Violence in Contemporary American Literature

Lecture in Contemporary English Literatures

University of Silesia

Marcin Sarnek

David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970

Use of violencevs Exploitation of violence• War movie

– Apocalypse Now (Francis F. Coppola)– Platoon (Oliver Stone)– Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg)– lots of others

• Western– The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)

• Violence and TV– Deadwood– The Wire– Shield– Dexter

• How thin is the line between exlpoitation and 'legitimate violence'?– I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978)

and other 'rape and revenge movies'– Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

Use of violencevs Exploitation of violence• exploitation films (Grindhouse films)

– Fight for Your Life (Robert A Endelson, 1977)

– cannibal films– slashers– splatters– shocksploitation

• vigilante movies– Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and four

sequels– Death Wish (Micheal Winner, 1974)– Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)– Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)

• how about celebration of violence by Quentin Tarantino?

• violence and popular music• violence and the gaming industry tagline: There is no greater violence than a

father's revenge for the rape of his daughter.

Violence in American Literature• War

– Joseph Heller– Kurt Vonnegut– Timothy O'Brien

• Ultimate violence of cannibalism– Neal Stephenson, The Diamanond Age

• Violence as Deus Ex Machina– Paul Auster, Ghosts– Don Delilo, White Noise

• Racial violence– Toni Morrison– Alice Walker– Joyce Carol Oates

• Sexual Violence– Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde– James Dickey, Deliverance

• The rise of True Crime– Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

• Political violence– Don Delilo, Libra

• Moral hopelessness of violence– Cormac McCarthy, The Blood Meridian

Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1965

Cannibalism

• anthropohagy• literal cannibalism

– survival cannibalism– ritual cannibalism

• endocannibalism• exocannibalism

– homicidal cannibalism– necro-cannibalism

• symbolic cannibalism• cannibal serial killers

Cannibalism interpreted

• ultimate hate and humiliation• ultimate love• ultimate taboo• ultimate violence• psychoanalytical approach (Eli Sagan)

– Oedipus complex– significance of a dominant mother figure

• cultural materialist approach– dietary insufficiencies

Sublimation and symbolic cannibalism• thesis: with the forwarding development

sublimation of violence is required

• Hamatsa

• potlatch

• communion?

Cannibalism as symbolic violence

• the stigma of cannibalism

• ultimate taboo - separation from humanity

• a thought experiment…

• cannibalism as cultural libel

• 'cannibal talk'

Symbolic and cultural violence as symbollic cannibalism• identity theft

• cyborgization

• cloning

• stem cell research?

Examples of Cannibalism in American Literature• Herman Melville, Typee (1846)• Tennessee Williams, Suddenly,

Last Summer (1958)• Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

(1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999), Hannibal Rising (2006).

• Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse (1996)

We must eat (each other)

• speaking of [this] metonymical eating Derrida reminds us [that] “one must begin with identity with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally.” One must eat he asserts. There must be eating: our relations with the other must, inevitably, involve assimilation, identification, interiorization . Yet, we also see Derrida reminds us that we cannot eat the other– Penelope Deutscher

How to eat well?

• the other cannot be (entirely) effaced. There can be no complete autonomy over oneself or from the other if we have always eaten the other. Instead, the possibility of an adequate political and ethical perspective could begin only once one acknowledges that "we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a 'self' is never in itself or identical to itself." How then to locate responsibility towards the other, when we have always already appropriated the other? This is the question posed in the formulation, how to eat well?– Jacques Derrida

Cybernetic automaton

• an active hierarchically governed, self-regulated and goal oriented machine, which was bound to its environment through a particular time/space logic — the adjustment of future conduct through a comparative assessment of past actions [in other words, the feedback loop]. – Norman Wiener

Collective intelligence – a human superorganism• we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of

social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront.

