February 11, 2022
Revenge may seem an odd choice of topic for a newsletter on imagination. What does revenge have to do with the imagination? But the answer is: everything. When we speak of revenge fantasies we go to the heart of the matter. Revenge is an attitude before it is an act, and that attitude is a way of imagining. The demonic is as much an act of imagination as the ideal. If you search “revenge” on the Internet, you may be startled by its overwhelming presence in literature and mythology, beginning with Homer’s Iliad, which was what first set me onto the topic, as I have begun talking about it in the Expanding Eyes podcast. The theme of revenge pervades both Classical and Renaissance tragic drama. Indeed, the latter developed it into a whole sub-genre, the “revenge tragedy,” from The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (or maybe somebody else) in the 1580’s, whose crudity did not prevent it from being immensely influential, to the late Jacobean revenge tragedies of Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, and others, some of which are so over-the-top that they make Quentin Tarantino look a bit restrained, though a film like Kill Bill is very much in the line of descent. The theme is everywhere in Shakespeare, starting with his apprentice tragedy Titus Andronicus, whose sadistic violence is as over-the-top as it gets, and including the most famous revenge story of them all, Hamlet.
Perhaps we are so fascinated by revenge precisely because we are not supposed to want it. We are supposed to be nobly detached and above all that. But we know better. Vengefulness lurks within us the way the Hulk lurks inside mild-mannered Bruce Banner, and often the best we can do is to avoid awakening it. Christianity does not approve of it: not only does God stipulate that “Vengeance is mine” but Christ admonishes us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek, a counsel frequently just ignored because it just seems too difficult, too unrealistic. That is what fascinates me about vengefulness. It is such a visceral, primal emotion that we begin to doubt whether it is really just an aberration. Perhaps it is an irradicable part of human nature, so that the human condition is irremediably tragic. I am not one of those people whose chief satisfaction in life seems to be taking offense and holding grudges; nevertheless, at my very core lies a smoldering anger that, if it erupted, would try to tear the whole world apart, howling in exultation.
The Christian injunction against revenge conflicts with a pre-Christian value system, common in many societies, in which revenge is not just approved of but demanded as a way of restoring a person’s “honor.” If you allow someone to injure you and do not retaliate, you are disgraced and despised. The problem is that the person against whom you retaliate is then obligated to avenge your vengeance, and you must retaliate against that, and so on. When I was young, we all learned a bit of American folklore about the Hatfields and the McCoys, two feuding clans in the Appalachians in the early twentieth century who supposedly wiped each other out in a series of revenges and counter-revenges, and counter-counter-revenges. Some societies institute a mechanism known as the “blood price,” so that the injured party accepts a fee in lieu of vengeance. Ajax alludes to this practice when he castigates Achilles in Book 9 of the Iliad: why, any other man accepts a blood price for a murdered child or kinsman, he says, but you refuse all restitution from Agamemnon, “and all for a girl, a mere girl.” It may seem cold-blooded to us to accept money for the death of a child, but in reality it is not so different from an insurance settlement when one's child is killed in an accident. The important thing is that it breaks the otherwise endless cycle of revenge, fueled by the implacable demands of “honor.” The first year I taught the Iliad, 1991, I came upon a newspaper article about the setting of a blood price in a murder case in Sudan, according to the Islamic Sharia, the criminal and civil code. The price set was 100 camels, or $16, 675—adjusted for inflation, about the price of my Toyota. The families of the British victims wanted prison sentences, but the judge recorded their plea as a waiver of blood money. When in Sudan, you do as the Sudanese do.
