Violence in Contemporary
American Literature
Lecture in Contemporary English
Literatures
University of Silesia
Marcin Sarnek
David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970
Use of violence
vs Exploitation of violence
• War movie
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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
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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 violence
vs 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?
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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
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War
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Ultimate violence of cannibalism
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Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Political violence
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Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde
James Dickey, Deliverance
The rise of True Crime
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Toni Morrison
Alice Walker
Joyce Carol Oates
Sexual Violence
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Paul Auster, Ghosts
Don Delilo, White Noise
Racial violence
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Neal Stephenson, The Diamanond Age
Violence as Deus Ex Machina
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Joseph Heller
Kurt Vonnegut
Timothy O'Brien
Don Delilo, Libra
Moral hopelessness of violence
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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
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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
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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, selfregulated 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 postcyberpunk 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
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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