On the second page of Bruce Robbins’s new book, Atrocity: A Literary History, the professor and critic recalls asking the hosts of a book talk for the email address of famous German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge: “My father, I said, had bombed him.” Robbins’s father was a B-17 pilot and squadron commander. Just weeks before Germany’s surrender ended the war in Europe, he led the bombers that converted most of the city of Halberstadt into 53 million cubic feet of rubble. Being of no strategic importance, Kluge’s hometown was a pointless target. Some twenty-five hundred people died, and more than ten times as many were made homeless. Kluge was thirteen when the bombers came.

Atrocity is an effort to explain how a series of facts like those could become an outrage. Looting, sexual assault, and the murder of noncombatants were once, as Robbins puts it, “like the weather,” something people couldn’t imagine “understanding or controlling, let alone living without.” History from this angle looks like a “slaughter-bench,” as Robbins quotes from Hegel, where meaning is impossible to grasp amid a disorder of suffering and cruelty. But by separating these events and arranging them into a narrative, Robbins suggests in an essay for n+1, it is possible to make “a history of atrocity” that “would overlap significantly with the moral history of mankind.”

It isn’t apparently an encouraging story. As Robbins says in our interview, the invention of atrocity is made up of many instances of “history progressing by its bad side”: the violence of colonization, transnational aristocratic class solidarity, and reaction against the beginnings of democracy all had a part in how we came to recognize mass violence. This book reminds us that representing atrocity means taking a side, and that it started with people taking sides that were not their own, and often plainly against their own. It is also an argument for explanations, most of all when they seem impossible: as Robbins put it, “recognizing the unthinkably bad, but without the unthinkably.” We spoke last month at his apartment in New York. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Grayson Scott

Grayson Scott: Let’s begin by talking about your subtitle: How We Learned Indignation in the Face of Mass Violence.

Bruce Robbins: The idea is that you think of indignation in the face of mass violence as something that must always have been there. In fact, various historical factors went into making it possible that people would feel indignation. The word indignation has got dignity in it. If people don’t feel that dignity, they’re not going to be able to feel indignant. In fact, they’re not even going to be able to feel themselves as victims of an injustice, which is really the same thing.

The recognition of atrocity is not just unambiguous moral improvement.

And that’s crazy: people march into your farmyard and massacre your family, and you don’t think that you’re a victim. But that’s what happens in the opening scene of this amazing seventeenth-century German text called Simplicius Simplicissimus. The scene says, in effect, “Nope, that can happen, and you won’t think of yourself as a victim.” These people have been so beaten down that they haven’t been able to develop enough of a sense of dignity to think of themselves as indignant in a way that we take for granted. So there’s a history there, and it’s a history that has to do with class.

GS: There are several storylines you give for this history. The first is the overcoming of ethnocentrism. There are no restrictions on the killing of those who are racially or religiously different until one day there are. This is cosmopolitanism as you’ve described it in your books Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence and The Beneficiary: a serious and sustained concern with the suffering of others. Cosmopolitanism, as we ordinarily think about it, asks you to negate or challenge various kinds of difference, in space or language: “Think of yourself as a member of a global community.” In this book you’re asking that people also be concerned about people who lived in the past. Historical suffering could be something that matters in the same way that suffering elsewhere in the world does.

BR: I have been kind of buffeted by different currents around cosmopolitanism, which is not my favorite term. It grabbed me however at a moment when people like the historian of anthropology James Clifford were starting to say, let’s stop thinking about cosmopolitanism as something that means only privileged male elite travelers who can have their attendants pack up sixteen trunks and go off and look at the world. It was something that ought to be attached to actual unprivileged people: the guides and translators of those privileged travelers, for example, or large diasporas of people moving for economic motives. It was this democratizing of cosmopolitanism that got me excited, a democratizing which was also kind of particularizing, pluralizing.

