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This chapter makes the case for reading Woolf's works—from her first novel to her last, with a special emphasis on her three primary works of the 1930s, The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts—as a great theorist of literary violence. It places Woolf in two primary relations to her contemporary culture with respect to violence: deeply, intimately exploring and formalizing its registers of violence; veering away from her peers and constructing an entirely original set of patterns to accommodate the visceral facts of ubiquitous, mass violence. The first half of the chapter elaborates three major topics in the cultural history of violence in the 1930s: the widespread debate about whether violence is or must be a determining feature of humanity, versus the view that civilization might yet prevail (discussion of Freud, Russell, Leonard Woolf, and V. Woolf); the Spanish Civil War, especially as it was reflected and understood in England (discussion of various writers on the war, as well as visual artists such as Picasso and Capa); the logics of action, as expressed by fascists, and the crisis around pacifism in the 1930s (discussion of Mussolini, British journal Action, and the history and language of British pacifism). The second half offers a reading of a full range of Woolf's writings (The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse) culminating in a detailed account of violence in her final three works.

This chapter looks at Paris, the exiled residence of Fernando Arrabal, and at two films that Arrabal directed, ¡Viva La Muerte!/Long Live Death! and L'arbre de Guernica/The Tree of Guernica. A former member of the Paris Surrealist Group and co-founder of the experimental theatre group Panique, Arrabal drew on his childhood experiences in Spanish-controlled North Africa during the 1930s to create two searing, surrealist-inspired films melding autobiography and history. This discussion also explores the efficacy of his deployment of shock tactics as an attempt to provoke a political response from the audience.

The rise of Fascism in Europe and its aftermath rest ever in the background of Chapter Six and its collection of ‘Disfigured Bodies’. The face and gaze of Antonin Artaud best characterises the tone of this series of violent destructions, lost ones and the isolated (like Picasso in occupied Paris). Amid ‘Veiled and Displaced Faces’ and ‘Empty Gazes’, involuntary displacement and sensory deprivation haunt representations of the human form. The head and human figures presented here are almost unrecognisable when re-conceived by a metteur en scène like Étienne Decroux or a sculptor like Alberto Giacometti. Marc Chagall, in exile, invents fantasy forms that masquerade the figures of opera and ballet performers with colourful, cushioned exteriors in magical scenographic spaces. Experimentation with actor as object manipulator or manipulacteur, like the scenographic, dynamic form in some of Jacques Lecoq’s work, displace dynamic expression to ‘things’ outside of the body form itself. In Chapter Six, some non-verbal performers search for statements beyond language: texts in the materiality of space itself. The abstracted silhouette speaks as depersonalised, masquerading image.

This chapter follows Michael Portillo’s pilgrimage to his late father’s native Spain as part of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys. Luis Gabriel Portillo was a poet and law professor who stayed loyal to the Republican government when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. A liberal intellectual and a Catholic idealist, he refused to carry a rifle at the front for fear of killing one of his brothers, five of whom were enlisted on the Nationalist side. Instead he ran messages as a courier and acted as a political instructor to the troops. In January 1939, shortly before Madrid fell to Franco, he escaped across the Pyrenees, reaching England as an asylum-seeker. For two decades he was unable to set foot in Spain. Michael’s moving Telemachan odyssey took him back to the land of his father’s heroes, to the village of his formative years, to the front line of the civil war, and to the ancient university city of Salamanca, the Ithaca of which Luis dreamt during his long years in exile. The chapter also looks at examples of Luis Portillo’s deeply nostalgic poetry of exile, from his published volume Ruiseñor del destierro.

This chapter describes the core of what came to be known as the Massacre of Addis Ababa, which involved the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of unsuspecting residents of Addis Ababa living in prescribed districts. The massacre, which was conducted over three days, was authorized at the highest levels of the Fascist Party in Rome, and organized by the head of the Party in Addis Ababa, Guido Cortese. The massacre was publicly announced at 4:30 pm on Friday 19th February. It began 30 minutes later and continued through the night. The methods of killing involved guns, grenades, clubs, bayonets, vehicles and whatever weapons the Italian Blackshirts and Fascist civilians could find. In the process, Blackshirts invaded the French legation. Through the night the Italians burned houses down, frequently with the residents locked inside. The Italians also attempted to burn down the cathedral of St George.

Chapter 1 questions why we often think of war when confronted with an extreme social anomaly or some inexplicable crisis. The chapter begins with a discussion of the 9/11 attacks and the immediate response of many Americans (including President George W. Bush) that the country was at war. This began the idea of a war on terror, an idea that was similar to Al-Qaeda’s idea of war on America, as both born out of a sense of social chaos and a threatened conquering by a shadowy enemy. War is an imagined alternative reality. Examples in culture include computer games, novels, and religious mythology. The etymology of the word “war” is based on the old English werra, meaning “chaos,” “confusion.”