Author: staceymeeker

Humans live and move and have their being in two realms, the immediate world created by the senses, and the vastly larger world mediated by meaning. Rites and rituals connect the two and inform the latter. From this intersection ritually expressed arises the sense of the sacred, at least primordially. “The sacred, in its simplest sense, is the restraining force on human appetite that gives birth to desire, mediated by the world of signs.”^[1]

There is however more to the sacred than original interdiction. Losing any sense of it is part of the modern dilemma. As seen by Charles Taylor, many people today have a “buffered self,” as opposed to people of previous ages who had “porous selves.” By this he means a perspective that grows out of a denial that anything that cannot be empirically proven has any claim upon us: we are “buffered.”

Taylor calls the present moment “the immanent frame”:

It is the sense of an absence; it is the sense that all order, all meaning, come from us. We encounter no echo outside. In the world read this way, as so many of our contemporaries live it, the natural/supernatural distinction is no intellectual abstraction. A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world as entirely immanent. In some respects, we may judge this achievement a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.^[2]

And yet that “achievement” is coming apart at a rapid pace. The fear that grips much of humanity today is stoked by inimical climate change, pandemics, economic chaos, war, and political divisions stoked by propagandists wielding tools that Josef Goebbels could only have dreamt of. For people who believe their world of meaning is “entirely immanent,” the need for the sacred comes roaring back. How else to explain the fascination for angels, extraterrestrials (science fiction angels), for magic, reviving dead pagan religions in the form of Wicca, the whole phenomenon of the “powers” of crystals and amulets, and the continuing consultation of mediums, spiritualists, gurus…

In any age, humans have always needed rituals to give structure and meaning to our private and social lives. That remains true today.

The terms “rite” and “ritual” (which can be considered synonyms) come from the Latin ritus, meaning “prescribed order,” which would itself comes from a form of Indo-European Vedic rta or arta, which evokes the order of the cosmos.[3] [4]

Generative anthropology has been developing the heuristic of the originary scene, in which the sacred center plays a vital part. That has not gone away. But with the disappearance of classical culture, the dying spasms of modern culture giving birth to postmodernism, humans have ever more extraordinary means of trying to understand ourselves. Our technology inundates us with meanings to understand. The dilemma today is not one of understanding so much as it is judging. Each of us must judge for ourselves what is worth living—who am I and what must I do?

These are philosophical issues, existential ones in the strict sense. They occur in every age, i every culture. “Who am I?” includes the past (“how did I get here?”), the present, and the future (“where am I going?”). The next stage of questioning is “what am I to do?” It should be clear that these are matters of conscience, that is, one’s self-awareness as a creature embedded in the passage of time and shaped by one’s culture, including how one has lived in response to both. The transient nature of both provokes anxiety. It can also evoke awe.

The strength of assertion and the pangs of doubt are the matrix for each of our conscience’s questioning. And we are each unique in this experience. Some may find that the best “answer” is to avoid thinking about it completely. Characteristic of the “buffered self” is the conviction that since “science has nothing to say” about such questions—or the existential ground of anxiety that provokes them—they are meaningless and therefore should not be asked.

The problem is, even for people who believe they are nothing more than machines governed by chemicals, created by blind random forces like the universe itself, there is no avoiding moments of anxiety. Or conversely, of wonder and awe. In other words, even if one concludes that all is absurdity (à la Camus), that conclusion forms a tie that binds, an identity. Which is to say, a religious conviction (from Latin religio, to bind up).

Because language is communal—there are no private languages—talk about religious convictions is purely in the world mediated by meaning, and it is expressed in symbol, analogy, simile, metaphor, metonymy, and beyond these figures of speech, ritualized myth. It is important to realize that a religion need not express itself in formal rites. The Society of Friends (“Quakers”), for instance, have no overt liturgies. Unlike other Christians, they do not baptize or celebrate Communion, or keep Christmas and Easter. Yet they are indeed Christians, cultivating inner experiences (“the inner light”) of what these “outer” rites seek to express.

If the influence of Plato and Aristotle has waned in our time, the ancient philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) has come into his own, as it were. He was no bon vivant, despite the pejorative “epicurean” to denote something or someone hedonistic. Epicurus taught that we should maximize pleasure and minimize pain to live tranquilly. This translated into leading an ascetic lifestyle, controlling one’s desires and impulses, on one hand, and on the other, banishing the fear of death and the gods by training oneself to accept that there is no afterlife or punishment after death. One might sum up his approach as achieving and keeping a clear conscience. [5]

The Roman philosopher Lucretius (ca. 99-55 BC) popularized the Greek’s ideas in epic poem form, entitled De rerum natura. The growth of the influence of this work has been enormous down to this day, especially in the rise of modern atheism.^[6] De rerum natura put forth a thorough-going materialist philosophy: we are born into a universe of random chance, in which death is final and no divinity holds any sway (if indeed there be any). Ironically, a ninth-century monastic copyist saved the poem from oblivion.

Ada Palmer has shown that De rerum natura came into its own during the later Renaissance and is a major source of Enlightenment thinking and beyond. Karl Marx wrote his doctoral thesis championing Epicurus’ thought, for instance.^[7] His famous assertion that religion “is the opium of the people” has its origin in Epicurus.^[8] Moreover, the relative ascetism of the ancient philosophy and its eschewing of politics gave way to the idea of progress through reason and the revolution to accomplish it, whether scientific or violent. The end result, as Taylor says, is that “race of humans which has managed to experience its world as entirely immanent.”

Well, not quite, as humanity’s engouement for myth is as strong as ever. Modern media empires have been built on satisfying our need for some feeling of transcendence over immanence. Think of the enormous influence of science fiction: the dense growth of the Star Trek, Marvel, and Star War universes, as well as the Matrix trilogy, Superman, and especially the Batman mythos. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has marked the global culture as well with its adolescent brand of “re-enchantment of the world”. The appearance of such religions as Scientology, Wicca, The Church of Satan, and even The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster[9] is more proof that the sacred hasn’t gone away. Like trying to nail jelly to a wall, it just keeps slipping away.

It is often said that Communism was an attempt to create a secular Christianity by sublating certain elements of the gospel. One example of science doing the same kind of transposition is the notion that we live in a simulation. This hypothesis posits that everything we experience, our very being, is actually created by computer code written by super-intelligent beings or being.[10]

The opinion that we live in some kind of computation in and by itself is not an outrageous claim. For all we currently know, the laws of nature are mathematical, so you could say the universe is just computing those laws. […] The controversial bit about the simulation hypothesis is that it assumes there is another level of reality where some being or some thing controls what we believe are the laws of nature, or even interferes with those laws.[11]

In other words, “some (divine) being.” Of course, this is no longer science at all, but merely bad theology: where do the super-intelligent beings come from? To prolong this weird chain of being, maybe the coding entity is a rogue super artificial intelligence, that having utterly destroyed its creators, creates a simulation of them as an expression of its regret… or something…

Back to the originary

The originary scene heuristic developed by Eric Gans makes the fundamental connection between the appearance of human language and the sense of the sacred. As the scene develops, a group of hominins are gathered around the booty of their hunt. Having collaborated to track and kill their prey, they are now rivals for the consumption of the meat. The usual outcome is a fight with winners and losers, some wounded or even dead. However, as the mimetic rivalry grows to a fever pitch, one member creates a sign in sound, an “aborted gesture of appropriation”. ^[12]

As the members of the group reproduce the sign, the originary event becomes a scene, a “liturgical” re-enactment of the deferral of violence and survival of the community through the sign, which becomes a symbol—the beginning of language. The scene has a center and a periphery, moving outside from the sacred to the profane.

What humanity has from the beginning designated as god is not the object that occupies the center of the circle but the Being of the center itself, which subsists after the destruction of its original inhabitant and whose will, conceived as the force that holds the circle and its center in equilibrium at the moment of the emission of the sign, guarantees the sign’s timeless meaning…^[13]

Whereas language communicates meaning, in this specific case the spoken sign not only effects a change in the group but evokes something beyond the immediate moment. What is sacred is not the meat but the interdiction of violence to appropriate it. That sense of the sacred is first a feeling of awe and reverence, and its ritual re-enactment is a spur to the development both of a communal language and a new sense of community. “We are the people of our god(dess),” the members say. “This is what made us what we are together.” An effigy of the god is a further development, another representation of the originary scene, with the erection of a dwelling to house it: “our god is with us!” (literally). This then led for some time in the ancient Near East (at least) to the practice of “god-napping,” making off with the local statue to lessen those people’s sense of identity.[14]

Language developed along with spoken and eventually written stories of the ineffable “Being of the center itself,” which made available the evocative experience of the sacred in story, song, sagas, codified in liturgies that are meant to stimulate the worship of the community gathered. A turning point came with “the Greek discovery of mind,” in Bruno Snell’s suggestive words.[15] The importance of rational analysis, the existence of the individual as subject, the difference between mind and body, etc., were the notions that took form among the Greeks, leading to Plato and Aristotle. The enduring reality of what I call the existential questions was promoted by the tragedies like Œdipus Rex. The slow discrediting of the Greek (and later Roman) gods and goddesses began.[16]

The sense of the sacred evolved as well. The Hebrews’ revelation of a god whose name is simply “I am,” who had no visible representation other than a fire that does not consume what it burns, found congenial ground among the partisans of the philosophers, such as Philo of Alexandria[17]. With the appropriation of the divine in the figure of a human, Christianity eventually carried the Greek discovery through the collapse of the Roman Empire. Muslim philosophers brought forward in particular the thought of Aristotle, translating his works conserved by Eastern Christians, leading to the great syntheses of Thomas Aquinas.

Here it is worth pointing out that Aquinas’ famous “Five proofs” of the existence of God (which they are not) address two very modern-sounding assertions: a good God cannot exist because there is evil in the world; and, since all things can be reduced either to nature or the reason and will of humans, there is no need of God.[18] Thomas did not imagine that his Five would convince anyone of the reality of the living God of the Scriptures.[19] The Five reproduce “what everyone (in the 13^th century) calls God” but what God actually is cannot be divorced from revelation. But what the Five do is underline that every language has a word for “god.”

Despite all that has happened since 1274 AD, every language still has a word for “god.” Try as it might, the rise of modern atheism cannot cancel the sense of the sacred. It is, as I’ve said, hard to nail down. It can be dismissed as illusory, a quirk of neurons, a former evolutionary advantage to survival which has become redundant like the appendix (and can become dangerous like an appendix), and so on. An epicurean philosophy may teach how to ignore intimations of Something More, but the fact that it must be dealt with—since Epicurus himself—proves that the sense of the sacred perdures.

What is sensed?

Two great theologians of the past century did posit that the sense of the sacred is a real pointer toward God.

The sense of the sacred is what impels faith to attempt to explain what it cannot describe—which is a basic definition of theology. Reflecting on this mysterious evocation raises the pressing questions I have described, as we seek insights into this phenomenon that is both individual and so unique, and that is also shared in and by a community through which faith comes, including the American Atheists, the Humanist Society, and so on.[20] [21]

Gans’s hypothesis is a heuristic and not a reference to any particular event in history. Faith is a trusting response to that which is “revealed” in the originary event. Since language is always communal, I learn a vocabulary of gesture, ritual, liturgy, developed by my “community of faith” to describe what I am feeling and why I should or should not trust it.^[22] Doubt is always a reflection of faith: no one doubts what is certain (except for Pyrrhonian skeptics).

Karl Rahner interpreted the sense of the sacred by borrowing terms of Martin Heidegger’s Dasein metaphysic: humans have a “supernatural existential.” This is a very complex argument; suffice it to say here that it means that all humans have an existing offer to share God’s life (grace) prior to ever becoming aware of it, and thus the capacity to accept (or reject) sharing in God’s life.^[23]

Bernard Lonergan developed a theoretical explanation that is grosso modo similar to Rahner’s concept, which he at first called “obediential potency.”^[24] He was careful to insist that this “potency” develops only within a community of faith—for Christians, in the church. In his later work, Lonergan located this capacity to love God in a “downward” and “upward” movement: first in the action of the Spirit “down,”^[25] and then “up” in what he called the “eros of the human spirit.”[26]

We see in both theologians the foundational influence of Augustine: “You have created us, Lord, for yourself, and our hearts will find no rest until they rest in you.”^[27]

Using the Gans heuristic allows us to find a potential for “what everyone calls god” in concrete human experience and history. As an anthropological, i.e., scientific, tool, it does not and it cannot depend upon acceptance of the existence of a deity at all, of course. However, the universal ritual reenactment of “originary scenes” noted by scholars such as Mircea Eliade^[28] (as well as René Girard) gives some grounding of a specifically non-theological basis for these very theological approaches of existentials and potencies.^[29]

But is it real? This is the essential question. It is quite plausible to argue that in fact nothing outside the brain of the sensing person is being felt. Neurons, all the way down… The position I have presented here absolutely does not rely at all on a human ability to “feel” God.[30] What I am arguing here is that whatever it is we are actually sensing, this evocation of Something Greater Than Me is going to remain a permanent aspect of human life, intimately connected historically, physically, and culturally with the phenomenon of language itself. In other words, this religious dimension of human existence is unavoidable. It is part of that world that language opens up, that makes us human, the world mediated by meaning.

Many people today refer to themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” They mean of course that they do not subscribe to some form of “organized religion.” With all due respect, we should stop saying that; perhaps we should say that we are “religious, but some of us are spiritual.”

This means that the future of the sacred is anything but improbable.

In the plot of the Iliad, we see that the Achaeans are fighting Troy for the return of Helen; yet there are contingencies to be resolved. The main theme of the Iliad is the wrath of Achilles and all its dire consequences. The abduction of Helen is a backdrop which accounts for the clash of two military factions.  The Trojan War rages on for nine years, all because Paris, by abducting Helen, had broken his oath as a guest to his host Menelaus. But then, during the siege of Troy, at the Greek camp a pestilence breaks out. Achilles calls forth an assembly. The seer Kalchas assigns cause for the plague to Agamemnon’s taking of the maid Chryseis from her father Chryses, Apollo’s priest. To appease the god and prevent the contagious illness from spreading further in the ranks, Agamemnon must give back Chryseis.[1] Agamemnon accedes but takes away Briseis from Achilles. Subsequently, Achilles withdraws from the fighting to sulk in his tent for the loss of Briseis. Absence of the best warrior occasions countless Greek casualties in the furious fighting. The question arises as to how much grief is justified by the loss of Achilles’ female companion. We must make Homer’s concerns our own.

Patroclus and Hector share much of the spotlight as central characters in the Iliad‘s plot, for they are both closely involved in the two love triangles which outline the theme of sacrifice in the Homeric epic. The relationship between Achilles and Agamemnon, with Briseis as object of desire, reflects in microcosm the broader upheaval brought about by the struggle between Menelaus and Paris over the abducted Helen, genesis of the Trojan war. In his The End of Culture Eric Gans views the distinction between both conflicts as vital source for the epic genre:

The fact that Achilles’ grievance against Agamemnon mirrors within the Greek camp that of Menelaus against Paris with which the Trojan war began is not a mere sign of what a New Critic might call the “well-wroughtness” of the poem, or an illustration of what French formalists call mise en abyme. This involution of the external conflict is precisely the moment of literary epic, as opposed to the pre-literary legend from which it sprang. [2]

The critic incisively suggests that Agamemnon’s overbearing role vis à vis Achilles narrowly mirrors Paris’ violation of the alliance due to his host, Menelaus, while a guest at his palace. The epic springs from the legend. To maintain the role of victors in the struggle, Argives must differentiate themselves from their Trojan foes.[3] There is disorder in their ranks analogous to the war they wage against Troy. Quarrel over two female characters stands as background for the violent devastation of war.

Helen appears most prominently in the Third Book of the Iliad. The abducted heroine comes to the fore as Priam, contemplating the fighting from the walls of Troy, inquires about the fighting heroes. The Trojan king reassures Helen of her innocence in the slaughter by blaming the gods for their ordeal [Il. III, 164].[4] Assigning guilt to the gods is an attempt to disclaim responsibility and to discount the possibility of human frailty and the ravages exacted by desire. The inhabitants of Troy understand that Helen’s beauty may justify her abduction, but not the war. They wish she would go away on the ships back to Greece, or else she shall become a bane, pema, to them and their children [Il. III, 156-160].[5] Hector himself rebukes his brother for taking away from her husband a fair woman of a remote land [Il. III, 39, 48-49]. Paris justifies the abduction of Helen by reference to her ravishing beauty, adding that gifts from the goddess of love are not to be cast aside [Il. III 65]. Hector’s exoneration of Paris shows his allegiance to Aphrodite, protector of Troy.

