Terrible Beauty: The Violent Aesthetic and Twentieth-Century Literature

By Marian Eide

If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground than that of the twentieth century. From the trench poetry of World War I and Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the post-colonial novels of southern Asia and the anti-apartheid plays of the South African Market Theater, writers have married beauty and horror. This "century of trauma" produced writing at once saturated in political violence and complicated by the ethics of aesthetic representation. Stretching across genres and the globe, Terrible Beauty charts a course of aesthetic reconciliation between empathy and evil in the great literature of the twentieth century.

The "violent aesthetic"—a category the author traces back to Plato and Nietzsche—accommodates the pleasure people take not only in destruction itself but also in its rendering. As readers, we oscillate between a fascination with atrocity and an ethical imperative to bear witness. Arguing for the immersive experience of literature as particularly conducive to ethical contemplation, Marian Eide plumbs the aesthetic power and ethical purpose of this creative tension. By invoking the reader as complicit—both stricken witness and enthralled voyeur— Terrible Beauty sheds new light on the relationship between violence, literature, and the moral burdens of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813942360

Book preview

Cultural Frames, Framing Culture

Robert Newman, Editor

Justin Neuman, Associate Editor

Terrible Beauty

The Violent Aesthetic and Twentieth-Century Literature

Marian Eide

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2019

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Eide, Marian, author.

Title: Terrible beauty : the violent aesthetic and twentieth-century literature / Marian Eide.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. | Series: Cultural Frames, Framing Culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018046950 | ISBN 9780813942353 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813942377 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813942360 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Violence in literature. | Literature—aesthetics.

Classification: LCC PN56.V53 E43 2018 | DDC 809/.04—dc23

LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018046950

Cover art: Tree Study, Mary Moquin

For Lawrence James Oliver

Contents

Preface

The Violent Aesthetic: An Introduction

Part I. Lyric Poetry

1. Witnessing and Trophy Hunting: Writing Violence from the Great War Trenches

2. Real Violence: W. B. Yeats and the Easter Rising

3. Mimetic Damage: The Poetry of Northern Ireland’s Troubles

Part II. Postcolonial Novels

4. Partition’s Children: Ethnic Cleansing on the Indian Subcontinent

5. Slow Tyranny: Entangled Allegory in Recent Nigerian Novels

Part III. Testimonial

6. Going Through with It: Holocaust Memoir and the Challenge of Beauty

7. Apartheid Spectacle: Race, Drama, and South Africa’s State of Emergency

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Zainab Salbi was a child in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War. She remembers her embattled childhood in aesthetic terms: in vivid, explosive colors. How can we talk about war without talking about its colors? she writes. The colors of fire and blood, the color of earth as it explodes in our face?¹ Salbi’s colorful memory of war raises ancient questions about the relations between violence and aesthetics. In the twentieth century, these questions were most urgently addressed by Walter Benjamin’s edict that art must not aestheticize war lest humans become playthings to themselves, much as we were the playthings of the gods in the Greek tradition. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.² Responding to the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who praised war’s aesthetic appeal, Benjamin called for the politicization of art.

For Salbi, however, an aestheticized memory of war produces not an alienated or dissociated relation to the human costs of violent conflict, but rather a lifelong activist commitment to alleviating these conditions, especially for women in war zones. When most Iraqi men were away fighting, Baghdadi women worked to create a sense of normalcy under constant threat and danger. Honoring those women, Salbi founded Women for Women International. Like other feminist humanitarians, she practices a situated philanthropy, conscious of her own assumptions going into a conflict zone and seeking to learn from the women in situ how best to improve conditions. I’m a women’s rights activist and a humanitarian, and I’m here to help people,³ she explains. During the 1,425 days of the siege of Sarajevo, for example, she worked with Fareeda, who kept her music school open and its instruments tuned, even when students needed to wear their overcoats and hats in her unheated classroom, even when snipers shot at her through the windows. That was her fight, Salbi recalls. That was her resistance. In the face of modern weaponry, she practiced the ancient art of music. Honestly, Salbi concludes, it was the women that I thought I was helping who taught me how to enjoy beauty and celebrate it.

