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thE AwkwArd AEsthEtiCs of vioLEnCE in sAuL BELLow And MArguEritE durAs

gErALd dAvid nAughton And yuLiA PushkArEvskAyA nAughton

At a climactic moment of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel, Herzog, we find the titular hero finally moved to dramatic action. Moses Herzog, the cuckolded and abandoned husband, who has spent the largest part of the novel in an increasingly solipsistic spiral of epistolary narrative, finally feels ready to apply violence to the logic of his narrative. He stands at the window of his former home, ready to kill the elegant Valentine Gersbach, his wife’s lover. There, Herzog witnesses a typical domestic moment, as Gersbach bathes Junie, Herzog’s young daughter, before cumbersomely washing the bath. However, as his moment to act presses upon him—as the violence, which the situation seemingly demands, comes closer to expression—Herzog with-draws. Feeling a strange detachment, he examines his antique pistol, “[t]here were two bullets in the chamber....But they would stay there. Herzog clearly recognized that. ...Firing this pistol was nothing but a thought” (Bellow 2003a, 280). Here we find a moment of inaction, or rather, a pressure point at which direct violence becomes unworkable, impossible in Bellow’s fictive universe:

As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath, the reality of it, the tenderness of such a buffoon to a little child, his intended violence turned into theater, into something ludicrous. He was not ready to make such a complete fool of himself. (2003a, 280-81)

Daniel Brudney describes this episode as mere “murder fantasy,” not to be “taken seriously” (2010, 313). His analysis focuses on “Herzog’s theatrical-ity, which [Brudney takes] to be his distinctive orientation” (312). And yet, there is more to the scene than mere “theater.” Theatre, indeed, remains rele-gated to the subjunctive. Herzog is not capable of playing his role in the easy

© symploke Vol. 20, Nos. 1-2 (2012) ISSN 1069-0697, 209-225.

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aesthetic tableau. What Bellow is introducing here is a certain metatheatrical-ity. There is a self-awareness that to “perform” violence, like performing any well-defined role, is a matter of art or artifice. This is a profound moment of self-realization for Bellow’s protagonist. He is forced to acknowledge that to seek violent revenge against the Other is to create a false aesthetic.

There are two aspects to the scene which make violence impossible, or, more accurately, inarticulate. First, there is a tenderness between Gersbach and Junie, which Herzog cannot fail to notice. Second, and perhaps more revealingly, there is a certain awkwardness to the scene which Herzog, like many of Bellow’s protagonists, cannot reconcile with “theatrical” violence. Indeed, the tenderness expressed by Gersbach shows a character already “misperforming” his role in the anticipated “theatre” of violence. Here, the idea of direct violence becomes overwhelmingly awkward and certainly unworkable. This creates an awkward aesthetics of violence in the text.

It is this aesthetics that this essay will explore in Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet and Herzog, and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. The moment at which Herzog realizes the impossibility of murdering Gersbach is a moment that points to the limitations of literary violence in the novels of both Bellow and Duras. In Bellow, we find that the definitive moment of literary violence can be the inaesthetic moment—the moment at which actual violence must be suppressed or, rather, find more figurative forms of expression. Similarly, Duras’ novella deals with violence in a linguistically awkward, broken way that seems to suppress violence rather than express it. In both Duras and Bellow, the threat of real, physical violence hovers over the narrative uncov-ering other, more subtle forms of violence. Rather than being performed directly, violence finds a symbolic outlet, through a strange, elusive, awkward aesthetics—an aesthetics that is discomforting, troublesome, unsatisfying, and yet revelatory of deeper layers of subjectivity. In both writers, violence can be positioned within an erotic, gendered narrative, but is always linked to the memory of collective violence. In both, direct violence is necessar-ily translated, transformed, or aestheticized in a way that creates awkward, jarring fissures in their narratives. This awkwardness explicitly brings these two post-Holocaust writers into dialogue with each other; it is almost as if it would be an indecency for them to approach violence directly, though indi-rect violence remains pervasive in their work.

However, if by aesthetics we are to understand a broad spectrum of ideas and forms in which these ideas might be expressed, then there is a crucial departure between the two writers. In Bellow, the awkward aesthetics reveals the potential of an aestheticized, if awkward, moment to transform violence and human deformity—whether physical or psychological—into an art. In Duras, the awkward aesthetics points to violence itself as an art form. In one, violence creates an aesthetic that may transcend its origin; in the other, violence is an aesthetic that remains intimately connected to its origin.