At this critical juncture in the Third Book of the Iliad the two central parties in the conflict arrange for a trial by combat. The winner shall take Helen, bringing a peaceful end to the war and saving lives. But the duel between Menelaus and Paris ends when Helen’s lawful husband is left holding Paris’ helmet while the legendary womanizer is transported by Aphrodite to the lovely lady’s bedchamber. Helen, meanwhile, is still dwelling on her heritage and pointing out the individual prowess of the Greek heroes, standing close to Priam on the Trojan walls. When Aphrodite beckons her to return to the bedroom where Paris is waiting, Helen rebukes the goddess for such sudden summons. On the battlefield the heroes look for Paris in vain. Understandably, Helen refuses to do “the shameful act,” νεμεσσητὸν [Il. III; 410].[6] We are led to believe that Paris is very different in character from the fighting men. But the goddess remains undaunted and threatens Helen: the goddess shall throw her to the mercy of both Greeks and Trojans, to be torn to pieces by the rage ensuing from their bitter hatred if she does not comply with Aphrodite’s dream play and give in to Paris’ lust. In other words, the goddess of love threatens to make Helen be perceived as the real cause of evil and not visible to Trojan eyes through the beguiling illusion of erotic desire. The cowed Helen complies; and, back in her chamber, Paris, awaiting, again seduces her by using the argument that war has intensified love in his soul and his desire for her is stronger than ever [Il. III, 442-446]. In this dream play Paris cheats death through the intensity of erotic desire, personified in the blind Trojan worship of Aphrodite.[7]

Helen appears again in the Iliad in Book VI. Hector visits Paris in his chamber and rebukes him for failing to join the others in battle [Il. VI, 343-368]. Paris justifies his indolence by insisting he has been grieving in sorrow over the constant slaughter and agrees to rejoin the fighting. In this scene Helen beckons Hector to sit by her and rest from all the warfare taking place “for the sake of shamed me and the blind passion of Alexandros” [Il. VI, 356]. She adds that Zeus has set on them a hard fate so that they may be made the subject of song henceforth [Il. VI, 358]. Helen and Hector both know the great dimension of the important roles they must play in the heroic epic. The worship of Aphrodite exacts its toll.

In Book VII Helen does not appear herself, but figures prominently in the discussion. There is an assembly held within the walls of Troy. Antenor, an aged counselor, the counterpart of Nestor in the Greek camp, proposes that Helen of Argos be given back to the grieving Achaeans, along with all her possessions, since “we now fight with our sworn words turned into lies” [Il. VII, 351-352].[8] Antenor is probably referring to the duel between Menelaus and Paris which was intended as a trial by combat to settle the issue and end the war, but which Aphrodite’s dream play interrupts by whisking away Paris into Helen’s bedchamber. The words of the aged counselor may be taken to refer indirectly also to the original abduction of Helen by Paris while a guest at her husband’s royal court.[9] In either case Paris feels spurned by the argument raised over the object of his erotic desire and refuses outright to give back “his wife,” gunaika, although he is willing to give back the treasures he took, adding additional compensation from his store [Il. VII, 362-364]. Fairness of the crucial proposal, with the important partial refusal, is not considered by members of the assembly as a parliamentary issue whose justice can be questioned, discussed, and voted on; rather, Priam stands and asks that Paris’ uncontested reply be delivered by a herald to the Greeks, adding a request that a truce be granted for burial of the dead on both sides. “Paris’ decision, for whose sake the war started,” is to be delivered to the fighting Danaans [Il. VII, 374].[10] The herald delivers the message, quoting verbatim Priam’s epithet for Paris [Il. VII, 388]. The messenger adds a parenthetical embellishment all his own; referring to Paris, he wishes that he should have died before [Il. VII, 390].[11] The importance of the announcement is given legal force since the herald uses in place of Helen’s name an epithet, “wedded wife of glorious Menelaus” [Il. VII, 392].[12] The message includes also what is probably a truism; Paris refuses to give back Helen, but the Trojans wish he would. [Il. VII, 393]

At the Greek Assembly Diomedes is quick to speak in order to refuse the proposed partial compensation, probably because it excludes the return of Helen, using prominently the lady’s name, conspicuously absent from Paris’ and the herald’s speech [Il. VII, 401]. Homer may be pointing out the Trojan guilt implicitly in such obfuscated reference to Helen. Agamemnon echoes the declaimed refusal to accept partial compensation but grants the truce for burial of the slain on both sides.

Guilt for the Achaean-Trojan struggle is attributed to Helen a few times. Hera, cohort of Zeus, tells Athena to inspire courage in the Argives when they are yearning to sail back to Greece; they should stay, fight, and not leave to Priam and to the Trojans Helen of Argos, because “many have lost their lives for her sake” [Il. II, 161-162]. Athena goes to Odysseus and delivers the message quoting the same line of verse [Il. II, 176-177]. Odysseus brandishes Agamemnon’s scepter as sign of authority when addressing noblemen and strikes with it common warriors while reprimanding them for fleeing, despite Hera’s request to stay and fight. Helen’s rapture is also used as a point of leverage to spur warriors to continue on with the struggle. Nestor, the aged counselor, stirs the troops by urging the men to fight for victory “so each one of the Greeks may lie in bed with the wife of a Trojan to avenge the grief of Helen” [Il. II, 354-356]. Adequate retribution appears to be the release of sexual passion. When exposing the catalogue of ships included in the Greek naval force, Homer uses the same line of verse indicating revenge through sexual release to justify Menelaus’ resentment in a war for the loss of Helen [Il. II, 590]. Abduction engenders a presumed need for further rapture as the wheel of fortune spins uncontrollably.

When appearing in the narrative, the character of Helen is self-conscious about her compromising position. She refers to herself as “shameless me, to whom Agamemnon was once a brother-in-law,” when pointing out to Priam the fighting heroes before the dream play in the Third Book [Il. III, 180].[13] Helen’s shame is most obvious in the scene where, addressing Hector as her “brother-in-law,” she calls herself a despised mischievous bitch [Il. VI, 344].[14] This self-deprecating taunt seems an indirect effort to appeal to Hector’s carnal desire. Noble Hector reacts by dashing off rapidly to seek the company of his wife [Il. VI, 365-366]. Compared to Helen and Paris, Hector’s character is beyond reproach.

The Argives must establish complete differentiation from the Trojans. Eventually, Agamemnon recognizes the need to quell Achilles’ anger over the absence of Briseis. Consequently, the Greek chieftain sends an embassy to Achilles. Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix, Achilles’ old tutor, try to persuade the sulking hero to accept restitution and return to battle. Restoration to order, as outlined by the fable of the Litai, Spirits of Prayer, in Phoenix’s parainesis to Achilles during the embassy to his tent in Book IX, offering restitution, requires human acceptance of great physical loss with humility and resignation:

For there are also the spirits of Prayer, the daughters of great Zeus
and they are lame of their feet, and wrinkled, and cast their eyes sidelong,
who toil on their way left far behind by the spirit of Ruin:
but she, Ruin, is strong and sound on her feet, and therefore
far outruns all Prayers, and wins into every country
to force men astray; and the Prayers follow as healers after her.
If a man venerates these daughters of Zeus as they draw near,
such a man they bring great advantage, and hear his entreaty;
but if a man shall deny them, and stubbornly with a harsh word
refuse, they go to Zeus, son of Kronos, in supplication
that Ruin may overtake this man, that he be hurt, and punished.

καὶ γάρ τε λιταί εἰσι Διὸς κοῦραι μεγάλοιο
χωλαί τε ῥυσαί τε παραβλῶπές τ᾽ ὀφθαλμώ,
αἵ ῥά τε καὶ μετόπισθ᾽ ἄτης ἀλέγουσι κιοῦσαι.
ἣ δ᾽ ἄτη σθεναρή τε καὶ ἀρτίπος, οὕνεκα πάσας
πολλὸν ὑπεκπροθέει, φθάνει δέ τε πᾶσαν ἐπ᾽ αἶαν
βλάπτουσ᾽ ἀνθρώπους: αἳ δ᾽ ἐξακέονται ὀπίσσω.
ὃς μέν τ᾽ αἰδέσεται κούρας Διὸς ἆσσον ἰούσας,
τὸν δὲ μέγ᾽ ὤνησαν καί τ᾽ ἔκλυον εὐχομένοιο:
ὃς δέ κ᾽ ἀνήνηται καί τε στερεῶς ἀποείπῃ,
λίσσονται δ᾽ ἄρα ταί γε Δία Κρονίωνα κιοῦσαι
τῷ ἄτην ἅμ᾽ ἕπεσθαι, ἵνα βλαφθεὶς ἀποτίσῃ.
[Il. IX, 502-512][15]

Achilles refuses the restitution offered by the Embassy, displaying excessive, unmitigated bitterness. Eric Voegelin explains the fable of the Litai [502], Prayers, daughters of Zeus [508], as the dialectics of guilt, Ate [504, 505, 512]:

The Homeric Ate means the folly of the heart, the blindness
of passion, that makes a man fall into guilt; and it also means
the sinful act, the transgression of the law. And the Homeric Litai
correspondingly means the repentance of the heart, as well as the acts
(prayers and sacrifices to god, prayers and offers of recompense to men)
in which repentance expresses itself. Litai are the daughters of Zeus
in so far as they express the active willingness to rise from the fall
into disorder, to heal the guilt… Hence if a man repels another
man’s manifest willingness to repair the broken order, he himself
falls into the guilt of perpetrating disorder; the disorder is now his
Ate for which he will have to make full atonement. [16]

Submission to the peaceful entreaty of a suppliant cannot be refused. Suppliants cannot be cast out, nor ignored. Achilles must heed the claim of Agamemnon’s embassy. Although the warrior does not accept yet the offered recompense, he keeps Phoenix, his old tutor, by his side [Il. IX, 425-429]. The gesture discloses rumination over possibility for self-appeasement by the young warrior.

The legend and the epic must be aligned in our understanding. Paris, the archer who fights from a distance, avoids responsibility for his actions. Achilles, the swordsman, must eventually subdue his wrath and accept that the product of struggle can be reconciliation. Resolution of a conflict comes through sacrifice. How much should a man pay to attain the object of his desire is in question. Gans suggests that resentment “derives from the mimetically induced excess of appetite for the central object.”[17] In the Iliad retribution comes after the slaying of Patroclus, Achilles’ alter ego, and at the death of Hector, Priam’s son, and Paris’ older brother.  Both Hector and Patroclus represent the sacrifice suffered due to their involvement in the mimetic double bind drive over appropriation of Helen and Briseis, respectively.[18]

Briseis is a prominent place holder in the Iliad accounting for Achilles’ wrath and his subsequent withdrawal from the fighting. Her elegiac mourning over Patroclus parallels Helen’s mourning over Hector. Patroclus is to Briseis what Hector is to Helen, a kind benefactor. Thus, we may include Patroclus in the love triangle between Agamemnon and Achilles over Briseis, just as Hector enters as a paradigm of loss to be suffered and endured in the struggle of Menelaus and Paris over Helen. Homer possibly intended, in his architectonic conception of the Iliad, that the love triangle should be expanded and better viewed as a quadrangular relationship which includes the theme of loss and deadly suffering for the appeasement of desire. The relationships involved in linking Briseis to Patroclus and Helen to Hector are balanced by the paradox of opposites. Briseis, born in the Troad, is highly respected by the Greek Patroclus; while Helen, a Greek, is protected by Hector, a Trojan. This opposing binary structure supports the direct equivalence we ascribe to the importance of two leading women characters, absent from their clan, who subsist among antagonistic factions in the Iliad.

The cornerstone speech outlining the quadrangular conception occurs when Briseis mourns the dead Patroclus as the one who would have made her Achilles’ legally wedded wife:

Patroclus, far most pleasing to my heart in its sorrows,
I left you here alive when I went away from the shelter,
but now I come back, lord of the people, to find you have fallen.
So evil in my life takes over from evil forever.
The husband on whom my father and honored mother bestowed me
I saw before my city lying torn with the sharp bronze,
and my three brothers, whom a single mother bore with me
and who were close to me, all went on one day to destruction.
And yet you would not let me, when swift Achilles had cut down
my husband, and sacked the city of godlike Mynes, you would not
let me sorrow, but said you would take me back in the ships
to Phthia and formalize my marriage among the Myrmidons.
Therefore, I weep your death without ceasing. You were kind always.

Πάτροκλέ μοι δειλῇ πλεῖστον κεχαρισμένε θυμῷ
ζωὸν μέν σε ἔλειπον ἐγὼ κλισίηθεν ἰοῦσα,
νῦν δέ σε τεθνηῶτα κιχάνομαι ὄρχαμε λαῶν
ἂψ ἀνιοῦσ᾽: ὥς μοι δέχεται κακὸν ἐκ κακοῦ αἰεί.
ἄνδρα μὲν ᾧ ἔδοσάν με πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ
εἶδον πρὸ πτόλιος δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκῷ,
τρεῖς τε κασιγνήτους, τούς μοι μία γείνατο μήτηρ,
κηδείους, οἳ πάντες ὀλέθριον ἦμαρ ἐπέσπον.
οὐδὲ μὲν οὐδέ μ᾽ἔασκες, ὅτ᾽ ἄνδρ᾽ ἐμὸν ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεὺς
ἔκτεινεν, πέρσεν δὲ πόλιν θείοιο Μύνητος,
κλαίειν, ἀλλά μ᾽ ἔφασκες Ἀχιλλῆος θείοιο
κουριδίην ἄλοχον θήσειν, ἄξειν τ᾽ ἐνὶ νηυσὶν
ἐς Φθίην, δαίσειν δὲ γάμον μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσι.
τώ σ᾽ ἄμοτον κλαίω τεθνηότα μείλιχον αἰεί.
[19] [Il. XIX, 287-300]

Patroclus is the kind benefactor who leads Brises to hope for a union in marriage with Achilles. Widowhood makes her a more veridic figure of a wife than Helen. The character of Patroclus shows a kindness which we can identify as exceptional and is ratified by his prominence in the plot. In Book XI Paris shoots and strikes Machaon, the healer, son of the great physician Asclepius [Il. XI, 506]. Achilles observes from a distance a fallen warrior in the battlefield who seems to him to be Machaon and sends Patroclus to verify that the healer has fallen [Il. XI, 610-612]. Nestor had already carried Machaon off in great sorrow, for a healer is one man who is worth many men due to his unique ability to remove arrows and apply medicine [Il. XI, 514-515]. Achilles’ closest friend verifies the fact that Machaon has been struck [Il. XI, 650]. Patroclus himself heals Eurypilus [Il. XII, 2; Il. XV, 394]. We should notice that the original intent for Patroclus to leave Achilles’ camp and enter the melee is concern over Machaon’s absence due to injury in battle.  But offering aid to the fallen is not enough for noble Patroclus. The hero, weeping bitterly, returns to Achilles. The great warrior scolds his friend for crying like a little girl [Il. XVI, 7]. At this point in the narrative Patroclus ushers forth a bitter reprimand to Achilles. His parents cannot be Thetis and Peleus, but rather the grey sea and the jagged cliffs must have engendered him [Il. XVI, 33-35]. Then noble Patroclus asks Achilles for his armor and weapons so he can return to battle in his stead to frighten the Trojans into thinking that he is him [Il. XVI, 41].[20] Events leading to Achilles’ return to battle originate in the wounding of Machaon, the healer. Patroclus assumes the role of savior.

Achilles considers Patroclus’ request seriously. His response outlines in detail the nature of his stance and sets the tone for what follows. In his answer to Patroclus, Achilles expresses resentment because Agamemnon had placed him in the role of a “dishonored outcast” [Il. XVI, 59]. The hero had referred to himself by using the same self-deprecating epithet in his answer to Ajax’s plea begging him to return to the battlefield during the Embassy from Agamemnon in the Ninth Book [Il. IX, 648]. Repetition of the exact same term, ἀτίμητον μετανάστην, [21] reveals how greatly Achilles feels contempt for the role of suppliant, customarily adopted by someone seeking proper redress from a wrong suffered. As he sends Patroclus, wearing his own armor, to take his place in the fighting, Achilles tells his dear friend to come back to his encampment as soon as the Trojans are close to the ships [Il. XVI, 95]. His wish is that, at the moment preceding the instance of ultimate disastrous defeat for the Argives, he can claim to be the Greeks’ savior along with Patroclus [Il. XVI, 100]. Here pride transcends all rationale. Achilles must accept that he cannot reach the glory he craves in life; such is the nature of his prophetic death in youth. He must experience the loss of his alter ego, κεφαλῇ [Il. XVIII, 82], before he can accept the duty of his calling: to perform as the greatest warrior, regardless of reward. [22] In order to attain eternal glory, he must not deny his share in mortality. His friend cannot avoid demise. Patroclus’ death at the hands of Hector is the loss Achilles must suffer to realize who he is. Fame in unison with his best friend is a reward in the afterlife. Dying young with glory includes foregoing the pleasures of old age among mortals. Their heroic triumph is not terrestrial.

