On ‘Sexual Violence and Literary Art’

Adam Piette interviews Peter Robinson, author of Sexual Violence and Literary Art

Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He has published many volumes of poetry, translations, fictional prose and literary criticism, and been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His seventh monograph, Sexual Violence and Literary Art, which addresses works by Ovid, Shakespeare, Pope, Richardson, Shelley, Hardy, Larkin and Nabokov, has recently been published by Anthem Press. Adam Piette, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, asked him about it for us.

Adam Piette: Sexual violence has a long history of representation in literature, from Homer to the present day: what are the features that most strike the contemporary reader?

Peter Robinson: What strikes the contemporary reader is its relation to survivability. In Ovid, the metamorphoses enable the survivals but at the cost of not exactly surviving. In the Philomel story, the fact that the rapist, Tereus, is also metamorphosed into a bird characteristically complicates any response to what these changes are to signify. Most of the women central to my book’s chapters don’t survive. This general non-survival exercises much of the discussion. Non-survival is central to the chapter on Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Shelley’s The Cenci, and it brings the chapter on Clarissa to a conclusion. It’s notable too how frequently the eventual death of the victim is required for representation to have closure. Framing these painfully unhappy examples, though, are the accounts of survival and degrees of recovery recounted in the philosopher Susan J. Brison’s testimony, which contributes to the book’s introduction, and the short sequence of my poems discussed in the final chapter which is reprinted in an appendix.

Adam Piette: Brison explores how true survivor first-person narratives can enable victims to find a way out of the trauma of rape violence. How far can a poetry of witness be as enabling if either based on the perspective of a non-victim; or on a perpetrator’s point of view, as with Lolita; or on male narratives of female victim accounts?

Peter Robinson: Behind your question are a number of difficult but key issues. One is the incorrigibility of first-person testimony and its vulnerability to the charge of unreliability. Brison is articulate about the wide social ramifications of sexual violence, the collateral damage to relationships it causes, how non-victims can become secondary victims and equally suggestive about the need in first-person narratives to be heard and understood. Being believed is one of the ways to become a true survivor, something that is at stake with first-person testimony. Sexual violence is thus a societal problem, and one men must address too, even if it is women who have so helpfully raised it as a question. What these texts have in common is the project of taking unwanted, severely damaging events and transforming them into a reading experience that ameliorates by means of their telling. Each of them are attempting to take the recognisably bad and turn it into something which can do good. To read well and assess what benefits are available, we need to look at the total speech act situation – which you do with your question’s discriminations. So I wouldn’t expect each of them to achieve even similar results, because not addressing quite the same issues or questions, and not inviting quantifiably relatable responses.

Adam Piette: The sense you represent of this subject grows and grows with the ethical questions becoming more and more urgent and complex as we read: in the light of your own experience, has the writing of these chapters, for you, been in any way reparative?

Peter Robinson: The idea of reparation changed both as regards who or what might be the subject of repair and what such an activity might involve or achieve. Making amends and reparation was, from the first, an ambivalent aim – because it can simplify responsibility and expectations about what should be done and by whom. Writing and revising these chapters has involved a good deal of self-change. But I wasn’t thinking about self-reparation. Any such benefits wouldn’t be possible if you were aiming to get them. There has been some satisfaction from bringing the book to completion and finding what I hope are appropriate things to say about these works, but reparative benefits would have to be subliminal by-products of committing myself to exemplifying helpful ways to address these urgent issues.

Adam Piette: Your readings are so searching, the analysis so intent with deep feeling as well as intellectual probing, the writing of a poet thinking through this most difficult test of poetics. What were and are you hoping to achieve with this book?

Peter Robinson: The first work I looked at when starting on the book was Shakespeare’s Lucrece, and on the basis of F. T. Prince’s edition, you would have to conclude that the Bard himself did not pass this most difficult test. I tried to see if his poem could be vindicated in the face of its critics. This then became something of a familiar experience. Male writers were the targets of challenging and closely argued feminist criticism. The assumed gender divide tended to place these writers on the side of the violators and characterise the women as more or less helpless victims. There were exceptions, as when Siobhán Kilfeather criticises Terry Castle’s view that Clarissa is silenced by Lovelace’s violence. Jacqueline Rose, in debate with Catharine A. MacKinnon, argues that to characterise all men as complicit in rape culture is to reinforce patriarchy as a monolith. My book works against such a pessimistic outcome by showing that literary art addressing sexual violence acknowledges complicity as basic to its representation so that, through the redress of literary work, alliances between the sexes and solidarities against rape may be fostered. What I was and am hoping to achieve is to realign the voices of these writers alongside their critics as acts of solidarity against this plague on all our houses.