The key questions that this article will explore are: how do Duras and Bellow create this awkward aesthetics of violence? and what does such an

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aesthetics bring to their novels? In order to address these questions, this essay builds a theoretical framework that links violence with aesthetics, or more specifically, with awkwardness in some way. In Maurice Blanchot’s conception, literature works to express “suppressed violence” as an “inac-cessible space,” and this “contained violence” makes us “feel in excess” (1989, 192). If the point of literature is, indeed, to make us “feel in excess,” then writing must deploy a particular kind of language to do so. For Julia Kristeva, in her analysis of Duras’ novels, this kind of language is achieved by cultivating a certain “aesthetics of awkwardness” (225)—that is to say, a language that is excessive or “inaesthetic” (clumsy, unsightly, disconcert-ing, deliberately inexpressive). Such “aesthetics of awkwardness” becomes a particular modality for the awkward aesthetics of violence: while it is a particular kind of violence embodied in language, it also serves to unveil a whole range of other forms of violence. In Slavoj Žižek, these other forms can only be perceived through indirection—by looking at violence “awry” (2008, 3). According to Žižek’s taxonomy, linguistic violence is an expression of only one form of violence; other forms may or may not be expressed through language. Within this combined theoretical framework, awkward aesthetics reveals the hidden, yet inescapable, presence of “contained violence” in the landscape of human lives. Whether Duras’ and Bellow’s novels simply dwell on this omnipresent violence or offer a solution to it is another matter.

“Symbolic violence”— Family in Duras and Bellow

Critics of Duras and Bellow have so far tended to focus on the more apparent kind of violence in their writing. Bellow has been discussed as a writer who articulates the trauma of the Holocaust, or a particularly ‘Jewish’ relationship to violence (Rosenberg 2001, 153-206). He has relatively rarely been discussed within a comparative framework, and the theoretical dimen-sions to the violence in his texts require further exposition. Discussions of violence in Duras vary between analyses of war in her writings (Ladimer 2009), suggestions of specific type of ‘female engendered violence’ (Heathcote 2000), and expositions of literary violence inspired by Maurice Blanchot (Just 2010). In this article, we propose to examine Bellow and Duras in dialogue, in order to show how other, more elusive forms of violence are present in their works. Violence not only pervades these writers’ descriptions of family and society—descriptions which bear the hallmarks of war—but it also under-pins desire, pleasure, writing, and literature itself.

The type of violence that Bellow’s Herzog finds impossible to enact, is, we should be careful to stress, only one form of violent action. Žižek, in his 2008 treatise, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, breaks violence down into three general categories: “subjective,” “symbolic,” and “systemic” (2). For Herzog to have shot Gersbach through the window would have brought

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about only the first, and most obvious, category. In order to understand the true nature of violence, Žižek believes, “we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjec-tive’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (2)—be it “violence enacted by social agents” and “evil individuals” or “disciplined repressive apparatuses” and “fanatical crowds” (11). ‘Subjective violence’ is merely the product of “systemic violence”: “violence inherent in a system,” which contains the “more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” (9). Finally, Žižek (interpreting Heidegger) describes the “essential violence” of language itself (70) as a form of “objective violence”: language, Žižek says, “involves unconditional violence,” because “verbal violence” is the “ultimate resort of every specifically human violence” (66).

Moses Herzog’s inability to shoot his rival, thus, does not elide violence per se. Indeed, the very gun that he is incapable of using against the Other is transformed through suppression from “subjective” into “symbolic violence”—which has been the very basis of Herzog’s relationship with his wife, Madeleine, all along. As she discovers Herzog’s antique gun with its two still-unfired bullets, she screams at him: “one of those was for me, wasn’t it!” (Bellow 2003a, 327). She describes him, painfully, as “a dictator, a regular tyrant” throughout their marriage (45), while he describes how she would habitually “shriek and curse,” how her hatred was the “most powerful element in her life, stronger by far than any other power or motive.” “In spirit,” he concludes about their marriage, “she was his murderess” (277). The violence contained in the language deployed by both husband and wife is what Žižek calls “unconditional violence”, a part of the everyday. This “unconditional violence” follows Blanchot's conception of “contained violence” in two ways: first, because it is suppressed and contained in language, and secondly, because it demonstrates how such “contained violence” can make us “feel in excess” (192). After discovering the two bullets, Madeleine looks at Herzog intently:

As she stared at him her color receded and her nose began to move very slightly. She seemed to realize that she must control her tic and the violence of her stare. But by noticeable degrees her face became very white, her eyes smaller, stony. He believed he could interpret them. They expressed a total will that he should die. This was infinitely more than ordinary hatred. It was a vote for his nonexistence, he thought. (Bellow 2003a, 327-8)

