Author: staceymeeker

Along with our three conference articles, this issue includes two others. Matthew Taylor‘s is his third for Anthropoetics and his second on Jane Austen’s problematic novel Mansfield Park, where the mimetic rivalries he analyzes so subtly have long extended beyond the novel to its readers and critics. The analysis of a very different set of novelistic rivalries is the burden of first-time contributor Benjamin Barber, who puts both GA and mimetic theory to use in situating Hunter Thompson’s Rum Diary on the road to postmodernism and his better known Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

About Our Contributors

Ben Barber holds degrees in English and Pedagogy from the University of Victoria, Canada. He is a member of COV&R and presented a paper entitled, “The Double Bind of Missionary Colonialism and the Resulting Postcolonial Crisis in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night” at the most recent COV&R at Saint Mary’s College in London. Ben is looking ahead to graduate work in literary and critical theory, which will focus on Generative Anthropology and mimetic theory in English Literature.

Ian Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, and was the Chief Organiser of the 2009 GA Conference there.  He is the author of four novels, of the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997), and of Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009), a work of literary criticism making substantial use of both Mimetic Theory and Generative Anthropology.

Peter Goldman is an Associate Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board, and a founding board member of The Generative Anthropology Society & Conference. Peter teaches classes on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and film studies. His publications include articles on Shakespeare, Reformation literature, film studies, Generative Anthropology, and Kafka. His long term project is a book on Shakespeare and the project of iconoclasm, and he is also now working on an article on originary scenes in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Robert J. Hudson is Assistant Professor of French at Brigham Young University and his academic interests involve questions of Lyricism, Imitation Theory, Petrarchism and Gallicism in the literature of Renaissance France.  In his research on literature and film, he cites GA as an extremely useful heuristic for understanding the generic qualities of poetics and the anthropology of artistic production.

Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, a recently published collection of essays on Generative Anthropology. He teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and is presently at work on a new book on and in originary thinking tentatively titled Beginnings in the Middle: Originary Grammar, Remembering Firstness and Retrieving the Ostensive in Modern Semiosis.

Matthew Schneider is chair and professor of English at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 1991. A founding member of the first Generative Anthropology seminar with Eric Gans at UCLA in 1987, Schneider has continued his involvement with GA for more than twenty years, contributing six articles to Anthropoetics, guest-authoring two Chronicles of Love and Resentment, and publishing an essay in Adam Katz’s The Originary Hypothesis. He has published two books, the latest of which, The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, came out from Palgrave Macmillan in June 2008. His articles on nineteenth-century British literature, literary theory, and Biblical exegesis have appeared in Dalhousie Review, European Romantic Review, Poetics Today, Legal Studies Forum, and Symbiosis.

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 and presented on EFL pedagogy and science-humanities issues. He has co-authored an academic writing textbook for EFL students (Cengage) and more recently a speaking skills textbook (Macmillan). His work in mimetic theory, including two previous studies for Anthropoetics, has pursued mimetic analyses of contemporary Japanese society and mimetic interpretations of Jane Austen’s fiction.

This special conference issue of Anthropoetics includes several papers from the Fourth Annual Generative Anthropology (GA) Summer Conference, which was notable on several counts. The first Utah GA conference was co-hosted by Westminster College in Salt Lake City and Brigham Young University in Provo, and co-organized by the editors of this volume, Peter Goldman of Westminster and Robert Hudson from BYU. In accordance with a new tradition founded by Ian Dennis last year in Ottawa, there was considerable local and undergraduate participation: four Westminster College students made fine presentations which were well received, and we were pleased to welcome presentations by professors from the University of Utah, BYU, Westminster, and Salt Lake Community College. Our conference theme for GASC 2010 was “The Anthropology of Modernity,” and featured two keynote lectures, from Eric Gans and Vincent Pecora, addressed to the controversial problem of secularization. On the final day of the conference, Dr. Gans and Dr. Pecora engaged in a lively and enjoyable roundtable discussion on “Secularization and Modernity.” GA is clearly developing substantial momentum and mass: yearly conferences with enthusiastic participation from international scholars, our own dedicated journal Anthropoetics in addition to publications in other journals, many books on GA and related topics, a substantial web presence, and increased visibility and recognition. Perhaps most important, The Generative Anthropology Society and Conference (GASC) was founded this year (June 24^th) by (current president) Andrew Bartlett, Ian Dennis, Eric Gans, Peter Goldman, Robert J. Hudson, Adam Katz, Stacey Meeker, Matthew Schneider, and Richard van Oort. This is a great milestone for all of us who have worked with GA over the years, promising continuing support and development of GA’s research project. While GA has been around now for 30 years, it is still amazingly fresh, and there remain vast territories of human culture and history to explore from this perspective.

