Hey, everyone. Another quick comment on today’s episode similar to last week’s. This time we’re going to dig into cultural and systemic constructions of horror as they both find their way into literature and our broader history. And while I won’t be describing anything too graphic or explicit, the psychological examinations of cruelty and human behavior, fictional and historical,  may be difficult for some listeners. If so, you’ll want to skip ahead in the podcast series a bit to Episode 6.18, the episodes on The Great Societies that begin in December of 2025. Just a quick note as part of our collective Necessity of Care.

6.17 True Horror: Le Guin, Poe, Cavarero, Bataille, and Arendt

 

Marking Our Trail

I know you’ve been there, too, that time when you’re walking down a trail or street and then you see a little path, maybe a side road, that you’ve not noticed before. I mean, the path you’re on is fine, but it wouldn’t hurt to explore this new one just a bit, would it? Most times we don’t: we don’t have the time, we dislike discomfort and uncertainty, we enjoy our habits . . . But now and then, we do. Just a little side trip, just a minute to check it out, it won’t be a problem . . . And then we see that it winds a little farther still, it offers us a hint of something really interesting, and–you know–nothing bad has happened, so it can’t hurt to go just a little farther still . . . and then around just one more corner . . . farther still.

Well, that’s what happened to me. I had this trail pretty well marked with Le Guin–this idea of searching for why we allow the child to suffer through literature, and then, you know, it was Halloween and all, so I dropped a Poe story there, which I thought was loosely related to this idea of unexplainable cruelty. And then, you know, I found another story which was similar, and then . . . still another. So I had to ask the question, didn’t I? I had to ask: if we can’t motivate people to James’s “strenuous mood,” to that moral outrage of action to end the suffering of a child, is it because there is a counter-force, a darker element altogether, at work? As Poe suggests, as Cavarero does when we talked last time, maybe it’s less about stirring people to moral action than understanding our capacity for motivationless cruelty. 

And so. I wandered down this side trail, this alternative approach to Le Guin’s dilemma. I didn’t want to be here, not exactly. And maybe you didn’t either. But here we are, asking questions that not too many ask. Sometimes side trails like this reveal something new and significant; sometimes they are dead ends. And I admit, my brave listeners and fellow nomads, I admit that this has taken me to some difficult and disturbing ideas, and I’m going to share some of them with you today. Because Le Guin is just around the corner on this trail, too.

And then—then—-we’ll stop, turn around, head back to safer ground, main trails. Unless you ask for more. Because, my duty as a guide, I have explored further still down this route, and I’m not taking you that far today. It’s even more difficult going, perhaps a further reach into the theoretical and philosophical and sociological and political than anyone wants to go. But it’s there. If you want to go ahead on your own, I’ll be offering you some ideas and concepts that will get you there. If you’d rather me take you further myself, I can: just drop me a message by email or through the Literary Nomads mailbox and ask. I’m more than willing to talk through more of this with interested listeners. Links to contact me are, as always, in the Show Notes.

In the meantime, to get us just a little further down this particular horror sidetrail before we turn back, I think it’s a good idea to point out our trail markers. That is, let me review a bit about how we got here and what we’ve suggested so far. Then we can move ahead, okay?

First and most obviously, this entire Journey 6 has been focused on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and its horrible question and dilemma: What to do about the Suffering Child? The Suffering Child is, of course, one that exists in a fair amount of literature; I’m just using Le Guin’s story as an easy access point, but as we’ve seen, the question—more like a thematic archetype now—appears in a lot of literature: Dostoevsky brings it up directly in The Brothers Karamazov, and William James suggests, in his argument against utilitarianism, that a universal moral outrage rises up in us when it occurs. But we’ve seen the Suffering Child archetype now in a fair amount of literature: from Stephen King to N. K. Jemisin to Edgar Allan Poe to The Book of Job and we’ve even found hints in Shel Silverstein. We have a lot more literature ahead which does the same.

