The Violence of Representation (Routledge Revivals)

Literature and the History of Violence

Nancy Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317744344
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1989, this collection of essays brings into focus the history of a specific form of violence – that of representation. The contributors identify representations of self and other that empower a particular class, gender, nation, or race, constructing a history of the west as the history of changing modes of subjugation. The essays bring together a wide range of literary and historical work to show how writing became an increasingly important mode of domination during the modern period as ruling ideas became a form of violence in their own right. This reissue will be of particular value to literature students with an interest in the concept of violence, and the boundaries and capacity of discourse.

Part One

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Early Modern Culture: Putting the Politics Back into Poetics

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1

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The scene of tyranny

Violence and the humanistic tradition

Stephanie Jed

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Narratives of political violence occupy a notable space in the writings of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists. In particular, narratives representing the means by which tyranny is either maintained or overthrown were of interest to the Florentine humanists and exercised a certain amount of authority over the relations to politics and writing they imagined for themselves. But the question of whether or not represented violence had any effect on the interpretative and methodological procedures of those humanistic readers and writers who found such representations appealing is seldom raised.¹ Is it possible to identify an enactment of these figures of violence and power in the interpretative activities of the humanists?

Contemporary philosophic thought has presented the urgent need to investigate the humanistic tradition for signs of an unacknowledged violence.² This need arises from the fact that, while the humanistic tradition is often proposed as an exemplary site of interpretation, little attention is paid to the conditions under which this tradition is reproduced and transmitted. One might well suspect, then, that an exercise of domination and suppression may be implicated in the very conditions of humanistic codification. This essay examines two specific narrative representations of violence, coded by humanists for “literary” transmission. The first is the account of one tyrant who covertly advises another to maintain his tyranny by ordering the mass decapitation of noble citizens; the second is the narrative of a young fifteenth-century Latin scholar who, induced by his reading of Latin literature, carries out a political assassination. In each case, the narrative in which violence is figured is coded in such as way as to disguise the violence it exercises, as a narrative, upon the scene of writing.

A message of violence and the humanistic code

In the fifth book of Herodotus’ Histories, Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, sends a messenger to Thrasybulus, the tyrant of Miletus, to find out how he might best govern his state (V.92). In response to this query, Thrasybulus leads the messenger to a field and cuts off the tallest standing ears of grain, while questioning the messenger about his arrival from Corinth. The messenger then returns to Corinth and reports to Periander how he received no response from Thrasybulus and how Thrasybulus seemed crazy to him for the way in which he had destroyed his grain. Upon hearing the messenger’s report, Periander knows he has been advised to murder his most powerful subjects: the cutting of the tallest standing grain in Miletus is understood in Corinth as a sign to decapitate the most prominent citizens.

This tale of tyranny is transmitted and codified by a tradition which finds metaphorical stories about political violence central to its own concerns. Aristotle, for example, reminds his readers of the tale in his discussion of ostracism as a means of maintaining equality in the state (III. 13). Livy retells it to fit the needs of early Roman history, changing the names of the cities to Gabii and Rome, transforming Thrasybulus and Periander into the “Italian” tyrants, Tarquinius Superbus and Sextos Tarquinius, and substituting the tallest “heads” of poppies for the tallest standing ears of grain (I.54). Shakespeare has a gardener deliver advice about the tallest standing plants:

Go thou and, like an executioner,

Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays

That look too lofty in our commonwealth.