The great variety of topics, approaches, and insights produced by scholars at the conference testifies to Generative Anthropology’s scope and power. GA’s openness to all kinds of perspectives and the truly new and original understanding it offers, unhampered by any ideological agenda, represent its strength—as manifest by the presentations at our conferences and the articles in Anthropoetics, which are as broad and inclusive as culture itself.

Ian Dennis, organizer of GASC 2009 in Ottawa, ventures here a pioneering “definition and deployment” of Romantic joy from the perspective of Generative Anthropology, tracing Wordsworthian joy back to its ethical function on the Originary Scene. Ian also looks at how the Romantics and their modern heirs have deployed the concept and representation of joy in relation to the natural landscape. His essay offers a valuable contribution to Romanticism studies as well as to current debates on environmental protection.

Adam Katz, long-time Anthropoetics contributor, argues persuasively that the seemingly primitive category of defilement continues to have relevance for us today in its modern guise of White Guilt. Defilement can occur without any intention to defile, and a simple mistake can incur its stigma. Any use of language, Adam argues, implies the possibility of mistakes; and in this sense, mistakenness is an originary category. But while mistakes are often perceived as violations of sacred norms, Adam shows how they can also be productive of new social forms. A reformation in our attitude about mistakes is thus called for, with potential benefits for arenas from the composition classroom to the public sphere.

Matthew Schneider, a consistently original and productive GA scholar, shows how the resistance to Generative Anthropology is really a fear of GA’s power, a fear rooted in the ambivalence about power after Auschwitz. Tracing power back to the originary scene, he analyzes how the invention of language transformed both the ends and means of, literally, brute force in the animal world, deferring and transforming animal violence into culturally-powerful forms. The increasing complexity of language during our history reflects its transformative power. Schneider offers an incisive reading of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to illustrate the relationship between physical force and cultural complexity. The totalitarian rulers in that novel reduce language to simplistic slogans in order to make resistance literally unthinkable. The explanatory power of Generative Anthropology offers the best opposition to such reductionism, by bringing out the true complexity and variety of human cultural forms.

By way of announcement and testament to GA’s continued momentum, Matthew Schneider and High Point University in North Carolina have generously agreed to host next year’s conference. We certainly look forward to seeing everyone again in 2011.

“Yet Mansfield Park is a great novel, its greatness being commensurate with its power to offend.”

Lionel Trilling(1)

The “Proper Study of Mankind” is Mansfield

Of Jane Austen’s six canonical masterpieces,(2) Mansfield Park is the most scandalous, and it scandalized in such a way that its canonical status is almost tenuously granted, as if it were ever in danger of being bumped off the top shelf and consigned to the limbo of “problem novel.” Oddly, Mansfield Park scandalizes much more for its presentation of virtue (as embodied in Edmund Bertram and most particularly Fanny Price) than for the actual scandal in the novel: an adulterous affair, scooped in the gossip sheets, that ruins at least one life and shatters relations among four families. Indeed, that such a dire outcome should follow from an affair no doubt contributes to many readers’ discomfort; in an age when flaming liaisons, tabloid splashes and untidy splits are routine matters, the harsher consequences that follow from them in Mansfield Park really do seem to pose a problem of historical adjustment.

This largely unspoken objection sums up in many ways the curious and contradictory effect of Mansfield Park. It is so close to us, insofar as its scandals are very much like our own, yet so far; few Austen fans could propose that the proper penalty for infidelity today should be (as with Maria Rushworth) to cast the female party out from her family forever and exile her to a remote region. Kingsley Amis found Maria’s expulsion an offense against Christian charity.(3) Many readers find it scandalous that any of the scandals in Mansfield Park–the theatricals, the irreverent parlor talk, the flirtations, the seductions, the affair–should be so scandalous. Even allowing for the normative standards of her time, this adverse reaction today may indeed indicate a serious miscalculation on Austen’s part–or, in other words, an artistic failure.

