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PART 5 Conclusions and Future Directions for Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War

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CHAPTER Th e Extremes of Confl ict in 24 Literature: Violence, Homicide, and War

Joseph Carroll

Abstract Literature depicts emotions arising from conflict and makes them available to readers, who experience them vicariously. Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted events alone but also, and more important, in the interpretation of depicted events: in the author’s treatment of the depicted events; the reader’s response to both the depicted events and the author’s treatment; and the author’s anticipation of the reader’s responses. This chapter outlines possible stances toward violence, makes an argument for the decisive structural significance of violence in both life and literature, and then presents a representative sampling of violent acts in literature. The examples from literature are organized into the main kinds of human relationships: one’s relation to oneself (suicide); sexual rivals, lovers, and marital partners; family members (parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins); communities (violence within social groups); and warfare (violence between social groups). Key Words: literature, emotions, interpretation, author, reader, suicide, lovers, family, community, war

Introduction characteristics of human nature. Literature arises What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the out of and depicts human nature, so confl ict is inte- clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel gral to literature, too. works of nature! Literary works sometimes depict hostile encoun- —Darwin, 1903; 1: 94; letter to Joseph Hooker of ters between alien groups, but more frequently, the July 13, 1856 emotional interest of literary works arises out of confl icts among people who are intimately related Th e world is a violent place. More are born, in every to one another. Such confl icts are a natural prod- generation, than can survive. Natural selection fi l- uct of inclusive fi tness. Like other animals, human ters out weaker organisms. Among creatures with beings share fi tness interests with their mates and nervous systems, those that do not survive seldom off spring. Except for identical twins, though, the go quietly into that good night. Th ey struggle and fi tness interests of even the most closely related kin often suff er horribly before they die. Many become are not identical. Inclusive fi tness produces a per- food for other animals. All compete for scarce petual drama in which intimacy and opposition, resources against other creatures, including mem- cooperation and confl ict, are closely intertwined. bers of their own species. Human beings, despite Th e evolved reproductive strategies of men all their technological and cultural contrivances, include both paternal investment, which requires have not escaped this universal struggle. Confl ict mate guarding, and low-investment short-term and struggle are integral to the evolved and adapted mating, which often requires eluding the vigilance

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of other men. Men form coalitions for coopera- interpretation of depicted events: in the author’s tive endeavor but also compete for mates (Geary treatment of the depicted events; the reader’s & Flinn, 2001). Women have evolved strategies response to both the depicted events and the author’s for securing a bonded attachment with men will- treatment; and the author’s anticipation of the read- ing to commit resources, but they have also evolved er’s responses. It is worth pausing to emphasize the strategies for taking advantage of short-term mating fundamentally social and psychological character of opportunities with other men, especially men who literature. Meaning in literature cannot be reduced have higher genetic quality than their own mates to plot. Meaning consists in an imaginative expe- (Buss, 2000, 2003; Geary, 1998). Th e pleasurable rience at least partially shared between an author feelings associated with sexual relations are thus and a reader. When we analyze narrative/mimetic necessarily tinged with suspicion, jealousy, frustra- literature (stories, plays, and novels, as opposed to tion, and resentment. Much of the time, men and lyric poems), we have to consider the interplay of women manage workable compromises, but sexual perspectives among characters, authors, and readers: relations sometimes break down in rejection, vio- how characters regard one another, what they think lent emotional struggle, and physical abuse, includ- about one another, what the author thinks of them, ing murder (Buss, 2000; Daly & Wilson, 1988). what the author anticipates readers will think, and A parent and child both have a fi tness interest in what readers actually do think about the characters the child surviving and reproducing, but a child has and also about the author’s responses to the char- a 100% genetic investment in itself; each parent has acters. Consequently, in this chapter, the literary only a 50% genetic investment in a child. Mother– examples do not consist only in plot summaries. child confl ict begins in the mother’s womb, with Th e chapter also takes account of authorial stances the embryo struggling to acquire more resources and readers’ responses. Authorial stance and reader from the mother than the mother is willing to give. response are the substance of literary experience; Siblings share fi tness interests but also compete for they are, accordingly, the proper subject matter of resources. Parents must often distribute resources literary criticism. across multiple off spring, all of whom want more After outlining a range of stances toward psy- than an equal share. Parents often prefer some chil- chopathic violence, this chapter makes an argument dren to others, and they must also make choices for the decisive structural signifi cance of violence in between eff ort devoted to parenting and eff ort both life and literature. Th e chapter then presents a devoted to mating. Such tensions can and do erupt representative sampling of violent acts in literature. into homicidal violence, in both life and literature. Th e examples from literature are organized into the Th e confl icts generated from diff ering fi tness main kinds of human relationships: one’s relation interests manifest at the proximal level as motives to oneself (suicide); sexual rivals, lovers, and mar- that are driven by emotions: desire, love, jealousy, ital partners; family members (parents, children, guilt, shame, frustration, resentment, rage, and siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins); communities hatred (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Ekman, 2003; (violence within social groups); and warfare (vio- Plutchik, 2003). Literature depicts such emotions, lence between social groups). evokes them, and makes them available to readers, who experience them vicariously (Oatley, 1999, Stances Toward Cruelty 2002, 2003; Tan, 2000). An author and a reader Psychopathic cruelty is relatively rare (Baumeister, inhabit an imagined world created by the author, 1996; Grossman, 2009). Even in genocidal warfare, who chooses a subject, adopts a stance toward that people seldom regard their own behavior as inten- subject, organizes the presentation of the subject, tional harm infl icted for pleasure. Instead they and modulates style and tone to aff ect the reader’s rationalize violence as self-defense or as a means responses. Readers can passively register the images toward a greater good. Th ey also minimize or turn a and sensations thus evoked, but they can also stand blind eye toward the suff ering of victims and instead apart from them, situating them in their own ana- magnify threats to themselves (Baumeister, 1996; lytic and evaluative frameworks. Literary criticism is Smith, 2007). Studies of soldiers in warfare support only the most explicit and highly developed form of the contention that most people in postagricultural readers’ refl ections on the imagined worlds created societies are on the whole reluctant to harm oth- by authors. ers. Even after heavy conditioning, and even when Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted they are themselves in danger, many soldiers never events alone but also, and more important, in the fi re their weapons, or they fi re to miss (Grossman,

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2009; Marshall, 1947). (Wade [2006] and Cochran Oates’s frequently anthologized story “Where Are and Harpending [2009] argue that sedentism, a pre- You Going, Where Have You Been?” requisite to agricultural and industrial economies, A few narratives adopt a structurally ironic has selected for personalities less prone to violence.) stance, taking psychopaths as ostensible protagonists Psychopaths, people who actively enjoy killing and but treating them with implicit contempt and anger. feel no remorse, evidently constitute only about 2% Instances include Henry Fielding’s caustic 18th-cen- of modern male populations (Swank & Marchand, tury narrative about a professional criminal, Jonathan 1946; cited in Grossman, 2009, p. 44). A similar per- Wilde, and William Makepeace Th ackeray’s depic- centage would probably prevail among male literary tion of Barry Lyndon, a heartless rogue who leaves a authors, and a still smaller percentage among female trail of wreckage behind him. (Kubrick’s fi lmed ver- authors. Only a very few literary authors clearly sion of Barry Lyndon eliminates Th ackeray’s satiric invite readers to participate vicariously in sadistic stance and turns the story into a prettily fi lmed pica- pleasure. Th e Marquis de Sade, whose name is the resque adventure.) source for the term “sadism,” is one such author. Some writers are hard to locate clearly on either (See for instance One Hundred Days of Sodom.) In side of the divide between psychopathic and sym- the fi nal chapter of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork pathetic perspectives. Flannery O’Connor, for Orange, the fi rst-person narrator unconvincingly instance, a Catholic American writer from the disavows the gleeful psychopathic violence in the middle of the 20th century, envisions homicidal main body of the novel. In contemporary fi ction, violence as a means of transcending ordinary social the most prominent overtly psychopathic novel is life, which she regards as hypocritical and spiritu- Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Film directors ally shallow. Her story, “A Good Man Is Hard To attracted to sadistic cruelty include Stanley Kubrick Find”—one of the most widely anthologized of all and Brian de Palma. Kubrick produced a fi lm ver- short stories—depicts a psychopathic killer, Th e sion of A Clockwork Orange; and both Kubrick and Misfi t, as a religious skeptic. Th e protagonist of the de Palma produced fi lm versions of Stephen King story is an old woman who achieves, in terror for novels, eliminating, in both cases, the compassion her life, a moment of Christian charity toward her that gives emotional depth to King’s explorations of killer. Th e protagonists of O’Connor’s novels Th e horror (Kubrick, Th e Shining; de Palma, Carrie). In Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood both achieve most literary works that depict psychopathic cru- spiritual metamorphosis through acts of homicidal elty, the author’s stance registers revulsion against violence. cruelty. Among contemporary writers held in high Baumeister (1996) defi nes “evil” most sim- esteem, Cormac McCarthy gives an exceptionally ply as “the adversary of good” (p. 67). We tend prominent place to graphic violence. Th roughout to regard ourselves and our associates as good McCarthy’s novels, gaining a tough-minded, realis- people, and our enemies as bad people. Our ene- tic perspective means accepting the ultimate, deci- mies, who have their own distinct points of view, sive reality of homicidal violence. Th e dead do not reverse the nomenclature. In fi ction, the “good” is get to establish moral norms. In All the Pretty Horses, typically embodied in protagonists—agents with McCarthy’s protagonist is a young man who gets whom readers are invited to sympathize—and evil thrown into a brutal Mexican prison. To survive, he is embodied in their adversaries, that is, in antag- has to accept that lethal violence takes priority over onists (Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, & Kruger, all moral considerations, but his struggle to come 2008; Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, Kruger, & to terms with the necessity of his situation tacitly Georgiades, 2010; Johnson, Carroll, Gottschall, & locates his homicidal behavior in a moral con- Kruger, 2008, 2011). Among literary characters, text. Th e protagonist of No Country for Old Men is most psychopaths are antagonists, for instance: humane and warm hearted. He ultimately falls vic- Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello; the malignant dwarf tim to a psychopath who tempts readers to identify Daniel Quilp in Charles Dickens’s Th e Old Curiosity with his stance of cool command. A similar kind of Shop; Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s temptation for the reader is at work in Shakespeare’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the Catholic priest who tor- depiction of Richard III. Like the protagonist of A tures Dr. Monygham in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo; Clockwork Orange, Richard is witty and droll, though the renegade Blue Duck in Larry McMurtry’s west- vicious. Even when dominant characters are purely ern Lonesome Dove; and the serial killer Arnold destructive, they naturally tempt readers to iden- Friend (based on a real person) in Joyce Carol tify with them, but Shakespeare and McCarthy also

