Violence. Brad Evans
on human life.
Greek tragedy, particularly with its obsessive focus on the aftermath of the Trojan War, is largely about combat veterans. But it was also performed by combat veterans. Actors were not flimsy thespians or the Athenian version of Hollywood stars but soldiers who had seen combat, like Aeschylus himself. They knew firsthand what violence was. Tragedy was played before an audience that had either participated directly in war or were indirectly implicated in war. All were traumatized by it, and everyone felt its effects. War was the life of the city and its pride, as Pericles argued. But war was also the city’s fall and undoing.
How might we respond in a similar way to the contemporary situation of violence and war? It might seem that the easiest and noblest thing to do is to speak of peace. Yet, as Raymond Williams says in his still hugely relevant 1966 book, Modern Tragedy: “To say peace when there is no peace is to say nothing.” The danger of easy pacifism is that it is inert and self-regarding. It is always too pleased with itself. But the alternative is not a justification of war. It is rather the attempt to understand the deep history and tragic complexity of political situations.
The great virtue of ancient tragedy is that it allowed the Greeks to see their role in a history of violence and war that was to some extent of their own making. It also allowed them to imagine a suspension of that cycle of violence. And this suspension, the kind of thing that happens in the trial at the end of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, was not based on a fanciful idealism but on a realistic and concrete grasp of a historical situation, which was something the Greeks did by focusing history through the lens of myth.
The slim sliver of hope I have is that the same could be true of us. To see the bloody events of the contemporary world in a tragic light exposes us to a disorder that is not just someone else’s disorder. It is our disorder, and theater at its best asks us to take the time to reflect on this and to imagine what a world where violence is suspended might look like.
With that in mind, I’d like now to turn to Shakespeare. In Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine you show how Shakespearean figures are relevant for understanding the ways in which deeply tragic questions concerning life, death, and love are embodied today. What is it about Shakespeare that still captures the violence of the times?
From the beginning to the end, Shakespeare’s drama is a meditation on political violence. Whether one thinks of the wild excesses of Titus Andronicus, the vast majestic sweep of the history plays, or the great tragedies, Shakespeare had a tight and commanding grip on the nature of political power and its relation to violence and the claims and counterclaims of justice. What is most powerful about Shakespeare is the way in which his historically coded reflections on the politics of his time are combined with intense and immense psychological intimacy. Shakespeare, like no one before or since, binds together the political and the psychological.
To take the play that I know best, Hamlet, it is not just that this play is a drama of violence in a surveillance state where power is constituted through acts of murder (the Castle of Elsinore and the state of Denmark is clearly some kind of allegory for the late Elizabethan court and police state), but also that we feel an awful proximity to the effects of violence on the mind of the young Danish prince and the way in which it drives his feigned madness into something more real and frightening, as when he confronts his mother with terrifying psychic violence (act 3, scene 4).
What answer does Hamlet give that helps us understand our current political situation? Simply put, the play counsels us that time is out of joint. What people often forget is that Hamlet’s father, before he was himself murdered, killed Fortinbras’s father. And therefore it is fitting that Hamlet ends not just with the prince’s death but also with the military occupation of Denmark by the forces of young Fortinbras, who is Hamlet’s twin, insofar as they are both the sons of murdered fathers, one by the other.
So the point of Shakespeare is not to give us simple answers or reassuring humanistic moral responses to violence but to get us to confront the violence of our own histories. “Hamlet” gives us many warnings, but perhaps the most salient is the following: if we imagine that justice is based on vengeance against others, then we are truly undone.
How can we connect insights such as this to the historic and evidently prescient contemporary relationship between violence and sport? Are sporting arenas perhaps the real theaters of our times? Are they inevitably bound up with the problem of violence in both its glorified and its vilified forms?
Ah, now you’re talking. Sport is obviously the continuation of war by other means. And sports stadiums are undoubtedly the closest thing to ancient theaters that we have, especially in terms of scale (nearly 15,000 people sat in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens). It’s fascinating to me that when Bertolt Brecht was trying to imagine the ideal audience for the kind of epic theater he was developing in the 1920s, he pictured a sports crowd. That is, a crowd that is relaxed and not anxious, sitting under lights rather than in the dark, and that has knowledge of what is happening and a passion for it, rather than people either looking perplexed or quietly taking a nap, as usually happens in New York theaters. I think there is a lot to Brecht’s idea.
Sport is obviously violent, and it is violence that we want to see. We want to see people putting their bodies on the line for their team and leaving their bodies on the field. This is why the whole debate about concussions in the NFL is so hypocritical, to my mind. Sport is a place where bodies break. If you don’t agree with it, then don’t watch it.
But sports is not just some gladiatorial spectacle of violence. It is violence honed into skill and masterful expertise, what psychoanalysts would call “sublimation.” It is violence refined and elevated. And sporting drama is only made possible through an elaborate set of rules, which have to be observed and with which all parties agree.
But what is in the background of the rule-governed physical violence of sport is something more complex, something closer to what the ancients called fate. This is particularly the case with the sport that I take it you and I hold dearest, what our American pals call soccer. For the real fan, what is at stake in a soccer match is a sense of profound attachment to place, whether town, city, or nation, a sense of identity that is almost tribal and that is often organized around social class, ethnicity, dialect, or language. But what is driving the whole activity is something closer to destiny. This is usually experienced when one’s team loses, as one has the sinking feeling that England must when playing Germany and the game has to end with penalty shots.
But the key phenomenon of sport in relation to violence is that although sport can and does spill over into actual violence (whether through hooliganism or ethnic or racist violence), this usually doesn’t happen. As a fan, one follows the physical, violent intensity of the game with a mixture of intense passion and expert knowledge of what is happening, and then the game ends and one goes home, often a little disappointed. I think sport, especially soccer, is a wonderful example of how violence can be both made spectacular and harnessed for nonviolent ends. At its best, one accepts defeat, respects the opponent, and moves on eagerly to the next game.
The subtlety of the potential for nonviolence you express here seems crucial. In particular, how might we develop the necessary intellectual tools adequate to these deeply violent and politically fraught times?
My response is very simple: art. I think that art at its most resonant and powerful can give us an account of the history of violence from which we emerge and can also offer us the possibility of a suspension of that violence. Art can provide an image for our age.
For me, this happens most powerfully in popular music. For me, as for many others, one of the most coherent and powerful responses to the racialized violence of the past year or so was Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. With dazzling linguistic inventiveness, steeped in intense inward knowledge of traditions of jazz, soul, and funk, Lamar does not provide easy solutions or empty moral platitudes but confronts us aesthetically with the deep history of racialized violence. You hear this very clearly on a track like “Alright.” It is what Public Enemy, Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye did so powerfully in previous generations.
Some days I am inclined to agree with Nietzsche when he said that without music life would be