Author: staceymeeker

Nobody knows what narrative is. We define it traditionally as the form of discourse that represents a series of events, but this definition lacks important specifics that would help us make sense of narrativity as an affective, temporal, pedagogical, cognitive, performative, structural, and linguistic phenomenon. We can isolate its constitutive parts and effects, but it is very challenging to put them together as a unified concept.

Consider characters, to whom events happen. Having access to their thoughts, feelings, and desires, (a privilege we do not have with real people), we engage with the events they undergo and, as William Flesch puts it, actively will on their behalf or against them (2012, 6). Certainly, narrative’s ability to draw us into the vicarious experiencing of these events is central to its meaning-making potential. But the experiential quality of the plot also affects our understanding. It is not just “a series” of events but a specific arrangement of this series. Plots have different shapes, and these shapes influence the way we construct meaning within a created framework of expectation. Then there is setting, which has more recently received more attention under the guise of fictional world. It is hard to know what it is exactly – an imaginary referential object, a cognitive environment, a scene on which characters act? Questions that surround it are those of how it can it be delineated and how it shapes the story “contained” within it. Nebulous as the category is, it is helpful mental scaffolding, according to one view, for theorizing events: an event is a jump from one potential world to another.[1] But on top of these ways of accounting for what is going on in the story itself, we cannot lose sight of the narrated aspect, the fact that the story does not exist as an artifact in itself but is told by a narrator to a narratee. The story and narration elements are heterogeneous to each other yet inseparable, both presupposed by narrative as a holistic concept. Even as we weave the events of our day together into a story in a constantly running, unstoppable process of what Peter Goldie, in an aptly named book The Mess Inside, calls “narrative thinking,” we also narrate this story to ourselves: we are both the narrator and narratee. But even though it is hard to pinpoint what narrative is exactly, and even while those of us in Generative Anthropology occasionally disagree with others on whether animal communication can be called language, we would all agree that only human beings tell stories.

Generative Anthropology has dealt both with the story and narration aspects of narrativity as derivations from the originary scene. In Originary Thinking and his “Originary Narrative” article, Eric Gans focuses on the story and traces what we perceive as its suspense-generating drive toward closure to the origin of signification, which gives birth to the new dimension of verticality and creates the span of deferral (“the origin of language is also … the origin of narrative”). Thus in Originary Thinking, Gans connects narrative temporality of to the emergence of the declarative sentence in the context of ritual. The declarative, according to his genealogy of the linguistic forms, came into being as a failed response to an imperative in order to express the absence of a requested object. But while in the profane, everyday context, the interlocutor is only interested in the descriptive information of where the object can be found, in the ritual context, the temporality of communication itself becomes important because the audience wants to “[maintain] the scene of ritual presence through which communal peace is preserved and reinforced … as an awaiting” (97). This state of awaiting is instantiated narratively as a series of predicates that tell the story of the “coming of the divinity,” beginning from absence to its full presence (97). The “Originary Narrative” article reformulates this in minimal terms by stating that the sign simply tells the story of its own constitution as it “translates” the horizontal gesture of appropriation into the vertical one of signification. What accounts for the temporality of the narrative form then is the pre-linguistic acquisitive movement being retrieved through the prolongation of sign toward its referent that symbolically substitutes for the object of appetite. It can be figured as a final resolution of a quest or a character’s accession to the center of significance or even the reader’s successful arrival at the meaning of the story.

In “New Thoughts on Originary Narrative,” Gans turns his attention to the narrational aspect, deriving it from the act of imitation. As he explains, “the originary analysis of storytelling conceives narration as an extension of the reciprocal exchange of the originary sign.” But even though the exchange is reciprocal, it is always prompted by someone who goes first and thus commands the group’s attention. This initiation of action is the impetus of the narrator-led and thus asymmetrical narrator-narratee dynamic. “Submission to the narrator is analogous to submission to the mimetic mediation of the first in the originary event, just as the desires we espouse under the narrator’s influence are analogous to the desire aroused by the originary central object.” In mediating the group’s mimetic desires, the narrator undertakes the deferral of the mimetic conflict. In other words, the aesthetic prolongation of the sign is contextualized by the ethical dimension of narrative. The aesthetic effects of the story are inseparable from the ethics of narrative communication.

In my own GA take on narrative, I focus on the interaction of the narrator and narratee on the scene of representation incorporating some important insights of narrative theory on the structure and dynamics of narrative communication.[2] In the current article, I want to return to the topic of narrative communication from the dual perspectives of GA, on the one hand, and a particular branch of narrative theory called the rhetorical approach, on the other. Recent and relatively recent developments in this area show interesting similarities and convergences between rhetorical narratology and GA’s model of narrativity. My goal is to explore these similarities with the view toward situating relevant narratological concepts in the more minimal and explanatory context of GA, but also bringing more nuanced narratological forms of analysis to bear on the GA’s rather large-grained theoretical apparatus. Toward the end, I will consider the meaning of narrative temporality in light of both approaches.

Without trying to be comprehensive or historically and terminologically precise, I will give a brief background of how rhetorical narratology came to be and situate it among some other approaches. Until relatively recently, the study of narrative did not make the communicative aspect of narrative, that is to say, the fact that stories are told by story-tellers to their audiences, the centerpiece of its analytical pursuit. In trying to understand what narrative is, it focused on the story itself as the object of the study and dealt with the narrativity aspect as a secondary phenomenon. Older, structuralism-inspired approaches to narrative theory mainly concerned themselves with the structure of the plot, the phenomenology of time, and the question of interpretation. For brevity’s sake, I am bracketing a parallel line of inquiry into the reader’s response to narrative, comprising investigations into the nature of suspense or identification with literary characters, which cut across these divisions but will return to it when I discuss rhetorical narratology. To resume then, the first of these research angles focuses on narrative elements, classifying narrative as a synchronous artifact, a narrative langue, and to this effect, systematizing plot types and articulating the grammar of narratives. The “building block” of a plot, according to this view, is a narrative event: a narrative is commonly understood as a succession of events.[3] But event itself is notoriously hard to pin down. The usual definition, that of “an event is a change of state” type, does not bear close scrutiny. Would any trivial action by a character, such as getting up from a chair or walking toward the door, be counted as a change of state? In response to this criticism, some narratologists clarify that this must be a significant change of state, prompting the question of how to determine significance, a difficult question, which has not been answered satisfactorily.

The second line of questioning is motivated by a desire to capture the temporal nature of narrative as a cognitive phenomenon, drawing a distinction between the story as a chronological sequence of events and discourse, the order in which the events are actually narrated (which rarely follows strict chronology). Story in its chronological sense (also called fabula in Russian Formalism), is an atemporal object, a plotting of points along a time axis, that we can perceive at a glance. Narrative discourse (correspondingly, syuzhet), on the other hand, unfolds in time and mobilizes our faculties of anticipation and remembering. Fabula is commonly seen as ontologically prior to discourse insofar as fictional events, invented as they may be, “really” do happen in a given order in the fictional universe of a literary work). But in another view, less indebted to structuralism, the chronological sequence is a post-construction that comes into existence as a result of syuzhet-processing.

Yet another distinct emphasis of narrative theory has been on the narrated aspect rather than the story as the content or object of narration. Stories (even in non-literary media) are told from a narrative perspective or point of view, which guides us in our interpretation of what has happened. Concepts such as narrator and focalizer foreground what is being told vs. what is being seen, with both reflecting the two connotations of perspective (or point of view), the mental and the visual, respectively. This is when/why interpretation comes into play: we do not have direct access to the fictional world with its fictional “facts”; our knowledge is skewed and limited because we are getting a filtered version. The accuracy of our interpretation, in other words, is always at risk, which is known as the problem of an unreliable narrator.

But interpretative concerns encompass not only the classical problem of unreliability but also more recent, post-classical interrogations of ideology and narrative authority (“post-classical” is the label for the late post-modern and post-millennial developments in narrative theory). In other words, we may trust the narrator’s reporting but mistrust the overall perspective of the text which we may perceive as biased, uncongenial, intellectually unsound, or originating from a suspect source. This broader interrogation of perspective and interpretation receives a more nuanced treatment in the model of narrative frames, which re-conceptualizes the narrator and narratee. Previously, they were seen as regular elements of narrative among other elements, but now they are “elevated” as a cognitive bracket to form a narrative frame around the story. To put it another way, a story is not a self-sufficient artifact: it is a “missive” enclosed in a communicative “envelope” that designates the sender and receiver. The expanded version of this model conceives of a series of embedded envelopes or frames. The frames on the levels closest to the story are those reflecting the communication between the narrator and narratee. There could be more than one because we may be reading a story within a story, and so on…  It is sometimes debated whether the narrator-narratee frame should always be presumed or imposed, given that an explicit narrative voice is often missing, and we hardly ever hear explicit invocations of a narratee of the “Reader, I married him” variety in contemporary novels. But those who argue that this layer is indispensable justify it by pointing out that an implicit narrative voice is inherent in the genre itself with its origin in oral tradition. Around this envelope, we find the one of the implied author vs the implied reader. The former could be seen either as a construct by the reader or, alternatively, the construct of the text, an index of its “designedness.” The implied reader is what the reader construes as the implied author’s intended audience. And finally, the outer envelope addresses the communication between the real author and real audience, which might become relevant in some cases of biographical criticism, textual ambiguities, or perceived ideological discrepancies between what the narrative suggests and our knowledge of the real author’s opinions.

