The shapes of wrath

Apr 15, 2024

Rage is having a moment.

On Broadway, a revival of Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim’s tale of a wronged man exacting his revenge, is nearing the end of a successful year-long run.

The 50^th anniversary of the publication of Carrie has occasioned a spate of commentary on the remarkable staying power of Stephen King’s story of a bullied teenage girl driven over the edge.

And the success of R.F. Kuang’s recent novel, Babel, has trained a spotlight on the themes of colonialism, exploitation, and the role of pure vengeful wrath in redressing those wrongs.

Rage is, of course, hardly a new theme, in literature or in life. Greek drama – Medea, Orestes – mined the depths of human anger and its violent consequences. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein is ultimately a story of rejection and retribution. John Steinbeck memorably warned those atop an unjust heap to beware the fury of those they abuse: “In the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Why the new preoccupation with this ancient theme? Perhaps because, willingly or unwillingly, we are saturated with it. Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign by telling his supporters, “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution” – and millions are responding with approval, according to the polls. Hamas and Israel are locked in a seemingly endless cycle of violent revenge, with no exit in sight and no sign that either wants one. Vladimir Putin is visiting his own form of vengeance on any and all who defy him.

In Babel, Kuang centers her alternative-history novel on Robin Swift, a young Chinese scholar with a gift for languages. He seems an unlikely candidate for a revolutionary, until he gradually discovers that the translation skills he and his friends are honing at Oxford provide essential fuel for the imperial ambitions of Britain’s white male rulers. The rebels at first try the path of political persuasion, which proves to be a dead end, a result forecast by Robin’s older brother Griffin: “Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock.”

And so Robin becomes a killer – at first impulsively and almost accidentally, then strategically. He kills his own father, and discovers the limits of acting purely on emotion: “Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you…Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.” It is a lesson he will not forget.

Carrie launched King’s powerhouse career as a writer; the book and the movie made from it are burned into our consciousness as the essence of the horror genre. But contemporary commentary on the novel asks a question that King himself considered in a memoir: What is the true horror? Is it the apocalypse that Carrie creates, or the people around her who drove her to that madness? Margaret Atwood, no stranger to the dystopian genre, wrote in the New York Times that for King, the real culprit is “the all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that exists in America today…The ultimate horror, for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty, and especially cruelty toward children.”

Another novelist writing in the Times about Carrie, Amanda Jayatissa, sounded a similar note: “What is it about the character of Carrie that’s truly horrifying? Is it the revenge that’s exacted by a bullied girl? Or is it the actions of those who stood around and allowed her to be tormented? The question at the heart of the story is: Who is the real monster? Fifty years later, we’ve come to understand that it’s not Carrie but the world that made her.” In that sense, Carrie shares a kinship with Shelley’s Frankenstein, another “horror” classic that asks the same question.

There isn’t much doubt at first about who the monster is in Sweeney Todd; after all, the play’s subtitle is “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” We are told in the show’s first song: “His skin was pale and his eye was odd/He served a dark and vengeful god.” Sweeney and his well-stropped razor dispatch a long line of “customers” to an untimely end. But we learn that he has his reasons. And by the time the real author of Sweeney’s madness plops down in the barber’s chair, unsuspecting, and exposes his throat to the barber’s blade, we are asking the same question about the real monster’s identity.

Is there a way out of this long cycle of tit-for-tat, an exit ramp off the limitless autobahn of rage and vengeance? One writer thinks so. After surviving – barely – an assault by a blade-wielding assassin two years ago, Salman Rushie has written a memoir of the experience. He calls it a book “about both love and hatred — one overcoming the other.” He chose the title, Knife, quite deliberately, as a metaphor for writing as a “kind of knife, the thing that cuts through to the truth,” he told the Times. “I wanted to use the power of literature — not just in my writing, but in literature in general, to reply to this attack.”

And how does he feel about the attacker?

“Obviously I’m not particularly pleased about him,” he said. “And if I gave it some attention, I probably am angry. But where does that get you? Nowhere. And it also becomes a way of being captured by the event, you know, to be possessed by a kind of rage about it.”

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

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