Topic: "Violence In Literature; when is enough, enough?" My guest today, Author, Tantra Bensko

My guest today is Tantra Bensko, please join in the discussion...your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

Extreme Conflict in Literature – or Lucid Fiction?

by Tantra Bensko

When people see violence in the screen, they have been measured, in studies, to show more riled-up hormones, and more preponderance of irrationally aggressive behavior afterward. Reading it would do the same thing, and so the question is --- why do people seek out something that makes their adrenalin pump in such an unhealthy way? It's damaging, and aging for their bodies, and for the folks, even animals, around them. Having the adrenals artificially stimulated regularly doesn't do anyone any good, when it's frightening stuff constantly bombarding a reader. Once in awhile, in a way that shows it in an artistically beautiful way that perhaps help delve deeply into psychology, the nature of society, and reality itself, seems useful. But violence has become such a default accessory for entertainment, the more mundane, ubiquitous forms of it seem to me to affect our health, and society negatively.

The more we artificially stimulate our adrenals, throw off our blood sugar, the more our glands crash and need more stimulation so we can function. Then, we are hooked. We need violence like a drug. We need to buy more, devote more time to it, get more violent with it, act out the violence in real life. It's just biology.

What does that do to our culture? We need to express the violence that has taken place in our subconscious, which feel the vividly drawn scenes are real. We grow numb to real violent acts, and don't run to help the victims, don't even recognize when we are victims ourselves. We become consumers, even more, needing more coffee, tobacco, sugar, cocaine. We don't produce as much, being weakened, and need to go to the doctor more. We become tired, and need something to stay up at night, but then can't get to sleep. Our dreams become more violent, but we don't remember them as well. Something uneasy happened, is all we know.

I believe most likely many people eschew violence, but really, the traditional plot arc that nearly everyone agrees is a requirement for fiction, is made out of violence. It MUST be created out of conflict. Drama drives the plot, and without dualism, people at odds, something at stake, people assume there is no reason to read it. It's not even considered a story at all. It doesn't exist, if it's peaceful. No one cares, if it isn't something at stake, something to be tense about, at least for the characters, themselves. Because tension is entertainment. Dull and boring, otherwise.

But why does “something happening” have to mean conflict? There are sooooo many other things that create interest in anecdotes people tell us, events that occur to us, imaginations we delight in. Yet, these don't get written about as the core of a novel, screenplay, short story, play. These things can be fascinating, and the way they are told can become a core part of the narrative. The changes in the reader as he navigates the new method of story telling, and is transformed by it.

This topic leads directly into the genre I call Lucid Fiction. While there are many factors to it, one major one is questioning the role of conflict in literature. I promote this genre not just for fun, but because I feel it has the potential to make a little change to our society. Of course, obscure literary movements rarely have a big impact, but person by person, it does allow us to be mindful, rather than just reading, and thinking routinely. If we can continue spreading the idea, publishers and editors can open up more to different kinds of plots, and readers can realize they actually enjoy stories that entertain them in other ways other than by conflict.

Though I don't myself watch TV, in the house I lived in recently, my housemate watched movies on a big screen TV, loudly, every night, on the other side of the wall. I suppose the sounds I heard are normal, found in most houses. As I'm not used to it, and don't want to be, it was bizarre to hear screams constantly. I had to relax hard to keep it from upsetting me, and I'm sure it did, on some level of my psyche. It seemed not one movie went the full length without several screams, and often, an hour or so consisting of the darn things.

That apparently is normal to people, maybe men, especially, with adventure, action films, and literature. It raises the testosterone, yes, which can be a good thing sometimes, for men and women both. Maybe the lowered testosterone levels from our unhealthy practices on this planet mean we want more violence. But if we can raise the levels in other ways, can we move on to more varied entertainment, then, please?

I've been writing about Lucid Fiction for a long time, and recently guest edited the Lucid Fiction in Medulla Review. http://www.themedullareview.com/Lucid_Fiction.html I was amazed at how many writers resonated with that genre, and were so glad to move away from the plot arc, exploring other things, sometimes spiritual, expansive, going into the parasympathetic dominance, to balance out the over-dominance in our culture of the sympathetic, flight or flight ready nervous system.

I don't avoid conflict like the plague in my fiction. I just don't go there by default, without thinking about it. In my entire life, almost no one has ever gotten killed off in my writing. I open up to other possibilities, naturally. I like a lot of literature that does have conflict. I'm not a prude, per se. I just so enjoy reading literature that explores beyond that, that leaves me expansive, fulfilled, rather than stunned by violence created just to entertain me.

Tantra Bensko, MFA, writes articles, and teaches fiction writing. She is the author of books, including Lucid Membrane, put out by Night Publishing. http://lucidmembrane.weebly.com/ In addition, she has over 170 creative publications in magazines, and runs her own, Exclusive Magazine. She also maintains the resource site, Experimental Writing, the FlameFlower experimental short story contest, and LucidPlay Press. She is also an artist. She lives in Berkeley, CA, near her wonderful son.

Topic: "Violence In Literature; when is Enough, Enough?" My guest today; Author, Evangeline Jennings.

My guest today is author, Evangeline Jennings.

VIOLENCE IN LITERATURE – WHEN IS ENOUGH, ENOUGH?

Evangeline Jennings

We live in violent times. We always have done. Violence is central and organic to the human story. Inhumanity is integral to our plot.

Twelve thousand years ago, our ancestors were painting battle scenes on the walls of caves in Spain. Today, we have a world wide web and twenty-four hour news. This week alone we’ve seen anarchy in the UK, massacres in Syria, Pashtun-Urdu violence in Karachi, and fresh revelations about torture camps in Zimbabwe’s diamond mines.