On this view, while unreliable narrators might have opinions we are not meant to endorse, the ultimate ethical ground of the text lies in the ideology we can ascribe to the implied author, deducing it from the gaps between what the narrator says and what the text suggests. Consequently, we may accept or reject the author’s position. This is what is referred to as the ethics of narration. Another important distinction that should be made is one between the functions of the narrator-narratee vs. implied author-implied reader frames. The former is the function of communication, which both transmits the story and controls its rhetorical effects; the latter is the function of fictionality expressive of a fictional narrative’s status as an invention. The following example could make this clear. Imagine that a friend, who is a talented story-teller, is telling you about something that happened in her work. Through her use of vivid language, gestures, and facial expressions, she can make her narration very engaging. She could also arrange the order of what is revealed in a very skillful way so as to entrap you in suspense and spring on you a surprising revelation. She might even be very explicit in her evaluation of the related events, with which you may or may not agree. But you would not be looking for themes or symbols in her story because these, among some other aspects of narrativity, belong not to communication but to fictionality, the quality of being invented, i.e. intentional design.

All of these perspectives struggle in different ways to resolve the problem of narrative hybridity, the fact that narrative is both an object for cognition and a performative phenomenon. And in its heterogeneity, it is also subject to dual temporality: the temporality of the told (a story, which “represents” time) and that of telling (narrating that story “in” time). As a result, each approach runs into some kind of impasse and pivots around a point of undecidibility or contradiction. Take the structuralist approach, which treats narrative as representation. While regular grammars work with well-defined objects, narrative grammars are based on (significant) events, which, as already mentioned, are difficult to identify and distinguish from trivial (non-)events. The crux of the problem is that significance depends on the framework of expectation that is being created in the course of narration. In other words, a structural analysis depends on a variable that belongs to narrative’s performative dimension. The same problem occurs within the fabula vs. syuzhet problematic. While fabula is a structural representation that visually plots the events of the chronology on the axis of time and can thus be grasped at a glance, syuzhet, again, is contextual and performative. The primacy of one vs. the other is ultimately undecidable since the two plot-related concepts belong to two incommensurate “ontologies” of narrativity. The same is true for the theorization of narrative perspective, which is also motivated by the incompatibility between the cognitive and performative dimensions of narrativity. The notion of perspective arises out of trying to “cognitivize” multiple instances of communication – dialogues between characters, narrators situated on different levels of embedded narration, as well as the position of the implied author. But bringing the discourse of narrators and focalizers into the structural analysis of story elements creates an unnatural yoking: the two do not belong within the same conceptual realm.

It is here where rhetorical narratology enters. I do not know whether rhetorical narratologists would agree with me–and there are, no doubt, different ways to derive the genealogy of the rhetorical approach from other concerns–but I connect the emergence of this model with a search for a new perspective that would resolve the uneasy balancing act of accounting for narrative heterogeneity, as outlined above. The rhetorical approach brackets the story as representation and an object of cognition and privileges the narrative process. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz define narrative as communication, namely: “Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (2012, 3).[4] According to this definition, it is the act and context of communication that are foregrounded, with the story being blurred as “something [that] happened.” Stressing that it’s not the story as a static artifact that is the object of inquiry, Phelan elsewhere states that “narrative is itself an event–more specifically, a multidimensional, purposive communication from a teller to an audience” (2017, 5). Consequently, he subsumes all perspectival distinctions, such as those between focalizing characters, narrative frames, the implied and real authors under “multidimensionality.” Instead of specifying and juxtaposing different levels and sources of perspective, the rhetorical approach “identifies a feedback loop among authorial agency textual phenomena . . . , and reader response” (2012, 5). In other words, all communication takes place between the author and reader and not between imaginary agencies: “texts are designed by authors to affect readers in particular ways” (2017, 6).

Phelan’s theory of the reader takes an innovative approach. Instead of postulating different kinds of abstract and concrete readers, both as things-in-themselves and as conceived by the author, he envisions all of these positions being occupied at the same time by real readers. For fictional texts, he identifies four distinct positions. The first one is the actual audience, real people reading the book in their own historical time. The second is the authorial audience, the people that the author has in mind because they are “the group that shares the knowledge, values, prejudices, fears, and experiences that the author expected in his or her readers” (2017, 7). The third type of audience is the audience addressed by the narrator, that is, the narratee. And the final group is the narrative audience, “an observer position within the storyworld. As observers, the members of the narrative audience regard the characters and events as real rather than invented” (2017, 7). The last two classes might appear similar, but Phelan and Rabinowitz clarify the difference, explaining that while “The narrative audience is a role that the actual reader takes on while reading; the narratee, in contrast, is a character position in the text, one that the narrative audience in a sense observes” (2012, 7). They use an example of the frame narrative in Frankenstein to illustrate the difference: “we do not pretend to be Mrs Saville, to whom Captain Walton is addressing his letters; rather we pretend to be a narrative audience that views her as a real person and that, in a sense, reads over her shoulder” (2012 7).

What seems especially promising and original in this approach is the above theoretical move of postulating the reader’s multi-perspectivism. Of the four audiences, only the actual reader and the narratee within the text are determinate; the other two are ideations that an actual reader will or may adopt. Real readers are free to inhabit the authorial position if they find it congenial; but they may also choose to reject it if they see the author’s worldview as hostile or incompatible with their own. In the case of joining the authorial audience, real readers become what Phelan calls rhetorical readers, those who now possess “the double consciousness that allows [them] to experience the events as real and to retain the tacit knowledge that they are invented” (2017, 8). Once they have joined the authorial audience, they must, by default, join the narrative audience, as well. But even here, they are in a double position because they are free to either take the narrative account as authoritative or disbelieve it as naive, ignorant, or ethically problematic. In this way, Phelan’s (and Rabinowitz’s) rhetorical approach can incorporate the communicational frames model but without a strict separation between perspectival levels and positions. All perspectives exist within the purview of the reader, who could inhabit them simultaneously, or jump between them in the course of reading, as Phelan shows through multiple examples in Somebody Telling Somebody Else.

Perspectival instability emphasizes another important point that the rhetorical approach makes. The author-audience interaction forms a dynamic progression of the reader’s journey along the cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic axes of responses. All of these levels of responses can be hypothetically activated in concert, creating a polyphony of reading experiences. These reading progressions are brought together with the textual dynamic, what we normally think as the unfolding of the story, but can often “trump . . . the logic of event sequence or of telling situations” (2017, 4). The reading-dynamic progression is central to rhetorical narrative analysis, which conceives of reading as a two-step process: “rhetorical readers . . . [are invited to] evaluate [their] experiences. . . . Indeed, rhetorical readers do not complete their acts of reading until they take this second step” (2017, 8).

While Phelan and Rabinowitz subordinate the story to communication in their analysis, Richard Walsh’s take on the rhetorical approach is even more radical. Situating his model in the pragmatics of communication, Walsh appeals to the relevance theory of Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson to argue that communication does not need to be referentially grounded to be relevant. Relevance theory is itself rooted in the model of conversational implicature by H.P. Grice, according to whom relevance attaches itself to the overall context of communication constructed through inferences or implicatures. In other words, speech acts “fulfil the appropriateness conditions of relevance . . . not by being informative, but by being exhibitative–by being tellable” (2007, 21). Sperber and Wilson, as quoted in Walsh, articulate this as a communicative intention, an intention to “inform . . . of one’s informative intention” or to “manifest an intention to make something manifest” (2007, 24). The informative content itself (explicature) cannot be isolated from the implicatures inherent in the act of communication. It is the chain of implicatures or inferences that maintains the context of relevance. From the perspective of GA, it is interesting that Sperber and Wilson refer to the behavior that manifests an intention to manifest as “ostension” or “ostensive behaviour,” formulating their principle of relevance in the following way: “Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance” (qtd. In 2007, 25).

