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The “Business” of Violence in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage

In Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory Beatrice Hanssen claims that “violence now includes such phenomenologically elusive categories as psychological, symbolic, structural, epistemic, hermeneutical, and aesthetic violence” (8). This translates in two opposite approaches: either we detect violence where it is not, or conversely, violence is everywhere. In this latter approach, violence is an all-embracing concept, and defines almost every human act. It thus loses its specificity and efficacy in elucidating human behaviours, and consequently the multifarious representations of violence in literature serve no purpose. If we turn to French literature this conundrum is all the more troubling, since violence is the “most significant [theme] characterizing modern French literature” of the last one hundred years, according to influential American critic Wallace Fowlie (Fowlie, vii). Florence Fix, editor of a collection of essays on violence in drama, further writes: “Illogique et inintelligible, la violence est ce qui résiste à l’analyse et à la distance critique car elle se veut une fin en soi” (Fix 22). If an inflated concept of violence combines with the impossibility of understanding it, then interpretation is stopped in its track. This would be an unacceptable end to interpretation. Yasmina Reza’s play tackles this very paradox. By representing the many ways violence manifests itself in our so-called civilized society, God of Carnage seeks to investigate the root cause of violence and whether society is able to control our innate violence. The play however debunks its own grand theories by ridiculing their proponents as well as their opponents in such a way that there are no winners nor losers in the play’s manifold conflicts. God of Carnage accomplishes what Roland Barthes called a “théâtre du malaise” with “les cris, les gestes, les bruits et les actes, dont le mélange doit produire sur la scène un carnage général” (Barthes 98). This