During that long siege, Salbi was able to enter and exit the city, so she asked one Bosnian woman, ‘OK—what do you want me to bring you next time I’m here?’ And the woman said ‘lipstick.’ I’m, like, ‘Lipstick? What are you talking about? Don’t you want—I don’t know—vitamins?’ While Salbi focused on the practical and the necessary, concerns perhaps made possible by her freedom of movement, by her access to both lipstick and vitamins, this woman focused on what an outsider might accurately describe as cosmetic and inaccurately, as it turns out, as frivolous. Salbi remembers her reasoning: Because it’s the smallest thing we put on every day, and we feel we are beautiful, and that’s how we are resisting. They want us to feel that we are dead. They want us to feel that we are ugly. Bosnian women preserved beauty as a defense in the face of violence, Salbi argues, and they explained their daily resistance in aesthetic terms: I put on the lipstick every time I leave because I want that sniper, before he shoots me, to know he is killing a beautiful woman.

I am struck by this arresting thought, a woman imagining her own body, dead in an alley. The sniper’s bullet has taken her life, and through the telescopic lens of his rifle, he can see her lips enhanced with color and see not only her natural beauty but also her embellishment, her anticipatory aestheticization of her corpse for a tableau with which she confronts her murderer. She wants him to know not only that he killed a living being, but, crucially, that he killed a beautiful woman. It is in her beauty, perhaps, that she rescues the specificity of a single life from the generic logic of a target, that she turns a statistic into an individual. It is in her beauty regimen that she imagines her killer will be forced to reflect, to confront the moral questions of war.

My argument in this book is not so different from that of this Sarajevan survivor. I argue that it is in the aesthetic response to violence that artists and their audiences join in a collective process of moral reflection. I admire the strength with which Fareeda cultivated beautiful music to battle the brutality of war; however, I aim here to explore the particular aesthetic of Salbi’s lipstick story. How are we to understand her artful description of an anticipated death in sniper alley, to interpret the tableau she paints in words: a beautiful woman, artfully appointed, gunned down in the back alley of a formerly cosmopolitan city? The women of Bosnia survived violence by making beauty, but Salbi herself engaged in another aesthetic, one in which she fascinates her audience with aesthetic violence that is not unlike the more traditional aesthetic practices: the beautiful and the sublime. It is an aesthetic through which she seeks to activate her story’s audience.

This book is structured as a series of case studies in this aesthetic of political violence. I examine literary responses to war, insurrection, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation, genocide, and torture. Each of these forms of violence is the subject of a chapter. The texts I consider span literary genres to include poetry and novels, memoirs and drama. The aesthetic is produced from locations around the globe for readers across the globe.

I would like also to present here an alternative or supplement to existing trauma theory by noticing the drive to describe violence in itself, to dwell on brutality and even to delight in cruelty. I wish to propose that the violent aesthetic is poised between traumatic witness and another, darker will to destroy, mar, or harm. In literature that addresses calamity, the impulse is not only to testify to a victim’s tribulation but also to make something beautiful out of horror, to put lipstick on before becoming a corpse. I would like to convince you that this tendency is an aesthetic practice of its own, comparable to but also different from the beautiful or the sublime. Literatures of calamity aim to produce a difficult and volatile response to history’s depredations, a response that (to borrow from Immanuel Kant’s theory of the beautiful) engages contemplation and reason in processes of judgment that model practices for negotiating ethical dilemmas.