Hector is another victim who must perish in the story to outline the sacrificial nature of mimetic desire in Homer. The noble warrior is a character who places family matters first. [23] This role prevails when Hector mourns fallen heroes in Book XIII [Il. XIII, 769-773]. He reprimands Paris as a womanizer but refrains from going any further. Paris retorts that Hector should not “blame the blameless,” ἀναίτιον αἰτιάασθαι [Il. XIII, 775]. The noble warrior acquiesces, yet the subsequent death of Hector constitutes a great tragedy. Mirroring Briseis’ lament over Patroclus, Helen starts her litany over Hector’s corpse by considering herself the wife of Paris:

Hector, of all my lord’s brothers dearest by far to my spirit:
my husband is Alexandros, like an immortal, who brought me
here to Troy; and I should have died before I came with him;
and here now is the twentieth year upon me since I came
from the place where I was, forsaking the land of my fathers. In this time
I have never heard a harsh saying from you, nor an insult.
No, but when another, one of my lord’s brothers or sisters, a fair-robed
wife or some brother, would say a harsh word to me in the palace,
or my lord’s mother – but his father was gentle always, a father
indeed – then you would speak and put them off and restrain them.
I mourn for you in sorrow of heart and mourn myself also
and my ill luck. There was no other in all the wide Troad
who was kind to me and my friend; all others shrank when they saw me.                                        

Ἕκτορ ἐμῷ θυμῷ δαέρων πολὺ φίλτατε πάντων,
ἦ μέν μοι πόσις ἐστὶν Ἀλέξανδρος θεοειδής,
ὅς μ᾽ ἄγαγε Τροίηνδ᾽: ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλον ὀλέσθαι.
ἤδη γὰρ νῦν μοι τόδε εἰκοστὸν ἔτος ἐστὶν
ἐξ οὗ κεῖθεν ἔβην καὶ ἐμῆς ἀπελήλυθα πάτρης:
ἀλλ᾽ οὔ πω σεῦ ἄκουσα κακὸν ἔπος οὐδ᾽ ἀσύφηλον:
ἀλλ᾽ εἴ τίς με καὶ ἄλλος ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἐνίπτοι
δαέρων ἢ γαλόων ἢ εἰνατέρων εὐπέπλων,
ἢ ἑκυρή, ἑκυρὸς δὲ πατὴρ ὣς ἤπιος αἰεί,
ἀλλὰ σὺ τὸν ἐπέεσσι παραιφάμενος κατέρυκες
σῇ τ᾽ ἀγανοφροσύνῃ καὶ σοῖς ἀγανοῖς ἐπέεσσι.
τὼ σέ θ᾽ ἅμα κλαίω καὶ ἔμ᾽ ἄμμορον ἀχνυμένη κῆρ:
οὐ γάρ τίς μοι ἔτ᾽ ἄλλος ἐνὶ Τροίῃ εὐρείῃ
ἤπιος οὐδὲ φίλος, πάντες δέ με πεφρίκασιν.
[Il. XXIV, 762-775] [24]

To justify her legitimate claim to mourn for Hector, Helen calls Paris her husband, πόσις [Il. XXIV, 763]. [25] In describing her life at Troy Paris’ siblings become Helen’s brothers-in-law, δαέρων  [Il. XXIV, 769]. Among them Hector is her kindest benefactor. Helen feels guilt and wishes she had died before coming to Troy [Il. XXIV, 764]. Hector’s protection of Helen extends to the treatment he expected her to receive as an equal, among his other relatives. Alliance to the family legitimizes her presence as a companion to Paris at Troy. Helen alludes to a difference between Hecuba and Priam, this difference is most obvious when Hecuba discloses her bitterness over Hector’s death.[26] Although Hector reprimands Paris, he welcomes Helen to the family. In her mournful elegiac speech, she expresses intense gratitude for Hector’s unique kindness.

Patroclus and Hector fall as victims sacrificed to the mimetic double bind conflict among embittered rivals over Briseis and Helen. The dispossession of Achilles’ Briseis, identified as the warrior’s prize [Il. I, 185], mirrors the legendary abduction of Helen by Paris while a guest at Menelaus’ court, presumed cause for the Trojan war. Upon seizing Briseis, Agamemnon indirectly aligned himself with the enemy, hence justifying Achilles’ struggle for differentiation through rightful indignation – even though Briseis herself was obtained by the great warrior upon his slaying of her husband, conforming to the typical acquisition of spoils in fair battle during persistent warfare in a primitive tribal society. The deaths of Hector and Patroclus fulfill the ransom exacted by the desires of Paris for Helen and Agamemnon for Briseis, respectively. Perhaps the most damning reference to Helen as direct cause for the conflict is the bitter, open lamentation of Achilles when he mourns the death of Patroclus in Book XIX. The hero exclaims that neither the death of his aged father, Peleus, nor that of his son Neoptolemus, not even his own death, in a foreign land “over horrible Helen,” εἵνεκα ῥιγεδανῆς Ἑλένης, could grieve him more than Patroclus’ death [Il. XIX, 325]. In the Iliad Achilles is destined to suffer punishment for his resentful, and costly, withdrawal from battle by enduring the loss of Patroclus.

The expurgation of Achilles’ anger, Menis, is the central theme of the Iliad, as Homer tells us by choosing the term as the first word of the poem.[27] The price demanded by fate comes to fruition in Book XVIII of the Iliad. Voegelin believes that: “the drama of the cholos hinges on the death of Patroclus; with the death of his friend the obsession of Achilles falls apart, and the reality of life and order is restored.”[28] Achilles’ return to the fighting involves recognition that Agamemnon had infuriated him, ἐχόλωσεν [Il. XVIII, 111]. Hector must die to avenge the slain Patroclus; and Achilles must fight and face his own death. The great warrior deeply laments the toll exacted by fate due to his refusal to join the melee: loss of his close friend, φίλης κεφαλῆς [Il. XVIII, 114].[29] Voegelin considers the dialogue between Achilles and his mother, the nymph-goddess Thetis, lines [Il. XVIII, 78-126] where Homer expounds on the reasons for the hero’s return to the fighting, central to the narrative; the critic calls this passage “the psychological masterpiece of the Iliad.” [30] Yet the epic does not end here, despite this climactic peak. Achilles returns to the fighting because Patroclus has died, and the great hero wants to join his friend in the afterlife. He wants Hector dead and is ready to die himself soon, fulfilling the prophecy that rules his destiny as warrior, if Hector pays for Patroclus’ death. Patroclus’ shade tells Achilles that death is near, and both their ashes must be placed in the same urn [Il. XXIV, 91-92]. There is a new test for the measure of Achilles’ indignation. His vengeance must reach a true measure, commensurate with the suffering caused by Patroclus’ death. Revenge over Patroclus’ death gains significance when balanced by the loss of Hector, his slayer.

Achilles slays Hector, yet the Trojan leader’s body cannot be disfigured while being dragged around mercilessly by Achilles. The gods prevent decomposition until Priam arrives to ransom the princely corpse of his warrior son. The moment of requital harkens back to the early scene when Briseis is taken. At that moment Achilles is restrained by Athena from drawing his sword against Agamemnon [Il. I, 194-195]. Gans reminds us that: “The wrath of Achilles is no mere model of the Greek’s wrath against Troy for the theft of Helen. It is an expression of resentment, not of heroic rivalry, and its effect is to transform the heroic narrative into literature.”[31] Achilles’ refusal to battle Agamemnon is explained: “The necessary choice of ‘wrath’ over violence is an archetypal genesis of resentment.”[32]  Thus, the Iliad starts with the proposal to dwell on the hero’s anger. Likewise, at the end of the epic, Achilles must subdue his wrath and restrain from striking down Priam when the Trojan king insists on displaying excessive eagerness to bury Hector’s corpse while he is a guest at the hero’s tent [Il. XXIV, 560-570]. The king must bargain patiently for his son’s body, so it can be taken back to Troy for public burial. Achilles grants a grieving father the body of his slain son, which is the hero’s battle trophy.[33] Each party has a notion different  from what the other is getting, but the transaction is effectuated.

Gans mentions that the Iliad, today a work of fiction, was earlier recited at religious festivals as the equivalent of “oral scripture.”[34] Voegelin compares composition of the Biblical narrative and the Homeric epic by explaining that the “traditional-historical” method in the former and the “oral composition” of the latter make the architecture and meaning of the works compatible.[35] In the Biblical narrative religious practice includes instructions on how to worship and how to live.[36]  The Homeric epic could also express beliefs and customs generally seen in the context of religion and law. Burial of Hector’s corpse brings together the will of the gods and the customary respect owed the dead.[37]

Priam and Achilles share an intimate dialogue in which the warrior observes that the condition of mortals is intrinsically much different from the gods’ stance as immortals:

Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals,
That we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.[38]

ὡς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι
ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις: αὐτοὶ δέ τ᾽ ἀκηδέες εἰσί. [Il. XXIV,525-526]

The gods spin the web for human sorrow, while they themselves remain aloof from the bereavement endured by the loss of a loved one. Priam has lost Hector; Achilles has lost Patroclus. Destiny brings the king and the warrior together. The mutual intimacy evoked in the confrontation between Priam and Achilles is crucial. Woeful anguish unites them in lamentation. Priam wants his son’s corpse to take to Troy for public mourning; Achilles must turn over Hector’s corpse to subdue his anger and put away his thirst for vengeance. Although each party in the agreement gets something different from what the other bargains for, Hector’s corpse is ransomed.[39] The Trojan warrior’s corpse represents the additional third element in a contractual transaction; besides offer and acceptance, there must exist just compensation so that both contracting parties can seal a pact.[40] Hector’s corpse becomes a metaphor for proper consideration; such is a possible early source for an essential element in civilized trade.[41]

We should become aware that the impending death of Achilles, prominent in the legend, is not a tragedy included in the Iliad, any more than the actual abduction of Helen is, nor is the fall of Troy. But by drawing a strong quadrangular equivalence between a) Agamemnon’s quarrel with Achilles over Briseis, with the resulting loss of Patroclus, and b) the strife of Menelaus against Paris over Helen, with the subsequent death of Hector, the ransom for desire is redeemed by both sides. In this transposition Homer draws back from the Iliad scenario, with Achilles’ wrath as central focus, to the cause for the War’s inception in the legend due to the abduction of Helen. With the ransom of Hector’s corpse, the issue of Achilles’ wrath is finally resolved. Hector’s sacrifice recalls Patroclus’ death. In the bitterly ironic balance of war, Hector had slayed Patroclus [Il. XVII, 821]. Priam’s loss reminds Achilles of the loss his own father, Peleus, must also suffer when his son dies away from home.[42] Within confines of the epic narrative Homer does not let his choice of topic become either obscure or distant from the legendary themes. Hector and Patroclus as noble victims are not sacrificed in vain to blind desire. Priam and Achilles subdue the desperation engendered by a cruel destiny to wrench from grief a conceptual basis for the endurance of societal commerce. As symbol for proper consideration Hector’s corpse leaves an indelible mark in the development of commercial trade in Western civilization. The concluding scene of the epic shows the burial of Hector’s body, object of a peaceful transaction between sworn enemies. The profound significance establishes relevance for study of the oral epic beyond the realm of literature. At the end of the Iliad the frantic nature of heroic struggle merges into the legal framework for contractual exchange.

In this study, I explore some differences between the ideas of Eric Gans and those of René Girard concerning the identity and role of “violence” in human affairs. Girard has made negative remarks about the originary hypothesis proposed by Gans; Gans has questioned Girard’s concept of the scapegoat mechanism (End 135-45; “René Girard”; Scenic 163-69). Although I will identify and probe certain impediments to dialogue in what follows, I trust that in the end it will be clear that the escalation of a mutually negating rivalry is not my goal. I will, however, open provokingly, with an ironic thesis intended to capture the attention of those “Girardians” who have subscribed to the orthodox teaching that permits an easy dismissal of Gans as a “social contract” thinker: there is more “violence” in the originary event of Eric Gans than in the scapegoat mechanism of Girard.

That thesis counters René Girard’s most public dismissal of generative anthropology, which I will assume stands still as his most influential verdict on the question of whether Gans’s work deserves the attention of thinkers interested in “mimetic theory.”  In Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (2008), we can read accounts of seven chapter-length interviews Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha conducted with René Girard in 1995, 1999, and 2003 (12n3). In a chapter titled “The Symbolic Species” (69-96), in its closing section (88-92), they give Girard the opportunity to pass judgment on the originary hypothesis. They quote a passage from the “Introduction” chapter in Gans’s Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology (1993). Here is some of Girard’s response. I will quote it at length, because this study will seek to identify and untangle some of the misunderstandings to which the dismissal might well give rise.

Secondly, why should this “fearful symmetry” make violence really impossible?  How can a simple gesture, regardless of how ostensible it may be, prevent the mimetic doubles from killing each other? As if violence did not exist! It is another way of denying violence. I think this is, again, a rhetorical manoeuvre to negate the primacy of religion in human culture. If one accepts Gans’s hypothesis, then all other forms of social contract have also to be accepted. In order to have language, an embryonic form of culture is needed, some kind of cultural sheltering from violence. There must already be a non-linguistic solution to the problem of violence, which inevitably is a religious solution, and that [non-linguistic solution] is the result of the scapegoating mechanism, of the spontaneous grouping against an arbitrary common victim….

. . .

We cannot do away with the actual killing of a victim. This is the moment of supreme crisis. The moment when the group should be most willing to give up violence—the moment of maximum undifferentiation, when pure revenge is working at all levels—is also the moment when they can least give up violence, because they are angry, and their fury gets the best of them. At this stage—at the moment of supreme rage, supreme excitement, when you are out of your mind, ecstatic in the way of violence—there is no scope, no possibility for social contracts. This is the problem with Gans: he minimizes violence, for he suggests an entirely linguistic form of dealing with violence. Indeed, he simply suppresses violence, and he envisages an embryonic social contract. Rather, I posit it [violence] at the very centre as far as the beginning of culture is concerned. (89)

It must be confessed that those habituated to thinking in the way of Eric Gans may struggle even to make sense of some of Girard’s remarks.

Let us begin with the fact that Gans’s originary thinking assumes that sign exchange initiates culture. Therefore, Girard’s idea of an “embryonic form of culture” or a “cultural sheltering from violence” operating prior to symbolic exchange will to us appear to be a self-contradiction. What kind of culture, even “embryonic,” could precede symbolic exchange? To answer that question, one may observe that some anthropologists count as “culture” the collective learning in animal groups of behaviours not genetically programmed but transmitted intergenerationally. For purely Girardian mimetic theory, such learning without words counts as culture. For originary thinking downstream from the hypothesis Gans offers, such learning does not count as culture (van Oort, “Critic” 88-89). At the same time, not to exaggerate differences, let us notice that Gans’s originary event does presuppose “learning” without words prior to the emergence of symbolic culture. It presupposes the scenic centrality of an animal victim of collective hunting behaviour. Getting a bit of dirt on generative anthropology’s own conceptual purities, we can concede that the cognitive capacities that contributed to the hunt’s success might be labelled a kind of pre-symbolic “culture.”  So much depends on a definition of “culture.”

The chances of misunderstanding created by incommensurate vocabularies continue with another of Girard’s formulations: that contained in the phrase a “non-linguistic solution to the problem of violence, which is inevitably a religious solution.” A disciple of Gans will probably be stumped by the idea of a “religious solution” that is at once a “non-linguistic solution.” Just as Girard assumes culture may pre-exist language, he lets religion pre-exist language. But what kind of “religion” could function without words? How would it co-ordinate pre-symbolic action? How can “religion” pre-exist a minimally self-aware human naming of a sacred Other? There may be answers to those questions, but the answers would emerge only after we become comfortable with the fact that Girard’s version of the process of hominization includes many pictures of unself-conscious ritual action that deserve, for him and his followers, the label “religion.” Once again, to quiet rather than exacerbate the dissonance that increases chances of misunderstanding, we might concede that the protohumans tangled up in the earliest spontaneous scapegoating episodes were being named, although not doing themselves any naming. But the originary thinker more in tune with the thought patterns of Gans will be asking, does the branded cow own the symbol burnt into its side?

Girard in the quoted passage complains also that Gans’s originary hypothesis proposes and remains satisfied with “an entirely linguistic form of dealing with violence.” The accusation is unfounded to the extent that the very concept of “violence” that preoccupies Girard so deeply, the violence of mindless collective murder, does not preoccupy Gans. In other words, Girard’s implication that Gans is asking us to focus our attention on the emergence of a “linguistic form” is fair. But to presuppose that the problem of “violence” to which Gans is posing a solution is specifically that of mindless collective murder is not fair. Rather, we might observe, Gans is interested in the problem of the origin of minimally self-conscious collective violence. Nowhere does Gans, as Girard does or at least risks doing, anthropomorphize the “ecstatic in the way of violence” primate hordes from which we have descended ever so gradually. On the contrary, in seeking the origin of representation, of language, of symbolic culture itself, Gans seeks the origin of anthropomorphism itself.

In perhaps the most revealing of his sentences in the quoted passage, René Girard owns boldly the way that his project seeks not to construct a plausible model of the originary minimally self-conscious human subject, but rather to theorize the model of a process to which all human animals are subjected.

Religion is a structure without a subject, because the subject is the mimetic principle. I think one can have a purely realistic and materialistic interpretation of [religion]. (90)

The “religion” to which Girard alludes could bear no analogy to (say) animism or Daoism or Judaism or Christianity or even, as in originary thinking, the event of a glimmering of self-transcendence based in the event of the sacralization of a food object collectively remembered. It could bear no such analogy because to provide a “purely realistic and materialistic interpretation” of the events on which such religions base themselves would prove undoable. For generative anthropology, the exchangeable sign itself is not a “purely… materialistic” thing, and so the notion of a “purely… materialistic” interpretation of it seems implausible. For Gans, the exchangeable sign may be interpreted in a purely “realistic” mode, yes. But for Gans, the exchangeable sign once it emerges in nature—Nature?—is that which creates a new level of reality emergent from the purely material.

