The Art of Cruelty Read online

  Had she not starved herself to death in solidarity with the French Resistance in the 1940s, and had she somehow ended up an exile in Los Angeles, an elderly Simone Weil might have nodded in agreement while driving by Kruger’s LACMA banner. For Weil’s famous 1940 essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” argues that force is that which turns both its wielders and its victims into things. That is to say, under the guise of subject-object relations, violence actually works to construct object-object relations between otherwise sentient beings. This view stands in precise opposition to, say, the masculinist model set forth by Bertrand de Jouvenel (as quoted by Arendt in her 1970 book On Violence, which is dedicated, incidentally, to Mary McCarthy): “A man feels himself more of a man when he is imposing himself or making others the instruments of his will.”

  As much distaste as I have for this latter sentiment, and as much as I admire Weil, I must admit that I have never really understood the novelty or social efficacy of Weil’s reversal. It may indeed come as a surprise to the abuser or the torturer or the soldier to find that the formula runs both ways—that he or she is made thing-like by the force he or she presumes to possess—but really it is part of the same package. The larger, crueler problem, it seems to me, comes from the conviction that violence is the privileged means by which we come into ourselves or lose ourselves as human subjects. It is quite banally human both to perpetrate violence and to find oneself a victim of it. And if, as Arendt observed, the “rage and the violence that sometimes—not always—goes with it” are human, to cure man of them would be to dehumanize him. And dehumanization is one means of forgetting who we are. But again, who are we? And what could it mean to forget who we are?

  ANOTHER COMPLICATION of the IN VIOLENCE, WE FORGET WHO we are adage is that in many famed accounts of subjectivity—such as Freud’s—a certain kind of forgetting—namely, repression—plays a critical role in structuring the mind. According to Freud, one of the most powerful repressed elements of the unconscious is the Oedipal complex, which places a fantasized or symbolic patricide at the center of the (male) psyche.

  Freud was not known for his attention to female subjectivity or sexuality, the latter of which he famously deemed a “dark continent” for psychology. It therefore comes as no real surprise that he chose a founding myth for psychoanalysis that places the male subject, heterosexual desire, and patricidal fantasy at its core. Ironically, however, the trope of a psychically repressed matricide (or, more generally speaking, a gynecide) as the constitutive element of (male) psychic life crops up ubiquitously in art and literature. A trashy but lucid recent template for this trope can be found in the movie Memento (2000), whose main character is a man who has no memory and can make no new memories, but who is nonetheless trying to stay coherent enough to move ahead toward the avenging of the brutal rape and murder of his wife. As the film moves backward in time, however (the movie unfolds in reverse order), we become confused—as does the main character—as to whether he is aiming to avenge a heinous act committed by another, or whether he is on the run from an act he himself committed. (The movie also poses the possibility that his wife is alive but has left him—in which case the fantasy of her rape-murder stands in—as wish fulfillment?—for the pain of his rejection.)

  Memento was, to my mind, essentially a pretentious gimmick, but it did have one memorable offering: this distilled portrait of male amnesia, coupled with its ubiquitous counterpart—a woman with her mouth slightly open, her eyes frozen wide with terror, her brutalized body left for dead in the clear plastic of a shower curtain—in short, in as positive a situation as the situation would allow. As with so many renditions of this narrative device (see, for example, any number of Clint Eastwood movies, from Unforgiven to Mystic River), the female is always already dead: that is how the plot begins. Indeed, there can be no plot without her death—without it, what would there be to find out, explain, or avenge? Comic-book aficionados even have a stock phrase to describe this setup: they call it the “woman in the refrigerator syndrome,” which derives from a Green Lantern comic in which the hero is set into motion by the discovery of his girlfriend’s corpse in his icebox.

  Hashed as it may be, this narrative structure continues to enthrall, seducing even those whom one might hope were too impatient with cliché to fall into its clutches. Brian Evenson presents a complicated case on this account, as he has at times wielded the trope with great success. I am thinking primarily of his excellent, dreadful, transporting novel, The Open Curtain (2006), which takes on the Mormon Church’s repressed history of violence—specifically, the murderous practice known as blood atonement. The novel gets worrisomely bogged down at times by its (literal!) use of the rotting-corpse-in-the-fridge motif, and then, in its final hour, by a man-strangling-woman denouement lacking in the inventiveness of the preceding pages. But taken as a whole, the novel presents a surprisingly poignant, linguistically brilliant, and viscerally terrifying portrait of the dialectic of concealment and revelation that undergirds certain forms of individual and institutional violence.

  Elsewhere, however—such as in the short story, “Desire with Digressions” (from 2009’s Fugue State)—Evenson’s wielding of the trope collapses into the hackneyed. “Desire” begins with a man leaving a woman after an unnamed, charged encounter. As he turns away from her, her humanity—signified here by her face—has already begun to slip away: “I felt that if her head were to turn toward me then I would not see her face but an unfeatured facelessness, as inhuman and smooth as a plate.” The further he drives, the longer he stays away, the less he can remember about what happened between them: “What was it she had said to me, that day before she had abandoned me to sit beside the creek and grow strange? And how had I responded? Why could I not recall?”