The book is organized by genre into three parts: lyric poetry, postcolonial novels, and testimonial writing. To some extent, that organization is both arbitrary and inconsistently isomorphic: while the first section only addresses lyric poetry, the last grouping of testimonial writing includes memoirs and activist theater productions. So why this arrangement? The more obvious way to order the material might have been to proceed chronologically from the trenches of the Great War to the oil-fed terrors of the Abacha dictatorship in Nigeria. My alternative, generic organization resists the conclusions chronology might imply: that within these aesthetic practices one can track change over time, progress from cause to effect, or a genealogy of literary practice. That is not my argument. I find this aesthetic fairly static over the course of the century and mean to demonstrate that aesthetic stability by example as the cases unfold, moving forward chronologically in one section to retrace my steps to earlier times in the next. The case for generic grouping is a consciously fairly weak one, though I do assert that there are some conspicuous commonalities within forms: the lyric poem produces the poet’s sense that authenticity is formed by violence. The novel’s unfolding Bildung, its story of personal development, mirrors the development of a collective in which acts of violence cement ties within a group while marking their distance from outsiders. Testimonial anticipates reception, gathering its force by the shadow pain it can inflict in the service of full understanding, cementing community with the shock of brutality.

Leading into the first section, the introduction presents the theoretical framework for the violent aesthetic, rooting the project in twentieth-century literary traditions and noting an indebtedness both to trauma theory and, particularly, to the idea of the witness, while also charting a divergence from this precedent by exploring aesthetic pleasure in violence. I do not argue for a ubiquitous will to harm, but for a desire to contemplate violence in aesthetic terms in order to feel sympathy for those who are harmed, and also to identify with and take pleasure in the harm itself at the distance of its aesthetic rendering.

The first section, consisting of three chapters, considers lyric poetry. Here I address the trench poetry of the Great War, including canonical poems by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (among others) and also lesser-known accounts published by Vera Brittain and Mary Roberts Rinehart. This chapter explores the complex boundary between soldiers’ actual aggression and the aesthetic produced by battle. Here I review the pervasive practice of collecting battle trophies, literal and literary, as testament not only to the horror of war but to the soldiers’ military muscle, the authenticity of their mortal encounters on the battlefield. The second chapter focuses on Ireland’s insurgent war for postcolonial independence and particularly on W. B. Yeats’s lifelong project of responding to and memorializing the Irish rebellion of 1916. In concert with the concept of the unrepresentable offered by trauma theory, this section explores Jacques Lacan’s Real as a model for the vertiginous encounter with violence that troubled Yeats as a form of desire. I address here also the question of aesthetic violence as a spur to action. The responsibilities of traumatic representation vexed literature during the Troubles in Northern Ireland between the 1960s and the 1990s and raised particular challenges for Catholic poets of the region, the focus of the section’s third chapter. If, as Alex Houen argues, terrorism—such as that practiced by paramilitaries on both sides of this sectarian divide and by imperial occupying forces as well—depends for its traumatizing public effects on widespread media representation, then what is the obligation of poets who bear witness to terrorism’s trauma? A challenging, anti-mimetic aesthetic characterizes the poetry of three such writers—Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson—who came of age during this period of particular turbulence in political life as well as a renaissance in Irish poetry.

Section 2 considers the postcolonial novel of development in South Asia following decolonization and in neocolonial Nigeria at the close of the twentieth century. Following independence, the partition of the Asian subcontinent into three nations—India, Pakistan, and later Bangladesh—resulted in mass migrations and untold brutality in the service of ethnic cleansing. Three South Asian novels—Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy—narrate these events as fragments of pervasive, accepted, and routine violence (to adopt Gayanandra Pandey’s term), the brutal substrate revealed by eruptions of communal, public atrocity. In the next chapter I engage Rob Nixon’s slow violence to suggest that visible, physical violence enacted on individual bodies both masks and reveals structural forms of atrocity. Two Nigerian novels—Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila—draw allegorical lines from the 1990s Abacha dictatorship’s oppression of the nation’s populace and the slow violence of oil exploitation. I observe that this resource curse funded a brutal regime, and further that oil extraction itself must also be understood as violent because of the environmental harm it causes and because of its damaging effects on ordinary Nigerians, effects dramatized in both novels.

