere nce.com/ view/ 10.1093/ acref/ 978019 1800 986.001.0001/</p><p>acref- 978019 1800 986- e- 360</p><p>Daly, Glyn. 1999. “Ideology and Its Paradoxes: Dimensions of Fantasy and</p><p>Enjoyment.” Journal of Political Ideologies 4, no. 2 (June): 219– 238.</p><p>Dobson, Miriam, and Benjamin Ziemann, eds. 2020. Reading Primary Sources:</p><p>The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History,</p><p>2nd edition. London: Routledge.</p><p>Fritzsche, Peter. 2010. “German Documents and Diaries.” In The Oxford</p><p>Handbook of Holocaust Studies, edited by Peter Hayes and John K. Roth.</p><p>Oxford: Oxford University Press: 381– 396.</p><p>118 Erin McGlothlin</p><p>Fritzsche, Peter. 2016. “The Management of Empathy in the Third Reich.”</p><p>In Empathy and Its Limits, edited by Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers.</p><p>Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan: 115– 127.</p><p>Gutman. Israel. 1984. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Boston and</p><p>New York: Houghton Mifflin in association with the US Holocaust Memorial</p><p>Museum.</p><p>Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. 2007. “Ideology.” In The Cambridge</p><p>Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge</p><p>University Press: 217– 230.</p><p>Jackson, Robert R. 1946. “Opening Address for the United States.” In Nazi</p><p>Conspiracy and Aggression (1946– 1948), Volume I, edited by Office of United</p><p>States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Washington, DC:</p><p>US Government Printing Office: 114– 174. www.loc.gov/ rr/ frd/ Milit ary_ Law/</p><p>pdf/ NT_ N azi_ Vol- I.pdf</p><p>Jewish Historical Institute. 2013. “Stroop’s Report in the New Version.” www.</p><p>jhi.pl/ en/ blog/ 2013- 05- 09- str oop- s- rep ort- in- the- new- vers ion</p><p>Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess. 1988. “Schöne Zeiten”: Judenmord</p><p>aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.</p><p>Magilow, Daniel H., and Lisa Silverman. 2020. “The Boy in the Warsaw</p><p>Ghetto (Photograph, 1943): What Do Iconic Photographs Tell Us about the</p><p>Holocaust?” In Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction, 2nd</p><p>edition. London: Bloomsbury: 12– 20.</p><p>McGlothlin, Erin. 2021. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and</p><p>Nonfiction. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics,</p><p>History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p><p>Moczarski, Kazimierz. 1981. Conversations with an Executioner, edited by</p><p>Mariana Fitzpatrick. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall.</p><p>Paloff, Benjamin. 2017. “Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Warsaw Ghetto?”</p><p>Modernism/ modernity 24, no. 3 (September): 429– 460.</p><p>Raskin, Richard. 2004. A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo.</p><p>Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.</p><p>Searle, John R. 2001. “How Performatives Work.” In Essays in Speech Act</p><p>Theory, edited by Daniel Vanderveken and Susumu Kobo. Amsterdam: J.</p><p>Benjamins: 85– 107.</p><p>Stroop, Jürgen. 1979. The Stroop Report, translated by Sybil Milton. New York:</p><p>Pantheon.</p><p>Wirth, Andrzej. 1979. “Introduction to the First Edition.” In The Stroop Report,</p><p>translated by Sybil Milton. New York: Pantheon.</p><p>Wulf, Joseph. 1984. Das Dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker. Frankfurt am Main:</p><p>Ullstein.</p><p>Wyschogrod, Edith. 2005. “The Warring Logics of Genocide.” In Genocide and</p><p>Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, edited by John K. Roth. Houndsmills,</p><p>Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 207– 219.</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-11</p><p>8 Space of Murder, Space of Freedom</p><p>The Forest as a Posttraumatic</p><p>Landscape in Holocaust Narratives</p><p>Helena Duffy</p><p>With “Auschwitz” having become a synecdoche for the Nazis’ annihila-</p><p>tion of European Jewry, it is understandable why concentration camps</p><p>were Holocaust Geography’s original focus.1 Subsequent studies have paid</p><p>attention to other settings, such as ghettos (Cole 2003), trains (Gigliotti</p><p>2009; Cole 2011) and hiding places in urban areas (Paulsson 2002; Moore</p><p>2010). Scholars have equally turned to the role of the forests during the</p><p>genocide (Merin and Porter 1984; Tec 1996; Weber 2008, 2012, Reichelt</p><p>2017; Cole 2019), an unsurprising choice considering Claude Lanzmann’s</p><p>identification of the gassing of Jews in the Rzuchów Forest as the begin-</p><p>ning of the Holocaust (1986, 11). However, even before gas vans came</p><p>into use, as in Rzuchów on December 8, 1941, the forests had provided</p><p>a stage for what Father Patrick Desbois has called the “Holocaust by</p><p>bullets.” (2008) Being secluded from public view, the “bloodlands,” as</p><p>Timothy Snyder has dubbed the borderland forests of western Poland</p><p>and eastern Soviet Union (2010), saw mass shootings of Jews, Romanies,</p><p>communists, the mentally ill and other social and ethnic groups the Nazis</p><p>considered a threat to the security of their troops. Following in the wake of</p><p>the Wehrmacht, between 1941 and 1942, four Einsatzgruppen conducted</p><p>massacres, such as those in the Rumbula Forest, the Krępiecki Forest, the</p><p>Ponary Forest and the Sosenki Forest.2 But, forests also provided hiding</p><p>spaces for Jews escaping from ghettos, transports and executions. It is</p><p>estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 fugitive Jews sought refuge in</p><p>the forests</p><p>and that only 10 percent of them survived the war (Cole 2019,</p><p>667– 668; Weber 2012, 2). The testimonies of these fugitives demonstrate</p><p>that although, being primarily urban, Jews initially perceived the forest as</p><p>alien and menacing, they ultimately found it liberating, consolatory and</p><p>protective (Cole 2019). As exemplified by the group of Jewish partisans</p><p>headed by the Bielski brothers, the forests also provided Jews with scope</p><p>for active resistance against the Nazis (Tec 2009).</p><p>Due to the negligible number of survivors of the mass shootings of Jews</p><p>and the small number of surviving forest fugitives, these two aspects of what</p><p>Roman Sendyka has dubbed the “dispersed Holocaust” have been poorly</p><p>documented (Sendyka n.d.).3 They have nevertheless been subject to fic-</p><p>tional reworkings, as exemplified by Anthony Hecht’s poem “More Light!</p><p>120 Helena Duffy</p><p>More Light!” and Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Heavy Sand.4 Likewise, the two</p><p>contemporary French- language novels I examine in this chapter cast the</p><p>forest as a major Holocaust setting and, in so doing, maintain its aforemen-</p><p>tioned duality; while in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (first published</p><p>in French as Les Bienveillantes (2006)) woodlands are the stage for mass</p><p>executions, in Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck (first published in French as Le</p><p>Rapport de Brodeck (2007)) they shelter three fugitive women. Additionally,</p><p>the protagonists of the two narratives project their Holocaust memories on</p><p>to the forest whereby they construe it as a posttraumatic landscape.</p><p>It is the two novels’ investment of woodlands with traumatic images</p><p>and their consequent opening of Holocaust violence to a reinterpretation</p><p>through an ecocritical lens that interests me in this chapter. Notably,</p><p>I examine the ways in which Littell and Claudel expand the trauma theory</p><p>in the direction of ecocriticism, with a view to drawing attention to the role</p><p>of nature in the Nazi genocide, to the human/ nonhuman interconnected-</p><p>ness and to the implications of interhuman violence for the environment.</p><p>As its starting point, my discussion takes Cathy Caruth’s reorientation of</p><p>Sigmund Freud’s reading of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1996,</p><p>1– 10), a sixteenth- century epic that, written in the spirit of counterreform-</p><p>ation, imaginatively reconstructs the First Crusade of 1099. In the episode</p><p>reexamined by Caruth, Tancred and his fellow knights venture into the</p><p>forest of Saron with the aim of felling trees. They intend to rebuild the</p><p>siege towers that had served to attack Jerusalem’s high walls, but which</p><p>Muslim warriors, including Tancred’s beloved, Clorinda, burnt down in</p><p>the night. What the Crusaders do not know is that the sorcerer Ismeno has</p><p>cast a magic spell upon the forest and that the trees will produce images</p><p>that play on the knights’ worst fears. For example, Tancred, who mor-</p><p>tally wounded Clorinda in a skirmish, sees his beloved’s blood gush from</p><p>a cypress when he strikes its trunk with his sword. Then, when he strikes</p><p>the tree again, Tancred hears Clorinda complain of having been killed</p><p>twice. While for Freud the episode illustrates the repetitiveness of trau-</p><p>matic neurosis (1954, 16), for Caruth it demonstrates that trauma is a</p><p>deep and painful mental wound that, left by a shocking event, manifests</p><p>itself belatedly and in an unmediated form:</p><p>Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second</p><p>wounding, so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or ori-</p><p>ginal event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very</p><p>unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first</p><p>instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.</p><p>(1996, 4)</p><p>The scene additionally reveals trauma’s potential for an ethical encounter</p><p>with the Other’s pain, leading Caruth to reconceptualize history as</p><p>an enmeshment of different traumas: “We can … read the address of</p><p>[Clorinda’s] voice here, not as the story of individual in relation to</p><p>Space of Murder, Space of Freedom 121</p><p>the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s</p><p>own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” and in which it can</p><p>engender “the encounter with another, through the very possibility and</p><p>surprise of listening to another’s wound” (1996, 8).