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include characters who off er alternative perspectives. Independence); the South had an economy heavily Both authors leave it to the reader’s own strength dependent on slaves held in place by coercive force; of mind to decide how to feel about the characters. the regional political confl ict between the North In Blood Meridian, based on a historical event from and South was fi nally suppressed only in a bloody the middle of the 19th century, McCarthy depicts civil war; and during the last century America par- a band of psychopathic killers who cut a swath of ticipated in the two largest wars in history, thus con- random violence through Mexico and the American solidating, for half a century, its now rapidly fading Southwest. Th e protagonist is a boy who had been position as the dominant military and economic traumatized by violence from the time of his earli- power in the world. est memories. Th ough tagging along with the band, Th e picturesque landscapes of Europe— in a psychologically numbed condition, he is not crumbling castles, walled towns overgrown with ultimately absorbed into mindless and heartless moss and ivy—are the quaint relics of a history of brutality. In Th e Road, a futuristic novel situated in mass violence that shaped the demographic and an American landscape devastated by an ecologi- political landscape. On the largest scale, world cal holocaust, possibly nuclear, the moral lines are history consists in migrations and invasions: huge more clearly demarcated. Th e protagonists, a father masses of armed people descending on other peo- and his son, are struggling to survive in an environ- ples, killing many of them, enslaving others, and ment dominated by cannibalistic bands. Th e emo- gradually merging with the survivors. Instances on tional focal point of the story is the father’s devotion a continental scale include the barbarian hordes that to his son. Th ough McCarthy is preoccupied with inundated the Roman Empire; the Mongol inva- violence and often noncommittal in his own emo- sions of China and Europe; the European invasions tional responses, it seems safe to say that he is not of North and South America; the Bantu expan- ultimately a sadist along the lines of Burgess, Ellis, sion south and east in Africa; and the English col- de Palma, and Kubrick. He just pushes the reader onization of Australia and New Zealand (Gibbon, harder, in morally challenging ways, than most 1776–1789/1994; Roberts, 2003; Turchin, 2007; writers do. Wells, 1921). Great Britain is the product of mul- tiple genocidal events: the Germanic invasions that How Important Is Violence in Literature? overwhelmed the Romanized Celts, who had them- Within social groups, the exercise of power tends selves pushed aside the Picts; the Danish incursions heavily toward containing and defl ecting lethal vio- into Anglo-Saxon lands; the brutal Norman con- lence (Boehm, 1999). In virtually all social groups, quest that subjugated the Anglo-Saxons and Danes; the amount of time spent in violent encounters is and the English conquests of Scotland and Ireland, small relative to the time spent in peaceful interac- especially Ireland (Davies, 1999; Johnson, 1980). tion. Nonetheless, because violence is the ultimate World War II was initiated chiefl y by German and sanction against behavior that violates group norms, Japanese eff orts once again to change the shape of the potential for violence has a powerful organizing populations over whole continents (Davies, 2006; infl uence on behavior within a group. A similar point Gilbert, 1989; Keegan, 1990; Snyder, 2010; Spector, can be made with respect to interactions between 1984). Both before and during the war, the Soviets social groups. One possible way to look at collec- reshaped and redistributed their vast population by tive violence is to suppose that history consists in starving, shooting, or deporting millions of their periods of peace and stability occasionally disturbed own citizens (Snyder, 2010). Th e period of rela- by military confl ict. It would be more accurate to tive geopolitical stability produced by World War II say that periods of peace and stability are contained will not last forever. Expanding global population is and organized by periods of mass violence (Potts & placing increasing pressure on scarce resources, and Hayden, 2008, pp. 12, 268). Consider American that kind of pressure has always been a chief cause history. Americans have not had a war within their for the mass movement of populations. Sometime territorial boundaries since the Civil War, 150 years within the present century, the geopolitical land- ago, but the country was founded on aggressive scape will perhaps be once again transformed by acts of territorial acquisition from the natives; the cataclysmic upheavals (Friedman, 2009; Wilson, natives the fi rst colonists encountered were just the 1998, ch. 12). survivors of about 15,000 years of savage tribal war- Th e case for the organizing power of violence on fare; the nation came to birth, as a nation, in an a world-historical scale has a bearing on even the act of collective, organized violence (Th e War of most domestic and polite form of literature: the

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“novel of manners.” Novels by authors such as Jane theme is taken up again in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Austen and Anthony Trollope (both British writers probably the single most widely known work of of the 19th century) contain very little overt vio- modern Western literature. Contemplating his lence. Pride and Prejudice and Barchester Towers, for crime, Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, laments, “O, my instance, chiefl y concern themselves with confl icts off ence is rank, it smells to heaven; / It hath the over mate choice and social status. But these domestic primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder” dramas take place within a sociopolitical landscape (3.3.36–38; for an evolutionary interpretation of that is the stabilized result of acts of domination: Hamlet, see Carroll, 2011b, pp. 123–147). the domination of whole populations over others, So also with the Greeks. Th e oldest classic that in fashioning the British nation; the domination of has come down to us is Homer’s Iliad. Much of the whole population by an elite class living off the the Iliad consists in graphic depictions of the grisly proceeds of agricultural labor; and the political and forms of death produced by barbarian warriors religious upheavals, culminating in the English Civil wielding edged and pointed weapons (Gottschall, War, that created a national church and associated it 2008b). Before the Greeks could set sail to rape, with the elite political class descended from military murder, and pillage among the Trojans, the Greek barons who had domineered over a population of leader, Agamemnon, had to placate the Gods by serfs. Austen’s novels take place during the era of the sacrifi cing his daughter Iphigenia. And thereon Napoleonic Wars. No battles are depicted, but offi - hangs a tale, or series of tales: the Oresteia, three cers of the army and navy fi gure very largely among plays by Aeschylus (Agamemnon, Th e Libation the casts of characters. In Persuasion, the male pro- Bearers, and Th e Eumenides). Th e act of child sac- tagonist, Captain Wentworth, has become rich off rifi ce sets off a chain reaction: Agamemnon is mur- the spoils of the French vessels he has defeated in dered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, battle. Th e polite manners and well-regulated social Aegisthus; and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are mur- hierarchies in domestic novels are like the rock for- dered by Clytemnestra’s son Orestes. In addition to mations produced by molten lava once it has cooled. being Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus had a second Th e exercise of social power in such novels has stabi- motive for murdering Agamemnon: Agamemnon lized, so that violence is no longer often necessary, and Aegisthus are cousins; Agamemnon’s father but violence helped create the stabilized social order Atreus had murdered Aegisthus’s brothers, who, like and still sustains it through foreign wars. Aegisthus, were Atreus’s nephews. (Th e murderous Th e novel of manners is built on a foundation confl ict between Atreus and his brother Th yestes is of cooled and congealed violence. Th e action in the subject of a play, Th yestes, by the Roman play- much canonical literature is violence still hot and wright Seneca the Younger.) liquid. (“Canonical” literature is literature that has If we fast forward to the Christian Middle had a seminal, creative force that makes itself felt Ages, skipping past the derivative drama of Rome in subsequent literature.) For the literature of the and the illiterate centuries of barbarian chaos, the West—Europe, the Americas, Australia, and those most prominent landmark is Dante’s Inferno, which portions of Asia, especially Japan, that have come consists largely of graphic, gruesome descriptions under the cultural sway of the West—canonical lit- of physical torture, varied with monstrous inge- erature has two chief wellsprings: ancient Greece nuity, in the nine circles of hell. Fast forward once and the Bible. Both sources off er abundant enter- again, and the next major landmark in Western tainment for readers with a taste for what the pro- literature is Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Roman his- tagonist of A Clockwork Orange fondly describes as tory plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra “ultraviolence.” hinge on assassination and war. Th e English history Th e Old Testament consists largely in chroni- plays chronicle the Wars of the Roses, a drawn- cling the wars, conquests, defeats, and enslavements out sequence of intrigues, betrayals, assassinations, of an ancient pastoral people who commonly prac- and bloody battles. Th e major tragedies (Othello, ticed genocide against their neighbors (Headlam Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear) turn on murder, Wells, 2011). In the story of Noah’s Flood, God war, torture, or all three. Move up to the 19th cen- goes the Hebrews one better, wiping out not just a tury, a period in which representational/mimetic lit- few neighboring tribes but the whole human race, erature is dominated by the novel, and ask: What is all but Noah and his family. Th e fi rst family drama widely regarded as the greatest of all novels? War and in the Bible, after Adam and Eve are cast out of par- Peace, many would say. Th e central subject in War adise, is the murder of one brother by another. Th at and Peace is Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the