  When he finally makes it back to her, after a manly sojourn that has included an interminable trek through snow, the witnessing of a craggy old man’s death, a bad case of frostbite, and a nightmarish hospital stay and escape, he finds the woman sitting by the creek, just as he had left her. But, to his horror, on closer inspection he sees that she is now but a rotting corpse: “what I had thought was her arm was only the bones that had once structured the arm, the flesh mostly gone. And I saw that a part of her on the other side, too, was in the process of grimly disarticulating itself with the aid of vermin and time, and I remembered what, out of love or hate, had happened, and why I had left in the first place.”

  Ah yes, that pesky thing I kept forgetting, O.J.- or Memento-style—I killed her! And then the final, disingenuous smearing of agency (not to mention the textbook repurposing of love as a constituent factor in gynecide): he remembers not what he did, but “what, out of love or hate, had happened.” Of course, this story is narrated, and one could argue that Evenson intentionally created a narrator who suffers from these tired symptoms and self-deceptions. (One could also argue that the story leaves tantalizingly unclear “what, out of love or hate, had happened”—but given that the man speeds away from the primal scene unharmed, while the woman is left creek-side to rot, a certain ineluctable narrative shifts into view.) Such moments in Evenson drain the writing of its disquieting inventiveness. In short, while the woman or corpse may “grow strange” beside the creek, the story fails to do so.

  GIVEN THE ubiquity of this storyline, it can seem as though matricide or gynecide stands somehow behind or before the Oedipal complex—perhaps as the repressed content of the Freudian repressed. (French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray has gone so far as to call matricide “the blind spot of Western patriarchal civilization”; scholar Amber Jacobs has described it as the “death that will not deliver”—that is, a “non-concept” long denied any structural generativity by classical psychoanalytic thought.)

  By this point, however, everyone from radical feminist theologian Mary Daly to psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to French philosopher Julia Kristeva has noted that it is a hallmark of patriarchal religion, culture, and psychology to have
a repressed, symbolic matricide at its root—a matricide cast as necessary for the human subject to leave the mess of Nature and bodily dependency behind, and to become a full participant in subjectivity, language, and culture (all of which, in phallocentric discourse, are identified with the male). As Kristeva famously puts it, “For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychical necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua non of our individuation.” Note that the subject here imagined doesn’t simply outgrow or separate from the mother. It murders her.

  One of the most shocking literalizations of such a matricide can be found in the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), a drama in dialogue that tells the story of the corruption of a young teenage girl, Eugenie, by a team of libertines. Throughout Philosophy—which alternates between pornographic action and philosophical disquisition, as does most of Sade—the figure of the mother is the enemy of just about everything Sade holds dear. The unfolding tale of Eugenie’s corruption is fairly jovial and enjoyable (depending on your tastes, of course), but the work’s finale is decidedly one of the cruelest in literature that I’ve encountered. When Eugenie’s mother finally arrives on the scene, she is gang-raped (her daughter both participates in the assault and cheers it on). She is then given the following death sentence: a man with late-stage syphilis (a disease that was uncurable and fatal at the time) is summoned to ejaculate into the mother’s vagina and ass. Both orifices are then sewn together with needle and thread (without anesthesia, obviously), in order to keep the pestilence in, and likely as a symbolic, punitive measure—both for giving birth and for attempting to protect her daughter from the free exercise of carnal pleasure. The scene has a viciousness that never fails to take me by surprise—and this even compared to the many torturous rapes and murders in Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.

  Kristeva’s term for this violent psychic expulsion of the maternal (dramatized in Philosophy as a sadistic, elongated matricide) is abjection. And while the abjection of the maternal may be necessary, according to Kristeva, to form a subject, its expulsion can never be seamlessly accomplished. The abjected maternal returns, via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt, the inchoate but harrowing sense that one has lost, left, or killed something critical. (And here we might note that Evenson’s first book of stories, Altmann’s Tongue— the volume that got him in so much trouble at Brigham Young—takes its epigraph from Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.)

  Personally I have no idea why this abjection or matricide (or the Oedipal complex itself, for that matter) need be the sine qua non of our individuation. As with most psychoanalytical concepts, the question of whether they are descriptive, prescriptive, transiently useful, or simply lunatic always strikes me as wide open. Nonetheless, it seems clear enough that many or most models of Western selfhood place a repressed crime (or the repressed desire to commit one) at their core. Indeed, modernity itself could in some sense be defined as that which privileges disassociation from—even the violent destruction of—that which has come before, rather than that which secures its reverent continuation (in which case murder, particularly of a parent, is a fitting trope).