Lionel Trilling argued otherwise, namely, that Austen’s scandal to readers is deliberate, and that the extent of this scandal (c.f. the epigram above) is “commensurate” with the novel’s greatness.(4) Trilling’s observation is, arguably, the single best critical assessment of Mansfield Park ever made, though it was lost in his subsequent conjectures about Austen’s conflicted Evangelical conscience. Trilling saw the novel’s moral and creative greatness as the inadvertent byproduct of that religious tension: Austen waging guilty war on Austenian delight. Yet Austen is far more in control of her complex plot than this scenario would imply, and her “offense” is much too thorough and premeditated for Mansfield Park to be great, as it were, by accident.

We might do well to put aside Trilling’s elaboration but retain his initial insight, which can and should be explored further. Scandal, whether within Mansfield Park (among the characters) or about it (the multiple offences Austen commits against readers) is indeed central to the novel, deeply entwined in all its overriding concerns. In fact, the scandalized reactions that Austen constantly provokes indicate how deeply readers are drawn into Mansfield’s fraught community, for reader objections almost invariably echo reactions of characters. As we unwittingly mimic reactions from within the narrative, Austen makes us party to its increasingly tangled moral dilemmas; we become enmeshed with characters in the same scandals.

This scandalizing dynamic continues to operate, often at nearly visceral levels, upon a large plurality of Mansfield Park‘s readers (many of whom are otherwise devoted Austen fans). One need only note the tenor of the “Fanny wars” that have erupted on online discussion forums to confirm this.(5) However, recent decades of criticism have given the novel possibly its most appreciative, most level-headed, most un-scandalized treatment to date. That Mansfield criticism has matured past the disgruntled rants of Kinglsey Amis is undoubtedly a welcome development, yet we should not forget what got Amis so “riled up” in the first place, and what continues to outrage many readers, lest we miss what the novel is about. Scandalized readings of Mansfield Park are mis-readings, but they are orchestrated mis-readings. If Austen expected and indeed provoked such reactions (which I think must be the case), then a de-scandalized reading of Mansfield Park may be correspondingly further from Austen’s intent.(6) Since scandal is at the heart of Mansfield Park, it should not be downplayed at the price of being understood.

Nearly every connotation of the word “scandal” applies to Mansfield Park: leading another into sin, grave wrongdoing, setting a bad example, gossip, social embarrassment, risqué titillation, voyeuristic prurience, public disgrace, tawdry celebrity debacle, moral or aesthetic affront. René Girard’s gloss on “scandal” (from the Gospel skandalon) is also particularly relevant, because it focuses on the interpersonal obstacle, or “double bind” that gives rise to scandal in these more conventional senses.(7) Such interpersonal struggles pervade the world of Mansfield Park and contribute in manifold ways to the catastrophic social scandal that erupts later in the novel. Jeremiah Alberg’s comparison of Rousseau and Girard neatly captures the way Austen portrays scandal (among characters) and incites it (among readers):

Rousseau’s analysis of amour-propre as that which excites without satisfying, seduces without delivering, and promises without fulfilling, parallels Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire as the doomed-to-be frustrated reaching for the scandalon.(8)

Finally, the “sacrificial” and “prophetic” dimensions of scandal elaborated by Girard are crucially relevant, since the social dynamics in Mansfield Park continually threaten to converge toward a sacrificial resolution.(9) (Kingsley Amis was not wrong to see Maria’s expulsion as problematic, only wrong in supposing that Austen must have applauded it.)