I stayed excited about it, but at the same time it started to feel really spineless. I started to think that it’s not enough to be hybrid. It’s not enough to have lived in more than one place, to like ethnic food, to be tolerant of others. The term really isn’t worth doing anything with unless it’s making some pretty serious demands on you ethically and politically, meaning to take seriously the welfare of others. This is where violence comes in. For me, the political question was really always, what about the nationalism of your own country, if you’re an American, or a Jew? What about the militarism of the people who are acting in your name? Politically, that’s where I come from.

I’m also trying to get people to think seriously about what Edmund Burke calls “old violence.” But how to think about old violence, violence that happened long ago, is not ethically or politically simple. You should be able to be as critical of the things your country is doing as you would be of what another country is doing. That’s pretty simple. What to do with old violence is not nearly as simple. Because I do believe that the passage of time makes a difference. But how much of a difference? What kind of difference?

GS: Another, and more persuasive, explanation you give for the invention of atrocity is class. You point out “that racial and religious otherness, which might seem the single most obvious, indispensable, and decisive cause of atrocity,” is not always that way; consciousness of atrocity can emerge without reference to those categories of identity. To fill in the rest of the story, you give a complementary account about the wealth that derives strictly from violence: loot, essentially.

You tell a story about the Battle of Agincourt, in 1415, and this nascent class solidarity that emerges: the English nobility sees the slaughter of their defeated and captured French aristocratic counterparts, and they say, “Oh, that’s inhumane. It’s an atrocity.” That’s not how one would assume a story that ends in a kind of leveling—people learn to blame their own nations or communities for extraordinary violence against others—would begin. But as you put it: “Atrocity becomes visible not from below, but above.” Another class-related element that you discuss is that the kind of plundering these armies are doing is too democratic: these mercenaries, or emergent bourgeois elements in the armies, are getting rich in a way that undermines the state’s system of privilege and hierarchy by simply taking what they want.

BR: I didn’t want to come across as a crass, vulgar Marxist there, but this is a story that has class in it in a really important way. Taking the Agincourt example, aristocrats felt a kind of solidarity with other aristocrats, wherever they were from, whatever language they spoke, that was probably stronger than what they felt for their fellow nationals. “Do whatever you want to the common soldiers, but you can’t do it to my fellow aristocrats.” That’s making class pretty important.

Another thing that knocked me over is in Bartolomé de las Casas and in Edmund Burke. The defense of the indigenous people of the Americas in Las Casas, the defense of Indians from British colonialism in Burke—this becomes possible partly because the colonizers were getting filthy rich by stealing from the locals. They were coming back and walking around saying, “Look at me. I’m back from the colonies, and now I’m an important person, and I can throw my weight around.” So there was a kind of disruption of social hierarchy in the home country as a result of these ill-gotten gains, all this plunder. This is history progressing by its bad side. The recognition of atrocity is not just unambiguous moral improvement, it includes people defending feudalism.

GS: For people to discover atrocity, they had to discover themselves as victims. This involved creating a state that could recognize violence, at least from some classes or groups, and establish what kinds of violence were impermissible. Your placing the state there in this history troubles an assumption one can imagine coming from some on the left, which is that the state is the originator of mass violence and cruelty.

BR: I’m going to probably take a certain amount of shit over that. On the one hand, the emergent state makes a promise of dignity to its citizens, a promise of recourse against troopers riding into the family farmyard and killing everyone. A court of appeal whose existence, even if it doesn’t actually protect its citizens, bestows on them a certain dignity. On the other hand, the emergent state is basically trying to seize the right to commit violence from the feudal lords. In order for the modern state to emerge, it needed to enforce a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence. You—as in the feudal nobles—may have thought that violence was your thing as a class, but no, now it belongs to the state. The feudal lords did not like that change very much. It leaves them ambivalent. So at that moment, which side are you on? On the side of the feudal lords, or on the side of a state which is going to use its monopoly over the legitimate exercise of violence to do some pretty terrible things? It’s a real historical moment—real in the sense of irreducible moral complexity—that you need in order to explain the consciousness of atrocity. The in-betweenness of the aristocratic perspective on violence helps make atrocity visible.