It might seem unfair of me to deploy repetitiously the phrase “mindless collective murder” as a label for the initial event in the model of hominization that Girard proposes, to the extent that from the mindlessness, in Girard’s way of thinking, human mind gradually, very gradually in the orthodox Darwinian mode of the accumulation of small differences, emerges. But let us pause over Girard’s rhetoric in the quoted passage above, to remind ourselves how attached he wishes his followers to be to the primordiality of the spectacle of shocking bloodshed, intense anger, mob-like brutality, and physiological damage: “maximum undifferentiation… pure revenge… fury… supreme rage [and] supreme excitement, when you are out of your mind, ecstatic in the way of violence.” Now how does human mind come out of such a behavioral melee, or emerge from such a state of things? Well, once the arbitrarily chosen victim is killed, so Girard proposes, all the members of the community feel a peace. Without the inclusion of that subsequent-to-the-frenzy feeling or sensation of peace, the description of the scapegoat mechanism is incomplete. It is the feeling of peace that makes the community feel grateful, and it is the feeling of peace that makes the community of protohumans attribute to the body of the cadaver a sacrality the origins of which they misrecognize. I want to pause here, because mimetic theory invests so very heavily in the positivist truth of that claim of what must have happened repeatedly over many thousands of years of prelinguistic protohuman ritual action: maximal murderous fury succeeded by maximal peace. The transition from maximal violence to maximal (and misunderstood) peace is essential to all descriptions of the scapegoat mechanism at work on the ground. The prelinguistic feeling of peace is strong and decisive, as formidable in impact as is the felt chaos and madness of the prelinguistic “violence” that precedes it.

Another point needs to be made before we turn to a description of the different model of violent energies that Eric Gans hypothesizes and invites us to imagine in human origins. For mimetic theory, the first symbol is not performed by the hominid body; it is not anything performed by a self-conscious agent. I confess that fact is perhaps the biggest obstacle to my feeling satisfied by or at ease with Girard’s account of human origins. For Girard, the originary symbol is not a spectator’s performed representation of the single victim cadaver; rather, the originary symbol is the dead body itself in the center of the scene. Girard asks us to see the body in the scenic center itself as the signifier, the material thing that signifies; and the inventory of collective memories produced by it becomes the signified (Things Hidden 103).

By contrast, in Gans’s originary scene, the dead body at the center of the scene (and it is most often imagined as a hunted animal, a food object) is not a signifier but a referent. The signs are abortive gestures exchanged by the earliest human animals on the periphery of the scenic circle; they are gestures which represent that central object-body-referent. Girard’s notion that the cadaver itself is the first sign reminds me of a moment from book III of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. One of the projects to which Lemuel Gulliver’s hosts at the Academy of Lagado introduce him is “a Scheme for abolishing all Words whatsoever” (157). Despite some resistance from the common people, Gulliver reports, some academicians try to do without words by simply carrying about the things that those words represent:

…many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man’s Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. (157)

For Girard, the cadaver is the Thing that “expresses” and makes visible “the mimetic principle” (“Religion is a structure without a subject, because the subject is the mimetic principle”). And the cadaver does its strange, silent work without any words being spoken or symbols being performed on the scene. The cadaver, I suggest, is the thing which pure mimetic theory (detached from originary thinking) will have to carry about as a substitute for the word that might have (in another form of event) replaced it.

Three Reminders

In wondering why so many readers find René Girard’s model of emissary murder attractive while comparatively few attend to Gans’s far less dramatic and shocking version of originary events, I hope I am not being cynical when I suspect that those who seize upon the model’s intuitive appeal are moved by certain moral intuitions; and I rush to include myself in that group, for I have felt and will continue to feel the self-situating appeal of the idea that humankind originates in countless episodes of mindless collective murder. “Violence is ugly,” René Girard judged when interviewed by David Cayley of the CBC. Who would disagree? Who wants to be on the side of violent unanimity, ganging up all against one and killing a living being?

That which makes Girard’s model of human origins deeply disturbing, however, is that which makes it superficially morally attractive. Its superficial moral attractions function in the following way: by assenting to the hypothesis, we implicitly confess that, yes, however uncomfortable it makes us, we will gather under the umbrella of responsibility for our deep-seated propensity toward unspeakable cruelty and thoughtless atrocity, so as to help prevent the recurrence of such scenes and move toward being “on the side of victims.” Whatever we do, we do not want to participate in scapegoating. Again, who would disagree? Who is prepared to declare: “I like scapegoating. Can you please give me an opportunity to participate in some scapegoating?” By contrast, the originary event of Gans’s mimetic crisis altered by a hesitation that significantly reduces intraspecific violence is strikingly ascetic in terms of the dramatic intuitions it asks us to grasp.

I offer three reminders to point out the way indulging in the superficial moral attractions of an awareness of the “scapegoat mechanism” follows from a misreading of Girard. The first reminder is this: keeping distinct the form of spontaneous scapegoating from that of its sacrificial re-enactment, Girardian thought contains the paradox that (in the words of Guy Lefort) “…the only true scapegoats are those we cannot recognize as such” (Things Hidden i129). According to the model, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any of us to bring to individual awareness the deepest collective delusions in which our group-dependent identities originate and by which they are sustained. At one conference on mimetic theory I attended, there were distributed jacket-buttons with a symbol meaning “no more scapegoats!” The buttons were circular, maybe an inch in diameter; a little goat was surrounded by red circle and the diagonal “do not” slash cut across the scapegoat, barring it from access. “No more scapegoats!” I can sympathize with the motives for the advertising campaign, but it does represent a measure of conflict with the paradox that the only true scapegoats are the ones we do not recognize.  Those oblivious to the ineradicability of the scapegoat mechanism as psychological reality may well become tempted (if untutored) by the tee-shirts that display the painfully unironic slogan Hate the haters.

A second reminder is that, even at the level of the kind of conscious participation that comes with the advanced performance of rituals that contain violence (substituting for the incidents of mindless mob violence that they reconstruct through méconnaissance), the sacrificial treatment (expulsion, exclusion, murder) of the single victim can never be completely overcome on this side of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Just as the kingdom in which Jesus rules is not of this world, not in this world will we ever construct a society utterly free of “scapegoats.” It fascinates me that some of the most ostensibly pacifist communities, those populated by separatist apocalyptic Anabaptists, are among the communities most procedurally adept at rituals of full-scale sacrificial expulsion. Regardless, Girard was not a pacifist separatist; he was not a revolutionary utopian; nowhere does Girard project or promise a beatific state of nonviolence as the end-goal for the social order. Gans’s uncompromising impatience with “victimary thinking” in many of the Chronicles of Love and Resentment resembles not a little Girard’s critique of political correctness (I See Satan 161-93). Knowledge of the scapegoat mechanism, therefore, may not have that many consequences for pragmatic action, apart from the implication that we should do our best to follow Jesus, who would do us no violence and have us do no violence to one another. All the sound advice Luke Burgis offers in his delightful volume Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (2020) is, in a way, Christian wisdom tastefully plated for readers who would never wish to be churched.

And the call to follow Jesus brings me to a third reminder, the historiographical projection of Girard, which resembles a culture critique so deeply pessimistic it risks giving way to a counsel paralytic of hopeful good will. In the Girardian model, the Christian revelation, which exposes the scapegoat mechanism for what it is and makes human communities aware of the arbitrariness and amorality of their collective violence, the “innocence” of their victims, is a revelation that brings not peace but a sword. The scapegoat mechanism divides people because once members of human communities believe less and less in the innocence of their scapegoats, and the more the Christian revelation seeps into secular global society, there will follow less and less social cohesion (which needs insiders and outsiders) and more and more a disastrous increase in mimetic competition, indifferentiation, instability, that which Girard calls “internal mediation.” Given such negative consequences, it would perhaps be wise to wonder whether the mindless murderous frenzy with which Girard’s theory begins ends up pervading all the predictions it makes about our prospects for social order and human self-conceptualizing. It risks operating as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The only hope it offers is that which might follow a despairing awareness of our helplessness before the reality of our constitutive species’ “violence,” something to which our hypermimetic nature condemns us.

“Violence”: Damage-doing Aggressiveness or Immoral Performance?

Given even the negative consequences of Girard’s preoccupation with collective murder, let alone the positive investment the theory makes in it, how can I possibly argue that in the originary event brought to our attention by Eric Gans, there is more violence than that in the process of the mimetic evolution of culture proposed by Girard and his followers? I begin by starting from the position that “violence” properly speaking is more than destructive animal aggression, from the position that real “violence” must involve a measure—and I would alert all to the fact that in Gans’s originary event the measure is an absolutely minimal measure—a measure of self-aware intentional action. I will wonder whether some light might be shed by drawing a line between prehuman animal aggressiveness and genuinely human violence, which requires the knowing violation of prohibited scenic centers.

Let me therefore now climb onto the stony fence of refusal that Girard’s intimidating dismissal in the interview with Antonello and de Castro Rocha might well seem to have created. Sitting there in the way of a little-man Humpty Dumpty trembling with equal parts impudence and uncertainty in the face of Girard’s big-man declarations, I begin by asking explicitly whether “violence” worthy of the label requires something more than damage-doing animal aggression. Let us examine an account of “ambush killing” performed by chimpanzees. Melvin Konner offers the following summary in his chapter-contribution to Scott Garrels’ 2011 collection, Mimesis and Science.

 In a group of 150 chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park studied for five years, the critical mass was about 18. At about this number, the males would grow more excited until they went out into the forest in single file. On these expeditions they were uncharacteristically quiet, and they bypassed hunting opportunities along the way, until they crossed beyond the range of their own territory. If they then came upon a lone male from the neighbouring group, they collectively beat this victim; on five different occasions, the beating was deadly. (159)

Given the quality of stealth in the chimpanzees’ goal-seeking and given the way such hunting-party ambush beatings did not always end with the death of the assault victim, I do not share Konner’s summary description of the episode to invite comparison between it and the hypothetical scapegoat mechanism fleshed into dramatic form. But let us ask: do we attribute to the chimpanzees’ performance a moral intention? Yes, the violence is ugly, to pass an esthetic judgment. It is an unequal contest so damaging to its victim that it must feel “bad” to us. But at the same time, it lacks something which is, ironically, even more lacking in the frenzied violence in Girard’s scapegoat mechanism.

What is that something? I poach a bit of wisdom from the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, who has engaged respectfully with Girard’s thought on multiple occasions (On Human 128-33; The West 35-37; Soul 18-22, 180-82; Political 126-41: Uses 76-77, 202-203).

It is not the difference of species that I endow with moral significance, when I distinguish people from other animals. It is rather the difference between a moral being, who lives as the subject and object of judgment, and a non-moral being, who merely lives. (Political 50)

For Scruton, philosophical reflection leads us to appreciate that our human being is not reducible to our species being: anthropology cannot be reduced to biology. Generative anthropology would welcome and endorse that appreciation. That we are moral beings does not mean we are “good.” It means only that we are capable of making practical judgments about “good” and “bad” courses of action. Gans has frequently argued that the specifically human intuition of moral reciprocity emerged alongside the originary exchange of signs (Originary 31-61).

It is true that the violence in the originary event Gans hypothesizes is not a violence assimilable to that of Girard’s mindless mob frenzy. On that point, I have no objection to Girard’s impatience with his student’s decision not to identify fully with the teacher’s version of the originary scene. However, it can be only (at best) an inattentive misrepresentation to imply that the emergence of Gans’s abortive gesture of appropriation assimilates to social contract theory, to the discredited picture of man-like creatures already endowed with reason who deliberate to decide what they had better do to co-operate. In what follows, I hope to show that, not unlike the idea of the scapegoat mechanism, the originary hypothesis invests deeply in the “violent” irrationality of pragmatic paradox and morphogenetic processes, and that there is a way in which there is more violence in the originary event of Gans than there is in the scapegoat mechanism of Girard.

Morphogenesis and Gans’s Originary Event of Violence

I have begun to introduce myself to the ideas of self-organization and morphogenesis in mimetic theory. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a disciple of Girard who resembles Gans partly in that he too is a thinker fond of paradox and invested in paradoxical binds as constitutive of social origins, has helped with that introduction. The paradoxical elements in Gans’s originary event bear some similarities to a process of morphogenesis. Here is one account of the mimetic process as morphogenesis that Dupuy offers in his essay “Naturalizing the Mind.”

Mimetic rivalry and the object of conflicting desires determine each other; neither [rivalry nor the object] preexists the other. The actions that reveal the converging desires cause them [those desires] to emerge and intensify. Desire does not preexist action. There is a feedback loop of action onto desire. (198)

The process that Dupuy there describes fits very nicely with the process in Gans’s originary event. It fits nicely partly because Gans’s understanding of Girard’s thought is every bit as thorough, deep, and respectful as is Dupuy’s understanding of it. Skeptics might jump up and say: “Not so: Gans places an appetitive food object in the originary event, so the object does preexist the rivalry in his model and that is his mistake!” The objection would be misplaced. The point of the originary hypothesis is to explain not the mechanism by which the surrounded animal victim of hominid hunts appears, but rather, the mechanism by which such a “victim” becomes a represented object, a transcendent object of purely human desire and exceptionally human resentment. And it is the case that according to the originary hypothesis the sacralized food object is a fruit of nothing but the kind of double mediation that Jean-Pierre Dupuy above describes. The food object sacralized (as opposed to the object of mere animal appetite and prelinguistic mimesis) does not preexist the mimetic paradox at the event of human language origin.

When Dupuy elaborates on the way Girard’s superimposed mimetic triangles come to create new objects, again the description fits the emergence of the abortive gesture of appropriation considered as itself an object:

Now, the starting point of the emergence of the object possesses an apparently contradictory twofold property: it is nothing or almost nothing, a je ne sais quoi; a caprice, a chance encounter; and yet, it plays a crucial role, since everything takes place as if it were the thing that “determined” the object, the “objective” reality that is to emerge. There is a beginning, but the beginning is evanescent; there is determinism, but the determining factor is in the final instance… beyond grasp. (198)

It helps to think of Gans’s originary sign, the abortive gesture of appropriation, a performance visible in bodily form, as itself a new “object,” a new thing in nature the “determining factor” the emergence of which is also “in the final instance… beyond grasp.”  The abortive gesture of appropriation is physical; the abortive gesture of appropriation is visible and perceptible; it is a performance that occupies space and takes time. And yet the abortive gesture of appropriation is at the beginning “nothing or almost nothing.” It is the representation of a minimal hesitation; it is a gesture less extended than the pointing gesture of appetite it replaces. Seen from the outside, it would appear “a caprice, a chance encounter”; if we were to ask what caused the first sign user to “come up with it,” we could not appeal to the laws of physics or chemistry or biological necessity alone. There is nothing external to the mimetic paradox that makes it have to happen: “the determining factor is in the final instance… beyond grasp.” Therefore, I will be so bold as to suggest that when in the interview quoted above René Girard accused Eric Gans of engaging in “social contract” theory, Girard may have been (ironically) underappreciative of the fidelity to the principle of mimesis in Gans’s deployment of his teacher’s ideas. Girard for whatever reasons appears to have closed himself to the possibility that intellectual and spiritual labour might have been shared between the mimetic paradox at work in the mindless collective murder of scapegoating and the same at work in the mind-generating originary violence of Gans’s language event.

In Gans’s originary event, there is first pure animal violence or, to speak Girardian, acquisitive mimesis in the presence of a freshly killed food object, an object of appetite. There is mutual imitation at an ethological level, prelinguistic, in which animal appetite (not human sign-mediated desire) is the motivating factor. So prelinguistic mimesis does contribute to the conflict in the originary language event: those who wish for human origins to include the “prelinguistic,” who do not wish to start with language, should take comfort there. Furthermore, there is something that looks like prelinguistic “violence”; it is the psychological violence of escalating animal rivalry. This acquisitive mimesis escalates into conflictual mimesis, to use the Girardian category, because the rivals encircling the appetitively stimulating food object cannot share it without conflict. Again, the purist Girardian should take note: prelinguistic double mediation is at work, for the primate gestures that point toward the food object as an object of appetite are one kind of gesture; and such pointing gestures, prior to their truncation and diminishing in the emergence of renunciation of appetite, will escalate the rivalry. Now these appetite-driven gestures that point to the food object as an object of appetite are not—we must register—the abortive gesture of appropriation, the first linguistic sign. Inasmuch as Girard’s scapegoat mechanism asks us to picture a psychological state of intolerable, irresolvable tension in the modes of acquisitive and conflictual mimesis, the model of the originary event as Gans presents it borrows from Girard’s conceptual repertoire and contains an intolerable quantity of psychological violence that those preoccupied by the necessity of “fury” at the origin might find satisfying.

In Gans’s originary language event, there is no way the rivals will be able to satisfy their appetites or to abandon their conflictual mimesis. Either a collapse back into behavioral regulation through dominance hierarchies will return them to a state of pre-human primatological being, or they will rip each other to pieces and (to borrow a key phrase from Girard) fall into the trap of “losing sight of the object entirely and only being concerned with the model” (Things Hidden 311). Observe that, even before the emergence and “taking on” of Gans’s distinctive and new element of the abortive gesture of appropriation, the scene is loaded with tension, incompatible and escalating appetites, prelinguistic mimetic fury and the loss of degree, the breakdown of dominance hierarchies. I do not omit the fact that because the victim has already been killed, this “violence” might seem a scandal to Girardian thinking, which holds fast to the idea that furiously mob-mad collective killing itself is the thing that mysterious brings about its opposite peace. But I do ask those enthralled by the maximal violence-maximal peace opposition to attend a little to the deep similarities that still abide between the two ways of thinking.

