implacable violence, part one
Implacable Violence,
Part One
The death of Senator John McCain quickens our interest in how to deal with contemporary narratives of life history. McCain's touchstone story pertains to
American conservative values, the consequences of trauma, military and public service, violence,
and a sense of honor. Barack Obama's differently remarkable narratives
direct attention to the absence of military service, class and caste violence,
the audacity of hope, centralist values, and diversity in the history of
"race." Narratives about
McCain and Obama stand in noteworthy contrast to future narratives about Donald
Trump, stories that may place ego in the foreground as they unfold tales of
sexism, constipated values, inadvertent racism, the violence of capitalism,
sleight of mouth, and avoidance of military service. Ego, self-fashioning, and boldness are
apparent in the three sets of narrative, but excess lynches the Trump set. Violence
is a common denominator in recuperating, analyzing, and interpreting the biographies
of these public figures. Degrees of
pathology are also powerful factors for which we ought to account. As we ---all of us who deal with the mind and
its expressions ---- venture into dealing with these history-drenched narratives,
we must bring to our work an admission
regarding the limits of knowing. Perhaps the most we can say about
"reality" is that we habitually refute and revise one iteration in
order to establish the hegemony of another iteration.
What we champion as knowledge is quite more subjective than
the intellectual commerce of criticism is willing to admit, unless our premises
of purpose, our ideologies and
methodologies, and our time-bound historiographies become the objects of
scrutiny. We seem to be more predisposed
to use rhetorical deflection than to risk plain talk about uncertainty. Thus, a tantalizing question arises. Do we need to become slightly more honest
by using a combination of traditional methods of scholarship and close reading, psychoanalysis, and the findings
of neuroscience/ neuroforensics to locate fictive and non-fiction narratives in literary and cultural histories? Access
newspaper articles on violence at
and
Make a response to the question.
If we choose to limit our inquiries to the matter of African
American male life histories and the genres of autobiography, memoir, and
biography, we must prepare to deal ruthlessly with the systemic nature of
American violence, trauma, and domesticated terrorism. We can find no sanctuary from the grotesque
aspects and affects/effects of implacable violence, and we need not fool
ourselves into thinking that the interventions of critical cultural study will
yield consensus or anything more than "symbolic" resolutions.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. August 26, 2018
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