AGTD & The Subtleties of Violence (Moody, Flannery O'Connor)

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

All this talk of Thomas R. Pynchon's readable beach burner soon to be
available on DVD makes me question if these flesh and blood
characters, who seem capable of emotions, violence, surfing
...characters with hearts though at times heartless, who come to life
on the pages under a Dick's Private narrative, are not lacking in the
subtelties of violnce.

In AGTD the subtleties of violence saturate every page as we meet the
ghosts of exterminates peoples, enslaved persons, the people who
murdered them and enslaved them. It is the Civil War Part II and it is
being waged in imperial colonial stratagies at home and abroad. No one
is saved; the ceremony of innocense is strangled in its cradle; there
is only shadow under the rock, but their is that voice, dry and even
wry and witty that sustains us. Keeps us reading after characters
morph into characters from previous novels and then like twins in a
funhouse mirror are frightend away never to return and they drag the
plot, the set, customes, even the hooks they and we had, if only
tentatively  hung their hats on, out of the book. But this is what TRP
does best. Call is hyterical or a bombed out mind or pleasures
grotesque and groovey, but we know what is meant. There is less of it
in VL and more of it in AGTD. The rubber, the gold, the mines, the
labor, labor, labor, the payroll. Who are you working for if not for
THEM? Historians play a game of bloodsport tales. Genocide Holocaust
KIll Kill Kill and all the students moved away from the mad professor.
Nothing subtle about a history of humanity--murder and money. Then
sixty thousand are murdered by a sea storm and the wind. No reason.
Not even the season for it. Kids go back to their dorm rooms, take
comfort, and fuck, and feel better. Raise some money. Send it to the
poor bastards. Watch a comedy. Laugh it off. Go to the beach. Read a
Pynchon novel? Wha?



Rick Moody:
The Subtleties of Violence
PEN America 2: Home and Away

This talk was originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters
Tribute to Flannery O'Connor, sponsored by the PEN American Center and
Lincoln Center.

http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1118/prmID/525

The Subtleties of Violence

As in the movies, there are in literature certain kinds of violence
that themselves seem to do harm, that seem be acts of violence
committed upon the reader as well as upon characters, that seem to be
engenderers of violence rather than literary or moral formulations on
the difficulties entailed in violence. Were I to attempt to formulate
some characteristics of these violent episodes of literature, I would
want to speak to how character is depicted in these works. That is, if
literature intends to permit or even facilitate violence, it has only
to dispense with the construction of complex character, which is so
essential to the mission of literature in general. If we know nothing
of a character, if we know nothing of his or her tastes or ambition,
then how can we care if she or he is beaten, tortured, or murdered?
Work that avoids characterizing victims of violence makes violence
easy because it dispenses with the cost implicit in force: human
potential, human associations. Such work, then, tolerates and even
appreciates the callousness and menace of violent behavior. If a
certain lassitude is sometimes evident in the construction of victims
of violence, there's also a danger in a shorthand with respect to its
perpetrators. That is, it's too easy to portray the thieves, rapists,
murderers, and warmongers of our literature as simple villains or
miscreants. This abbreviated characterization overlooks the potential
for violence that is immanent in each of us. The lessons of modernism
make clear that the old heroism is no longer enough, will no longer
completely illustrate humankind, and the same is true for the modern
villain. He can be just as sympathetic, just as flawed, just as human
as his victim; indeed, he ought to be, if we are to understand how he
came to be where he is, with his pistols and knives, free to act while
knowing better.


.  .  . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


So: if it is to be depicted properly in contemporary literature, in
such a way that we know precisely its harrowing cost and
inexplicability, violence must take place between fully imagined
people, between complete, genuine lives.

On to the case at hand. For a middle-class woman of education and
relatively serene circumstances, Flannery O'Connor seems to have known
a lot about violence. It is there in the margins of many of her
stories, it is there in the very center of a great many of them, but
my hypothesis tonight is that it's always there in two antipodal
guises, namely in a grotesque form, or, contrarily, in a restrained
form.

Sometimes, the best way to suggest a thing is through glancing
contact, rather than by direct means, through objective correlative,
through withholding. If O’Connor wasn’t intending to write directly
about violence, she nonetheless occasionally demonstrates startling
insight into both its human origins and its costs. Anything more would
be the province of an essayist, not a writer of imaginative
literature, and as O’Connor remarked of fiction writers, “We don’t
solve problems, we tell stories.”