And Le Guin asks us about that “walking away” part, what we are to make of it as a choice, a moral rejection of a culture or society which has become somehow dependent upon the suffering. Jemisin rejects it and argues we should “stay and fight.” Poe suggests, generally across his narrators, though, that they (perhaps like us) are emotionally geared toward preying on the vulnerable. And, last week, I suggested that, since horror of the type Poe exemplifies seems to have a growing hold on our popular consumption of the genre, he may not be wrong that we share some kind of connection to his narrators, these ones who are driven to unspeakable cruelties despite their intimacies with their victims, these ones who are driven to horrors and who simultaneously insist upon their rationality. These ones who, even so, openly confess to us this predilection, because they believe we will understand them.

And if we aren’t quite Poe’s narrators, not quite that level of sociopathic action, still–still—we look in, voyeurs as readers and viewers, on this capacity, returning again and again to the genre and the stories, unexpectedly fascinated by the commission of the act, this crime upon the vulnerable. I didn’t mention then, but will now, that we also have an enormously rising popularity in films, books, podcasts, and documentaries, even graphic novels, about true crime, especially of serial killers. I wondered last time, I think, if it wasn’t exactly a moral outrage which causes us to end the child’s suffering, but a capacity further down which desires it to continue.

And, to be sure, it’s not psychopathic behavior that we’re talking about here, at least I don’t think so, since it seems quite . . . well, popular. It’s a fascination not with commission of the act, but at least with our capacity to do it, with a phrase I’ll use here and then again later this episode, that “everything is possible.” Some of you may be thinking, “Whoa there! Not me! I’m not like this. I hate all this stuff and I never watch horror, so leave me out.” And for now, I offer Le Guin’s description of the people of Omelas who look in or even who know the suffering goes on. They are disgusted, revolted, by it all, and even if they never look in on it, they allow it to continue, never disrupting their daily activities.

Now last week, too, I brought us a new thinker, Adriana Cavarero, who coins the word “horrorism” to describe what we’re talking about, not merely Ann Radcliffe’s idea of horror as a paralyzing closure of the mind’s realization of fear and violence, but a unique infliction of absolute dehumanizing physical violence upon the vulnerable. Cavarero tells us that horrorism is what happens when a terrorist reclassifies humans as “targets,” when a U.S. soldier sees an Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoner as a, um, plaything. 

Now we don’t have time to discuss just now all of the circumstances around the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib in 2003, and it’s clear that if nothing else, we mightn’t pronounce these soldiers as each fully responsible for their behavior (but this is a topic we will have to consider at some point in our Journey). No, I am fully aware of studies and reports that have noted, quite importantly, a number of factors which influenced these particular historic cruelties: uncertain commands, poor training, lack of support and oversight, weird combinations of peer pressure and prejudices. And most of these soldiers have publicly regretted their behavior. But Cavarero makes this moment important in her book, and so I name it here. And despite it all, they committed these acts and photographed themselves doing so, essentially–like Poe’s narrators—both confessing and insisting on it being an understood, rational course. And, as I said last week, I imagine we could think of other examples if we considered it for any length of time. For Cavarero, horrorism is a violent abandonment of what she claims is a primal urge in humanity: the “necessity of care.”

When you and I first started this journey, I was suggesting that these failures of empathy (really quite an understatement there)–that these failures were at least in part marked by a certain degree of privilege, that our privilege either blinded us or entitled us to ignore the suffering which kept it in place. Marvell builds walled gardens for contemplation; The Andrews family erases their workers; the people of Omelas live a utopic life of happiness which “depends upon” the suffering. The thing is, I don’t think these two ideas–of privilege and of perverseness–are at all self-exclusionary. They can both be in operation. 

But if this supposition of our capacity to cruelty is right, we may have a couple of very different causes to work on. I suggested Radcliffe’s definition of horror as a paralysis; she says it is a contraction, a freezing, that “nearly annihilates” the soul. And Cavarero, too, binds her concept of horror philosophically to our consciousness; it is something in us. Jemisin, in her short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” says that we must root out the bad thoughts, the intolerances and selfishness, violently if necessary. Philosopher Karl Popper suggests that the only thing we need not tolerate is intolerance itself. But what do we do if all of us–every one to some degree or another–has this capacity?

 

Intro Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and today our trail becomes more overgrown and shadowy, and we may need a machete to clear the path.