  In other words, in placing Oedipus at the center of his psychic modeling, Freud did much more than privilege patricide (and the subsequent sexual possession of the mother) as the defining desires of the (male) subject. He also placed the questions “What have I done?,” “Am I a criminal?,” and “Do my deepest and darkest desires make me a criminal?,” at the heart of self-inquiry (see the plot of Memento). As Adam Phillips has put it (in Terrors and Experts), “Oedipus is so important in psychoanalysis because he does something that can be found out, something he can know about. . . . The fictional Oedipus becomes the paradigmatic seeker and avoider of truth, and therefore the sustainer of the idea that there are truths.” No wonder this paradigmatic seeker and avoider of truth recurs so often in art and literature as our hero, or antihero. His circuitous journey toward and away from unbearable self-knowledge makes for compelling drama, as it turns our lives into detective stories; our innermost selves, into culprits.

  While seemingly custom-made for Screenwriting 101, this version of both self and self-knowledge can have an utterly flattening, reductive effect on the myriad mysteries of being a human being. “After all,” Phillips writes, “what else can we do with crimes—and with people—but find them out?” And here, Phillips explains, is where the Enlightenment Freud and the post-Freudian Freud part ways: the former is more interested in what the patient cannot afford to let himself know that he knows (the repression of which constitutes the unconscious); the latter recognizes that the acquiring of knowledge is but one means of knowing, and further, that knowing itself is but one mode of experiencing. In which case, as Phillips explains, psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art.

  AFTER ALL, the assertion that we ourselves, or the business of love, or the universe at large, or a religion (such as Islam or Christianity), are essentially cruel or essentially compassionate, essentially “nice” or essentially “not nice,” essentially peaceful or essentially violent, essentially optimistic or pessimistic, or essentially any one thing at all, is but an assertion—one whose pretension to certitude usually incites rather than terminates debate. Perhaps you could even call such an assertion a choice, albeit one mitigated by an amalgam of experience, education, genetic disposition, ideology, mood, chance, and will. But whatever it is, it cannot be an empirical measurement, or a verdict reached after all the evidence is in.

  Freud knew this, which accounts for his ever-changing conjectures about the complex drives that propel and perplex the human animal. But that didn’t stop him from making radical pronouncements throughout his career on the human condition—pronouncements that have, over time, been isolated from their contexts and congealed for many into “fact,” as if their emanation from an entity named Freud miraculously stamped them with a lasting, objective authority. “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved,” Freud famously wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). “They are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.”

  Men do these things, it is true. But men are also gentle creatures who want to be loved (see Hitler, nuzzling his cat). Due to Freud’s own revelatory, relentless emphasis on ambivalence, his life’s work, when taken together, ends up providing a portrait of the human animal that does more to explain “why we deplore cruelty in some cases and relish it in others” (see Richard Rorty) than that of almost any other thinker. The more compelling question becomes not “what” or “which” we essentially are, but why, how, and when we choose to believe that one aspect of the human condition edges out, invalidates, or annihilates another.

  This question applies not only to the human condition, but also to that of the divine. “I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture,” writes Sister Prejean, in an attempt to explain her anti–capital punishment activism in light of Christian theology. “Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power to torture and kill.” Fair enough. But it’s no wonder that more and more often Prejean finds herself “steering away from such futile discussions,” and trying instead “to articulate what [she] personally believe[s] about Jesus and the ethical thrust he gave to humankind: an impetus toward compassion, a preference for disarming enemies without humil
iating and destroying them, and a solidarity with poor and suffering people.”

  This belief is a choice, or a focus, and one with a purpose. It is essentially pragmatic, and I respect Prejean’s willingness to put that pragmatism front and center. When we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are—or so said pragmatist William James. Prejean has been brilliant at utilizing this mode of belief and action, and it has served the world well. But as theology, it will likely convince no one. Which is fine, so long as one is willing to turn away from theology, and toward the bewildering but urgent maze of habits, choices, refusals, aspirations, and actions that constitutes a living ethics.

  IN HER book Lovingkindness, Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg tells a story that offers a refreshing alternative to the saga of seeking the truth about ourselves, especially the truth of our inherent goodness or badness. “When I first practiced meditation with Sayadaw U Pandita, in 1984, I went through a period of disturbing memories about all the terrible things I had ever done. . . . I said, ‘You know, I just keep thinking of event after event—all of these bad things I’ve done. I feel terrible. I feel horrible. I feel awful.’ U Pandita looked at me and asked, ‘Well, are you finally seeing the truth about yourself?’ I was shocked at his response. Even though I was enveloped in self-judgment and criticism, something in his comment made me want to challenge it. I thought to myself, ‘No, I’m not seeing the truth about myself.’ And then he simply said, ‘Stop thinking about it.’ Only later would I understand the wisdom of his advice.”

  In short, attempts to nail down “who we really are” most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas (i.e., humans are “really” self-interested first and foremost, therefore a self-serving capitalism is the system most suitable for us; humans are “hard-wired” for aggression and conflict, therefore some form of warfare will always be with us; or, conversely, “the kind life—the life lived in instinctive sympathy with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others—is the life we are more inclined to live,” as argued by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor in On Kindness). In light of this situation, Sayadaw U Pandita’s advice to “stop thinking about it”—or, perhaps, to stop talking about it—can start to seem like the best advice indeed. At the very least, following such advice makes space for different conversations, different questions.