</p><p>Despite the ample scrutiny of Caruth’s rereading of Tasso’s text, few</p><p>critics have paid attention to its topographical setting. Advocating the</p><p>expansion of trauma studies beyond its dominant humanistic focus, Stef</p><p>Craps bemoans the fact that the epic and its readers “trope away from</p><p>environmental destruction,” thus “derealizing and invisibilizing the scene</p><p>of literal damage to a tree” (2020, 281). Where Craps sees a manifest-</p><p>ation of “plant blindness,” Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper perceive an</p><p>opportunity for reconceptualizing trauma as an “environmental and</p><p>cosmological rupture, as something that happens … not simply to indi-</p><p>viduals …, but also to the broader network of relations by which life itself</p><p>is animated” (195). In fact, Caruth herself who engages only with Freud’s</p><p>commentary on Tasso’s epic, rather than with the epic itself, glosses</p><p>over the forest’s instrumentality in the revelation of Tancred’s trauma</p><p>and of his trauma’s entanglement with that of the Crusaders’ Muslim</p><p>victims.5 Caruth’s narrowly humanistic reading consequently overlooks</p><p>the traumatized subject’s implication in the nonhuman world and the</p><p>ensuing potential for posthumanist and environmental approaches to</p><p>trauma. In contrast, even if stopping short of embracing either approach,</p><p>Jane Tylus foregrounds the imbrication of Muslim and Christian suffering</p><p>and attaches the violence of the Crusaders toward Jerusalem’s inhabitants</p><p>to the damage they inflict upon their victims’ natural environment. For</p><p>Tylus, both Clorinda’s “bleeding body trapped in a tree” and the bleeding</p><p>bodies of the Muslims chased by the Crusaders to their wooden stockades</p><p>invoke Christ’s crucifixion “on a tree” (1999, 119). Likewise, Clorinda’s</p><p>entrapment “between life and death” calls to mind the human form that</p><p>Christ took to save mankind (1999, 122). Yet, in accordance with the</p><p>image of universal and triumphant Christianity Jerusalem Delivered</p><p>promulgates, Tasso does not capitalize on these haunting parallels,</p><p>instead contrasting the positively valorized Crusaders with Jerusalem’s</p><p>demonized residents (124). Hence, contrary to Caruth’s positive reading</p><p>of the episode, the knights forego the opportunity for a transformative</p><p>encounter with the otherness of their victims, instead pursuing their mur-</p><p>derous agenda in regard to both the local population and its natural</p><p>environment. The felling of the trees not only enables the reconstruction</p><p>of the towers and hence the driving out of the Muslims, but also produces</p><p>environmental harm, leaving the forest’s inhabitants – the birds and the</p><p>beasts – homeless (Tylus 1999, 124).</p><p>It is the underresearched role of the forest in Tasso’s epic, whose role</p><p>is both evidential (the forest exposes Christian violence through an ironic</p><p>analogy between victimized Muslims and the crucified Christ) and agen-</p><p>tial (it temporarily hinders the Christian conquest of Jerusalem), that</p><p>provides the impetus for my examination of the reframing of Holocaust</p><p>122 Helena Duffy</p><p>violence in The Kindly Ones and Brodeck. In the first part of my dis-</p><p>cussion, I inquire whether by ultimately redirecting our attention to the</p><p>Jewish tragedy, Littell’s focus on perpetrator trauma redeems the promise</p><p>of ethical effectiveness that Jerusalem Delivered fails to fulfill. This can</p><p>be achieved through isolating the forest as the locus of the entanglement</p><p>of different traumatic histories, including those belonging to the non-</p><p>human world. Brodeck, too, as I argue in the second part of my analysis,</p><p>foregrounds the porosity of the human/ nonhuman boundary, posits the</p><p>traumatized human subject as inextricable from its natural</p><p>environment</p><p>and casts this environment as a posttraumatic landscape construed by the</p><p>protagonist through the processes of projection and identification. Hence,</p><p>while endorsing Caruth’s conception of trauma as a belated response to</p><p>a painful event that resists representation, and of history as an enmesh-</p><p>ment of the victim’s and the killer’s traumatic stories, the two narratives</p><p>potentially broaden this conception by stressing trauma’s embodiment</p><p>and embeddedness in nature. I will contend that this challenge to the</p><p>humanistic understanding of trauma recasts the Holocaust as a product</p><p>of modern ontology with its privileging of the human within the human/</p><p>nonhuman binary. Indeed, as the two novels suggest, it is this binary that</p><p>has not only legitimized our exploitative and abusive relationship with</p><p>the nonhuman world but also enabled the dehumanization and conse-</p><p>quent oppression of human groups, as emblematized by the Holocaust.</p><p>The Forest in the Perpetrator’s Murdering Hand</p><p>Littell’s hugely successful albeit controversial debut novel narrates the</p><p>Holocaust from the perspective of a former officer of the Sicherheitsdienst</p><p>(SD), the intelligence agency of the Nazi Party. Settled in northern France</p><p>under a false identity, Maximilien Aue reminisces about his deploy-</p><p>ment on the Eastern Front as of Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June</p><p>1941. His over- 900- page memoir charts the progression of the Third</p><p>Reich’s exterminatory policies, beginning with the Aktionen, as the</p><p>Nazis euphemistically called mass executions of Jews and other ethnic</p><p>and social minorities that they deemed undesirable. The first Aktion at</p><p>which Aue is present takes place in a Ukrainian forest that, as it transpires</p><p>when the condemned Jews start to dig their own graves, has already been</p><p>used by the Bolsheviks as an execution and burial site. Contextualized</p><p>with Caruth’s emphasis on the unknowability of trauma at the time of its</p><p>occurrence (1996, 3), the implausible calm marking the scene and Aue’s</p><p>own similarly unlikely composure signal the protagonist’s traumatiza-</p><p>tion that will later manifest itself through classic PTSD symptoms.6 The</p><p>unavailability of the painful event to Aue’s consciousness is additionally</p><p>communicated by his failure to register the moment when long pieces of</p><p>wood lodge themselves within his hand. While for Eric Sandberg this detail</p><p>testifies to the tremendous emotional stress that Aue experiences, but of</p><p>which he is unaware at the time (2014, 242– 243), for Liran Razinsky,</p><p>Space of Murder, Space of Freedom 123</p><p>the splinters are a miniaturization of the forest that “marks itself within</p><p>the perpetrator’s body, within the murdering hand itself,” becoming “an</p><p>ineffaceable sign of the acts committed” (2012, 53). To synthesize the</p><p>two critics’ comments, the forest makes Aue (or rather the reader) realize</p><p>his implication in the Nazis’ genocidal violence, just as in Tasso’s epic it</p><p>makes Tancred fully grasp his responsibility for Clorinda’s death. In other</p><p>words, it becomes a site for the killer’s potentially ethically productive</p><p>encounter with his victims’ trauma. The embodiment of human mental</p><p>wounding in nature finds articulation when the forest unexpectedly and</p><p>repetitively yields the literal image of the crime that, in relation to the</p><p>novel’s diegetic moment, is about to be committed but, in relation to the</p><p>narrative moment, has already been carried out. Since, having been buried</p><p>in winter, the bodies of the victims of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat</p><p>of Internal Affairs) have not decomposed, the traumatic memory of the</p><p>violent event returns in an unprocessed form. Trauma’s unwished- for</p><p>repetitiveness postulated by both Freud and Caruth finds further illus-</p><p>tration in the analogies between Soviet and Nazi methods. Irrespective of</p><p>their moral outrage at the Bolsheviks’ war conduct in the Soviet- annexed</p><p>parts of Poland (Littell 2010, 83), the Nazis reappropriate their enemies’</p><p>execution sites and replicate their killing techniques.</p><p>Should we reconsider Tancred’s belated realization of his crime in the</p><p>light of the aforedescribed scene, we can see more clearly why Caruth’s</p><p>focus on Clorinda’s killer and, in her reading of Freud’s Moses and</p><p>Monotheism (1964, 11– 25), on the murderous Israelites has raised such</p><p>fierce objections and why these objections repeatedly use the Holocaust</p><p>as their reference point. Ruth Leys argues that if Tancred</p><p>can become the victim of the trauma and the voice of Clorinda</p><p>testimony to his wound, then Caruth’s logic … would turn the</p><p>executioners of Jews into victims and the ‘cries’ of the Jews into tes-</p><p>timony to the trauma suffered by the Nazis.</p><p>(2000, 297)</p><p>Similarly, Anne Rothe fears that, if the Israelites not only were</p><p>traumatized by their murder of Moses but also committed this murder</p><p>without experiencing it, “the Nazis were traumatized by their murder of</p><p>the European Jews which they likewise did not experience” (2016, 191).</p><p>However, in The Kindly Ones, Leys’ and Rothe’s anxieties regarding the</p><p>ramifications of the trauma theory for Holocaust memory are neutralized</p><p>by Aue’s awareness of the criminality of the Nazis’ actions, which he</p><p>throws into sharp relief with the ironic contrast between the massacre of</p><p>the Jews he witnessed and his own relatively minor physical and mental</p><p>discomfort: “For us, it was another dirty day’s work; for them, the end</p><p>of everything” (Littell 2010, 83). Furthermore, notwithstanding Aue’s</p><p>successful extraction of the splinters, the posttraumatic sylvan land-</p><p>scape has irreversibly penetrated and polluted his consciousness. This</p><p>124 Helena Duffy</p><p>is evidenced by Aue’s subsequent inability to enjoy woodlands (Littell</p><p>2010, 702) and by the superimposition of his wartime memories over</p><p>his happy childhood memories of German forests: “That’s what forests</p><p>used to mean to me, games like that, full of keen pleasure and boundless</p><p>freedom; now, the woods filled me with fear” (Littell 2010, 109). As for</p><p>the accusation that Caruth’s theory inverts the victim and the perpetrator</p><p>positions, Littell’s novel counteracts it by fulfilling the unrealized ethical</p><p>potential of Jerusalem Delivered, held in the correspondences between</p><p>Clorinda’s entrapment in a tree and Christ’s agony on the wooden cross,</p><p>and between the Muslims’ and Christ’s bleeding flesh. Unlike Tasso’s epic</p><p>that programs its sixteenth- century audience to ignore Muslim suffering,</p><p>Littell’s representation of Aue’s trauma draws our attention to the Jewish</p><p>tragedy with renewed strength, thus opposing the compassion fatigue</p><p>resulting from the oversaturation of victim- focused narratives, including</p><p>these concerning the Holocaust (Dean 2004; Mitschke 2016).</p><p>By assuming the perpetrator perspective, Littell’s novel not only</p><p>refuses to inscribe the “Holocaust metanarrative” (Hunter 2019),</p><p>which ushers readers into what Eric Leake terms “easy empathy” (2014,</p><p>175) with the morally irreproachable victim,7 but also aligns itself with</p><p>the Caruthian idea that different traumatic stories become interlaced</p><p>within the fabric of history. According to James Berger, Caruthian</p><p>theory demonstrates that</p><p>each national catastrophe invokes and transforms memories of other</p><p>catastrophes, so that history becomes a complex entanglement of</p><p>crimes inflicted and suffered, with each catastrophe understood –</p><p>that is, misunderstood – in the context of repressed memories of pre-</p><p>vious ones.