 

The Pathology of Annihilation

Now I’m going to anchor as much of our discussion on Poe as I can here, but I’m going to shift our direction or literary point of view a bit. In traditional literary interpretation, we look at a work and then discuss what it means; the work produces the meaning. But last week I suggested that the horror fiction and film we have been seeing may be a signal or even alarm to what is happening in our broader society—that the literature is instead a reflection or artifact or demonstration of our cultural attitudes. In this way, it isn’t that Poe’s works have themes that were crafted–or rather, it isn’t that this is all that they do. We can look at Poe’s works and see another phenomenon, another layer of meaning, completely: that Poe’s stories (and those of today’s horror) may be examples emerging from a broader social pathology, one that Le Guin was responding to, as well. If you wish to understand it this way: the cultural context that these writers are composing in influences the work.

And so we step further down our trail today by first underlining that the horror we are going to be talking about–the horrorism of Cavarero—is absolutely unilateral. It is one-sided, against the defenseless. This isn’t war or a duel or a hero fighting a monster. This is the irresistible and unlimitable infliction of violence.

The old man in “Tell-Tale Heart” is trusting, unarmed, defenseless. In “Cask of Amontillado,” Fortunato is drunk and incapacitated during the crime. Poe may not understand that he is demonstrating Cavarero’s idea here, but it doesn’t matter from our approach today: he is an example of it, 150 years earlier. 

More, Cavarero suggests that it is the physical body, the body as body, which is the target of violence, its goal is to erase, to annihilate whatever uniqueness the victim has as a human, what I called last week an ontological crime. By this I mean the crimes we see in Poe and elsewhere are rarely mere murder. The goal is not to just kill the other, here, but to disfigure or destroy the body as body. The goal is not to end a life; it is to destroy the dignity, the idea of being itself, its individuality. Our Tell-Tale narrator dismembers; our Amontillado narrator calls out to the emotional ruin of Fortunato who is slowly walled up until he no longer answers. It is an undoing.

But there is also an intimacy between killer and victim in this act of annihilation, a self-identification which calls for the elimination of the self committing the act. In other words, we destroy the other and in so doing work upon the destruction of ourselves, our own “I” or uniqueness. All of our Poe narrators confess and destroy themselves; in “Imp of the Perverse,” the title creature is Poe naming this very impulse, something which lies in each of us. 

In some of Poe’s other works–and here I’m thinking of “Ligeia” or the painter in “The Oval Portrait,” we get artists whose acts of destruction or of murder are also their own destruction, but–strangely, significantly—the creation of a perfect poem. In the stories we read, each death is described as a work of magnificence and beauty, of artistic skill. 

Let me say that again, but this way: Poe makes death and murder aesthetic experiences (and we talked about this explicitly and at length with his conception of the aesthetic, of an alignment with beauty itself). In other words, it is the destruction of the individual for Poe’s narrators which is more beautiful than their affection for the victims or of the victims as living humans. Cavarero calls this a kind of “erotic carnage,” and the use of erotic here calls for yet a further walk than we can go today, but let’s appreciate at least that the murderers are highly passionate, hugely emotional, much caught up in the physical act itself, in the destruction of that physical uniqueness, sadistically so, and I’ll just mention that the word sadism comes to us by way of the Marquis de Sade. 

So: we have unilateral horror, one-direction, upon the physical bodies of vulnerable unique humans, for the purpose of erasing that unique individuality–perhaps the victims and the killer’s own—all in a kind of aesthetic passion. It is, as I said, an absolute refusal, a denial, of our necessity of care. And for what?

And for what? This is the next troubling question. It is one of disagreement between two thinkers, because we asked it. Note its phrasing: “for what?” You know, as if there is some kind of “get,” some return we receive, for this grotesque annihilation. At the heart of our question is an idea we have worked with a bit, but now warrants a deeper look. “For what?” is a utilitarian question, one which suggests that what we do is based on transaction and exchange. 

 

Utility and Annihilation

Doing good so far? Because now we have to up the ante quite a bit and bring in our old anti-utilitarian friend, one we met back in the episodes on the Le Guin story itself, Georges Bataille. 

Now maybe it will help if I remind us (me, too, I need reminding) of what Bataille argued in terms of the Omelas story, not that he read it or responded to it, but my contention of what he might have argued. For Bataille, utilitarian thinking pollutes our consciousness; it robs us of the human potential to act purely of will. 

