Violence and art have a long history. The Greeks found a balance between them, depicting brutality without being overwhelmed by it. Now, in an age of extreme violence, artists struggle to look it in the face without being thrilled or turned to stone

IN HOMER’S Iliad, there is an explosive, ferocious and terribly violent event, with men “mauling each other there like wolves”. Odysseus thrusts his spear through one temple of Priam’s bastard son, and its sharp bronze point comes out through the other side. We are made to see guts spilling on to the ground, to hear the sickening crack of shattered bones. Even the great god Apollo roars out like a demented thug as he urges on the Trojans: “Stab them, slash their flesh!” And yet one of the great achievements of Robert Fagles’s monumental translation of the poem is to find a language in which this violence is neither unbearable nor pleasurable. It is vivid, visceral and unflinching.

But it is contained within a poetry that is stern, formal, stately and oddly serene. Its rolling rhythms and supple syntax work against the horror and chaos of the scenes it describes, so that the violence and the serenity, the content and the form, are held in perfect tension.

This artistry opens up a gap between the reader on the one side and the act of violence on the other. Within that gap, we can elude the twin dangers of being seduced into imaginative collusion with violence on one side and of being overwhelmed and numbed on the other.

Both in Homer and in Greek tragedy, there is this capacity to be at once true to the physical brutality of violence and yet sufficiently distant from it that it generates neither sadistic pleasure nor inured numbness.

One of the reasons we still return so often to the Greeks is that, in an age of extreme violence, contemporary art struggles to find the same balance.

Artists in the 20th century developed at least five different strategies. Two of them fail and three succeed to some extent in finding some way to look violence in the face without being either thrilled or turned to stone.

EXPLICITNESS

At the end of his 1937 poem from the Spanish Civil War, I’m Explaining a Few Things, Pablo Neruda utters a terrible demand to replace metaphors with literalness:

Come and see the blood in the streets.

Come and see

The blood in the streets.

Come and see the blood

In the streets!

Neruda’s response reminds us that the idea of explicit violence in art didn’t start out as sensationalism. Systems of power had colluded to hide the realities of mass violence, to keep it at a distance, to turn it into abstract glory. It was natural to imagine that the core problem with violence was its lack of visibility: if people could really see what was happening, they would make it stop.

The urgency of this idea was enormously enhanced by the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps. Because the camps had been hidden from view and because the sheer scale of the atrocities committed there stretched credulity, the idea of showing the most sickening and disturbing images to as many people as possible had a tremendous moral force.

It is striking that the first significant evidence presented to the Nuremberg trials was not that of a camp survivor or even of one of the soldiers who had to liberate the camps. It was a movie, made by George Stevens, a Hollywood director of romantic comedies and simply called Nazi Concentration Camps. It represents the high point of the idea that art, by being explicit, can make us feel the full horror of acts of annihilation.

Yet ultimately this idea fails. It does so for at least four reasons.

Firstly, as explicitness becomes the norm, rather than the rare and purposeful exception, it either loses its capacity to disturb or becomes so brutal that it overwhelms the capacity for compassion or reflection. Secondly, the explicit in art is dangerously close to the literal, and literalism calcifies into cliche. Explicit art becomes bad art. Thirdly, the depiction of those who have died violently, especially en masse, dehumanises them. What we see are not people but inert flesh. And, most unsettlingly, the explicit depiction of violence foreshortens the moral distance that is necessary for the viewer not to be complicit.

At its most extreme, explicitness becomes not merely sensationalist but a form of gloating over the dead. The emotions it stirs are not compassion and grief but a sense of power and exultation. In a Quentin Tarantino movie, for example, we see the violence from the point of view of the killer and are invited to share in its thrill.

ART AS VIOLENCE

A second response to the dilemma of dealing with the violence of the 20th century is the idea that art can replace violence. The first World War seemed to suggest that the mass of the people was half-dead. The conditions of industrial life had cut them off from their primitive urges and instincts. Rulers could thus manipulate the masses by appealing to those instincts. They could unleash them in violence on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

But what if art could satisfy those needs instead? What if it could tap into the same inchoate impulses and release them as ritualised performance? The image here is that of Frankenstein’s monster being brought to life by a bolt of lightning or of a disturbed psychiatric patient being given shock therapy. Physically and psychologically, humanity is assumed to need the kind of high-voltage jolt that violence delivers. If art can provide it, war will be made redundant.

