The Theme of Violence in Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Herr's Dispatches and Schuyler's Black No More - Literature review Example

Discuss violence and/or cruelty in the at least two texts you have studied in this The theme of violence is firmly en d in literature and that for several genres it is, in fact, a fundamental element. A great number of studies have already explored and discussed this fact in literature and underscored that it is a precarious dimension in literary history. This is not without justification because although violence is ugly with its discourse of gore, destruction, cruelty, mutilation, torture and death, it is used as means to achieve a greater end in a literary piece. It may be used as a tool to highlight social, philosophical, political and aesthetic discourse. For this paper, I will discuss three texts that used the theme of violence in their narratives: E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (2007), Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) and George Schuyler’s Black No More (1989). It is expected that from this discussion, the employment of violence may be justified to deliver what the author wanted to express to the reader besides merely eliciting horror, excitement or other emotional response. The Book of Daniel E.L. Doctorow discussed the Cold War and the New Left movements in The Book of Daniel. He reconstructed the trial and execution of the Isaacsons - the Rosenbergs - in the early 1950s. The story was narrated from the perspective of Daniel, one of their sons. Daniel’s book, which was both his dissertation and the novel sought to explain the mystery of his parents’ trial and execution. A general display of violence is when Doctorow tried to outline the kind of American radicalism of the past that, for him have vanished today. Here he depicted the work of radicals not towards achieving socialism or social justice but on producing cataclysmic images. Artie Sternlicht, the main character that represented this kind of radical politics stated: “We’re gonna overthrow the United States with images. (p. 140) Sternlicht’s insights, of all its morbidity, were able to seize Daniel and awakened him. A specific scene that manifested an image of violence, although not in the context of the radical politics mentioned above, is demonstrated in the cost of the state’s abuse on individual, family and society. This is displayed in Daniel’s attitude toward his wife and sister. The violence in him is often narrated in the form of erotic genital violence. At one point and in perhaps the cruelest scene in the narrative, Doctorow described Daniel making his wife kneel, facing away from him just so he could prepare to burn her buttocks with a cigarette lighter. Then, the reader, at one point learned that Daniel’s sister tried to commit suicide with a razor blade in the restroom of a turnpike Howard Johnson’s. Such scene was described by Doctorow in a hard-edged, intimate prose photography, through Daniel, the brother. For Doctorow, such aggression in Daniel particularly in his use of misogyny and homosocial bonding, and the instances of violence like the suicide of Susan, are manifestations of the individual and familial displacement by the state. Furthermore, Daniel wrote a disturbing passage: I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution… I know there is a you. There has always been a you. YOU: I will show you that I can do the electrocution. (p. 312) With the discourse on radicalism and the Daniel’s aggression, Doctorow was able to use violence in order to demonstrate the ills of society and the abuses of the state. Using the history of family and Daniel’s efforts to connect his past, for instance, Doctorow outlined the effects on a family of becoming the target of the antagonistic and projective forces of society. Violence became a tool to highlight the information found in the past so that the present generation would learn from it. Furthermore, with the tones of violence, despair, cruelty, interrogation and delegitimation and cynicism, Doctorow was allowed to effectively underscore a positive vision, which was the hope for the future. Herr’s Dispatches Dispatches is a non-fiction work that chronicled Michael Herr’s experiences as journalist in Vietnam. Published in 1977, it explored, narrated and discussed the American soldiers’ experience in Vietnam and is considered to be one the first printed works that addressed this theme, particularly in a period when Vietnam veterans would not speak much of what transpired during the war. Violence is graphically narrated in several of Dispatches’ narrative on friendly fire. There was a grenade-rigged toilet that killed a US marine at Khe Sanh and such case would become just “another one of those stories that moved across the DMZ, making people laugh and shake their heads and look knowingly at each other, but shocking no one.” (p. 58). Here, Herr depicted violence as somewhat of a norm in a community created by war. Those within it were already desensitized to its incidence and that it was part of life as much as the air or breathing is. Writing more about friendly fire, Herr recounts: “There were always plenty of stories about… Marines ambushing Marines, artillery and air strikes called in our own positions, all in the course of routine Search-and-Destroy operations.” (p. 102) He further proclaimed, “The stories from that time became part of the worst Marine legends; the story of one Marine putting a wounded buddy away with a pistol shot because medical help was impossible, or the story of what they did to the NVA prisoner taken beyond the wire – stories like that.” (p. 122) At one point the discourse of the violence on Vietnam was so legitimized that the war was referred to as Vietnam the movie. In one statement, Herr said: At the battalion aid station in Hue a Marine with minor shrapnel wounds in his legs was waiting to get on a helicopter, a long wait with all of the dead and badly wounded going out first, and a couple of sniper rounds snapped across the airstrip, forcing us to move behind some sandbagging. ‘I hate this movie,’ he said, and I thought, ‘Why not?” (p. 188) In Dispatches, Herr tried to outline all the reasons why America