For Bataille, we have to compare our suffering Omelas child to, say, the suffering of Job. Notice how we often ask the same question of the Job story that we do now: Why is the suffering necessary? Job did nothing wrong–in fact, quite the opposite–and yet he (and his family and household) suffer. When he finally asks God why, the answer is basically “Because I am God,” and that is reason enough. In other words, there is absolutely no reason of justice or rationality for the suffering, merely submission to it. It is senseless expenditure, loss without return. And Bataille loves it. He loves it because here, at last, is suffering rescued from all utility. The very idea of motive or reason or exchange or justice placed upon an act of suffering for Bataille, the “For what?” question, is one of utilitarian morality, an exchange or transaction. And Bataille wants none of that. 

Put another way, Job surrenders himself to the meaningless sacrifice. We have no business seeking “divine justice,” and Job admits that his life is meaningless in contrast to the mysteries of the universe. He repents in “dust and ash,” gives up his right to complain. For Bataille, Job enters into what he calls “the will to chance,” the intimacy possible with a world that cares nothing for individuality. Job doesn’t lose his life; he loses the meaning of it, this idea that a unique individuality matters to the universe. The burden of demanding justice or exchange in the world is gone forever. Now Job is free to allow risk and chance as he wishes.

There is a perverse sort of sense to this, I think, but it leads us to consequences I don’t think any of us will like. On the one hand, Bataille says, utilitarianism is an evil burden–it demands some kind of rational economy to exist in the moral and spiritual dimension that is an absurd burden on everyone. Capitalism is the ultimate enactment of utilitarianism, that everything—literally everything—is available for exchange. This is an ideologyFrom Todd Gitlin and Antonio Gramsci, a system of beliefs—... More which wreaks havoc on society and individuals. I get that. On the other hand, Bataille says that the ultimate sacrifice of an ego to senselessness frees humanity to chance. And that’s glorious.

We said a few episodes back that for Bataille, the people of Omelas are trapped in exchange. They get a utopic society in exchange for the suffering child; it’s a structural flaw in the system of utilitarianism and capitalism. The great ones, for Bataille’s way of thinking, are the ones who walk away, because only that act separates them from the conditions of the exchange. To do anything else–to resist, to rescue the child, to succumb, to seek justice, whatever—buys into the existing transactional system. They spend energy to gain something. Walking away? Who knows what is out there? But it isn’t this utilitarian suffering, so it’s good.

Now I’ve got two arguments immediately against this position. The first is that it leads us, ultimately to the celebration of destruction, even of self, the “I,” much like Poe’s own narrators. Better dead than trapped in such a system, it seems. And it is true, when life is meaningless, when everything is chance, we aren’t trapped; but it’s also true that we aren’t seemingly bound by any moral obligation either, and therefore we have Poe’s murderers and horrorists. Now, Bataille says that utility is a “bourgeois” morality, and he’s right: that by basing morality on exchange (even if it is something like ‘Be virtuous and you buy your way to heaven’), we have positions of wealth crushing those without it. We get the unnatural results of exploitation and war. For Bataille, loss is natural and expected; it’s not a moral choice to make. Utility and capitalism are denials of natural law. So though I am here lamenting that this way lies destruction, Bataille actually agrees with me: it’s proof of his theory. All ways lead to destruction; one is natural and acceptable; the other cries out uselessly for justice.

My other argument against Bataille, though, is that he offers this, seemingly, as a binary. That utility is the only alternative to his dissolution/self-annihilation of individuality. I agree that capitalism and utilitarianism are seriously over-extending into our consciousness; but I’m not ready to suggest, yet, that the only alternative choice is nihilism and the void of meaning. As I argued near the beginning of this Journey, the binary is highly suspect, a forced choice when alternatives may be in view.

But for Bataille, the question of the Suffering Child is not whether or not it should or should not be allowed to suffer. This is irrelevant. The question is whether we’re getting something for this, some advantage; and we should not be. The kid suffers utilitarian pain; Job does not.