</p><p>(1997, 572)</p><p>To Littell’s implicit adherence to Caruth’s conception of history testifies</p><p>his narrator’s identification of Nazi crimes with the Soviets’ extermination</p><p>campaigns. Apart from deriding the Germans’ self- perception as superior</p><p>to their enemy, his novel thus wrests the Holocaust from its unproductive</p><p>(or even counterproductive) designation as unique or at least unprece-</p><p>dented, which “distracts from the consideration of other historical tra-</p><p>gedies” (Rothberg 2009, 9) and has “compelled [the Holocaust] to become</p><p>generalized</p><p>and departicularized”8 (Alexander 2002, 51). Referring more</p><p>specifically to trauma studies, Karyn Ball links their ethical investment to</p><p>the move beyond the “ahistorical insistence upon the sublime singularity</p><p>of the Holocaust” (2000, 10) and toward “the strategy of comparison”</p><p>(2000, 15). Significantly, with the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyń</p><p>Forest epitomizing Stalin’s war crimes, woodlands become an apt means</p><p>of forging a link between Nazi and Soviet violence, a link spelt out by the</p><p>anachronistic graffiti “Katyń= Auschwitz” that Aue encounters later in</p><p>the novel (2010, 619).9</p><p>Space of Murder, Space of Freedom 125</p><p>The Kindly Ones further expands the interpretative framework of the</p><p>Nazi genocide by encompassing the nascent posthumanist and ecocritical</p><p>perspectives in Holocaust Studies (Małczyński et al. 2020; Cole 2020b;</p><p>Domańska 2020).10 Scholars championing these approaches invite us</p><p>to contemplate the role of nature in the Holocaust and the Holocaust’s</p><p>and its commemorations’ transformative influence on the environment</p><p>(Smykowski 2020; Małczyński 2020). They also raise the question of the</p><p>cultural construction of Holocaust settings as posttraumatic landscapes</p><p>(Baer 2002), the genocide’s and ecocide’s shared origins in modernity’s</p><p>separation between the human and the nonhuman and its related quest</p><p>for humanity’s control over nature (Katz 1997, 2015; Małczyński et al.</p><p>2020). Such efforts to ascribe quasi- human agency to nature or to discuss</p><p>its instrumentalization in the genocide have, however, met with critique</p><p>and resistance. While for Tim Cole these efforts continue to “privilege[e]</p><p>human actors and action” (2020a, 275), Omer Bartov deems the</p><p>responses to the Nazis’ antisemitic policies of local governments and</p><p>populations more important than the trees that “were neither silent, nor</p><p>witnesses [but] were simply there” (2021, 3). The critic additionally finds</p><p>“equating the killing of a human being to chopping down a tree” an eth-</p><p>ically dubious exercise (2021, 10). Although the forest that shields the</p><p>Aktion from public view in Littell’s novel could be endowed with a con-</p><p>spiratorial or evidential role in relation to Nazi and Soviet crimes, I am</p><p>more interested in identifying it as a mnemonic space constructed through</p><p>its investment with the symptomatology of human trauma, and in Littell’s</p><p>resulting enlargement of Caruth’s theory through his reinsertion of the</p><p>human subject into the nonhuman world. In other words, The Kindly</p><p>Ones foregrounds trauma’s “trans- corporeality,” which means that “the</p><p>human is always intermeshed with the more- than- human world,” and</p><p>that nature is more than an inert and empty background available to</p><p>human exploits (Alaimo 2010, 2).</p><p>The posthumanist resonance of the aforediscussed scene is further borne</p><p>out by Aue’s jaunt into the surrounding countryside during the Aktion.</p><p>The pleasure that he takes in the landscape’s pastoral beauty – a pleasure</p><p>that echoes the uncanny serenity of posttraumatic spaces remarked by</p><p>Holocaust geographers (Charlesworth and Addis 2002, 231; Young</p><p>1993, 120) – is spoilt by his sighting of a crow crucified by its feet. This</p><p>reference to Christ’s – or rather St Paul’s – crucifixion seems to position</p><p>the Holocaust as the culmination of centuries of Christian antisemitism.</p><p>Yet, Aue’s attentiveness to farm animals – a flock of “fat geese,” “a</p><p>frightened calf” and “a weeping cow,” whose inevitable and tragic fate</p><p>is suggested by the qualifiers Aue employs to describe them – reconnects</p><p>the Holocaust to the violence men inflict upon the nonhuman world and</p><p>bridges human and nonhuman trauma (Littell 2010, 82). The episode</p><p>therefore demonstrates Littell’s implicit concurrence with John Roth’s</p><p>view that the Holocaust has produced a world that is both spiritually and</p><p>ecologically scarred by “its killing centers, mass graves and incinerated</p><p>126 Helena Duffy</p><p>bodies,” and that “disrespect for human life and disregard for the natural</p><p>world are intertwined” (2013, 25).</p><p>The Forest on the March</p><p>By focalizing his novel through a victim rather than perpetrator, Philippe</p><p>Claudel seems to adopt a more conventional approach to narrating the</p><p>Holocaust. That said, Brodeck departs from the traditional representa-</p><p>tion of the victim as invariably righteous, instead staging a protagonist</p><p>who becomes mired in complicity with his oppressors in the camp. Upon</p><p>his return to his village, Brodeck is forced to reenter the “grey zone” of</p><p>collaboration, this time by reporting on his neighbors’ murder of a new-</p><p>comer nicknamed de Anderer. Troubled by the stranger’s alterity and</p><p>linked capacity for stirring unwelcome memories of wartime collabor-</p><p>ation, the villagers kill him and, to cover up their crime, feed his remains</p><p>to pigs. Alongside the conventional figuration of the survivor, Claudel</p><p>rejects the realist aesthetics that many deem the most appropriate in</p><p>Holocaust literature (Adams 2014). Namely, he opts for an allegorical</p><p>approach to the Holocaust and to France’s both postwar reluctance to</p><p>recognize its implication in the Jewish tragedy and continued perse-</p><p>cution of ethnic otherness in the colonies. In keeping with its univer-</p><p>salizing ambition (Duffy 2018), Brodeck is set in an unnamed village</p><p>located on the border with a Germanophone country and nestling in a</p><p>sylvan landscape. The centrality of the forest in the novel is in keeping</p><p>with its Germanic flavor and fairy- tale ambiance, including its indebt-</p><p>edness to the work of the Grimm Brothers. Indeed, the Germans have</p><p>long associated themselves with Waldbewußtsein (forest- mindedness)</p><p>and have at times identified with wooded landscapes (Imort 2005, 55;</p><p>Wilson 2012, 3). This tendency intensified in the nineteenth century</p><p>when, in reaction to Napoleon’s occupation of the German lands, artists</p><p>and thinkers hoped to unify the beleaguered people through their local</p><p>culture and especially through the folklore of the forest. Exemplified</p><p>by the Grimms’ fairy tales whose key locale are woodlands (Wilson</p><p>2012, 25), such efforts led to a politically motivated Germanization,</p><p>mythification and aestheticization of the forest. In the 1930s, the Nazis</p><p>capitalized on the Romantics’ völkisch conception of the “German</p><p>forest” by reintegrating it into their Blut und Boden (blood and soil)</p><p>rhetoric of a national renewal arising from nature (Imort 2005, 59;</p><p>Wilson 2012, 225).</p><p>As in fairy tales, including those by the Grimms (Zipes 2002, 68),11</p><p>where the forest “designates danger, even possible death” (Landwehr</p><p>2009, 158), but can also signify freedom (Ashliman 2004, 6), in Claudel’s</p><p>novel the woods maintain their fabular ambiguity. More specifically, they</p><p>provide de Anderer with aesthetic pleasure and artistic inspiration, and</p><p>the locals, who hunt and gather, with sustenance. The woods are a source</p><p>of livelihood for Brodeck himself whose job is to report to the authorities</p><p>Space of Murder, Space of Freedom 127</p><p>on the local fauna and flora. More pertinently, during the war, the forest</p><p>offers refuge to three fugitive Fremdër girls, the term “Fremdër” desig-</p><p>nating in the novel a minority in which we easily recognize Jews.12 The</p><p>forest’s protective capacity is, however, limited. Having come across</p><p>the young women, the peasants lure them to the village where, with the</p><p>blessing and participation of the occupying forces, they rape and murder</p><p>them. They also sexually assault and then leave for the dead Brodeck’s</p><p>wife, Émelia, who came to the women’s rescue. This episode reflects not</p><p>only the narrow survival chances of Jews hiding in forests but also the</p><p>until- recently- historically- neglected phenomenon of sexual assault and</p><p>exploitation Jewish women faced in hiding (Waxman 2010; Levenkorn</p><p>2010), including in sylvan settings (Tec 1996, 39).</p><p>At the same time, the forest is a space on to which Brodeck projects the</p><p>trauma resulting</p><p>from his experience of the camp where he was reduced</p><p>to the canine servant of his tormentors. Importantly, in narrativizing</p><p>his incarceration, Brodeck uses not only recognizable concentrationary</p><p>tropes such as “useless violence” (Levi 1988) but also, as exemplified</p><p>by the repurposing of a butcher’s hook in the daily hangings, imagery of</p><p>animal cruelty. Intrusive memories of captivity contaminate Brodeck’s</p><p>sleep and torment him in daytime, as during an outing with Émelia and</p><p>her daughter Poupchette. That the protagonist perceives the woods as</p><p>an all- engulfing and menacing force is illustrated by his remark that a</p><p>pond has tripled in size – an ominous sign in itself – and that the trough</p><p>standing in its midst and once capable to stirring pleasant associations</p><p>with a floating vessel resembles a tomb. Disturbed by this morbid vision,</p><p>Brodeck hurries back to the women, but, as if in a nightmare, he slips on</p><p>the marshy ground and sinks into holes and quagmires that emit “sounds</p><p>like the groans of the dying” (2010, 164). Claudel anthropomorphizes the</p><p>forest further by equating it with the bulldozing violence of the invading</p><p>soldiers, in whom we unmistakably recognize the Wehrmacht,13 thus</p><p>seemingly drawing on the well- established link between the “German</p><p>forest” and militarism. Echoing German- language poet Elias Canetti,</p><p>who likened the German army to a “marching forest” (1978, 173), and</p><p>writers of Canetti’s generation who sought parallels between uniformed</p><p>ranks of soldiers and rows of trees (Wilson 2012, 178– 179), Brodeck</p><p>fears that the shed shielding his writing from the ill- founded curiosity of</p><p>his neighbors will be razed by trees on the march.</p><p>The forest’s duality is further revealed by the symbolic investment of</p><p>its flora, exemplified by the mushrooms that Brodeck receives from his</p><p>former teacher, Ernst- Peter Limmat, and by the flower for which he vainly</p><p>searches in memory of his fellow deportee, Moshe Kelmar. The traditional</p><p>evil symbolism of the black- colored and funnel- shaped fungi, which owe</p><p>their name “trompettes de la mort” to the belief that they were trumpets</p><p>played by the dead, is confirmed by the threats with which Limmat</p><p>coerces Brodeck to exonerate de Anderer’s murderers in his report. But</p><p>the forest is also – or at least was – home to the valley periwinkle whose</p><p>128 Helena Duffy</p><p>delicate beauty Kelmar evoked to mitigate the horrors of the deportation.