had to be in Vietnam and wage its war. He tried to account for all the reasons “from the lowest John Wayne wet dream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy.” Further on in Herr’s narrative, he would remark that “Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” Herr attempted to generalize the Vietnam experience in order to tell the tale of the soldiers and also, too, of those civilians who were in Vietnam, those who were in America but had not escaped its clutches. In the book’s ending, Herr emphasized, “we’ve all been there.” (p. 260) Further on, Herr managed to infuse a certain socio-cultural dimension to his narration specifically in regard to how America coped with the violence of the war. For instance, Herr pointed to the sacred relics and good-luck charms that many soldiers would carry in their person. These assortments include “pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix” and so forth. (p. 57) In the backdrop of violence, Herr has shown that he could discuss other issues such as race and values and how this played out during battles, in front of the enemy and the raining bullets and fallen comrades. With violence, Herr illustrated the effects of the Vietnam war – the protracted conflict - on individuals, on soldiers who must face the enemy in a distant land. Even as a journalist, being there allowed Herr to share the experience. In the following words, one sees what Herr wanted his readers to understand and how violence made it more poignant and effective: Behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes… The information isn’t frozen, you are. (p. 20) With the new kind of seeing allowed by violence – through the pornographic gun shots to the high-technology splatter wounds – the readers certainly and finally understood what Herr was talking about. Black No More George Schuyler attack on violence in Black No More to deliver his story is different in the sense that it is comical as it parodies lynching and color madness. In the narrative, a lynching took place in a crazy, impossible and pseudo-science fiction environment. During the lynching, Schuyler turned the scenario in reverse. The victims became a pair of white supremacists who conveniently had fallen into the clutches of the disciples of the True Faith Christ Lovers’ Church in the pretty southern town of Happy Hill, which interestingly is depicted as lily-white. In a comical depiction of lynching and bizarre narration of violence, Schuyler wrote that the Happy Hill church people proceeded to the ceremonies according to time-honored custom and as the victims were lynched and burned, the Happy Hill people were naturally ecstatic while the victims, as the flames subside, were just no more than “two charred hulks.” (p. 217) Such satiric treatment, however, is not to poke fun at the themes being told and that it does not trivialize the tragic insularity of the black people. With the parody of the violent act, Schuyler criticized the stupidity of the lynching of the blacks. Furthermore, with the violent backdrop, Schuyler also lampooned the obsession of Americans on color – black artists and con men, fake white politicians and businessmen, exaggerated piety of the Southern Christians. In the story, a black man discovered a way to turn his black skin into white, sending everyone is flurry of skin-changing. Black people were suddenly turning up white while the whites are scurrying to find ways to distinguish themselves from the newly minted “whites.” This scientific process wrought havoc to the American society and since it was difficult to determine the blacks from the whites, great panic ensued. Out of the comic depictions, there is a seriousness found in the way it communicates disgust on the cruelty of the color system created by the American whites on the black people. With the parody, Schuyler captured the absurdity of the violent lynching of the negro race not just in the context of mob psychology but also in the use of religion and the name of God to perpetuate the act. Schuyler successfully depicted the hypocrisy that justified the violence committed against a race by invoking Jesus’ name. Conclusion In Politeia, Plato expounded a theory that have defined the parameters of the Western philosophy of the beautiful as good. In this theory, the beauty of an art form is correlated with variables such as proportion, harmony, which according to Kant, a quasi-natural “purposiveness without a purpose.” (Myskja 2002, p. 107) But there are cases, as displayed by the employment of violence in the texts discussed by this paper, that violence could be more than ugly and in opposition to the conventional conception of beauty in art. In Doctorow’s work, violence was used just so the grim abuses of the state towards individuals who earned its ire unfolded clearly and effectively. In Dispatches, Herr used violence to narrate a war and its effect on individuals and that his effective use of the theme allowed the readers to experience what transpired, including the horrors, fears and finally, understanding in terms of soldiers as changed people after the conflict. Then, Schuyler poked fun at violence and by doing so expressed his own outrage at the senselessness of it all. Violence becomes significant when it mirrors and underscores the social reality or confirms it or a social order. Its relationship with art comes with the beauty of the tragedy which breeds concepts that are true to the Western aesthetics such as renewal, hope, transformation, redemption and sacrifice. This is beyond the shallow usage of violence wherein it is employed within the idea that the horrific is pleasurable or exciting. Violence, hence, becomes fundamental in literature. With the texts discussed by this paper, it is easy to understand why the authors were compelled or required to depict it. References Doctorow, E.L. (2007). The Book of Daniel. Rando House Paperbacks. Herr, M. (1977). Dispatches. Vintage Books. Myskja, Bjorn. (2002). The sublime in Kant and Beckett: aesthetic judgement, ethics and literature. Walter de Gruyter. Schuyler, G. (1989). Black no more: being an account of the strange and wonderful workings of science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-194. UPNE. Read More