For Cavarero, she has a few key objections to Bataille, and you won’t have to work very hard to guess what they are. Yes, she detests utility, but with this single exception: there is a fundamental utility of existence itself, that we have the right to existence as an “I,” a unique self, which is separate from all this nihilism and destruction. Cavarero sees, like I suspect we do, that if we accept Bataille, we are accepting a certain kind of complicity, of co-responsibility, with the violence and dark capacity of horror that we see in Poe’s narrators. In other words, if we accept that we should separate ourselves from morality and live by risk and chance, anything is possible, everything is possible.

Fundamentally, Cavarero rejects our ignoring the child, our ignoring the helplessness, our refusal of the necessity of care. She does not deny that we can walk away from such suffering, but she will claim that this refusal of care is the very act of dissolution, the annihilation of humanity, we are working to avoid. 

We could try it this way. When Poe’s narrator in “The Imp of the Perverse” operates without reason, he becomes bent on his own self-destruction. When he exalts in his violence and the impotency of society to discover him, he practices both horrorism and his own self-negation. The Imp isn’t just a quaint psychological symbol but Poe’s intuition of what Cavarero and Bataille disagree about: ontological self-destruction. Poe describes it as an “unintelligible principle,” but we can begin to understand it through Cavarero: it is our capacity to horrorism, meaninglessness and motivelessness to our violence, what destroys victim and killer both.  

So it seems that Cavarero and Bataille (and Poe) all see the same thing, an abandonment of motive in the perpetuation of violence, and they perhaps agree that this violence is bent upon the erasure, the annihilation of the individual identity. But that is where the agreement stops. Bataille weirdly celebrates the situation as a freeing from the burdens of exchange and utility. Life doesn’t have to be about “getting something,” but about freeing oneself to chance and amorality. Cavarero laments the violence against a key principle we must hang on to, caring for that identity. There is, for Cavarero, then, a utility for preservation of humanity. Where is Poe? Hard to say, though, considering his own ideas of artful murders done with a nod toward self-annihilation in order to achieve some great Unity of Beauty in the eternal, it sounds like he leans Bataille. For Cavarero, and frankly for myself, there is no beauty in physical annihilation; it’s the antithesis of liberation.

Why do I think this? First, because I think the individual has value: in our own lived experience, it is about the only thing which does. (Now, to be sure, I have not here discussed at all the Eastern philosophies which abandon the self, the various Buddhism and Taoist teachings, for instance, but let’s save them for another time.) And yes, the individual is challenged, oppressed, constantly pushed and compromised, and not only or merely by the enormous forces of capitalism and utility. But I guess I’m not ready to declare either of two possibilities: 1) I’m not ready to declare that utilitarianism is an absolute evil in all contexts, that it is an all-powerful and undefeatable force; and 2) I’m not ready to declare that there can’t be another way of living which negotiates with that not omnipotent force. 

And since I am allying myself with the individual–with my own sense of agency, with the diversity of uniquenesses in the world, with the child suffering in the Omelas closet–I need to find a path through the horror that we’ve been discussing. Without the uniqueness of the individual, the concept of relationship is lost.

And while we’re here, let’s note that William James, too, acknowledges the problems of utilitarianism (his entire philosophy of pragmatism is set in opposition to it), he also loathes its imposition, its seeming monopolizing of the moral, but like Cavarero, he believes there is a universal morality beneath which fosters that “strenuous mood,” perhaps of rejection of the horror. James accuses utilitarians of a “callous indifference to suffering,” so it follows that his rejection of Bataille is pretty clear. And while James is uncertain of where this moral indignation comes from–he calls it an “infinite and mysterious obligation”— his entire argument we’ve learned from him is that it is inherently an ethical concern. 

Think of it as a condemned house which is burning down, and the house is utilitarianism or capitalism or exchange. Everyone we’ve talked about is happy it’s burned down. Cavarero and James understand that this clears the way to build something better. Bataille simply cheers for the destruction and has no interest in replacing it with anything else.

