Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

According to Girard, order and peace within a community depend on the proper maintenance of cultural distinctions. Human desire, however, acts as a mechanism giving rise to rivalry, violence, and disorder, which erase the distinctions upon which order and peace are founded. Girard views Greek tragedy as the genre that best exemplifies the tendency of violence to erase social distinctions:

The tragedians portray men and women caught up in a form of violence too impersonal in its workings, too brutal in its results, to allow any sort of value judgment, any sort of distinction, subtle or simplistic, to be drawn between "good" and "wicked" characters (47).

Girard makes interesting use of Shakespeare to support the counterintuitive idea that it is the erasing of distinctions in society, not their presence, that gives rise to violence:

…Oh, when degree is shaked

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

The enterprise is sick! How could communities,

Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenitive and due of birth,

Prerogatives of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,

But, by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy, the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the ruder son should strike the father dead:

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong

Between whose endless justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

                                Troilus and Cressida

Girard argues that social instability may reach such a point of crisis that all the "internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community" can only be resolved through a further collective act of violence directed at a scapegoat victim (7). It is important to note in regard to Girard's theory—at least as put forth in Violence and the Sacred —that the scapegoat should not be thought of merely as an innocent victim of an act of collective violence, for in that case the scapegoat would not be able to attract to himself or herself the violent impulses of society. Nor (73) should the scapegoat be too much like the community whose interest he or she is serving, for if so violence against the scapegoat would call forth reprisals from relatives and others which would only exacerbate the social crisis ( 13). The king and the fool , Girard maintains, are likely candidates for scapegoating, since, he argues, the king is isolated from his fellows—he escapes from society 'via the roof,' as it were. Girard considers the very rich to comprise one class of marginal insiders. The fool, on the other hand, escapes from society through the cellar.

For Girard, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus comprises the summit of creative achievement in laying bare the method of ameliorating social crisis through scapegoating. In this regard, Girard describes the city of Thebes as facing a social and religious crisis of startling dimensions. Laius, Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias are all guilty alike of practicing "symmetrical violence" against one another (35). All four, therefore, share responsibility for undermining the institutions of monarchy and religion ( 71).10 First of all, long before the beginning of the play, Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejected Oedipus, fearing that his son would usurp the throne of Thebes. Oedipus in turn committed an act of reciprocal violence by killing his father, doing away with the Sphinx, and replacing both as "king and 'scourge' of the city" (48). Within the play itself, Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, taking their cues from the oracle, all seek likewise to destroy one another (48), so that a certain "uniform condition of violence" characterizes relations among them, any observable difference being either "illusory or quickly defaced" (70). According to Girard, the only significant difference among the three is that no one is present at the end of the play to protest against fixing guilt for regicide on Oedipus alone (78). Girard goes beyond ascribing equal shares of guilt to Laius, Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias. As his theory demands, he assigns responsibility for the play's social and religious crisis equally to the citizens of Thebes in general. Within the city, he says, a "thousand individual conflicts" rage among "a thousand enemy brothers" (79). Everyone in Thebes is equally responsible for the plague ravaging their city (2004, 54), and the plague itself, according to Girard, is a metaphor (2004, 81), "merely a euphemism for the state of things that condemns men to the deadly strife of enemy brothers" ( 72). In such a situation, Girard (78) says, "The old pattern of each against another gives way to the unified antagonism of all against one." While no citizen of Thebes is more guilty or innocent than any of his fellows, Oedipus is selected as a single scapegoat victim, whose eventual expulsion will solve the religious and social crisis for which the plague is a metaphor.

Questions for discussion:

1.Is Girard correct that all hierarchies and divisions within Thebes have broken down in Sophocles’ Oedipus?

2.Is Sophocles’ Oedipus a Girardian scapegoat for the city of Thebes?

3.Does Girard’s theory of scapegoating have relevance to Seneca’s play?

4.Had something occurred in Seneca’s Thebes that has abolished distinctions and degrees and led to the decay of society in the manner Girard envisions?  

Any of you who might be interested in exploring the idea of synaesthesia in Sophocles might want to look at the following:

Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain on Synesthesia by Richard E. Cytowic and David Eagleman. I recommend it only because David Eagleman is one of the authors. His book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain is a fabulous read. I've been recommending it to all of my friends. He is informative on the subject of neuroscience and has a wonderful writing style The book on synaesthesia is so described on Amazon:

"A person with synesthesia might feel the flavor of food on her fingertips, sense the letter "J" as shimmering magenta or the number "5" as emerald green, hear and taste her husband's voice as buttery golden brown. Synesthetes rarely talk about their peculiar sensory gift--believing either that everyone else senses the world exactly as they do, or that no one else does. Yet synesthesia occurs in one in twenty people, and is even more common among artists. One famous synesthete was novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who insisted as a toddler that the colors on his wooden alphabet blocks were "all wrong." His mother understood exactly what he meant because she, too, had synesthesia. Nabokov's son Dmitri, who recounts this tale in the afterword to this book, is also a synesthete--further illustrating how synesthesia runs in families. In Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, pioneering researcher Richard Cytowic and distinguished neuroscientist David Eagleman explain the neuroscience and genetics behind synesthesia's multisensory experiences. Because synesthesia contradicted existing theory, Cytowic spent twenty years persuading colleagues that it was a real--and important--brain phenomenon rather than a mere curiosity. Today scientists in fifteen countries are exploring synesthesia and how it is changing the traditional view of how the brain works. Cytowic and Eagleman argue that perception is already multisensory, though for most of us its multiple dimensions exist beyond the reach of consciousness. Reality, they point out, is more subjective than most people realize. No mere curiosity, synesthesia is a window on the mind and brain, highlighting the amazing differences in the way people see the world."

On Monday we will discuss Aristotle's great contribution to an understanding of Sophocles' Oedipus.

First and most importanr is Aristotle's distinction between simple and complex plots:

"Some plots are simple, others are complex. By "simple" plot, I mean one in which as it develops in a consecutive and unified manner... the shift in fortune (metabasis) comes about without peripety (peripeteia) or recognition; by "complex" one in which the shift (metabasis) is accomplished consecutively but with peripety or recognition or both." (Poetics1452a12ff.)

Next, Aristotle defines peripety:

Peripety is the shift of the action toward the opposite pole..., as, for example, in the Oedipus, the messenger who has arrived, when it seems that he will make Oedipus happy and relieve him of his fears towards his mother by revealing who he is, brings about the oposite." (Poetics, 1452a23ff.)

 What Aristole means will require some explication! He is making an extraordinarily important point, which is often misunderstood.

While going through Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" I noticed in Act 3, Scene2  this little speech from Robin Goodfellow:

My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,

For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,

And yonder shine's Aurora's harbinger,

At whose approach, ghosts wand'ring here and there

Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all,

That in crossways and floods have burial.

The play is supposed to be set in ancient Athens, but, of course, it's not. It's interesting that Shakespeare has knowledge of the practice of burying suicides in crossroads. Crossroads as liminal areas, places betwixt and between, places of filth and dirt, have a long, long history.

Images courtesy of Martin Liebermann: 

www.martin-liebermann.de".