GS: You write that “class, a modern form of tribute, helps explain modern fatalism. In a class society, those who are looted believing they are free deliver up their possessions and sometimes their lives of their own free will.” I think that’s a brilliant way of getting across the historical argument you’re proposing.

BR: We think of tribute as this ancient thing, you know, the army marches in, and it loots and then marches out again. But it can also say, “We are the law now. The looting that we do now, we’re going to continue doing every month. You pay it or we come back and we kill everybody.”

GS: You return a few times to a moment in Politics and Letters, the collection of interviews between Raymond Williams and the editors of the New Left Review, where they ask, and I’m paraphrasing: “In the 1840s, there was an atrocity happening on England’s doorstep: the deliberate and forced starvation of Ireland. You, Raymond Williams, are a person who studies cultural history. Where is the representation of this atrocity in the novels from this time, perhaps the greatest time in the history of the novel?” And he can’t answer. Your book isn’t optimistic on this question. It doesn’t conclude that the novel will redeem us.

BR: It’s not. I’m afraid—Grayson, forget it. Redemption is not on the agenda.

GS: That’s sort of how this ends, isn’t it? All these forms you take up—memoir, journalism, various kinds of fiction—even at their highest level of achievement, they’re complicit. They fail.

BR: Complicity is not a topic I did justice to. Something Williams could have done—while admitting that social realism in Britain shamefully ignored the Irish famine, for which Britain was largely responsible—is point to Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murat, which is about the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. It has become a go-to text for a lot of people who want to remember that these things happen. Tolstoy, as a young man, participated in the atrocity that he then wrote about as a very old man in Hadji Murat. When he tried writing the story as a young man, he screwed it up. That’s about the best that Western fiction did with the atrocities committed against indigenous people in that period.

How complicit did he feel? He probably felt pretty complicit, whether he was pulling triggers and bayoneting people or not. He was marching with these Russian soldiers and riding with them. He thought of them as doing the right thing. Later, he thought about it, and he wrote this amazing novella. I’m told that during the worst of the fighting in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s, when the Chechen rebels were angriest at pretty much everything Russian and desecrating, destroying, and so on, the statue of Tolstoy was the one thing that went untouched.

GS: You remark on the images, in Hadji Murat, of a broken thistle in a plowed field. It’s one of two thistles that are in the book, but this one is discussed as a figure for triumph over nature, a technological expansion and conquest, but Tolstoy seems to intend it as a figure for the protagonist, also. This came to feel symmetrical with a reading you do elsewhere with a passage in Middlemarch—

BR: Oh, I see where you’re going. The Tamburlaine drawing.

GS: Yes, exactly. Tamburlaine, this conquering emperor who is probably familiar to the people in Middlemarch as the subject of a Christopher Marlowe play. The character Will Ladislaw is describing a drawing of Tamburlaine driving a chariot drawn by defeated kings, and he says: “I take Tamburlaine in his chariot for the tremendous course of the world’s physical history lashing on the harnessed dynasties.” And you reply: “Can the world-class violence Tamburlaine committed be identified with ‘the tremendous course of the world’s physical history’? That is, can it be morally neutralized by being assimilated to the West’s increasing mastery of the physical world?” The natural gets displaced somehow, challenged or negated by, the new technological capacity for atrocity. The common figure here is a kind of sublimity, isn’t it?

BR: [George] Eliot is referencing the very nineteenth-century idea of a technological sublime. The premise is that modernity, in terms of its technological mastery of the world, is so big, so powerful, so beyond our imagination to unthink, that it’s somehow beyond moral judgment. There are going to be victims of this, like indigenous people, and others. And some would listen to this and conclude, “Forget about rendering any moral judgment of anything that big.” That is not a feeling I’m comfortable with, and I want to give Tolstoy credit for both thinking it and unthinking it.

