Torture

[madclairvoyant.livejournal.com]

Okay, I admit that I shamelessly stole this idea from the post below (feel free to throw rotten eggs at me), but I had this totally (not) cool epiphany that I was bursting to share.
It would help the discussion too, so here it is...

What is torture?
Is it an end (a punishment) of a means, or a means (a method) to the end?

Which is is portrayed as (or both) in the books?
What are your personal views?

Comments

[agentmaly.livejournal.com]

No wonder I had weird dreams; I forgot that I was a part of the discussion in the other post last night. Lovely theme we have going here, huh?

The whole morass of torture, incarceration, and corporal punishment is something I've been dealing with (perhaps a bit too) intimately in my own writing life for a while now, so you'll forgive me for being a bit overloaded and not really desiring to push my tolerance too far. I'm susceptible to episodes of severe moral disquietude when I'm significantly impressed with man's inhumanity to man.

That being said. If this is a discussion you really want to have, we could delve pretty deeply into the philosophy and sociology (and psychology) of punishment. There is a very interesting monograph I found last year which proposes that corporal punishment is not inherently wrong and that as a penal recourse is preferable to prison in its impact on the subject. The premise is that imprisonment is torture of the soul, whereas corporal punishment is mortification of the body which (when correctly applied) is necessarily significant in its impression but short in its duration. As I remember it, the author condemns all forms of torture, but argues that corporal punishment is not the same as physical torture, and that it is the formula of incarceration plus infliction of physical pain which constitutes physical torture. I would need to refer to the monograph to ensure that I'm remembering that linkage accurately, but at present I can't find it.

I think that in the Eugenides books torture is definitely used as an end, as a punishment, if the dichotomy we're constructing is end-as-punishment or means-as-method-of-obtaining-information. I get the sense that even the torture of Relius is at least as much driven by a sense of penalty as it is enacted to determine the extent of his indiscretion.

I really hope that whatever agency is almost certainly compiling an internet search history on me realises that I'm a writer and a general purpose researcher and not some sort of fiend. Sometimes I have visions of being called into some sort of office in thirty years to answer for information I've sought.