Evan Winter, "The Rage of Dragons" (2019)

‘The fighting men and women of the Chosen were already onshore, were already fighting and dying’ [3]; ‘He grabbed the man's wrist, breaking it across his knee. The dagger fell to the sand and Tsiory crashed his forehead into his opponent's nose. With his enemy stunned, Tsiory shoved all his weight forward, forcing the rest of his sword into the man's guts, drawing an open mouthed howl from him that spattered Tsiory with blood and phlegm’ [10]; ‘Tau stabbed and swung at limbs and faces. He sliced away someone's fingers, praying they'd come from an enemy's hand’ [44]; ‘Aren lifted his sword to defend. Kellan adjusted, hitting him on the wrist, separating hand from forearm’ [111]; ‘Blood from the wound on his face dripped on the floor’ [125]; ‘The jagged cut Lekan had given him was bleeding through its scabs. The man's head had felt like a rock when he'd slammed it into Tau's face’ [151]; ‘He hit him in the shoulder and then, as Jengo hopped back in pain, he cracked him in the neck. Jengo made a strange high-pitched sound and went down’ [179]; ‘Tau drew his arm back, near to blacking out from agony, and lashed with his remaining sword, slicing the demon across its chest’ [239]; ‘Tau fell to the murky ground and felt his insides spilling out. He looked down and cried out in pain and horror. His intestines were exposed to the air, ropes upon ropes of them. He reached down to try and push them back. The pain was indescribable’ [265]; ‘The creature closed its jaws on the back of his neck, cracking his spine and dragging him to the ground. With his spine severed Tau could not feel the leg or his rib cage being torn open by the two demons. He could hear them though, as they slopped up his innards and shook his body with their jostling’ [311]; ‘Tau's head lolled. He was dying. It hurt. It hurt so much’ [315]; ‘The bastard shot his other sword out and low, burying a handspan of bronze in the meat of his left hip. Kellen screamed and fell’ [415]; ‘Tau launched himself into the fray, swords whirling, and the closest man took a dulled blade to the face, shattering his eye socket’ [417]; ‘... a warrior woman with full lips, caramel skin, and astonishing green eyes. She moved like an ocean storm, her bladework brilliant. He took her hand off at the wrist and she gawped at him, as if to ask why he'd done it. He wanted to tell her he wasn't sure, but his bronze was deep in her breastbone and there was nothing to say that would have meant a damn’ [443]; ‘Tau dropped, cutting through the man's calf with his blade. The Indlovu began to fall, and as he did Tau drove his sword through his skull. The dead man collapsed on the tiled floor’ [486]; ‘She fell to her knees and clawed at her neck, and blood erupted from her ears, mouth, nose and eyes. With fingers clawed, she tore at her face, peeling stripes of flesh away in rolls. She opened her mouth wide, as if to give birth through it, and vomited a torrent of filth, her arms giving way as she did’ [491]; ‘The pain coursed through Tau like a tsunami ... he looked down at his wound. The demon had him open from belly to groin’ [509].

It's exhausting.

I'm not saying its badly done. If you like this kind of thing (which is to say, if you like ultraviolent Fantasy war-adventure with lots of hack-n-slash) then this, I would hazard, will prove the kind of thing you like. But, sheesh. I'd suggest ‘ugh’, but I really not sure Rage of Dragons rises to the level of a Lawrentian or Burroughsian ‘ugh’. Not to damn with faint praise or anything. What I'm saying here, it should be evident, reflects my own squeamishness as much as anything else.

It's a larger question, of course. Larger than this one novel, I mean. Why is contemporary Fantasy so often so ultraviolent? Is it the same reason why so much of contemporary culture more broadly is so in hock to ultraviolence? I read reviews of the recent Harley Quinn flick Birds of Prey that praised the movie specifically for its representation of violence—visually inventive, say the critics; fun, they say; well-choreographed they say, as if grievous bodily harm is an elaborate and expressive dance rather than an affront to our collective humanity. Such celebration goes, it seems to me, in tandem with critics praising the movie for putting women in front of and behind the camera, a tacit argument that Birds of Prey dramatises the revolt of oppressed womankind against patriarchy. Don't misunderstand my weariness, here. Manifestly, patriarchy is a structural violence, and manifestly men are often actually violent against women. But it seems to me the myth of the ‘kick-ass femme’ reproduces, rather than deconstructs, both those things. As if Harley Quinn could figure as a role model to any but the most morally amaurotic! I mean, it's possible that that's exactly where we are. But one hopes not.

I understand, of course, the argument that says: this is neither a representation of, nor a call to, actual violence—it's cartoon violence, like Tom and Jerry. Still, Tom and Jerry used to be a five-minute interlude between Crackerjack and Blue Peter. Now it's the whole schedule. Sure, we chafe against the restrictions of Civilisation and Its Discontents, and (sure) those discontents stem from the way we must constrain our desires and aggressions in the face of the provocations of others. But the fantasy that acting out our violent instincts would free us from this bind is as fatuous as it is mendacious. Do it really need saying? Physical violence in facile books and films simplifies, frees, acts cathartically and manifests graceful physicality; but physical violence in real life is always ugly, always upsetting, always graceless, never effects any longer-term catharsis and always, always but always complexifies and degrades the situation into which it is inserted. Violence is another word for intolerance—is, indeed, the purest somatic embodiment of intolerance. If intolerance, more broadly framed, is our problem, injecting more intolerance surely isn't the solution, howsoever we urge ourselves on with self-assurances that our intolerance is the good kind, not like their nasty and bigoted intolerance, and so on, and so forth. But, look: I'm getting preachy. You know the drill. I've hummed and ha'd around this question before, and at some length. Still harping on tortures? Apparently so.