Christians have circumvented the rule against revenge in two ways. Vengeance is the Lord’s, but it is easy enough to convince yourself that you are the Lord’s instrument, that you are not giving in to a base instinct but dedicating yourself to aiding the cause of divine justice. For after all Christianity has been in part corrupted over the centuries by the spirit of revenge. The Christ who forgave his enemies on the cross, saying that they know not what they do, will return at the Last Judgment as a different figure, a terrifying figure of wrath, of justice rather than mercy, except that the “justice” is a thinly disguised version of revenge. Far-right Protestant sects in the United States are all too fond of dwelling on this coming orgy of revenge, as in the Left Behind series of novels about the rapture. The other way of getting around the Christian counsel against revenge is simply to ignore it when it becomes inconvenient, which is what Hamlet does. He is willing to say “Leave her to heaven” about his mother, but he never questions the ghost’s demand that he seek revenge on his uncle Claudius.
Revenge is not the same as justice, which is impersonal and detached or it is not justice but revenge in disguise, as it so often is. Justice may involve a tit-for-tat retaliation, the Old Testament’s “eye for an eye”: that is indeed the original form of law in society. As the Gospel of Matthew has it, “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matt. 7:2, KJV), which gave Shakespeare the title for his dark and troubled play about justice, revenge, and forgiveness, Measure for Measure. But such punishment, at least ostensibly, is an expression of an order that is social but ultimately cosmic. In Dante’s Inferno, it is expressed by contrapasso, the rule that the punishment not only fits the sin but in a sense rights the balance. The schismatics are split from head to foot repeatedly by an angel’s sword, from which they heal only to be split all over again. You split the Church, the Church splits you. Revenge, however, is anarchistic, capable of defying the law if the law gets in its way. The emotions driving justice and revenge, though superficially similar, are in fact opposite. The objective detachment of justice is not inconsistent with justified anger, with wrath, as when Jesus drove the moneychangers from the temple. “Love your enemies” is not inconsistent with the righteousness that denounces injustice, tells it like it is, from the prophets to Jesus saying woe to the scribes and Pharisees to Martin Luther King. True Christianity is not a smiley-button religion. But the hate that drives revenge could not care less about justice.
Revenge is not based on loss or injury, for which I might seek justice, but do so dispassionately. If we pause to think deeply about the emotion that lies at the heart of revenge, what it is really all about, we find, I think, that it is a feeling of humiliation, of a loss of self-respect. Injury we can forgive or seek calm restitution for. But humiliation is a touched nerve. Immediately we want to lash out—to humiliate in return. We may restrain ourselves from doing so; we may be horrified by our own irrational fury. But there it is. And we cheer, taking vicarious satisfaction when poetic justice—meaning revenge of which we approve—is visited upon creeps and villains in novels and films. Inwardly we say “Yes!” when those horrible Muggles get their (invariably humiliating) comeuppance every time for mistreating Harry Potter. We are exhilarated when the villain gets his, and something would feel wrong if his plot were thwarted but the villain simply escaped, although it may merely displace our hope onto a sequel. We even cheer, however ambivalently, those heroes—or anti-heroes—who operate outside the law, from Dirty Harry to Batman, to ensure that, if the law cannot touch the villain, revenge has fewer scruples. We are more uneasy when such vigilantes operate in real life, but still respond to a real-life figure like Buford Pusser in the Walking Tall movies. If evil is not punished, we say that justice would not be done, but we are not really talking about justice. Justice comes from the head, but revenge comes from the gut, from what in Homeric Greek was called thymos, a seat of passion particularly associated with anger.
There is certainly a gender component to the dynamics of revenge. We most immediately think of it as an element in a male code of status through competition, where the loser suffers shame, Homeric aidos. The competition is normally in battle: in the Iliad, Achilles is not content merely to kill Hector but attempts to humiliate him beyond death by defiling his dead body, dragging it lashed to his chariot through holes drilled in the heels. But this climax is an outcome of a chain of events that began with the public humiliation of Achilles by his commander Agamemnon, who not only takes away the girl who is Achilles’ war prize but gloats about it in the most insufferable way, telling Achilles this shows how much greater a man he is. Achilles’ revenge is to refuse to fight, which leads to the death of Patroclus at the hands of Hector, and therefore to Achilles’ revenge against Hector. Such a dynamic of honor, shame, and revenge is familiar in many cultures, also in sub-cultures such as criminal and youth gangs. It begins early, in the humiliations of high school. Lex Luthor became his lifelong enemy because a rescue attempt by Superboy resulted in Luthor’s permanently losing his hair. Real-life versions are a good bit grimmer: from Columbine forward, all the school shooters have been humiliated, outcast males seeking revenge.