All must be even in our government. (3.4)

And in his commentary on Tacitus, Filippo Cavriani writes that the best strategy for the suppression of rebellions is the decapitation of poppies in the garden:

Tiensi, che la vera strada d’opprimere le ribellioni sia quella mostrataci primieramente da Aristobolo: et imitata poi da Tarquinio di Sesto Tarquinio padre, col gettare a terra i capi dei piu belli, et de i piu grossi papaveri dell’horto (522)

(It is held that the best way to suppress rebellions is the one demonstrated first by Thrasybulus³ and then imitated by Tarquin, the father of Sextos Tarquinius, who struck to the ground the heads of the tallest and most beautiful poppies in the garden)

Although the transmission of the narrative of the tyrant in the field is actualized by distinct agents operating in distinct historical moments, the accumulation of these instances produces an overall rhetorical effect. The entire series of tyrants in the field is transmitted to the scholar of western tradition in one package, as if it were one text punctuated by the recurrence of this tyrannical motif.⁴ What begins in Herodotus as the establishment of an analogic relation between the tallest standing grain and the most prominent citizens is eventually transformed, by virtue of the acquired familiarity of the story, into a topos of humanistic discourse about tyrants.

The creation of this topos, of course, does not occur in a social and political vacuum, but results from the narrative’s codification by a particular class of readers in whose interests it is to codify the tyrant’s “decapitation” of ears of grain as a referent of its own conceptualizations of power and violence (White, 1982a: 288). Thus, every allusion to the tyrant’s message of violence refers not only to Herodotus’ text, but also to the history of reading and writing practices by means of which Herodotus’ text is transmitted and codified. Humanism, the ancestor of our modern-day humanities,⁵ discourages us from scrutinizing the specificity of humanistic topoi to a particular kind of literacy and cultural code; any attempt, therefore, to locate Thrasybulus’ message of violence in the cultural code of humanists who transmit this narrative seems, at first, illogical and absurd. And yet, the topos of the tyrant in the field, inasmuch as it thematizes, in its representation, the relation between Thrasybulus’ message and the code of tyrants, invites precisely this type of scrutiny. For the mode of communication between tyrants is, in some respects, analogous to the mode of communication between humanists.

Seen from a semiotic perspective, the tyrant’s “decapitation” of ears of grain or poppies forms part of a complex communicative process: a coded message is transmitted from one tyrant to another and the narrative of this exchange is transmitted from one reader to another. Furthermore, just as Thrasybulus knows that the coded message transmitted by Periander is to be deciphered with reference to the maintenance of tyranny, so the humanist knows that the codified texts transmitted by other humanists are to be interpreted so as to perpetuate a “republic of letters” regulated by a particular class of readers and writers.⁶ But there is more than just a simple analogy at work here; if Thrasybulus’ message of violence is implicated in the code of tyrants, then it becomes important to investigate the relation of these coding processes to one another. Evidence about this relation emerges, if we consider the reproduction of this narrative as an active response to Thrasybulus’ message of violence.

The tyrants’ coding process is entirely figured within the confines of the narrative. The tyrant (whether Thrasybulus or Tarquinius Superbus) communicates his advice to decapitate the most prominent citizens by means of a metaphorical violence committed against the grain (or poppies). And the violence takes place at the level of representation: the decapitation of citizens remains within the limits of verbal configuration. Once this narrative is transmitted, however, there is no insurance against the eruption of the tyrants’ violence outside the limits of textual representation. For, at this point, the violence of the tyrants is embedded within a cultural practice by means of which the narrative is transmitted and reproduced.

In the transmission of this text from humanist to humanist, the sender and the addressee are human interpretants who, stimulated by their study of the classics, are moved to enact these texts outside, as a part of their daily activity.⁷ Just as Thrasybulus transmits a message of metaphorical decapitation, so that Periander will enact the metaphor on the heads of citizens, so humanists, in their codification of classical learning, transmit figural messages to other humanists in the hope that they will enact the figures in their own lives. For the most part, this enactment takes the form of discussions, editions, reproductions, interpretations, and citations of the classical texts. But in cases of narratives of “tyranny” and “freedom,” classical texts have been enacted in real political propaganda, real political opposition, and even in real violence, real murders.

