Perhaps I should remain decently silent about the terrible shootings yesterday at Virginia Tech. Perhaps it is something foolish in me feeling prompted to write concerning these events. After all, the Kenyon Review Weblog is devoted primarily to literary and other artistic matters, so there is no reason why we clearly should take up the matter here today, or even next week. Part of the reason has to do with genre. Generally, responses to such events articulated in traditionally literary terms–as poems, stories, novels, plays, etc.–require a longer period of time to develop than has passed thus far. One of the great services and challenges of many journalistic genres is the speed with which the pieces are generated, allowing for some immediate responses.
At the same time, it seems somehow appropriate to articulate something about the tragic events in this space. After all, the work that the Kenyon Review has carried out for decades has included responses to those life experiences that take us away from the everyday conceptual map, that tear us away from our habitual routines and responses, that disturb and disrupt at the deepest levels–such moments as the theologian David Tracy refers to as limit-experiences.
I recall that within a week of the September 11, 2001, attacks, I had a discussion with my students (I was working at Kenyon College at the time) about the place of literary language and genres in response to such limit-situations as the one that collectively we found ourselves part of at the time. One motive for metaphor and other literary language, it seems to me, is to create a way of confronting these limit-situations without being entirely overwhelmed. Perhaps one needs to be somehow overwhelmed for a time–there have certainly been moments of grieving when I felt that all I could or should do is feel the terrible and terrifying loss–but then it also helps to have a language that provides some modicum of distance from the grief, terror, and loss while at the same time providing a way of confronting, thinking about, talking about the loss and fear and pain. I believe that this double function of providing some distance while also allowing a way of facing a limit-experience is one also served by ritual. Certainly the rituals of my own religious tradition have served me in this way.
I remember one of my literature professors at the University of Iowa recalling that when he was in high school and the news came out concerning the shooting of President Kennedy, his English teacher came to class and read aloud “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” Walt Whitman’s great elegy for President Lincoln. This strikes me as an entirely appropriate response, a somewhat ritualized way of confronting and living through the moment. I can imagine great solace and meaning also in reading, for example, certain Psalms, Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” or Justice’s “Invitation to a Ghost.”
For a while this morning, I was thinking that reporters, in their interviews, ought not to lead with such questions as, “What do you think of what just happened?” or, “How do you feel about these shootings?”–since such questions inevitably lead to rather banal responses; in such circumstances, what other kind of response is possible? But I’ve come to rethink this idea as it has dawned on me that these questions are part of the public ritual too. Perhaps we need to hear and overhear each other and ourselves affirm out loud that such events are terrible and that we have no satisfying explanation for them. Like any good ritual, this one reminds us too how inadequate to such limit-moments human language remains. So I take this moment to remember, in my own inadequate terms, all who are suffering today through the events in Blacksburg, Virginia.