The Girard Reader (25 page)

interpretive nihilism of our time will see no possible compromise on this point. I certainly

violate this law. But my reasons for doing so are legitimate. Critics will retort that there

cannot be any legitimate reason for such a violation. They think that the law is absolute, that

it suffers no exception. They are wrong.

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I am going to show that there are exceptions to the law of contamination by the fantastic, and

everybody tacitly agrees that they are legitimate. I will then show that, even though they are

not included among these exceptions, foundational myths should be.

The texts I have in mind are thematically and structurally similar to our Venda myths. They

are stereotyped modalities of collective persecution and their interpretation rightfully violates

the law of contamination by the unbelievable. They relate the violent actions performed by

deluded persecutors, witch hunters for instance, and they believe that the women accused of

witchcraft are truly guilty. They include unbelievable features, therefore, presented as solid

evidence against the accused,
bona fide
truth.

In
The Scapegoat
I have shown that we interpret these medieval texts
against
their own superstitious and violent spirit, in a manner that closely parallels my interpretation of myt
h. 1.

In order to understand these texts we must realize that the authors mistake the unbelievable

for the truth because they participate in the scapegoating of the victims. The French poet

Guillaume de Machaut, for instance, believed that the Jews really contributed to the Black

Death epidemic by poisoning the sources of drinking water and committing all sorts of

crimes.

Even though these texts take at face value the fantastic material they contain, modern

historians do not regard them as necessarily useless from the standpoint of objective

information. They understand the reason for the author's credulity. They have no trouble

detecting a magical accusation behind the fantastic theme and they realize that, dreadful as its

consequences are, the author's blindness does not necessarily extend to all data in his text and

does not invalidate the entire account, especially insofar as the other data relate to the violent

consequences of scapegoating. If the author reports that the accused have been killed or

otherwise punished, there is a good chance that, on this point at least, he is saying the truth.

These texts reflect a mimetic polarization broadly similar to the one I think can also be

deduced from the themes and structure of all myths of the type exemplified by our Venda

myth.

Let us first find out a little more in detail how our myth responds to the possibility that, like

the medieval texts, it might reflect a scapegoat mechanism triggered by a magical accusation.

____________________

1. See chapters 7 and 8 of this Reader. -J.W.

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The longish first part of our myth is initially a little confusing, but as soon as we examine it

from the standpoint of a witchcraft accusation, the confusion clears up.

The second wife is presented as the
rival
of the first. In reality, as her husband's favorite, she has no reason to be jealous or envious of anyone. The first wife, on the contrary, has a good

reason to regard the second as a rival. The myth seems to espouse the viewpoint of the first

wife in this affair. This is only one of the signs that designate the first wife as the accuser of

the second.

To their husbands, second wives are usually more attractive than first wives, at least for a

while. First wives have more authority, however, not only in their household, but with the

community. They are in a good position to make life difficult for second wives, and even, it

seems, to exact a dreadful vengeance for the humiliation of being supplanted by a younger

woman. It is for a husband to decide which wife he chooses for the night. Just before the

drama, the husband of our two wives, it seems, was spending all his nights with wife number

two, and part of his days as well.

Wife number one was incensed. Being in charge during the day, she would try to prevent

additional rendezvous between the two lovers. Apparently she was not very successful.

The situation perfectly accounts for the peculiarities of the accusation against the second wife. As a wife, she is just as legitimate as the first and she cannot be indicted simply for

being her husband's favorite. Having no special rights to claim, the first wife must concoct a

more arcane transgression, and she elaborated the myth of a divine status for her husband, of

which she alone is supposed to be informed.

Even this most fantastic aspect of our myth must not be fiction in the sense that our literary

critics demand. Their fabrication
ex nihilo
probably does not exist at all. The mimetic theory suggests an explanation for the divinity of the husband. It must go back to the mimetic rivalry

between the wives which, as usual, magnifies the value of the disputed object so much that it

seems divine. Imagination and imitation are one and the same thing.

The dreaded secret, we are told, could not be kept away from the second wife for long. She

discovered the "truth" about her husband even though or perhaps because her rival was trying very hard to prevent that discovery.

This catastrophic disclosure too must be a mythical reading of the mimetic escalation that any

rivalry tends to generate. The obstacles that the two women place in each other's path finally

turn the husband into a divinity not only in the eyes of the most frustrated first wife, but in the

eyes of the other as well, whose frustration must grow as a result of the first wife's behavior.

Being perpetually crossed by this jealous woman,

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the second wife finally surrenders to the spirit of the rivalry, the spirit of her rival.

Our myth sounds like a malevolent fantasizing of mimetic rivalry, triggered by a husband's

preference for a younger wife, the twisted expression of a jealousy that finds the triumph of a

rival intolerable.

The first part of our myth seems merely to repeat what the first wife told the elders about the

origin of the drought. This means that first these elders and then the whole people

mimetically embraced these mad rantings, thus turning them into the truth of the myth, the

sacred dogma of the entire tribe.

The second wife is too insignificant to be regarded as the direct and principal cause of the

drought. She belongs in the "sorcerer's apprentice" category. She was too simple and flighty to realize that her pestering of the god -- what her enemy interprets as such -- could harm the

whole community. Even a beloved favorite can abuse her privileges and make herself

obnoxious in the eyes of an easily offended divinity.