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retreat in which most of his army perished. Tolstoy’s topics in textbooks of evolutionary psychology and chief competitor for title of greatest Russian nov- also common themes in literature. In this section, elist is Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment is about these categories are used to organize a sampling of a young man who uses an axe to murder two old depictions of violence in literature. women; Th e Brothers Karamazov is about a malig- nant old man who is murdered by his illegitimate, Violence Against Oneself psychopathic son. And in our own time, the last Understanding Suicide From an major canonical American novel that formed a Evolutionary Perspective shaping imaginative experience for a whole genera- People seem to have a natural inhibition against tion, many people feel, is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, harming their own kind and a much greater inhi- a war novel full of violent deaths. bition against harming themselves. Th ey often In answer then, to the question, How important overcome both inhibitions, but not without a is violence to literature? we can say that violence is psychological cost. When we speak of “violence,” as important in literature as it is in life. Like sex, the connotations of that word do not limit them- even when it does not take much time, proportion- selves to actions. “Violence” suggests high stress: ally, it can have a decisive impact on subsequent intense passion and confl ict, including inner confl ict. events. Gloucester in King Lear jokes that there Popular “action” movies are imaginatively uninter- was “good sport” at the making of his illegitimate esting because they falsely depict violence as easy; son Edmund, but then Edmund betrays Gloucester they are emotionally shallow. Literary depictions of to his enemies, who gouge out Gloucester’s eyes. violence are most interesting when they evoke the McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove off ers an illustration of greatest degree of inner struggle. No form of inner the same point. Th e protagonists are two middle- struggle is more intense than that which culminates aged cowboys, former Texas Rangers, on a cattle in taking one’s own life. drive. At one point, they must fulfi ll the unpleasant Most forms of violence can plausibly be described task of hanging one of their old friends. Th e friend as extensions of adaptive behavior—sexual jealousy, is good natured but morally lax and had inadver- struggles for dominance or resources. Not suicide. tently become involved with a band of psychopathic Eff orts to explain self-infl icted death as a strategy for killers. Over the years, the amount of time the three propagating one’s genes have a strained look about friends had spent in genial exchange was much more them (deCatanzaro, 1981). From an evolutionary extensive than the few minutes required to perform standpoint, not all signifi cant features of human the hanging, but the hanging is more important, physiology and behavior need be regarded as adap- practically, than anything that had preceded it; tive. Illnesses such as stroke, cancer, heart attack, moreover, it sets the moral quality of the relation- and diabetes are not adaptations; they are break- ship into stark relief, revealing that the executioners, downs in complex adaptive systems. Th at does not unlike their condemned friend, have a severe com- mean that evolutionary explanations are irrelevant. mitment to a moral code. To understand how and why a system breaks down, Th e emotional intensity and decisive practical one must understand the function for which it was character of homicidal violence invest it with spe- designed. Adaptation by means of natural selection cial signifi cance as evidence for underlying force in is the default explanation for complex functional human mental and emotional life. Hence the very organization (Pinker, 1997; Tooby & Cosmides, large role violence plays in literature. 1992). It also provides the necessary explanatory context for dysfunctional behavior. Literary Depictions of Violence in the Humans have a uniquely developed sense of self- Phases of Human Life History: A Sampling awareness that derives from the evolution of the Beneath all variation in the details of organi- neocortex. Individual persons have a sense of per- zation, the life history of every species forms a sonal identity continuously developing over time, reproductive cycle. In the case of human beings, and they consciously locate themselves as indi- successful parental care produces children capable, viduals within social networks and within nature. when grown, of forming adult pair bonds, becom- Self-awareness facilitates planning and actions ing functional members of a community, and caring that require shared images of collective purpose for children of their own. Survival, mating, parent- (Hawkins & Blakeslee, 2004; Lane, 2009, ch. 9; ing, and social life thus form natural categories in Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). the organization of human life. Th ey are common Self-awareness is evidently functional; it is complex,

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expensive, universal, and reliably developing. It is murder her husband, but the guilt torments them also fragile. Human beings are peculiarly vulnera- until they take poison to escape from themselves ble to conceptions of their own existence that cause and from each other. them intolerable mental pain. Grief, guilt, self- In most readers’ perceptions, Th érèse and her lover loathing, and the feeling of being trapped in impos- undergo a transition in role: from being objects of sible social situations or incurable mental illness can horror—merely villains—to being objects of tragic drive people to escape from their own minds in the pity. Th ey learn about the moral magnitude of their only way possible: escaping from life itself. crime only by committing it, but they do learn. As moral agents, they are thus radically distinct from Guilt characters such as Richard III, who commit horri- Literary suicides arising from simple grief are ble atrocities—Richard murders children—without relatively rare. Th ey do not reveal complex inner ever feeling a shiver of guilt. On the scale of guilt, confl icts and thus off er little insight into inner life. Shakespeare’s Macbeth falls somewhere between Romeo kills himself because he mistakenly thinks Othello and Richard III. Macbeth and his wife are Juliet is dead; Juliet kills herself because Romeo both tormented by guilt at the murders they have has killed himself. Lyrically moving, yes; psycho- committed; she kills herself, but Macbeth, like logically interesting, no. Guilt is a more complex Richard III, fi ghts on to the end. Such a death leaves emotion than simple sorrow and a more common most readers suspended between a feeling of tragic motive for literary suicide. In the best known of pathos and a feeling of satisfaction at a just retribu- all ancient plays, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Oedipus tion. Th at ambivalent feeling can be contrasted to stops short of suicide, but when he discovers that the simple emotions of grief and horror readers feel he has murdered his father and married his mother, when Macbeth’s henchmen murder Macduff ’s wife even though he had acted inadvertently, he gouges and children. (For convenience, responses to drama out his own eyes. Oedipus’s incestuous marriage are designated as responses of “readers,” though of produced a daughter, Antigone. In Sophocles’s course drama is in the fi rst instance intended to be Antigone, the autocrat Creon is Antigone’s uncle but watched and listened to, not read.) has Antigone walled up alive for defying his orders. Oscar Wilde’s Th e Picture of Dorian Gray has a She hangs herself. Creon’s son, who is in love with fantastic plot device: Dorian remains perpetually Antigone, kills himself when she dies. His mother young and beautiful, but his portrait becomes ever then kills herself. Antigone does not reach an emo- older and more hideously ugly, revealing the deprav- tional climax in Antigone’s despair, her lover’s grief, ity of his soul, which has been corrupted by cruelty, or the grief of his mother. It reaches emotional drugs, and sexual excess. Th e portrait is an external- climax in the tragic anguish of Creon, humbled, ized image of his conscience. Riven by unresolvable shattered, chastened, riven by guilt, with his vision confl icts between irrepressible desires and guilty of himself and the world fundamentally and per- self-loathing, he stabs the portrait in the heart; the manently changed. Shakespeare’s Othello murders portrait returns to its original state, and he him- Desdemona out of sexual jealousy. When he realizes self lies dead, old and vile. Self-loathing is also the that he has been duped and that she was innocent, motive for suicide in Th omas Hardy’s Th e Mayor of he fi rst mortally wounds the man who deceived him Casterbridge. In middle age, the title character fi nds and then kills himself, turning his sense of justice himself bereft of everything he had ever wanted or against himself. In Jean Racine’s 17th-century ver- achieved; he is an outcast, without social stand- sion of the Phaedra story (Phèdre), a stepmother ing, without friends, without family. He feels him- succumbs to a guilty passion for her stepson; when self despised and also despises himself. He starves her husband, Th eseus, brings down a fatal curse himself to death and leaves behind a will demand- on his son, unable to endure the commingled grief ing that no man remember him. He has not lived and guilt, she poisons herself. In Conrad’s novel a good or wise life, but having passed such severe Victory, the protagonist Axel Heyst loses faith in the judgment on himself, he leaves none for the reader woman he loves. Too late he realizes that while he to exercise in vindictive satisfaction. had been cynically repudiating her, she had been giving her life for him. He builds a funeral pyre for Social Failure her and uses it also to immolate himself. In Émile People are social animals. Even their most inti- Zola’s Th érèse Raquin, Th érèse has a passionate aff air mate feelings about their own identities refl ect their with her husband’s closest friend. She and her lover sense of their place in a social network. Some of the

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best-known literary suicides fi nd themselves caught their political identity. When they come to the end in a socially intolerable situation—entangled in for- of their political ropes, they all take their own lives. bidden or hopeless passions, pushed against the wall Cleopatra uses an adder to poison herself; Cassius for lack of money, or trapped in an ideological or and Brutus fall on their swords. Hyacinth Robinson, political impasse. in Henry James’s Th e Princess Casamassima, takes In Hippolytus, Euripides’s version of the Phaedra an oath to perform a political assassination. He story, Phaedra is caught out in an illicit passion for loses confi dence in the righteousness of his cause her stepson, realizes she is socially lost, and hangs but still feels bound by his oath; he resolves his herself. Virgil’s Aeneid, the most prestigious and dilemma by shooting himself. In Kate Chopin’s infl uential literary work of the Roman world, con- Th e Awakening, Edna Pontellier feels stifl ed by the tains a long episode in which Aeneas, fl eeing from sociosexual roles open to her in turn-of-the-century the havoc at Troy, lingers with the Carthaginian New Orleans; she swims out to sea and drowns. In Queen Dido. When he abandons her to pursue his Chinua Achebe’s Th ings Fall Apart, the protagonists destiny, she builds her own funeral pyre and dies on Okonkwo attempts to lead the people of his tribe in it. (Christopher Marlowe produced a dramatic ver- a revolt against White domination; when the rebel- sion of the story, and Purcell an operatic version.) lion fails to take fi re, he hangs himself. Dido dies not merely from sorrow but from the rec- Meaning in fi ction depends heavily on the ognition that she has hopelessly compromised her degree to which an author’s perspective corresponds position as queen. Anna Karenina leaves her hus- to that of any given character. Gissing’s perspective band for the man she loves. Discovering that pas- in New Grub Street is morose and self-pitying; he sion alone, outside the system of accepted social identifi es closely with Biff en, and even more closely roles, cannot sustain her, she throws herself under a with Biff en’s friend, Edward Reardon, who dies of train. Winnie Verloc, in Conrad’s Th e Secret Agent, illness brought on by hunger and exposure. Tolstoy’s murders her husband, fl ings herself at another man, stance toward Anna Karenina remains clinically and when he abandons her, throws herself over- detached, registering the vacuity of the social con- board from a ship. Lily Bart, the protagonist in ventions against which Anna rebels, but registering Edith Wharton’s Th e House of Mirth, cannot bring also the self-destructive character of her emotional herself to marry for money without love, or for love impulsiveness. Cather evokes Paul’s aestheticism in without money. She loses her place in the social a sensitive way, but she looks with cold irony at the world and poisons herself. In George Gissing’s New delusions with which he sustains his fragile arro- Grub Street, Harold Biff en, an impoverished author, gance. Emma Bovary, too, lives in fl attering delu- realizes he has no hope of winning a worldly wom- sions. Flaubert sustains a stance of cool contempt for an’s love. He poisons himself. In George Orwell’s her, as he does for most of his bourgeois characters, Burmese Days, John Flory, a colonial administra- in all of his fi ction. (His stance toward his protago- tor, is publicly humiliated and then rejected by the nists in Salammbô, in contrast, is almost tender. Th e woman he loves. He shoots himself and his dog. protagonists are barbarian warriors leading a slave In Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Emma revolt in the ancient Near East. Salammbô luxuri- Bovary takes arsenic because she has secretly gone ates in a voluptuous welter of vengeful cruelty on a into debt. Th e protagonist of Willa Cather’s story massive scale.) Emma’s death is particularly painful “Paul’s Case” is a sensitive adolescent aesthete, unfi t and ugly. Flaubert dwells on the physically repulsive for the world of middle-class squalor into which he details of death by arsenic. is born. He steals money, lives a few days in lux- An author’s moral and ideological views often ury, and then throws himself in front of a train. In strongly infl uence how he or she responds emo- Dickens’s Little Dorritt, the charlatan fi nancier Mr. tionally to characters. Euripides evidently expects Merdle—a Bernie Madoff of the Victorian period— readers to disapprove of Phaedra’s willingness to creates a speculative bubble and then cuts his throat sacrifi ce fi delity to a guilty passion. Her death seems before the bubble bursts. In Anthony Trollope’s Th e right and necessary. Virgil regards Dido as a tragic Prime Minister, Ferdinand Lopez plays a high-stakes victim of historical forces larger and more impor- game for money and social position, loses, and tant than individual passion. He sympathizes with throws himself in front of a train. her, but his sympathy is tinged with contempt. Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Trollope regards Lopez as both an outsider and a and Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar, are all polit- psychopathic adventurer. Lopez’s self-destruction ical people; their inner sense of self is bound up in reestablishes social equilibrium and thus serves as