In applying these insights to fiction, Walsh takes issue with some conventional views of fictionality. Thus he criticizes a common enough view of a fictional story as a speech act that has a fictional referent, something like a fictional world, objecting that this “desire to treat fictions as ontological wholes, as worlds, transforms the communicative process of inference from the implicatures of an utterance into a quite different process of ontological extrapolation” (2018(a), 3). He also argues with another wide-spread misconception (according to him), namely that fiction is a pretense or make-believe speech. Not so, he says, fictionality is a mode of a serious, non-referential, speech act that is simply light on information, or “indirectly rather than directly informative” (2018(a), 11). “The distinguishing feature of fictionality,” he claims, “is not its relation to falsehood, then, but its independence from directly informative kinds of relevance” (2018(a), 2). Instead, “the direct informative relevance of the narrative instance is superseded by the second-order relevance it affords when considered as such a narrative instance” (2918(a), 13). This second-order relevance refers to filling in the reader’s expectations with contextual inferences in the direction of the overall increase of relevance. In this light, “narrative closure figures less as the resolution of plot in itself . . . than as the resolution of the evaluations of relevance,” such that “The narrative force of fiction depends upon assumptions carried forward, enriched, modified, reappraised, overturned in the process of reading” (2007, 30-31). The narrative pressure that is built up by the pursuit of relevance carries the rhetorical force of cumulative aesthetic and cognitive effects. Walsh thus sees fictionality as a rhetorical resource attaching itself to the communicative act itself rather than its fictional referent; in other words, a feature of the communicative act rather than its product. What the rhetoric of fictionality aims at is a kind of “re-orientation of communicative attention . . . in the shared cognitive environment between communicator and audience” (2018(a), 10).

For the sake of comparing the rhetorical approach to the GA theory of narrative, I will treat both Phelan’s and Walsh’s models as consistent with each other, and so will be talking about one rhetorical model even though there are differences between the two with respect to the contingency of referentiality. But for my purposes, they both present a novel and productive way of looking at narratives that shares important assumptions about the nature of communication and communication’s role in narrative discourse. Walsh’s conceptualization of narrative discourse apparatus is especially close to that of GA. It is easy to draw parallels between his re-orientation of the speaker and audience’s attention to a communicative intention in the common cognitive environment, on the one hand, and the sign users’ joint attention to the signifying center on the scene of representation, on the other. But Phelan’s approach too constitutes a radical departure from the tradition of making the story the main object of study. By conflating various positionalities and subsuming them under just two categories, those of the author and the audience, he loosens the rigidly stratified narrative communication model, which, despite its recognition of the communicative aspect, ends up putting the emphasis on the story, as well, because it directs attention to it by representing it as a framed object. By turning away from the literalist reading of the story or fictional world as referential objects, the rhetorical model transfers attention to the scenic aspect of discourse and the symbolic status of the central object.

From my disciplinary perspective, I interpret the emergence of rhetorical narratology as a harmonizing development that brings narrative theory and GA on a path of consilience. With its prioritizing of the communicative act over the representational object (Walsh 2018(a), 12), the rhetorical approach shows sensitivity to the performative dimension of narrative interaction underlain by something like a GA scene. It is more explicit in Walsh’s postulation of a shared cognitive environment. But it can also be inferred from Phelan’s description of the shared ethics of reading: “The ethics is based on reciprocity and trust: the author and the audience assume that narrative communication is a shared enterprise, albeit one in which the author takes the lead” (2017, 22)). The idea of shared enterprise strikes me as implicitly scenic: the author and the reader are mutually aware of their common goal, but with the author being in the privileged position of firstness.[5]

But can we take this observation about compatibility further? Can GA fill some gaps in rhetorical narratology, and the other way around? In considering this question, I will, from this point on, refer only to Phelan’s Somebody Telling Somebody Else, to limit my discussion to one particular work, which is convenient for my purposes because of its succinct model of a feedback loop between the authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response that is worked out for a great variety of rhetorical situations. One can start by saying that it is difficult to imagine ways in which Phelan’s compelling and nuanced close readings could be improved. This, in a sense, serves as “the proof of the pudding” with regard to the question of whether rhetorical narratology “needs” GA’s intervention. It seems to have all the necessary analytical tools to generate a rhetorical reading, which, according to Phelan, enriches and expands the reader’s engagement with the cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of a literary work (2017, 9). These rhetorical registers are themselves produced as responses to the three types of readerly interests, namely, mimetic (“tied to the rhetorical readers’ participation in the narrative audience” and “evolving judgments and emotions, their desires, hopes, expectations, satisfactions, and disappointments”), thematic (“interest in the ideational function of the characters and in the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by the narrative”), and synthetic (“interest and attention to the characters and larger narrative as artificial constructs”) (10). Deploying these conceptual distinctions, Somebody Telling Somebody Else generates surprising and helpful insights into the workings of various rhetorical resources, showing, for example, how some types of narrative unreliability can, paradoxically, engender trust as a reader’s response.

Where GA can intervene is in providing a more minimal explanatory model for the rhetorical effects Phelan is uncovering. There are three important claims that Somebody Telling Somebody Else makes that especially interest me and that I would like to re-articulate using GA’s conceptual apparatus. The first one has to do with his theory’s flexible use of positionality. For example, the real reader, as already mentioned, may choose to occupy the position of the authorial reader, that is the reader that the author is addressing, and as the authorial reader, he will also occupy the position of the narrative audience. In his turn, the author “relies (consciously or intuitively) on the authorial audience’s unfolding responses to the narrative progression as he or she constructs new parts of the text” (32). In other words, the reader inhabits the position of the author as he conceives his reader, while the author can also occupy the position of the reader. This reciprocal “mind reading” can, for example, produce what Phelan calls the crossover effect: “readerly dynamics–rhetorical readers’ unfolding responses to the progression–cross over into the textual dynamics and lend a logic to the events that is more powerful than the logic of external probability” (2017, 53). While Phelan calls this “empathic” ability to experience the other’s position “double consciousness,” in following his own analysis, we can ascertain that it is more than double. Thus the reader, other than being himself, can occupy the authorial reader’s position and become a member of the narrative audience, at the same time, while also inhabiting the consciousness of one or more characters. All of these positions are associated with different degrees of understanding: a character can be in the dark or know more than the narratee; the narratee may disbelieve the narrative; the authorial reader may agree with the author’s moral position while the real reader may reject it and still be able to entertain it on the contingent basis of stepping into the authorial reader’s shoes. This multiperspectivism is a distinguishing feature of narrative consciousness, usually talked about in connection to our relationship to characters as the phenomenon of identification. Rhetorical narratology takes a broader view and ascribes this proliferation of perspectives to a system of intentionality–a “larger system of thought” that governs narrative’s “purposive design” (203). Instead of imputing individual perspectives and intentions to individual agents, the book locates intention in the authorial agency of the feedback loop between it, the textual phenomena, and reader response: “the intentionality of [the authorial] agency . . . is accessible through textual phenomena and . . . testable against reader response” (2017, 203). Put another way, our amazing competence in jumping between perspectives while keeping in mind different perspectives we are simultaneously embodying is contained in the understanding of narrative as something that someone tells someone else on some occasion and with some purpose.

While the nature of identification and perspectivism has been disputed, and the notion of intentionality has been controversial in literary analysis until relatively recently (reclaimed by theories such as rhetorical narratology, which recognized that we attribute intentionality to acts of communication), Generative Anthropology has accounted for these phenomena by deriving them from the origin of symbolic representation. Our ability to align ourselves with and ascribe intentionality to multiple agencies can be connected to our paradoxical double position on two scenes, at the same time, the communal scene with the shared center of symbolic significance and the individual scene on which each participant imagines acceding to the object individually. On this individual scene, as Gans explains in “The Paradox of Desire and Art,” “desire ‘feeds on itself,’ deferral making the object of appetite significant/sacred within the individual’s own scene of representation. The intentionality this gives rise to in the individual, unlike the expression of significance through the sign, makes him aware of his independence from the community.” I would also add that intentionality makes itself manifest on the private scene of representation, which gives rein to the acquisitive desire. Within his private space of imagination, the participant wants to be alone to possess the appetitive object, and, at the same time, also wants to know what others intend to do about it: will they abstain from the object or do they plan to deceive others who defer appropriation by breaking the agreement of the collective scene (and thus going for the object illegitimately). Intentionality is a feature of language and symbolic representation that has its genesis in the origin of the sign: our scenic consciousness always wants to know what others think and intend, and this is something that is thematized by the narrative form.

Multiperspectivism, as categorized and exemplified by Phelan, follows from our interest to ascertain the others’ intentions by aligning with their points of view. The proliferation of positionalities on different levels is enabled by the generativity of the scene and our ability to occupy different scenes at the same time. Just as we can align ourselves with characters, being engaged, say, in dialogue with other characters on the imaginary scene of the fictional world, and perceive the conversation from their perspective, we can also distance ourselves from the story and characters’ interests and join the narrative audience addressed by the narrator on the scene where the narration is taking place. While the two scenes are distinct, they both belong to the imaginary scene. At the same time, the reader understands that the communication on the imaginary scene is initiated by the author on the real/communal scene of authorial communication that we attribute to the fictional aspect of narrative. On the level of authorial communication, however, we read for symbolic rewards such as thematic meaning or stylistic flourish instead of more vicariously appetitive rewards of a satisfactory plot closure. To sum up, Generative Anthropology provides a theoretical foundation for the feedback-loop model and even a justification for viewing rhetorical narratology as a theoretical advancement in the study of narrative for the reason that its insight into communication as a larger system of [narrative] thought is more anthropologically astute than those of the earlier theories.