The aesthetic core of this moment is intensely violent. This comes through not only in Madeleine’s gaze, but also in Herzog’s (or Bellow’s) eager, almost gleeful description. Both characters bask in the violence of the moment. Their violence—Madeleine’s annihilating intention, Herzog’s brutal fram-ing of it in language—is matched in intensity. Many critics have argued that Bellow’s most persistent form of literary violence was directed against

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women. “Bellow’s misogyny,” according to Brooke Allen, for example, “is shrill and hysterical, and entirely without self-knowledge” (2001, 78). Joseph Epstein goes so far as to describe the writer as a “literary Bluebeard,” “kill-ing” women through cruel depiction in his novels (2011, 131). However, this concentrated focus on Bellow’s misogyny perhaps obscures the underlying reciprocal violence of the family within his narratives.

Similarly, in Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, the family is conceptualized as a space of suppressed violence—the violence that Blanchot describes as “an inaccessible space both evident and withdrawn, perhaps immutable, perhaps even restless” (1989, 192). Violence underpins all feeling in Duras’ novel—not just the intensely erotic love story between the protagonist, a young French girl growing up in Saigon, and her lover, a rich Chinese man, but also the more familiar, familial, bonds. “My mother, my love, her incredible ungainliness…I’m ashamed of her…, but she, she doesn’t notice anything, ever, she ought to be locked up, beaten, killed” (Duras 1997, 20). The “contained violence” of this family is, in Blanchot’s words, “withdrawn,” “immutable,” “restless;” it guarantees that the family always “feel[s] in excess” (1989, 192). It is also a violence that is accompanied by awkwardness: feelings of embarrassment and shame co-exist with a desire to “beat” and “kill.” The awkwardness of the family relations here contains the violence of the family and is translated into a peculiar—incomplete, elliptical—aesthetics. An undecidable, unspo-ken silence takes the space between the familial violence and the violence of writing:

In the books I’ve written about my childhood I can’t remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don’t know if I wrote about how I hated her too, in that common family history of ruin and death, which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can’t understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child. It’s the area on whose brink silence begins. What happens there is silence, the slow travail of my whole life. (Duras 1997, 20; our emphasis)

Owen Heathcote argues that the novel links violence “specifically with women” and that violence emerges as profoundly female-gendered in L’Amant (2000b, 206). This contention certainly resonates with the protago-nist’s description of her mother—“she ought to be locked up, beaten, killed” (Duras 1997, 20)—but it seems to take into account only the level of purely “subjective violence.” This is also undoubtedly true of the violence perpe-trated on the girl by the mother’s beatings and the elder brother’s encourage-ment of these beatings. And yet, there are more important, subtler levels of violence enacted in Duras’ writings.

Indeed, what is most striking in The Lover is not only the precision with which Duras approaches the violent, unshakeable bond of the family and its inexpressible, silent hold over her protagonist’s life, but also the violence of

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her language in an attempt to reach such precision. Again, we may recall Kristeva’s famous description of Duras’ writing as writing that

...does not analyze itself by seeking its sources in the music that lies under the words nor in the defeat of the narrative’s logic. If there be a formal search, it is subordinate to confrontation with the silence of horror in oneself and in the world. Such a confrontation leads her to an aesthetics of awkwardness on the one hand, to a noncathartic literature on the other. (1989, 225)

The “awkwardness” of Duras’ writing is a reflection of the violence of language and its taciturn attempt to approach the violence of the familial bond. “Stylistic awkwardness,” for Kristeva, is inextricable from violence—it is “the discourse of distilled pain” (1989, 226). Such awkwardness mixes “silences” with “exaggeration;” language here is “tensed, as if on a tightrope above suffering” (226). Bellow’s literary style is typically noted for its “exag-gerations” rather than for its “silences,” but perhaps such excesses address “suffering” in a similar way to the more taciturn awkwardness of Duras.

Duras’ “stylistic awkwardness” (226)—apparent in the broken syntax and the suddenness of words—signifies a rupture and a pain that can only be expressed by un-expressing. Hence, the “noncathartic” quality of Duras’ writing is as inescapable as it is intentional. As Kristeva contends, “Duras’ books should not be put into the hands of oversensitive readers”: they “bring us to the verge of madness;” the “texts domesticate the malady of death, they fuse with it;” and “[t]here is no purification in store for us, ...no improvement, no promise of a beyond” (227-28).