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a form of resolution. For Dickens, Merdle virtu- man, morose and fearful. His oldest child, a vir- ally embodies fraudulent social pretense; Dickens tual personifi cation of clinical depression, hangs exults in vindictive glee over Merdle’s death. himself and his siblings. Jude eventually stays out Chopin seems to regard Edna Pontellier as a vic- in the rain long enough to get pneumonia, thus tim of a stifl ing social order—hence Edna’s current bringing his own misery to an end. Chief White status as an icon of resistance to patriarchy. James Halfoat, in Catch-22, uses the same strategy for elicits pity for the death of Hyacinth Robinson ending his life. and indignation against the maliciously manipula- tive anarchist who has placed him in an untenable Existential Despair position. Orwell’s John Flory is intelligently appre- Human beings are the only species with a brain ciative of Burmese culture; he serves Orwell as a so highly developed that they can locate them- foil for the unintelligent arrogance of the British selves in a cosmic scheme of things. Humans are Raj. Nonetheless, Orwell registers the weakness of susceptible to religious fantasies and supernatural Flory’s ego with pitying contempt. For Conrad, terrors. Th ey often need to feel that their existence Winnie Verloc’s passionate though “morbid” devo- has some “meaning” within the larger scheme of tion to her retarded brother serves as a counter- things. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, caught somewhere weight to the moral vacuity of the anarchists who in between medieval supernaturalism and modern surround her. Conrad treats Winnie’s death with metaphysical nihilism, yearns to destroy himself but a combination of overstrained pathos and ironic fears the afterlife. In his closet drama, Empedocles on distaste. Etna, Matthew Arnold captures the mid-Victorian Tragedy requires an element of grandeur or mood of metaphysical despair, translocating his nobility lacking in most cases of suicide for rea- own metaphysical gloom into the voice of an early sons of social failure, but Achebe’s Okonkwo and Greek philosopher. After discoursing eloquently Shakespeare’s Roman protagonists are tragic fi gures. about the futility of human life, Empedocles fl ings Okonkwo is a strong but fl awed man, victimized himself into a volcanic crater. In the later 19th cen- both by circumstances and by the limitations in tury, with the widespread loss of religious belief his own perspective. In the deaths of Cleopatra, among educated people, the sense of existential Cassius, and Brutus, Shakespeare evokes a Roman despair became a predominating theme in litera- ethos in which suicide is the only honorable conclu- ture. Conrad is particularly eff ective in giving voice sion to a failed political intrigue. to that theme. In Conrad’s epic novel Nostromo, Decoud, a Gallicized South American patrician, Mental Illness is trapped in solitude on a small boat for several Mental illness is a neurophysiological dysfunc- days. Losing all sense of purpose or meaning in tion that produces mental anguish (Oakley, 2007). life, he shoots himself and falls over the side of the Virginia Woolf suff ered recurrent bouts of mental boat. Conrad speaks of this death with mocking illness; rather than go through it one more time, contempt, but the contempt is directed as much she drowned herself. Some sense of the horror she at himself as at his character. Decoud’s perspec- must have experienced is captured in one of her tive is a close approximation to one main aspect of novels, Mrs. Dalloway. Over the course of a single Conrad’s own point of view; and, indeed, Decoud day, Woolf counterpoints Mrs. Dalloway’s placid kills himself by shooting himself in the chest, the ruminations with the hallucinatory terror of a bat- same method that in his youth Conrad had adopted tle-shocked veteran suff ering from schizophrenia. for attempting suicide. Aldous Huxley’s futuristic At the end of the story, as Mrs. Dalloway is enjoying utopia/dystopia Brave New World depicts a society herself at a party, he kills himself by jumping out in which life is perfectly regulated by genetic engi- of a window. In Maid in Waiting, John Galsworthy neering and behavioral conditioning. Th e protag- gets readers close to the suicidal anguish of uncon- onist, a “Savage” who had grown up on an Indian trolled bipolar disorder, before that disorder had reservation and has thus escaped conditioning, a clinical name. Edward Ashburnham, in Ford cannot fully articulate what he feels is intolerable Madox Ford’s Th e Good Soldier, is a slave to recur- about such a society, but he ends up hanging him- rent and irresistible romantic passions. He fi nally self in despair. Th e existential problems explored escapes by cutting his own throat. Severe clinical by writers like Shakespeare, Arnold, Conrad, and depression gets canonical expression in Hardy’s Huxley have not been solved; they are part of our last novel, Jude the Obscure. Jude is a disappointed active cultural heritage.

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All in the Family she murders their two sons for revenge. In George Next to one’s relation to one’s self, one’s closest Eliot’s novel Adam Bede, an unmarried woman, relations, genetically, are to parents, off spring, and Hetty Sorrel, leaves her newborn infant to die in the siblings. Th e “ultimate” causal force, inclusive fi t- woods. In William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Sophie ness, creates “proximal” feelings of psychological has to choose which of her two children to sacrifi ce closeness. Blood is thicker than water, but in family to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Later, tormented dramas blood sometimes runs like water, producing by guilt, she commits suicide. Th e protagonist of in readers peculiarly intense sensations of shock and Toni Morrison’s Beloved chooses to murder her chil- horror. Not surprisingly, in Dante’s Inferno, people dren rather than have them returned to slavery. In who commit crimes against kin are placed in the King’s Th e Shining, Jack Torrance is gradually pos- ninth circle of hell, the lowest circle. sessed by evil spirits in an isolated hotel; under their Family violence is sometimes complex and infl uence, he almost succeeds in murdering his wife sequential. Th e cycle of family violence that moti- and child. vates Aeschylus’s trilogy about the house of Atreus In fi ction, murdering members of one’s own has already been mentioned: Agamemnon mur- family almost always has an evil cast, but evil can be ders Iphigenia, is murdered in turn by his wife, contextualized in many diff erent ways, depending Clytemnestra, who in turn is murdered by her son on the total worldview of the writer. Greek trage- Orestes. Sophocles’s depiction of Oedipus has also dies tend to adopt a stance that hovers ambiguously been mentioned: Oedipus murdered his father and between moralism and fatalism, that is, between married his mother, then in remorse gouges out his emphasizing the consequences of behavioral choices own eyes; Oedipus’s daughter Antigone defi es her and counseling resignation to the caprice of the uncle Creon and is executed by him; Creon’s son, gods. In Salammbô, Flaubert seems to be aiming who loves Antigone, kills himself, and his mother at a purely aesthetic goal: evoking the ferocity of a then kills herself. In both Euripides’s and Racine’s barbarian culture, without judging it from a moral versions of Phaedra’s story, Th eseus’s wife, Phaedra, stance. George Eliot, in contrast, dwells on a moral betrays her stepson; Th eseus invokes the power of a theme: the opposition between egoism and empa- god to destroy his son; and Phaedra commits sui- thy. She sets up a clear moral dichotomy between cide. In King Lear, Edmund betrays both his father the vain and shallow nature of Hetty Sorrel, who and his brother Edgar. Lear’s two oldest daughters, abandons her newborn child, and the loving nature Goneril and Regan, collude in humiliating their of the female protagonist, Dinah Morris. Th e three father but then fall out over a sexual rivalry, each main characters in Styron’s Sophie’s Choice—a Polish competing for Edmund’s favor. Goneril poisons Catholic woman victimized by the Nazis, a Jewish Regan, and then, when she is exposed and trapped, schizophrenic, and a descendant of Southern slave stabs herself to death. Edgar kills Edmund in com- owners—off er an occasion for meditations on prob- bat, but Edmund has already ordered the execution lematic racial and ethnic relationships. Morrison’s of Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia. After she dies, Beloved is designed as an indictment of slavery in the Lear dies from grief. In Dostoevsky’s Th e Brothers American South. Dostoevsky situates Smerdyakov’s Karamazov, Fyodor Karamazov’s illegitimate son patricide within the context of a philosophical Smerdyakov, inspired by the atheistic writings of debate over morality and religion. Jack Torrance in his brother Ivan, murders his father. Th en, feeling King’s Th e Shining is a recovering alcoholic and a betrayed by Ivan, Smerdyakov kills himself, leaving failed writer. His demonic possession is cast in terms another brother, Dmitry, to take the blame for the of an inner struggle between egoistic vanity, fueled patricide. by alcohol, and his devotion to his wife and child. Murdering one’s own children has a peculiarly Th e Shining is essentially a moral drama, like Adam horrifi c eff ect, since it combines the revulsion against Bede. King Lear, too, is a moral drama. Goneril and murdering kin with the revulsion against murdering Regan are faithless and wantonly cruel; they pro- children. In Flaubert’s Salammbô, the worshippers of vide a foil for the idea of family bonds personifi ed Baal are fi ghting off a genocidal revolt of slaves, and in their sister Cordelia. the war is going badly. To propitiate Baal, they burn alive all the infants in the city, fl inging them one by Violence and Sex one into the glowing belly of the great brass god. Sexual Rivals Medea, in a play by Euripides, abandons her home- Th e biblical story of David and Bathsheba exem- land for Jason’s sake; when he later abandons her, plifi es homicide prompted by sexual desire. Greek