The great exemplar of this ambition is the French actor and playwright Antonin Artaud. He demands that theatre address “the dark layers of consciousness”. It should reproduce, though Artaud does not say this directly, the experience of war, the thrilling and terrifying adventure of placing one’s existence on the line: “We stake our lives on the spectacle that is taking place on the stage.” Most of the avant garde in theatre, and much of it in other forms, comes from this desire. All of it has the same implicit ambition: to become a form of violence that liberates and heals rather than imprisons and destroys. But this impulse, too, ultimately fails.

It is a delusion to believe that art as violence can compete with its nemesis: violence as art. One phenomenon of the 20th century was the invasion of the artistic space by political violence. The spread of the mass electronic media allowed terrorists to stage acts of violence as dramas – for example, plane hijackings – or as visual spectacles, such as 9/11.

Presciently, in his 1991 novel, Mao II, Don DeLillo has his protagonist, a novelist, reflect that “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”

MIND THE GAP

These two strategies cannot hold open the gap between the violent act and the audience that confronts it. A third strategy is changing the location of the gap, placing it within the work of art itself, to create internally the tension between violence as perceived, represented and remembered on the one hand and violence as perpetrated on the other. The great exemplar of this idea is John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. It enacts the difference between the construction of a violent deed in language and the playing out of that violent deed in action. Synge opens up the gap in which reflection on violence is possible: the distance between the dramatic narrative of the cleaving of Mahon’s skull and the witnessing of that same act. Christy cannot understand why Pegeen, who was enthralled by his story of parricide, cannot abide him once she’s seen him apparently “kill” his da. She explains “that there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed”.

ATROCIOUS COMEDY

During and after the first World War, as Robert Fussell shows in The Great War in Modern Memory, irony became the standard mode of remembering and depicting violence. But over the course of a century of repeated carnage, the resources of tragic irony were used up. It became necessary to tap into those of comic irony as well.

A particularly potent example is James Simmons’s response to the IRA bombing of the village of Claudy in 1972, which ends:

And Christ, little Katherine Aiken is dead

Mrs McLaughlin is pierced through the head

Meanwhile to Dungiven the killers have gone

And they’re finding it hard to get through on the phone.

What Simmons does here is not nearly as simple as it sounds. For his technique is to apply two comic devices to the description of an atrocity, a risky procedure with high moral and artistic stakes. The first device is the mock-heroic pastiche, in this case of republican ballads extolling the deeds of patriotic heroes.

The second device is bathos, the abrupt transition from the high-flown and serious to the banal; they’re finding it hard to get through on the phone. What we get then is a horrific content in a comic form. The effect is one of estrangement, a defamiliarisation of the violence. It is striking not just that Simmons succeeds in this risky manoeuvre but also that he finds it absolutely necessary.

The obvious strategy of depicting the horror of the atrocity – explicit description and lamentation – simply won’t work.

THE VESTIGES OF VIOLENCE

The last – and arguably the most successful – strategy is violence as vestige. It is a strategy of evoking violence in its absence.

Instead of shocking us with bloody corpses or mass graves, it deals in aftermaths and traces.

This strategy is above all a strategy of place. Its interest is in the actual site of violence. The forerunner of this approach is Roger Fenton, and his famous image from the Crimean war in 1855, called The Valley of the Shadow of Death. It shows the aftermath of a battle that has just taken place. The war-blighted landscape is bereft of human presence, living or dead. Only the residue of the violence remains: a line of cannon balls that seem at first barely distinguishable from the rocks and stones.

Fenton’s aesthetic was marginalised after the first World War, when explicitness was in demand, but it returned after the Holocaust.

For just as the urgency of exposing the truth about the death camps gave impetus to the idea of the explicit representation of violence, it also raised questions about the ultimate effectiveness of such literal imagery.

Is the repeated showing of horrific images of masses of dead emaciated bodies from which all human individuality and personality has been stripped in fact a good way to encode a long-term memory of what had happened?

One answer to this question lies in arguably the single most powerful image in the history of the cinema. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) is deliberately minimal: just 31 minutes long. The camera moves slowly over the abandoned train tracks of Auschwitz, through the now-empty barracks and dormitories, and into the gas chambers. And it tracks over a ceiling marked by violent scratches. It is an image that, in any other context, would mean nothing at all. We have to know what the scratches are – the last marks made by the fingernails of those who were dying in the gas chamber – in order to feel their force. But when we do know, these marks are searingly violent. They seem like the most terrible inversion of the original marks in a dark cave, the great paintings of Chauvet or Lascaux in which western art had its origins. They return us to a use of metaphor that is more devastating than any explicit depiction of violence could ever be.

Fintan O’Toole gave a version of this article as the Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture at Princeton University last week