Violence with intent
Charles Marowitz
Violence in the Arts John Fraser (Cambridge University Press £2.50) This should be made required reading for Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse for, in the pages of John Fraser's tract, they might discover certain salutary aspects both of violence and pornography that would never occur to them in a thousand Festivals of Light. For instance, Mr Fraser's opinion that ". . . a very important way in which violences shock us — and shock salutarily — is that they undermine the yearning for invulnerability that violent entertainment caters to." Only a passing reference, and yet one that puts a multitude of hackneyed films and tele-plays in their place. For a basic distinction between_ salutary and dulling violence is precise, whether or not it confirms our fantasies or dismantles them. It is a distinction which the law is always being called upon to make and rarely has the artistic background to make wisely. Another of Fraser's useful distinctions concerns the other-worldliness of horror and violence, peopled with werewolves, vampires, zombies, Frankensteins, and the more disturbing 'human monsters' which, because they permit of easy identification in social situations familiar to Us, are very much more disturbing. The psychic area in which violence takes place is the determining factor for harm or good, and it only confuses an already confused issue to complain loudly and boringly about 'violence' in the abstract, without realising there is a fundamental aesthetic difference between the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear and the gouging-out of vile jellies in a -Mafia thriller.
Fraser understands and appears to subscribe to Antonin Artaud's concept of cruelty as being essentially purgative, that is, applying intellectual rigour, "implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination," to abolish the hypocrisies of life and to affirm its inescapable truths. And it is refreshing to find hackneyed subjects like shockability-in-art being thought through to some more profound conclusion: One of the ironies involved in the notion of the outrageous is the endeavour of proponents of it to get outrageousness all on their own side, so that, emancipated and unshockable themselves, they can watch comfortably as other people are outraged in piquant ways. Good art, however, doesn't shock
only the bourgeoisie; in some degrees it shocks everyone, including the artist. And it is because of the daring and ruthlessness of its interrogations — its intellectual cruelty in Artaud's sense of that term — that distinguished violent art remains genuinely radical however often one returns to it.
After analysing the positive side of violence and showing that it is not the prerogative of subversive groups or terrorist-organisations, but the mainstay of all Establishment structyres, Fraser comes dangerously close to arguing that without the methodical application of force, civilisation could not survive, and that to condemn individual acts of violence without recognising the abuses of corporatemight is deludingly simplex. Following through this idea, he finds virtue both in war and imperialism and, although some of his conclusions incite a violent rejection, so persuasive are his findings that the reader finds himself reassessing his own attitudes rather than attacking the author's. What emerges from these analyses is that any condemnation of violence that stops at the performance of an act, no matter how bestial, doesn't begin to yield useful information until the act is related to the social values which prompted it and the assumptions of its victim. Once it gets into that territory, almost every gesture of a civilised society can be construed as provocative to some people, and the subject acquires uncontrollable complexity.
.What makes for a completely unintentional violence in Fraser's own work is the jolting way in which he continually lurches from films to plays to paintings to history. No generalisation worth its salt can be compounded of so many disparate examples. The qualifications cry out to be made, but Fraser doesn't make them. In this way, despite the breadth of his canvas and the depth of his research, he tends to oversimplify, arriving at conclusions that can only stand up if one is prepared to lump together art-forms and events which a greater mental fastidiousness would insist on separating. Continually interacting between art and life, Fraser examines Nazi atrocities and contemporary crime-cases, relating these to the responses we get from de Sade and Kipling, Godard and Kubrick, the theories of Antonin Artaud and a galaxy of recent and near-recent pulp-fiction. Occasionally, a generalisation is thrown up that can sustain such a wide list of references, but it is a little like supporting a bridge with barrels, crates, ladders and totem-poles.
What one is left with is an extremely agile and incessantly active mind which illuminates almost every subject it touches, but hasn't the staying-power to build a set of progressive conclusions. But if we can appreciate novelists like Burroughs for brief flights of good writing, and critics like Johnson for only occasional bursts of insight, one shouldn't un
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