If you ask me – and somebody did, writing about violence is an entirely rational response to the world we live in.

Writing violence for its own sake? Not so much.

So when is enough, enough? And how much is too much? The only sensible answer is, Well, it depends.

Followed sharply by But I’ll know it when I see it.

“Was that as good for you as it was for me?”

- Mr Blonde, Reservoir Dogs

Like most adults I know, I’ve been a victim of minor violence. And like many women, I’ve also experienced sexual abuse and assault. The first time it happened I was thirteen-years old. On the unspoken sliding scale of such things, it was nothing to write home about. What’s being held down and felt up by three curious and frustrated boys compared to all the truly awful things that happen?

Lately, the awful things have inspired me to write a book called Puta, and I believe the level of violence in my work is entirely commensurate with the events I’m responding to.

In Texas, for example, in a small town only an hour’s drive from my family’s trailer park, an eleven-year old girl was gang raped on at least six different occasions at the end of last year. Up to twenty-eight men and boys may have been involved. Last time I looked, nineteen had been arrested. Mostly on the basis of souvenir cell phone movies.

Residents defending the accused have blamed the victim, suggesting she dressed inappropriately and enjoyed her starring role in all six entirely innocent gang bangs. Failing that, of course, they blame the little girl’s parents.

An hour to the east, a teenage cheerleader was kicked off her high school squad for refusing to cheer for her rapist. The highest courts in the land have supported that decision.

And this week in San Angelo, Texas, polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs has been sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting two underage followers he took as “brides”. He sexually assaulted one of them pregnant.

In Europe, Josef Fritzl, Detlef S, and the Kidwelly Cult cast long and obvious shadows.

And then there’s tip-of-the-iceberg headline grabbers like Operation Delego.

In other news, Afghan women continue to set themselves on fire in protest at life in the Middle Ages, and Saudi Arabia is still the biggest women’s prison on the planet. Apparently human rights are more of a guideline when that much oil is involved.

When they’re not jailing women who choose to drive their own cars, the Saudis have also been helping “keep the peace” in Bahrain where a twenty-year old woman was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured for reading a poem in public. After she was forced to apologize on TV, Ayat al-Gormezi was sentenced to another year in prison.

Meanwhile, India has again been shown to have criminally high levels of female infanticide and a culture of sex-selective abortion tantamount to gendercide. Indian girls lucky enough to survive their mothers will find domestic violence endemic, and police unwilling to intervene except in extreme cases.

Before you start feeling too good about life in your safe European home, consider what the UK charity Refuge has to say. Every week in England and Wales, two women are killed by a current or former partner and ten more women commit suicide as a direct consequence of domestic abuse. That’s more than six hundred dead women a year. And if there are children in those homes, half of them will be abused too.

So when is enough, enough? I’ll let you know when I see it.

Enter DEMETRIUS and CHIRON with LAVINIA, ravished; her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out

- Stage Direction, Act 2, Scene 4 of Titus Andronicus

I’m not going to argue that violence in literature is a feminist issue - although obviously it is. But my lifetime of reading has taught me a general literary truth. Straight men are killed for money - everyone else is killed for fun.

So here’s where I draw my line: Münchausen misery lit, serial killer shite, and any other bad and dishonest writing that tries to turn rape and torture into money.

Violence against women and children? That’ll do nicely. A fresh perversion or a novel brutality? Sign here. Who cares if we’re dehumanizing real victims and trivializing their suffering until it becomes another tired trope?

And you, Joe Formula, don’t tell me what you’re doing is different. Don’t tell me it’s art. It isn’t, and you’re not. You’re selling cheap holidays in other people’s misery and propagating the idea that women and children are born to be victims.

The books that defined the modern serial killer era - Red Dragon and Silence Of The Lambs - were written in the eighties. Jeffrey Deaver jumped on the bandwagon long ago. Writers as fine as Michael Connelly and John Sandford and prolific as James Patterson Inc have sprayed their various scents all over the genre. It’s time you rape-torture-porn idiots realized it’s over. Let go. No one listens to techno anymore either.

Michael C Hall’s Dexter – as opposed to Jeff Lindsay’s poorly written original - is giving you bums and losers the last rites, executing serial killer stereotypes season after season. Why not see if you have the talent and creativity to summon up something new?

Dennis Cooper did. Poppy Z Brite did. And so did Bret Easton Ellis.

“I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends."

- Patrick Bateman, American Psycho

When he wrote of rats and nail guns, Ellis was - he says - both building a performance art commentary on contemporary life and being entirely gratuitous. At one and the same time. The latter claim may have been an attempt to move his art off his publisher’s page and into the news media but, either way, Patrick Bateman’s matter-of-fact brutality is entirely in keeping with his obsessively detailed point of view. Actual or imagined, they’re rich with verve and humour.

In American Psycho, way too much is just about enough. It’s a splendid read - if you don’t throw up - but guess what? It’s been done. We’ve seen the movie, we’ve got the tee shirt. And we don’t need your witless variations on the theme.

Or to put it another way, Cliffs:

If you think Titus Andronicus, Patrick Bateman, and Mr Blonde give you permission to paint your pages red with gore porn and you’re not using your First Amendment freedom to say something important or new, then you’re a fiction-fan hack at best and your writing is probably worthless and masturbatory.

We’ll know it when we see it.

~~~~~

Evangeline Jennings is an opinionated bitch who tells lies for fun and profit.

She lives a glamorous transatlantic lifestyle jetting between a disused grow-house on the Welsh island of Anglesey and a trailer park on the fringes of Houston, TX.

The topic is open for discussion. Your opinions and observations are most welcome.