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myth is replete with instances of Hera, queen of along with them the serving maids with whom the Olympus, punishing Zeus’s mortal lovers or their suitors had had sex. In modern literature, men who off spring. Lethal jealousy is a major theme also in resort to violence in response to sexual jealousy are the three great epics of the Greco-Roman world— seldom if ever treated as epic heroes. More often, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. Th e Trojan they seem self-destructively obsessed with passions War, the subject of the Iliad, takes place, ostensi- they cannot control. Th ere are no modern literary bly, because the Trojan prince Paris runs off with heroes, like Odysseus, who are celebrated for mur- Helen, the wife of the Greek leader Agamemnon. dering hordes of their rivals. Odysseus is a chief in a Gottschall (2008b) makes a compelling argument polygynous warrior culture. Modern heroes have to that this specifi c motive was merely the symbolic conform to the ethos of a monogamous bourgeois tip of the iceberg. All of Greek tribal culture in culture (Gottschall, 2008b; Jobling, 2001). this historical period was organized around raid- ing for women. (Gottschall draws inspiration Lovers’ Quarrels from Napoleon Chagnon’s [1979] studies of the Jealous hatred of a rival, like grief, is a simple pas- Yanomamö.) Th e Odyssey, recounting Odysseus’s sion. Jealousy of a lover or spouse is more likely to eff orts to return home after the Trojan War, culmi- put intense emotions into confl ict with one another. nates with Odysseus slaughtering the suitors who After murdering Desdemona, Othello describes had gathered around his wife, Penelope. Th e last himself as a man who “loved not wisely but too well” half of the Aeneid occupies itself with Aeneas’s war in (5.2.44). In Racine’s version of the Phaedra story, Italy against Turnus. Th e ostensible occasion for the Phèdre is torn between jealous rage and shame; war is rivalry over the hand of the princess Lavinia. she colludes in a false accusation that results in her Th e fi rst story in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Th e stepson’s death, and then guilt, grief, and shame Knight’s Tale,” turns on the jealous rivalry of two drive her to suicide. In Robert Browning’s dra- former friends, who fi ght in knightly combat until matic monologue “Porphyria’s Lover,” the speaker one eventually dies. In Guy de Maupassant’s Une has been driven insane by jealousy. After strangling Vie, a husband discovers his wife in a tryst inside a his lover with her own hair, he tells himself that covered cart, which he rolls off a cliff , killing both his he has fulfi lled her own wish, since she can now wife and her lover. Bradley Headstone in Dickens’s “give herself to me forever.” In William Faulkner’s Our Mutual Friend tries to drown Eugene Wrayburn frequently anthologized story “A Rose for Emily,” in jealousy over Lizzie Hexam. William Boldwood, Miss Emily has an aff air with a man disinclined to in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, has a wed- marriage. Like the speaker in “Porphyria’s Lover,” ding party that is spoiled when his fi ancée’s husband, she kills him in order to keep him with her. Many erroneously supposed dead, shows up at the party. years later, after her death, the town’s folk fi nd the Boldwood shoots and kills the husband. In Cather’s lover’s skeleton in a bed in her house, with a strand O Pioneers!, the protagonist’s brother is murdered by of her gray hair on a pillow next to it. In Honoré de a jealous husband. Jean Toomer’s “Blood-Burning Balzac’s novel Cousine Bette, the fi ckle and oppor- Moon” depicts homicidal violence animated by tunistic siren Valérie strings along several men at both sexual jealousy and racial hatred; both rivals once, exploiting all of them, and is fi nally poisoned, die, one with his throat slit, and the other burned along with her new husband, by one of her deceived at the stake by a lynch mob. Zora Neale Hurston’s lovers. Tolstoy, in his own life, was tormented by “Spunk” depicts a hapless wronged husband pitted obsessive jealousy, a theme that fi gures promi- against a cocky, dominant rival, Spunk, who shoots nently in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. him. On the surface, Spunk seems unrepentant, but In “Th e Kreutzer Sonata,” the fi rst-person narrator he is haunted by the murdered man’s ghost, who explains that he murdered his wife because he was pushes him into a buzz saw. enraged both by ordinary sexual jealousy and by his Sexual jealousy leading to violence, and espe- own enslavement to sensual passion. In Zola’s La cially male jealousy of rival males, is a human uni- Bête Humaine, Jacques Lantier is driving a train on versal (Buss, 2003; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Geary, which his mistress is a passenger; another woman, 1998). However, diff erences in cultural attitudes prompted by jealous rage, derails the train, killing make a large diff erence in the stance authors take many people, but not the two she was intending to toward this universal disposition. From the perspec- kill. Remorse drives her to suicide. Lantier himself, tive of Greeks in the barbarian period, Odysseus is affl icted with a mental disease that couples sexual wholly within his rights to murder his rivals, and passion with homicidal fury, eventually murders his

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mistress. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love pits two fi tness by killing a mate; but many mates avoid egoistic and dominating personalities, Gerald and infi delity at least in part because spurned or cuck- Gudrun, against one another. After nearly strangling olded lovers can be dangerous. Th e other expla- Gudrun to death, Gerald wanders away, yearning nation is that human passions are not necessarily for a release from passion, and falls off a cliff . optimized for inclusive fi tness in every possible Murder/suicide is as common in the crime sec- combination of circumstances. All adaptations tion of the newspaper as it is in works of fi ction. have costs; all adaptive benefi ts involve trade-off s Th e commingling of love and hatred in works such against other possible adaptive benefi ts; and some as those just described gives readers imaginative adaptations confl ict with others. Male bears have access to the states of mind that animate such real- adaptations for having sex and also for eating small life behavior. Literary depictions also give us access animals; they sometimes eat their own off spring. to a range of possible attitudes toward this behav- Humans have adaptations for erotic fi xation and ior. Racine’s play is a neoclassical tragedy; it elicits also for punishing cheaters; they sometimes kill responses that mingle emotions of horror and com- their lovers. In “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Oscar passion. Browning’s monologue creates a sensation Wilde meditates on a man condemned to hang of horror like that in some of the works of Edgar for murdering his lover. Protesting against sin- Allen Poe (“Th e Tell-Tale Heart,” for instance)— gling this man out for punishment, Wilde declares horror both at homicidal violence and at mental that “all men kill the thing they love.” Th e gener- derangement. Insanity precludes the dignity and alization stretches the point further than it will grandeur that are typical of tragic emotion, but quite bear, but many people do indeed kill the most readers’ revulsion against Browning’s lunatic thing they love; they thus also sometimes destroy is nonetheless tinged with pity. Commenting on “A themselves. Rose for Emily,” Faulkner (1965) declared that his own attitude toward the story was essentially one of Violence Within the Social Group compassion for Emily’s wasted life. Balzac’s attitude Instrumental Violence toward Valérie and her lovers has an air of moral Much of the violence outside the family circle, in disapproval tinged with sensationalistic fascination. literature as in life, is largely instrumental in char- Th e fi rst-person narrator in Tolstoy’s story evokes acter. People harm or kill others to defend them- little compassion for the wife he murdered; he selves or their family and friends, to obtain money wishes instead to mitigate his guilt by treating sexu- or other resources, or to remove an obstacle to ality itself as a mental disease. In this story, Tolstoy social ambition. Odysseus jams a burning pole into not only depicts a deranged state of mind but also the Cyclops’s eye because the Cyclops is eating his exemplifi es it. Zola adopts a naturalistic stance— companions. Robinson Crusoe, in Daniel Defoe’s clinical, detached, empirical, fascinated by the spec- novel, also kills cannibals. In Dickens’s A Tale of Two tacle of power out of control. At the end of La Bête Cities, the elderly and very proper Miss Pross shoots Humaine, Lantier is driving a train full of drunken Mme. Defarge in order to protect Lucie Manette’s soldiers toward the front in the Franco-Prussian family from the guillotine. In Haruki Murakami’s War. He gets into a fi ght with his stoker, with whose Kafka on the Shore, Nakata, a gentle old man, stabs wife he is having an aff air, and both fall overboard, Johnny Walker to death to stop him from tortur- leaving the train without a driver, hurtling toward ing cats. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov disaster. Lawrence’s stance in Women in Love is murders a pawnbroker because he needs money; essentially moralistic; Gerald and Gudrun are used and he murders her sister to cover up the deed. In as foils for another couple, Birkin and Ursula, who Frank Norris’s McTeague, McTeague beats his wife represent, for Lawrence, a more wholesome form of to death over the money she is hoarding. Macbeth sexual passion. murders Duncan because Macbeth wants to be Killing a lover, like killing oneself or one’s kin, king, and Duncan is in the way. Claudius murders limits opportunities to propagate one’s genes. So in Hamlet’s father for the same reason; and the future what way can an evolutionary perspective illumi- Richard III murders several people to eliminate the nate this kind of homicide? Two explanations seem obstacles between himself and the throne. In Eliot’s most plausible. One is that a known disposition for Middlemarch, Bulstrode murders Raffl es because uncontrollable violence can have a powerful deter- Raffl es is threatening to expose his shady past and rent eff ect (Frank, 1988; Schelling, 1960, cited in thus ruin his social standing. In Th eodore Dreiser’s Wright, 1994, p. 278). Some people decrease their An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffi ths murders his

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pregnant girlfriend, Roberta, because she is threat- moralistic writers such as George Eliot. Bulstrode ening to spoil his chances of social advancement. In in Middlemarch serves Eliot as an exemplar of a cases such as these, though violence might be fueled morally ambiguous nature: a man with high ideals, by rage or hatred, harming someone else is not the low ambitions, and intellectual integrity too weak ultimate purpose of violence; harming someone else to acknowledge the discrepancy between them. For is merely a means to an end. Eliot, Bulstrode’s morally underdeveloped mind Th e value attached to instrumental violence, serves as a foil for the protagonistic characters who like the value attached to all depicted behavior, exemplify the power of directing one’s own behavior depends on the state of mind of the character, the in morally conscious ways. author’s stance toward the character, and the read- er’s response to both. Th e stance of the author and Dominance and Reciprocation the reader’s response are in most cases heavily con- In addition to association by kinship, there are ditioned by the cultural ethos of the character, the two basic principles in human social organization: author, and the reader, but any given cultural ethos dominance and reciprocation (Boehm, 1999; de is itself only a particular organization of the ele- Waal, 1982; Trivers, 1971; Wilson, 1993). In social ments of human nature. groups not related by kinship, if violence does not Odysseus exults over defeating his monstrous serve a primarily instrumental function, it usually enemy, and most readers rejoice with him. Miss serves either to assert social dominance, to sup- Pross is permanently shaken by the enormity of the press dominance in others, or to punish transgres- deed required of her, but Dickens clearly regards her sions against equitable behavior. Shakespeare’s Julius as a hero and as a symbol of British moral courage. Caesar off ers a straightforward instance of dominance Nakata is deeply disturbed to discover his own capac- as a central theme. Caesar seizes dictatorial power, ity for violence but recognizes, dimly, that violence overthrowing the collective power of the senatorial is sometimes necessary to sustain humane condi- class. In assassinating him, the senators exemplify tions of life. Raskolnikov, fi nding he cannot ratio- the social dynamic delineated by Boehm (1996): nalize murder, ultimately turns himself in; remorse collective force aimed at suppressing dominance in and redemption are the central themes of Crime and individuals. Suppressing dominance in individuals Punishment. McTeague, in contrast, does not have a blends into punishing transgressions against equity. moral consciousness suffi ciently developed to expe- Individuals typically assert dominance by harming rience remorse. McTeague is a “naturalist” novel, a others; they thus violate an implicit social contract genre that typically depicts characters operating at to treat others equitably. a level of mindless animal brutality. Richard III, In chimpanzee societies, sheer physical power unlike McTeague, is not a mindless brute, but he is establishes dominance. Even when weaker males a psychopath, and he delights in his cunning manip- form coalitions to overpower stronger males, phys- ulations. Readers are simultaneously lured into his ical strength ultimately determines hierarchical perspective and repelled at his viciousness. Claudius status. Two relatively weak males working together and Macbeth are more like Raskolnikov than like can be physically stronger than a single male who is Richard III; they are unable to reconcile themselves stronger than either individually (de Waal, 1982). to the murders they have committed. Richard III Physical power also undergirds human social rela- requires readers to establish their own independent tions, but human social relations are heavily regu- moral perspective; Hamlet and Macbeth provide an lated by norms and laws that prescribe obligations internal moral monitor in the conscience of the according to social roles (Hill, 2007). Civil society characters. An American Tragedy, like McTeague, is leaves little scope for individuals to assert domi- naturalistic. Clyde Griffi ths has a social imagina- nance through sheer brute strength. Humans must tion more refi ned than McTeague’s, but he seems instead use accumulated resources and acquired morally helpless before the lure of social glamour. skills, including social skills, to establish their Th ough planning and executing a murder, much place in a social hierarchy. Sports constitute a par- of the time he seems baffl ed, frightened, and wist- tial exception. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It and ful. One central implication of a naturalist vision is Achebe’s Th ings Fall Apart, the protagonists gain that people are ultimately driven by forces outside prestige through victory in wrestling matches. But, their control—a conclusion that converges with the then, sports are not means for dominating a social fatalistic stance in much Greek drama. Th e polar hierarchy through raw physical strength; they are opposite to that stance can be located in highly forms of regulated social activity.