Phelan’s other bridge to GA comes at the end of his book, where he considers the value and larger significance of his approach. What is the motivation behind this type of analysis, he is asking. Since the communication between the storyteller and audience is the main focus of this approach, we would need to answer this question from both ends. “The motivation for the somebody who tells is not far to seek: to come to terms with some aspect of human experience; to communicate ideas, attitudes, values, and convictions to anyone who will listen; to create something of lasting beauty” (2017, 258). As for the opposite perspective, “The goal of rhetorical poetics,” he says, “is to help individual readers to perform [the] two-step process as skillfully as possible” (2017, 258). This two-step process was already mentioned; namely, to engage with the affective, cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of narrative experience, followed by the step of evaluating this experience. Engaging with these experiences would involve “giving oneself over to mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components of the teller’s communication” (2017, 258-259). And then the second step, to evaluate, means to assess the truth or trustworthiness or moral soundness of what the author communicates. In this step, the readers would ask themselves whether they trust the report by a character or the narrator, and if they trust the facts, whether they trust their evaluations of the facts, but ultimately, whether they trust the author’s values, judgments, worldview, and ideology (thus “assessing the teller’s mind, emotions, values, and sense of quality” 2017, 259)).

In couching this second step in the language of GA, we might say that the readers are asking themselves whether they would join the scene where they have been invited. As already mentioned, in “New Thoughts on Originary Narrative,” Gans points out that narrative communication is mediated by mimetic desire, expressed as the firstness of the narrator: “the first user of the sign must persuade his fellows that his gesture is no longer an act of appropriation but a sign, or in other words, that his relationship to the central object of desire is the newly invented/discovered relationship of signification.” It would not be far-fetched to equate the first step, that of giving oneself over to narrative experience, to the mimetic mechanism of succumbing to the pull of attraction exerted by the narrator as the model of imitation, the persuasive attraction of the first. But the second step is a move away from being seduced, an awakening, perhaps, to one’s state of being in thrall to mimetic desire. It will have to come second because one must already have succumbed to being successfully interpellated by the narrator before one can even question whether to stay on this scene. But there is no definitive reason to stop there. One can go back and forth between being swayed by the rhetoric of persuasion and rejecting it. The dynamic of this oscillation is structurally similar to that of the oscillation between the communal scene mediated by the sign and the private scene of desirous imagination. In this sense, GA can provide an explanatory model of why the “rhetorical readers do not complete their acts of reading until they take this second step.”

But what about the author, what about the motivation of the first? Phelan provides a psychological explanation of what drives the author to tell his story, as quoted above, namely, to share human experience and communicate ideas “to anyone who will listen.” The formulation is similar to Peter Brooks’s description (of the producer’s side) of narrative desire, which is not only a desire to hear a story and the desire to tell it. In his analysis of Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, he close-reads the scene in which the protagonist, Raphaël, is telling his story to an interlocutor who has fallen asleep. According to Brooks,

That Raphaël should be thus talking to the air makes more starkly clear the absolutism of the desire from which narrative as narrating is born: it is in essence the desire to be heard, recognized, understood, which, never wholly satisfied or indeed satisfiable, continues to generate the desire to tell, the effort to enunciate a significant version of the life story in order to captivate a possible listener. (54)

As we see, he words this desire to be a narrator in similar psychological terms as a desire to share, explain, and communicate. He also adds the motivation of reciprocity by using words such as “recognized” and “understood.” Yet in the very next paragraph and throughout the chapter, he talks about narrative desire in terms of being a “motor,” which is, in a way, the opposite figure to that of motivation.

This is indicative of some existing tension in our understanding of communication, an oscillation between its voluntaristic and mechanistic aspects. Are we forced by the charismatic narrator and suspense to listen to the end of the story in our expectation of closure or do we freely choose to “give ourselves over” to the thematic, mimetic, and synthetic interests? Do we consciously internalize our purpose in communicating to someone that something has happened to us on some occasion, or are we blindly compelled to tell our story “to the air” because we are driven, zombie-like, by a narrative engine? To find some theoretical grounding for the narrator’s desire in mimetic theory we may invoke Girard’s observation that the person who is imitated starts to imitate his own imitator: “This person who is a mediator without realizing it may himself be incapable of spontaneous desire. Thus he will be tempted to copy his own desire” (1966, 99). But in this case, we would be saying that the narrator’s desire awakens after he becomes the narrator and gains his following of the narratees. Gans’s concept of the producer’s desire might be a better candidate as when he writes in The End of Cuilture “All desire is desire for significance. Producer’s desire aims at its unique possession and, in its most radical sense, can never be fulfilled” (160). Indeed, in the symbolic economy of language, jockeying for becoming a narrator is a bid for significance under its guise of the cultural centrality of firstness, which is the simultaneous expression of the creative desire to produce. Phelan makes a similar observation when he says that what the narrator wants is to “create something of lasting beauty.” Another hypothesis is advanced by me in my 2019 presentation at the Narrative conference, where I speculate that the narrator and narratee are entangled as a “system,” and as such, we cannot meaningfully disentangle consciously-willed action and a drive-like behavior of compulsion. “This [entangled interdependence] serves as the basis of what I see as the narrator-narratee “system,” whereby the narratee and narrator exist inseparably from each other in the performative moment of now. That’s what being on the scene means: a performative situation is both coercive and ethical, ensnaring its participants into engaging with each other, bringing them together as a collective agency, so that the passive-active narratee can be seen as the initiator who elicits the story from the active-passive narrator.” Whatever the case may be, the anthropological foundation of the narrator’s desire needs to be thought of more, in my estimation.

Finally, what I find interesting is Phelan’s final reflections on the “why?” question. Why engage in the rhetorical analysis of narratives? What is the pragmatic significance of this practice? What new knowledge is produced? Are there some lasting values that are discovered or reinforced? Phelan’s answer is that looking at stories through the lens of the rhetorical approach has a direct effect on how we live our lives. He writes that

rhetorical poetics wants to break down the border between reading and living. It believes that reading narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional . . . functions as a rich and rewarding way of living life. To be sure, reading narrative does not by itself constitute a full life, but it is a valuable way to spend time that can greatly enhance other ways of spending it. Thus, the better rhetorical readers we can become, the better lives we can lead. Consequently, the ultimate purpose of rhetorical poetics is to contribute to human flourishing. (258-9)

In thus reclaiming this long-unfashionable humanist belief in the beneficial influence that art can have on life, the rhetorical approach to narratology affirms its emphasis on ethics as the cornerstone of human communication. The ethical aspect is certainly harder to isolate and theorize when the main focus of analysis is on the structural elements of the story itself, not on its communicative aspect. The interest in the ethics of communication is also something that rhetorical narratology shares with Generative Anthropology, which postulates the human scene as the source of ethical consciousness.

In the bulk of my analysis so far, I have tried to find common ground between the rhetorical approach to narratology and Generative Anthropology. In addition, I tried to situate elements of rhetorical analysis anthropologically with the help GA’s conceptual apparatus. In my conclusion, I will turn in the other direction and use some insights by rhetorical narratology to uncover possible gaps in GA’s approach to narrative that need to be filled in. I started out by saying that narrative is an odd and conceptually discordant aesthetic form consisting of several heterogeneous aspects, such as story, perspective, and temporality that are difficult to integrate into a coherent object for cognition. In describing the analytical method of rhetorical narratology, I focused on perspectival and communicative aspect and not so much on temporality, which is itself a complex, hard to grasp phenomenon, encompassing the incompatible aspects of the temporality of telling and that of the told. In privileging the communicative dimension, the rhetorical approach does not delve very deeply into the nature of narrative temporality except in its consideration of progression or narrative sequence. Progression is a question taken up by rhetorical theorists as a substitute for the earlier emphasis on the story. Thus Walsh writes that “Narrative is the semiotic articulation of linear temporal sequence” (2018(b), 12). Early in Somebody Telling Somebody Else, Phelan explains that “the progression of a narrative [is a] synthesis of textual and readerly dynamics. Textual dynamics are the internal processes by which narratives move from beginning through middle to ending, and readerly dynamics are then corresponding cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses of the audience to those textual dynamics” (2017, 9). The rest of the text demonstrates the above statement by analyzing various types of narrative progression through tracing the unfolding of readerly dynamics with masterful detail. What these analytical instances make abundantly clear is that meaning is a journey, not the correct and final determination of some semantic value. One needs to travel through the crooks and bends of aesthetic and affective responses, be misled by false clues, surprised by late revelations, diverted by misevaluations, become attracted or repelled by characters and narrators, switch allegiances, undergo the vagaries of plot peripeteia, and so on, before one completes the two-step rhetorical process and arrives at the destination of, say, understanding a work of literature thematically. When a theme is defined as an idea, something important is lost. This point is eloquently made by Tolstoy, for example. When he was asked about the meaning of his novel Anna Karenina, he responded that his work was trying to express the “family idea.” At the same time, in his famous letter to N.N. Strahov on the same topic, he writes: “If I wanted to express in words what I meant by my novel, I would have to write the novel–the same one I have written–from the beginning. And if critics feel they now understand it and can summarize it in a feuilleton then I congratulate them and can confidently assure them that qu’ils savent plus long que moi.”