</p><p>Since Brodeck fails to locate the flower in the forest, but finds it in an</p><p>almanac of local flora, he assumes that nature has withdrawn it from its</p><p>catalog in punishment for humanity’s wrongdoings (2010, 235). If the</p><p>agency with which Claudel imbues the forest is undoubtedly part of his</p><p>novel’s fabular anthropomorphism, it challenges the idea of the environ-</p><p>ment as a passive backdrop to human activities and an entity separate</p><p>from humanity. Indeed, Brodeck reasserts interconnections between</p><p>men, animals and plants through a plethora of zoological and botanical</p><p>similes and animal parables. One of these parables recounts the collective</p><p>suicide of foxes, which Brodeck investigates in his professional cap-</p><p>acity and which defies the idea of self- inflicted death as uniquely human</p><p>(Bennett 2017, 26– 28). As well as foregrounding, as does The Kindly</p><p>Ones, man’s trans- corporeal connections to the natural world, with its</p><p>Germanic setting, Brodeck inscribes its protagonist’s embodied trauma</p><p>into Germany’s quest for national self- definition. This quest brought into</p><p>dialogue ecological and racist ideas, turning the forest into “a labora-</p><p>tory for social Darwinism” (Wilson 2012, 177). This is exemplified by</p><p>comparisons between German people and German woodlands where</p><p>“proud trees” were thought to “withdraw from the company of lower</p><p>classes of plants” (Imort 2005, 63) or by the extension of the botanical</p><p>term “Schmarotzenvolk” (social parasites) to Poles and Jews (Neuman</p><p>2012, 110).</p><p>A further insight into Claudel’s representation of the forest can be</p><p>gained through Brodeck’s occupation. As a scribe, the protagonist helps</p><p>to control nature with the use of language that, significantly, the novel</p><p>situates as a humanity- defining feature; if Brodeck’s animalization in</p><p>the camp culminates in aphasia, his rehumanization signals itself by his</p><p>recovery of speech. The two types of oppression – that of nature and</p><p>of that human alterity, whose assassination Brodeck is forced to jus-</p><p>tify – are consequently equated through their insertion into humanity’s</p><p>self- identification with logos and desire for domination over human and</p><p>nonhuman otherness. Like The Kindly Ones, Brodeck thus foregrounds</p><p>the imbrication of human and nonhuman trauma and extends the</p><p>Caruthian understanding of mental wounding to the natural world. It</p><p>additionally shows the categories of perpetration and victimhood to be</p><p>blurry and protean rather than clearly defined and static, with Brodeck</p><p>occupying the position of a morally compromised victim in the con-</p><p>text of racial violence and, in relation to the forest, of an “implicated</p><p>subject,” as Michael Rothberg defines a “beneficiar[y] of a system that</p><p>generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing</p><p>simultaneously” (2013, xv). Thus reframed, Brodeck’s decision to leave</p><p>his typewriter behind upon his departure from the village denounces</p><p>culture’s enlistment in both interhuman and human– nonhuman violence.</p><p>The novel’s message is reinforced by Brodeck’s donning of de Anderer’s</p><p>fur cap, slippers and mittens, and by the presence at his side of a dog,</p><p>Space of Murder, Space of Freedom 129</p><p>Ohnmeist. Having resisted domestication when living among humans,</p><p>the stray mongrel, who is clearly Brodeck’s canine doppelganger, returns</p><p>to the forest to assume his earlier undomesticated form of the fox. In</p><p>alignment with its fairy- tale aura, the novel concludes with the utopian</p><p>image of humanity’s postwar rehabilitation through its reintegration</p><p>into the natural world, and with nature’s corresponding recovery of its</p><p>autonomy and agency of which it has been stripped through humanity’s</p><p>quest for control, progress and profit.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>Despite their rather different approaches to narrativizing the Nazi geno-</p><p>cide – Littell adopting the perpetrator’s perspective and Claudel the</p><p>victim’s perspective – by encoding Jewish suffering in wooded landscapes,</p><p>the two novels share their endorsement of the Caruthian model of trauma</p><p>as resistant to conventional representational or descriptive language.</p><p>While also corroborating Caruth’s view of history as a tangle of different</p><p>traumas, The Kindly Ones and Brodeck go beyond this view’s humanistic</p><p>dimension, showing trauma to be an environmentally embedded phe-</p><p>nomenon that reconnects the mentally wounded human subject to the</p><p>(wounded) nonhuman world. In other words, contrary to the classical</p><p>understanding of the traumatized individual as being isolated in working</p><p>through the belated effects of a shocking event, the two narratives work</p><p>toward decentralizing and deprivileging the liberal human subject by</p><p>endowing it with what – following Rosi Braidotti – Deniz Gundogan</p><p>Ibrisim calls “a relational embodied and embedded, affective identity”</p><p>(2020, 233). The two protagonists’ reconnection to nature happens either</p><p>through their degrading, yet enlightening animalization (Brodeck), or</p><p>through their infiltration by the pain of their victims embodied in the</p><p>forest that was the theater of these victims’ agony (The Kindly Ones).</p><p>Whatever the traumatogenic process, in both novels the forest becomes a</p><p>culturally constructed landscape that the traumatized protagonist invests</p><p>with his mental torment and with which he consequently identifies.</p><p>Paradoxically, appropriative cultural construction of sylvan spaces was</p><p>also part of Germany’s nineteenth- century search for a unified national</p><p>identity through the internalization of the values of freedom, heroism,</p><p>vigor</p><p>who work across these divisions (Matthew &</p><p>Goodman 2013; Ayyash 2019; Davis & Meretoja 2020), and this volume</p><p>makes an intentional effort to breach disciplinary boundaries.</p><p>Like violence as such, ethics as such must remain without preconceived</p><p>definition in order to remain undogmatic and receptive of the complexity</p><p>of the unique ethical quandaries that specific instances produce. Ethics</p><p>is, nevertheless, at the heart of the communal scholarly endeavor this</p><p>volume represents. The representation of violence for another’s consump-</p><p>tion is an inherently ethically charged issue because it invites readers or</p><p>viewers to imagine someone else’s pain or the suffering of others (Adorno</p><p>1973; Sontag 2003). A story may encourage readers/ viewers to place</p><p>themselves in the position of victim, perpetrator, witness, rescuer or</p><p>implicated subject. They may imagine the events narrated in the manner</p><p>invited by the text or in a resistant fashion, but by engaging a depiction</p><p>of violence at all, they deem it a pleasant or ethically worthwhile use</p><p>of time and thought. This collection investigates the layers of interpret-</p><p>ation involved in narrating violence and designating the engagement with</p><p>violent stories as meaningful. Contributors focus especially on violence</p><p>performed with political or symbolic goals, including war, colonialism,</p><p>terrorism and mass violence, but our aim is to offer novel insights about</p><p>the ethical quandaries of narrating and interpreting violence that are</p><p>broadly applicable.</p><p>With regard to narrative, we contend that stories play an important</p><p>part in the epistemological acts of recognizing or failing to recognize</p><p>an individual’s life as precious, precarious and grievable. As theorists</p><p>hailing from the phenomenological- hermeneutic tradition such as</p><p>Paul Ricoeur (1988, 1991) and Jerome Bruner (1987) have argued,</p><p>we tell ourselves about ourselves and about other people in the form</p><p>of narratives and such storytelling is an ethically charged process of</p><p>interpretation. Narrative hermeneutics suggests that it is through</p><p>narrative processes that our lives become objects of complex reflec-</p><p>tion (Brockmeier & Meretoja 2014; Brockmeier 2015). The forms of</p><p>narration through which we become aware of fictional or nonfictional</p><p>violent events, therefore, shape the very possibility of our ethical per-</p><p>spective toward those involved in violence. Narratives, however, are not</p><p>inherently (due to their narrative form) ethically good; rather, their eth-</p><p>ical potential or harmfulness should be evaluated contextually (Meretoja</p><p>2018). Ultimately, the meaning of narratives takes shape through our</p><p>6 Cassandra Falke,Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>interpretive encounters with them. By recognizing the multilayered,</p><p>temporally complex nature of every act of interpreting a violent story,</p><p>this collection offers insights that are relevant for acts that most people</p><p>engage in every day – reading the news, turning on a film or picking</p><p>up a novel. Moreover, in addition to concrete narrative artefacts, there</p><p>are implicit cultural narratives that function as models of sensemaking</p><p>that underlie such concrete narratives and which lead us to narrate our</p><p>experiences in certain ways (Meretoja 2022).</p><p>The essay collection grows out of an interdisciplinary multiyear</p><p>project involving thirty scholars from eight countries. Many of these</p><p>scholars have contributed to bodies of scholarship related to this book’s</p><p>aim, including ethical criticism, interdisciplinary narrative studies,</p><p>trauma studies, histories of violence, memory studies, and Holocaust</p><p>and genocide studies. Their new work, represented here, steps out of</p><p>these more specialized fields of inquiry to confront the contemporary</p><p>increase in politically motivated violence against noncombatants and the</p><p>increase in literary and media representations of that violence in a glo-</p><p>bally connected public sphere. Rather than try to explain violence, this</p><p>collection tries to approach narratives of violence – in literature, bureau-</p><p>cratic reports, humanitarian campaigns, terrorist manifestos and film –</p><p>with understanding. This does not mean accepting, but it means creating</p><p>conditions for dialogue.</p><p>The collection is divided into three sections. The first section, entitled</p><p>“Representing Violence, Violent Representations,” deals with the many</p><p>and various ways in which violence is represented in literature and dis-</p><p>course. It has a particular focus on the ambiguousness involved in the act</p><p>of representing and addresses the question of how representation itself</p><p>can be an act of violence, continuing the violence that it represents. The</p><p>double meaning of representation as “the act of presenting somebody/</p><p>something in a particular way” and “the fact of having representatives</p><p>who will speak […] for you or act in your place” (Oxford Dictionary</p><p>Online) has a complex significance when related to violence. The</p><p>privileged role ascribed to the victim in humanitarian representations</p><p>of mass violence could be understood as an effort to present without</p><p>representing, that is, without acting or speaking for the victim. However,</p><p>as Cassandra Falke points out in her chapter “Witnessing Violence in</p><p>Literature and Humanitarian Discourse,” a narrative that tries to pre-</p><p>sent without representing, may also unintentionally perpetuate the vio-</p><p>lence that it seeks to condemn. Falke proceeds from the observation that</p><p>our time is the “era of the witness” (Wieviorka 2006). Thousands of</p><p>pages of testimony to violence during the Holocaust combine with a</p><p>growing testimonial record from Biafra, Palestine and Syria to create an</p><p>unmanageable mass of recorded victimization. In our age, the figure of</p><p>the witness is venerated for possessing truths about humanity available</p><p>only to the victim. For the sake of highlighting the extremity of suffering,</p><p>Falke points out, critics and humanitarian organizations often publicize</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations 7</p><p>the most shocking experiences and the most vulnerable victims; however</p><p>this is stripped of a context that could establish peace and compassion as</p><p>norms against which this violence is contrasted. Such portrayals risk nor-</p><p>malizing what they strive to condemn. Through the figure of the reader</p><p>as witness, Falke explores ways that violence can be represented without</p><p>instrumentalizing suffering. In its ability to carry us beyond the bounds</p><p>of the familiar, literature, she argues, is uniquely suited to the ethical</p><p>representation of violence that preserves its excess untamed.