In this book Girard brings the "Girardian framework" to the myth of Oedipus, as well as to the novel, myth, and stories in general. He first tackles the never-ending human quest for desires and impossible wants. “It is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires…. Behind every closed door, every insurmountable barrier, the hero senses the presence of the absolute mastery that eludes him, the divine serenity of which he feels deprived.” Desire, for Girard, is always framed in opposition to the Other. “Desire, a force oriented toward the Self, an energy which is strictly narcissistic and yet which tears the individual away from himself to make him into the satellite of an Other.” This is the eternal duel between the Self and the Other. The more one seeks to identify differences, the more one loses the reality of the sameness inherent in man. “To turn back against oneself the curse first hurled at the Other, to discover that this wicked Other and the Self are one, means discovering the Same in what once passed for absolute Difference, it means unifying reality. But first of all it means dying.” In the Oedipus myth, Oedipus creates bitter enemies from his closest rivals. “Creon, the enemy brother, and Tiresias, the blind prophet, are the doubles of Oedipus, blind and a prophet himself. Each episode goes a little further in revealing Oedipus’s adversary to be an alter ego.” It is his own subjective viewpoint that blinds him from the truth.
The tragic conflict of the Oedipus myth begins with Oedipus and his father, Laius. “Driven by the same desire, the two men are constantly headed towards the same violence…. The conflict between the two men does not feed on differences, as all thinking in line with common sense would have it, but on resemblances continually elicited by the identity of aims and the convergence of desire…. The object that lies behind an obstacle is only the more desirable for being forbidden. The obsession with forbidden fruit is not primary, it is not the cause but the consequence of the rivalry.” It is the rivalry the begets the object of desire. Whatever is identified as an obstacle becomes a sign that he is, in fact, on the right path- the path to fulfill life’s desire, the impossible goal. The violence becomes circular as the object disappears and both become focussed on each other instead. The model and the obstacle merge as one, while the object loses all importance. “Each seeing in the Other a real or potential rival, each takes refuge in the same violence…. Each contemplates in the Other the truth of his own desire.” This is an anti-Manichean view of the world. “The signifiers of good and evil superimposed on the tragic relationships are always unstable, always ready to reverse themselves.” There is only “the lie of the myth, the effort of all men to shunt their truth onto the Other…. Each person, at this level, plumbs the other’s “unconscious,” each congratulates himself on his own perspicacity. The more real this perspicacity is, and it is real, the more it focuses us on the Other. It conceals from us the essential aspects of the structure, the role that we personally play in it.” The more similar the Self and the Other, the more obsessed we become with irrelevant differences. Every man is the guilty party to the Other, who he never sees as himself. We speak the truth, but only half-truths, for we cannot see in the Other what is most like ourselves.
The tragedy of the myth of Oedipus is that the contagion of rivalry spreads to the community at large. In the myth this is symbolized by the very real threat of the plague. “The mythic plague is the passive contagion of desire and hatred, which, spreading from one person to the next, shakes the very foundations of society…. Along with the plague there are bad harvests and women dying in child-birth. Everything here is a metaphor of sterility.” In Western culture this problem in society has been intensified as traditional roles and hierarchies have disappeared. There is no rigid system to put the individual in his place. Instead, roles are fluid and rivalries multiply. “With a small number of rigorous prohibitions replacing the immense variety of positive prescriptions, the exchanges display a degree of mobility never before attained.” In the pre-Christian days, sacrifice mitigated the rivalry that arose within the community. “To sacrifice an animal is to have recourse to a means of purification that may originally not be simply ritual, since it substitutes, for the fathers and sons pitted against each other, for those guilty parties of whom the interminable pursuit would lead to a terrible familial vendetta, a living creature, a victim still but a “neutral” one, intermediate between a man and an inanimate object, a victim that can be put to death without aggravating the divisions within the city. To sacrifice an animal is to make allowance for a desire for violence incapable of being entirely sublimated…. The goat takes upon itself the sins of the fathers, of the sons, of the brothers, indeed of all of the citizens. It carries away, into death or into the desert that closes around it, the seeds of those conflicts that the convergence of desires, which is to say the very unity of the culture, its internal cohesiveness, cannot fail to provoke.”
When an animal will no longer do, often a man becomes the scapegoat. He is kept at a safe distance and excluded from the community even before he is killed or exiled. The choice is often arbitrary. There must be a sameness, but also difference. That is why the selection is often a newcomer or one with a deformity that marks him apart. “The scapegoat is responsible for all guilty desires. He is the only one to commit the crimes these desires suggest. If the myth is a perfect mirror, if it is purely and simply the projection onto a single mythical figure of a reality common to all men, the choice of this figure, the choice of the scapegoat, is completely arbitrary…. Just as an animal was first substituted for man, so the hero substitutes for the animal.” He is the one that absolves the city at large from its crimes. He purifies the city by taking on all its sins. The arbitrary nature of the choice must be hidden from the city for the choice to work. The human sacrifice is now no longer neutral, but he is the only guilty party. He is the exceptional one, apart from the rest. “If the collective decision designating the scapegoat is arbitrary, that is because only this decision can put an end to the hunt of all against each and of each against all.” It puts an end to the skandalon, the scandal, infecting the whole community and spreading throughout it. “If the conflict involved tangible goods, a solution would be conceivable. It is the nullity of the difference that renders the conflict inexpiable.” Cultural creation is the fruit of trying to prevent this contagion. Culture neutralizes rivalry. Taboos, hierarchies, and institutions block the convergence of desires and seek to eliminate confrontations. however, modernity has broken down these walls. “If there is no longer any difference between men, that is because in truth there never was. The truth of the myth is absolute symmetry. There is no true father, and that indeed is the knowledge that the expulsion of the scapegoat obscures…. To choose a scapegoat is to choose the universal other who will put an end to the universal discord. In the case of physical violence, the cure is genuine insofar as the community is truly re-unified against the single victim, insofar, therefore, as the evil qualities of the random victim are unanimously and uncritically accepted.”
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