The third section is devoted to testimonial writing in both memoir and dramatic forms. Testimonials by Holocaust survivors recollecting Nazi concentration camps, or Lagers, join beauty to horror in their effort to wound the reader in the service of witnessing to the unknowable ravages of genocide. In keeping with the focus on Anglophone literature throughout this project, I address memoirs by Ruth Kluger, Lucille Eichengreen, Manny Druker, Frank Stiffel, and Sala Pawlowicz. These English-language accounts are not widely known or read, Kluger’s being an exception. Expanding the canon of memorial contributes to the effort to keep alive the multitude of voices and experiences that collectively comprise the Shoah. Thus I have focused on voices that have been heard less often than those of writers such as Primo Levy, Jean Améry, and Elie Wiesel, though these well-known memoirists are also referenced in the discussion. In South Africa during the 1980s state of emergency, the moral and political responsibility of writing in a time of violence challenged testimonial drama. When the Market Theatre continued the work of anti-apartheid resistance in these violent years, their work both preached to the converted and performed the work of utopian solidarity theorized by Jill Dolan. Three lesser-known works of the period—Gangsters by Maishe Maponya, Born in the RSA by the cast and director Barney Simon, and Asinamali! by Mbogeni Ngema—were performed at the Market, a singular, multiracial venue, where productions confronted the brutality of the state and particularly the torture of prisoners; the theater’s political contributions remain one of the lesser-known stories of the period.⁴

Throughout this book, I emphasize not only the traumas of twentieth-century life as witnessed in these texts but also the fascination with aggression that haunts each telling. I explore the impulse to witness violence in aesthetic productions not only to understand the experience of victims, which is obviously crucial, but also to grasp the impulse to perpetrate violence and the desire to register brutality. I assume that the representation of violence is not purely empathic in its motivations or in its effects. Rather, I argue that the violent aesthetic is vertiginously balanced between empathy and aggression, between the pleasure of morally admirable understanding and the threat of brutal desire.

My title, Terrible Beauty, derives from W. B. Yeats’s famous description of the Easter Rising, a description he borrowed from Oscar Wilde. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian perpetrates a terrible cruelty, his first and the only one actually specified in the novel, when he abruptly breaks his engagement to Sibyl Vane because she offends his aesthetic sensibility with a particularly bleak performance as Shakespeare’s Juliet. In despair over the breach, Sibyl takes her own life. Informed of her death, Dorian finds himself strangely detached, feeling as though these events were themselves a sort of stage drama: "It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded."⁵ With these lines Wilde gave a name to the violent aesthetic and traced its roots to Greek tragedy, a move I will try to replicate. Dorian, however, experiences the terrible beauty of a young woman’s suicide, not with remorse, but with a sinister, detached appreciation, an enjoyment of her artful rendering of emotional extremity. Wilde, unlike his character, emphasizes the tragic force of Sibyl’s end, the debts incurred by her decision, and the part Dorian’s own cruelty played in her despair; his portrait begins to deteriorate with this violence.

The novel’s larger point is that beauty cannot be sustained in the face of cruelty, pettiness, or immorality. As Dorian explores the darker reaches of human experience, his portrait degenerates into a grotesque mask. Wilde indicates, through negative example, that the desire for beauty may make a person act well (if only to keep his or her face free from the evidence of evil-doing), or, to express it in another way, that the good life will also be the aesthetically beautiful life.⁶ For Wilde, terrible beauty produces an ethical responsibility, which can only be hidden away in an attic at the expense of the moral good.

W. B. Yeats remembered Wilde’s phrase when he adapted the idea to describe the death of Irish patriots as a conversion of the ordinary comedy of degraded, colonial Dublin life to the terrible beauty of tragic deaths which left survivors of this political violence with a responsibility to those fatalities in which the ethical and the aesthetic both collide and collude. It is in that terrible beauty, in the place where an aesthetic provokes moral reflection, that I locate the literatures of political violence.