</p><p>The chapters by Avril Tynan and Amrita Ghosh both deal with</p><p>representations of historical violence that in different ways continue in</p><p>the present. In today’s memory culture, remembering a violent past often</p><p>involves an effort to come to terms with it, addressing its unresolved</p><p>calls for justice. Tynan’s contribution “Violence, Encore! Popular Music,</p><p>Power and Postwar Memory,” calls attention to the use of memory as</p><p>a way to avoid dealing with present demands for justice and responsi-</p><p>bility. Attentive to the use of memory in cultural representations of the</p><p>Algerian War, Tynan argues that it often illustrates an ongoing rejection</p><p>of judicial practices and resistance to reconciliation. In an analysis of the</p><p>French author Didier Daeninckx’s short story “Corvée de bois” (2003),</p><p>she argues that memory moves in circular ways that prevent a just reso-</p><p>lution of the past. The story’s explicit and even gratuitous presentation</p><p>of war atrocities is entangled with popular culture and radio to suppress</p><p>or perhaps censor memories of the past, Tynan claims. Memories of war-</p><p>time violence are silenced by noise or the more insidious subversion of</p><p>background music, which makes them dissipate into everyday environ-</p><p>ments and actions. Tynan concludes that although memories of the war</p><p>return again and again in Daeninckx’s story, they are not articulated</p><p>with the performative power to come to terms</p><p>and manliness, which Romantic artists and thinkers attributed to</p><p>wooded landscapes (Imort 2005, 59). Yet, it is more likely the recognition</p><p>of both the “German forest” and the Holocaust as outcomes of mod-</p><p>ernity that prompted Littell and Claudel to privilege the woodlands as a</p><p>stage for the enactment and entanglement of Holocaust trauma with non-</p><p>human suffering (Wilson 2012, 9).14 Put differently, the rootedness of the</p><p>two concepts in modernity serves the two novelists to reinsert the Nazi</p><p>genocide into a wide comparative framework that entails not only other</p><p>instances of traumatogenic interhuman violence but also man’s abusive</p><p>exploitation of the nonhuman world.</p><p>130 Helena Duffy</p><p>Notes</p><p>1 For an overview of the discipline, see Cole (2020a).</p><p>2 In Rumbula, the Einsatzgruppe A and its local auxiliaries murdered 25,000</p><p>Jews between November 30 and December 8, 1941; in Ponary, 75,000 people</p><p>were massacred between 1941 and 1944; in the Sosenki Forest, 23,550 people</p><p>were murdered over three days in November 1941.</p><p>3 Testimonies to mass shootings have been provided by perpetrators and eye/</p><p>earwitnesses (Vice 2019, 92, 89).</p><p>4 See also Bronia Jablon’s A Part of Me (2018), Ruth Yaffe Radin’s Escape to</p><p>the Forest (2000) and Rebecca Frankel’s Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story</p><p>of Survival, Trial and Love (2021). For a discussion of literary works drama-</p><p>tizing the Holocaust by bullets, see Vice (2019).</p><p>5 Craps remarks that in the afterword to the twentieth- anniversary edition of</p><p>Unclaimed Experience, “the issue of what happens to trees in the poem” is</p><p>related to a footnote (2020, 281).</p><p>6 These include digestive problems, hallucinations, nightmares, episode of</p><p>hypervigilance and anxiety. For a further elaboration of Aue’s trauma, see</p><p>Duffy (2020).</p><p>7 For a discussion of empathy in Littell’s novel, see Meretoja (2018, 217– 254).</p><p>8 For a discussion of Littell’s endeavor to reinsert the Holocaust into the histor-</p><p>ical continuum, see Meretoja (2018, 217– 254).</p><p>9 Liran Razinsky demonstrates the inscription’s historical implausibility as</p><p>it uses Auschwitz as the reference point when the camp had not yet been</p><p>recognized as a symbol of evil (2012, 55),</p><p>10 Efforts have been made to identify nature with bystanders, perpetrators and</p><p>victims. For example, Polish artist Łukasz Surowiec believes that the trees</p><p>growing around the former camp of Birkenau “draw water from the soil</p><p>mixed with the ashes [of the victims’ bodies] and breathe the same air that</p><p>carried the smoke from incinerated bodies. These trees hold something of</p><p>those people” (Miller and Surowiec 2012, my own translation). Conversely,</p><p>Dutch artist Armando calls the landscape surrounding the former concen-</p><p>tration camp of Amersfoort “schuldig Landschap” (guilty landscape), thus</p><p>establishing a continuity between trees and perpetrators (Sendyka 2015, 20).</p><p>11 Zipes illustrates his conception of the forest as unconventional, free, alluring,</p><p>but also dangerous with Hansel and Gretel, where the children get lost in</p><p>the forest before emerging from it richer and wiser. If Snow White confirms</p><p>the forest’s enchanting potential, in Red Riding Hood the forest is a stage</p><p>for dangerous temptations and the dwelling place of predatory males (2002,</p><p>65– 68).</p><p>12 Brodeck has an uncharacteristically swarthy complexion and black hair, and</p><p>is circumcised.</p><p>13 Headed by Adolf Buller, who is a travesty of Adolf Hitler, the enemy soldiers</p><p>march under black- and- red banners reminiscent of the Nazi flags. Like the</p><p>real- life Nazis, they readily use animal analogies.</p><p>14 Wilson opposes the dominant perception of the Germans’ fascination with</p><p>sylvan spaces as symptomatic of antimodern mysticism and irrationalism. He</p><p>argues that, orderly and managed, Germany’s forests symptomatized a high</p><p>modernist approach to the environment (2012, 11). Similarly, Imort identi-</p><p>fies the “German forest” as a concept “very much rooted in the mechanistic</p><p>Space of Murder, Space of Freedom 131</p><p>worldview of the Enlightenment: symmetry and uniformity underpinned the</p><p>new forestry” (2005, 62).</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Adams, Jenni. 2014. “Relationships to Realism in Post- Holocaust Fiction:</p><p>Conflicted Realism and the Counterfactual Historical Novel.” In The</p><p>Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature, edited by Jenni Adams, 81–</p><p>102. London: Bloomsbury</p><p>Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material</p><p>Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.</p><p>Alexander, Jeffrey. 2002. “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The</p><p>‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama.” European Journal of Social</p><p>Theory 5 (1): 5– 85. doi:10.1177/ 1368431002005001001.</p><p>Ashliman, D. L. 2004. Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood</p><p>Folklore Handbooks.</p><p>Baer, Ulrich. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA:</p><p>MIT Press.</p><p>Ball, Karyn. 2000. “Introduction: Trauma and Its Institutional Destinies.”</p><p>Cultural Critique 46: 1– 44. doi:10.2307/ 1354407</p><p>Bartov, Omer. 2021. “What Is Environmental History of the Holocaust?” Journal</p><p>of Genocide Research 24 (3): 1– 10. doi:10.1080/ 14623528.2021.1924587</p><p>Bennett, Andrew. 2017. Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce</p><p>to David Foster Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</p><p>Berger, James. 1997. “Review: Trauma and Literary Theory.” Contemporary</p><p>Literature 38 (3): 569– 582.</p><p>Canetti, Elias. 1978. Crowds and Power, translated by Carol Stewart. New York:</p><p>Seabury.</p><p>Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History.</p><p>Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p><p>Charlesworth, Andrew, and Michael Addis. 2002. “Memorialisation and</p><p>the Holocaust Landscapes of Holocaust Sites: The Cases of Płaszów and</p><p>Auschwitz- Birkenau.” Landscape Research 27 (3): 229– 251. doi:10.1080/</p><p>01426390220149502</p><p>Claudel, Philippe. 2010. Brodeck, translated by John Cullen. New York:</p><p>Anchor Books.</p><p>Cole, Tim. 2003. Holocaust City: Making of a Jewish Ghetto. New York:</p><p>Routledge.</p><p>Cole, Tim. 2011. Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying in and out of the Ghettos.</p><p>London: Bloomsbury.</p><p>Cole, Tim. 2019. “‘Nature Was Helping Us’: Forests, Trees and Environmental</p><p>Histories of the Holocaust.” Environmental History 19 (4): 665– 686.</p><p>doi:10.1093/ envhis/ emu068</p><p>Cole, Tim. 2020a. “Geographies of the Holocaust.” In A Companion to the</p><p>Holocaust, edited by Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl, 333– 347. Hoboken:</p><p>John Wiley and Sons.</p><p>Cole, Tim. 2020b. “Expanding (Environmental) Histories of the</p><p>Holocaust.” Journal of Genocide Research 22 (2): 273– 279. doi:10.1080/</p><p>14623528.2020.1726653</p><p>132 Helena Duffy</p><p>Craps, Stef. 2020. “Climate Trauma.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature</p><p>and Trauma, edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja, 275– 284. New York:</p><p>Routledge.</p><p>Dean, Carolyn J. 2004. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY:</p><p>Cornell University Press.</p><p>Desbois, Patrick. 2008. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover</p><p>the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, translated by Catherine</p><p>Spencer. New York: Palgrave.</p><p>Domańska, Ewa. 2020. “The Environmental History of Mass Graves.” Journal of</p><p>Genocide Research 22 (2): 241– 255. doi:10.1080/ 14623528.2019.1657306</p><p>Duffy, Helena. 2018. “Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck as a Parody</p><p>of the Fable or the Holocaust Universalized.” Holocaust Studies 24 (4): 503–</p><p>526. doi:10.1080/ 17504902.2018.1468669</p><p>Duffy, Helena. 2020. “Shit, Blood and Sperm: The Nazi Perpetrator’s</p><p>Hallucinations and Nightmares in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.” In</p><p>Dreams and Atrocity: The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma, edited by</p><p>Emily- Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka, 236–255. Manchester: Manchester</p><p>University Press.</p><p>Frankel, Rebecca. 2021. Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Trial and</p><p>Love. New York: St. Martin’s Press.</p><p>Freud, Sigmund. 