The violence of the family and the violence of language ought to be mirrored by the violence of literature itself—and this is the focus in much of Blanchot’s work, with which Duras was well familiar (Just 2010, 360). As the reader treads on the uneven surface of Durassian language, he also “enter[s] a zone where he can scarcely breathe and where the ground slips out from under his feet” (Blanchot 1989, 196). Thus, reading, as Blanchot maintains, is “participation in that open violence”—writing or “the work” itself (196). Daniel Just summarizes Blanchot’s “definition of literature” in the following way: the “essence of literature is its disappearance and the nature of literary language its tendency toward its own destruction” (2010, 360). Duras’ writ-ing illustrates this violence of literature with exactitude:

Destroying the novel, meaning, and the subject in a blank, frag-mented, and exhausted narrative, Duras believed, held a potential for opening something entirely new....Against what one would intuitively expect, Duras suggested that the blankness of story, coming as a result of destroying everything without offering anything in its place, did not reinforce a self-enclosed existence but was instead supposed to work toward its opening. (Just 2010, 360)

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Thus, the aesthetics of “blankness,” “fragmentation,” and “exhaus-tion” in the Durassian text—the “destroyed novel”—is an invitation to an “opening” of some kind. If, as another critic of Duras suggests, the “esthetic relationship is a variant of love” (Ladimer 2009, 115), then it could be said that Duras’ torturously evasive prose contains the kind of violence that is inflicted by lovers on each other in order to sustain the intensity of desire. At the very least, Duras envisaged her writing as a leap into the unknown. At its limit, it becomes a potential trauma for her readers: “In her scenario, the writer, by destroying sentences and destabilizing characters, engages in making the readers undergo a similar devastation, thereby advancing some-thing entirely new and unpredictable” (Just 2010, 361). We may recall here, Kristeva’s description of Durassian language bringing the reader “to the verge of madness” (1989, 226). Just echoes Kristeva’s contention that Duras’ “aesthetics of awkwardness” is itself a form of violence against the reader.

In Duras, as in Bellow, violence has to remain on the symbolic level. The eruption of “subjective violence” is decentered, because “symbolic violence” is the very foundation of family and language. Hence, violence has to be maintained—suppressed and un-expressed:

Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don’t even look at one another. When you’re being looked at, you can’t look. To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it. Looking is always demeaning. The word conversation is banished. I think that’s what best conveys the shame and the pride. Every sort of community, whether of the family or other is hateful to us, degrading. We’re united in a fundamental shame at having to live. (Duras 1997, 34-35; our emphasis)

The “symbolic violence” that underpins family life—and which, Žižek tells us, underpins all social life—cannot be enacted, because the suppressed, un-expressed violence is a much more powerful bond, both with the family and with life itself. Hence, violence cannot be directed against anyone in particular: “every day we try to kill one another,” “not only do we not talk to one another, we don’t even look at one another,” “we’re united in a fundamental shame at having to live.” As hatred and shame are shared indiscriminately, they also sustain a “fundamental” familial bond.

The violence practiced by the family serves as an antidote to the “systemic violence” that produced the family and its malady. The mother, led into disastrous investment in infertile land by the government of colo-nial Indochina, and thus reduced to lifelong poverty, is a victim of “systemic violence.” Her children—the antisocial, murderous elder son, the weak, scared younger son, and the unconventional daughter, a writer-to-be—are

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also marked and produced by this violence. However, it is only the daugh-ter who manages to translate the violence of society, of the everyday, into a language which embodies, crystallizes, and aestheticizes violence. Her anarchic use of language, her “aesthetics of awkwardness” is both a conse-quence of the “systemic violence” that produced her family and an artful use of “symbolic violence.” If Heidegger, as Žižek claims, believed that violent language is “language bringing things into their essence, language ‘moving us’ so that things matter to us in a particular kind of way” (qtd. in Žižek 2008, 67-68), then Durassian language is violent language par excellence. The enchantment of her broken, terse prose is penetrating and traumatising; the violence of her writing is diffuse and all-encompassing.

“Looking awry” at Violence

Emmanuel Levinas famously suggests that in a violent encounter the Other’s face is “exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill” (qtd. in Morgan 2007, 81). The non-identity of the family violence in The Lover is that which keeps the “act of violence” at bay and that which perpetuates the life of the family. On another level, the inexpressibility and the impossibility of actual violence, or “subjective violence,” is a direct consequence of consolidated subjectiv-ity, which, in its self-centeredness, must negate the “face,” the very fact of existence of the other. “To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it. Looking is always demeaning” (Duras 1997, 34). The extreme and purposeful disinterestedness in the other may come across as a mere form of self-aggrandizement, but it also serves to de-subjectify violence and bring it to a level of abstraction at which it signifies a pact with life itself.