The prominence of political violence in twentieth-century literature calls me to propose an aesthetic category that is neither the beautiful nor the sublime, although it partakes of both: a terrible (in the sublime sense) beauty. I am not so much inventing this new category as I am deriving it from an inheritance I trace back to two figures from the classical tradition: Leontius, a minor figure in Plato’s Republic, to whom I turn next, and the god Dionysus, whose Bacchanalian festivals prompted Friedrich Nietzsche to associate him with the pleasure that people take in destruction and its representation. In the pages that follow I will claim, first, that the violent aesthetic invites readers to confront, in virtual form, their own capacities to commit violence; also, that some readers experience pleasure in represented violence; further, that this pleasure drives rather than subsumes a moral engagement that witnesses to trauma and promises through that witness to assist in the restoration of the traumatized; and, finally, that the vertiginous experience of such terrible beauty prompts ethical reflection.

I am indebted to the many readers and writing partners whose thoughtful questions, comments, and suggestions have refined my thinking over the long years spent on this book. Thank you especially to Kate Conley, Ashley Currier, Donnalee Dox, Susan Egenolf, Theodore George, Kate Kelly, Vicki Mahaffey, David McWhirter, Linda Radzik, Larry Reynolds, Robert Shandley, and Susan Stabile. Thank you also to Medbh McGuckian who spent a precious hour sitting by the ocean at the tip of Ireland, willing to talk when this project was in its infancy. I have been inspired over many years by the brilliant work of my cohort in twentieth-century studies Sarah Cole, Jonathan P. Eburne, Jed Esty, David Holdeman, Peter Kalliney, Pericles Lewis, and Douglas Mao, and especially by the talents of my dear friends Jessica Berman, Erin Carlston, Nicholas Miller, Victoria Rosner, and Paul Saint Amour. The kindness of the whole community at Sandy Neck made writing a sincere pleasure. Finally, I am greatly indebted to the anonymous readers from the press, to Justin Neuman, and to the extraordinary generosity of Robert Newman.

Support for the project was provided by a fellowships at the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University and the Tanner Humanities Center of the University of Utah.

I am grateful to the archives at the National Library of South Africa, the Historical Papers Research Archive of the University of Witwatersrand, and the Northern Ireland Political Collection at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as Witnessing and Trophy Hunting: Writing Violence from the Great War Trenches in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 49, no. 1; copyright 2007 Wayne State University Press, used with permission.

The Rear-Guard, copyright Siegfried Sassoon, is reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon. Belfast Confetti and O by Ciaran Carson as well as To My Disordered Muse and Drawing Ballerinas by Medbh McGuckian are reprinted with permission of Wake Forest University Press and the Gallery Press. Excerpts from Leda and the Swan, Easter, 1916, and Man and the Echo are reprinted with permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

The Violent Aesthetic

An Introduction

Leontius

In book 4 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates, in dialogue with Adeimantus, tells this brief parable:

Leontius, the son of Aglaeon, was on his way up to town from the Piraeus. As he was walking below the north wall, on the outside, he saw the public executioner with some dead bodies lying beside him. He wanted to look at the bodies, but at the same time he felt disgust and held himself back. For a time he struggled and covered his eyes. Then desire got the better of him. He rushed over to where the bodies were, and forced his eyes wide open, saying, There you are, curse you. Have a really good look. Isn’t it a lovely sight?¹

Even in the brevity of Socrates’s description, the scene arises vividly to my imagination. The executed bodies bear the marks of their recent, violent deaths; they are already transformed from people into abject husks. Leontius hesitates, tries to walk on and even to cover his eyes, but he returns to the bodies in a rush, horrified with shame, blaming his body for his imagination’s lurid curiosity. What impels Leontius both to desire and fear this view, to contemplate the evidence of killing and to despise himself for doing so? And what drives so many writers, like Plato, to record experiences of violence?

We have names for Leontius’s behavior: morbid curiosity and even voyeurism describe his desire to see, to look upon the corpses as if they could tell him something of death or of what it is like to be killed, to feel that ultimate pain to the body. He cannot directly experience death or know what it is like to die. Nor can he identify immediately with the criminals’ experience of dying. Looking at the corpses, he can only see death’s facade. The impossibility of knowing drives his complementary desire to see.