When and how, according to Gans, does the originary sign of language, the abortive gesture of appropriation, enter into the “violence” of conflictual mimesis over the food object? Originary sign exchange “happens” when one of the participants—and there need be only two, if we wish to use the triangular version—”invents” the abortive gesture of appropriation and “discovers” thereby a feeling of minimal peace that hesitating before the food object creates. Where does the gesture come from? The abortive gesture alone may from one perspective be taken as the initially “random” equivalent in Gans’s scenic process of the “random” selection of the scapegoat in the orthodox Girardian mimetic hypothesis. I refer the reader to the fact mentioned above that from the “outside,” the emergence of the abortive gesture of appropriation appears random, but from the inside the rivals will eventually and gradually experience its effects as a form of self-organizing mediation of conflict. Gans posits that at the origin, the minimal hesitation—I repeat, minimal hesitation—would create a minimal reduction of mimetic tension. The mimetic double bind caused by acquisitive mimesis is reduced by the mutual mediation that “discovers” the beneficial peace-making effects of the sign, without any one of the participants, or either of the two rivals in the triangular version, fully understanding the process. It is not a model of the supernatural injection from the sky of pacific rationality into a situation of mimetic conflict. Once the abortive gesture is invented or discovered, and imitated, and its imitation imitated by the imitators of other imitators, more mimetic paradox and more mimetic escalation follow. What had been animal appetite for the central object now becomes sign-mediated human desire, properly speaking. Again, it is not a matter of social contract rationality; on the contrary, it is nothing other than mimetic escalation at work.

Language is born of mimesis in the thought of Eric Gans. Yet there in that fact is another risk of confusion caused by significant differences of vocabulary: the disciple of Gans when reading Girardian scholarship may feel a conceptual blurring in the ethologically inclined descriptions of “mimesis,” where what we would call “appetite,” an orthodox Girardian will happily label “desire.” For generative anthropology, strictly speaking, the slogan might be that where there is no language, there is no human desire. For us, the central food object becomes desirable only when sign-exchange substitutes briefly for the satisfaction of appetite, and as the signs continue to be exchanged, the central food object becomes more and more desirable. Originary sign exchange creates a kind of minimal peace before the sparagmos, because as long as we can re-present the object rather than appropriating the object, we are deferring our violence through representation. That is the formula in Gans: the function of language, of religion, of culture, is the deferral of violence through representation. Therefore, the “violence” between the peripheral rivals on the scene is reduced in these instants of minimal peace, minimal hesitation, before the consumption of the food object.

I beg the reader to notice that the “peace” is minimal; in terms of quantity of feeling, as it were, it is indeed much less than the powerful, awe-inspiring peace that follows the mob frenzy in the Girardian version of the originary process. Furthermore, the violence deferred locates itself in circulation between the rivals at the two corners of the triangle other than the one occupied by the food object; or, to use the structure of center and periphery, the violence deferred circulates between the protohuman sign-exchangers on the periphery of the circle and the food object occupies the contested central locus. It is inaccurate of Girard to claim that Gans’s model of the emergence of the sign is a “solution” to a problem; on the contrary, language itself is a new problem, to the extent that properly human desire with its infinite and in principle unsatisfiable transcendental capacity is far more problem-making than animal appetite, which is easily satisfied. Any environmental activist will eagerly explain the difference. Gans’s references to the deferral of violence are in no way references to the abolition of violence. It is unfair to caricature his model of human interaction as if it is suggesting that language comes out of nowhere and solves the problem of violence instantly. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

A Reading of “Originary Violence” in Signs of Paradox

In the tenth chapter of Signs of Paradox (1997), “Originary Violence,” Eric Gans more than a dozen times refers to the process of originary resentment accumulating an excess of energy that must eventually be discharged in the sparagmos. Now as “violence” is foundational to Girard, “resentment” is foundational to Gans. In originary thinking, desire says: I want to possess the scenic center and its contents for myself. Resentment says: whoever occupies the scenic center must get out of it and let me have it. Desire desires the center imagined as unoccupied by anyone other than the all-powerful, all-consuming usurping self. Resentment resents the occupant of the center, who (or which) appears to be an all-powerful obstacle to usurpation and consumption. Gans writes: “The moment of division discharges the mimetic tension that had been redirected from their fellow participants to the central object in the form of originary resentment” (Signs 133). In other words, although sign exchange creates some peace between agents on the periphery when they exchange signs (the deferral of violence through representation), sign exchange increases resentment of the central sacralized object conceived as a self-withholding agent.

The term “sparagmos” denotes the consumption of the food object. The consumption includes the tearing apart into pieces and dividing up of something that once was a living whole. Witness: there in that tearing up of the central food object, a tearing-up more violent than it would have been before the emergence of the sign, will be that which truly merits the name human “violence.”

In the following, Gans differentiates the energies operative in nonhuman aggression and those operative in the violence of sign-mediated sparagmatic damage.

The sign expels violence from the group by concentrating it against the central figure. In historical phenomena [such as the Dionysian rituals or Robertson-Smith’s camel sacrifice] … the violence of the action far exceeds that required for the rational division of the object; this excess is the measure of the specifically human phenomena of violence. (Signs 134) [emphasis added]

In this passage, we see the closest thing in the originary hypothesis to the “scapegoat mechanism” which exteriorizes the violent energies that were internal to the group and would have destroyed the group: “The sign expels violence from the group by concentrating it against the central figure.”  Notice that the division of the remains of the central food object entails an excess that goes beyond the rational. Once more, a fair-minded reader would be disinclined to project into such a model a latent social contract. Rather than establishing a rational script, the economic conclusion in the hypothetical originary event of Gans, as we shall see, is a conclusion almost overwhelmed by the excess of resentment—of “violence”—being discharged.

Before the mimetically tense sign exchangers on the periphery collapse into consumption of the central victim, their attention is oscillating between the sign-as-referring-to-the-object (their gestures) and the-object-as-referred-to-by-the-sign (the food object to which their gestures refer). That oscillation is a model of the first glimmerings of esthetic experience. Gans proposes that an analogous oscillation operates during the violence of collective consumption of the food object. This latter oscillation derives from a tension between restrained division—the will to preserve a memory of the sacred object as a formal whole—and unlimited defiguration—the will to obliterate all trace, all memory of the whole object.

Similarly, in the sparagmos, the rational appetitive operation of dividing the object is supplemented by the violent discharge of this tension in what is also a defiguration, a destruction of the very formal-esthetic closure that was imitated in the transformation of the appropriate gesture into a sign. (Signs 135)

A violent discharge that seeks to destroy the referent of language itself: does that not suffice to resemble something like what Girard was attached to under the sign of “pure fury”?  Regardless, let us translate the rather abstract formulation above into homelier terms. I invite us to think of it this way: we prepare food to eat; we cut things up, spice and sauce them, cook them; we dress the food and plate it, perhaps pray to a god before dishing it out and eating it. Compare the oblivious thoughtlessness inside which the robin chews up the worm, the eagle takes the lamb, the cheetah bites into the breathing oryx, the cow tugs out and chomps into the rough grass. The point is that once the human animal comes to name with exchangeable signs those things it eats, nothing—I say nothing—removes from its mind the minimal awareness of destroying another’s life to sustain one’s own. Thanks to the reality that we as humans unlike every other animal on the planet have come to represent such “victims” before consuming them, we as humans unlike every other animal on the planet have come to know the difference between eater and eaten. (It may be worth noticing that in the story of Adam and Eve, everything changes only when they eat an apple—not when they chop down the tree or pound the fruit’s pulp into juice in a mindless frenzy. Adam and Eve became aware of the knowledge of good and evil after simply… eating.) In Gans’s originary event, the awareness of the difference between eater and eaten founds ethical reflection. It may not be enough to define the human as the only animal that engages in artifactual representation; it is better to include the fact that as human animals we represent symbolically only those things that we consume; and to those things which we consume, we do “violence.” Anyone doubtful of this might ask any philosophically inclined vegan or fasting ascetic to explain.

I am suggesting that in Gans the invention/discovery of language itself has the cost of creating violence in the sense of opening the door to self-consciousness about and transcendental motives for “violence.” In the following formulation, Gans offers support for that suggestion.

The sparagmos shows that the originary deferral of potential violence through the sign was not free of cost; the resentment generated by this deferral provokes this supplementary violent discharge of mimetically bound energy when the deferral is terminated. (Signs 138) [emphasis added]

The minimal hesitation or peace enabled by sign exchange is renamed in the phrase “originary deferral of potential violence through the sign.” The minimal peace carries with it a “cost,” and that cost is a violence expended on the sacralized object that would not have been expended if the symbolic had not come into play. Therefore, language, although it creates that space of deferral that makes possible the human transcendence of purely mindless animal aggression, creates alongside itself an excess of “mimetically bound energy” that is discharged on the central sacred object.

Furthermore, we resent the objects we consume in proportion to the energy by which they appear to withhold themselves from our consumption: the sacred object is no less resented as a seeming cause of violence than desired as a source of transcendence. If all consumption itself is taken up as “violence,” is that not enough for the Girard-loyal skeptic attached to his master’s dismissal of the originary hypothesis to think twice before comfortably side-stepping any obligation to engage in dialogue with Gans by dismissing him as a “social contract” thinker who “minimizes” violence?

Furthermore, Eric Gans does not limit the inventory of items that might count as single “victims” in the scenic center to humans converted into meat for peace-bewildered cannibals. Every human everywhere must eat to live, but it is not true that everybody everywhere must confess to ancestry in cannibals only a few generations hence. The sacred center in originary thinking can be occupied by many objects, not just the human victims of collective murder: by a tract of land, by a mineral-rich mountain, by a fish-filled river, by a contested concept or item of intellectual property. The slogan Silence is Violence has recently enjoyed a vogue: we have reached the point where even the meaning of “silence” is a sacred central object we cannot help but tear to pieces. These facts too might help support the thesis that there is more “violence” in the originary event of Eric Gans than there is in the scapegoat mechanism of René Girard.

In the following formulation from the chapter, Gans quietly indicates that his model of anthropogenesis is not a model of the social contract by explicitly stating that the “state of nonviolence” that language initiates is not durable.

The criterion of parsimony would indeed be violated by any model that required a durable state of nonviolence as a consequence of the emission of the originary sign. The sparagmos is the originary violent act, for violence is conceivable only within the human order of representation. (Signs 142)

The Girard-loyalist skeptic may be puzzled by the claim “violence is conceivable only within the human order of representation.” We confront another crossroad at which confusion is created by the branching apart of different concepts of “violence.” Which way to take? In the phrase “conceivable only within the human order of representation,” Gans is not saying that humans are incapable of mindless mob violence; he is neither naïve nor oblivious to our capacity for atrocious cruelty. Nor is he implying that ethologists never witness “animal violence” in the field, although, as I have hinted, much clarity would follow if all nonhuman “violence” were renamed aggression and we ceased anthropomorphizing nonhuman animal aggression, which should not carry with it any connotation of moral judgment. To grasp Gans’s sentence, it is best to interpret rather flat-footedly the verb “to conceive.” The idea is that we cannot conceive our violence, think about our violence, name it, reflect upon it, remember it, become self-conscious about it or become morally responsible for it, even at the most basic level of reflective intuition, unless we are “within the human order of representation”—unless we are minimally equal as language users, exchangers of the sign, unless the victim can name itself to the persecutor as if capable of belonging to the realm of words and the persecutor can “hear” the name of the victim. Until we are “within the human order of representation,” we do not have human violence. One of the things that a real dialogue between Gans and Girard might eventually help to clarify is that the scapegoat mechanism at work in the earliest stages of human history, prior to language, is named “violence” only at the cost of risking the slide from a sensible esthetic judgment to an unreasoned moral judgment. Is aggressive harmful damage done to a physical body the only thing we need to name the action “violence”? Is all intraspecific aggression “violence”?

As the chapter “Originary Violence” proceeds, Gans shifts his lexical choices a little and the term “aggression” comes into play. I believe the shift is significant; it reflects the sharpening of Gans’s sense that the deferral of violence through representation by implication recommends regathering images of anthropomorphized “violence” done by nonhuman languageless creatures under a different label.

In resentment, the aggression deferred by the sign is accumulated within the new human order in preparation for its discharge in the sparagmos, which [discharge] is indispensable to the successful conclusion of the event. (Signs 145) [emphasis added]

The “delusion,” if you like, that the mimetic paradox in the originary event creates is the feeling or belief in the rivals that the object is an agency or personhood withholding itself. Gans’s counterpart to Girardian méconnaissance occurs here: the deferral of violence through representation creates the misrecognized sacred. As I argued above, only with difficulty can the cadaver alone in Girard’s scene be considered an agential source of prohibitions and ritual prescriptions; or we can say that it is really that, but only in the remembering minds of the mimetic subjects emerging in the aftermath of violence. In the same way, we can say that the food object in Gans’s scene is not really an agential source of self-withholding power; or we can say that it is really that, but only in the minds of the mimetic subjects emerging in scenic conflict.  Mimetic desire, mimetic paradox, and méconnaissance operate in both cases.

In the end, Gans associates his hypothetical model of the origin of language with the theological model of the decisive separation of humankind from “nature” in the paradox of the fortunate fall. Before moving to our final quotation in this series, and the longest, recall that the violence expended on the sacralized food object results from the méconnaissance entangled with the paradox-induced belief in its self-withholding. The violence is directed toward the seeming “personhood” of the center which, in reality, is nothing other than the morphogenetic result of the statistical accumulation of abortive gestures of appropriation being exchanged. Now although the originary human animals in their sacrificial violence (in the sparagmos) tear up, divide, and destroy by eating the single slain animal in the center, the experience has been sufficiently powerful—and that powerfulness may be taken as a counterpart in Gans of the “peace” that follows the mob violence in Girard’s scapegoat mechanism—sufficiently powerful that the participants will recall the now-empty center of the scene as a locus or site of significance.

The happy failure of this resentful aim [the aim to obliterate the center entirely] becomes manifest only after the event, in the subsistence of the sign and of the central locus as the support of its significance. Interpersonal aggression has failed in its ultimate aim: the sacred person has remained intact. The universe of signification has saved the human community from returning to animality. We are justified in calling aggression against the central being “evil” even in the purely human sense of “antisocial.” But our analysis also makes clear that evil in the latter sense [the purely human sense of “antisocial”] is a derivative notion: in the absence of the central guarantee of communal loyalty referred to by the sign, aggression, intraspecific or otherwise, would be merely an animal phenomenon. (Signs 52)

Permit me to add the implied inversion: In the presence of the central guarantee of communal loyalty referred to by the sign, human aggression becomes a thing different in kind and merits the name “violence.”  It merits the name because only it carries within itself the infinity of a “violence” that transcends anything conceivable in the animal kingdom, because we are capable of reflecting on the violence that we do but we do it anyway; and doing it anyway, even though we can represent it to ourselves, is the thing which definitely separates human violence from mindless animal aggression and—yes—separates it from the mindless collective murder of the scapegoat mechanism. The aim of obliterating the sacred center of the originary scene is the project of destroying God. Girardians are often theological thinkers, so I ask: is there a desire more violent than the desire to obliterate God? Once again, we have an opportunity to observe that there is more violence in the originary event hypothesized by Eric Gans than there is in the scapegoat mechanism proposed by René Girard.

Girard’s accusation that Gans fails to appreciate the power of violence in anthropogenesis because he is proposing a model of the origin of language as a solution to the problem of violence is, I hope it has become clear, at least a little unfortunately misleading. So much depends on how one conceptualizes “violence.” For Girard, any conflictual mimetic behavior whatsoever, including damaging competitive behaviors of cats and dogs and geese and fish, may well deserve the name “violence.” By contrast, Eric Gans is from the beginning seeking a model to describe and explain only that “violence” given to our specifically human self-consciousness, as mediated by symbolic exchange.

The originary hypothesis creates a model for the emergence of the peaceful creativity that language makes possible. However, it also creates a minimal model for the destructive creativity that language makes possible. There is no room for beatific innocence anywhere in Gans’s model of the deferral of representation through violence. That we represent our damaging aggressiveness but continue to perform it anyway makes it worse and more “violent” than anything animals do. The deferral of violence through representation entails, with the discharge of sign-mediated resentment in the sparagmos, a self-consciousness of the very “crime” of consumption. The following sentences refer to the “resentment” that has been created by sacralization of the central object before its consumption.

Resentment of the central object accompanies recognition of its sacrality. The evil action of the sparagmos is preceded by evil intent. Each participant commits the crime of appropriation in his imagination at the very moment he renounces it in practice; the renunciation and the crime are inseparable. (Signs 144-45)

Originary ostensive representation means that the participants have only a name for the central object (they do not yet predicate anything of it). Even so, the naming and its deferral of violence permit those originary humans who exchange the abortive gestures to hold the food object in mind as an object of “imagination.” Imagine the moments before the sparagmos, during which the mimetic rivals are representing the object rather than appropriating it, their desire and resentment both escalating. To represent the object before consuming it is, precisely, to consume it in imagination rather than consuming it in reality: that is why “the renunciation [in practice] and the crime [in imagination] are inseparable” (145).

The self-consciousness of originary humans in the sparagmos is a “crime,” according to Gans.