1954. “Beyond</p><p>with the past or to evoke</p><p>any calls for justice and responsibility in the present, but are turned into</p><p>standardized recycled forms that dilute and ultimately de- realize historic</p><p>violence as intangible background noise.</p><p>Cultural representations of colonial violence are also examined by</p><p>Ghosh in her chapter “Rethinking Planetarity in the Specter of (Neo)colo-</p><p>nial Violence,” which combines a reading of The Strangler Vine (2014),</p><p>an adventure novel and historical thriller by the English historian and</p><p>writer Miranda Carter, and contemporary uses of the term “thug” in the</p><p>United States. Using the metaphor of the strangler vines, Carter revises</p><p>the idea of violence and criminality of “thugs” in 19th century India.</p><p>By following the history of the term “thug,” Ghosh shows how Carter’s</p><p>novel engages not only colonialism but also contemporary political dis-</p><p>course. Ghosh connects the novel to President Barack Obama’s speech on</p><p>the Baltimore riots in 2015 and President Donald Trump’s speech in 2020</p><p>on race riots in America. Ghosh claims that Carter’s shift in gaze and</p><p>alterations of the adventure genre pose as a critique of colonial violence.</p><p>Yet, the novel, she argues, also undermines its own decolonial narrative</p><p>and ironically raises important questions on the very notion of colonial</p><p>8 Cassandra Falke,Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>violence. By so doing, it shows how power and discourse are updated</p><p>in asymmetrical planetary intersections and contexts that have uncanny</p><p>reverberations at the present time.</p><p>Jakob Lothe’s chapter, “Variants and Consequences of Violence in Iris</p><p>Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine,” examines the ethical</p><p>dimensions of representing violence at the intersection of fiction and phil-</p><p>osophy. In a reading of Iris Murdoch’s 1974 novel, Lothe focuses on how,</p><p>and why, the main characters in the novel variously engage in or become</p><p>entangled in acts of violence. He emphasizes that violence forms an</p><p>essential part of Murdoch’s fictional exploration of ethical issues, which</p><p>then encourages the reader to engage in a dialogue with Murdoch as an</p><p>implied author. Taking his cue from Emmanuel Levinas’s claim that we</p><p>are bound in networks of responsibility to known and unknown others</p><p>whose vulnerability bids us not to commit violence, Lothe argues that the</p><p>violence represented in Murdoch’s novel is a constituent element of an</p><p>ethics that emerges through the fiction’s narrative, yet intimately linked</p><p>to her philosophical writings.</p><p>In the final chapter of this section, “Violent Appetites: Distaste and the</p><p>Aesthetics of Violence,” Tero Eljas Vanhanen interrogates into the role of</p><p>distaste in aesthetic representations of violence. Starting by pointing to the</p><p>boundaries between tasteful and distasteful representations of violence</p><p>within classical aesthetics, Vanhanen proceeds by examining Thomas De</p><p>Quincey’s infamous essays on murder as art from the 1820s. For all the</p><p>glinting irony of his writings, De Quincey, Vanhanen argues, keeps vio-</p><p>lence at an arm’s length just as classical aesthetics does. By narrating</p><p>from the perspective of a bystander rather than the victim or the per-</p><p>petrator, De Quincey assumes that a distance can be upheld between the</p><p>audience and the violence, which weakens the affective power of vio-</p><p>lence to shock and makes it intelligible and interpretable, even permit-</p><p>ting readers to experience violence as sublime. Vanhanen criticizes this</p><p>sort of distancing, which is common in “tasteful” representation of vio-</p><p>lence. Through case studies of violent works of literature and their critical</p><p>reception, Vanhanen argues for the need to elaborate less distancing ways</p><p>of interpreting and responding to represented violence, ways that do not</p><p>turn away from the shock and horror of violence by turning it into safe</p><p>and comfortable modes of entertainment.</p><p>Part II, “Understanding the Violence of Perpetrators,” focuses on</p><p>making sense of the acts of those who commit violence, hermeneutically</p><p>and critically. Within scholarship on violence, there has been an increase</p><p>in research on perpetrators. To understand the conditions of possibility of</p><p>violence, it is not enough to focus on victims; it is also necessary to study</p><p>why ordinary people end up committing atrocities. The chapters in this</p><p>section explore the violence of perpetrators, focusing mainly on the Nazis</p><p>and their collaborators in the Second World War but also drawing links</p><p>to other forms of mass violence, including contemporary mass shootings</p><p>and the ongoing violence committed by humans on nature.</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations 9</p><p>Brian Schiff and Michael Justice’s chapter “A Manifesto on the</p><p>Hermeneutics of Violence” brings interpretive tools to bear on</p><p>understanding perpetrators of mass violence whose actions are often</p><p>considered a hermeneutic puzzle because they seem too extreme to be</p><p>understood and because their own interpretations are dismissed as mere</p><p>fabrications and lies. Schiff and Justice argue that understanding must be</p><p>predicated on restoring the interpretive horizon of violent actions – the</p><p>set of collectively shared narratives that made violence possible. Mass vio-</p><p>lence requires synchronized and convincing efforts in the symbolic realm</p><p>in order to motivate would- be perpetrators, to provide justifications for</p><p>action and to preempt potential dissent. Reviewing the scholarly debate</p><p>on the motivations of genocidal perpetrators and closely analyzing the</p><p>manifestos of contemporary mass shooters, Schiff and Justice argue that</p><p>perpetrators are acting within a different moral horizon, supported by</p><p>the narrative and symbolic resources of their time and context, in which,</p><p>from their perspective and that of those around them, it makes sense to</p><p>denigrate and destroy the other.</p><p>Erin McGlothlin’s “Narrative Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-</p><p>Authored Documents: Interpreting Closure in The Stroop Report” focuses</p><p>on a relatively little- known document on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,</p><p>an album known today as The Stroop Report, which was assembled by</p><p>SS commander Jürgen Stroop and his staff as a commemorative sou-</p><p>venir for Heinrich Himmler. It documents the German military response</p><p>to an uprising in which the violent effort to transport the remaining</p><p>Jewish ghetto population to Treblinka was met with armed revolt by</p><p>beleaguered ghetto internees. The report is comprised of daily military</p><p>reports, photographs depicting combat and captured ghetto fighters and</p><p>residents, and a narrative summary. Few critics have investigated the</p><p>report’s narrative and its attempts to achieve mastery over the events</p><p>it documents. McGlothlin examines the rhetorical strategies Stroop</p><p>employs in his report to discursively induce closure through its construc-</p><p>tion of a straw enemy deserving of the full brutality directed at it and</p><p>through symbolic and performative declarations of the vanquishment of</p><p>that enemy.</p><p>Helena Duffy’s chapter “Space of Murder, Space of Freedom: The Forest</p><p>as a Posttraumatic Landscape in Holocaust Narratives” braids together</p><p>Holocaust studies and environmental humanities by focusing on forests</p><p>in the context of Holocaust perpetrator fiction. The chapter examines</p><p>two novels, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and Philippe Claudel’s</p><p>Brodeck, which cast the forest as a Holocaust setting and thereby reinvest</p><p>it with the symptomatology of human trauma. While endorsing Cathy</p><p>Caruth’s conception of trauma as a belated response to painful events,</p><p>and of history as an enmeshment of the victim’s and the killer’s traumas,</p><p>the two novels broaden this conception by stressing trauma’s embodi-</p><p>ment and embeddedness in nature. Duffy shows how Littell and Claudel</p><p>challenge a humanistic understanding of trauma, reframe the Holocaust</p><p>10 Cassandra Falke,Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>as a product of modern ontology with its privileging of the human within</p><p>the human/ nonhuman binary, and suggest that this binary</p><p>has legitimized</p><p>both our abuse of the nonhuman world and the dehumanization and</p><p>oppression of human groups.</p><p>The third and last section of the volume, “Articulating Inherent</p><p>Violence,” explores different levels of violence and pays particular</p><p>attention to the violence that inheres in language, systems of signification</p><p>and social structures.</p><p>In “Physical, Emotional and Discursive Violence: The Problem of</p><p>Narrative in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle,” Hanna Meretoja</p><p>distinguishes between different varieties of violence: physical, emotional</p><p>and discursive. She then critically discusses, in the light of the distinction</p><p>between subsumptive and nonsubsumptive cultural forms, the view that</p><p>narrative is inherently violent. By drawing on discussions on our shared</p><p>vulnerability and destructibility, she explores the possibility of dialogical,</p><p>nonviolent understanding. In the latter part of the chapter, she analyzes</p><p>narrative in relation to different types of violence in Karl Ove Knausgård’s</p><p>autobiographical series My Struggle. She argues that the series is fraught</p><p>with a tension between a nonsubsumptive and a subsumptive dimen-</p><p>sion: while the narrator- protagonist has crucial limits in relation to (non-</p><p>subsumptive) dialogical openness to others, the self- reflexive strategies of</p><p>the series have potential to promote the readers’ ability to engage with</p><p>the cultural narratives that surround us in ways that could contribute to</p><p>breaking certain cycles of violence.</p><p>In “Reading Violence, Violent Reading: Levinas and Hermeneutics,”</p><p>Colin Davis explores the hermeneutics of violence in the work of</p><p>Emmanuel Levinas. Although Levinas is usually associated with ethics</p><p>rather than hermeneutics, a large part of his work consists of interpretive</p><p>commentaries on the Talmud. Davis draws on this commentary to sketch</p><p>what a Levinasian hermeneutics might look like. He suggests that Levinas</p><p>associates Talmudic study with violence done both to the text and the com-</p><p>mentator, looking particularly at a commentary entitled “The Damage</p><p>Caused by Fire.” He also discusses similarities and differences between</p><p>Levinas’s reading practice and the thought of the major hermeneutic</p><p>thinkers of the 20th century: Martin Heidegger, Hans- Georg Gadamer</p><p>and Paul Ricoeur. Davis concludes by suggesting that a Levinasian her-</p><p>meneutics is characterized by the combination of faith and rigor and by</p><p>drawing attention to the ways in which interpretation can be a matter of</p><p>life and death.</p><p>Amanda Dennis’s chapter “Style and the Violence of Passivity in</p><p>Samuel Beckett’s How It Is” examines the inherent violence in words.