Perhaps Leontius, as one of the first to witness the criminals’ passing, can begin the work of mourning their loss; executed for their crimes, they are still a part of the fellowship that is humanity and that honors its dead. Yet Leontius is horrified by his curiosity; surely the noble inclination to witness would not provoke abhorrence. He tries not to look, as if a good man would not experience this interest, as if looking were a voyeurist’s impulse and a sign of degeneracy or ill will. He attributes the desire to see to his eyes alone, as if they were abjectly external to him, merely physical like the physicality of the dead bodies they want to examine. He punishes himself even as he gives in to the craving, asserting both his moral abhorrence and his inability to withstand temptation. The extremity of his revulsion indicates that his morbid curiosity has a darker motive than a compassionate concern for the conditions of his fellow humans or even an inquiry into the specter of his own possible end. The eyes that Leontius despises want to view the ugly sight of damaged bodies, bodies whose death is visible in recent wounds, and bodies that came to that death (presumably) due to violent or unlawful acts that were met with the executioner’s rough justice. Leontius’s eyes want to soak in all of that brutality.

Plato’s modern translator, Tom Griffith, uses the word desire to describe Leontius’s impulse to look, suggesting that the urge to see death is not dissimilar from the sexual urge; death-watching may be pornographic in the sense that the viewer is not a participant, does nothing to contribute or prevent an action, but only takes pleasure in standing back and seeing it without being seen. If the look is pornographic in this sense, then Leontius must feel something within himself that mirrors the violence he sees outside. Sexual pornography responds to and heightens lust; Leontius’s voyeurism in the presence of death suggests a parallel, violent impulse that is met by the ghoulish viewing of these bodies. However, I contend that Leontius’s gaze is not only that of the ghoul, it is also the ethical look of the witness whose gaze commemorates the passing of his fellows. That oscillation between impulses is the dynamic on which this book focuses its literary analysis in order to describe larger cultural consequences of contemplated violence.² I conclude that Leontius’s gaze reflects back on the viewer himself and creates a moral oscillation between pity and desire, or between a desire to restore the traumatized victim to a state of wholeness through sympathetic understanding and a desire to see the bacchanalian display of brutality for its own sake.

Notably, Leontius is not said to have attended the execution of these criminals; he is not a direct witness to a violent act or to the moment of these deaths. Rather, he contemplates the evidence of violence after the fact. It may not be violence itself he both wants and does not want to see, but he is certainly interested in the remainder of that violence marked on the bodies of the dead. His fascination, then, does not arise from direct contact with killing, or even at one remove from it (as one attending an execution), but at two removes in which the body becomes a kind of text to be read and interpreted.

Socrates and Adeimantus are implicated in Leontius’s voyeurism as well as his mourning, for they have heard the story through the grapevine and are discussing it again. Plato, the writer, also contributes in that he records the story for others to read. Each figure participates at a distance in the initial act that disturbed Leontius. Thousands of years later, contemporary readers are again provoked to contemplate the bodies of these long-dead criminals. Leontius’s experience came to exemplify a twentieth-century understanding of the duty to witness brutality. Through Leontius’s eyes, these thousands of years after he viewed the corpses of criminals, we gaze on men and women who are reduced to mere objects of brutality, and build within ourselves the strength of our own moral imagining. We try to become, in contact with violence, versions of our best selves while recognizing the depths of horror for which we might someday be or already are responsible, if only by neglect or complicity.³

I begin with this parable to anchor the idea of an aesthetic that oscillates between bearing witness and celebrating violence and also to indicate the lengthy history of textual concern for violence to the human body. Tracing these roots back to Plato, however, is not an attempt to suggest that these concerns are conceived similarly in every era and in all locations. This gesture, in other words, is not meant to be universalizing. Rather, I wish to suggest that the violent aesthetic in the twentieth century makes a particular appropriation of, or intervention into, the Platonic parable. My methods throughout this book will indicate both the theoretical repercussions of literary situations and, at the same time, the value of a literary critical interpretation of theoretical meditations on violence.

