Thursday, April 19, 2007
The world has been stunned by the shocking news of a South Korean university undergrad who has gunned down 33 people, including himself, in Virginia Tech University, USA.
I was really shaken when I read about the incident in the newspapers. Barely 8 years after the Columbine High School shootings, we have another massacre with an even larger deathtoll in a university, which should be a safe haven for learning and experimentation and not murder! It is indeed a great pity that so many students and academics, who came from all over the world, should have perished so meaninglessly.
But what shocked me even more was the fact that the gunman was not some thug from the street but an English major. Cho Seung Hui was someone who was studying the same discipline in the university as me and many of my friends. Cho's actions would likely impede greater cross-cultural acceptance of South Koreans in the US, and he has certainly not done a service for the reputation of students of English Literature either. But while it is important to recognize that Cho was an individual and in no way representative of all South Koreans and English Lit students, I think it's significant to think more deeply about his relationship with literature and the society he lived in before we merely label him as just one 'mad' individual.
In my experience, Lit students have always been considered somewhat peculiar and out of place in this technocratic world that we live in. Most people don't believe that what we study is 'useful' for society and if they do, they are usually clinging on to traditional Arnoldian liberal humanist values that have already crumbled in the face of postmodernist scrutiny. My parents often tell me that only 'lazy' white people chose to study 'easy' subjects like Literature in their university in the UK, while all the 'hardworking' students in Engineering were Asians and other non-Caucasians (the old dichotomy of the engineers vs the arts intellectuals).
And artists and intellectuals of the humanities (I'm afraid there is no term that adequately describes all the people who engage in a huge diversity of disciplines ranging from literary studies to philosophy to cultural studies) are very often associated in the popular mindset with madness. There are the familiar stereotypes of the Romantic mad genius, the nihilistic philosopher (think Sade), the counter-culture Beatniks and hippies, even Hamlet.
But I'm not implying that studying literature necessarily predisposes one to 'madness'. I do believe that literature, and art in general, exist to defamiliarize and make us question our own unexamined assumptions about the way we live and the world we live in. This destabilizing aspect of art does make it difficult for people who really engage with it to live peaceful, happy lives, but I would argue that pained consciousness is more valuable to me than blissful ignorance. And I'm going to suggest that perhaps Cho, as a student of English Lit, had indeed 'seen' something, had seen the ugliness of the world, had crossed the line into a zone of 'madness' where he gained insights that we, in our mundane 'normalcy', do not see or do not want to see. When I read about his writings, I thought immediately that he reminded me of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, a brooding, unhappy intellectual who is bitterly dissatisfied with the corrupt society he inhabits and decides to change himself and the world by taking a hatchet to an old pawnbroker's head. Perhaps Cho too, like Raskolnikov and his famous precursors Hamlet and Faust, was dissatisfied with "words, words, words" and wanted to translate words into action, but went horribly awry.
Perhaps I'm going to get a lot of flak for associating a gunman with the so-called 'great' tragic heroes of Western literature, but I think it's important not to dismiss Cho as simply 'mentally deranged'. Categorizing individuals as 'mad' tends to be political. But I'm not going to romanticize Cho either. Being deeply affected by what one thinks what has gone wrong with the world does not entitle one to shoot other people.
Moreover, although I do believe that art is fundamentally destabilizing, it is also 'healing', not in the crude way where you put mental patients in front of a soothing watercolour painting in a hospital and voila! they're cured, but in the sense that both the creation and interpretation of art help us to articulate and to give shape and meaning to our experiences. Modern art recognizes that it is not easy to find the right words to express one's pain and suffering, but it is the attempt of art, like Lily Briscoe's painting in To the Lighthouse, that allows for a very humble kind of transcendence, a "going on" in the continual struggle of our lives.
Maybe Cho was trying to do that in his plays and he was failing, but instead of helping him and encouraging him to come to terms with his anger and pain through performative writing which seeks to imbue words with a transformative power, his teachers dropped him from classes and isolated him further. I think he really needed help, but the university simply left him to his own devices, and that has resulted in an immense tragedy for both the killer and the killed.
And while this post is not meant to be a justification of Cho's actions, I must admit that this is in some ways a defence of the study of Literature, and a reflection on how we, as students of Literature, might be more deeply engaged with the world and our experiences through art instead of merely dissecting our set texts with a view to doing well in the exams.
kaoru said at 5:59 PM
|