</p><p>Her analysis of Samuel Beckett’s 1961 novel How It Is (Comment c’est)</p><p>starts by interrogating into the violence involved in the novel’s own signi-</p><p>fying process, being composed in strophes without punctuation. Dennis</p><p>deals with the relationship between the novel’s refusal of traditional sen-</p><p>tence structure and its unflinching descriptions of physical violence and</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations 11</p><p>ritualized torture. She argues, however, that the work’s bold coupling of</p><p>bodily violence and broken syntax is possible to read not only as a lin-</p><p>guistic and stylistic innovation that discursively grasps limit- experiences,</p><p>but also, and even more importantly, as an exploration of new forms of</p><p>relationality, which through foregrounding embodiment and the materi-</p><p>ality of language, can open for a radical reimagining of subjectivity, soci-</p><p>ality and, ultimately, community.</p><p>In the last chapter, “Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence,” Victoria</p><p>Fareld explores the connection between the concept of vulnerability and</p><p>the language of violence in contemporary feminist philosophy. In recent</p><p>years, we have witnessed a resurgent interest in the concept of vulner-</p><p>ability but often it is seen as a condition that has to be reduced in human</p><p>life and which is primarily equated with injurability and passivity. In</p><p>contrast, several feminist scholars call for a reconceptualization of vul-</p><p>nerability as not only limiting but also enabling and activating. Fareld</p><p>examines the place and role of violence in this reclaimed understanding</p><p>of vulnerability. She discusses the connection between different forms</p><p>of violence and nonviolent ways of understanding subject formation,</p><p>embodied life and responses to human vulnerability. She concludes</p><p>by stressing the constitutive role of violence in a relational ethics of</p><p>nonviolence.</p><p>Overall, we hope this volume provides conceptual resources for</p><p>thinking about violence in its many forms in times of global crises. As</p><p>the volume shows, violence ranges from discursive and structural vio-</p><p>lence to concrete, embodied violence in war against humanity, against</p><p>nature and in everyday interpersonal relationships. Often discursive vio-</p><p>lence is directly linked to bodily violence, as can be seen in the case</p><p>of racist violence where hurtful words often lead to physical assaults.</p><p>Becoming aware of the interconnections between different forms of vio-</p><p>lence and of the ways in which cycles of violence are perpetuated by</p><p>practices and structures that often remain invisible is a necessary step</p><p>in working toward breaking such cycles. In this volume, we explore the</p><p>ethical potential of literature and other arts in such processes of making</p><p>mechanisms of violence visible while also acknowledging that often</p><p>good intentions can mask complicity in social structures that perpetuate</p><p>practices of oppression.</p><p>Note</p><p>1 Straus and Wierviorka’s journal is preceded by the Journal of Interpersonal</p><p>Violence (est. 1986), Journal of Family Violence (est. 1986), Violence and</p><p>Victims, which is focused on interpersonal violence (est. 1986), Terrorism and</p><p>Political Violence (est. 1989), Violence Against Women (est. 1995), Psychology</p><p>of Violence (est. 2010). Only Violence and the International Journal of Conflict</p><p>and Violence (est. 2007) explicitly integrate the study of public and private</p><p>forms of violence.</p><p>12 Cassandra Falke,Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja</p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialektik, 1966).</p><p>Trans. E. B. Ashton. London & New York: Routledge.</p><p>Arendt, Hannah. 1969. On Violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.</p><p>Ayyash, Mark M. 2019. A Hermeneutics of Violence: A Four- Dimensional</p><p>Conception. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.</p><p>Barnhart, Robert K., ed. 1988. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. New York:</p><p>The H. W. Wilson Company.</p><p>Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the</p><p>Autobiographical Process. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p><p>Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. “Understanding Narrative</p><p>Hermeneutics.” Storyworlds 6 (2), 1– 27.</p><p>Bruner, Jerome S. 1987. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54 (1), 11– 32.</p><p>Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political.</p><p>London: Verso.</p><p>Davis, Colin, and Hanna Meretoja, eds. 2020. The Routledge Companion to</p><p>Literature and Trauma. London & New York: Routledge.</p><p>Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology (1967). Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty</p><p>Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.</p><p>Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Writing and Difference</p><p>(1967). Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 79– 153.</p><p>Dodd, James. 2017. Phenomenological Reflections on Violence: A Skeptical</p><p>Approach. London: Routledge.</p><p>Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Gadamer, Hans- Georg. 2004. Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960).</p><p>Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London:</p><p>Bloomsbury.</p><p>Kearney, Richard. 2011. “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?” Journal of Applied</p><p>Hermeneutics. 1 (2011), 1– 14.</p><p>Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with</p><p>Emmanuel Levinas [Interview by Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes & Alison</p><p>Ainley].” In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the</p><p>Other, ed. Robert</p><p>Bernasconi and David Wood. Trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright.</p><p>London: Routledge: 168– 180.</p><p>Marion, Jean- Luc. 2013. Givenness and Hermeneutics. Trans. Jean- Pierre</p><p>Lafouge. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press.</p><p>Matthews, Graham, and Sam Goodman, ed. 2013. Violence and the Limits of</p><p>Representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics,</p><p>History, and the Possible. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.</p><p>Meretoja, Hanna. 2022. “Implicit Narratives and Narrative Agency: Evaluating</p><p>Pandemic Storytelling.” Narrative Inquiry (online first April 19, 2022, https://</p><p>doi.org/ 10.1075/ ni.21076.mer)</p><p>Mootz III, Francis J., and George H. Taylor. 2013. “Introduction.” In Gadamer</p><p>and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics, ed. Francis</p><p>J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor. London: Bloomsbury: 1– 14.</p><p>Representation. Oxford Dictionary Online (accessed June 20, 2022).</p><p>Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New</p><p>Haven, CT: Yale University Press.</p><p>Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations 13</p><p>Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David</p><p>Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today 35 (1), 73– 81.</p><p>Robbins, Bruce. 2017. The Beneficiary. Durham: Duke University Press.</p><p>Rothberg, Michael. 2019. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and</p><p>Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press.</p><p>Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,</p><p>Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.”</p><p>In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, ed. Eve Kosofsky</p><p>Sedgwick. Durham: Duke University Press: 123– 52.</p><p>Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.</p><p>Straus, Scot, and Michel Wierviorka. 2020. “Introducing a New Journal:</p><p>Violence.” Violence: An International Journal 1 (1), 3– 7.</p><p>Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Trans. Jared Stark. Ithaca,</p><p>NY: Cornell University Press.</p><p>Wolfe, Cary. 2012. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical</p><p>Frame, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p><p>Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. London: Profile.</p><p>Part I</p><p>Representing Violence,</p><p>Violent Representations</p><p>DOI: 10.4324/9781003188001-3</p><p>1 Witnessing Violence in Literature</p><p>and Humanitarian Discourse</p><p>Cassandra Falke</p><p>In Sophocles’ Antigone, the chorus pronounces on the nature of humanity,</p><p>in a passage that has come to be called the “Ode on Man.”</p><p>There is much that is strange, but nothing</p><p>that surpasses man in strangeness.</p><p>…</p><p>He wearied even the noblest of gods, the Earth,</p><p>indestructible and untiring,</p><p>overturning her from year to year,</p><p>driving the plows this way and that</p><p>with horses.</p><p>And man, pondering and plotting,</p><p>snares the light- gliding birds</p><p>and hunts the beasts of the wilderness</p><p>and the native creatures of the sea.</p><p>With guile he overpowers the beast</p><p>that roams the mountains by night as by day,</p><p>he yokes the hirsute neck of the stallion</p><p>and the undaunted bull.</p><p>…</p><p>Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue,</p><p>he comes to nothingness.</p><p>Through no flight can he resist</p><p>the one assault of death</p><p>In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger places the “Ode”</p><p>at the center of his definition of humanity as violent (1959, 146– 148).</p><p>In the context of the play, Kreon has taken control of Thebes following</p><p>his nephews’ battle to the death. He has forbidden anyone to bury the</p><p>body of one of the brothers, Polynices. Just after daybreak the following</p><p>morning, a guard comes to tell Kreon that his order has been disobeyed.</p><p>Polynices’ body has been ceremonially covered with dust. Kreon threatens</p><p>to kill the guard if he does not find the person who was so bold to disobey</p><p>18 Cassandra Falke</p><p>him. Thankful to have escaped the king’s wrath for the time being, the</p><p>guard leaves the stage. The old men of the chorus are then left alone to</p><p>speculate on the nature of man. They conclude, “There is much that is</p><p>strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness.”</p><p>In Heidegger’s interpretation of these lines, the key term is “deinotaton,”</p><p>the strangest. “This one word,” he says, “encompasses the extreme limits</p><p>and abrupt abysses of his being” (1959, 149). The root of this word</p><p>means terrible, wondrous, awful in the old sense of the term. Heidegger</p><p>reads it as:</p><p>powerful in the sense of one who uses power, who not only disposes</p><p>of power but is violent in so far as the use of power is the basic trait</p><p>not only of his action but also of his being there.