On the Teaching of Violent Literature

How can we teach challenging subjects without eroding our students' capacity to be horrified?

The following is adapted from a conference paper I presented at a very small conference some years ago. The idea still haunts me (as I prepare for my Horror Film class next semester), so I thought I’d put it in front of a few more eyes. I would love to hear your thoughts, which you can leave in the comments below (or by reaching out to me via email — you can reply to this email if you are a subscriber).

Let me begin with some poetry.

I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,

that joy in death, that philosophical

understanding of carnage, that

concentration on the species.

—I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.

I am going to behave like a Jew

and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,

and pull him off the road.

Gerald Stern, “Behaving Like a Jew”

This essay is an attempt at responding to ongoing controversies over trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, and other fronts in the Culture Wars of higher education.

Predictably, the lines in this battle are usually drawn along partisan lines: political conservatives will associate “Cancel Culture” with group-think and a creeping infringement upon individual freedoms of speech and action. Conversely, politically liberal commentators will maintain that “Consequence Culture” is merely an inclusive approach to speech and thought with the ultimate goal of kindness and compassion for society’s marginalized citizens.

In the classroom, one primary site of this ideological conflict is the syllabus. Questions as to whether teachers should, either by choice or decree, warn students in advance about objectionable, offensive, or sensitive content intersect with professional concerns about academic freedom, worries over institutional reputation, and cultural fears about inclusivity and community.

This is a big subject, in other words. No wonder people fight about it so much.

Rather than taking a position about the appropriateness of trigger warnings, I’m going to divert the conversation to a philosophical discussion about:

a). what we hope to achieve by incorporating transgressive material into academic endeavors, and b). the potential cost of this activity.

The poem, “Behaving Like a Jew,” by Gerald Stern that I quoted at the beginning of this piece captures the essence of the matter for me. The speaker of that poem, in choosing to “behave like a Jew,” utterly rejects modern and sophisticated patterns of thought that intellectualize “carnage.” His is an attempt to maintain the ability to mourn death and destruction without the mediation of enlightened practice and method. So desperate is the speaker for this connection to life, he extends his mourning to an opossum, dead in the road.

I want to organize my inquiry around my own experience teaching Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell.

From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Top Shelf Comics.

The book is a fictionalized account of the Jack the Ripper murders in Victorian London, and Moore and Campbell work diligently to capture the full horror of the crimes. The story is staged as an unfolding conspiracy set into motion by Queen Victoria herself, who enlists royal surgeon Sir William Gull to fulfill his Masonic duty to Queen and country and eliminate a group of prostitutes who have knowledge of an illegitimate heir to the throne of England.

Queen Victoria and her Masonic henchman. Sir William Gull.

Gull approaches his work with a religious zeal, heavily employing Masonic symbolism in the killings as a kind of rite of purification.

As an object of academic inquiry, From Hell is a goldmine, encouraging enlightened conversation about monarchy as a political system, patriarchy as an ideology, the roots of fascism, the aestheticization of violence, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc. In addition, as an English teacher, the novel has deep intertextual relationships with William Blake and other literary figures. In short, as a teacher of English at an American college in the 21^st Century, From Hell is a wonderful text that supports the intellectual mission of my profession. And yet.

Moore, as he is fond of doing, performs an act of deconstruction in the novel. Where Watchmen explicitly attacked a latent fascism in the superhero comic, From Hell works to rip, if you will, the Whitechapel murders from the realm of lurid fascination in pop culture. Moore’s explicit aim is to re-humanize the victims of the crimes and make the reader of From Hell confront the human tragedy of their murders. Ethically speaking then, Moore’s intent echoes Stern’s call to “behave like Jew.” Incidentally, Moore and Campbell open their work with an image that parallels Stern’s opossum; a dead seagull sets the stage for the ensuing “melodrama.” And yet.

