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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 23. 21st September 1972

[Introduction]

James Bertram, professor of English at Victoria prepared this address for the Wellington branch of the Royal Society of N.Z.

It was printed in The Gazette (Aug. 1970), and is available in The Royal Society publication 'Violence' (Social Science Section 1971 — ed. J.M. Barrington.)

"Love is an open wound"

Charles Brasch.

There isn't a great deal of New Zealand writing we can fairly call literature; and what there is of it isn't especially marked by violence, either in manner or content. I suspect it would be rather better as literature, if it were more violent. And it wouldn't be difficult to argue that New Zealand writing has become progressively more violent, more frank and brutal and uncompromising, as it has matured. One could easily illustrate this by tracing a line, say, from Lady Barker through Jane Mander and Katherine Mansfield to Janet Frame; or from Alfred Domett through Arthur Adams to R.A.K. Mdson, Alistair Campbell, and James K Baxter. These earlier writers don't often shock us, the later ones sometimes do. And the power to shock is surely one of the marks of an adult and living literature.

There are two main snags, however, about this historical, "evolutionary" approach. First, it tends to assume that creative writing, like social development, is not merely continuous (which it is) hut also some kind of steady progress and advance (which it isn't). Second, the whole modern age since the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars has been a pretty violent one — a tract of time crammed with private anguish and public slaughter on a scale hard to match in the long annals of man's inhumanity to man. Literature, like the other arts, has had to reflect and keep pace with all this: so that modern literature almost by definition is a literature of violence. The veneer of civilisation has worn pretty thin; we are all aware of the destructive forces it covers.

To find words for modern life is as brave an act as that of the cave artist who drew the slender figures of primitive men confronting the most powerful of predators. In the cave drawings the monster is faithfully observed, the artist's technique assured. Our modern monsters aren't as easily brought to view, and we are still struggling to find the techniques to present them.

I am not a philosopher, still less a theologian; so I shan't venture into any discussion of the age-old problems of evil, violence, and human suffering. Even in the most hopeful of religious schemes, the Judaeo-Christian, man has fallen from grace before he's got fairly started and the first mortal birth is the birth of a murderer. To account for the presence of an Adversary, tor the force of evil in the heart of man, we have to presuppose a revolt of angels and war in heaven-in a word, primordial conflict, suffering and doom. Other religions, whether or not they share the hope of man's ultimate redemption, agree in recognising the chief facts of the human condition: for good or ill, we all inherit conflict, suffering and mortality. As Beckett's Hamm puts it. You're on earth, there's no cure for that."

Now this whole business of painful or tragic conflict between man and his predicament, between man and his fellow men, has always been the stuff of great literature. There is no drama in Eden till the serpent enters it. The death of Abel is the first tragedy. The Old Testament, in sum, is a fairly blood-stained record of the fortunes of the chosen people, and it reaches its greatest eloquence in the warnings and lamentations of the prophets. Homer's Iliad is one of the most violent books ever written, and one of the greatest. Goethe's Faust shrinks in comparison with Dante's Commedia, we might claim, not because Goethe was a less gifted poet, but because his enlightened scepticism couldn't face the full horror of human depravity that Dante (fortified by Aquinas) took in his stride. And since Goethe, the characteristic mark of modern literature has been "to exact a full look at the Worst."

What I am trying to suggest is not that great literature must be violent in tone, or must approach the special effects of Greek tragedy; but that it must somehow accommodate violence, at least dip if not plunge into the tragic flux of human suffering, whether in Naxon or in Nelson If violence alone made great literature, Seneca would be greater than Sophocles, and he isn't. Polite novelists like Jane Austen or Henry James can convince us by a mere tremor, by the slightest of vibrations in the crystal, that they are just as responsive to the agonizing pressures of their time as more flamboyant writers like Stendhal or Dostoievsky. One of the most violent novels ever written is that exquisitely polished exchange of letters in French high society. Les Liasons Dangereuses.

May we agree then (ducking a number of nice problems in aesthetics) on one general working assumption? In all times and places, but especially in our own time and to some degree in our own place, good imaginative writing must always, like Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, show the two contrary states of the human soul. I think this is as true for a short lyric as it is for the longest and most elaborate work of fiction. "Without Contraries is no progression", whether we name the contraries as Love and Hate, Reason and Energy, Good and Evil, Faith and Unfaith. And without contraries there is no art.

It isn't the artist's task to resolve the contraries though of course we all recognise some supreme works of art(like Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, and Dante's Commedia, and Shakespeare's final plays, and Rilke's Duino Elegies) which seem to have achieved this miracle. But he must somehow include them—the Tiger along with the Lamb, the Satanic mills along with the beams of Love—if he is to convince us that he is a man speaking to men, that his work is rooted in life as we know it.

If we turn, then, from the company of masterpieces to what has been written in or about our own islands, the same general values should still apply. How fully, or how adequately, have our best writers managed to accommodate violence? I am too ignorant of traditional Maori chant and song to bring it into the picture-though it is obvious that in the celebration of heroic myth, and in the bawdy humour of satirical exposure, Maori poetry has resources nearer to those of Homer and Aristophanes than pallid modern English words can easily compass. Nor can I fairly bring in probably the finest verses ever composed in this country, the doom-laden and prophetic poems in exile of the German-Jewish refugee, Karl Wolf-skehl.

Quite arbitrarily, I want to suggest a few broad categories with their own convenient labels. These might be: Cosmic Violence ("Man against the gods"); Natural Violence ("Man against nature"); Social Violence (organised and in some sense licensed conflict of bodies of men, as in wartime or periods of class struggle), and finally the very elastic compartment I can only call Human Violence—the shocking things men and women do to themselves and to one another, with whatever motive, and too often gratuitously.