Interestingly, Žižek develops his tripartite understanding of violence deliberately through a refusal to look directly at the subject—hence the “six sideways glances” (2008, 3) of his methodological framework. “There are reasons for looking at violence awry,” he explains. “My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it” (3). In making “looking at violence” an awkward, sideways gesture, Žižek refuses to privilege violence as an absolute object of inquiry and, indeed, “demystifies” violence.

It is the sideways glance that leads Moses Herzog into the self-realization that will allow him to better understand his relationship with a character like Valentine Gersbach. It is only when Herzog moves away from the direct gaze that this clarity becomes accessible to him. When he had looked directly at Gersbach, Herzog felt only a “mystifying” confusion. The attempt to pull the pieces of his adversary together, to make of him a single subjective entity, had failed:

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His face was all heaviness, sexual meat. Looking down his open shirt front, Herzog saw the hair-covered heavy soft flesh of Gersbach’s breast. His chin was thick, and like a stone ax, a brutal weapon. And then there were his sentimental eyes, the thick crest of hair, and that hearty voice with its peculiar fraudulence and grossness. The hated traits were all there. But see how he was with June, scooping the water on her playfully, kindly. (Bellow 2003a, 279)

The “traits” that Herzog so painfully attempts to unite in one man seem too incongruous, too impossible. In one moment, he can reveal carnality and tenderness, “brutality” and “softness,” “heartiness” and “fraudulent gross-ness.” This, of course, is not a testament to Gersbach’s ineluctable complex-ity—more than one critic of the novel has noted with disappointment that though he is a “major character” in Herzog, Gersbach suffers from a portrayal which borders on “symbolic caricature” (Goldman 1983, 148). Visualising Gersbach, Herzog feels an aversion that goes beyond violence: “he looks so sugary, repulsive, poisonous,” he decides, “not an individual but a fragment, a piece broken off from the mob. To shoot him!—an absurd thought” (Bellow 2003a, 280). The chasm between the two men is too great, and Herzog cannot bridge this divide, even through violence. In his mind, Herzog has already aestheticized the idea of killing Gersbach into an awkward, “absurd” moment—and by thus aestheticizing the moment, he has prevented it.

If Herzog cannot look upon Gersbach as a coherent person, it is simply because Gersbach has had that coherence violently taken from him. Again, his description of the bathing scene reveals a great deal here: “The man washed her tenderly. His look, perhaps, was false. But he had no true expres-sions, Herzog thought” (279; our emphasis). Firstly, it is Herzog himself who takes away the Other’s coherence: because Gersbach’s tenderness is ill-fitting from his perspective, it becomes an awkward incongruity rather than a “true expression.” Secondly, Gersbach can be read as a character who has already been maimed and reduced. His amputated leg, we argue, is used by Bellow as a means of articulating “systemic violence”, as defined by Žižek. To have “no true expressions,” or to be a collection of “traits” which do not add up to one coherent person is, in Bellow’s Liberal Humanist imagination, to be less than a subject. Bellow frequently pointed to the twentieth century as a time of diminished humanity—and this is the true sense of violence which he tries to convey in his novels. Speaking in general terms of post-war American literature, he once noted a process of “diminution”:

It’s obvious to everyone that the stature of characters in modern novels is smaller than it once was and this diminution power-fully concerns those who value existence. I do not believe that the human capacity to feel or do can really have dwindled or that the quality of humanity has degenerated. I rather think that people appear smaller because society has become so immense.” (qtd. in Gray 2004, 610)

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This sense of people being diminished by society’s “immensity” leads to one of Bellow’s most recurrent narrative devices. Many of his characters who cope best in the contemporary society he depicts are physically maimed. We may recall here William Einhorn, the self-made man in The Adventures of Augie March, who is described as a “cripple” without the use of his arms or legs, though he retains the use of his hands; similarly, the crazed and brutal Eisen, in Mr Sammler’s Planet, who has accepted the reductive terms of the society in which he lives, is another of Bellow’s literary amputees—having lost his toes as a result of anti-Semitic violence. Paradoxically, these are the characters who best negotiate the humanly diminished landscapes of Bellow’s contemporary America.

