positive. Drawing on notions of power developed by
the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Newton
Garver’s essay “What Violence Is” (1975) includes
covert, psychological, and institutional forms of vio-
lence in declaring, “Any institution which systemati-
cally robs certain people of rightful options generally
available to others does violence to those people”
(420). Despite his sympathies with nonviolence as a
stance, Garver does not advocate it as a viable social
goal and posits that conflicts between nations may
be minimized but not always eliminated. Obviously,
thinkers differ in their approach to defining violence
and continue to examine its apocalyptic manifesta-
tion in contemporary times.
The problem of violence has also been of consid-
erable interest to psychologists. Sigmund Freud was
the first to diagnose the origins of neurosis, includ-
ing violent behavior in human subjects. According to
Freudian psychoanalysis, repression of the instinctual
id leads to the “psychopathology of everyday life,”
which in turn makes violent behavior commonplace.
Likewise, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization
(1955) combines Freudian and Marxist theories to
undercut the cultural codes that overdetermine and
repress human psychology and sexuality, resulting
in deviant tendencies. Following the psychoanalytic
paradigms of repression, the complexity of human
violence has been studied by modern psychiatrists
such as James Gilligan in Violence: Reflections on a
National Epidemic (1996). Asserting that “violence,
like charity begins at home” (5), he demonstrates
how home as a microcosm reflects the cultural and
historic macrocosm in which violence thrives. While
he celebrates civilization as the greatest blessing of
humanity, Gilligan condemns its “tragic flaw—the
violence it stimulates” (267). He attributes vio-
lence in humans to a life bereft of love, either from
without (resulting in feelings of rejection) or from
within (resulting in shame). Thus, both these defi-
ciencies are an outcome of the patriarchal structure
of civilization that assigns codified and often repres-
sive roles to each of the sexes, reinforcing traditional
ideas of honor and dishonor, pride and shame. For
psychoanalysts from Freud to Gilligan, violence
remains a disturbing subject whose origin as well as
cure lies within the complex cultural network that
fashions human subjects.
Owing to its omnipresence and the human
mind’s obsession with it, violence has had ubiquitous
representation, from cave paintings to the contempo-
rary television drama The Sopranos. Beginning with
epic narratives like The Mahabharata, the Homeric
verses, and beowuLF (Anonymous), among others,
literature has always attempted to represent violence
as a trope for relationships of power and domina-
tion. In many respects, Western literature, ranging
from Sophocles’ oedipus the kinG (429 b.c.), the
biblical stories of Cain and Abel, Dante’s Inferno
(14th century), William Shakespeare’s kinG
Lear (1608), and Herman Melville’s Moby-dick
(1851), seeks to define itself by the tragedy arising
from human violence. For most 20th-century artists,
violence, ranging from the destruction of large-scale
warfare to individual crimes of murder, rape, and
abuse, is an inevitable aspect of their visions. Unable
to accept a fallen world, modernist writers often
employ destructive violence as the central motif in
their works. For instance, the poetry of Sylvia Plath
and John Wain attempts to discern the sources and
effects of modern violence culminating in anger,
frustration, despair, and even suicide. For some mod-
ern poets, however, violence has provided an ironic
source of creativity and change, a view articulated
by William Butler Yeats in poems like “The
Second Coming” and “Easter 1916.”
Critics generally attribute the predominance of
violence in modern literature to both its sensational
appeal and its potential to shock readers, leading
them to question their beliefs. Critics also emphasize
the historical significance of violence in the period
following World War II, when poets and novelists
bemoaned a world mired in conflict, and in which
aggression threatened to destroy all humane quali-
ties. The Holocaust has been a common subject with
American literary artists ranging from Sylvia Plath
to Saul Bellow. anne Frank: the diary oF a younG
GirL (1947) is a significant Holocaust document on
the experiences of a war victim during the German
occupation of the Netherlands during World War
II. Other postwar novels, such as George Orwell’s
dystopian nineteen eiGhty-Four (1949) condemn
totalitarianism in an essentially meaningless world.
Likewise, Kurt Vonnegut’s deeply pessimistic
vision pervades his novels, including Player Piano118 violence