Women are supposed to be both passive and pacific, which is perhaps why the unrestrained intensity of their vengefulness frightens men: hell hath no fury.
Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia to the gods in exchange for a wind to waft his thousand ships to the Trojan War. Euripides’ Medea is willing to kill her own children as part of the revenge against her faithless husband Theseus. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido has to be content with cursing Aeneas for dumping her in order to found Rome, but, as with King Lear, the ferocity of her revenge fantasies compensates for her impotence in carrying them out, as she imagines serving up Aeneas’s son to him at a feast. This is an allusion to the story of Thyestes, one of the most recomplicated revenge sagas of all time. Thyestes committed adultery with the wife of his brother Atreus, who took revenge by serving Thyestes his own children as meat pies in a feast. Thyestes took counter-revenge by raping his own daughter to produce an offspring, Aegisthus, fated to kill Atreus’s offspring Agamemnon, which Aegisthus did in concert with Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon’s son Orestes avenged his father by killing his own mother and her lover but was pursued by the Furies, whose task is the avenge the crime of matricide. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is influenced by this whole mess, complete with the meat pies, by way of the Latin dramatist Seneca’s Thyestes. At any rate, the line of female furies, human rather than supernatural, runs in our time through the film Fatal Attraction, where the meat pies are replaced by a boiled rabbit, and Stephen King’s Carrie. And, as usual, art and life imitate each other: those of us of a certain age will remember the name of Lorena Bobbitt, who had her fifteen minutes of fame by taking revenge on her abusive husband by bobbing, shall we say, a portion of his anatomy.
Men take revenge on women in ways ranging from murder to revenge porn, sometimes for real injustices but often simply for diminishing their male pride. In certain cultures this may include killing or at least rejecting a wife who has been raped, not because she did anything but because her violation makes her rapist a kind of rival who shames the husband. The film The War of the Roses (1989) was about one of those insanely vindictive divorces we all know some example of. The parallel between the personal and the political alluded to in its title—all’s unfair in love and war—expands the range of the revenge dynamic from the individual to the collective. Political leaders can be driven by revenge. The current theory about Vladimir Putin is that he is determined to avenge the humiliation of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other words, he is repeating the pattern of Hitler, who gained a following by promising to avenge Germany’s humiliating treatment after the end of the first World War. As I write this, the Russian army is sitting on the border of Ukraine, and some commentators are suggesting that Putin may feel impelled to go ahead with an ill-advised invasion because backing down would cause him to “lose face,” a phrase derived from the honor code of traditional Japan.
The object of revenge may be a whole unjust system, especially an elite and indifferent class system. This is implicit in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo and becomes more explicit in a famous science fiction novel based on it, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Captain Nemo sets himself against the whole modern world in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But the theme is capable of realistic as well as melodramatic treatment: I remember how thrilled I was in high school, reading Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, when, in the final pages, the hero Rastignac looks down from a height overlooking Paris and announces, “Henceforth there is war between us.” A metaphysically minded rebel such as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick may seek revenge against the unjust system of the universe itself, or against its creator, for whom a white whale is merely an agent (“Strike through the mask,” Ahab declares). Note that the whale has inflicted a humiliating injury upon Ahab, biting off his leg, even more humiliating if you are of a Freudian persuasion. What is driving some of the right-wing fascists of the present moment is a desire for revenge against the whole system run by the “elites,” which has threatened not only their livelihoods but their self-respect.