I must confess that, despite the fitness of the novel’s intellectual and moral work, I never overcame a persistent uneasiness with teaching the novel with to a group of undergraduates. In addition to images of pornographically explicit sex, the novel makes its moral claims with cruel and methodical images of the violence perpetrated on these women’s bodies. The murder of Mary Kelly is particularly grotesque.

Staged over several pages of wordless images. The murder-victim becomes a show piece for The Ripper’s artistic ritual, and his work is shown in excruciating detail. Frame after frame of wordless images shows Kelly’s body being methodically disassembled, culminating in an autopsy-like image of the final horror.

Now intellectually, I could and still can explain the pedagogical value of approaching such moments in the novel.

As an English teacher, there is a lot of close-reading to be done. And historically speaking, the sequence even opens up space for an interesting discussion about Victorian medical practices, not to mention the socio-economic environment of Victoria’s London. And even from an ethical perspective, there is good intellectual work to be done. The brutality of Campbell’s images suits Moore’s accusatory purpose and forces the contemporary reader to confront his or her own participation in various forms of violence against women.

Simply by being fascinated by the persistent romance of the Ripper killings, we participate in his atrocities. It makes one wonder about the perpetual popularity of serial-killer documentaries and other forms of True Crime entertainment.

I wonder, however, if something else is lost by applying these scholarly methods and practices to human tragedy. Is it the place of higher education to process such deeply human experiences?

My thinking about such issues is no doubt deeply influenced by Lionel Trilling. One of the more prominent members of the so-called “New York Intellectuals” who coalesced around such little magazines as Partisan Review, Trilling, who also taught at Columbia University, represents a bygone era in literary criticism, one which existed before the academic publishing industrial complex. Maybe it is his very alien-ness to the modern academic that makes his thoughts worth considering.

In his 1961 essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” Trilling, who was, like Gerald Stern, Jewish, wrestles with anxieties similar to my own on these issues.

The essay documents Trilling’s uneasiness with teaching literature that we would classify as Modernist. Proust, Kafka, Gide and others canonical modernists had been, by student demand brought into Columbia’s literature program for the first time, and Trilling found himself having to teach works that, in their very essence, “asks every question that is forbidden in polite society (8).”

(Incidentally, can you imagine living in a world where students would demand to read Kafka and Proust in class?)

Without denying the value, quality, or importance of modern literature, Trilling nonetheless approached the task with trepidation.

His complaint was not one of modern literature’s quality, and this is also important for me to acknowledge here. As Trilling did with the literature of Modernism, I give full assent to the artistic, intellectual, and historical merit that comics bring to the classroom. And with regards to violent comics, I reiterate that From Hell is a treasure trove for intellectual activity.

Trilling’s anxiety, and mine as well is instead situated on the powers and limits of institutional education. In other words, the problem lies not with the course reading list, but with the class itself.

The sex and violence of Moore and Campbell’s book represents an assault on polite society’s morals and norms. This is of course by explicit design. Moore’s very intent is to present the horrifying truth of our society, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, so that we must confront the structural realities of sexism and violence. In this intent, it shares a great deal in common with Modernist literature, about which Trilling describes as “the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself – it seems to me that the characteristic element of modern literature, is the bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs through it” (3).

From Hell is, if anything, more hostile to our society than the works on Trilling’s syllabus (it equates even office-cubicle life with Jack the Ripper’s killings, along with the Crown, and canonical Western literature). Despite this claim, though, Trilling is an avid reader of this type of work; his reservations center (as the title states) “on the TEACHING of modern literature.”

On one hand, the body of work in question seems to require a formal institutional setting in order to fully grapple with its depths. Confronting Joyce or Eliot without guidance in literary and historical context, the young reader will experience the vertigo and confusion that we all have. Trilling acknowledges this, writing that “Modern literature, however, shows its difficulties at first blush; they are literal as well as doctrinal difficulties” (7). Then echoing the call for covering this difficult work in the official curriculum, he asks “if our students were to know their modern literary heritage, surely they needed all the help that a teacher can give?” (7). The same logic guided my decision to teach From Hell. The intricate historical context and the postmodern intertextuality of the novel require a great deal of explication and discussion to fully unpack, and one can imagine a solitary reader missing huge reservoirs of literary depth without such guidance.