The original “crime” of culture is not intraspecific murder—which other species commit as well on occasion—but the uniquely human act of representation, which defers appetitive action and creates difference. (Signs 144)

I point out Gans’s rejection of the primacy of Girard’s scapegoat mechanism in the passage (“The original crime is not intraspecific murder”). We might also notice the nod to Derrida’s deconstructive principle of différance (“which defers… and creates difference”). Gans continues: “It is this difference that gives rise to the ethical laws that define and forbid murder as well as to the desire that motivates it” (144). What exactly is “this difference”? I remind the reader of the wisdom I poached from Roger Scruton above. It is that between the animal that can represent its “violence” to itself (the human) and the animal without language that cannot represent its “violence” to itself. There is no murder in the animal kingdom, strictly speaking, for in the animal kingdom there is no linguistic capacity to represent, define, hesitate before, or prohibit killing—because one has not yet named the object that is there in the scenic center about to be “murdered.”  It might be sensational and thought-provoking to think of mindless scapegoating as “murder”; but it is also at least a little misleading.

Coda

To close, I borrow and play with a passage from Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s indispensable study The Mark of the Sacred (2008; trans. 2013).  Prepare to observe Dupuy describing a morphogenetic process that is morally paradoxical. A mimetic interaction exclusive of any “intentional act” will somehow produce through an “unconscious process,” a “conviction” about that act. But where there is conviction, there must be reflection on the intention that was (ironically) thought not to be part of the act in the first place.

The scapegoat mechanism… does not function as an intentional act. Persons who persecute others do so without knowing what they do. This, perhaps, is why they must be forgiven: the very act of persecution produces in them, through an unconscious process, the conviction that their victim is guilty. (117)

I will now playfully transpose Dupuy’s formulations into the key of the originary event, particularly the sparagmos, where resentful sign-mediated violence against the sacralized object would have caused communal dissolution but for the effect of the sign.

The sacralization of the central object… does not function as an intentional act. Humans who consume the objects they sacralize do so without knowing what they do. This, perhaps, is why they must be forgiven: the violence of consumption produces in them, through an unconscious process, the conviction that their consumption is innocent.

I would suggest that the consumption is innocent, to the extent that we must eat in order to live, and the Loving Creator surely did not give us life so that we might starve ourselves to death. If we permit René Girard to have his “guilty” violence at the origin of languageless human culture, perhaps we should open ourselves to grant Eric Gans the permission to present a hypothesis of “innocent” violence at the origin of language-based human culture. In any case, I submit that reflection on Dupuy’s text alongside the Gans-inspired transposition of it may open us up to the resonant proximity between Girard’s and Gans’s ways of thinking.

René Girard calls us with apocalyptic Christian urgency to renounce all our “violence” (an impossible task, finally). Eric Gans calls us with generous judgment in the spirit of Jewish wisdom to recognize that in representing our “violence” we do defer, and so renounce, some of it (a less dramatic but more doable project). For Gans, we defer the damage-doing animal aggressiveness that would have destroyed our species in its originary context of hypermimetic self-destruction (just as the “scapegoat mechanism” allowed our gradual emergence from animality in Girard’s view). For Gans, thanks to the originary sign (in my view, the sign has been from the beginning a gift of the Loving Creator, not the shameful trace of an atrociously mindless cruelty), we also open ourselves to the ontological realm of representation, where conscience will risk making cowards of us all and where the powerful technologies that come in the train of symbolic culture bring us into the position of the superspecies threatening to destroy its own planetary habitat.

For both Girard and Gans, representation contains intraspecific violence. For both Girard and Gans, the human is the hypermimetic religious animal, a maker of the sacred. The time has come to cease projecting an image of discontinuous rivalry onto the Girard-Gans relationship. Rather than permitting the remarks that René Girard made in some interviews decades ago perpetually to legitimate a peremptory dismissal of the work of Eric Gans, the case of Gans versus Girard or Girard versus Gans should be dismissed. A genuine understanding of the originary thinking of Eric Gans can only deepen the understanding of and increase the explanatory power of “mimetic theory.”  Those interested in “mimetic theory” should acknowledge and study the work of Gans rather than (more or less) ignoring it. Neither René Girard nor Eric Gans has to occupy exclusively the inaccessible center of anthropological truth. It would be better to let the two anthropological thinkers dance around that center together, pseudo-enemy brothers delighting in self-deprecating mimesis. The truth is that Girard and Gans, Gans and Girard, will always belong together.

Works Cited

Burgis, Luke. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021.

Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. “Naturalizing Mimetic Theory.” In Garrels (2011), 193-213.

—–. The Mark of the Sacred. 2008. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Stanford U P, 2013.

Gans, Eric. The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. Berkeley: U California P, 1985.

—–. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1993.

—–. “René Girard and the Deferral of Violence.” Forum Philosophicum 23 (2018) no. 2, 155-170.

—–. The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2007.

—–. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford U P, 2007.

Girard, Rene. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. 1978. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford U P, 1987.

—–. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. 1999. Trans. James Williams. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2002.

Garrels, Scott R. Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion. Michigan State U P, 2011.

Konner, Melvin. “Sacred Violence, Mimetic Rivalry, and War.” In Garrels (2011), 155-74.

Scruton, Roger. On Human Nature. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2017.

—–. A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism. New York and London: Continuum, 2006.

—–. The Soul of the World. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2014.

—–. The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope. London: Atlantic Books, 2010.

—–. The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Studies Institute, 2002.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York: Norton [Norton Critical Editions], 2002.

van Oort, Richard. “The Critic as Ethnographer.” The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics. Davies Group Publishers, 2009. 71-108.

Ambiguously soulful “music” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) resonates in the “polyphonic” voices of the two main characters, the underground man and his potential love interest, Liza. Their conversational polyphony is echoed, if not imitated, in Anthony Burgess’s hybrid work 1985 (1978), a tribute to the better-known Orwell novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or, as it is alternately known, 1984. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Burgess’s 1985 are paired for discussion here because of their noteworthy similarities: both are divided into two distinct parts––the first a set of reflections on historical and intellectual topics, the second a fictional novella; both works are preoccupied with profound philosophical issues of their times, rendering them literary dystopias; and both, for the main purpose of this study, are structured according to various “musical” features.

Dostoevsky and Burgess structure their works musically by alternating between metaphoric and literal “euphony” and “cacophony,” mediated by “polyphony.” Burgess places “cacophony” in a broader context in Part I of 1985 when he characterizes the book’s principal topic, Orwell’s imagined dystopia in 1984, as “a cacotopia on the lines of cacophony or cacodemon. It sounds worse than dystopia” (48). In the fictional dystopias or cacotopias devised by Dostoevsky, Orwell, and Burgess, cacophonous sound is one of the main techniques for creating the worst of all possible worlds.

In polyphonic and metaphysical terms, both Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Burgess’s 1985 can be understood in light of ​​Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “coexisting” voices in the polyphonic novel, contrasted with ​Girard’s theory of “fused” voices in the metaphysical novel. “Sounds” and “noises” so thoroughly suffuse the identities of the characters in the novels of Dostoevsky and Burgess that the question naturally arises, as it was posed by Eric Gans in his remarks at GASC 2022: “What is the origin of music?” Intimations of the originary question about music can be divined in the musico-philosophical perspectives explored in Notes from Underground and 1985. Tentative explanations of “the origin of music” may emerge from the ways in which the two musico-philosophical authors Dostoevsky and Burgess incorporate such musical elements as euphonious sound and cacophonous noise into works that deal with ultimate questions of ontological dichotomy.

Bakhtin’s “Coexisting” Voices vs. Girard’s “Fused” Voices in Dostoevsky

The twentieth-century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984) viewed the novels of Dostoevsky as “polyphonic,” by which he meant that “Dostoevsky’s world is profoundly pluralistic” (26). Bakhtin compares this pluralism to the “church as a communion of unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous men come together” and describes his polyphonic model as “the image of Dante’s world, where multi-leveledness is extended into eternity, where there are the penitent and the unrepentant, the damned and the saved” (26-27). Moreover, Bakhtin asserts that Dostoevsky’s novels consist of “coexisting” polyphonic voices, not “merged” voices. He claims that Dostoevsky “created a fundamentally new novelistic genre. . . [as] the creator of the polyphonic novel” (7).

Bakhtin developed his “polyphonic” theory of Dostoevsky’s novels under the influence of two other Russian literary critics: One influence, Bakhtin notes, was Dostoevsky scholar Vasily Komarovich (1894-1942), who compares Dostoevsky’s works with “polyphonic music” (21). Bakhtin cites Komarovich to explain the metaphor of “polyphonic” music in the novels of Dostoevsky: “The five voices of a fugue, entering one by one and developing in contrapuntal harmony, remind one of the ‘harmonization of voices’ in a Dostoevskian novel” (21). The other influence acknowledged by Bakhtin was Dostoevsky scholar Leonid Grossman (1888-1965) who described the structure of Dostoevsky’s novels as “multivoicedness,” a term which refers to “the musical principle of polyphony” (41-42). Musically, polyphony involves two or more independent melodies operating simultaneously, as opposed to harmony with movement in either direction.

By contrast, in Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, René Girard (1923–2015) takes a markedly different position on music in relation to Dostoevsky, focused on his growth as an artist: “One should not compare the author’s successive works to the musical exercises by which musicians gradually increase their virtuosity” (3). Girard prefers to speak less of music and more of Dostoevsky’s “metaphysical” interests, claiming that Dostoevsky’s characters want to be “fused,” in the sense that characters who attempt to imitate Christ want to be “fused” with Him. While this may surely be a consummation devoutly to be wished, such a resolution of ontological dichotomy is­ rarely straightforward. For example, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, Girard observes that in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, “Kirillov is obsessed with Christ. . .” and “in his pride is imitating Christ” (277). In such ways, Girard considers Dostoevsky to be “the metaphysical novelist” whose works prefigure “the Dostoyevskian apocalypse” (288), the revelation of sacred knowledge hidden in plain sight within secular life. Metaphysically, Girard’s “Dostoyevskian apocalypse” can be understood, at least indirectly, in musical terms––as a manifestation of the ontological dichotomy presented in Notes from Underground through the polyphonic interplay of the characters’ voices identified by Bakhtin and Grossman.

Bakhtin acknowledges his debt to Grossman in his use of Grossman’s musical term “polyphony” to interpret Dostoevsky’s novels. As Bakhtin notes, “Grossman emphasizes the musical character of Dostoevsky’s composition.” Indeed, Bakhtin praises Grossman for his “observations on the musical nature of Dostoevsky’s compositions [which] are very true and subtle” (41–42). Grossman’s views on Dostoevsky are helpful in untangling the competing assessments of Dostoevsky’s “musicality,” i.e., Bakhtin’s “coexisting” model and Girard’s “fused” model.

The Music of Polyphonic Voices Echoing from Dostoevsky to Burgess

Among the musical features of Dostoevsky’s novels, the voices of “coexisting” characters face uncertain odds of being successfully “fused” into harmony. Voices that are not “merged” may end up as dissonance, which, as noted earlier, Burgess prefers to call “cacophony.” In such works as 1985, Burgess uses musical effects similar to those that Dostoevsky employed in his novels. Any deliberate imitation by Burgess can only be surmised, though Burgess was clearly familiar with Dostoevsky’s works. Metaphysical and polyphonic features like those in Dostoevsky appeared early in Burgess’s literary career, following the visit to Leningrad in 1961 that Burgess made with the stated intention of appreciating Dostoevsky and other Russian writers in their native milieu. In both Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Burgess’s 1985, such musical elements as “voice” and “song” are major recurring features. (As will be discussed later, music figured prominently throughout Burgess’s life and works. Musical elements were already conspicuous in A Clockwork Orange, which Burgess published in 1962, the year following his visit to Leningrad.)

Music and musicians were undoubtedly significant influences on the life and works of Dostoevsky. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, under the influence of Grossman’s musical perspectives, Bakhtin identifies “voices” with “polyphonic” aspects in Dostoevsky’s novels––the same elements of “song” and “singing” that were later used by Burgess. In effect, Bakhtin argues, Dostoevsky created a new kind of fiction, the “polyphonic” novel which illuminates “thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence” (270). Reflecting on the ways that consciousness is manifested in “the dialogic sphere,” Girard contends in Deceit, Desire and the Novel: “It matters little whether Dostoevsky’s underground man believes in or denies the existence of God; however violently he argues for or against God, it is only his lips which speak” (62). Implicit in the phrase “his lips which speak,” though, is a voice with the capacity for dialogue, in which the underground man struggles but ultimately fails to engage, as well as the latent potential to “sing,” as indeed he does on at least one occasion.

Frequently, Bakhtin uses the word “visualization” to describe Dostoevsky’s skills as an artist; however, by calling attention to “voice” in the musical elements in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Bakhtin asks readers not only to “visualize” but also, in ways similar to Girard, to “auralize” the novel, as it were, and listen closely to appreciate its “polyphonic” features. Matters of ontological dichotomy­ can be explored through such parallel dichotomies as sound and sight. Sound, however, tends to dominate in Notes from Underground. In the “voice” of the anti-heroic underground man, readers may hear some of the novel’s musical structures. Grossman presents Dostoevsky’s personal correspondence showing how the author was thinking of the novella’s structure in musical terms.

Originally, the story was to have been divided into three chapters, each differing in content but internally united. The first chapter was to have been a polemical and philosophical monologue, the second a dramatic episode, preparing the ground for the third, the disastrous conclusion. In a letter to his brother about the forthcoming publication of Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky wrote:

“The story is divided into three chapters. The first will be something like thirty-six pages. Do you really think it can be printed separately? It will evoke ridicule, for it has no juice without the other two (main) chapters. You know what modulation [transition] is in music. It is exactly the same here. The first chapter appears to be idle chatter, but in the next two chapters the chatter suddenly erupts into unforeseen disaster.” (316) [Emphasis added.]

The letter shows how Dostoevsky contemplated adapting musical structure into his novella. Indeed, the musical elements in Notes from Underground provide clues to what Dostoevsky learned from his favorite musicians and musical pieces.

Chief among those favorites, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) had a profound impact on Dostoevsky. According to Grossman, Dostoevsky “delighted in Beethoven” (606). Dostoevsky’s widow Anna Dostoevskaya recorded in her memoirs  that her husband was “particularly fond of the opera Fidelio” (120). After serving four years in a Siberian prison camp of unspeakably squalid conditions, Dostoevsky would have understandably responded with enthusiasm to a hymn to freedom like Fidelio (1805–1814), Beethoven’s only opera, which, significantly, is set in a political prison. Under the influence and inspiration of Beethoven and other favorites like Mozart, Dostoevsky adapted features resembling operatic duets and orchestral themes and variations into the structural elements of his “polyphonic” novels. Musical effects that appear in Notes from Underground (1864) persist and expand in subsequent works, culminating in the complex alternations of polyphony and cacophony to be found in the exchanges of multiple voices in the family disharmony that pervades Dostoevsky’s sprawling final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880).

Traces of Dostoevsky’s creative interplay of music and literature can be detected in Burgess’s works. Among the nonfiction pieces in Part I of 1985 is “1948: An Old Man Interviewed.” It is an ostensibly conventional interview in which the voice of an unnamed old man reflects on the social consequences of the scarcities and grievances in Britain during the years immediately after the Second World War, with attention to the year 1948 of the title. Responding to minimal prompts from a similarly anonymous interviewer, the old man expounds at great length on the postwar conditions that gave rise both to the British Labour government and to George Orwell’s responses to the dramatic changes in British society under the shadow of the early atomic age, anxieties that culminated in his novel 1984. (Orwell wrote much of the novel in 1948, and one theory suggests that he devised the title by reversing the last two digits of the year.) Throughout the interview, the anonymous old man refers to numerous English songs and melodies––from music-hall tunes, to British Army wartime propaganda songs, to post-war socialist anthems––as he engages in a polyphonous dialogue with the interviewer, ending with the interviewer’s concluding remark: “Thank you, Mr. Burgess” (34). In that last line, the “old man” is unmasked as Burgess himself, or more exactly as his fictionalized doppelgänger, revealing that Burgess had ventriloquized both voices of the interviewer and the interviewee.

Part II of 1985 is a dystopian novella in which Burgess imitates the manner in which Orwell created 1984 by extrapolating from post-war British conditions into an imagined dystopia set years in the future. Similarly, Burgess takes the dysfunctional British social conditions at the time of his novella’s 1978 publication and follows them to their worst possible conclusions in an imagined Britain of seven years later in 1985, just one year after Orwell’s novel is set. Not encompassing the entire world as 1984 did, 1985 is a more localized dystopia in which tyrannical labour unions have nearly paralyzed the British social order with perpetual labour strikes, while enormously wealthy Arabs acquire vast amounts of British real estate on which to build a proliferation of mosques that serve an ever-growing Muslim immigrant population in the UK. The imagined British future is literally a cacotopia, typified by the scene in which the protagonist, a former history teacher named Bev, is enlisted as a government journalist to cover a “double strike” in London (pp. 214–215). Bev witnesses a truly horrific event, essentially a cacophonous political battle of the bullhorns. In a disharmony of polyphonous dialogue, a loudspeaker truck supporting non-union labour duels with a union spokesman shouting through a personal “loudhailer.” Each side struggles to win over an angry crowd of striking workers at the construction site of an immense mosque rising, symbolically, near Westminster Abbey.

