Violence as a literary device

Okay, as promised, the first of the posts inspired by my thoughts on fantasy violence. This one is about violence as a literary device--what it does and why it works so well.

As I started to look at violence across the various texts I'm familiar with and think back over how it had affected me, I came to realize two things. First, there is a visceral response to violence--something in our brains that clicks into place when it detects it, that keys us up and gets us ready to act. This visceral response isn't one that gets triggered often when reading, but it can be. A well-written fight scene, one in which the reader can imagine oneself participating, can evoke that response and all the adrenaline and heightened awareness that it entails. Achieving this, in my opinion, does a great deal to draw the reader into the book, and I want to emphasize the importance of the heightened awareness part of an adrenaline rush here. When one really gets into a fight scene, one reads faster, but one also catches and digests every word. The brain kicks into high gear, and if its focus while it's in high gear is your writing, then you have a great opportunity to do a lot more than just provide an adrenaline rush to your reader. That's one thing that violence can do.

The second is that it can draw the reader closer to the protagonist who is the victim of the violence. Everyone has some personal experience of violence, except for maybe some of the youngest, luckiest children. Last summer I had a particularly bad bout of the flu, and I remember lying exhausted on the cold tile of my bathroom floor at 4 AM, after having thrown up for the third or fourth time since midnight, my head pounding, my stomach muscles burning, the sweat on my skin freezing me even as my fever worsened, and feeling like I was fighting for my life against something that had me completely in its power. That was violent--not in the same way as two people clashing with swords and shields is, but that last feeling, that I was fighting with everything I had just to stay alive, is one that I think is universal across violent situations, and even if it's not, to many readers it seems like it is, which is just as good for getting them to identify with a character who's getting the snot beaten out of them.

The reverse of that, of course, is that your reader, when they're lying on the cold tile of their bathroom floor begging for unconsciousness, will think back to the fight scene in your book. It may give them strength, or it may just give them something to think about other than the sorry state of their stomach, but either way it's a service that a writer can provide for readers, and in my eyes it's definitely a worthy one.

There are downsides to having violence in a text, to be certain. It can be distracting, it can result in people unconsciously thinking of violence as glorious when it's not, and it can make your writing unpalatable to certain audiences. But to me, at least, the benefits outweigh the costs--provided there's more to read for than just the violence.