regardless of race, language or religion

Much has already been said about how the modernist aesthetic re-enacts a form of violence upon narrative and textual means of representation and understanding. I’d just like to point out a further relationship between violence and aesthetic systems that struck me while reading Fanon (and thinking about Auerbach). Fanon writes that colonized masses “intuitively believe that their liberation must…and can only be achieved by force” (33).

Inhabiting as they do a pervasive structure in which colonial dominance (in economic, cultural and political fields, as described by Fanon) prevent the subject from confronting the coloniser as an equal, the outright rejection of such structure seems to be the only means available for levelling the playing field. In PI for example, Aziz knows the result of his trial has already been foretold; his legal, social and cultural standing are more than enough to ‘prove’ his guilt. On the other hand, physical violence, in all its bloody reality, represents not only a rupturing of these oppressive structures, but also allows the battle between coloniser/colonised to be fought in a kind of primordial state of pure physicality, a kind of lacanian Real where social constructions and the (false) inequalities that they bring are abolished. An oblique reference to this can be seen in Adela’s observatin of the punkah, whose “strength and beauty…[and] physical perfection” is likened to a go’ d in contrast to the “cultivated, self conscious and conscientious” Assistant magistrate opposite him (205). Physical violence, in other words, provides the interface where men can meet as equals and reverse the stifling hierarchies that colonialism spawns. ( I was actually thinking of Pahlanuik’s Fight Club, which might help demystify what I think has been a rather convoluted paragraph)

The idea of equality drew my thoughts back to Auerbach, who also described the aesthetics of modernism as possessing an equalising impulse. I posted earlier that I disagreed with Auerbach regarding modernism’s ability to represent an unprejudiced and universal sort of “common humanity. But it strikes me now that the modernist aesthetic, like violence, attempts to locate a space that is free from imposed systems and representational biases. Thus, modernism too promotes a sort of equality: Not only reexternal differences in individuals disregarded in favour of ‘common’ interior processes, but also, ordinary and nondescript people are seen as being equally worthy of representation. My grammar goes awry – a sign of sleepiness – and shall just end by saying that equality provides a common thread by which violence and modernist aesthetics can relate to one another