Literature
and Conflict: One-Day Postgraduate Conference at the University of
Birmingham
Annie
Dickinson (University of Birmingham)
Abstract
The inaugural one-day
postgraduate
conference hosted by the School of English, Drama, American and
Canadian
Studies at the University of Birmingham on June 20th 2014,
invited
postgraduate students and academic researchers to explore the multiple
relations and interactions between literature and conflict. Three
plenary
speakers from institutions across the country, as well as three panels
of
postgraduate students from the University of Birmingham, gave papers
which
examined such diverse topics as the issues and debates around the
textual
representation of violent conflict and war, literature as an expression
of
personal inner conflict, and audience responses to theatrical violence.
Papers
and subsequent discussions raised multiple interesting questions about
literature and conflict, prompting a re-evaluation of both terms.
Keywords:
literature; conflict; war; violence; representation; text
Literary
texts and their creators, from the classical Greek epic to the
twenty-first
century novel, have attempted in multiple and wide-ranging ways to
engage with
(and in) conflict. The inaugural one-day postgraduate conference hosted
by the
School of English, Drama, American and Canadian Studies (EDACS) at the
University of Birmingham on June 20th 2014 explored the diverse
interactions
between conflict and the written word, bringing together more than
thirty
postgraduate students, researchers, and academics. Three plenary
speakers,
along with three panels of postgraduate students from the University of
Birmingham, at both Masters and Doctoral level, spoke on texts and
topics from a
wide spectrum of genres and historical periods, and asked the audience
to
rethink their definitions of the terms ‘literature’ and
‘conflict’.
Motivated
by the centenary of the First World War, the other organisers and I
were initially
interested in the extent to which literature is able to effectively
represent war
and other violent conflicts. This question has sparked a great deal of
debate
in literary and cultural criticism: how can the impulse towards an
artistic
response to conflict be reconciled with the fear that the violence and
horror
of war cannot be truthfully represented in traditional literary forms?
This
tension between conflicts and their literary representations, as
pointed to by
Theodore Adorno’s famously controversial phrase, ‘to write
poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1981: 34), is perhaps due for
reconsideration in a
Western, media-driven society, in which war and violence are everyday
presences
on our television and computer screens. A number of our speakers
explored
issues around representation, including plenary speakers Dr Jarad Jon
Zimbler
(University of Birmingham) who discussed the success and failure of
literary
representations of apartheid, and Dr Natasha Alden (University of
Aberystwyth),
who focussed on a second generation fictional response to the First
World War.
The
first of our three plenary speakers, Zimbler, opened the conference
with a
paper titled ‘J.M. Coetzee and the Truths of Colonial
Violence.’ Via a discussion
of Coetzee’s novels, written during the height of apartheid in
South Africa, Zimbler
explored the power that literary art has to express the ‘truth
content’ of the
lived experience of colonial violence. Central to Zimbler’s
arguments was his
claim that a shift is needed in the study of postcolonial texts, which
so far
has not placed enough emphasis on literary technique, referred to as
‘craft.’ In
order to fully understand the ways in which truth may be reached though
craft,
Zimbler suggested that the critic must consider the totality of choices
available
to the artist: as well as the actual materials for writing with, this
includes
the words, subjects, forms, genres and techniques which she or he has
access to
at a given moment. Considered in this way, the postcolonial text is
crafted out
of the postcolonial conflict that is the moment of its production.
Zimbler’s
approach also has applicability outside of the sphere of postcolonial
studies:
the relation of literary craft to the conditions of production has the
potential to shed light on texts produced at any historical moment.
Zimbler
ended his paper with a literary comparison of the novels of two
writers: Alex
La Guma and J.M. Coetzee. He argued that that La Guma’s novels,
for example A Walk in the Night (1962) and The
Stone-Country (1967), are generally
characterised by an excess of overly descriptive or writerly language.
They are
self-consciously literary to the extent that the reality or
truth-content of
the violence that they describe is eclipsed. The result Zimbler
described as ‘a
failure to look squarely at the evils of apartheid.’ Coetzee,
conversely, was
presented as an example of aesthetic success in the representation of
conflict.
Citing passages from Dusklands (1974),
Zimbler demonstrated the ways in which Coetzee’s novels react
against those of
writers like La Guma. In comparison, Coetzee’s style is sparse,
bare and
brutal, allowing the truths of colonial violence visibility. This
aspect of the
paper revealed a further interesting intersection between literature
and
conflict: art, Zimbler made clear, is relational, with negative,
conflictual
relations between texts as important as positive influence.
While
Coetzee had direct experience of South Africa under apartheid, our
second
plenary speaker, Dr Natasha Alden, dealt with the fictional
representation of
conflict by an author with no direct experience of that conflict. Her
paper was
titled ‘Repression, revenants and illegible handwriting:
sexuality, gender and
perspective in Pat Barker’s Regeneration.’
Alden’s research focuses on second generation world war fiction:
novels, like Regeneration (1991), that centre on
conflicts which, for both their authors and readers, are historical.
Alden
looked closely at Regeneration, which
centres on (and fictionalises) psychologist William Halse Rivers Rivers
(1864-1922), who treated officers, including Siegfried Sassoon, for
shell shock
during World War One. Yet she also considered a number of the
first-hand
historical sources that Barker used to write her novel: accounts from
Rivers’
patients and samples of his handwriting for example.
By
putting these primary sources into dialogue with the fictional text,
Alden’s
paper raised a number of points about the relation between history and
fiction
in representing real life conflict. One important point that emerged
from the
talk was the way in which history and fiction intersect: history itself
is
always given a narrative structure by the historian that produces a
record of
historical events (White, 1978). Historical fiction such as
Barker’s, then, can
be read as enacting a similar process, albeit in a much more explicitly
fictional and literary way.
