RADICAL VIOLENCE

'Besides considerations as to the possible transfers and promotions likely to result from Ivan Ilych's death, the mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, "it is he who is dead and not I."'-- Tolstoy, THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH.

I was reminded of Tolstoy's insight into human attitudes on death-- perhaps THE fundamental attitude, as one can imagine it translating to any time or culture-- the other day while reading Harold Schechter's SAVAGE PASTIMES. Schechter, both an academic and the author of several books on true crime, presents ample evidence to the effect that since recorded history humankind has always nurtured a fascination with murder, torture and violence. This in itself sounds unremarkable, but Schechter is refreshing in that he doesn't explain the fascination as resulting from class or racial inequities, as do Marxist critics like Patrick Brantlinger, or on repression of sex, as did sometime comics-critic Gershon Legman, whose theories I've refuted here. PASTIMES even quotes large sections of the now-obscure Legman to demonstrate that, contrary to Legman's expectations, Americans' fascination with violence did not simply fade away once the pop culture of the Sexual Revolution made both sex and sexual entertainments far more widely available to the average consumer.

As I continued to read account after account of ordinary goobers, whether modern or medieval, fetishizing mementos of hideous murders and those that committed them, the Tolstoy passage occured to me as a way of explaining such a constant phenomenon. Most critics explain the love of human audiences for gore and murder through the compensation theory, which assumes that audience-members exorcise their real aggressions by viewing fictional ones. This explanation almost certainly accounts for some of the appeal of fictional violence, but it seems most applicable to adventure-oriented stories, in which the audience's identification figure, the hero, usually wins out against his enemies. It seems less broadly applicable for the horror genre, or any genres that take the same basic approach as horror (for instance, black comedy), insofar as the identification characters are as likely as not to be destroyed, driven insane, etc.

Tolstoy observes that, however restrained it may be, the most fundamental emotion one feels upon hearing of another's death is that of relief: "it is he who is dead and not I." To my knowledge, there have been few if any critics who have addressed the radical of violence in fiction-- not only pop fiction, but also in canonical literary works-- as a way of watching others go, usually not too gently, into that "good night," before we ourselves have to. That insight in itself is not that revelatory, but it might be more meaningful when coupled with a deeper understanding of the power-relations that dominate life, until one no longer has a life to be so dominated.