Humanists are incited by their reading of classical literature to commit real acts of violence. And this violence may seem, at first, to be incompatible with the tranquility of the scriptorium, the site of the humanist’s engagement in scholarly, noble, non-violent activity. But what about the narratives of rape, murder, and violent contests between forces of “tyranny” and “freedom” which are central to the corpus of texts codified by the humanistic tradition? The making of the humanistic code cannot be divorced from the recurrence of such figures as the decapitator of grain, the vindicator of violated honor, the scholarly tyrant-slayer, etc. And if tyrants are able to maintain their “tyranny” by transmitting coded messages of violence, some vestige of this violence must remain in the humanists’ codification of this tale. As heirs to this tradition, we, modernday humanists, might want to examine the violence in our own culture as a possible by-product of our “literary” activities. For the modern “literary” discipline continues to enact (in public lectures, conferences, interpretative essays, etc.) figures codified by the humanists without acknowledging the violence of the code.

The rupture between “literature” and “politics”

In 1456, Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned Vespasiano da Bisticci, the merchant “prince of booksellers,” to supply him with 200 books for a new library at the Abbey of Fiesole.⁸ Forty-five scribes, experienced in copying a repertoire of texts that had been in demand for over a hundred years, filled the order in twenty-two months. In this rapid and artificial production of a library (representing the synchronic efforts of a book-making industry rather than the interests of successive generations of readers), a precedent was set for the formation of the library as a symbolic instrument of the power of the state (Petrucci 1983: 547–51). Subsequently, Vespasiano supplied other rulers, including Mattia Corvino, King of Hungary, and Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, with “humanistic libraries” as symbols of their power. Although competition from the printing press eventually forced him out of business in 1480, Vespasiano’s entrepreneurial activities had a lasting cultural legacy.

The creation of the “humanistic library,” coupled with the avant-garde interests of humanistic scholars in the linguistic and formal properties of “authentic” Roman Latin and script, helped to formalize an already operative cultural practice: a certain kind of writing, coded as belonging to a humanistic library, was isolated from the kinds of writing practiced in mercantile and diplomatic offices, in courts of law, and in shops, by tax collectors, notaries, etc. By means of this isolation, not only was humanistic “literature” detached from the activity or process of its production, but signs of the relation between “literature” and other kinds of lettering of society were tacitly suppressed. As a consequence, the consideration of humanism as a particular practice of literacy to be seen in relation to others came to be overshadowed by the humanistic ambition to dominate the scene of writing with exclusively “literary” models. This suppression and domination implicit in humanistic cultural practices can be effectively illustrated by a humanistic representation of tyrannicide in which the only kind of writing represented by the narrator is the Latin writing inducing three young scholars to commit murder.

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Cola Montano, an ambitious scholar (“uomo litterato e ambizioso”),⁹ taught Latin in Milan to the noble youth of the city. He became particularly intimate with three young students, G. Lampognano, C. Visconti, and G. Olgiati, and he made them swear that, as soon as they were old enough, they would liberate their city from the tyranny of the duke, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. Galeazzo was lascivious and cruel. Not only did he rape noble women (including women associated with Visconti and Olgiati); he received even more pleasure in publicizing their dishonor. He wasn’t satisfied to kill men, unless he had killed them by some cruel means. He lived with the reputation of having killed his own mother.

The three young students made plans to kill the duke. They hoped that once the duke was slain, the patricians, followed by the people, would take up arms against the duchess and princes of the dukedom. Their hopes were founded on the hunger of the people and on their plan to turn some property of the princes over to the people as their booty in the struggle for liberty.

On December 26, 1476, in the church of Santo Stefano, the three young Latinists slew the duke. Two of the conspirators, Lampognano and Visconti, were also killed. And Olgiati, after hiding out for a couple of days hoping for an insurrection, was caught, confessed, and was sentenced to be tortured and quartered alive. His bravery was such that even as he faced his executioner, he delivered a long oration in Latin, because...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction Representing violence, or “how the west was won”
• Early Modern Culture: Putting the Politics Back into Poetics
• Modern Culture: The Triumph of Depth
• Contemporary Culture: The Art of Politics
• Index