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In most literary traditions, domestic violence— Revenge asserting individual dominance through physi- Individuals who assert dominance through sheer cal force—falls outside the range of acceptable physical force belong to a despised fringe in both behavior. Th e most famous character in medieval life and literature. Using violence to gain revenge English literature, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, takes for injuries or insults is a diff erent matter. Bullies are as her chief theme the moral norm that prohibits held in contempt, but characters who seek revenge violence against wives. In the prologue to her tale, through violence often elicit readers’ respect, if not she describes her relationship with her fourth hus- their conscious approval. band, a scholar and misogynist. Th ey quarreled; she Personal injury motivates many instances of ripped pages out of his favorite antifemale tract, and murderous revenge. Samson is tricked, blinded, in a rage he struck her, knocking her senseless. His and shackled for public display. When his strength remorse was so severe that he conceded complete returns along with his hair, he crushes the Philistines, interpersonal dominance to her. She says they were along with himself, under the stones of their temple. very happy together after that. Her actual tale, as In One Th ousand and One Nights, a medieval Islamic distinct from her prologue, is a fable illustrating the collection of stories, Sharyar, a Persian king, discov- idea that men should yield domestic dominance to ers that his wife is unfaithful. He has her executed, women. and then, extending his revenge to womankind in In literature as in life, alcoholic derangement general, marries a new woman every night, execut- often plays a precipitating role in domestic vio- ing each the next morning. (Scheherazade avoids this lence. In Th e Dram Shop, Zola depicts the moral fate by telling Sharyar a new story each night, but squalor of the alcoholic underclass in Paris. A father leaving each unfi nished until the following night.) who gradually beats his prepubescent daughter to In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s mon- death is only the most poignant instance of perva- ster develops a grudge against his creator and even- sive, gratuitous violence. McTeague is drunk when tually kills everyone in Frankenstein’s family. In he beats his wife to death. In King’s Th e Shining, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, the criminal psychopath Bill Jack Torrance reverts to alcoholism, beats his wife Sikes beats his girlfriend to death because he thinks, nearly to death, and tries to murder his son. At the mistakenly, that she has informed against him. Th e time, he is under the infl uence of “evil spirits” in protagonist of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is both senses of the word. Th e supernaturalism of raped and her hopes of happiness ruined by Alex the novel serves as a symbolic vehicle for depict- d’Urberville. She stabs him with a carving knife. In ing Torrance’s losing struggle to resist his own inner Conrad’s Th e Secret Agent, the anarchist agent pro- demons. vocateur Mr. Verloc lures his wife’s retarded youn- Individuals in literature seldom assert dom- ger brother into trying to blow up the Greenwich inance through sheer force, but groups often do. Conservatory. Th e brother stumbles en route and Racial or ethnic domination forms the theme of is himself blown to smithereens. Like Tess, Verloc’s works such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Harriet wife uses the instrument nearest to hand, a carving Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Faulkner’s knife, to take her revenge. In John Steinbeck’s Th e Light in August, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad kills a policeman who has Tadeusz Borowski’s Th is Way for the Gas, Ladies and just smashed in the skull of his friend preacher Casy. Gentlemen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, William Styron’s In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Clare Quilty helps Sophie’s Choice and Th e Confessions of Nat Turner, Lolita escape from Humbert Humbert; in return, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Class confl icts culmi- Humbert tracks Quilty down and shoots him mul- nating in riots with fatal consequences appear in tiple times. In King’s Carrie, the town outcast, a Scott’s Th e Heart of Midlothian, Benjamin Disraeli’s teenage girl, is humiliated at the senior prom; she Sybil, and Eliot’s Felix Holt. Dickens’s Barnaby uses her telekinetic powers to slaughter the whole Rudge climaxes in a deadly riot animated by reli- graduating class of the high school, trapping them gious strife. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens depicts inside a burning building. the Terror that followed the French Revolution. In Indignation at personal injury is a close cousin most representations of collective violence, authors to off ended pride. Th e protagonist of Shakespeare’s sympathize with protests against racial oppression, Coriolanus is driven into traitorous homicidal fury class injustice, or political tyranny. At the same by outraged pride. Iago destroys Othello because time, few literary authors give an approving depic- Othello has passed him over for promotion. In tion of mob violence. Edgar Allen Poe’s “Th e Cask of Amontillado,” the

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narrator protagonist Montresor says his acquain- Th e darkest moments in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry tance Fortunato has casually insulted him, so he Finn involve the murderous feud between the shackles Fortunato to a wall deep underground and Sheperdsons and the Grangerfords. When Huck bricks up the niche. Th e Duke in Browning’s mono- asks his Grangerford friend what started the feud, logue “My Last Duchess” has his wife murdered the boy cannot provide an answer, but he nonethe- because she shows too little regard for the dignity of less falls victim to the feud. Twain clearly expects his rank. In Dickens’s Bleak House, the French maid readers to register the sad futility in killing of this Hortense murders the lawyer Tulkinghorn because kind. he has insulted her. Harm to kin or lovers is a common motive for Death by Law revenge. Aeschylus’s Oresteia consists in a sequence Legal execution is partly instrumental—it aims at of vengeful murders within a single family. In deterrence—and partly a form of collective revenge. Shakespeare’s fi rst tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Lavinia When it serves the purposes of “poetic justice,” legal is raped, and her rapists, to prevent her from iden- execution can be neatly folded into the emotional tifying them, cut out her tongue and cut off her satisfaction with which a story concludes. Even Billy hands. (Th e source story, the myth of Philomela, Budd’s hanging, in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, is appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.) Lavinia nonethe- presented as a tragic sacrifi ce to the necessities of less succeeds in identifying her assailants. In the sub- naval discipline. At other times, though, legal execu- sequent cascade of vengeful acts, the two rapists are tion is presented as the medium of a malign fate, an killed, cooked in a pie, and fed to their unsuspecting unjust social order, or both. At the end of Stendhal’s mother. (Th e same kind of revenge appears in Seneca Th e Red and the Black, Julien Sorel is guillotined for the Younger’s play Th yestes.) Laertes in Hamlet stabs shooting his former mistress. He and Stendhal both Hamlet with a poisoned rapier because Hamlet has seem to regard his fate as an indictment against an murdered Laertes’s father, Polonius. Hamlet murders aristocratic social order that provides no career open Claudius, his uncle, because Claudius murdered his to talent. When Tess of the d’Urbervilles is hanged own brother, Hamlet’s father. In one of the earli- for stabbing her rapist to death, Hardy explicitly est English novels, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, protests against some cosmic principle of injus- Clarissa is abducted, drugged, and raped. After she tice. In Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the retarded dies from grief, her uncle kills her assailant in a duel. giant, Lenny, accidentally kills a woman. His friend In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Th e Great Gatsby, Gatsby is and protector, George, shoots him before he can be murdered because a man mistakenly believes that lynched. In Th e Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck explicitly Gatsby killed the man’s wife. In Denis Lehaene’s protests against social injustice. In Of Mice and Men, Mystic River, a father murders a childhood friend he seems less interested in protesting against injustice because he believes, mistakenly, that the friend mur- than in stimulating the reader’s compassion for the dered his daughter. plight of an itinerant male underclass. In Ambrose Th ough often moralistic on other themes, many Bierce’s “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge,” a Southern literary authors display a strikingly tolerant attitude civilian is hanged by Federal troops. Th e bulk of the toward revenge as a motive. Revenge looks like a story consists in depicting his fantasized escape, as basic form of justice and often gives a feeling of the rope breaks and he falls into the water under the emotional satisfaction to readers. If that were not bridge. At the end of the story, he is snapped back the case, “poetic justice” would not be so widely to reality, with a broken neck, swinging beneath the used as a plot device. Poetic justice occurs when bridge. Th e story focuses emotional attention not “good” characters are rewarded and “bad” characters on retributive satisfaction, social protest, or simple made to suff er. Judging by the relative frequency of compassion. Instead, it evokes the love of life and plot structures, we could reasonably infer that read- the horror of death. It also captures the sharp con- ers can more easily tolerate a plot in which a “good” trast between the victim as a mere object, for his character comes to a sad end than a plot in which a executioners, and his own intense inner conscious- “bad” character lives happily ever after. ness, frantic with terror and yearning. Blood feuds are a special case. One murder leads to another, but the whole sequence proceeds in a Human Sacrifices senselessly mechanical way. Th e deaths of Romeo Along with “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and Juliet result in an agreement to end the blood and “A Rose for Emily,” Shirley Ann Jackson’s “Th e feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. Lottery” is one of the most frequently anthologized

