Violence and Representation

My post is related to Yisa's suggestion that the artist must do violence to representation for "a kind of healing can occur, within the individuals who approach art either from the standpoint of the artist or from that of the audience."

In class the notion of "violence" in nationalistic poetry was brought up: the birth of the new nation state is forged through a poetry which "does violence" to existing language: in this way, the colonisers language is now re-arranged to speak of the native's experience, or the native's language breaks out of its traditional form/content and addresses issues of modernity and the nation. The old laws in the state of representation are broken; new laws are formed, and the state of poetry is symbolic of the nation state.

In this sense, violence is not only destructive, but also productive; nonetheless what it produces does not transcend violence, merely re-arrange it. Fanon's act of writing/narrating "On Violence" comes to mind, it is a violent gesture turning the colonisers Hegelian dialectic and the language back against them.

I suggest that Forster's "A Passage to India" also does violence to representation, but in a different way: through a process of “erasure”, which problematises any mode of representation’s hold on reality. In the novel, events which are described off-handedly become significant (Mohammad Latif’s bribing of Antony), events that seem central are then made to seem trivial (Mrs Moore’s epiphany in the caves), actions that reconcile also further division (Aziz’s collar stud).

What does this violence produce? I suggest it opens the possibility for a state of interpersonal relationships that is immediate and somehow beyond language (or at least, the rhetoric of coloniser/colonised). One glimpses this inexpressible state in Aziz's affection for Mrs Moore/Ralph/Fielding, who resorts to a mere platitude: "You are an Oriental".