Those who cannot inflict revenge upon their original victimizer frequently seek substitutes. It is a well known fact about abusers and bullies of various sorts that they were frequently abused themselves. Donald Trump, a man wholly dominated by the will to revenge, was emotionally abused by his monstruous father. The petty bureaucrat who goes out of his way to make life miserable for others, the sadistic teacher or athletic coach are taking revenge on innocent others to prop up a shaky self-esteem. Our hyper-competitive capitalist society sees everything in terms of winners and losers, and the losers are objects of contempt. The fact that they lost proves that they are inferior and deserve their humiliation. Donald Trump will do anything to prove that he is not a loser, and he treats everyone he regards as a loser with complete contempt, including his own employees.
The term “self-esteem” implies a central question. Abraham Maslow ranked it second only to self-actualization itself in his hierarchy of basic needs. The term nowadays elicits the scorn of those who feel that our society has so overvalued self-esteem that it grants it even when people have not deserved it. But preserving self-respect is more important at least to many people than survival itself. A complete loss of self-respect can result in suicide, which could be called a form of revenge against oneself.
Revenge is sometimes justified on the grounds that, while it does not right the original wrong, it restores the avenger’s honor and pride. Yet in the end, revenge is not the solution but the problem, both individually and socially. Psychologically, revenge is an addiction, a dangerous drug, a form of hate that grows ever more obsessive. As with all drugs, the need for it escalates, leading to the kind of can-you-top-this villainy characteristic of Jacobean revenge dramas. It sweeps up the innocent along with the guilty, with the excuse that the ends justify the means. Rationalizing their behavior as the pursuit of justice, the vengeful risk being dragged down to the level of their enemies—or lower. In the latter half of Paradise Lost, Satan becomes aware of the contrast between the titanic rebel he was in the first two books and the literal and figurative snake in the grass that he has become. The answer to the question “How low will you go?” is that there is no final limit. Moreover, revenge, like all forms of obsession, represents a loss of freedom. It is the obsession that is in control, not the individual.
We have already glanced upon the social dangers of revenge. True revenge is not merely punishment for a wrong inflicted. Your enemy must be humiliated as you were humiliated: that is why it is so important to explain to the enemy why they are being punished, to get them to see their guilt, even if they refuse to admit it. Comic book super-villains spend so much time making long, bombastic, justifying speeches about the revenge they are about to perpetrate that they give the hero a chance to figure out an escape. But a humiliated enemy will smolder with resentment, with injured pride that will prompt a counter-revenge more effectively than any moral code. Thus, as we have said, revenge evolves into an endless, nihilistic cycle.
While it is easy to deny complicity in the face of such extreme examples—“Well, of course I would never go that far!”—anyone who has had to deal with people institutionally knows how easily people take offense at slights, real or imagined; how they hold grudges, while denying, even to themselves, that they would ever do such a thing; how they “get even,” especially if they can do it invisibly and unprovably; how they must have the last word. On bad days, it is hard to keep from wondering whether vindictiveness and grievance-collecting aren’t just human nature. Maslow would say that they are not. Vengefulness is what he called a deficiency-motivation or D-motivation. Very much like a deficiency disease physically, it is caused by a lack of something positive, namely self-esteem—true self-esteem and not the narcissism that so often is confused with it. Vengefulness really hides insecurity and a feeling of weakness, as it obviously does with King Lear, whose pathetic impotent threats of revenge on anybody who does not flatter him and grant his every wish contrast starkly with his daughter Cordelia’s deeply moving reply of “No cause, no cause” when he finally admits that he has wronged her.