Generative Anthropology does address the important question of narrative temporality by connecting it to the memory of the temporally extended appropriative gesture and the early form of the ritual scene. In Originary Thinking Gans opposes the atemporal nature of the declarative form to the temporality of narrativity. While “The narrative element is provided by the presignifying temporality of the gesture, that is, by what has been abolished by its conversion into a sign,” while “The textual is the moment that contemplates this abolition of protective temporality as the source of the meaning of the sign” (105). On the profane scene, as already discussed, “the relative insignificance of the object” makes the temporality of the declarative insignificant: “We are not interested in hearing a story about the object’s absence” (97). But narrative retains the character of the ritual scene with its divine presence and strives to maintain this scene through which “communal peace is preserved and reinforced” (97). Gans reiterates this point in “New Thoughts on Originary Narrative,” where he says that narrative, which transforms the pre-linguistic temporality of the acquisitive gesture into the symbolic temporality of deferral, has an important ethical function. “The substitution of the sign’s formal temporality for that of worldly appropriation confirms the deferral of appetitive action and of the concomitant risk of mimetic violence.” Put another way, the temporality of deferral plays an important role in preserving and prolonging the scene and thus conferring on its participants a sense of safety. The re-temporalization of the sign in narrative has the effect of reenacting or revivifying the memory of the originary scene–an experience that we enjoy in its duration and want to see protracted. And it should not be overlooked that the very oscillating character of the scene, that is to say, the “oscillating attention of the peripheral participants between the reciprocally exchanged sign and its sacred central referent,” is a fundamentally temporal experience. That is so because the perception of alternation is predicated on a higher level of attention, no longer one of semiotic thirdness but a kind of “fourthness,” a metaperspective that can register periodic phenomena as the accrual of pulses along the fourth dimension, that of time.

But even though GA has a theory of temporality (in Originary Thinking, Gans even says “The originary sign, and by extension every sign, is only meaningful in the context of a temporal project” (105)), it does not explain how meaning is created by the “itinerary” of the journey we take toward narrative closure, commenting only on the “interlocutor’s awaiting the closure of the sign,” the fact of duration itself. Of course, it is entirely possible that the affective, cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic experiences we undergo are “epiphenomenal” to the semantic meaning formed by words and sentences. Perhaps they are merely physiological side-effects of the atemporal semiotic process that are irrelevant to its functioning. In this case, there is nothing intelligible we can say about them. I do think, however, that the reader response journey matters, not least because it mirrors and amplifies our interest in the dramatic structure of the plot and its typologies, which has been the central focus of narrative theory from the very beginning. And if so, the dynamic character of meaning remains an important question for GA to investigate.

Thoughts about wisdom tend to gravitate towards an idea or ideal of real knowledge that is unavailable and even irreducible to the conventions of logic and philosophical argumentation; we regard it as immune to the vagaries of instrumental reason. We tend to think of wisdom as transhistorical, even transcendental, rather than transactional, whence its kinship with religious thought. In Western religious tradition, wisdom is conceived as a perfection of knowledge bestowed as a gift of God. It is granted, for instance, to King Solomon who has prayed for this endowment in preference to riches or power (I Kings 3).

The most notorious instance of this bequest is not aphoristic, as we find in the Book of Wisdom, but episodic; it comes in the form of a narrative, namely, the well-known story of two prostitutes in rival claims for a living infant, each alleging that a dead child belonged to the other. Rémi Brague reminds us of the double heritage of Western culture: from Athens we have concepts, logic, and the conventions of argumentation; from Jerusalem we have stories, narrative, which have a logic of their own (Sur la Religion, Kindle loc. 384-385) for us “story telling animals,” as some anthropologists label our species. The argument has been made (Siedenbock, Bandera 1994, among others) that Western culture owes it truth seeking impulse, including its scientific spirit, principally to the biblical tradition of Judeo-Christianity. Marcel Gauchet has labeled this “the religion of the exit from religion,” as an ongoing critique of heteronomy, which in terms advanced by René Girard means the exit from false transcendence. What Girard’s mimetic theory and Eric Gans’s generative anthropology bring to the fore is the narrative dimension of this impulse which is the specialty of our biblical inheritance: stories, not syllogisms. A number of texts, fiction and non-fiction, in American literature will serve to sharpen our focus on this concern.

We know how the Solomon story his ends: the king asks for a sword to divide the child in two, whence the king can discern who is the  true mother as the one who would give up the child to her rival rather than have it killed, while the other would rather child die than lose it to her rival. The true mother is focused on the child, the false one on her rival. The difference between true and false, between original and copy, is resolved by the king at a more fundamental level as the absolute difference between life and death, which is the choice that the God of Israel has placed before his people in no uncertain terms (Deuteronomy 30.19-20).

René Girard has commented on this narrative (Things Hidden, 237-45) and so have I (Violence and Difference, 206-10) because it resonates with all the core themes of his mimetic theory: rivalry leading to a crisis of difference that portends a sacrificial solution. Indeed, this little “theater of envy,” which is how Girard describes the works of Shakespeare, is a template for Girard’s critique of sacred violence from the point of view of its victim. In 1 Kings 3, mimesis is embedded, all but thematized in the narrative, as the kings’ decision is fashioned on the option of killing the infant (decidere/occidere). Mimetic rivalry as the fountainhead of violence is the central theme of the story. All the commentaries I have read overlook this outstanding feature: at very epicenter of the narrative (1 Kings 22-23), the king literally repeats the words of the rivals, such that it is clear that this crisis of difference cannot be resolved at the level of verbal testimony. His demand for a sword refocuses the issue on the life or death of the child, the potential victim of the controversy, which resonates with Girard’s conviction that the Hebrew bible stands out from mythical narratives for its perspective on violence from the point of view of its victims rather than that of its mystified perpetrators. In this context, the famed wisdom of Solomon is fully and anthropologically intelligible.

Whether or not the Hebrew Bible is the inspired word of God, as averred by believers, or a pious delusion, as averred by unbelievers; whether or not such an event occurred at all, whether or not it is fact or fiction, it is a truthful story, hinging as it does on the absolute difference between life and death, to which all mortals, such as we are, are notionally bound to subscribe. Truthful stories can be matters of fact, historically verifiable, or genial contrivances of imaginative fiction, this difference being secondary to the demonstrable truth they make available. I could cite as another example the Good Samaritan story in Luke’s gospel; it’s a tale Jesus made up on the spot, under pressure exerted by a “man of the law” to clarify the practical application of “the greatest commandment,” love of God and love of neighbor. The moral of the fable is the pragmatic injunction to “go and do likewise,” that is, to imitate the man who comes to the rescue a victim of nearly lethal violence. Hence we have another story, a work of fiction, which binds us to the truth of its conclusion, defeating our reluctance by placing Jesus’ hearers and the reader in the position of the dying victim, a “man going down to Jericho,” presumably having duly participated in temple rituals. With both Solomon and Samaritan, we are entertained with an imagination, an imaging process, that, as Gans avers, is not static, as in paintings, but scenic, as in plays and novels.

The narrative ends with an imperative, a linguistic form whose difference from declarative utterances typical of narrative I shall explore further in the light Gans’s focus on its performative implications. Imperatives typically issue from positive or negative commandments, but also from prophetic speech bearing on the destiny of a nation: Israel in the bible, and ours when it comes to words of Lincoln near the term of the civil war.

The epistemological issue, which is what concerns me here, is that we ignore the wisdom of certain biblical narratives at our own peril. And furthermore, that our Western literary canon, which includes the Bible and is tributary of the latter’s claim to cultural authority, is host to demonstrable truths about ourselves at a universal, that is, anthropological level, human self-understanding being a goal of literary studies and of humanities education in general. I will proceed with some textual examples in fiction and non-fiction to substantiate this claim, with specific reference to the relevance of mimetic behavior that they unveil.

My first example comes for Jefferson’s well-known comments on slavery in his famous Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), whose mimetics have not received the attention they deserve. In aid of his condemnation of slavery, the classically trained author summons Aristotle’s Poetics (IV) on our being mimetic animals, a constant reference for Girard. His primary concern here is the bad example of the owner’s behavior for his children’s moral development. No commentary is required for this pellucid little narrative, in which the author, a practiced reader of Montesquieu, displays his neoclassical, enlightenment temperament in carefully balanced, sententious prose:

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. (Ch. XVIII)

“Catches” is a telling expression for the fact that the child is contaminated by his father’s behavior; violence is, as Girard has argued, ubiquitously contagious. Regardless of our founding father’s notorious dereliction in the matter, the truth of the moral lesson here stands free and clear of it, being grounded as it is in the mimetic, modeling role that parents are bound to play in the attitudes and behavior of their children, in their moral—or immoral—disposition and the actions flowing from it. As with Solomon and Samaritan, the ineluctable truth of the narrative is inseparable from its ethical content.

