The Aesthetics of Violence

Art, Fiction, Drama and Film

Robert Appelbaum

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786605047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Violence at an aesthetic remove from the spectator or reader has been a key element of narrative and visual arts since Greek antiquity. Here Robert Appelbaum explores the nature of mimesis, aggression, the affects of antagonism and victimization and the political uses of art throughout history. He examines how violence in art is formed, contextualised and used by its audiences and readers. Bringing traditional German aesthetic and social theory to bear on the modern problem of violence in art, Appelbaum engages theorists including Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Adorno and Gadamer. The book takes the reader from Homer and Shakespeare to slasher films and performance art, showing how violence becomes at once a language, a motive, and an idea in the experience of art. It addresses the controversies head on, taking a nuanced view of the subject, understanding that art can damage as well as redeem. But it concludes by showing that violence (in the real world) is a necessary condition of art (in the world of mimetic play).

Chapter 1

Playing with Violence

1. ‘SUDDENLY INEXPLICABLY’

Art is a form of play, and one of the things it plays with is violence.¹

Here is an example, a passage in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1994; originally published 1955). A middle-aged man named Thomas Fowler is sitting in a café in Saigon, drinking beer, ruminating. He has just lost the woman he loves to another man, the ‘quiet’ American of the title. At the table next to him sit ‘two young American girls … neat and clean in the heat, scooping up ice cream’. He instinctively despises them, as he despises all Americans, and all things American now. The quiet Alden Pyle has taken away Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress, on the premise that in all kinds of ways Pyle is better for her. He is younger and richer, healthier and happier, and unlike Fowler, who is already married and can’t get a divorce, he will be able to marry Phuong and make a proper housewife out of her. For Fowler such good intentions, and the sincerity that goes along with it, are delusory and hollow. And they are only too typical of what it means to be an American in the world of the early 1950s, or in the Vietnam of the 1950s, as French colonial rule is breaking down and the armed communists of the north try to take over.

Also in the café is a ‘dowdy middle-aged Frenchwoman’ who is putting her make-up on. The American women get up and leave, and Fowler follows them with his eyes. Here then is the scene, as Fowler himself tells it:

I watched them idly as they went out side by side into the sun-splintered street. It was impossible to conceive either of them a prey to untidy passion: they did not belong to the rumpled sheets and the sweat of sex. Did they take deodorants to bed with them? I found myself for a moment envying their sterilised world, so different from this world that I inhabited – which suddenly inexplicably broke into pieces. Two of the mirrors on the wall flew at me and collapsed half-way. The dowdy Frenchwoman was on her knees in the wreckage of chairs and tables. (209)

After attending to the Frenchwoman, Fowler goes outside to see the scene of the explosion. He thinks the explosion might be a prank, a ‘joke’ being played by one of the political parties contesting for control over the country, raising a little scare. But here again is the scene in Fowler’s words:

when I got to the Place Garnier, I realised by the heavy clouds of smoke that this was no joke. The smoke came from the cars burning in the car-park in front of the national theatre, bits of cars were scattered over the square, and a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens. (210)

2. PLAYING WITH VIOLENCE

Art is a form of play, and one of the things it plays with is violence. In the world of the novel the violence isn’t play. It is ‘no joke’. It could have been but it isn’t. This particular act of violence, a terrorist bombing, shatters. It breaks a world into pieces. It also kills. Fowler sees the dead and the dying from as close up as the police who have rushed into the scene will allow him, and he is outraged. Among other things, he believes he knows who the culprit behind the explosion is, exactly the same Alden Pyle who took away his mistress. But that is Fowler’s world, and it is all make-believe. We readers are unaffected. We readers are doing just fine.

According to the philosopher Roger Caillois (2001), working on the basis of the earlier work by historian Johann Huizinga (1955), play is an activity that can be defined by its separateness. It usually has its own times and places. It isn’t ‘serious’. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t absorbing. Nor does it mean that it’s not important. Professional artists, like professional athletes, can take their ‘play’ very seriously indeed. It is their livelihood. What’s more, it is ‘no joke’. Their play demands commitment, effort, ingenuity and excellence. And as for we who experience their play, we too find ourselves committed and making an effort. We keep an eye out for ingenuity and excellence. We try to rise to the occasion of the play. We need to appreciate what the artist or the athlete is doing. And finally, all of us, athletes, artists and observers – readers, listeners, spectators, audience members, exhibition goers – are convinced that the play means something. In fact, it means something in at least two senses. As some literary theorists put it (especially Hirsch 1984) it has both a meaning and a significance. When you read that ‘a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens’, and you understand that the man is a victim of the explosion and dead or dying, then you know the meaning of that part of the passage. But as for its significance, to grasp that you have to compare it to other passages in the book (and see who else dies in the book, for example, and how and why) and you have to measure it against other things as well, like what you know about the realities of political struggle and civil war in twentieth-century Vietnam. At the end of the novel, we find that due to a complex reaction to that terrorist bombing, from indignation at an atrocity to jealousy in an affair of the heart, Fowler has Pyle assassinated, in another act of terrorist violence, collaborating with the communist insurgents of Saigon. And to grasp the significance of that bit of aggression, you need to know something about morality too, the dilemmas at the time posed by existentialist philosophers and their counterparts in the arts, about the necessity of what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘dirty hands’ in the face of evil, and the rise of this kind of attitude towards violence (sometimes you have to get your hands dirty with it) as it arose in the experience of the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the rise of fascism.²