Other
papers also considered the issue of representation, particularly of
colonial
and postcolonial conflicts. Sarah Chatterley, for example, examined
George
Orwell’s representation of imperialism and the relation between
the white man
and the native in his early novel Burmese
Days (1934), to argue that while Burmese
Days ‘is not a perfect anti-imperialist novel,’ it
effectively showcases
the failings of imperialism, and influenced postcolonial writers Chinua
Achebe
and Edward Said. On the same panel, Jerome Wynter discussed strategies
of
resistance to discourses of imperialism and slavery in Victorian poet
Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Poems before Congress
(1855) and Casa Guidi Windows (1851).
As one commenter noted, both Chatterley and Wynter chose to focus on
writing from
within the culturally dominant group, rather than that of the oppressed
minority or racial other. The question of how far one group is
justified in
representing the conflicts of another was dealt with particularly well
by
Wynter, who referred to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work on
representation and
the role of the intellectual in allowing the oppressed subject a voice
in ‘Can
the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988).
It
quickly became clear that the umbrella theme of ‘literature and
conflict’ could
in fact cover far more than the literary representation of violent
conflicts
external to the text. Many of the speakers suggested new ways of
connecting and
understanding both terms and the relationship between them. Papers
explored the
ways in which writers might utilise conflict to literary ends: how
texts
themselves can function as sites of battle and dispute, the role played
by
literature as an expression of inner or mental conflict, and the
manifestations
of wider religious, political and cultural conflicts in literary texts.
Both
William Green and Elizabeth Cook considered the expression of wider
religious
and philosophical conflicts in literature of the seventeenth century.
Green looked
at religious conflict on the Jacobean stage, reading John
Fletcher’s
tragicomedy, The Island Princess
(1621) as an example of a more nuanced portrayal of Catholicism
compared to its
usual demonization in the drama of the period. Cook focussed on
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), to suggest that
the text exhibits a conflict between two world-views: an idyllic
prelapsarian
vision of biocentrism, in which humans, animals and plants are seen as
members
of a wider biosphere, and a postlapsarian anthropocentrism, which
places the
human self at the centre of the universe.
Lucy
Rowland also focussed on conflicting world-views in the early modern
period.
Her paper argued that the transformations of attitudes effected by
scientific
discovery in the early seventeenth century are realised psychologically
in the
mental conflicts of three of Shakespeare’s tragic characters:
King Lear,
Macbeth and Timon of Athens. Speaking on the same panel, Molly Bridges
also
considered mental conflict. The act of writing poetry, for the early
modern
writers Bridges considered, was a way of warding off or alleviating
madness.
Literature for these writers, Bridges suggested, is a balm for
conflict, a way
of healing a conflicted self. Judith Roads too found a positive
association
between text and conflict, as made clear by her corpus-based inquiry
into the ways
in which early Quakers used conflict and dispute in their tracts and
pamphlets.
She concluded that it was frequently a campaigning tool by which they
spread
their message and recruited followers.
The
final talk of the day, from the third of our plenary speakers, Dr
Rebecca
Yearling (Keele University), ‘“Getting caught up in the
action:” Violent
Spectacle and the Theatre Audience’, continued the
afternoon’s focus on early
modern literature. Plays like Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus (c.1594), John Marston’s Antonio’s
Revenge (c.1600) and John Webster’s The
Duchess of Malfi (c.1612), all of which contain an excessive amount
of
stage violence, are today performed more than they ever have been since
the
seventeenth century, and Yearling explored the responses that audiences
might
have to such violence in the early modern period and today. Most
interesting
was her discussion of the difficulty in controlling audience’s
responses, and
the risk of unintended reactions to violence. To illustrate this she
used the
example of Antonio’s Revenge ,
arguing that while the spectator desires the punishment of the evil
duke Piero,
the excess of the violence (Piero’s young son is murdered in
front of him) can
leave an audience with a profound sense of unease.
Also
important to Yearling’s discussion was the immediacy of the
theatre: an
audience sees violence and conflict enacted before their eyes. In the
world
outside this would demand an active response, but in the world of the
theatre
the enforced passivity of spectatorship, Yearling
maintained, makes the audience feel like either voyeurs or cowards.
Yearling’s
arguments, therefore, raised an important point about fiction’s
potential to
unsettle its audience or reader through its depiction of conflict or
violence.
We are not always able to control our responses to a piece of drama or
a
written text; perhaps the best literature on conflict always makes us
uncomfortable in some sense, by revealing, to return to the topic of
Zimbler’s
opening paper, the truths of that conflict. Conference organiser Emily
Wingfield, representing EDACS, asked the question in her closing
comments,
would a conference on literature and harmony have inspired the same
amount of
discussion? Perhaps, but there is a sense in which all literature is in
some
way driven by conflict, be it the explicit representation of conflict,
or
simply on the level of narrative: conflict between the characters in a
novel
for example. The range of different ways in which papers at the
conference
explored and interpreted the relationship between the two terms
certainly
suggests so, revealing new insights on both literature and conflict,
and
literature as conflict.
Acknowledgments
The
Literature and Conflict conference was the first of what we hope will
become an
annual postgraduate conference in the English Department at the
University of
Birmingham. It was made possible by generous funding from the School of
English, Drama, American and Canadian Studies, and was organised by
Sarah
Chatterley, Annie Dickinson, Chloe Morgan, Lucy Rowland and Emily
Wingfield.
References
Adorno,
T. W.
(1981), Prisms, Weber, S. and S.
Weber (trans), Cambridge MA: The MIT Press (originally published in
German as Prismen in 1955)
Spivak,
G. C.
(1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Nelson, C. and L.
Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271-316
White,
H.
(1978), Tropics of Discourse: Essays in
Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press