The first wife showed genius when she linked her rival to the drought. Or is it the

community's obsession that created that link? We cannot tell and it does not matter. All we

need to remember is that everywhere in the world, even today, any natural or man-made

disaster intensifies the appetite for victims and causes accusations to proliferate. Even in our

world, when a crisis breaks out, accusations border on the magical and, regardless of the

facts, politicians have to pay the price.

The myth says, of course, that the second wife's alleged indiscretion with her divine husband

came first, not the drought. This is obvious nonsense, but in the light of our hypothesis,

highly significant nonsense. The mythical sequence is a scapegoat inspired reversal of cause and effect. The jealousy of the first wife has nothing to do with the drought but the drought

provides the ideal terrain for it and it spreads like wildfire.

If our myth first seemed like a heterogeneous collection of themes, this impression is now

entirely dissipated, replaced by something so coherent that the reality of the drama reflected

in it becomes highly probable. Just as in the case of Machaut, or of medieval witch-hunting,

we are led to believe that a real victim must have perished.

All the themes dovetail in such a way as to confirm the scapegoat interpretation of the whole

text. What clinches the case is the very theme that made the myth look like inextricable

nonsense when we first read it, the snake god. The role of this deity fits too perfectly with the

rivalry of the two women, with the killing of the victim and finally with the end of the

drought, not to compel the reasonably attentive reader to perceive the scapegoat reading as

the only commonsensical solution to the riddle of this text.

Let us go back to the law of contamination by the fantastic. Just as in the case of medieval

texts, we can and we must suspend its ap-

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plication because the magical accusation hypothesis works too well to be rejected. The story

of the snake is no longer the sole affair of the first wife but that which everybody believes,

the consensus of the whole community, the content of the scapegoat accusations. We can well

understand, therefore, why the myth handles this nonsense as if it were the truth.

As soon as we see this, we no longer have to assume that the myth is necessarily valueless

from the standpoint of extratextual information. If the second wife is the target of a scapegoat

polarization, the probability of a real victim, treated just as the myth suggests, is very high.

The scapegoaters truly cannot distinguish the true from the false. It is not poetic imagination

or the Freudian unconscious that generated our Venda myth but the jealousy of the first wife,

authenticated by the unanimous scapegoating of the community. The myth-makers are

deluded scapegoaters in very much the same sense as medieval witch-hunters.

Our reading of the myth can reach this conclusion because the scapegoat hypothesis turns the

fantastic theme into a magical accusation similar to a witchcraft accusation in a medieval

text. This hypothesis enables us to sort out the fantastic theme in our myth and keep it

separate from the other themes. The idea of a magical accusation functions like a
cordon

sanitaire
that prevents the fantastic data from contaminating the nonfantastic ones and

destroying their credibility. The same idea also disentangles the believable from the

unbelievable in the case of medieval texts. Looking at each detail separately we have been

doing step by step and quite deliberately what the readers of medieval texts do so rapidly and

instinctively that it hardly reaches their consciousness. They
discount
the magical theme

because they immediately realize that it is a magical accusation.

Far from being an outlandish and farfetched invention, "my theory" of myth is not even

"mine." It is patterned after the historians' interpretation of texts we long ago learned to demystify. It is the application to myth of a critical practice that seems unproblematic as long

as it remains confined to our own cultural context. If this practice were examined for its own sake, the theory of it would be mimetic in the sense of my mimetic theory.

Let us forget for a while that our Venda myth is called a myth and let us pretend that it

originated somewhere in Europe in the fifteenth century. Let us shift the language to

medieval Latin or some French or German dialect. To do a credible job, we must modify

some themes but very slightly. The general tenor and the structure of our text will remain the

same.

The beer offering and the flute playing have no place in the medieval world and we eliminate

them. The snake can remain but not as a legitimate husband and not as a divinity. We must

turn him into a demon, or

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the devil himself. The idea that a woman can make love to a snake who is really Satan in

disguise poses no problem
as a witchcraft accusation
.

We would not be surprised to see that this charge leads to the drowning of the accused. It is

presented as true, just as true as the drowning itself, because everybody involved believed

that it was true. The inability of the text to distinguish the unbelievable from the believable

does not mean that it should be regarded as unbelievable
in toto
, it means that a mimetic

scapegoat genesis should be inferred. With a few minor changes, we almost instantly

transform our myth into an example of medieval witch hunting that is too
transparent
not to

be convincing.

Fire was the most popular way of dealing with witches but drowning was not uncommon.

And, just as in the case of the second wife, the death of a witch was regarded as beneficial to

the community, not to the extent that a mythical drama is, no doubt, but to a degree sufficient

for us to realize that the principle of the transfiguration is the same. If a witch is accused of

causing a drought, and if she dies for it, we can be sure that her death will be credited with

the return of the rain, provided of course, that the account comes from true believers.

If our myth were a
bona fide
historical text, not even the most ardent textual nihilist would

dare reject the realistic and referential explication that I just gave. Everybody would agree

that there must be a real woman behind the text and that she is a scapegoat.

Everybody would understand that the conjunction of themes in our Venda text cannot be