• The human race becomes a superorganism building its unity through cyberspace. And because this superorganism is becoming the principal agent of transformation and maintenance of the biosphere, cyberspace grows, by extension, as the biosphere's nervous system. If we can witness the evolution — organic, sensitive and linguistic — as a sole movement, if we understand the profound unity of the cultural and biological evolution and their interdependence, therefore we can discover that cyberspace is at the peak of this unified evolution

– Pierre Levy

Cyberpunk and ambiguity towards the body• body = meat?

• yet: both in classic cyberpunk and in post-cyberpunk a 'quest for the body' or a bodily experience is a major theme– William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)– Ghost in the Shell (movie), (1995)– Strange Days (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)(1995)– eXistenZ (dir. David Cronenberg) (1999)

Neal Stephenson

• The Big U (1984)• Zodiac (1988)• Snowcras (1992)• The Diamond Age (1995)• Cryptonomicon (1999)• The Baroque Cycle (A Trilogy)

– Quicksilver (2003)– The Confusion (2004)– System of The World (2004)

• Anathem (2008)

Neal Stephenson• The Diamond Age: or A Young

Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)– nanotechnology

• "In diamond, then, a dense network of strong bonds creates a strong, light, and stiff material. Indeed, just as we named the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Steel Age after the materials that humans could make, we might call the new technological epoch we are entering the Diamond Age" – Ralph Merkle

• cheap production of diamond structures, hence – of 'everything' in Matter Compilers

– Neo-Victorians and other phyles– Feed technology vs Seed

technology

The Rite of the Drummers

• The girl faints, falling backward . . . and is caught by several of the dancers, . . . She ends up flat on her back on the ground, and one of the dancers is between her legs, and in a very few thrusts he has finished. A couple of others grab his arms and yank him out of there . . . and another one is in there, and he doesn't take very long either . . . the girl . . . [is] not struggling . . . . Toward the end, smoke or steam or something begins to spiral up from the middle of the orgy. The last participant grimaces even more than the average person who's having an orgasm, and yanks himself back from the woman, grabbing his dick and hopping up and down and hollering in what looks like pain. That’s the signal for all of the dancers to jump back away from the woman, who is now kind of hard to make out, just a fuzzy motionless package wrapped in steam.

The Rite of the Drummers continued• Flames erupt from several locations, all over her body, at once,

seams of lava splitting open along her veins and the heart itself erupting from her chest like ball lightning. . . . The crowd observes a long moment of silence while the body burns. Then, when the last of the flames have died out . . . four men . . . grab . . . comers of the sheet. Her remains tumble into the center . . . The . . . men carry the remains over to a . . . steel drum and dump it in. . . . One of the . . . men picks up a long spoon and gives the mix a stir, then dips a . . . coffee mug into it and takes a long drink.

• The other three . . . men each drink in their turn. By now, the spectators have formed a long queue. One by one they step forward. The leader . . . holds the mug for them, gives each one a sip, then they all wander off, individually or in small groups. Show's over.

– The Diamond Age

Nanosites explained

• We . . . found several million nanosites in . . . [the] brain. . . .[says Napier] Very small ones . . . They are introduced through the blood, of course — the haemocules circulate through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the blood/brain barrier and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They can monitor activity in the axon or trigger it. These ‘sites all talk to each other with visible light.”

• “So when I was on my own, my ‘sites just talked to themselves,” Hackworth said, “but when I came into close proximity with other people who had these things in their brains —“

• “It didn’t matter which brain a site was in. They all talked to one another indiscriminately, forming a network.” .

– The Diamond Age

Nanosites further explained

• “. . . These particles had two functions: spread through exchange of bodily fluids, and interact with each other. . . . Each one is a container for some rod logic and some memory. . . . When one particle encounters another either in vivo or in vitro, they dock and seem to exchange data for a few moments. Most of the times they disengage and drift apart. Sometimes they stay docked for a while, and computation of some sort takes place. . . . Then they disconnect. Sometimes both particles go separate ways, sometimes one of them goes dead. But one of them always keeps going.”– The Diamond Age

Symbolic canibalism turned literal cannibalism