PARTISAN REVIEW
377
I was at the window before the scream ended, careless about
whether I'd be seen or not... .
Joe Sault was in a kitchen chair half-facing me, with Kerch in
front of him and Rusty behind him holding his arms. His left ear
hung down like a red rag, dripping blood rhythmically onto his
stylish collar. His mouth was ragged and spongy. His body was
naked from the waist down, and his shirt had been rolled up
under his armpits. His lean belly, bisected by a line of dark hair,
trembled steadily like a beaten dog's.
Floraine was sitting with her fur-coated back to me, almost
against the window. She didn't move and she didn't say a word.
Garland was standing behind her, but all I could see of him was
the grey elbow of his coat. The vibrating white light of a gasoline
lamp on the table gave the room an ugliness as precise as a raw
photograph.
Karch put down the heavy iron spoon that he had been
balancing in his hand, and picked up a paring knife from the table.
Before he began to move, I sensed that he was going to turn, and
ducked.
All the participants except the narrator are criminals, and the young
man being tortured is himself a thoroughly unpleasant one, so that we
have here the exact reverse of the kind of automatic ethical de–
humanizing of people on the "wrong" side that I spoke of earlier.
(Such instances of reversal are, I
think,
rather uncommon. One of
the most memorable, I suppose, is that in which the blinded Cyclops
tenderly addresses
his
favorite ram, under which Odysseus is hang–
ing.) What is especially to my purpose, however,
is
the means by
which the humanizing comes about. At the risk of seeming to offer
another recipe, I would like to suggest that very often in the kinds
of violences I am discussing one
is
made aware of the continuation
of normal, nonviolent life at the very moment when the violences
are occurring. Kitchen utensils, domestic animals, trees, the corncob
in
Sanctuary
(especially in the dreadful statement, "Only we never
used a cob. We made him
wish
we had used a cob"), the "vile
jelly" on which Cornwall sets his foot, the "organic" comparisons
in the death scenes in
Antony and Cleopatra,
the laboratory animals
and doves at the end of
Les Yeux sans Visage
-
what results is an
at times almost unendurable sense both of the complete believability
of the violence and of its immense
strangeness.
In this connection,
incidentally, the fight in the woods in Tony Richardson's
Tom Jones
also comes to mind, in which suddenly, after innumerable costume