My next example comes from the pages of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, chapters VI and VII. Here we have an historical document, and a best seller in its time, that ranks indisputably among the lasting monuments of nineteenth-century American literature. Back-to-back episodes recount the child’s inaugural apprenticeship to slavery, his painful consciousness of his degraded condition, and his subsequent apprenticeship to writing.

 When his owner found out that his wife was teaching young Frederick to read, alongside of her own son, we are told, he at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master–to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly.

I underline “revelation,” as the author does not, for its biblical resonance, if not its provenance; a truth emerges about “dark and mysterious things,” as if in paraphrase of John’s gospel, where “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot comprehend/overwhelm it.” There is a corollary to this statement that Douglass’s tale illuminates, namely that the darkness is revealed by the light, is known by the light it denies and vainly resists. That’s revelation for you, and it is sharply in tune with mimetic anthropology.

Douglass dwells further on this “prize” to the detriment of his peace of mind, which nonetheless fuels his determination, serving as it does as a negative model of his nascent desire for freedom. In his typically fulsome and elegant style, his careful delineation of this process highlights the role of the obstacle in the path of desire to its object, where the opponent desire is an anti-model for his own, where the good he seeks is illumined by the evil of his condition:

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.

In this systematic series of antitheses, we see that the narrator’s goal is motivated by his master’s clarifying prohibition. The young Frederick is scandalized by his master’s words, which unveil the truth of his condition and which ironically inspire his desire to read, which in turn would be scandalous to his owner. The logic of scandal (Girard, Celui par qui le scandale arrive) is condign with the model/obstacle relationship.

Reflecting upon this revelation, Douglass proceeds to report on the effect of slavery on his benign, well-meaning mistress, wherein the crucial misgivings expressed by Jefferson are confirmed, as we witness her moral and emotional degeneration that her husband models for her:

It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed her apprehension.

Douglass’s portrayal of his mistress’s putative benignity is a strategic paraphrase of prophetic and gospel injunctions that her subsequent behavior, modeled on her husband’s, will violate. Douglass is tracking the escalation that is endemic to violence.

Douglass tells us that the first book he read through was a volume of speeches, The Columbian Orator, containing a highly improbable dialogue between a slave and his master, who ends up being convinced of the rightness of emancipation and acts upon it. It is a fiction whose message is unmistakable to right-thinking, rational animals, notwithstanding Aristotle’s excuses for slavery. The master is obliged to see his position from the point of view of his slave, to see his privilege, which is just that, privus lex, a law unto oneself, devoid of universal legitimacy, from the point of view of his victim. We find another version of the condemnation of racial injustice in the imaginary dialogue of J. A. Rogers’ From Superman to Man, where an educated railroad porter convinces a Texan tradesman of the fallacies of his notions of racial superiority.

Douglass’s account of his writing apprenticeship is accomplished by a ruse whereby he engages racial prejudice in order to defeat its degrading objectives. For once he is attuned to the obstacle’s role in animating desire, he can manipulate it to his own advantage. He challenges the inherited claim of superiority entertained by white boys his own age by alleging he can write better than they; they fall for the bait, the race-baiting in reverse, and become his instructors. Hired out to work in a shipyard, he observes how timber is marked with letters assigning their place on the vessel. All he can do at first is to copy their handwork:

I soon learned the names of these letters, and for what they were intended when placed upon a piece of timber in the shipyard. I immediately commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four letters named. After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, “I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.” I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way. During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write.

By engaging his interlocutors in competition, he triggers a rivalry, which implies equality, which the boys are culturally inured to deny. His every failure in this contest results, by their correction, in his ironic success.

He then covertly engages this copy practice in his master’s domain, methodically and arduously training his hand to assume his owner’s signature and to borrow his identity:

When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.

These texts speak for themselves; they always have, which is why our culture endows them with canonical authority. They are, in Gans’s epistemological vocabulary, auto-probatory, as are others I shall examine.  What a Girardian reading illuminates in them is a consistent and coherent mimetic pattern, which is what Mark Twain implied when he stated that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” This is to say that different events and episodes display common structures and dynamics, often with baleful consequences. William Faulkner’s version of this is expressed by the Quentin Compson in Absalom! Absalom!: “Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks” (Novels 1936-1940, 28). Compson is trying to explain to his Canadian roommate at Harvard his harrowing ambivalence towards the South, a spectral region for thematically placed outsiders. In the end, he expresses his attitude with a vehemence that suggests denegation: “I don’t hate it… I don’t. I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it!” (263). Michael Gorra claims that these divided sentiments mirror Faulkner’s own and are generative of his historical insights.

The reason why Douglass’s autobiography has not until recently been included in our American canon of literary masterpieces is not due to any cognitive or esthetic deficiency, but to the racial bias ingrained in our culture from its earliest beginnings. As James Madison remarked in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, the slave trade was our nation’s “original sin,” a statement repeated abundantly these days without reference to a founding father and without due reflection on its properly biblical significance. In the Genesis narrative of its first appearance, sin is markedly mimetic, spurred by rivalry—with God. In Girard’s view, the notion of original sin is a great insight, not as to an inherited disposition to evil, but as primarily mimetic and systemic, contagious in the proliferation of evil. With the children of the first parents, we have fratricide born of envy for God’s favor, and a futile effort to warn Cain away from it, followed by the interdiction of revenge killing, of violent reciprocity. In the beginning, God has nothing to do with violence. Indeed, if God made us “in his image,” then God is the first imitator.

Among all the masterpieces of our American literary canon, the works of Mark Twain stand among the tallest, the most widely read among them being Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And the best-known episode in the first is doubtless in chapter 2, where we read of how Tom lures his friends into the decidedly unappealing task of whitewashing his Aunt Polly’s fence. It has served as a staple in mimetic theory commentary. A close reading of this episode, which has ever only been Girard’s method, the classical French “explication de texte,” will disclose the work’s resonance with Frederick Douglass. The episode tracks minutely Tom’s strategy of the coquette, as analyzed by Girard (Things Hidden, 370-71), in displaying indifference as an attractor of desire, in deploying obstacles that transform an object of negative value into a coveted treasure.

The meaning of this episode is notoriously clear; Twain will harp on its broader significance at its conclusion. I nonetheless find it worthwhile to focus on its artistry, its step-by-step unfolding.

Having failed to bribe the slave Jim to take on the task, Tom is at the lowest point of expectation for relief from this odious burden. This depression, this hopelessness, is the ironic foundation of his strategy; he’s bottomed out, with no place to go but up. “At this dark and hopeless moment an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a great, magnificent inspiration.” It is at this point that the narrator weaves mimesis into the episode, first as imitation of an object, or objective mimesis, which is what has mostly absorbed critics on this topic. It mostly absorbs Aristotle himself, though in the tragedy he made famous by his commentary, Oedipus Tyrannos, it is primarily the subjective, behavioral mimesis of violent doubles that preoccupy the playwright in the verbal duels between Oedipus and Teiresias, and then between Oedipus and Creon; they replicate the mimetic, foundational conflict between father and son at the crossroads.

Tom’s friend Ben comes along imitating a steam boat, and Tom’s ploy will be to imitate an artist, as one to whom Ben’s elaborate mimicry is unworthy of attention; his feigned indifference is bound to ensnare Ben, to ensure that Ben’s attention will map onto his own. Ben expects Tom to envy his make-believe; all Tom has to do is to ignore his friend to turn the tables of desire as summed up in the neatly laconic “No Answer,” which marks the tipping point in this little “theatre of envy”:

Tom went on whitewashing — paid no attention to the steamboat. Ben stared a moment and then said: “Hi-YI! YOU’RE up a stump, ain’t you!”

No answer. Tom surveyed his last touch with the eye of an artist, then he gave his brush another gentle sweep and surveyed the result, as before. Ben ranged up alongside of him. Tom’s mouth watered for the apple, but he stuck to his work. Ben said:

“Hello, old chap, you got to work, hey?”

Tom wheeled suddenly and said:

“Why, it’s you, Ben! I warn’t noticing.”

“Say — I’m going in a-swimming, I am. Don’t you wish you could? But of course you’d druther WORK — wouldn’t you? Course you would!”

Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said:

“What do you call work?”

“Why, ain’t THAT work?”

Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”

“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you LIKE it?”

The brush continued to move.

I pause here to observe the textual focus of this single-sentence paragraph on the objects of contention, boat/brush; the latter is signaled without agency, which I take to be Twain’s emphasis on an impersonal mechanism at work here in this “transvaluation of values.” The rest is what drama critics describe as falling action:

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth—stepped back to note the effect—added a touch here and there—criticized the effect again—Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:

“Say, Tom, let ME whitewash a little.”

