364
JOHN FRASER
by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit the essential
sickness or strength of the human soul." Nor do I have in mind the
formal violences, the grinding dislocations and compressions, that
often characterize such works - Celine's, say, or Rimbaud's or Van
Gogh's. And I am not even concerned with the full range of physical
violences that one encounters
in
"cruel" works in Artaud's sense or
senses of the term; Lautreamont"s
Les Chants de
MaldoToT,
for in–
stance, lies outside my province here. What I am concerned with
are, broadly speaking, realistic violences, namely violences that may
indeed occur in "cruel" works or
in
works characterized by a good
deal of expressive intensifying and heightening, but that owe their
effectiveness not to the general context of ideas and attitudes in
which they occur or the formal daring of the work but to the simple
fact that one believes that such violences could actually happen.
Ezra Pound has called major literature "news that
stays
news." My
chie~
aim,
more precisely, will be to define some of the features of
the kind of "realistic" violence that stays shocking however often one
returns to it and - which is even more to the point - the effects
of which seem to me unequivocally salutary. I shall naturally
be
drawing a number of my examples from movies, since these days the
movies are what classical Latin literature once was to intellectuals–
the one cultural topic they all have in common. I shall
also
be
drawing a number from thrillers, of which I have read a great
many. Where more "respectable" works are concerned, each reader
will no doubt think of obvious examples that I have failed to give.
However, I am not trying to give a panoramic view of fictional
vi~
lences, I am trying to work out how and why it is that certain
shocking things shock - things, for the most
part,
that have lodged
themselves strongly in my memory during the past twenty-five years
or so and have shocked
me.
Since to be shocking is not in itself a merit, obviously, let me
start
with
a couple of jokes that form useful paradigms and will
help me to make certain basic distinctions. The first is of a familiar
recent American kind: "Question: What is yellow and black and
screams when it rolls over? Answer: A school bus." The second
is
English and dates back at least twenty years. Scene, an English
bus; characters, the driver behind his glass partition, a man on the
seat just behind him, another passenger looking on. Man behind