‘Playing with violence’ is an unavoidably ambiguous expression, but I am trying to use it with some precision. I do not use ‘playing with violence’ in the sense of ‘playing with a playmate’, for violence is not a person; you cannot play with it that way. Nor do I mean it in the sense of ‘playing with fire’, for violence is not a thing or a form of energy. You cannot touch it or apply it to something else. Violence is action. So when you play with it, you are playing with an action which you are not actually performing; you are playing at doing it (‘rough and tumble’ is what ethologists call it when animals and children do it), or at experiencing the doing of it in some way (a kind of voyeurism is involved).

The play I am referring to often has two sides, those who actively labour at it, and those who more or less passively or vicariously experience it. Graham Greene, the author of The Quiet American, actively plays with violence as the creator of the tale. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director and screenwriter of the first film version of the novel (1958), and Philip Noyce, the director of the second film version (2002), also play with violence as creators. So did the screenwriters for the second film, Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, as well as the actors in the films, including such megastars as Michael Redgrave as Fowler in the first film and Michael Caine as Fowler in the second. And then there were the cinematographers, the location managers, the stunt men, the costume makers, the editors and the many other members of the film crews, along with the producers and executive producers, the distributors and movie house managers and workers. The production and showing of a film involve a whole industry, international in scope. And lest we forget, much the same could be said about a book. Back in 1954 Greene sent his manuscript to an agent and then an editor who read it and possibly made suggestions or changes and then sent it on to copyeditors, printers, proofreaders, advertisers and distributors, so that copies of the book landed in book stores in a large part of the English-speaking world. It was soon translated into French, German, Japanese and many other languages; in 2001 it was translated into Vietnamese. It is selling around the globe to this day. (A small bookstore I visited in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2014, had four copies of it on display, and I have read that in Ho Chi Minh City today, formerly Saigon, the book is sold in any of several languages as a souvenir for tourists.) For a long time now most art has been the product of a capitalist industry. As such, it has also been the product of subsidiary-related industries (camera makers, paper makers, transporters) and the protégé of state institutions, law firms, financial firms and for that matter educational institutions, which have become responsible for making people capable of making and using art). This is the ‘culture industry’, as Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) called it. Whether or not it is as pernicious as those philosophers claimed, it is certainly a complex phenomenon, and even the most apparently privileged places in it, the places of the author, the producer or the director, are in many ways subordinate to the whole, elements of a machinery over which neither they nor anyone else in particular has real control (see Luhman 2000: 141). But still, all the people, processes and institutions are active in the production of art. All of them are directly or indirectly playing with violence too. But they are to be distinguished from the people, processes and institutions who are involved in it more passively, as consumers – or as I prefer to call them, users.³

I am a consumer or user with respect to The Quiet American, and always will be, even if I am also active as a critic, and even if, in some of my other occupations, as a university professor and writer, I am also a (minor) contributing member of the culture industry. I experience The Quiet American in a different mode. And so I play with the violence in it in a different mode. Production and consumption, creation and experience, are always interrelated. The writer of a book is also its first reader. The reader of a book is complicit in the production of a book’s meaning. But distinctions are nevertheless important, and there is a big distinction to be made between producers and consumers, or between the senders and receivers of artistic messages.

I call the study of the production of artworks and similar objects poetics. I call the study of the experience of artworks and similar objects aesthetics. This distinction between poetics and aesthetics is not original with me. Aristotle (or at least the scribes who entitled his work on the subject) used the word ‘poetics’ in just this way, as the study of artistic production, and some of the originators of the field of what they called ‘aesthetics’ (based on the Greek word for sentience) in the nineteenth century, including the German philosophers Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant, focused their studies, conversely, on the study of the subjective dimension of art. To Aristotle, poetics was the study of making an object or executing a performance, creating form and generating effects. To Baumgarten and Kant, aesthetics was the study of experience: sensation, perception, appreciation and the exercise of ‘taste’ (see Jay 2004).⁴ Still, many use the word aesthetics today to indicate the general study of the theory of art, production and consumption together, and I wish to keep them separate. Knowing about the production of violence in artworks is important. But I want to know, in this book, what it is that we do, we patrons of artworks, we spectators and readers, when we play with the violence that is in them.⁵