There's an episode of The Sopranos (‘For All Debts Public and Private’ I think it is) where Tony gifts Christopher the identity of the now-retired cop who killed his, Christopher's, father. Tony drives him to this man's house and waits outside as Chris goes in. Later, during his session with his psychoanalyst Dr Melfi, Tony confesses that he sat in the car thinking about the ‘beating’ taking place, and wishing it was him, inside the house. This is connected, we assume, with Tony's sense that he's not as young as he used to be, his fear of waning powers. But Melfi's question, with respect to this desire to be where the beating was actually happening, is perceptive: ‘giving it?’ she asks. ‘Or taking it?’

Reading this novel, and having read many like it, I find myself struck that two things are always at play. On the one hand there is the idea of violence as something you inflict on others, others ‘who deserve it’ (to free you from any qualms your conscience might try to insert into the situation)—the idea, in other words, of violence as freeing, a freedom both from societal constraints and from your own motivations, thoughts and prompts (hence: an acte gratuit). But always, alongside this fundamentally sadistic notion, runs the masochistic one. The Rage of Dragons puts enormous emphasis on the long, exhausting and often painful training its characters must undergo, and spends as long on the wounds our guys receive as the ones they inflict: gloating accounts of enemies being hacked to pieces, and equally gloating accounts of we ourselves (that is, our fictional proxy) being on the receiving end of others' violence. Maybe that fictive jink that divides the universe in goodies (us) and baddies (them) isn't quite the get-out-of-jail-free card our conscience needs. Perhaps we must receive as much violence as we dish out in order that we are able to continue dishing it out. An eye for an eye, we might say, cuts both ways.

It's certainly hard to deny that movies from Rambo to Starship Troopers and Captain America: Winter Soldier are as much about how much violence and pain our hero can absorb as they are about how much he (in most cases it is a he) can direct against others. Swapping out the kick-ass hero in favour of a kick-ass heroine does not challenge or upend, but rather internalises and intensifies, this structural relation. It's not actually a case of ‘women have been on the receiving end of this kind of crap for generations, now it's our turn to dish it out’. That's for several reasons I think, and not the least of them is: men are on the receiving end, and always have been. In life, but egregiously so in art. Sylvester Stallone squatting in a cave and gurning in agony as he sews up his own wounds without anasthetic: Rambo is much more a masterpiece of masochism than it is an outwardly projecting power-fantasy. And that makes a kind of sense, doesn't it: because the System (Power, Foucault would say) absolutely depends upon our capacity to absorb its punishments—upon, in fact, our ability not just to take this, but to convince ourselves that we should, that this is the logic of reality, even that we secretly enjoy it. It isn't us, but we're encouraged to believe it is. In truth, as Ballard's Richard Pearson says in Kingdom Come (2006) ‘Violence is the True Poetry of Governments.’ So here we are.

Violence is a physical action, and its representation in art is an emotional prompt (to exhilaration perhaps; or disgust). Which is another way of saying: violence is not an idea. Me, I'm old-fashioned enough not to wish to forego the idea that SF is a literature of ideas. The problem is that an idea is always a constraint upon emotion; an idea is always a formulation, and therefore a formalisation, which is to say: a form. All the bollocks about violence as something to be ‘choreographed’, as a kind of ‘dance’, is a fundamental and, I think, self-serving evasion of the truth that violence degrades form, is always about breaking shit, not forming it. Our confusion (one, I'm tempted to say, structurally imposed upon us) is our belief that our guilt merits violence, along with this ideolegeme's correlative that violence is the necessary idiom of all punishment. But it need not be so. In Coldness and Cruelty Gilles Deleuze argues that ‘even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is.’ Rather he says, they ‘leave it in a state of indeterminacy equaled only by the extreme specificity of the punishment.’ He adds: ‘this is the world described by Kafka.’ Oh for a properly and fully Kafkaesque Fantasy novel today! Vain hope, I know.

So, yes: I suppose I'm suggesting this style of writing, so common today, only superficially appears sadistic. It's actually masochistic, in this specifically Deleuzian sense. In place of sadism's essentially institutional, apathetic and quantitative powers, connected as they are in our post-Enlightenment epoch with the demonstrative reason of the superergoist state, these sorts of novel are exercises in Deleuzian masochism. These works only mimic heat; they are in fact cold. They pay mere lip-service to justice and liberation; in fact they are cruel, qualitative and contractual (since the reader knows in advance what to expect here and will be angry if they feel ‘cheated’ of that; but also in the way violence against the other is ‘paid for’ in the currency of violence absorbed by the self).