And I know there are tons of Bataille fans out there somewhere–maybe you’re one and you’re saying that I am missing some big elements of Bataille. If so, please write me or send an audio comment and I’ll air it or we can talk about it. I don’t want to misrepresent, and I know I’m focused on one particular element (and frankly a more PG-friendly one) of the larger Bataille works. But let me set him, at last, aside for now, with this observation: Cavarero talks about Bataille’s obsession with the torture of a Chinese prisoner, something called the torture of the “hundred cuts.” We can use our imagination. In his work, Bataille writes  that he was “so shaken that I fell into ecstasy.” And there, I think, he sounds far too much like Poe’s narrators, like the killers of so many contemporary books and films.

 

Alignments: Structural Horrorism

I admit my biases. I understand where I’m coming from, I think. I can even anticipate that I’m blinded or guilty of a kind of romanticism or idealism, this belief in what we might call the human soul, but I’ll stick with individuality, uniqueness, or humanity–knowing that each of these terms is itself problematic, difficult to nail down. James calls it “infinite and mysterious,” and that seems too far for me, but we wrote 150 odd years ago, so . . . 

But I also know that I live in the 21st century now, and I’ve lived in the 20th. I’ve studied and learned about the violent capacity of humanity, especially in the political or social realm: I was teaching my students when we watched the September 11 attacks; I grew up in the historical shadow of the Holocaust and of the Cambodian Killing Fields; I was an active voice against the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, the persecution of the Uygher in China and the War in Iraq. I’m active now, and none of these examples account for the individual brutalities which dominate our news. I said last week that the rise of this subgenre of horror–the motiveless body horror in film and novels–could be seen as an alarm bell. Because far from what the Western world met in its reconciliations with the Holocaust, we have hardly slowed this kind of annihilation, these violations upon human dignity.

And with these experiences impacting my view, affecting my own moral outrage, I read Cavarero, I read Le Guin, and I get their significance. We haven’t spoken specifically of Le Guin for a bit, though, so let me pull her back into our talk, because she is right there with us, through this entire discussion. And how do I know? Because of her conception of the “treason of the artist.”

You remember: Le Guin writes:

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”

 

Wow. Strikes a little different in light of what we’ve been discussing now, doesn’t it? “To embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.” “Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.” “We have almost lost hold.” She is speaking to us pretty directly here. 

And in here, she uses a particular phrase in that treasonous position: “A refusal to admit the banality of evil.” Now I’ve commented on this concept before, that in a world of utility and without much empathy, the cruelties the people of Omelas perpetuate are more often rationalized away than anything else. The Suffering Child is a habit, a given, an unreflected essential, a part of the structure of exchange. That is part of its horror, not that it suffers, but that we expect it to.

And the phrase itself gives us exactly the historical connection we understand, this “banality of evil.” It’s a phrase made famous by historian Hannah Arendt who wrote a history of the Holocaust in her massive work The Origins of Totalitarianism. Then later, in reporting on the atrocities committed by Nazi Adolf Eichmann as demonstrated at his trial, she described him in this way, noting the “banality of evil,” the absolute unthinking dullness of it. She said, quite plainly, that rather than having some deep-seated malice against the Jewish people or against anything at all, he was simply a bureaucrat, “pompous” but ordinary, demonstrating in her words, “an inability to think.” He was simply following orders, doing what was expected of him in the system he worked in. 

To be clear, this seeming obligation as a leader of the Gestapo, a duty which he claimed made him innocent, was organizing the logistics for and implementation of the concentration camps which annihilated by some estimates about six million people: His personal deportation of nearly half a million to Auschwitz he said in his report, “went like a dream,” though in his trial he was more modest, claiming that he was “just following orders.”

This is what Le Guin is talking about, quite explicitly, when she quotes Arendt just a decade later. And, no surprise, Cavarero also discusses Arendt extensively. 

For Arendt, the inevitable outcome of empire and capitalism, unending conquest and unending consumption, is the totalitarian nightmare of complete annihilation. It is a system of governance which rests not on the rational, not even upon utility, but upon utility’s failure and lies. It substitutes instead, power and fear, depends upon loyalty to its inevitability, commits arbitrary horror, erasing the individual in spirit and in substance. It makes humans, in Arendt’s word, “superfluous,” utterly irrelevant.

