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Forgetting Lot's Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship

Martin Harries

3.8 · Rating details · 5 Ratings · 1 Review

Can looking at disaster and mass death destroy us? Forgetting Lot's Wife provides a theory and a fragmentary history of destructive spectatorship in the twentieth century. Its subject is the notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator. The fragments of this history all lead back to the story of Lot's wife: looking back at the destruction of th ...more

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Hardcover, 192 pages

Published June 15th 2007 by Fordham University Press (first published May 15th 2007)

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Aug 02, 2009 Edward rated it liked it

Spectacular and horrifying disasters that kill thousands, if not millions, of people are a grim trademark of the last century and show no signs of letting up in the 21st century. The 20th century saw the slaughter of millions of soldiers in two world wars, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombings of Dresden, the discovery of the death camps that killed 6 million people, not to mention the nearly constant smaller wars that went on constantly. The 21st century opened with Spectacular and horrifying disasters that kill thousands, if not millions, of people are a grim trademark of the last century and show no signs of letting up in the 21st century. The 20th century saw the slaughter of millions of soldiers in two world wars, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombings of Dresden, the discovery of the death camps that killed 6 million people, not to mention the nearly constant smaller wars that went on constantly. The 21st century opened with 9-11, and the retaliatory "war on terror" that has killed countless more. The majority of all these deaths have been civilians.
How do we, as individuals and unwilling "spectators", deal with this unrelenting horror? Harries has found in the Biblical account of the fiery destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the reaction of the people who escape, an ongoing cultural icon of how people cope with such annihilation. The best known example is of Lot's wife, who looks back and is immediately turned into a pillar of salt. What is the message here? Is it the same as Melville's warning in MOBY DICK, "stare not too long into the fire" or Nietzsche's "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."? Is this to say there are no answers and to search for any will lead only to madness? But on the other hand, forgetting or ignoring these evils, doesn't seem to be a good choice either.
Harries has looked at a number of paintings, in passing at a small amount of poetry and prose, and several popular film noirs of the late l940's (THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS and KISS ME DEADLY) that have as their subject such disaster. He finds an ambivalence in the treatment, or as he puts it, ". . .this book is about the complexities in the modern acknowledgment of the dilemma of Lot's wife." He is particularly interested, though, in visual images, not so much verbal ones, as these are that echo and influence people in popular culture.
Painters, for example, ever since the Renaissance, have depicted disasters. Lot's wife was a favorite subject of early painters, later ones have dealt with the Holocaust and with 9-11. . There is often an acknowledgement that the kind of literal retrospection represented by Lot's wife (and certain types of photography in modern times) serves no purpose except self-destructive morbidity. Symbolic paintings of the Holocaust, for example, may be more effective in creating a lasting effect than grimly realistic ones which veer toward a photographic pornography of violence. The same issue arises in the debate over how best to memorialize the dead of 9-11? Show pictures of mangled and crushed bodies? For what purpose? Or is a memorial to point toward some kind of redemptive good, hard as it is to imagine, that comes out of disasters. This tendency is a subtext in the story of Lot and his wife.
In a broader perspective, all of these reactions have to do with our attitude toward death. The dead are beyond caring, of course, but we often treat them as living beings trapped in a unending universe of loss, hardly a healthy attitude. "Double Check", a painting of 9-11 shows an individual hunched over his briefcase, destruction all around him. Is he an image of the living, going on with their lives? Or does he represent the dead, cut off in the midst of their productive lives? This is the kind of complexity and ambivalence that Harries finds in all of the examples he examines.
In a way, a frustrating book as it raises more questions than it answers, and in the Kindle version I read, the paintings were small and in black and white, so hard to appreciate them. The same was true with the two films mentioned, ones I hadn't seen. While Harries' comments were interesting, sometimes his examples seemed arbitrarily chosen and gave the book a kind of fragmentary feel. ...more

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