How do you tell a violent story?

 The propensity within human nature for violence: It’s a fascinating subject. Yesterday’s note mentioned Cormac McCarthy, who has written brilliantly about it.

I think how you go about the discussion might be nothing more than a matter of taste. If that’s true, taste is an important consideration in describing one’s character. It’s far more than whim.

Here are three examples of how people have conducted this discussion.

• Homer’s Iliad, which is one place to begin a discussion of Western literature, begins with an example of rage that erupts in violence. One act of violence leads to another. The epic is long and bloody.

• Alice Oswald, a brilliant contemporary poet, published Memorial, which recounts how all the soldiers in the Iliad met their end. She stripped out the plot — the story — and recounted all the spearing, stabbing, strangling, trampling. ... Her account is short, rather than long, and it’s eerie, rather than revolting. Her poem hit me as a meditation on what people do to other people in war.

• The great tragedians of Athens — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — recounted the same horrific stories. Confronted with unspeakably violent, gruesome myths, the poets yet spoke in a way that could be consumed by the public, in public — in fact as part of a religious festival. A lot of the plays are about rage and violence. But the acts of violence occur offstage.

Different artists have handled the topic of violence in ingenious ways. The notion that there is one way to do it strikes me as obviously wrong. The notion that the best way is the most graphic way also seems to me to be wrong. It’s the kind of notion that makes sense only if you haven’t read the Greek tragedians or Oswald’s poem.