Among the victims of this cacophony is the venerable British patriotic hymn––”I Vow to Thee My Country,” with its early twentieth-century text by British diplomat Sir Cecil Spring Rice set to the stately melody of the “Jupiter” movement from Gustav Holst’s 1918 orchestral suite, The Planets. Here the solemn music and words typically heard at state funerals and Armistice memorial ceremonies are transformed into an “unearthly blast of music” blaring from unseen loudspeakers, in an absurdly over-orchestrated arrangement with “a thousand voices, a Berliozian orchestra, brass bands added” (216). Moreover, there is truly bizarre irony, typical of Burgess, in the way that Spring Rice’s ode to Christian duty in this world and the next has been culturally appropriated to serve as theme music for efforts to break a British labour union strike at the construction site of an Islamic mosque. The cacophony of this musical street propaganda suddenly “stopped in mid-minim” (p. 217), with a brief moment of silence preceding the fresh discord of a brutal knuckle-dusting, union-busting crackdown by light infantry that ends the cacotopian scene.

The elaborate musical features of 1985 reflect the fact that Burgess was himself an accomplished pianist and composer who inserted musical elements into many of his works. Indeed, in some ways Burgess can be considered the successor of Dostoevsky in relation to the “polyphonic” novel. As in the works of Dostoevsky, the novels of Burgess often feature musical “voices” converted into songs that create harmony and dissonance, alternations between “euphony” or “cacophony.” Burgess’s undeservedly infamous work, A Clockwork Orange (1962), is a dystopian satire inspired in part by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). In both novels, the protagonists wrestle with some of the most urgent moral issues of their day (and of all time), notably the place of “free will” in human affairs that literally involve matters of life and death. Moreover, such confrontations with ontological dichotomy in these works are intertwined with music, even at the level of the dramatic situation. In Crime and Punishment, the disturbed Raskolnikov enjoys listening to a barrel organ and singing to a street organ; in A Clockwork Orange, the violent young Alex revels in the music of Beethoven.

Burgess’s reliance on Beethoven and Mozart for musical features in his novels reveals the parallel interests he shared with Dostoevsky. In his own works, Burgess frequently lets his readers hear the varieties of individually “sung” voices blended with the flow of music. Burgess’s use of musical structure can be detected in the fictionalized Part II of 1985 where the voices grow louder with the previously mentioned “unearthly blast of music,” and unseen loudspeakers create a cacophony of “a thousand mixed voices” (216), narrative devices which echo the often discordant “polyphony” in the novels of Dostoevsky. The “voices” in Burgess’s 1985 and A Clockwork Orange can be understood in relation to Bakhtin’s analysis of the protagonist of Notes from Underground: “Dostoevsky’s hero is not an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice; we do not see him, we hear him” (53). The underground man, in effect, is really more of an anti-hero and eerily suggestive of a ghost. Though he seems almost invisible, his “voice” is clearly perceptible to other characters and may be his most definitive feature.

Musical history illuminates Bakhtin’s discussion of “polyphony” in Dostoevsky’s use of musical structure. For example, music critic Ian Thomson notes that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) studied the polyphony in the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Mozart used what he learned from this august predecessor to compose his own operas. Furthermore, Thomson observes, Beethoven and subsequent composers inherited polyphonic style to express such themes as “rebellion against power” (325) and “Christian apocalypse” (352). Similar themes can be recognized in Dostoevsky’s works, together with his musical techniques of coexisting voices. Such musical features as polyphony––as employed by Dostoevsky and incorporated a century later by Burgess into his own novels––are illustrative examples of writers borrowing and possibly imitating musical elements and motifs for literary purposes.

Bakhtin observes that Dostoevsky’s polyphonic structuring of his novels becomes deeper but also more complicated through the convergence of music and literature with philosophy: “Dostoevsky’s extraordinary artistic capacity for seeing everything in coexistence and interaction is his greatest strength, but his greatest weakness as well. . . . Everything that seemed simple became, in [Dostoevsky’s] world, complex and multi-structured” (30). Such barely manageable complexity can be understood as the inevitable result of Dostoevsky’s desire to confront contemporary matters of ontological dichotomy, issues of free will and determinism, utopianism and nihilism, being and nothingness––all of which, of course, are not easy to simplify. Within this context, Bakhtin identifies the nature of Dostoevsky’s use of music to structure his novels. The tension of “two contending voices”­­––the cynical, nihilistic anti-hero known only as the underground man, and Liza, a young prostitute who is the only character to show the underground man any kindness––can be heard in their emotionally fraught exchanges in Part II of Notes from Underground. Moreover, such counterpoint appears in subsequent works of Dostoevsky, particularly in the intense conversations between the anti-hero Raskolnikov and his devoted Sonya in Crime and Punishment.

Grossman elucidates Dostoevsky’s polyphony still further, showing how musical form is transposed into literary structure: “Dostoevsky uses great finesse in applying the metaphor of musical modulation to the plan of a literary composition.” In such ways, Notes from Underground is constructed on the basis of “an artistic counterpoint” (316). Concentrating on the “voices” of the underground man and Liza in their fraught exchanges, Grossman asserts,

This is indeed contrapuntal. It is different voices singing the same theme, with a difference. It is polyphony, displaying the manifold images of life and the manifold complexities of human existence. “Everything in life is counterpoint, that is, contrast,” as M. I. Glinka (one of Dostoevsky’s favorite composers) says in his memoirs. (316)

Dostoevsky’s musico-philosophical stance, then, is manifested in his use of polyphonic voices in Notes from Underground and in later works.

Polyphonic and Metaphysical “Voices” in Dostoevsky and Burgess

Dostoevskian polyphony eventually made its way into the works of Burgess, accompanied by other musical and literary influences. For example, Dostoevsky’s underground man speaks throughout Part I of Notes from Underground, repeating such musical terms as “piano keys.” The underground man confronts his fears of the ontological dichotomy of free will and determinism in a sardonic remark that masks his anxiety: “Two times two makes four even without my will. Is that what you call free choice?” (23). In his epigraph to 1985, Burgess rephrases the formula as “2 + 2 = 5,” followed by the explanatory note: “A notice put up in Moscow during the first Five-Year Plan, indicating the possibility of getting the job done in four years, if workers put their backs into it.” Burgess’s equation, of course, echoes the exact same formula that Orwell used in 1984 to represent the gaslighting illogic of authoritarianism. In 1985, Burgess may have meant the formula in much the same way. Burgess also gave the epigraph a plausible origin story, though one that he may simply have written himself.

Dostoevsky’s underground man wants someone to listen to his voice, and verbal polyphony serves his purposes until it undoes them. He delivers several dramatic monologues that recall the soliloquies of Hamlet, though largely emptied of poetry. In Part I of Notes from Underground, the underground man’s voice echoes hollowly. In Part II, however, he expands his use of pronouns from “I” and “you” to include “we” and “they,” suggesting his nascent desire for a wider audience. Moreover, “voice” starts to assume the form of “singing” or “song.” The underground man “rejoiced and sang Italian arias,” but only when he is “ecstatic,” i.e., momentarily outside himself.

Whenever Liza’s voice overrides the voice of the underground man, however, “silence” descends and his monologues periodically shut down. The effect is like inserting a rest or a pause into a musical score. There are audible silences when the underground man’s voice tries to coexist with Liza’s voice, but silence ends, at least temporarily, when he attempts to fuse his voice with hers through his efforts to regain control of the dialogue. In her efforts to befriend the underground man, Liza tries to hear his supposedly “true” voice. Unfortunately, though, he rejects her good will with his incessant rudeness; their voices never fuse and instead merely coexist uneasily as their conversations steadily diverge. Eventually, Liza abruptly leaves the underground man, and he and his voice are left without an interlocutor.

The underground man’s brutish rejection that drives Liza away has a sort of inevitability that would be tragic were it not so pathetic. As Girard explains in “Mimetic Desire in the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky [1997],” the underground man is trapped in the self-defeating logic of “obstacle addiction” inherent in mimetic desire:

What this addiction really entails is clear: underground people are irresistibly attracted to those that spurn them, and they irresistibly spurn those who are attracted to them . . . . [The underground man] is in a straitjacket. . . . He got into it himself and he made it himself, or rather Dostoevsky made it for him. (253–254)

In effect, the underground man has created a dystopian hell for himself that prevents his voice and his character from functioning in harmony with anyone, even with himself, except in maladaptive ways.

As a musico-philosophical writer in the tradition of Dostoevsky, Burgess composed his hybrid work, 1985, in part as a tribute to the giants on whose shoulders he stood––among them Dostoevsky and Beethoven, and certainly Orwell, too. Burgess constructed 1985 in two parts, much as Dostoevsky organized Notes from Underground. (Part I of 1985 is a collection of essays and interviews about troubling conditions in British society in the late 1970s, involving trade unions and Islamic immigration ; Part II is a novella extrapolating those conditions into an imagined dystopia in the then-not-too-distant future.) In his essay “Clockwork Oranges” in Part I of 1985, Burgess considers the issue of human freedom in relation to early Soviet utopianism:

The Soviet State wished to remake man, and if one knows the Russians one can sympathize. Pavlov deplored the wild-eyed, sloppy, romantic, undisciplined, inefficient, anarchic texture of the Russian soul, at the same time admiring the cool reasonableness of the Anglo-Saxons. Lenin deplored it too, but it still exists . . . . The Leninist proposal [aimed] to rebuild, with Pavlov’s assistance, the entire Russian character, thus making the works of Chekhov and Dostoevsky unintelligible to readers of the far future. (90)

Of course, the works of Dostoevsky––and Chekhov, with many others––were never made obsolete. Moreover, as it was impossible for Lenin or Pavlov to foresee, the entire Soviet project would collapse in 1991, while the critical appreciation of Dostoevsky persists long after.

Dante, Dostoevsky, Burgess, and Dissonance in Dystopia

Throughout Dostoevsky’s career, several other incarnations of the polyphonic anti-hero appear, notably in Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. A century later, Dostoevskian “notes from underground” (in both narrative and musical senses) resonate in Burgess’s novels, including A Clockwork Orange and 1985, which use such musical forms as song, opera, and hymn for literary purposes. The persistence of Dostoevsky’s underground man has been observed by several critics. Orwell scholar William Steinhoff contends that “Dostoevsky’s anti-hero stays underground. . . . and has ‘the underground in [his] soul’” (137). Gans observes in A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art, that “pure nihilism is a Dostoevskian fantasy” (103).

The voices of anti-heroes and nihilists represent dystopia, though, as noted earlier, Burgess, in 1985, prefers the term “cacotopia” (48), particularly in relation to Orwell’s 1984. It is not implausible that Orwell borrowed the nihilistic cacophony of the “Dostoevskian fantasy” from such works as Notes from Underground and adapted it in 1984, with its authoritarian autocracy personified by the epithet-designated Big Brother, much as Burgess imagined that trade-unionism would assume authoritarian dimensions in 1985.

Certain paradoxes are inherent in dystopias. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Orwell’s 1984, and Burgess’s 1985 all present conflicting, contradictory efforts to reconcile irrational human impulses with supposedly modern organizing principles along rational lines. In practice, of course, both kinds of desire, irrational and rational, are highly prone to be self-defeating. As Steinhoff observes,

To Orwell, on the contrary, it [the equation, 2 + 2 = 4] is reason’s essence, the secret doctrine which guarantees the existence of objective reality. A number of writers­­—Chesterton, Dostoevsky, Proust, Andre Breton––have used this proverbial metaphor for self-evident truth in the context of argument about the superiority of the irrational over the rational. Orwell puts it at the center of the struggle between O’Brien and Winston Smith, and it is therefore interesting to examine Dostoevsky’s detailed exposition of the point in Notes from Underground, which we know Orwell had read. (173)

Both Dostoevsky and Orwell, and later Burgess, projected into their works variations on present and future dystopias where life might be experienced as a dissonance, a cacophony. As Gans asserts in A New Way of Thinking,

The “tragedy” of the human condition is sometimes described in terms of the tension between body and soul, the worldly mortality of the human being and the immortality of the signs by which he communicates. But in order for this originary tension to give rise to the agon of tragedy, there must exist a human analogue to the absolute difference of the central object. (108)

Gans’s view of the tragic dissonance between the flesh and the spirit can be understood as an exemplar of ontological dichotomy, a timeless struggle reenacted endlessly throughout human experience and consequently reflected in literary history. For example, Robert Hollander observes of Dante Alighieri’s dystopian vision in the Divine Comedy that “we can see the continuance of this medieval outlook in a later literary tradition, particularly in Dostoievski [sic]” (6). Hollander’s perception of a direct line from Dante to Dostoevsky suggests that dystopia is a recurring nightmare extending across the centuries.

By contrast, the countervailing literature of “utopia” seems otherworldly, strangely less than real. Stacey Meeker argues that

utopia is typically “boring” while the dystopian film and novel attract an enthusiastic public. Fourier was never a best-seller and More’s Utopia has never been made into a film. The public is able to identify with dystopian desire in a way that is structurally impossible in utopia; a “suspension of disbelief” or, as Gans would put it, an indefinitely deferred question of truth maintains the dystopia as an esthetic object whose experience can be renewed. (7)

Meeker is reflecting here on a perennial literary problem, namely the great difficulty of making virtue interesting, a challenge known to writers from Milton to Dostoevsky to Burgess who found that the most appealing characters tended to be the most diabolical.

One way around the problem of making virtue interesting is to give a story comic treatment. Meeker explains that her title “Utopia Limited” derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s rarely performed 1893 light opera of the same title, Utopia, Limited (Meeker 9). Burgess, in his role as music critic, asserts in his essay “S. Without G.” that “Sullivan in his day was considered to be England’s answer to Mozart” (570). Indeed, Arthur Sullivan earned a knighthood for his mastery of the very forms and styles of romantic Italian opera that he often parodied, topping off his compositions with the ethereal lightness of Mendelssohn and Mozart. Sullivan’s scores became the ideal musical accompaniment to the mad absurdist comic dramas spun by his eccentric artistic partner, William S. Gilbert. The range of Gilbert and Sullivan stretches from the ridiculous to the sublime, not unlike Mozart’s final opera, The Magic Flute––showing that the combination of glorious music and dramatic narratives, even highly fanciful ones, can produce fine art that is also thoroughly entertaining.

Turning from comic opera to epic poetry, parallels can be drawn between Dostoevsky and Dante, who both explored matters of ontological dichotomy through the intermingling of music and literature with philosophy. Bakhtin claims that in Dostoevsky “each novel presents an opposition of many consciousnesses, and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit, just as souls and spirits do not merge in the formally polyphonic world of Dante” (26). Grossman cites Turgenev’s depiction of Dostoevsky’s work as “Dantesque” (258). Girard observes in Deceit, Desire and the Novel,

For the sacred to have concrete significance, the underground man must first return to the earth’s surface. Thus, in Dostoyevsky, the return to mother earth is the first and necessary stage on the road to salvation. When the hero emerges victorious from the underground he embraces the earth from which he sprang. . . . The opposition and the analogies between the two transcendencies are found in all novelists of imitative desire, Christian and non-Christian alike. (62)

Such representations of ontological dichotomy in “the opposition and the analogies between the two transcendencies” are, in musical terms, known as “counterpoint.” Girard insists in “Marcel Proust [1962]” that “for Dostoevsky and Dante, the fall and the redemption are opposed, yet dialectically joined. But the opposition is less radical for Dostoevsky than for Dante” (69). When viewed from the Girardian metaphysical perspective developed in “Mimetic Desire in the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky [1997],” the underground man in Notes from Underground may seem to desire being “fused” with his “obstacle” (248). Nevertheless, while the underground man may “coexist” polyphonically with his interlocutor Liza, he can never be “fused” through “love” or anything else with her because he is incapable of either giving or receiving affection, let alone love. Dostoevsky offers Liza a free choice: to “coexist” or to “be fused,” in a figuratively musical sense, with the underground man. In the end, faced with the underground man’s unrelieved abuse, Liza freely and wisely rejects both choices and abruptly leaves. Presumably she returns to her brothel, which, while hardly paradise, at least occupies a higher circle of hell than the underground man’s apartment.

Such images of hell in Notes from Underground and elsewhere in Dostoevsky, with all their Dantesque connotations, are not simply metaphorical. Girard claims in “Mimetic Desire in the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky [1997],” that Dostoevsky’s underground world shows that “hell truly exists.” He continues, “Hell is not a figment of a human imagination still imprisoned in archaic thinking. Dostoevsky’s interplay of obstacles and models is a terrestrial version of hell with a religious significance that still awaits definition” (253). Viewed in this context, Liza’s decision to cut her losses and flee the underground man is a perfect example of acting in one’s own rational self-interest.

Maintaining the connection of Dante and Dostoevsky, in “Conversion in Literature and Christianity [1999],” Girard observes:

[A]ccording to Dante the function of profane literature is to guide us through Hell to Purgatory. This is what Virgil did for Dante, and it was a great help to Dante because hell is not a very nice place to live. It is not even a nice place to visit. If you still have even two cents worth of common sense when you are in hell, you will want to get out, for very selfish reasons. (263-264)

Considering the earthly hell that Dostoevsky created in his works (and sometimes in his own life), it is not unlikely that, as a reader of world literature and as a visitor to Italy, Dostoevsky had at least an acquaintance with Dante. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine the Italian master serving Dostoevsky as his Virgil––as a literary model and possibly even as a conductor through personal hell on the way to the paradise of redemption. Girard himself acknowledges that on his own spiritual journey, he was led “through hell,” as he puts it, not by Virgil or Dante but by the five Continental novelists he examined in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with Dostoevsky prominent among them (264).