More critically still, to pull together some of these strings, totalitarianism isn’t interested in ends and means, isn’t interested in transactions and productivity because it understands these as ultimately futile. It perpetuates the extreme horror because in Arendt’s words “it is important that the cruelty continue.” And that is its sole motivation. Totalitarianism is a demonstration, to use the phrase I offered earlier, that “everything is possible.” It is a level of violence that exceeds death. It is an act for which no word for crime is sufficient. It is the ultimate horror not because it is wicked, but because it is not, because it is absolutely banal, boring, unthinking, “just following orders.”

Now let’s take a pause and breathe a bit. Because I imagine many of you listening have not read or heard much about Arendt’s histories and books, though you’ve undoubtedly been influenced by them, as our past 70 years have been. Now let me say some of what I just said again so we have it:

• It perpetuates the extreme horror because “it is important that the cruelty continue.”
• Totalitarianism is a demonstration that “everything is possible.” 
• It is the ultimate horror not because it is wicked, but because it is not, because it is absolutely banal, boring, unthinking, “just following orders.”

 

Are we together here? For Arendt, this was Hitler. This was Stalin. And numerous efforts which follow. These are perpetrators who exist to demonstrate their loyalty to the totalitarian ideologyFrom Todd Gitlin and Antonio Gramsci, a system of beliefs—... More. They are immune to reason, to shame, to scorn. 

And Le Guin draws our attention directly, textually, to this idea. The people of Omelas are authentically convinced that they are right. They have built a society around this argument, that their lives “depend upon” cruelty and suffering. If you ask any of them, they are not responsible. They may even claim revulsion or disgust. But still, sacrificing one “for the greater good” works as the official argument; calling the child an “it” (which Le Guin does in the story) insulates them from feeling much more than that. They become unthinking themselves, then, they are interpretatively numbed, blissfully ignorant to their own hideous bargain.

But after all, the child is out of sight, most of the time. We can also insulate ourselves by geography, by social or ideological distance. Cavarero focuses her arguments primarily on Western peoples against Western peoples, but Le Guin seems far more open in the allegory, that we can see it–as Arendt does in her critiques on empire—as colonial abuses against non-Western peoples; or as the attitudes of urban socialites who depend upon slave plantations for their wealth; or, to put it more plainly still, that the “native” or “slave” or “foreigner” somehow cannot be marked as a victim worthy of our attention, or should I say, unworthy of our holding ourselves accountable for it.

We can look at politics as a background context for all of this, but I think Le Guin and Cavarero and Poe and even Bataille are as or more interested in what we’re talking about as a philosophical or psychological rupture. We don’t all bow down immediately to such cultural aberrations, of course. I suspect if you are listening to all of this, you do not claim to be a fascist or a servant to one. But perhaps we all have the capacity to be. All it requires is the right ideologyFrom Todd Gitlin and Antonio Gramsci, a system of beliefs—... More or psychological push. Cavarero says herself that the motives for horrorism, the savaging of body as body, the erasure of the human individual, are “more obscure” than politics. But it does demand that at some level, we reject the “necessity of care” and exploit the vulnerable. Once we do, well, “everything is possible.”

And when I think about this, I can’t help but imagine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, where Kurtz, after committing his atrocities upon the Africans around him, turns their severed heads on stakes to face his own hut. And he whispers, “The horror! The horror!” It’s Poe, of course, too. The violence as an end in itself, the irrational compulsion, the psychological breakdown made possible by the structural possibilities a society’s systems, political and bureaucratic. Horror as horror, and our refusal to think about it. Compliance, efficiency, loyalty, all valued. Irrational of course, nothing truly utilitarian or profitable about it, but still wearing the cloak of utility, the justification of expenditure.

 

The Burden of Complexity

There is still more to say, of course, more to explore. I feel in many ways that I’ve just barely articulated the topic. The trail continues. Other writers and thinkers would weigh in. We could look at Hobbes and Kant and their conceptions of the individual, of Poe’s and Cavarero’s and Bataille’s merging of body horror with our conceptions of the erotic, Kristeva’s idea of the “abject” (which I discussed briefly in the introduction episode “Literary Nomads for Teachers”). We could explore Deleuze’s anti-production or Foucault’s power or Zizek’s idea of the perverse. Or we could talk about the literary ruptures we find in writers like William S. Burroughs or H. P. Lovecraft, the body horror and vulnerability themes in Octavia Butler or the opposite end of death, the rupture of birth, natality, in Shelley’s Frankenstein. 

