[D66] Histories of Violence

[A.OUT]

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-violence-is-freedom/

Histories of Violence: Violence Is Freedom

Brad Evans interviews Roy Scranton



NOVEMBER 4, 2019

THIS IS 34th in a series of dialogues with artists, writers, and
critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is with
Roy Scranton, an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His
essays, journalism, short fiction, and reviews have appeared in The New
York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Dissent, LIT, Los Angeles Review
of Books, and Boston Review. His latest books are the study Total
Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of
Chicago Press, 2019) and the novel I Heart Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019).

¤

BRAD EVANS: A recurring theme throughout all your writings is the
problem of violence. This has included meditations on war, which no
doubt was influenced by your personal experiences in armed conflict,
along with wider issues concerning ecological devastation and
extinction. What is it about violence that commands your attention as a
writer?

ROY SCRANTON: Violence is, in itself, quite stimulating: it activates
our most visceral engagement, imbues the world with portent, and
freights every choice with existential signification. And it’s not so
much even the case that violence commands my attention, but rather that
violence is endemic to the fantasy life of American culture. It’s
impossible to escape. So there is one sense in which my work, in its
fascination with violence, is simply participating in American culture,
exploring canonical tropes and themes, as it were, playing tunes from
the great American songbook: “Stagger Lee” and “The Ballad of Jesse
James” and “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Fuck tha Police” and “’97 Bonnie
and Clyde.”

But it’s also true that writing is for me an esoteric process of
objectification and purgation, even betrayal, in which sense my work
isn’t merely playing with violence, but is rather a series of attempts
to exorcise from my own consciousness the violence that has shaped it
and continues to affect it today. At this level of understanding, which
sometimes takes shape as intellectualization and other times as
aesthetic shaping, what interests me about violence is first of all how
violence is a way that humans make meaning. Something happens when blood
is spilled, when physical force comes into the realm of ideas, which is
neither a silencing nor the irruption of irrationality, but rather a
merging of concepts and substance. This is the power of sacrifice, of
course, the power of trauma, the power of originary violence, the power
to lay down the law. We might even say that it is the law: logos backed
by violence.

Can you elaborate more on why you think writing about violence is an act
of betrayal? Do you feel there is something dishonest about the process
or at least that violence forces us to confront something our words
cannot fully grasp when it relates back to its experience?

It is axiomatic to modern civilization that violence is the exception,
rather than the rule, and the amount of ideological work dedicated to
preserving this fiction is massive. This is, in effect, the whole point
of the discourse of trauma, which insists that violence is so alien to
civilized life that it cannot even be discussed, that violence warps and
destroys language itself. As I show in Total Mobilization, though, this
is actually a two-step process: first the violence is disavowed as
unspeakable trauma, then it is brought back under “rational” control
through the techno-medical discourses of therapeutic and psychiatric
treatment. It’s difficult to say, in the end, which fantastic aspect of
this fort-da game is more precious: the conceit that violence is alien
to modern civilization, or the delusion that we can control it through
narrative.

I’m certainly not the first to expose this secret, but it seems to be
the kind of thing we’d all rather not think about. More specifically and
personally, I suppose, I see Total Mobilization as a betrayal of the
sacred role afforded veterans in American culture. There’s an unexamined
belief that combat veterans have, through their close encounter with
violence, been witness to unspeakable revelatory truths about existence.
Yuval Harari called this “flesh-witnessing,” and James Campbell called
it “combat gnosis.” It’s sheer nonsense, of course, in strictly
objective terms, but it’s a powerful belief. As a veteran myself, I have
enjoyed and profited from this kind of auratic power. I have also, for
better or worse, spent several years trying to publicly dismantle it.

In general, I think writing as such — at least with any honesty — is
necessarily an act of betrayal. Joan Didion said “writers are always
selling somebody out,” and I also often think of something Deleuze once
said or wrote, that I must have picked up from Maggie Nelson: “What
other reason is there for writing than to be a traitor to one’s own
reign, traitor to one’s sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to
be traitor to writing.”

[...]