I can of course, in my capacity as a critic, praise Graham Greene for his artistry, or analyse how his artistry works. I can look at the novel as a thing in itself, an expressive form, a subject of the philosophy of art and formalist criticism. I can also account for how Greene examined the situation in the Vietnam of his day, how he predicted American intervention in the country’s affairs and disapproved of what he saw on the horizon. I can explore how Greene constructed an allegory of a love triangle – a European and an American, contesting over the love of a woman, that is a feminized Vietnam – and at the same time made a novel of intrigue out of his analysis of the situation. I could even write about the art of violence in Greene’s novel. But I am thinking about the aesthetics of violence. I am thinking of how the first time I read the book I was as surprised by the explosion in Place Garnier as the narrator of the story was. I am thinking about how every time I go back to the passage I am impressed by its ingenuity down to its choice of words (suddenly inexplicably) and also by what it seems to be telling me – which is what … in its violence, that is? What does it say to me, and why do I seem, contradictorily, to like it?

Adorno, to whom I have already alluded, warns us not to confuse what we get from art with a kind of bodily pleasure, or something analogous to it, an ‘enjoyment’. Not that the body isn’t involved in art, or that there is anything wrong with bodily pleasure, but to identify the experience of art with something like bodily enjoyment is make it into a ‘source of pleasure that the consumer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself’ (Adorno 1997: 18). Presumably it would be possible to enjoy a scene of violence in a novel for the sake of the pleasure in it, just as one can enjoy a painting because of the intensity of the colour red one finds in it, or a scoop of vanilla ice cream for its cooling sweetness. But I am pretty sure that is not what happens when I read about the explosion at the Place Garnier. It makes me sad. It unsettles me, somehow. And that’s what I like about it. That is even what Adorno wants me to like about it.

3. BEING SOLICITED

I am being solicited by the explosion at Place Garnier. I am being called upon to see and feel it, but I am being called upon to see and feel it in play. The novel has its own time and space in two senses: first in the time and space represented, Saigon in the early 1950s; second in the time and space of my reading it, which is always a time and space set aside, for the duration of my reading it. I am not there when I am reading it. I am here, in this special zone, absorbed in the experience. It is make-believe. I am not reading about an actual bombing, and the bombing cannot threaten me or anyone I know or have ever known or could have known.

And I am playing in several other senses. In the work of both the dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), art is a form of play in the sense of ‘free play’ – not free from the rules of playing, but free from all the other rules, the mandatory rules of the ‘serious’ world.⁶ So make-believe (the medium of mimetic play) is free, even if it is also bounded. And there are other kinds of play, all of which are also both bounded and free in these ways, according to Caillois. In addition to make-believe there is first of all the thrill. I play at getting thrilled, as I might also play at getting myself excited by riding a roller coaster or bungee jumping. Caillois calls this the game of ‘vertigo’, of making yourself dizzy or giddy up to a point – up to a point, it must be stressed, because if the danger is too real the game is not a game. At an amusement park one is always strapped in. When you jump off a bridge in a bungee, you are not really jumping off a bridge. (You are free from the rules of jumping off a bridge, beginning with the fatal rule of gravity – although, to be sure, jumping off a bridge without protection, if one is not trying to kill oneself or escape an assailant, can also be a form of play.) When you read in a novel about explosions in Saigon you are not really reading about explosions in Saigon. But when you ride or bungee jump or read, you are seeking excitement, a thrill that unbalances you somehow, even to the point of nausea.

Play may also include an ‘aleatory’ element – that is, chance. When we play games we often take a chance; we gamble; we submit ourselves to situations (playing tennis with or without one’s back to the wind, for example) which we cannot control; we place ourselves in conditions where we cannot be certain of outcomes. There is an element of this submission to chance even in the act of being an audience member or a reader, though the submission takes place in the realm of make-believe. As I read about Fowler and Phuong and the political conflicts in Vietnam, I do not know, the first time, what is going to happen, or how. In fact, the novel has lots of surprises, one of the main surprises being a bomb going off so that a world ‘suddenly inexplicably’ breaks ‘into pieces’. So far as a narrative belongs to the category of fiction, the reading of it entails not only an anticipation but also an uncertainty about what comes next. For the reader there is thus always a degree of chance in the reading, a kind of risk. If I allow myself to be absorbed in the world of Greene’s novel, I take a chance in it. I may end up surprised. I may end up rewarded or devastated, just like the characters in the fiction. But only so far: a character may risk his or her life and die, but reading a novel will never kill me (I am free from the lethal rules of chance, even as I play at them). It will only provide me with a kind of vicarious experience of being in danger of dying. In fiction, Sigmund Freud (1918) wrote, ‘we still find people who know how to die, who are even quite capable of killing others. There alone the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all the vicissitudes of life...