Enduring violence: Representation and response in contemporary fiction (Alice Walker, J. M. Coetzee, Keri Hulme, D. M. Thomas, United States, South Africa, New Zealand, England)

Four contemporary novels counter the pervasive trends of glamorizing and trivializing violence and instead attempt to impress upon readers the dire consequences for both the suffering individual victim and the larger community, thus upsetting audiences' ability to view violence as entertaining or benign.; In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker shows the difficulty of even presenting violence since discussing many forms of violence is taboo, relating it may be traumatic, and conveying pain presents linguistic challenges. Nevertheless, she succeeds in emphasizing the damage to victims without defining them exclusively by the trauma they have undergone. J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians examines the difficulty of witnesses intervening in--even acknowledging--violence. His novel challenges readers to identify sympathetically, with victims across cultures or, at the very least, to conceptualize victims in ways that are not additionally damaging. Keri Hulme's The Bone People also grapples with resistance to intervention, especially as gender affects expectations about involvement in violence. In contrast to Walker's concern with how to make violence visible and Coetzee's and Hulme's with spectators' reluctance to address violence, Thomas confronts an antithetical problem in The White Hotel: all too often, people are more than willing to be spectators of violence. Delving into thanatos and pornography, The White Hotel forces readers to question the psychological origins and potential pleasure associated with violence.; As they struggle to overcome problematic conventions of representing violence, these novels make violence "endure" in several senses. First, their focus on victims makes readers attend to what victims endure when subjected to violence. The novels also show individuals and communities enduring violence in the sense of surviving the acts perpetrated against them. All four novels include somewhat optimistic resolutions, but they do so because pessimistic endings may encourage readers to accept violence as inevitable. Risks of learning to endure reading about violence include desensitization, apathy, and cynicism. To combat such risks, the novels employ narrative strategies that represent violence so that it is neither palatable nor easily dismissed.