By contrast, many of Bellow’s “most human” characters suffer from an excessiveness of spirit which is reflected in their physical largeness. We are reminded here of the colossal Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, or of the “bearish” Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day, “the carrier of a load which was his own self” (Bellow 2003b, 39). Several of Bellow’s protagonists, as more than one critic has noted, suffer for being too humane. But Bellow’s other, less sympathetic characters have suffered from a nameless, faceless violence that has attacked their very identity. They are victims of what for Žižek is the most insidious form of violence—“objective” and “systemic.” The violence done to their bodies is but an expression of the nameless violence wielded on the individual by “immense” society. It is almost as if this violence must be (over)stated in Bellow’s picaresque physical characterizations, so that it may be aesthetically transformed into something more than the everyday.

Valentine Gersbach is one such “victim,” and Herzog’s incapacity to enact violence against Gersbach stems, in essence, from an acute ideological or metaphysical misapprehension. Gersbach is another of Bellow’s (meta)physically incomplete individuals. The text famously introduces the char-acter to us by describing the way he walks, “on a wooden leg, gracefully bending and straightening like a gondolier” (Bellow 2003a, 67)—his elegance somehow depending on his partialness. Not oppressed by the incomplete nature of his own times, Gersbach, in fact, is symptomatic and emblematic of his era. By contrast, Moses Herzog seems to exist outside of the current. Early in his story, he is provoked, not for the only time, to consider his char-acter: “What sort of character was it?,” he asks himself. “Well, in the modern vocabulary, it was narcissistic; it was masochistic; it was anachronistic” (6). In these three telling adjectives, a chasm seems to open up between the two men.

This suggests one of the problems of violence within Bellovian aesthetics. If direct violence, as Levinas states, “exposes” the face of the other, and “to look,” as Duras notes, “is to feel curious, to be interested,” we can see how “subjective violence” becomes “impossible” in Bellow’s literary landscape. How can one truly look at the face of a man with “no true expressions”? As Herzog looks at Gersbach, he is, precisely, depriving him of a face, laying his incoherence bare, dissecting him, both visually and psychologically. In

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this long, penetrating gaze and the forceful linguistic frame that it takes, Gersbach becomes an unsightly, inaesthetic thing. “Subjective violence” is no longer necessary: the dismembering language of the bathing scene creates a texture of “awkwardness,” which renders “theatrical” violence impossible.

The Aesthetics of War

If we continue to examine Bellow’s picaresque gallery of characters in terms of their relationship to violence, or of the ways in which various types of violence are written onto their bodies, we are bound to pause upon the consideration of Arthur Sammler, the hero of the 1970 novel, Mr Sammler’s Planet. At first glance, Sammler may strike us as another example of Bellow’s interest in the (meta)physically wounded. Old aged and one-eyed, Sammler is a cultured and educated Polish Jew, of Liberal Humanist upbringing, who struggles to assimilate a wartime experience that has in many ways (de)formed him. Sammler, of course, is a Holocaust survivor, haunted by the memory of the day he crawled, half-blind, out of a mass grave of Nazi victims. Later, he had taken the opportunity to strip, humiliate, and kill a German soldier—something he had done deliberately, and with pleasure. Sammler is haunted by the (de)formative moment:

I was a studious young person, not meant for action. Suddenly, it was all action—blood, guns, graves, famine. Very harsh surgery. One cannot come out intact.…[B]y force of circumstances I have had to ask myself simple questions, like ‘Will I kill him? Will he kill me? If I sleep, will I ever wake? Am I really alive, or is there noth-ing left but an illusion of life?’ And I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door. Shula and I have been in this written-off category....Experience of this kind is deforming. I apologize to you for the deformity. (Bellow 2007, 189-190)

Much scholarship on Mr Sammler’s Planet has emphasized this wartime violence. The text, indeed, has been labeled as Bellow’s “first Holocaust-novel” (qtd. in Dittmar 1991, 79). Alvin Rosenfeld, however, has revised the paradigm—describing it instead as “a post-Holocaust novel...which means...that it is the study of Western culture in extremis” (qtd. in Dittmar 1991, 79). The abhorrent, unnatural, unprecedented violence of Nazism is, in fact, only one of the “deforming” realities which Sammler must face. The other is the constant, “systemic violence” of the everyday.

It may be important here to recall Žižek’s description of how “unnatural” violence can only be experienced and processed when we develop a belief in its opposite:

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[S]ubjective violence is experienced as such against the back-ground of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal” peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. (2008, 2; our emphasis)

Reflecting on his wartime trauma, indeed, Sammler claims that he is “aware of the abnormality of [his] own experience” (Bellow 2007, 189). And yet, the novel does not accept this dichotomy between “normal” and “abnor-mal.” Mr Sammler’s Planet is frequently cited as Bellow’s “problem text”—a novel with violent hatred on every page. More than any other writing by Bellow, James Wood has claimed, “Sammler stands out, in its anger” (2012, 2). And the most troubling aspect of the text lies in the fact that this anger seems so “misdirected”—not towards the trauma of the Holocaust, but towards the everyday. Bellow’s biographer, James Atlas, described the book as an outright “outburst of racism, misogyny, and puritanical intolerance” (qtd. in Allen 2001, 85).