To refuse revenge can be the best revenge, even if it is not intended as such. Christ refuses to condemn Judas—which is perhaps why Judas committed suicide. Similarly, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, when Mark Antony refuses to condemn the betrayal of his right-hand man Enobarbus, Enobarbus goes off, lies down in a ditch, and dies—of a broken heart, and also of shame. Not to need the crutch of revenge can be a sign of a strength of character so far beyond the normal that it can seem almost godlike. Yet it is not superhuman—only fully human. From Maslow’s perspective such a relative independence of deficiency motivation is possible when one has had a basic need fully gratified in the past. Those who have been loved in a deep and fulfilling way are relatively free of the need to be loved. Those who have had the need for self-esteem satisfied can be relatively detached from all the games people play in order to bolster their self-image, so much so that people who only understand deficiency-motivation are baffled and distrust them. I have taught an essay in composition classes about a Jewish woman, a survivor of the Holocaust, who went around lecturing in partnership with a repentant former member of Hitler Youth. When she said that she did not hate the Nazis for what they did to her and others—the most she would say was that she “disliked” them!—people would tell her that she was in denial. “It is impossible that you do not hate,” one of them said.
No doubt there are limits, and sometimes the best we can manage is simply a renunciation of revenge, a disciplined self-restraint. In his drama Samson Agonistes, Milton filled the scene in which a blinded Samson confronts the wife who betrayed him to his enemies with the remembered bitterness of his estrangement from his first wife, who came from a Royalist family but married a revolutionary. The best Samson is able to muster is “At distance I forgive thee, go with that.” Anyone who has gone through a crash-and-burn break-up can relate. Likewise, when Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest forgives his treacherous brother who betrayed him into twelve years of exile, it is through gritted teeth.
But what Christianity calls “forgiveness of sins” suggests it is possible to move beyond a rational, civilized restraint towards something more positive. As God forgives us, we must forgive others. This summons up the kind of sentimental “Jesus loves me” Christianity that someone like Nietzsche hated, calling it a religion of slaves who are trying to rationalize their slavery through making a shameful, servile humility into a virtue. But Nietzsche, for all his brilliance, was a mousy little man who spent much of his career getting revenge with his pen, which is so much mightier than a sword. There are people for whom writing is a form of revenge. We saw some of this in the period of the “theory wars” in literary criticism 40 or so years ago.
Shakespeare wrestled with the theme of the forgiveness of sins in play after play. In the earlier Merchant of Venice, the spirit of revenge is embodied in Shylock, and Shylock makes clear that his vindictiveness has been spawned by the way he has been treated by the Christians because he is both a Jew and a moneylender: the supposedly saintly Antonio has spit upon his beard in contempt. Portia makes a famous speech about mercy as a counterpart to justice, but Shylock will not give up his demand for a pound of flesh, in other words for revenge. So he has to be defeated, and is hustled off the stage as a lesson in how the spirit of revenge makes people monstruous, but not before his own famous speech insists that Jews and Christians share a common humanity: “If you cut us, do we not bleed?” It is a play that leaves the audience—or more likely the reader, since it is rarely performed these days for obvious reasons—very uncomfortable.
A later, greater play, Measure for Measure, may leave readers even more uncomfortable. An arrogant, holier-than-thou justice, Angelo, tries to extort sex from a would-be nun, Isabella, in exchange for her brother’s life. She pretends to go through with it, although another woman, Mariana, is substituted in the dark, upon which Angelo betrays Isabella and orders the brother executed anyway. The brother is saved, and all comes to light—but both women plead for mercy for Angelo. Mariana, with whom he was once engaged, still wants to marry him, and Isabella goes along with it for the sake of her friendship with Mariana. What in the world is Shakespeare thinking when he includes this would-be rapist of nuns in the happy ending? In teaching the play—and believe me, students are often understandably upset by the picture of two women forgiving a man who does not deserve it—I sometimes quote a line from a poem by W.H. Auden: “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart,” which my memory associates with a saying of Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” The two women renounce not only revenge but even strict justice, in favor of a mercy based on the recognition that none of us is remotely capable of perfection. Our crooked heart, with all its crooked capabilities, is what Christianity called the natural self. But that is not all we are. The ability of the two women to leap, out of empathy and pity for human frailty, beyond the impulse of revenge and self-righteous punishment, is also human nature. Christianity calls it the spiritual self: Maslow called it the “farther reaches of human nature.” Whatever we call it, it is the source of what hope there may be for the human race in this dark and violent hour.