Tom considered, was about to consent; but he altered his mind:

“No—no—I reckon it wouldn’t hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence—right here on the street, you know—but if it was the back fence I wouldn’t mind and SHE wouldn’t. Yes, she’s awful particular about this fence; it’s got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done.”

Tom indulges in some hucksterish false advertising, itemizing fictive models for Ben’s desire in a manner perfected by that P.T.Barnum, Twain’s contemporary:

“No — is that so? Oh come, now—lemme just try. Only just a little—I’d let YOU, if you was me, Tom.”

“Ben, I’d like to, honest injun; but Aunt Polly—well, Jim wanted to do it, but she wouldn’t let him; Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn’t let Sid. Now don’t you see how I’m fixed? If you was to tackle this fence and anything was to happen to it—”

“Oh, shucks, I’ll be just as careful. Now lemme try. Say—I’ll give you the core of my apple.”

An object of appetitive desire cedes pride of place to art, whose sole attraction consists in the attention it magnetizes. After Duchamp, enter Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst…. In the twentieth century, art is converted to forms of anti-art, defying the public to disdain it and so exhibit bourgeois philistinism (McKenna, “Art and Markets”; Gans, “Modernism and the Triumph of the Market”).

“Well, here—No, Ben, now don’t. I’m afeard—”

“I’ll give you ALL of it!”

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart.

We know how this ends, with Ben serving as a model for all of his friends in a mimetic queue to get the job done under Tom’s gleeful and materially enriched observation.  Twain closes the episode with reflections on its universal, law-like, significance:

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

The narrator’s laudatory self-reference parodies the huckster’s style, but also conveys his sense of the obvious that eludes most consumers. “Difficulty” here plays the role of the obstacle in the stimulation of desire; Twain’s “great law of human action” rhymes, resonates with Girard’s law of mimetic desire in human interaction, which requires models, mediators for its incitement, and which is enhanced by obstacles, such as over-pricing, to its attainment, since the object of desire is secondary to the mimesis that generates its value, its interest. Here as elsewhere, Twain intuits the dynamics of our vaunted consumerism, where price is not an index of quality in the object, but of the quality, the standing of the prestigious buyer as an enviable model for other buyers.  That hasn’t changed, being endemic to human culture.

This fable and its moral can be summarized in no more than 75 words as to what it signifies, but literature is not about the  “what” but the “how,” the process, how mimetic desire is experienced, how it works at the most fundamental level such that, as Twain extrapolates, we can conceive it, imagine it at other levels in other situations. Twain’s dialogue walks us through the process, such that we cannot ignore its effectiveness.  The fiction writer shows how mimetic desire is lived, word by word, moment to moment, interactionally, or, to use Girard’s only neologism, interdividually. Mimesis here is dramatized and thereupon thematized by Twain. It works, as the saying goes, “like a charm,” which is to say like magic in its reversal of the flow of desire. The counterintuitive magic here is the magnetic force of crowd mimesis. Social scientists have come up with the label “reverse psychology” for Tom’s strategy; this is a welcome addition to our self-understanding, but great writers are always ahead of our academic achievements. Their works stand the test of time, gain “canonicity”; though fictive, we recognize their realism, they are objectively true, their object being human interaction, which Gans has always insisted is “a more fundamental category than being.”

In one of her lectures, Toni Morrison remarks that in fiction, the reader is made to be an accomplice to the author in seeing the world from the point of view of the work’s characters (The Sources of Self-Regard, Part II, “The Writer before the Page”). This is a vital aspect of that other best known episode of Twain’s fiction, where Huckleberry Finn discovers that the runaway slave Jim, with whom he’s been convivially floating downriver on a raft, has been  abducted and sold back to slavery by the hucksters who have forcibly joined them: “Jim was gone! I sent up a shout—and then another—and then another one; and run this way and that in the woods, whooping and screeching; but it wasn’t no use—old Jim was gone. Then I set down and cried; I couldn’t help it” (Chap. 31). The last sentence thematizes Huck’s strong affective response, mostly unfamiliar to his readers, and the narrative escorts their attention throughout his efforts to “steal” Jim into freedom:

I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.

Huck’s clear moral judgment falls not only on Jim’s abductors but more generally on the economics of slavery.

Huck  contemplates the disgrace, the shame, he would face in his community, “that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom” : “The more I studied about his the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and  low-down and ornery I got to feeling.” Huck’s near despair at this point correlates with Tom’s before his task, with the fundamental difference of the ethical component, the turning point in his—and the reader’s—moral outlook, which the novelist carefully delineates in Huck’s quest for divine guidance. Having decided to report Jim’s loss to his owner, Miss Watson, and so protect the runaway from being sold downriver, he decides to pray for that outcome:

So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why couldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double…. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing  and  the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell  where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed  it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.

This justly famous statement involves us with two fundamentally different forms of linguistic expression, as first labeled by J.L. Austin: performative and constative utterances. It is a distinction that Gans places at the origin of language in his version of Girardian anthropology (Signs of Paradox). The constative is manifest in Huck’s “the words wouldn’t come,” being typical of narrative utterance, as of all declarative sentences (.e.g., it is raining—or not); the performative is manifest in commands but also in prayer, a speech act, an utterance intended to effect change in the world rather than to express a view about it. Constatives are subject to verification or refutation, logical or empirical; performatives, such as commands, oaths, prayers, are sayings aiming at actualization, realization—or hindrance. The former refer to the objective world, the latter engage our ethical participation in the world, often binding us inextricably to moral consequences. The former are either true or false; the latter are actions, good, bad, or indifferent.  We practice these different forms habitually, taking them for granted. Not Twain, whose Huck is blocked by what philosophers call a performative contradiction.

The progress of Huck’s radical conversion away from his religious formation is a world-class lesson in moral reflection. Huck writes the letter—and tears it up, having “set to thinking…and got to thinking” about his companionship with Jim, and he perforce brings his readers’ “thinking” along with him: “But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.” This is a canny understatement, a goad to convert the reader to “another kind” of viewing Blacks than is the custom, guiding his readers step by step through his thought processes. Huck is thinking—an emphatic theme here–”how good he always was….”: “I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘all right then, I’ll go to hell—and tore it up.’” Huck resolves this crisis of difference between what he sees as his moral obligation to his community regarding Jim as slave property and to Jim, his “best friend”; between the religiously sanctioned property rights of his community and the more deeply rooted fellow-feeling with his loving traveling companion, the irrefutable, unconditional recognition of Jim’s companionable humanity.

Twain’s own hostility to religion is notorious, but we have to consider its source in but recently slave-holding America. Huck decides against his religious tradition in a way that Dietrich Bonhoeffer decides against his official church’s collaboration with the flagrant evil of Nazism. It is not incidental that the pastor’s resolve was nourished by his participation in the services of Harlem’s Gospel churches during his stay in New York, whose safety and comfort at Union Theological Seminary he abandoned to escort his Christianity “underground” back in Germany. Back home, he was drafting a treatise on “religionless Christianity” that his execution interrupted (Letters and Papers). It would be a Christianity uncoupled from his church’s complicity in flagrantly sacrificial practices, from an idolatry of false transcendence.

As Huck pursues the task to reclaim Jim as his “my nigger,” he resembles Frederick Douglass in leveraging his culture’s bias by repurposing the proprietary claims of slavery underwritten by his own culture. Empathetic identification has overridden, or rather undercut all other considerations, “deep down in me;” it has subverted all putatively “moral” claims on his conscience. So, to reprise this turning point:

It was a close place.  I took it up, and held it in my hand.  I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.  I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said.  And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.  I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t.  And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

Huck finalizes his exit from religion with a humorously folksy colloquialism; the text comically binds the reader to his view.

Ralph Ellison summarizes the “moral” of Huck’s recognition scene, his road-to-Damascus conversion as follows: “Huck Finn’s acceptance of the evil implicit in his ’emancipation’ of Jim represents Twain’s acceptance of his personal responsibility in the condition of society. This was the tragic face behind the comic mask” (Shadow and Act, 50). It is a turning point for Huck, and a possible one for his readers, “a transitional period of American life”–which  has failed or refused to recognize it: “After Twain’s compelling image of black and white fraternity,” Ellison writes, “the Negro generally disappears from fiction as a rounded human being.” Ellison cites Hemingway who warns us to “stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boy. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating” (51). Jim Crow laws and rampant lynching among us is ample evidence of that, and Hemingway’s “cheating” metaphor evokes all the self-deception recruited in the service of ignominy. In 1901, Twain himself wrote a vehemently sarcastic diatribe, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” that he forbore to publish, in the certitude that the downhome humor of his lecture tours that was his living would be no longer welcome on our shores.