But as I said, we’re not going further down this path. I leave it for you to pick these thinkers and writers up and see what they have to say. And if you want to read some of Hannah Arendt (a recommendation), you should know that I recently completed a study of her larger work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and I have 17 video reflections on her work along with a full Reading Guide as pdf of the complete history. The link is in the Show Notes.

But now that we’ve traveled a bit down this trail (with thanks to Edgar–er, Edge—Poe), we have a relationship between our capacity for cruelty and our apparent refusal of James’s strenuous mood. We have equally a relationship between our psychological impulses (Poe and the uncanny, perhaps) and the larger system’s failure to protect human uniqueness.

And, as you can see from my own positions today, confronting these questions is simply not a neutral endeavor. Our own literacy as a skill itself is one of enormous privilege that imposes a burden, an accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More for our choices, our arguments and decisions or inaction. We could run away from all these complex questions or throw our arms in the air in some kind of defeat, but let’s be sure we understand: doing so is a sort of privileged noncompliance, that currently we choose not to see ourselves as involved in the cruelties. But if I could offer one outright position: whatever we each decide is important to consider here, we must refuse to allow this kind of horror to annihilate our capacity for attention, for thought. 

Poe let us in on the ground floor, focusing on the act itself and the psychological impulse to do it. Bataille philosophizes the impulse, and he argues that a chaotic destruction of individuality is a glorious rejection of utilitarianism. Cavarero openly argues against Bataille, agreeing with the destructive impulse in Poe but that our ignoring of the victim makes us complicit in an ethical crime against our very natures, the “necessity of care.” And Arendt, named by Cavarero and Le Guin both, demonstrates how utilitarianism and capitalism lead us to the manufacturing of humanity as superfluous; that we have structurally created this system for violence. 

Maybe we have. 

And maybe you think, too, that I have gone way way too far in my discussion of horror and of Le Guin, even though we see her directly pointing at Arendt’s ideas. Maybe.

So we’ll return to the main path next week, follow up with our questions that we carry, take a look at a simple little silent movie like Metropolis, one with a totalitarian impulse to cruelty over the exploited laborers below, and ask a question that maybe we’re having: Really, Steve? Must all art be political? 

And that depends on how we read. 

That’s all for now. Let’s turn back. Let’s take a moment and reverse our course. Go find a story you’re grateful for, one that inspires. Then feel better. Read it. 

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994. A Harvest Book.

Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley, Zone Books, 1992.

Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Translated by William McCuaig, Columbia University Press, 2011. New Directions in Critical Theory. K10plus ISBN.

Hirsch A. K. “Walking off the Edge of the World: Sacrifice, Chance, and Dazzling Dissolution in the Book of Job and Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’”. Humanities. 2016; 5(3):67. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5030067

James, William. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” International Journal of Ethics, vol. 1, no. 3, 1891, pp. 330–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2375309. 

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper & Row, 1975, pp. 275–284.

Moldenhauer, Joseph J. “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe’s AestheticsThe study of feelings, concepts, and judgments arising from ... More, Psychology, and Moral Vision.” PMLA, vol. 83, no. 2, 1968, pp. 284–97. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1261183. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, et al. Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Castle Books, 2002.

Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine, vol. 16, no. 1, 1826, pp. 145–52, https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/On-the-Supernatural-in-Poetry.pdf.

Shen, Dan. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Aesthetic Theory, the Insanity Debate, and the Ethically Oriented Dynamics of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 63, no. 3, 2008, pp. 321–45. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.321. 

 

Also Read:

Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche. Translated by Stuart Kendall, Suny Press, 2016.

*Bataille’s account of Nietzsche which tries to absolve him of the “stain of Nazism,” but also offers his conception of the “will to chance,” a revision of Nietzsche’s “will to power.”

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006.

*A companion read to Cavarero, Butler discusses our capacity to violence post-9/11 as a call for a more just world.

Rousset, David, and Maurice Nadeau. Les jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death). Hachette Littératures, 2005. 

* Classic witness account of Nazi concentration camps from which the phrase “everything is possible” comes.