In recent years, Leontius’s cursed sight has come to represent a ubiquitous human impulse to bear witness to political violence, an impulse that must be understood, as Socrates indicates, as deeply ambivalent. Leontius is cited to illustrate the turbulence within that mirrors the spectacle of violence in the world. Where Leontius viewed the subjects of judicial execution, twentieth-century critics have equated that experience with the evidence of violence more generally, with the aftermath of extrajudicial killing in genocide, natural disaster, or war. Leontius has become the name for a desire to know violence not in itself (as its victim or perpetrator), but at a remove (as a witness).

For example, Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, cites Plato’s passage to confirm the ubiquity of this problem: attraction to such sights is not rare, yet viewing brutality’s aftermath remains a perennial source of inner torment. Sontag meditates on the undertow of despised impulse dramatized in Leontius’s desire both to see and to excoriate himself for looking, to curse his eyes as if they were themselves the source of curiosity, separate from the self as a moral being, and in competition with that better self.⁴

Similarly, Philip Gourevitch, who cites Leontius’s story as the epigraph for his book on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, wonders about his own need to report from this killing field and about the interest of prospective readers. In We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, he writes:

Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge—a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it.⁵

For Gourevitch, Leontius’s desire to witness is a moral impulse: it is driven by the sense that he must be responsible for the actions of other humans no matter where they are located, physically or temporally, and that he must contemplate violence because turning away seems a tacit act either of acceptance or of impotence. Yet he reminds readers that, like Leontius, we already know the truth of what we are about to see. We know about brutality without looking into its face. Our desire to witness may be an empty affirmation of our own moral good in the face of evil acts when we see no clear course to prevent such brutality or improve the conditions of our fellows in its wake. One just does not know what to do in the face of extreme violence, in the face of genocide. Leontius’s gaze asks us to consider, What is the moral course of a good person in response to acts of brutality? While looking at the evidence of brutality can be a painful moral exercise, more difficult, as Maggie Nelson also observes, "is all the work that looking at atrocity doesn’t do."⁶ The ethical impulse calls one to bear witness even though one suspects the inadequacy and the impotence of such sympathy. We know that we cannot stop brutality just by seeing it.

In That the World May Know, James Dawes associates Leontius’s gaze with the look of relief workers and war reporters, of those who come to the aid of or tell the stories of people in peril. Those men and women who look on the dead are also motivated to go to any extreme to hear the testimony of the living or to assist survivors. Yet the impulses that stir their Leontius gaze are the very tendencies that can make them unfit for the work required by disaster: It is sometimes impossible to distinguish the desire to help others from the desire to amplify the self, to distinguish altruism from narcissism.⁷ Narcissism is the word for unconditional, positive self-regard, and it also describes an inability to draw clear borders between oneself and the world, a mistaking of self for the world outside. In the myth for which the condition is named, Narcissus turns himself (or at least his image) into an object for admiration; in this sense, narcissism also names the kind of self-objectification in which a beholder rests in both positions as subject and as object, as view and as viewer. This kind of narcissism integrates the other’s plight within the self’s ethical status. For Dawes, narcissism can form the root of altruism; it may also be at the root of Leontius’s desire to see, to know his own death in the deaths of executed criminals. So without Leontius’s narcissism, we would have lost the only witness to those deaths. The projection of self into the world, I would argue, motivates both appropriative damage and moral responsibility in which the plight of distant others is understood, perhaps narcissistically, to be relevant to the ethical status of the self.

Viewing the violent acts of our fellows produces an effect like vertigo: not just afraid of height but tempted, like Edgar Allen Poe’s imp of the perverse, to leap into the void. Witnesses to violence imagine themselves both as victims and also as perpetrators: wondering how much calamity one is capable of enduring and at the same time what degree of harm one might be culpable for perpetrating.⁸

In the cases that follow, I wish to indicate that, throughout the twentieth century, literature worked to form communities around not only the vertiginous pleasure in viewing atrocity, but also the moral impulse to reflect on the implications of one’s own desires in the face of such damage. This book focuses on the aesthetic of political violence precisely because of the kind of moral work literature prompts and the ambivalent, vertiginous response that Leontius’s reaction patterns. I do not claim that this aesthetic produces specific or predictable moral positions, rather that it provokes ethical contemplation in much the same way that, as Kant argued, beautiful objects awaken reflective judgment.

