I think our vocabulary of anger—our whole interior landscape of outrage—is impoverished, principally because it was formed in an aristocratic warrior culture and has been so little reconstructed since. The aristocratic culture, that is, pictured in Books 1 and 2 of the Iliad: the shouting, sniveling, self-regarding anger of petty chiefs quarreling over sex slaves and captured weapons. Homer’s poem, it seems to me, is merciless in its presentation of the killers: it can be, because it’s confident that its hearers will mostly admire them. It can even bring on a Thersites to speak the truth about the “debate” so far—“you took my piece of arse, and therefore thousands die”—and be flogged with a scepter for doing so. Thersites, the poem allows a few hearers to hope, is the voice of a possible (decently ugly) future.
Dream on. We’re still stuck after three thousand years with choler, fury, wrath, temper, umbrage, dudgeon, acrimony, indignation, irascibility, high words, taking offense. A puppet show of “attitudes.” We’re still invited by idiots to choose between “hope” and “despair.” Where does that leave us in the life we actually lead? The other night on TV I saw an exhausted mother trying to soothe a two-year-old, crooning to it, hopelessness written across her face. Then the camera tilted down, revealing the two-year-old’s legs blown off below the knees. Anger? Is that what I felt? Or what the newscast expected me to feel? (“Scenes some viewers may find distressing…”) Indignation? Spleen, ire, bitterness, resentment? The words here—the cartoon affects, the implied economy of response—seem to me self-serving, self-protecting. They try to disown the absolute normality of “collateral damage,” and our stunned (tranquilized) complicity in it. They try to bring mechanized mass death, that gift of the twentieth century, back into the realm of the face-to-face—quarreling chieftains, “human animals,” groveling captives, cities sown with salt—rather than accepting, or at least trying to perceive, that war (as episode, as excitement, as height and depth of humanity) is a thing of the past. In its place a continuum of horrors. None of them real (to us). All of them visible. All the time. Not an existence Beyond Good and Evil, then, but a state in which Pseudo-Good and Pseudo-Evil are ladled out in image-doses as descant to everyday life, essentially as social discipline—so that the monstrous and ubiquitous can look to be things good citizens might “protest” about, and be able to affect.
I know that I was too often angry as a young man, and could be frightening (or absurd) because of it. As Leavis once said of Auden in the 1930s, the big indignation about public matters was too transparently a conversion of childhood fears and rage. People that I cared for back then asked me to stop, and I mostly did; but I nursed the hope that somewhere, in later age, there would crystallize a set of reactions to the unforgivable that could balance ethos and pathos more sanely. I hoped that it might be possible to talk about the world—even to raise one’s voice against it—in ways that would frighten the apologists for obscenity, not the bystanders. That hasn’t proved the case. Between hope and despair, it turns out, lies a hinterland of immobilizing disgust. That’s where we live. Just the way our masters like it.
T. J. Clark’s next book is Those Passions: On Art and Politics.