Continuing this analysis of the contrapuntal dance of Dante and Dostoevsky, Girard argues that in a world filled with mimetic desire, “we should imitate only Christ or Christ-like non-competitive models” (265). Dostoevsky would very likely agree, even if many of his characters fell short of the mark––as did their creator, wasting much of his life as a serially compulsive gambler whose bad luck left him perennially debt-ridden. In his later works, culminating in The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) Dostoevsky prospected and mined dystopian territory, looking for veins of gold that represented, as it were, treasures to lay up in heaven. To such ends, his literary speculations were more successful than his failed attempts through card-playing to lay up treasures upon earth. (“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Matthew 6:19-21.) Maurice Baring, an early twentieth-century historian of Russian literature and culture, observes of Dostoevsky’s works written after Notes from Underground:

Dostoevsky is great because of the divine message he gives, not didactically, not by sermons, but by the goodness that emanates like a precious balm from the characters he creates; because more than any other books in the world his books reflect not only the teaching and the charity but the accent and the divine aura of love that is in the Gospels. (60)

This consoling vision of a resolution to ontological dichotomy can be heard musically and metaphysically in Dante’s poetic voice expressing itself in cantos (which, after all, are varieties of song), following a musico-philosophical chain from Pythagoras to Virgil, and from Virgil to Dante, and by extension to Dostoevsky and Burgess:

O men, who cannot see the meaning of this Song,
Do not however reject it; but pay attention to its beauty,
Which is great, either for its construction, which concerns the grammarians;
Or for the order of its discourse, which concerns the rhetoricians;
Or for the number of its parts, which concerns the musicians.
(Cited in Guénon 8)

Notice that musicians occupy the culminating pinnacle of this verse, suggesting that among the seven classical liberal arts, music belongs with two members of the trivium, grammar and rhetoric, replacing logic as an organizing principle––at least when serving aesthetics in the composition of poetic song. Logic, i.e. rationality, it would seem, does not have much to do with poetry––or with redemption, either.

Clues from Dostoevsky and Burgess to Answer the Question “What Is Music?”

In recapitulation, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Burgess’s novel 1985 exemplify Bakhtin’s “polyphonic” constructions in relation to Burgess’s idea of “cacophony.” Both novels represent a metaphysical “Dostoevskian apocalypse” with highly dystopian features. Particularly in 1985, Burgess’s efforts to use musical aspects similar to those in the works of Dostoevsky can be understood in relation to “coexisting” or “fused” characters.

Sound, particularly musical sound, shapes the identities and even the destinies of characters in the works of the musico-philosophical writers Burgess and Dostoevsky. As noted earlier, the originary question about music was posed in remarks by Gans at GASC 2022. Any serious consideration of how and why music originated, however, would normally require at least a working definition of what music is. In “An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology,” however, Steven Brown, et al. assert, “The question what is music? is one that has no agreed-upon answer. . . . Music is simply whatever people consider it to be” (6). While not entirely satisfying, the refusal of Brown, et al. to settle on a single definition of music has a curiously liberating effect. Essentially, they imply, there are no universal definitions of music. As beauty is proverbially in the beholder’s eye, so music resides in the listener’s ear, as a matter of taste and subjective judgment.

Accordingly, then, in at least one version of an origin story, music may have arisen from a desire to listen to something that transcends ordinary sound and noise. In “Art and Entertainment,” Gans observes that, paradoxically, “Desire takes us to our origin because that is what we all desire” (47). Music may be born of a basic desire to distinguish euphony from cacophony, intimating that sound can be differentiated into music and noise. What, then, is music and what is it not? A potential answer––ranging across psychology, sociology, and biology––appears in “Listening [sic] to Music,” where Wallin, et al. insist that “music is very much about who we are, as individuals, as societies, and even as a species. . . . [People] listen to music, to what it is telling us about ourselves” (483). Keeping in mind what Gans in “Art and Entertainment,” Brown, et al., and Wallin, et al. have said on the matter, “music” can be defined, at least tentatively, as “what or who we desire to be.”

Consequently, in contrast to “what music is,” the alternative––i.e., “what music is not“––could be considered as “noise” or “what or who we desire not to be.” Friedrich Nietzsche, an accomplished composer with a bent for philosophy, opined more than once: “Without music, life would be an error” (Liébert 8). From his position that “music is the metaphor of life itself, of life as it ought to be,” Nietzsche developed theories of music (and of culture more generally) arising from Dionysian and Apollonian tensions. Self-reflexively, Nietzsche mused that he was “a philosopher-musician––and a philosopher because a musician” (Liébert 9). [Emphasis added.]

Regarding another philosopher with a serious sideline as a composer (if not vice versa), Jean-Jacques Rousseau ruminated––in “Dictionary of Music” (1767) and in “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (published posthumously 1781)––on, among other things, the complementarity of music and philosophy found in classical Greek thought. From his own musico-philosophical origins, Nietzsche eventually found himself on problematic Dostoevskian ground. As Gans explains in The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology, “We might think to call this desire ‘envy,’ . . . Nietzsche gave it the more specific name of ressentiment” (173). From “the popular Nietzschean dictum, ‘God is dead,’” Gans reaches a perplexing conclusion: “A more profound understanding of the symmetry of the God-man hierarchy is expressed in Dostoevski’s ‘You will be as Gods each for the other’” (262–263). In this expression of ontological dichotomy, even if humans kill God in Nietzschean terms, they cannot be God, a philosophical dilemma that emerges in Dostoevsky’s novels and is reflected in his “polyphonic” style.

Continuing the inquiry into “what music is” and “what it is not,” dramatic scenes in the works of Burgess and Dostoevsky typically provide illustrative contrasts of music and noise. These scenes show similarities in what might be called the two writers’ irrational “operatic” tendencies and contain such musical elements as those that both Bakhtin and Grossman observe specifically in Dostoevsky’s musical structures. Such operatic musical features, perhaps inevitably, take on a psychological dimension. In “Art and Entertainment,” Gans observes, “The art/entertainment dichotomy. . . forces us to face the ontological dichotomy within ourselves” (52). In this regard, serious music requires listeners to consider inward conundrums that are not unlike Hamlet’s dilemma, the inner dichotomy of who or what we desire “to be or not to be.” To such ends, musical features in the works of Burgess and Dostoevsky metaphorically urge characters like the underground man in Notes from Underground, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and young Alex in A Clockwork Orange to transform into “new selves” by inner revolution, while dissonant noise torments them with invisible fears. As Gans continues in “Art and Entertainment,” “The future of the art/entertainment dichotomy is significant precisely because it cannot be in any sense determined; because its future determination depends on an ongoing process of freedom through self-understanding” (52).

With “self-understanding” serving as the prime directive, so to speak, musico-philosophical writers tend to venture beyond psychology and enter theological and moral territory, as already noted regarding Nietzsche. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard reflects on the common human tendency to fall into “self-misunderstanding”:  [Emphasis added.]

If we listen to Satan, who may sound like a very progressive and likeable educator, we may feel initially that we are “liberated,” but this impression does not last because Satan deprives us of everything that protects us from rivalistic imitation. Rather than warning us of the trap that awaits us, Satan makes us fall into it. He applauds the idea that prohibitions are of no use and that transgressing them contains no danger. (32-33)

In a Girardian sense, then, beguiling noise may be truly diabolical, as it is cacophony disguised as euphony, and in that way is analogous to the machinations of the prince of darkness himself. Those who have the misfortune to hear this seductive, siren-like noise can fall unthinkingly into moral traps that might be considered “satanic.”

Such traps can open up, then, when music transforms into noise, as exemplified in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange when the anti-heroic protagonist Alex, a violent teenage gang leader serving a life sentence for murder, is chosen as an experimental victim of the “Ludovico Technique” (i.e., the thinly disguised “Ludwig Treatment”). It turns out to be a program of aversion therapy in which Alex is fed emetics and “forced to view films showing scenes of Nazi torture and other horrors while Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is sounded in the background” (Ziolkowski 118). This state-sponsored perversion of art enlisted in the cause of social engineering results in a living hell, with Beethoven’s sublime music turned into cacophonous noise that erases Alex’s “free will”––along with his love for Beethoven and all other forms of zest for living (violence among them, the intended target of Alex’s “treatment”). This monstrous travesty of musical therapy effectively snuffs out Alex’s humanity, as it deprives him of his capacities for both evil and good, together with his will to choose freely between them. (It should be noted, however, that Alex eventually recovers his capacity for violence, but as he reaches adulthood he decides to put aside “childish” things and renounce his violent ways––of his own free will.)

The moral and theological implications of A Clockwork Orange were originally lost in waves of negative publicity about the novel’s supposed glamorization of violence when the work first appeared in 1962. Even greater notoriety arose after Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian film––by the same title and loosely based on Burgess’s novel––was released in 1971. Years later, Burgess defended A Clockwork Orange as an Augustinian “allegory of Christian free will” in his preface to his dramatized retelling of the novel in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (originally published in 1986):

Man is defined by his capacity to choose courses of moral action. If he chooses good, he must have the possibility of choosing evil instead: evil is a theological necessity. I was also saying that it is more acceptable for us to perform evil acts than to be conditioned artificially into an ability and only to perform what is socially acceptable. (vi)

Like Dostoevsky, then, Burgess was prospecting in dystopian territory for theologically grounded “self-understanding.” In the two metaphysical writers’ works, sound can be polarized into euphonious music and cacophonous noise through human choice, and noise may be manifested as diabolical––or at least malevolent––voices of temptation that lure characters into the ontologically dichotomous traps of a moral and even spiritual nature that are inherent in dystopias.

Musical “Notes” from Underground––Resounding to the Operatic Heavens

In the works of Burgess and Dostoevsky considered here, several characters engage with music and struggle against noise in literary, psychological, theological, and/or moral terms. The characters’ identities change as they become who or what they desire to be under the influence of classical music and various types of songs, complicated by occasions when the characters are drawn astray by “noise” that lures them toward what, in moments of better judgment, they may desire not to be. As mentioned earlier, because music is deeply subjective and personal––residing, as it were, “in the ear of the beholder”––music may emerge from a natural desire to discriminate between euphonious sounds and cacophonous noises. If sound can be differentiated into music and noise, the question of “what music is and what it is not” seems inevitably subjective. Wallin, et al. suggest that music may be best understood less as a binary polarity and more as a continuous spectrum. In light of what Wallin, et al. (483), Brown, et al. (6), and Gans at GASC 2022 all have to say on the subject, it may be possible to define “music” as “what or who we desire to be.” Certainly the musical genre that celebrates human desire most highly is opera, regarded by art critic Kenneth Clark as, next to Gothic architecture, “one of the strangest inventions of western man” (241).

Always a dynamic musical form, opera greatly expanded in the wake of the innovative operas that Mozart composed in the five years preceding his tragically early death in 1791. According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music, “After Don Giovanni almost anything was possible” (529). Inevitably, new variations developed, and in the third quarter of the nineteenth century Richard Wagner (1813–1883) pushed the limits of mid-century conventional opera so far that he not only redefined the genre and but even renamed it, as he “preferred what he called ‘music drama’ to ‘opera’” (530). Burgess, in his essay titled “Ring,” agrees that Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, or the Ring cycle, 1869­–1876) surpasses previous operatic forms to realize Wagner’s “music drama,” a revolutionary art form which “opened up polarities of humans and nature, as well as humans and gods” (8). Wagner designed his “music dramas,” his late works typified by the Ring cycle, as “total works of art” that blended music with drama, poetry, and the visual arts. Such a radical transformation of the already thoroughly irrational art form of opera led Burgess to describe Wagner as “the most dangerous magician” (10).

For better or worse, the musical heritage of the most dangerous magician continues to enchant (or hex) compositions and productions of modern opera. In “Ring,” Burgess explains:

In the late twentieth century composers are still trying to free themselves from the Wagnerian heritage. Wagner died a century ago, but we have only to listen to the opening of Das Rheingold, where the very ground bass of Nature is heard, hardly distinguishable from the voice of the eternal river, to be seduced into feeling that this is what music is about, and Mozart and Haydn and even Beethoven were merely playing parlor games. It is an illusion, but a very powerful one. (10)

If, as Burgess claims, The Nibelung’s Ring, The Gold of the Rhine is “what music is about” then Wagner’s Ring cycle may represent the magical nature of music at its most profound and mystifying. In “Ring,” Burgess splits Wagner’s Ring into separate genres of fairy tale and political allegory. Beginning facetiously, he claims that, at least superficially, the last of the four operas in the Ring cycle, the apocalyptic Twilight of the Gods, “suggests a cosy tea with muffins round the fire while the lights are low” (1). Burgess then shifts to a serious analysis of the Ring cycle:

Let us consider what the fairy tale is about. . . . It looks, on the surface, like children’s stuff, but, if we look more deeply, we shall discover a very powerful political allegory. The Ring is about the corruption of money and power and the need for revolutionary action in a world dominated by cynical tyranny. (1)

In effect, Burgess sees the world of turbulent desires in Wagner’s Ring as a moral universe running parallel with the human world in all its turmoil and ontological dichotomy, the conflicting desires of the heart and the will. Provocatively, Burgess contends, “Wagner liked to think that The Ring was an illustration of Schopenhauer’s philosophy” (6). Indeed, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) argued in The World as Will and Representation (1818) that the world is a site of human emotional struggles that are represented by music. Christopher Janaway affirms Schopenhauer’s musico-philosophical stance with the observation that “Schopenhauer’s view is that music is a ‘copy of the will itself’” (84).

Burgess contends in “Ring” that Wagner “wanted a break with the past––not only socially but musically––and the works he began to sketch in 1848 and 1849 combined the desire for a reformed society with the ideal of a new, freer, kind of dramatic music” (6). In effect, Wagner’s Ring represents “the dangerous magician’s” thwarted desires for a reformed society sublimated into ambitions for a revolution in music. In the process, Wagner broke traditional distinctions between the fine arts and the performing arts and reworked them all into a grand synthesis. The goals that Wagner could not achieve politically through his participation in the European uprisings of 1848-1849 he pursued by other means––that is, through the magic of music drama, his project for the remaining three and a half decades of his life.

As a side-note, considering once again the polarity of music and noise, not everyone agrees that Wagner’s music dramas represent the zenith of orchestral music. In a quip variously attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw, “Wagner’s music is much better than it sounds.” As noted by his widow, Dostoevsky was among those who did not care much for Wagnerian music; yet, paradoxically, both masters in their separate ways explored similar spiritual territory. Maurice Baring, in An Outline of Russian Literature, draws a comparison of Wagner and Dostoevsky in musico-philosophical terms:

[Dostoevsky’s] words have a power beyond that of words, a power that only music has. There are pages [in The Brothers Karamazov and The Devils] where Dostoevsky expresses the anguish of the soul in the same manner as Wagner expressed the delirium of dying Tristram. I should indeed put the matter the other way around and say that in the last act of Tristan, Wagner is as great as Dostoevsky. (60)

One of many qualities that made Dostoevsky and Wagner great was their ability to transcend the conventional limits of artistic forms in their time and create original works from their cross-disciplinary musico-philosophical explorations of the grounds of ontological dichotomy, at the confluence of the profane and the sacred, sin and atonement, time and eternity.

Such artistic high-wire acts, however, require not only imagination and courage but also a certain humility. In his essay “From the Novelistic Experience to the Oedipus Myth,” Girard says of great works of literature, “The masterpiece contradicts the artist’s original intention” and asserts, “In short, [the artist] recognizes that he is not God. That is the first step of true art” (11). The artist who aspires to greatness, then, must renounce his pretensions to divinity. That was a major task for the three musico-philosophical artists, Dostoevsky, Wagner, and Burgess––namely, to overcome the desires of artistic pride and personal egotism, both in themselves and in their artistic creations, their works and characters. Almost of necessity, musical features in literature take on psychological and spiritual dimensions. Gans’s words deserve repeating: “The art/entertainment dichotomy. . . forces us to face the ontological dichotomy within ourselves” (52). For Dostoevsky and Burgess, music was a metaphysical force and an instrument of choice for presenting characters working toward “freedom through self-understanding” in their literary creations.

Music urges characters in the works of Dostoevsky, Wagner, and Burgess to transform their incomplete nature into “new selves” by inner revolution, even as noise torments them with invisible fears. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard reflects on the human tendency to fall into “self-misunderstanding” (32–33). Facing such perils directly, however, Dostoevsky, Wagner, and Burgess found ways to use the mythic power of music to intensify the drama of the characters they placed on the edge of “satanic” traps of self-misunderstanding, allowing the characters to work out their own salvation through the human capacity for self-transcendence.

Conclusion

With hearts beating, sometimes audible to the inner ear, humans listen to sounds and noises in the natural and social worlds and try to make their own sounds or noises to create evidence that they are still alive. In this article, I focused on the ways that Dostoevsky and Burgess dealt artistically with ontological dichotomy through their musico-philosophical perspectives. Music brings these writers’ literary characters to life, while noise creates dissonance that threatens to cancel life altogether.

Further investigations of imaginative literature in relation to the effects and influences of music are worth undertaking. The “musico-philosophical” perspectives of two nineteenth-century British scientists, Florence Nightingale and Charles Darwin, promise to yield valuable insights into the convergence of music, literature, nonfiction, and early modern science. In a similar musico-philosophical way, the twentieth-century British writer E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster pursued lifelong interests in the merging of musical and literary matters. All three figures–Nightingale, Darwin, and Forster––are attractive subjects for future exploration of the places where music, literature, and philosophy converge.