Early in the novel, a lecture which Sammler is giving at Columbia University is broken up by a student screaming at his audience, “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come” (Bellow 2007, 34). Fleeing the scene, Sammler ponders the violence of the outburst against him:

Mr. Sammler did feel somewhat separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed—severed not so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote, disproportionate on the side of the spiritual, Platonic, Augustinian, thirteenth-century. As the traffic poured, the wind poured, and the sun, relatively bright for Manhattan—shining and pouring through the openings in his substance, through his gaps. As if he had been cast by Henry Moore. With holes, lacunae. (Bellow 2007, 34-35; our emphasis)

Sammler had been giving the lecture as a stand-in for a radical intel-lectual whose subject was to have been “Sorel and Modern Violence”—and Sorel’s glorification of political violence, for Bellow, is the kind of discourse which is craved in society. The grotesque brutality of the student’s language enacts violence on the body of Sammler once more—a violence which is, in the text, as real and as visceral as the Holocaust.

In many ways, violence produces the characters in Bellow, insofar as “systemic violence” individualizes people (at the same as it warps them) and forces them to position their own humanity against itself. To a certain extent, then, violence is aestheticized in Bellow, but awkwardly so. His protagonists are deeply troubled both by the “objective violence“ of society and by the eruption of actual, “subjective,” violence. And yet, these characters also rely on the aesthetic potential of violence for their very identity. The violence of the everyday leaves Arthur Sammler feeling physically wounded—with

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light “pouring through the openings in his substance, through his gaps”—but the description is purely aesthetic. Sammler himself perceives this—overtly likening his symbolically wounded and gaping body to a sculpture by Henry Moore. It is in perversely beautiful moments like this that we may locate Bellow’s awkward aesthetics of violence. Recalling Kristeva’s definition of Duras’ writing as “noncathartic,” in that it offers “no promise of a beyond” (1989, 228), we may say here that Bellow’s writing, by contrast, is “cathartic.” By creating such strangely aesthetic moments, Bellow offers precisely this “promise of a beyond”: the broken moment in his writing is transformed into a more aesthetic moment, which transfigures its violent origins.

Whereas Bellow transforms an ugly outburst of violence into an aesthetic moment, Duras mingles the categories of pain and pleasure, oppression and delight. In her novels, violence already contains beauty and “intoxicating passion,” at the same time as it contains destruction and “war” (Duras 1997, 39). Thus, for Duras, violence does not need to be resolved or transformed. Subjective violence always goes back to its origin, to the familial pact, which threatens with an “obscure, terrifying intent”—actual death and murder, revealed in “those black, murderous fits of anger you only see in broth-ers, sisters, mothers” (37). In The Lover, the elder brother is the epitome of violence in the family, but it is a violence that is present in other “brothers, sisters, mothers,” too. Moreover, this violence is at the heart of society at large, in its “systemic” form:

I see the war as I see my childhood. I see wartime and the reign of my elder brother as one....I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child’s body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin. (Duras 1997, 39; our emphasis)

The malady of war is at the heart of both innocence and experience, childhood and physical love, colonisation and peace. The violent intrusion is “always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time.” Duras breaks down these dichotomies in the same way that Žižek interrupts the distinction between the “abnormal,” condemnable incidents of violence, and the violence of “normality.” As Owen Heathcote comments on another Duras text, the film Nathalie Granger, the “combination of individual and structural violence makes violence all-pervasive yet invisible: violence is all the more ineradi-cable for being impossible finally to locate or express” (2000a, 88). Thus, if for Bellow, omnipresent, inescapable violence can produce a beautiful moment, then for Duras, violence is irredeemable. Herein lies a crucial distinction between Bellovian and Durassian aesthetics: Bellow’s awkward aesthetics of violence underscores the potential of art to transform human “deformity,“

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whether physical or psychological, whereas Duras’ “aesthetics of awkward-ness” intensifies violence at the heart of both art and human relations.