“Cognitively feeble” is the way the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner (Thought and Change, 203) has characterized humanistic studies, by contrast with the rigor and precision, and the real world predictability, iterability, and efficacy of what we call the “hard sciences.” This judgment no longer applies when we see how mimetic theory draws its conclusions from recognized masterpieces of literary realism. Girard’s first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, begins with a quote from Don Quixote. The cognitive and moral clarity—the truths, the wisdom, in sum—that they afford their readers is for each one of us to act upon—or not, as has been the case regarding the official and unofficial treatment of African Americans among us, as it had been of Jews among Europeans. Not incidentally, it was the report of pogroms in Eastern Europe that persuaded W E. B. Dubois of the need to create the NAACP.

There have been notorious social science experiments in brutality, such as the Milgram exercise in electrocution and the Stanford Prisoners Experiment. In the latter, randomly selected participants were cast in symmetrical roles of enforcer and enforced, of tormentor and victim. The experiment was aborted because of its baleful effects on all participants, the enforcers being appalled at their adaptation to the role assigned to them. And of course, American religious leaders, spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr., have successfully experimented with biblically inspired strategies of non-violence in the face of manifest evil, resulting in the nullification of Jim Crow laws, which sanctioned the oppression, and too often the effectual soul murder of African American citizens. Dr. King drew strategies initiated by Gandhi who contemplated them during his stay in officially Christian England. All this goes back to Israel’s foundational narrative of emancipation in Exodus, and there is plenty of evidence that we are far from realizing its social objectives. Not least among Israel’s “firsts,” to use Gans’s anthropological taxonomy (Generative Anthropology, “The Glossary”), was to “cry out” to its God (Exodus 3.7) against its enslavement, whereas slavery was ubiquitous in the ancient world, and institutionally unproblematic. We find it as well in Mosaic law, where it is highly regulated, extending in certain cases to mandatory manumission.

For predictability, in especial, as it concerns the future of our dealings with one another, we turn to prophecy, and this brings to mind Lincoln’s second inaugural address as it concerns us still. Lincoln’s famous quip, “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” is wise and true enough, but his last public speech is host to a narrative dimension that is viscerally more poignant—and precise, focusing on numbers:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

These sentences underline the economics of slavery, and the survival, the life or death of the republic as originally constituted. Then begins a serial juxtaposition of impersonal pronouns—neither/neither, each/both, same/same—which fully articulates and thematizes a crisis of difference not unlike the one confronting King Solomon:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.

The crisis is resolved by no hieratic moralizing, no fist-pounding injunctions, but in the gentle irony of understatement (“It may seem strange…”) capped by a notorious biblical paraphrase, and again followed by recourse to symmetrical pronouns—both/neither. Their relative neutrality exhibit a continuous, heartfelt effort to defang, defuse the argument, to ward off the mimetic vortex of finger pointing polemics. Lincoln is trying to walk his hearers serenely into reconciliation:

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.

“You can’t pray a lie.” The crisis of difference is resolved on the fulcrum of slavery, “social death” (Patterson)—its “strangeness” to any sense of justice—to which he gives a visual image, a human face, which he will not fail to elaborate further on.

But first a word, as the saying goes, from his sponsor: “The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’” For “offenses” read here “scandal” as we find in more literal translations; also as “stumbling block” to right conduct. Gorra (324) notes that the German government has sanctioned the placement of “Stolpersteine,” “stumble stones,” in city pavements to mark the places where Jews, by name and date, were rounded up, so as to forfend oblivion of this monumental scandal.

Lincoln then follows a lengthy, carefully scaffolded meditation cast in the speculative mode of an “if” clause, a conditional sentence, which ends up as a rhetorical question in this updating of biblical exegesis to Lincoln’s historical present:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

There is a patent echo here of Jefferson’s notes, where the Monticello slave owner weighs the matter succinctly thus: “The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

Lincoln’s next paragraph shifts gears from the declarative to the optative, performative mode of exhortation; more precisely, the first sentence oscillates cannily between them so as to incorporate, absorb his hearers into his vision. The final sentence unfurls with a lavish conditional clause recalling the brutalities of slavery, in order to conclude resolutely (“it must be said,” declarative/imperative) upon confidence in divine judgment as stated in Psalm 19.9:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Lincoln is reading history with biblical lenses. We identify this as political speech but it is far more accurate to acknowledge it as prophetic speech, not only for its emotional power and biblical references, but also and more especially in view of the evidence in all our information sources that our country still stands under this judgment. This disquieting fact is not unanimously shared in these re-United States, which is why we need prophets—and novelists—to bring their words up to date.

The North won the war, the South won the peace, is how some historians view the matter (Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War). This, in fact, is how Michael Gorra reads the works of William Faulkner as obsessively foregrounded in the fratricidal struggle of our civil war whose aims have been “left unfinished” (The Saddest Words, 56); it is a “past not dead, not even past” in the novelist’s view, whose “scandalous subject matter” depressed the sale of his books even while his critical reception was rising (Gorra, 17). A newly emancipated slave in The Unvanquished observes presciently about voting rights, “This war aint over. Hit just started good” (in Novels 1936-1940, 454). It is to our literary monuments, not to those cast in bronze, that we must look to understand the multifarious crises of difference bestriding our history right up to present controversies. (History shows that most monuments to Confederate leaders showed up as of 1890 with the rise of the KKK, whose animus targeted Blacks, Jews, and Catholics.) As to the epistemological role of fiction in historical self-understanding, the writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman proffers the useful expression “critical fabulation” (in Okeowo, 48), with the understanding than an uncritical or mythic fabulation would come from the point of view of persecutors, of lynchers, for instance, which Faulkner, for instance, unravels in his 1931 short story, “Dry September.”

As Gorra points out, this is America’s ongoing Historikerstreit, an expression naming the struggles [streit] in Germany with the memory of its Nazi past. In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson’s critique of racialized differences links the two histories by showing the Third Reich’s reliance on Jim Crow models, while extending this critique to the ongoing mistreatment of India’s Untouchables. Her wide-ranging study can remind us of Elie Wiesel’s observation about the absolute evil of the Third Reich that “nothing is comparable to the Holocaust, but everything is Holocaust related.”

Everything, at least, of grave concern about humans’ recourse to sacrificial violence, where selected victims leverage communal solidarity and identity; where, according to Gans’s post-Durkheim anthropology, a sacralized centrality (whiteness, Aryan-ness, Brahminism) convenes membership along its circumference—over against those who are excluded. Whiteness, and “the purity of our women,” for example, only became a red-hot cultural issue because of the proximity of a thoroughly subservient population abducted from Africa and routinely subjected to rape, a fact emphasized by Faulkner in his fiction. A presumably foundational identity is, on this account, secondary, being the derivative by-product of its shameful depredations, the negative exposure of its violent discharges. This idea has circulated in the French Left since Sartre promoted the writings of France Fanon, for which Lilian Thuman (La pensée blanche) provides a detailed update. GA provides a compact, geometrical image for it.

Prophetic speech is not mere fortune telling, as we sometimes suppose, but we should not be surprised to credit it with a certain measure of predictability, Lincoln to witness. The difference between true and false prophets is subject to the judgment of history, and our best writers engage us in a “discovery procedure” (Gans) to better understand it. The judgment of history idea is itself biblical, emanating from Israel’s highly self-critical narrative and prophetic traditions (Sacks). Athens knows almost nothing of this, though Thucydides’ devastating account of the Peloponnesian, i.e., civil, wars is condign with it. Girard (1973) regards the “Greek miracle,” especially its tragedians, as a failed revelation, in that it didn’t take worldwide.

In its minatory mode, prophecy warns the community away from adherences that will lead to its destruction; it denounces the “refuge of lies” (Isaiah 28.17; see Bandera 2013) wherein it deceives itself about the benefits of its sacrificial practices, which, however deritualized, are thriving among us today (Haden). Prophetic speech tells us, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see, the truth about ourselves that we are very often unwilling to acknowledge. It is, at its best, the natural, congenital ally of such literary masterpieces as examined herein, where we cannot fail to observe the indissoluble partnership of the esthetic and the ethical that Gans always asserted, and to ponder their affiliation with our truth-seeking aspirations, anthropological and therefore historical as well.

Marina Ludwigs is a Docent in the English Department of Stockholm University. She has published on Victorian, modernist, and contemporary literature, as well as film. Besides Generative Anthropology, her theoretical interests include Girardian theory, narratology, and philosophy of science. She is currently working on a project that studies the interrelationship between literary and scientific models.

Andrew J. McKenna, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, is Emeritus Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago and a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board. He is the author of Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (U of Illinois P, 1992), as well as of numerous articles on Moliere, Pascal, Racine, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and critical theory. Since 1996, he has been editor in chief of Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. Since retirement, he has been teaching writing-intensive literature courses in prison.

Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training and culture. He has written on EFL pedagogy, literature, the intersection of science and the humanities, film, social issues, mimetic theory, and generative anthropology. He has co-authored textbooks with National Geographic Learning and Macmillan LanguageHouse. His articles for Anthropoetics have explored social phenomena in Japan, socioeconomic issues, generative anthropology, mimetic theory, and the novels of Jane Austen.