In Hadji Murat, there are two thistles, and Tolstoy connects them to the indigenous peoples of the Caucasus. The narrator sees one of them, broken in half after a field was plowed up for planting, and it stands in as a victim of inevitable technological progress. “Well, if we’re all going to feed ourselves and feed everybody, then we’re going to just have to rip them up.” Against that logic of inevitability, of necessity, there’s choice. There’s another thistle, a beautiful one that the narrator picks at the beginning of the story, and in picking ruins its beauty. Both flowers are destroyed. The second thistle was chosen by the narrator in the same way the tsar arbitrarily chose a scorched earth policy in the Caucasus. There is no necessity: we don’t have to do that. We never had to do it.

GS: The book does have an answer, which is that you want atrocity to be explicable. If we want to take a definition for the sublime, there’s Kant’s “that in comparison with which everything else is small.” We can’t have that if we want to be able to explain atrocity.

BR: No, that’s exactly right. More than any other single thing, or at least as much as anything else I was trying to do in the book, I was trying to say that the sensibility that makes us so pained by all the death and destruction also talks us into feeling like all the death and destruction is beyond our own ability to explain, and it makes history itself beyond our ability to explain. As if it would be arrogant for us to think we can explain. The use of atrocity to back up a hesitation about historical explanation as such has its center in the Holocaust, but it has worked its way outward from the Holocaust outward to mass violence itself and to history in general.

The use of atrocity to back up a hesitation about historical explanation as such has its center in the Holocaust, but it has worked its way outward.

What bothers me about what I take to be educated common sense is that people say, “This is beyond our feeble capacity as mortals to explain, which probably means that history itself is beyond our capacity to explain.” My line is: don’t give up so quickly. We may not have a total explanation now, but we have some tools that have done good work, and there are things that we have done a good job of explaining. Let’s keep the job of explaining going on, and let’s believe in it. Even in a way in the most challenging case, which is mass violence against non-combatants, where it’s so horrible you just want to turn your mind off.

GS: You’ve anticipated my question again. We can’t take things like this for granted anymore, unfortunately, but you have throughout your career been on the side of politics. Your last book, Criticism and Politics, is a sustained argument against people who try to depoliticize criticism. War is a kind of political action. And if we’re in favor of politics, we have to reckon with the belief that our objectives can be accomplished through violence. It’s available.

BR: That is exactly my position. According to international law, the people of Gaza, as a colonized people, have the right to fight their colonizers by violent means. I don’t think that non-combatants should ever be targeted. But I wouldn’t take away from the Palestinians or any people the right to defend themselves, to try to throw the colonizers out.

This is not a pacifist book. It’s almost inevitable that there will be innocent victims in wartime. But for me, that’s not quite enough. I’m not going to say that violence is never justified.

GS: I want to ask about how to write well about atrocity, but that question also opens one about reading: There’s suffering for victims in these atrocities. But the reader is able to take pleasure in reading a good story, or one that’s told well.

BR: I have been very intrigued by the way prolepsis—this device of anticipatory leaps into the future—gathers around representations of atrocity. Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, tells the story of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. And in his telling, it looks like everyone is going to be dead, but the narrator tells us that the protagonist’s grandfather got a bruise that would not fade until many years later, when he died. We also learn that he will die on a hill, and we get two names for that hill: its Hindu name and its Muslim name. It reminds us that colonizers weren’t the only actors in Indian history. That seems characteristic, to me, of a kind of good writing about atrocity. It’s not restricted to the subjectivity of the people who actually are engaged in it, whether as perpetrators or as victims. It’s a jump into a future in which the writer, at least, and the reader, have access to ways of thinking about this that may not be possible for the people in the moment.

Another example comes from Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Describing Japanese atrocities in Manchuria against Chinese prisoners of war, Murakami jumps into the future in which the Japanese perpetrators die in various ways. It’s as if the invocation of the future stood in for a punishment that Murakami’s Japanese readership, still patriotic about Japanese imperialism, is not yet ready to see as morally appropriate. That’s a case of prolepsis as good writing about atrocity.

There are various kinds of readerly pleasure that get injected into an otherwise very, very grim representation, for example when prolepsis shows you that someone survives. It’s not just a gross pleasure—“Thank goodness somebody survives to tell the story!”—but also one with a moral dimension to it: where there are ways of thinking about the violence that are not available to the people in the moment, but that are available to you as a reader.