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short stories. In a quiet farming village, somewhere the last common ancestor shared by humans and in mid-century America, the local people gather for chimpanzees some 7 million years ago, and specif- the annual lottery, selecting slips of paper from a ically human forms of evolutionary development box. Th e “winner,” Tessie Hutcheson, is stoned to gave an extra impetus to coalitional violence. Early death. Her own family members, including her in their evolutionary history, humans gained “eco- toddler, take part in the stoning. Stories do not logical dominance” (Alexander, 1989; Flinn, Geary, become canonical merely because they are shock- & Ward, 2005); that is, they became the dominant ing and bizarre. “Th e Lottery” has a deep symbolic predator in their environments. Th e most dangerous resonance; it suggests that even within civil society, creatures they faced were members of other human in a time of peace, there is a force that subjugates bands. Male coalitional violence thus became a pri- individuals and family relationships to the col- mary selective force in human evolution. Highly lective identity of the social group. Th e coercive organized modern warfare is an extension of the power of the social group is given symbolic form coalitional aggression that characterizes most bands also in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. A group and tribes in preliterate cultures. of English school boys, stranded on an island by a War has fi gured as a main subject of litera- plane crash, quickly revert to savagery. Th e three ture for every phase of history, from the ancient boys who retain civilized values—Piggy, Simon, and world, the medieval period, the Renaissance and Ralph—are sacrifi ced to the cohesion of the sav- Enlightenment, to the 19th and 20th centuries. age band. In 1984, George Orwell locates coercive War forms the subject matter of verse epics, plays, social force in a totalitarian regime. At the end of prose fi ction, and lyric poetry. Much war litera- the novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is being ture blends closely with autobiography and history: tortured by an agent of the government. To end the lightly fi ctionalized memoir and accurate historical torture, he must betray the woman he loves, begging reconstruction that includes many actual historical his torturer to hurt her rather than him. During the persons. torture, he is required to guess the right answer to We have no surviving narratives from prehistory, a question about what motivates the totalitarian but William Golding’s Th e Inheritors off ers a pow- government. Th e right answer, as it turns out, is a erful reconstruction of lethal interaction between desire for power, as an end in itself. Th e fi nal stage Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Th e Iliad and in Winston Smith’s subjugation is to come to feel, the Bible evoke the warrior ethos of barbarian cul- sincerely, that he loves the totalitarian regime that tures; and Flaubert’s Salammbô, like Golding’s Th e will soon, as he knows, murder him. Inheritors, raises historical reconstruction to the Th e totalitarian regime in 1984 is essentially psy- level of high literary art. Steven Pressfi eld’s Gates of chopathic. Its practices are a collective equivalent of Fire reconstructs the Battle of Th ermopylae. the psychopathic cruelty that animates novels such Th e oldest surviving classic of French literature, as A Clockwork Orange and American Psycho. Unlike the Song of Roland, describes an 8th-century battle Burgess and Ellis, Orwell does not invite readers to in which the protagonists, like the Greek warriors participate vicariously in the enjoyment of cruelty. at Th ermopylae, are all killed. Scott’s Th e Talisman 1984 is designed to create a sense of angry outrage locates its action in the Crusades. In the classic in its readers. It is a symbolic indictment of totali- Japanese medieval epic, Th e Tale of the Heiki, two tarianism, not a peep show. In that respect, it adopts clans struggle to dominate Japan. A 14th-century a stance similar to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s realistic Chinese novel, Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the depiction of the Gulag in One Day in the Life of Ivan Th ree Kingdoms, also focuses on dynastic struggles. Denisovich. A tacit indictment of the psychopathic Shakespeare dramatizes the English Wars of the political culture of Stalinist Russia also informs 15th century. Th e Th irty Years’ War—the religious Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. war that devastated Germany in the 17th century— provides the setting for Hans von Grimmelshausen’s War semiautobiographical tale Simplicissimus. Th e pro- Th ere are only two primate species in which coali- tagonist in Friedrich Schiller’s dramatic trilogy tions of males band together for the express purpose Wallenstein is a general in the Th irty Years’ War. of making lethal raids on neighboring bands of con- Eighteenth-century wars include the fi rst and specifi cs: chimpanzees and human beings (Jünger, second Jacobite uprisings (rebellions aimed at restor- 2010; Potts & Hayden, 2008; Wrangham, 1999). ing the Stuarts to the throne of England), the Seven Th is behavior has evidently been conserved from Years War (the struggle among the main European

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powers that spread into the American continent in Th e major American war of the 19th century was Th e French and Indian War), and the American War of course the Civil War, which produced a crop of of Independence. Th ackeray’s protagonist in Henry contemporary novels and a steady fl ow of historical Esmond joins the fi rst Jacobite uprising, and Scott’s reconstructions, including Stephen Crane’s Th e Red protagonist in Waverly joins the second. Henry Badge of Courage, Michael Shaara’s Th e Killer Angels, Fielding’s protagonist in Tom Jones sets off to fi ght in Shelby Foote’s Shiloh, and Charles Frazier’s Cold that same military venture, though he never arrives. Mountain. Children’s novels about the American Th ackeray’s Barry Lyndon fi ghts in the Seven Years Civil War include Harold Keith’s Rifl es for Watie and War, which also forms the background to Major Irene Hunt’s Across Five Aprils. von Tellheim’s plight in G. E. Lessing’s play Minna Among the many novels about World War I, von Barnhelm. James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Mohicans is set in the French and Indian War. In Front holds a special place as one of the greatest of Th ackeray’s Th e Virginians, two brothers, grandsons all war novels. Th e last scene of Th omas Mann’s Th e of Henry Esmond, fi ght on diff erent sides in the Magic Mountain presents its philosophical protago- American War of Independence. Children’s nov- nist charging across a battlefi eld in World War I, with els about that war include Esther Forbes’s Johnny limited prospects for survival. Henri Barbusse’s Under Tremain and James Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Fire gives a French perspective on the war. American Dead. novels about World War I include Hemingway’s A Th e Napoleonic Wars dominated European Farewell to Arms, William March’s Company K, John politics in the fi rst 15 years of the 19th century. Dos Passos’s Th ree Soldiers, and Dalton Trumbo’s Diff erent phases of that war fi gure prominently Johnny Got His Gun. British novels include Ford’s in War and Peace and Th ackeray’s Vanity Fair. Parade’s End, Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series of novels and Babylon, and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. Some Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series chronicle of Faulkner’s and Kipling’s best short stories are set this period with gritty military and naval detail. in World War I. Charles Harrison’s Generals Die in Cornwell’s Waterloo off ers a brilliant fi ctional recon- Bed gives a Canadian perspective on the war. For struction of the Battle of Waterloo. Th ackeray gives Russians, World War I merges into the Bolshevik a short but rhetorically powerful description of Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Th at period the same battle in Vanity Fair. Th e protagonist in forms the background for Michail Sholokhov’s Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma witnesses Waterloo And Quiet Flows the Don, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor from the fringes, though without understanding the Zhivago, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s series of nov- course of the action. els included in Th e Red Wheel. In addition to novels European wars between 1815 and 1914—from and short stories, the war generated a large body of the Battle of Waterloo to the beginning of World War fi ne lyric poetry by poet-soldiers such as Wilfred I—include the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden. War, various Balkan confl icts, and the small imperial World War II produced major novels in sev- wars on the fringes of the British Empire, including eral national literatures. American novels include the Boer War. Tennyson’s poem “Charge of the Light Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s Th e Naked and Brigade” chronicles an episode in the Crimean War. the Dead, James Jones’s Th e Th in Red Line, Kurt Several of Maupassant’s short stories are set in the Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, and James Dickey’s To period of the Franco-Prussian War. Th e protagonist the White Sea. Everybody Comes to Rick’s, an unpub- of G. B. Shaw’s play Arms and the Man is a mer- lished play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, was cenary Swiss soldier serving in the Serbo-Bulgarian the basis for the fi lm Casablanca. Th e Spanish Civil War. Several of Kipling’s early stories depict British War, a prelude to World War II, is the setting for military actions in India, what is now Pakistan, and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Colin Afghanistan. Kenneth Ross’s play Breaker Morant, McDougall’s Th e Execution is the most important which provides the basis for the Bruce Beresford fi lm Canadian novel about World War II. German expe- of that name, is set in the Boer War. rience in the war forms the subject of Günter Grass’s Conrad’s Nostromo depicts a South American rev- Th e Tin Drum, Willi Heinrich’s Cross of Iron, Russ olution that transforms the lives of the characters, Schneider’s Siege, Heinrich Gerlach’s Th e Forsaken including English and Italian expatriates. Gabriel Army, and Th eodor Plievier’s Stalingrad. Th e great- Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude takes up sim- est Russian novel of the war, Vasily Grossman’s Life ilar themes from a South American perspective. and Fate, is designed to cover multiple theaters of