</p><p>Man, in his essential violence, “gathers the power and brings it to</p><p>manifestness” (149– 150). Violence, for Heidegger, is an innate capacity</p><p>whose presence in human beings joins us to the forces that move earth</p><p>and waves, light- gliding birds and hirsute stallions, but our awareness of</p><p>this power as part of our Being elevates it within us, making us “stran-</p><p>gest,” most awful of all, not least of all because we know we come to</p><p>nothing in the end. The chorus’ speech offers several examples of fun-</p><p>damental violence to support this reading. “Overturning,” “driving,”</p><p>“plotting,” “snar[ing],” humanity is pictured as dominating through vio-</p><p>lence a world of competitive, powerful forces. But for Heidegger it is not</p><p>the habitual and necessary overpowering of nature through agriculture</p><p>or hunting that constitutes our essential violence. These actions expose</p><p>our power in a familiar way. Rather, man is most violent when, “tending</p><p>toward the strange in the sense of the overpowering,” he “surpasses the</p><p>limit of the familiar” (151). According to this definition, violent actions</p><p>expose as possible things that the familiar workings of the world treat as</p><p>impossible.</p><p>In light of Heidegger’s definition, I want to question how violence can</p><p>be ethically represented and interpreted. The question of what violence</p><p>registers as normal or exceptional is an essential one for the represen-</p><p>tation of political violence in humanitarian discourse and fiction as the</p><p>proportion of the world’s population affected by such violence steadily</p><p>increases. In 2016, “more countries experienced violent conflict than any</p><p>time in nearly 30 years” (UN and World Bank 2018, xvii). In 2021, one</p><p>in 33 people “need humanitarian assistance and protection.” In 2020, it</p><p>was one in 45 (OCHA 2021, n.p.). Although the causes of this need are</p><p>diverse, global challenges such as climate change and resource extraction</p><p>are increasingly associated with violence. I argue that, in their ability to</p><p>establish norms and then carry us beyond the bounds of the familiar,</p><p>novels are uniquely suited to represent violence as norm- shattering. This</p><p>is not to deny that novels can also work in the opposite way and present</p><p>violence as normative, but to highlight the implications that a central</p><p>Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 19</p><p>feature of novels – their ability to evoke a world – has for the theme of</p><p>this volume. In contrast, humanitarian writings, because of their reliance</p><p>on images and quick, consumable narratives, rely on violence’s excess of</p><p>meaning and emotion to startle readers out of apathy and, therefore, risk</p><p>instrumentalizing a person’s suffering as a means to relieve it. Both because</p><p>of the constant imbalance between needs and the funding required to meet</p><p>them and because of the persistence of structural inequalities that nurture</p><p>political violence, humanitarian publications must continue to publicize</p><p>such narratives in order to do the work of bearing witness, but they face</p><p>the risk of normalizing victim status for certain people groups. Denis</p><p>Kennedy (2009, n.p.) calls this a “fundamental humanitarian dilemma”</p><p>because “if images of suffering are a means towards</p><p>a principled end …</p><p>they are also a powerful tool of social construction.” My intention in</p><p>contrasting novels to images or brief narratives published by humani-</p><p>tarian organizations is not to critique the way any particular organization</p><p>approaches the formidable challenge of representation. Rather, I want to</p><p>highlight the potential of many contemporary historical novels to com-</p><p>plement these organizations’ attempts to relieve and prevent suffering.</p><p>Strange, Human Violence</p><p>There are several implications of Heidegger’s definition of violence that</p><p>make it useful for considering ethical ways of interpreting and narrating</p><p>violence. First, he implies that there are no nonviolent people; there are</p><p>people who have not exercised their violent capacities. This has been</p><p>confirmed with disturbing regularity by social psychologists. The Milgram</p><p>experiments at Yale in 1963 and the later Stanford prison experiments in</p><p>1971 are the two most famous examples. Fascinated by Adolf Eichmann’s</p><p>assertion that he “did not feel [himself] guilty” or “responsible” for the</p><p>deportation of Jews to concentration camps, Stanley Milgram sought</p><p>to determine what percentage of people would physically harm another</p><p>person if commanded to by an authority (Eichmann 1962/ 2016, n.p.).</p><p>Participants were told that they were to help with an experiment in</p><p>memorization. A “learner” would be given word pairs to memorize. As</p><p>“teacher,” participants were instructed to shock the learner when pairs</p><p>were wrongly remembered. The shocks that the learner pretended to</p><p>receive ranged from “slight shock” to “Danger: XXX.” In 1961, students</p><p>predicted 1– 2 percent of participants would use the highest level of shock.</p><p>But as Milgram demonstrated, 65 percent of us, statistically, are willing</p><p>to shock “learners” into silence and presumably death when someone</p><p>in a professional wardrobe tells us to. This percentage has remained the</p><p>average as the experiment has been imitated with thousands of people</p><p>worldwide (Zimbardo 2009, xv– xvi).1 When Phillip Zimbardo reflects</p><p>on his own Milgram- inspired Stanford prison experiments in relation</p><p>to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, he decides that the “potentially toxic</p><p>impact of bad systems and bad situations” make “good people behave in</p><p>20 Cassandra Falke</p><p>pathological ways that are alien to their nature” both in history and in</p><p>experimental settings (195). As the narrator says in Jonathan Littell’s The</p><p>Kindly Ones, “you” – we – “should be able to admit to yourselves that</p><p>you” would probably have followed orders in these situations too:</p><p>I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern his-</p><p>tory, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances,</p><p>does what he is told to do; and pardon me, but there’s not much</p><p>chance that you’re the exception.</p><p>(Littell 2016, 20)</p><p>The disturbing excess of violence is present through the capacity Heidegger</p><p>identifies even when no violence is being performed.</p><p>A second implication of Heidegger’s definition is that there are people</p><p>who have exercised their capacity to powerfully reframe reality in ways</p><p>that resist political violence. As Slavoj Žižek points out, according to</p><p>Heidegger, Antigone’s burying of her brother is the truly violent act (2008,</p><p>60). Martin Luther King’s stubbornly peaceful marches in Birmingham,</p><p>Alabama, violently rearranged the country’s perspective on the need for</p><p>civil rights in the south, particularly after hundreds of children were</p><p>arrested for marching in 1963. The peaceful protestors in Peshawar’s</p><p>Storytellers’ Bizarre (Qissa Khawani) violently stirred action for inde-</p><p>pendence among India’s Muslim population after hundreds of unarmed</p><p>Pashtun people stepped across a growing line of bodies to be shot by</p><p>British imperialists in 1930. These things – the mobilization of over a</p><p>thousand children for nonviolent protest, the “cool courage” (Ghandi’s</p><p>term) of protestors challenging British soldiers to look at them, unarmed,</p><p>and shoot – exceeded what contemporary onlookers thought was pos-</p><p>sible. “The violent one, the creative” one, Heidegger writes, “sets forth</p><p>into the un- said – breaks into the un- thought, compels the unhappened</p><p>to happen and makes the unseen appear” (1959, 161). Calling these non-</p><p>violent acts “violent” is not meant to reduce violence to a metaphys-</p><p>ical level that fails to distinguish between harm in the flesh and symbolic</p><p>violence (Derrida 2001, 148). Nor is it meant to place nonviolent pro-</p><p>test on a continuum with revolutionary violence merely because it some-</p><p>times succeeds in effecting change. I would disagree with both of these</p><p>positions. But it is worth remembering that that same great, strange force</p><p>Heidegger identifies, whatever we call it, can be used in acts of protest</p><p>that are, physically speaking, defiantly nonviolent.</p><p>Physical violence frequently has the quality of revealing new possibil-</p><p>ities as well. History demonstrates that physical violence is hard for most</p><p>people to perform. Sociologist Randall Collins points out that “most of</p><p>the time … the barrier of tension/ fear … makes violence difficult to carry</p><p>out …. It is much more common to carry out … conventional gesturing”</p><p>(2008: 338) – whining, trash talk. This is why, in most cases, performing</p><p>violence requires something that pushes the perpetrator beyond the bounds</p><p>Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse 21</p><p>of regular patterns of interaction. This might be chemical (soldiers taking</p><p>stimulants; Kamienski 2016), emotional (the contagion of victorious</p><p>emotion during the 1937 Nanking massacre; Collins 2008, 98– 99) or</p><p>situational (isolation in intimate partner violence; Johnson 2010, 16).</p><p>Soldiers undergo intense training to make taking the first shot in battle</p><p>possible (Grossman 2009 et al., 13– 14). In most scenarios today, then,</p><p>physically harming another person is violent not only in the conventional</p><p>sense of physical brutality but also in Heidegger’s sense of manifesting</p><p>power in a way that “surpasses the limits of the familiar.” For the victim,</p><p>violence reconfigures their operative knowledge about what to expect</p><p>from others. For the perpetrator, it reconfigures what one knows oneself</p><p>to be capable of. And for the onlooker – the witness – violence either</p><p>alters a norm or secures an act further as unexceptional.</p><p>But this leads to a third and final implication of Heidegger’s broad def-</p><p>inition of violence, the one that is most important for contemplating the</p><p>alteration of norms through humanitarian discourse and fiction; the same</p><p>degree of harm strikes us as more or less violent depending on our prox-</p><p>imity and the extent to which harm is normalized in a given situation.</p><p>The familiar can be made to include physically harming others. What</p><p>becomes familiar in times of genocide, for example, differs jarringly from</p><p>the familiar safety in which most academic readers live. Furthermore, the</p><p>suffering of people in some regions or some demographics has become so</p><p>familiar that the excess of what those individuals endure may not register</p><p>with some reading audiences. Žižek recalls that in 2006, Time maga-</p><p>zine ran a cover story about “the Deadliest War in the World,” namely</p><p>the destruction of over 5.4 million Congolese people in political violence</p><p>between 1996 and 2006 (2008, 2). But, as he says, “none of the usual</p><p>humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of readers’ letters – as if</p><p>some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its</p><p>full impact in our symbolic space” (2). Spread out over a number of years</p><p>and nine countries, these deaths were accommodated within the familiar.</p><p>To put it more bluntly, the American public was used to people dying</p><p>in Africa. Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop makes a similar point</p><p>about news of the Rwandan genocide:</p><p>In an Africa viewed as the natural site of all the world’s disasters, the</p><p>Rwandan massacres were just one more tragedy to add to those</p>
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