Violence, Writing, and Desire

For Duras, it is this omnipresent, penetrating violence that keeps the protagonist sure of her identity and makes writing possible. The violent pact of the family is where a writerly identity is born and where her narrator feels most alive:

I’m still part of the family, it’s there I live, to the exclusion of every-where else. It’s in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance that I’m most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I’ll be a writer. That’s the place, where later on, once the present is left behind, I must stay, to the exclusion of everywhere else....It’s a place that’s intolerable, border-ing on death, a place of violence, pain, despair, dishonor. (1997, 45-46)

Thus, Duras conceptualizes the artist as a figure who emerges at the heart of the family’s violence. As Heathcote suggests, “the very indirectness of violence (in language, in the past, in other members of the family) seems to consolidate its power” (2000b, 205). He argues that Duras’ representation of “gendered violence is, via autofiction, relegated to former or other selves, to give the current writer an open, welcoming, dynamic space, where she can be creative, critical and safe” (212). This, he contends, means that “the repre-sentation of gendered violence is espoused but finally contained in writing” (212). We may be tempted here to expand the notion of “gendered violence” in Duras into “general violence,” conceived of as “always already there” in the Durassian universe: “Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin” (1997, 39). It may be equally tempting to suggest, yet again, that this all-encompassing violence is, precisely, necessary for writing: that it produces writing at the same time as it allows writing to contain it.

Violence, indeed, permeates Duras’ writing: her work incorporates violence, both at thematic and aesthetic levels. Thematically, all of her writ-ing contains violence of some kind—whether it comes in the form of inflicting pain, negating the self or the other, or fulfilling a death wish. Aesthetically, all of her writing absorbs violence into language: the linguistic landscape of her broken syntax and disjointed paragraphs is like an injured body that takes pleasure in its wounds. As Sylvere Lotringer contends, Duras’ writing is a “writing of the disaster, endlessly mourning the missed opportunity to have been one of the ideal victims” (2012, 10). In other words, the Durassian character willfully submits to violence, especially in memory. To empathize with the victims to the point of wanting to be in the victims’ place in order

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to experience the violence that they are subjected to—such is the logic of Durassian ethics and aesthetics. Because it is in “violence, pain, despair” (2012, 46) where her art is born.

Violence is also at the heart of her protagonist’s love affair with the Chinese man, who cannot marry her, but cannot let her go. The rupture between desire and fear—the fear of the girl’s elder brother and of his own father—intensifies pleasure. His desire for the girl is also based on a sense of “kinship” (Duras 1997, 57), and her desire for him is based on the lure of incest. This is where Duras’ awkward aesthetics points to uneasy, impossible scenarios for both family and lovers:

So I became his child. And he became something else for me too. The shadow of another man must have passed through the room, the shadow of a young murderer….The shadow of a young hunter must have passed through the room too….I had become his child. It was with his own child he made love every evening. (Duras 1997, 58)

The figures of the hunter and the murderer, the two brothers symboli-cally lurking between the lovers, bring them closer together; it is of her own family that the girl thinks when she is with her lover. Thus, the family is not only a place of “violence, pain, despair, dishonor,” but also a place of desire and pleasure, which are induced and sustained by the threat of violence.

Here, the pervasive violence of family life and language demonstrates its sensual and aesthetic potential. What we have read as violent interrelated-ness is, in fact, the very fabric of Duras’ “aesthetics of awkwardness.” Saul Bellow’s writing by contrast, is affected in a less direct way by the violence that permeates his narratives. In his treatment of male-female relationships, Bellow deploys a violent energy that comes close to the brutal and menac-ing way in which Duras writes about family life; but the more insidious “systemic violence” that his narratives are truly concerned with produces something very different. Bellow treats suppressed violence with linguis-tic exuberance and emotional excess. His picaresque characterisations, in which he writes “objective violence” onto the bodies of his characters as “subjective violence,” is but one example of this. Duras’ fiction, on the other hand, is underpinned by a “symbolic violence” which is “un-expressed,” as it were, by an awkward, reticent language that embraces this violence as its aesthetic premise and demise. Duras’ paradoxical “un-expression” and Bellow’s linguistic exuberance, however different they may seem, can both be best understood through the modality of the “aesthetics of awkward-ness.” Whether through excessive expression or through “unexpression,” both serve to invite, explore, and contain violence. For Blanchot, remember, “contained violence” “always [makes us] feel in excess” (1989, 192)—and this may be the best paradigm for understanding the two writers’ aesthetics of violence. In a Žižekian fashion, to look at violence “awry” through the use of Bellow’s “excessive” and Duras’ “inadequate” writing is to encompass it

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in language, and to encompass violence in language is to make it yet “more specifically human” (Žižek 2008, 66). What both writers achieve, then, is a naked non-subjective violence written into a peculiar aesthetics of awkward-ness and excess.

GULF UNIVERSITY FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (KUWAIT)

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