Don’t Blame Literature for Violence
The violent massacre at Virginia Tech is, no doubt, a national tragedy. And it hits close to home for the writing and literary community – especially those of us who are English Majors. I’m going to assume that over the next several months, much of Cho Seung-Hui’s own writings will come under increasing scrutiny as people try to find anything that might have given a clue to his impending violent outburst.
Looking to his fictional works is the wrong place to look. Violence is nothing new in literature. Shakespeare had plenty of violence in his plays, and even some of his contemporaries wrote sinister plays dealing with everything from rape to necrophilia and, you guessed it, murder. Even Spenser’s magnum opus The Faerie Queene has its moments. Lots of writers include violence in their writing, hardly any of them go on shooting sprees in college classrooms. In other words, Cho is definitely an exception, not the rule.
I can only wonder if there will be knee-jerk reaction in creative writing courses in schools across the United States. Will students be banned from writing stories and poems with violent themes? Or will students who do write such material be instantly cast in a shadow of suspicion? Either way, the tragic incident at Virginia Tech is going to give unwanted attention to the writings of many would-be authors.
Finally, I have always believed in a separation between the author and his/her work. But the author wrote the work, so how can there be a separation, you ask? Once a writer publishes a work, or it is merely written down, it takes on a life of its own. Readers will read the work, critics will write about it and academics will study it for years to come (if the author is lucky to achieve such a status), even after the author is long dead.
A work of fiction is just that, fiction – whether it’s in the form of a novel, short story, play, poem, it doesn’t matter. If I write a short story about a man who randomly kills another man, it does not mean that I have killed anyone, nor does it mean that I will kill anyone. The story is simply a figment of my imagination.
There’s no doubt that this issue will play itself out in public opinion, media, and especially the blogosphere. But it remains necessary to put things into perspective and not give in to knee-jerk reactions as a result of a very tragic isolated incident. I don’t want to minimize what happened at Virginia Tech, rather, I want people to examine the real issues surrounding Cho’s sudden violent outburst.
