Atrocity, Literature, Criticism

Atrocity has gained a disquieting prominence in the US since the advent of the “war on terror.” A quarter of a century ago, when torture and “disappearance” characterized the worst face of authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone and of political conflict in Central America, who would have guessed that Congress, Federal courts, and the executive branch of the US would publicly and earnestly debate the legitimacy and legality of these practices at home? In order to finesse US law, “enhanced interrogation techniques” and suspension of habeas corpus have been institutionalized offshore. Nonetheless, torture in particular has entered public consciousness as a practice that takes place inside the boundaries of American political life. The Fox TV espionage/thriller series 24 both registers this shift and dramatizes a rationale for torture at the hands of counter-terrorism agents. To the extent that the television still symbolically occupies pride of place in the American living room, 24 brings torture not only into the homeland but also into the home. As recognition grows that torture is not merely a practice of medieval lords, fascists, totalitarian communists, and shadowy, repressive dictators in remote national capitals, we must expand our reckoning with torture as a practice of modern, liberal, democratic societies.

Scholarship on torture, “disappearance,” and other atrocities further indexes this turn in American political life and also attempts to analyze, understand, and critique it. Journalists, attorneys, historians, sociologists, geographers, philosophers, and political scientists have produced a small library of studies on “extraordinary rendition,” “secret prisons,” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other “hot spots” in the “global war against terrorism.” A great deal of this scholarship builds upon the language and frameworks of international human rights that have been elaborated as law, politics, and ethics since the end of World War II. In the early twenty-first century, it is rare to proceed far in the analysis of torture or any other atrocity without pervasive reference to human rights. This is true not only for political scientists but also for poets, novelists, essayists, and literary critics.

Both literature and literary scholarship have increasingly taken up the language of human rights in considerations of political violence, legal injustice, social inequality, and related vectors of human suffering. Literary uses of the language of human rights are not exactly new; Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, uses the phrase in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Joseph Slaughter brilliantly delineates a particular intimacy between the notion of human rights and the rise and global expansion of the bildungsroman from the eighteenth through the twentieth century in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007). However, the intensity of literary interest in the language of human rights has increased in recent decades. Literature, it seems, is not to be left out of the diffusion of human rights frameworks into broadly cultural (in addition to political) practices. The titles under review render some of the most urgent questions and concerns that literature and criticism approach within the rubric of human rights late in the first decade of the twenty-first century. They also provide us with four distinct approaches to the problem of how to conceive of the place of atrocity in a liberal democratic society.

Addressing a classic concern of literature and human rights, the writer/activists at PEN have recently issued a new volume devoted to freedom of expression. Writers under Siege: Voices of Freedom from around the World (2007) comes to us from English PEN, working closely with International PEN. The volume includes poems, letters, essays, and extracts from memoirs and novels authored by both celebrated writers (Orhan Pamuk, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Aung San Suu Kyi, Anna Politkovskaya) and by...