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the war and to interweave politics, combat, the disciplined patterns of behavior regulated by rigidly Holocaust, and civilian terror in the Soviet Union. hierarchical social structures. Shared danger creates Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt gives an Italian perspec- a bond among soldiers that many describe as the tive on the war. British involvement in the war most intense and intimate they have known. At forms the background for Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of the same time, war systematically dehumanizes the Honour trilogy and J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. enemy in ways that make it easier to breach the psy- Ian McEwan’s Atonement reconstructs the British chological inhibition most people feel against doing retreat to Dunkirk. Japanese novels about the war violent bodily harm to other people (Baumeister, include Ashihei Hino’s Wheat and Soldiers, Tatsuzō 1996; Grossman, 2009; Smith, 2007). Some fi c- Ishikawa’s Soldiers Alive, and Ooka Shohei’s Fires on tional treatments of war, and some lyric poetry the Plain. Th e international order in Orwell’s 1984 inspired by war, adopt emotionally simple stances: includes a perpetual world war. heroism and patriotism, or protest and revulsion. Novels of Vietnam include Larry Heinemann’s Most evoke an ambivalent swirl of emotions that Close Quarters, James Webb’s Fields of Fire, John del include terror, rage, exultation, resentment, pride, Vecchio’s Th e Th irteenth Valley, and Tim O’Brien’s horror, guilt, and self-pity. Authors seldom stand Th e Th ings Th ey Carried. Báo Ninh’s novel Th e Sorrow wholly outside the emotions they evoke. Readers of War off ers a Vietnamese perspective. Francis Ford can easily enough adopt ideological principles that Coppola’s fi lm Apocalypse Now takes the core of its either justify war or condemn it, but the conscious plot from Conrad’s Th e Heart of Darkness, which is formulation of explicit ideological principles is not set in the Belgian Congo, and transposes the plot the same thing as an imaginative poise that refl ects to Vietnam. Th e script writer, Michael Herr, incor- genuine emotional mastery. Psychopaths have the porates episodes from Dispatches, his own journal- least diffi culty accommodating themselves to the istic memoir about his experiences as a reporter in emotional challenges of war (Baumeister, 1996; Vietnam. Grossman, 2009). For most people, war remains a In science fi ction, war is often projected into a troubling and sometimes traumatic experience. Th e fi ctional future and extended to confl icts between quality of that experience varies from individual to humans and other species. H. G. Wells’s War of the individual and from war to war. Th e perspectives Worlds provides a prototype for this genre. More of authors and characters are often heavily condi- recent examples include Robert Heinlein’s Starship tioned by the nature and outcome of the war. Most Troopers, Joe Haldeman’s Th e Forever War, and novels about World War I and about Vietnam reg- Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. ister a dreary sensation of futility mingled with hor- Fantasy worlds are as likely to be riven by war ror and revulsion. Novels about the Napoleonic as actual worlds. John Milton’s Paradise Lost depicts Wars, the American Civil War, and World War II the war in heaven between the good and bad have a much wider emotional range. Th e total emo- angels. (Th ey use cannons with gunpowder, as in tional trajectory of World War II was very diff er- the English Civil War, but to little eff ect, since they ent for Americans, British, Russians, Germans, and are immaterial beings.) J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Japanese. Such diff erences necessarily enter into Rings trilogy culminates in an epic confl ict among authorial perspectives on the emotional signifi cance the inhabitants of Middle Earth. Th ough written of the violence they depict. in the interwar period, Tolkien’s account of this war looks like an eerie forecast of World War II. Conclusion C. S. Lewis’s Th e Lion, the Witch, and Th e Wardrobe When we think of literature, we tend to think of chronicles a war in Narnia between the forces of quiet, civilized activity: writers sitting at a desk, pen good and evil—and indeed most fantasy wars, com- in hand; readers sitting in poised contemplation over pared with real wars, are more easily reducible to the pages of a book; the solemn hush of a library; ethical binaries. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series the mellow leisure of a bookstore. At fi rst glance, culminates in a bloody battle between the protago- then, literature would seem to have little to do with nists, practitioners of benign magic, and the min- violence—with men beating or raping women; peo- ions of Voldemort, the Dark Lord. ple stabbing or shooting each other; individuals poi- Th ough deeply ingrained in genetically transmit- soning, shooting, drowning, or hanging themselves, ted human dispositions, war puts exceptional stress cutting their own throats, or throwing themselves on men’s minds. Combat elicits instinctive fi ght- out of windows; or with large masses of men caught or-fl ight responses but channels them into highly up in the frenzy of mutual slaughter. And yet, as this

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survey suggests, violence is pervasive in literary rep- experience seems hopelessly outside the reach of resentation. William Wordsworth defi nes poetry as empirical scientifi c knowledge. Such scholars and emotion recollected in tranquility (1800/1957). Is scientists might acknowledge that biographical literary violence, then, just a form of sensationalistic information about authors and facts about plots can emotional self-indulgence? No. Freud (1907/1959) be determined in a reasonably objective way. Th ey made a great error in supposing that literature might also acknowledge that the demographics of consists in wish-fulfi llment fantasies. Most of the literacy can be assessed with the statistical methods instances of violence cited in this essay are ugly and of the social sciences. But the heart of the matter— painful. Very few people have ever enjoyed watch- the meaning authors build into plots and the eff ects ing as Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s eyes, or such meanings have on the minds and emotions of have felt pleasure listening to Lear’s howls of grief readers—all of that, many scholars and scientists after Cordelia is hanged. Most depictions of mur- feel, must always remain a matter of vague specula- der and suicide produce discomfort, at the mildest, tion, subjective at best, fanciful or absurd at worst, in readers’ minds. Th e satisfaction of revenge and in any case not accessible to scientifi c inquiry. the lust of battle off er partial exceptions, but such I am confi dent that this set of assumptions is pleasures are hardly pure. Revenge is at best a bitter mistaken. Outside the now obsolete behaviorist satisfaction (Baumeister, 1996). Th e warriors of the school, mental events—images, thoughts, and feel- Iliad who exult in a momentary victory also have a ings—are the standard subject matter of psychology. despairing consciousness that they will probably die Pen-and-paper tests, experimental designs with live a similar death, and soon (Gottschall, 2008b). subjects, and neuroimaging give access to mental Th e painful character of violence in literature events. Mental events also form the substance of lit- points us toward what is, in the present author’s erary experience. Mental events in the responses of view, the central adaptive function of the arts. We readers are as accessible to empirical inquiry as any do not read stories primarily because they pro- other mental events, and the responses of readers duce vicarious sensations of pleasure; we read them provide an opening to the intentions of authors and because they give us a deeper, more complete sense the psychosocial functions of literary works (Carroll of the forces that motivate human life (Carroll, et al., 2008, 2010). 2011b). Humans do not operate by instinct alone. To make major advances in empirical knowl- Th ey have a uniquely developed capacity for envi- edge about literary experience, two main changes in sioning their lives as a continuously developing attitude need to occur. Social scientists need to rec- sequence of actions within larger social and natu- ognize how large and important a place every kind ral contexts. Aff ective neuroscientists have shown of imaginative experience holds in human life; and that human decision making depends crucially on literary scholars need to recognize that incorporat- emotions; we are not simply “rational” creatures ing empirical research into scholarly study will give (Damasio, 1994; Linden, 2007; Panksepp, 1998). their research a kind of epistemological legitimacy Literature and other emotionally charged imagi- it desperately needs. Integrating humanistic and native constructs—the other arts, religions, and empirical methods of inquiry will also vastly expand ideologies—inform our emotional understanding the scope of literary inquiry, making it possible to of human behavior. Th e arts expand our feeling for locate literary study in relation to multiple contig- why other people act as they do, help us to antici- uous disciplines. pate how they are likely to respond to our behavior, Literary meanings and eff ects like those described and off er suggestions about what kind of value we in this chapter are complex phenomena. To make should attach to alternative courses of action. them accessible to objective scientifi c knowledge, Fictional violence delineates extreme limits in we have to break them down into components and human experience. We do not necessarily enjoy devise empirical methods for analyzing each compo- reading about violent acts, but we do enjoy fi nding nent. We should start with recognizing that literary out about the extreme limits of experience. Th at is meaning is a form of communication, an inten- a kind of information for which we have evolved an tional meaning created by an author who anticipates adaptively functional need. responses of readers. At the base of empirical liter- ary research, then, we need to tease apart the rela- Future Directions tions between mirror neurons, empathy, emotional For many scholars and scientists, in both circuits, and mental images (Baron-Cohen, 2005; the humanities and the social sciences, literary Decety, 2011a, 2011b; Rizzolatti & Fogassi, 2007).

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We also have to work out the relations between literary scholarship should now be studied with an responses to actual events and “offl ine” responses to eye toward generating explanations integrated with fi ction—that is, emotional responses “decoupled” principles of human life history and gene-culture from immediate action (Tooby & Cosmides, 2001). coevolution. Neurocognitive research on the way people process Evolutionary study tends toward an emphasis on emotionally charged information will make it pos- human universals. Th at is an indispensable starting sible to produce empirical knowledge about the point. It gives access to basic motives and basic emo- formal aspects of fi ction: narrative structure, syn- tions. Identifying cross-cultural regularities makes tax and prose rhythm, word choice, modulations of it possible to isolate the elements that enter into tone, and symbolic imagery. complex cultural confi gurations. But the particu- To locate neurocognitive fi ndings within com- lar character of those cultural confi gurations does prehensive explanatory sequences, we have to link in fact substantially alter the quality of lived and the highest level of causal explanation—inclusive imagined experience. We are only just beginning to fi tness, the ultimate regulative principle of evolu- understand gene-culture coevolution at a rudimen- tion—to particular features of human nature and to tary theoretical level (Carroll, 2011a). To advance particular structures and eff ects in specifi c works of in our understanding, we need highly particularized art. Human life history theory off ers the best avail- studies of specifi c cultural moments focusing both able framework for analyzing the components of on macro-structures of social dynamics (Turchin, human nature (Kaplan, Hill Lancaster, & Hurtado, 2007) and also on the neurophysiological character 2000; Low, 2000; MacDonald, 1997; Wrangham, of experience within given ecologies (Smail, 2008). 2009). Gene-culture coevolution off ers the best Cultural analysis is a necessary middle level in liter- available framework for understanding how specif- ary research. ically human mental capabilities interact with basic Th e study of individual identity is yet another motives and emotions (Carroll, 2011a). Gene- level at which literary scholars need to work. Th ey culture coevolution also provides a framework for have to understand individual diff erences in person- analyzing the way specifi c cultures organize the ele- ality as those diff erences apply to authors, charac- ments of human nature. ters, and readers. Evolutionary psychology took a A comprehensively adequate explanation of a wrong turn, early on, in deprecating the adaptive given work of art would stipulate the character and signifi cance of individual diff erences (Tooby & causes of its phenomenal eff ects (tone, style, theme, Cosmides, 1990). Th at wrong turn is now being formal organization); locate the work in a cultural corrected (Figueredo et al., 2005; Nettle, 2007a, context; explain that cultural context as a particu- 2007b). Th at correction will make the evolutionary lar organization of the elements of human nature standpoint much more valuable both to psycholo- within a specifi c set of environmental conditions gists studying live subjects and to literary critics (including cultural traditions); register the responses studying fi ctional subjects (Johnson et al., 2011; of readers; identify the sociocultural, political, and McCrae, in press). psychological functions the work fulfi lls for specifi c Substantial progress has already been made audiences (perhaps diff erent functions for diff erent in many of the research areas recommended here audiences); locate those functions in relation to the (Boyd, 2009; Boyd, Carroll, & Gottschall, 2010; evolved needs of human nature; and link the work Carroll, 2011a, 2011b; Gottschall, 2008a, 2008b). comparatively with other artistic works, using a tax- But in truth, we have only just begun. In physics, onomy of themes, formal elements, aff ective ele- “dreams of a fi nal theory” involve integrating the ments, and functions derived from a comprehensive weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, elec- model of human nature. tromagnetism, and gravity (Weinberg, 1992). In all In addition to locating individual works in evo- areas that concern human behavior, integrating the lutionary explanatory contexts, scholars and scien- humanities and the social sciences presents a sim- tists must also deal with groups of works, organized ilarly fundamental challenge. Th e opportunities by period, national literature, and features of formal are immense. Violence is only one topic within the organization and style (genre). Th ese are standard broad fi eld of evolutionary literary research, but it categories in traditional literary research, and for a is such an important topic that advances in under- good reason: Th ey constitute conventions within standing literary violence will almost certainly open which authors encode meanings and readers decode out into generalizable principles across the whole those meanings. All such traditional categories of range of human behavior.

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