The Rhetorical Strategies of Obscene Violence in Four Novels Steven Monk Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School June 2019 Intimate Fictions: The Rhetorical Strategies of Obscene Violence in Four Novels Steven Monk Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Monk, Steven, "Intimate Fictions: The Rhetorical Strategies of Obscene Violence in Four Novels" (2019). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4966. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4966 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. INTIMATE FICTIONS: THE RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF OBSCENE VIOLENCE IN FOUR NOVELS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Steven Monk B.A., Northeastern Illinois University, 2013 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2017 August 2019 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..........................................................................................................................iii INTRODUCTION: THE INTIMACY OF VIOLENCE ......................................................1 CHAPTER 1. FAILURE AND SOCIAL DEATH: CROSS AND HIS CREATOR IN RICHARD WRIGHT’S THE OUTSIDER .......................................................................10 CHAPTER 2. “THE DARK AGES IN THE COLONIES”: FANTASY AND THE NEO-SLAVE NARRATIVE IN MARLON JAMES’S THE BOOK OF NIGHT WOMEN ................................................................................................................................26 CHAPTER 3. THE AUTHORITY OF IGNORANCE: SCIENTISM AND GNOSTICISM IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S BLOOD MERIDIAN .................................49 CHAPTER 4. THE FAMILY AND THE BODY POLITIC: RACIAL AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN BIOSHOCK INFINITE ...............................................................................69 CONCLUSION: THE RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF VIOLENCE ............................87 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................94 VITA .....................................................................................................................................113 ii ABSTRACT Richard Wright, Marlon James, Cormac McCarthy and Ken Levine are each celebrated in their respective fields but notorious for their obscene depictions of violence. Contrary to trauma theorists’ claims that violence shatters language and cannot be spoken, these writers speak violence in its most disturbing forms: torn eyeballs, dead infants, forced fecal consumption and mechanized rape. I argue that obscene violence, much like obscene language, creates a space of intimacy in which transgressive, subversive and oppositional thoughts may be spoken. By alienating their texts from the larger reading public, these writers entice a smaller group of sympathetic readers to develop affective attachments to their stories. In other words, repulsion and attraction, disgust and fascination, segregate the public into insiders and outsiders. Obscene violence carves out an intimate space of representation, a magic circle open to the public but separate from the public. Because obscene violence will not be spoken about in polite society, its employment in these texts imbues the writer’s ideas with the power of the secret, the sacred and the criminal. Such violence works as a rhetorical device in service of larger critiques against American and Jamaican cultural, political and religious institutions. Literary violence does not necessarily entail a direct critique of violence. Because violence plays an oversized role in American and Jamaican history, particularly in the foundation of race and racial difference, images of violence can be attached to a multitude of ideas. Within this study, these ideas include the white fascination with race novels, the mythology of Jamaican Maroons, the dogma of the Catholic Church and the causal link between videogames and adolescent aggression. iii INTRODUCTION: THE INTIMACY OF VIOLENCE Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) opens with the narrator-protagonist, in a fit of drunken rage, cutting his cat’s eye with a pen-knife. The fury which compelled him “thrilled every fibre of my being” (8). Retelling the event produces an almost orgasmic response: “I blush, I burn, I shudder” (8). His guilt devolves into “the spirit of PERVERSENESS,” which he labels “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties” (8). He asks who among us has not done the same thing a hundred times before, has not committed wrong solely for the pleasure of committing wrong. The narrator romanticizes the eyeball slashing even while regretting it, borrowing from the language and sensory responses of lust and eros. By asking us to admit we have acted the same way, by claiming that this compulsion is ancient and unshakeable, the narrator cultivates a sort of perverse intimacy between the reader and himself. The notion that literary violence produces intimacy may sound strange. Many readers who encounter such a passage would simply close the book. I sympathize with those readers. But that forced separation between the repulsed reader and the attracted reader, the outsider and the insider, reinforces the intimacy of the textual space. The narrator has shared a feeling and admitted an action which are both socially unacceptable. By doing so, he has designated the text as a private space, an intimate space, where the socially unacceptable is accepted. The text is not actually a private space, of course. The text is published for the public. But the text functions like Johan Huizinga’s play-ground in Homo Ludens (1938), sometimes referred to as the magic circle, a space ostensibly open to the public but designated as separate, sacred, different, where the rules of society may not apply. When a narrator opens a story with a perverse act of violence, they are pointing out the line between acceptable social discourse and the unacceptable discourse of the text. Violating an eyeball, the only fleshy part of our bodies unprotected by skin, holds some sort of special power as an aesthetic device. Anyone who has seen Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) knows the sort of instant revulsion that a sliced eyeball can produce. Yet viewers find that image impossible to forget. If a writer can attach an argument or philosophy to such an unforgettable image, that idea gains a remarkable amount of rhetorical power. A violent image may be used to repel a reader from a particular idea, or it may be used to attract them to it. This notion of a repulsive or attractive image resembles the theory of abjection in Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982). But Kristeva’s theory would overstate the image’s effect by associating it with fear and jouissance, when more appropriate terms would be disgust and fascination. The abject image is dangerous but not threatening. We can sit down and study it. And the argument attached to the violent image does not need to be about violence itself. “The Black Cat” tells us relatively little about animal cruelty or spousal abuse, but it tells us a great deal about how alcoholics compartmentalize their guilt. The graphic disfigurement of a cat’s eye simply adds substance and weight to Poe’s loathing of alcoholism. The rhetorical weight of violence in literature works like the spectacular weight of violence in society, as a means of impressing upon the witness the power and authority of the actor. Arthur Redding refers to the weight of violence “as the ballast of ideologies; as in the semi-secret cargo of a slave trader’s ship” (4-5). The actual violence of the slave ship serves as a balancing force between the African power of the enslaved and the European power of the slaver. The violence impresses on the slave the social rules and relations they must abide by in the New World. The 1 violence “seasons” the enslaved and promotes the security of the plantation, a space under constant threat of collapse from slave insurrection. Middle Passage violence works like Kristeva’s theory of abjection, like the body’s nauseous expulsion of anything which might blur the line between life and death, between white power and black power. But Redding’s strategic reference to the horrors of the slave ship better exemplifies the literary violence this project examines. He deploys the rhetorical weight of Middle Passage violence to make a philosophical critique of ideology itself: “there is blood in the hold of every way of seeing” (5). In Redding’s anarchist philosophy, the slave trader symbolizes any dynamic system which exercises authority through coercion. Celebrated authors in recent American and Jamaican literature have incorporated perverse acts of literary violence to intensify their philosophical critiques of American and Jamaican institutions. The four subjects of my dissertation—Richard Wright, Marlon James, Cormac McCarthy and Ken Levine—have each been praised as among the greatest writers of their respective cohorts, and