Yet despite this conviction, the comic’s subversiveness fires in me the same anxiety that inspired Trilling’s essay, particularly when coupled with the excitement students brought to discussions of the book.

My students, like those who fought for modern literature to be added to Columbia’s curriculum in Trilling’s time, were rather eager to apply the techniques of academic literary criticism to the novel. The identification of motifs and repeated phallic images, the philosophical discussions about patriarchy, Freudian psychology, and social control: these were, on one level exhilarating to me as a professor and I experienced no small amount of satisfaction in watching my students apply the critical lenses that the institution of higher education prizes and encourages.

Trilling recounts similar experiences, yet with far less pride than me, characterizing the process as “the readiness of the students to engage in the process that we might call the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive” (26).

I’m taken aback even now, reading that sentence. When I teach From Hell, is the close textual analysis of graphic narratives that I prize being employed in the service of the “legitimization of the subversive?” If so, I fear that I might not only undermining society itself, but also doing a disservice to the moral capabilities of the subversive.

Horror films as a lens to see the horrors of society is a very different concept than horror films as a means to find the horrors of society simply fascinating.

Perhaps I’m over-quoting Trilling here, but his abilities with the language far exceed my own, so I will allow him to describe the problem. He writes:

“…to some of us who teach and who think of our students as the creators of the intellectual life of the future, there comes a kind of despair. It does not come because our students fail to respond to ideas, rather because they respond to ideas with a happy vagueness, a delighted glibness, a joyous sense of power in the use of received or receivable generalizations, a grateful wonder at how easy it is to formulate and judge, at how little resistance language offers to their intentions” (5).

In other words, Trilling’s students (and my own) were not sufficiently horrified by the literature we assigned.

The fear underlying all this can be stated quite simply; in our attempt to intellectualize our students through the power of our institution, are we robbing them of the ability to feel?

By empowering young intellectuals with the technical academic tools of critical thinking, are we legitimizing subversion and stamping out a conscientious sense of terror? Is the university extending its power too far?

Trilling asks “whether in our day too much does not come within the purview of the academy. More and more, as the universities liberalize themselves, and turn their beneficent imperialistic gaze upon what is called Life Itself, the feeling grows among our educated classes that little can be experienced unless it is validated by some established intellectual discipline, with the result that experience loses much of its personal immediacy for us and becomes part of an accredited societal activity” (10).

The end result of such mechanistic intellectual imperialism in this case is that when I press for intellectual responses to From Hell, my students, as Trilling again puts it, “can never again know the force and terror of what has been communicated to him by the works he is being examined on” (12).

In closing, I have one more quotation from our dear Lionel to share. If only because I personally find rather humorous. Allegorizing his anxiety about legitimizing the subversive, Trilling parodies Nietzsche, writing:

“I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: ‘Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men” (27).

Whether or not this is funny to anyone but me, the point about academic arrogance should be taken seriously. If we are to take Moore’s artistic intention seriously – to re-humanize the de-humanized women murdered by the killer we romantically call Jack the Ripper – it is worth considering whether our academic methods are another type of exploitation. When we look into the abyss that Moore and Campbell’s book opens, how do we reconcile what the institution demands our students see and what their humanity demands they see?

Let me say that, given the chance, I would teach From Hell again. Trilling ends his essay by stating, “I press the logic of the situation not in order to question the legitimacy of the commitment, or even the propriety of expressing the commitment in the college classroom…but to confront those of us who do teach modern literature with the striking actuality of our enterprise.” (30).

Like Trilling, I don’t argue for self-censorship or a truncated form of academic freedom. I simply wish to state that the works that have inspired these debates over trigger warnings should also inspire an honest awareness of the “enterprise.”