It is not the actual brutality of historical acts that fascinates readers of this kind of violent literature, but more exactly their effective articulation in literature. While the Sarajevan women Zenab Salbi describes hope to assert themselves through aesthetic embellishment, it is Salbi’s story, the rendering of war in narrative, that provokes my own moral reflection. The violent aesthetic, as I define it, includes both the aesthetic rendering of violence—Salbi’s description of war-torn Baghdad—and the turbulent reaction compelled by aestheticized violence. The violent aesthetic challenges readers to engage in contemplation, to pursue an inventory of self in conjunction with those ideas, literary memento mori that allow us to keep remembering, to borrow from Michael Woods.⁹ For those who contemplate the violent aesthetic (and there are many who prefer not to encounter brutality in art, whose rejection of this aesthetic is a matter of taste or disposition), the ambivalent results promise a richer moral understanding of brutal realities.¹⁰

The violent aesthetic may be present in a variety of art forms. The emphasis on the look from Plato to Sontag suggests that the visual arts participate effectively in the practice. My emphasis is on literature for two primary reasons: first, the complex play with empathy and identification that literature enlists (while at the same time producing a separation and differentiation between readers and events on the page) patterns the demand for witnesses after traumatic experience, as I will detail below; second, the immersive experience of literature in which the audience is invited into an unfolding over time may produce a more effective immersion in the shock of violence than the visual form in which the effect is both immediate and stilled in time.

Dionysius

Where Leontius’s gaze was self-divided—witnessing trauma sympathetically while also indulging a prurient interest in mortality—Nietzsche’s inquiry into destruction and its aesthetic rendering was less ambivalent. In his inaugural publication, The Birth of Tragedy, he invoked the god Dionysius to name the pleasure people take in carnage represented in ritual or drama. Following Nietzsche, I would like to argue that this pleasure in destruction is integral to aesthetic violence and that it can become a creative force.

In Nietzsche’s genealogy, the tragic form in Greek culture arose from two spiritual traditions of devotion to the gods Apollo and Dionysius. Apollonian practices can be seen in the more sculptural or representational aspects of drama, in the development, for example, of character. Dionysian practices, which are of primary interest here as they were for Nietzsche, can be seen in the musical aspects of drama and especially in the choric convention, as Nietzsche explains: The Dionysiac, with the primal pleasure it perceives even in pain, is the common womb from which both music and the tragic myth are born.¹¹ He distinguishes actual violence from the religious rituals that harnessed violent impulses and focuses his theory on the emergence of the tragic form as an aesthetic response to actual brutality whose roots are in ritual practices.

Dionysius, he observes, was celebrated in Greek culture at the coming of spring when the previous fall’s grape harvest had aged into wine. During festivals in his honor, celebrants drank this wine with other intoxicants and aspired to attain rapturous, mystic states of self-oblivion. In these altered states, according to Nietzsche, ordinary ways of thinking and perceiving were suspended, and the experiences of extreme ecstasy or agony were thought to promote profound insight or understanding in which excess revealed itself as truth.¹² Dionysian celebrants found that pain awakens pleasure while rejoicing wrings cries of agony from the breast.¹³ Emerging from these collective rituals, the tragic chorus performs the self-mirroring of Dionysiac man.¹⁴ For Nietzsche, the chorus forms a link between play and audience, the formal device incorporates community and connection within the drama, while at the same time asserting more particularly collective, brutal impulses mirrored by dramatic bacchanalia. This combination of elements—the killing, the intoxication, and the loss of self into community—marks the distinctiveness of Dionysian rituals but, crucially, becomes the characteristic elements of classic Greek theatrical experience at