The scope of Mansfield Park is thus as wide as the etymology of “scandal” suggested above. The multiple, degraded, and in some cases wildly antithetical derivations of the same word (e.g. grave sin, prophetic indictment, risqué tease) tell a story. They reflect an extended cultural development that is, remarkably, encapsulated in Mansfield Park itself, confined though the novel is to its particular historical moment. Because that moment is a crucially transitional one, involving the disintegration of a particular social order, Mansfield Park reaches both backward (toward what has been dissolved) and forward (to what is coming to fill its place). But in doing so, the novel comes to enact what is in effect an abbreviated history of the human race: from the primal scandal at the origin of culture, through the proliferating scandals of an exhausted traditional order, and finally on to the propagation and commodification of scandal in a desacralized ethos. Mansfield Park enacts the beginning, middle and end of culture. It is at once the story of a human community, and the human community–and the essence of that story is the ongoing scandal of collective existence.

These may seem oversized claims for Mansfield Park, particularly given the self-proclaimed modesty of the author, who famously limited herself to “bits of ivory.”(10) However, ivory miniatures are constrained by practical limits, not thematic ones, and the breadth of Austen’s ambition in Mansfield Park is certainly not hard to discern thematically. Mansfield Park is Austen’s most “anthropological” novel. The title itself suggests a microcosm of humanity, both as a “field” or setting for the human drama, and a “field” of investigation–as in Alexander Pope’s “The proper study of mankind is man.”(11) “Park” further suggests an Edenic element–a scene of origin.(12) Yet the best way to demonstrate the scope of Austen’s ambition in the novel may be to start near the end, where the most conspicuous scandal breaks upon the world a few chapters shy of its conclusion.

. . . Not in a State of Utter Barbarism

Like other culminating crises in Austen’s novels, notably the scandal with Wickham and Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park‘s prominent scandal takes place far offstage. We see it through second or third hand accounts and reactions, both as the scandal unfolds and in its aftermath. First news of the scandal reaches Fanny Price at Portsmouth through Mary Crawford’s tense and cryptic letter, a hapless attempt at “damage control”:

“A most scandalous, ill-natured rumour has just reached me, and I write, dear Fanny, to warn you against giving the least credit to it, should it spread into the country . . . . Say not a word of it–hear nothing, surmise nothing, whisper nothing, till I write again. I am sure it will all be hushed up . . . .” (297).(13)

Agitated and puzzled, Fanny learns the relevant details the next day from a second hand newspaper that her father gets from a neighbor, after Mr. Price “humphs” over the following item:

“. . . it was with infinite concern the newspaper had to announce to the world, a matrimonial fracas in the family of Mrs. R. of Wimpole Street; the beautiful Mrs. R. whose name had not long been enrolled in the lists of hymen, and who had promised to become so brilliant a leader in the fashionable world, having quitted her husband’s roof in company with the well-known and captivating Mr. C. the intimate friend and associate of Mr. R. and it was not known, even to the editor of this newspaper, whither they were gone.” (298-299)

Here we have the precursor to every well thumbed tabloid reporting the latest celebrity meltdown: the leering voyeurism couched in the thinnest pretence of “infinite concern,” and the thorough itemization of the truly relevant points of interest: “beautiful,” “brilliant leader in the fashionable word,” “well-known and captivating”–in other words, glamour, beauty, trend-setting, fashion, fame, charisma. The envious adulation is inseparable from the barely-contained glee at the celebrities’ downfall, effected through the act of reportage itself.

Fanny’s reaction to the scandal is undoubtedly the most significant. Geographically distant from events, she is close enough to those concerned to comprehend the damage that has been done. Fanny suffers something like primal terror:

Fanny seemed to herself never to have been shocked before. There was no possibility of rest. The evening passed, without pause of misery, the night was totally sleepless. She passed only from feelings of sickness to shudderings of horror; and from hot fits of fever to cold. The event was so shocking, that there were moments even when her heart revolted from it as impossible–when she thought it could not be. A woman married only six months ago, a man professing himself devoted, even engaged, to another–that other her near relation–the whole family, both families connected as they were by tie upon tie, all friends, all intimate together!–it was too horrible a confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of evil, for human nature, not in a state of utter barbarism, to be capable of! . . . (299)

Shortly after, Fanny helplessly concludes, “. . . as far as the world alone was concerned, the greatest blessing to every one of kindred with Mrs. Rushworth would be instant annihilation” (300).

Fanny’s horror is almost pre-linguistic (sleeplessness, sickness, shudderings, hot fits, fever, cold) and evokes a Hobbesian nightmare. Her linguistic capacities seem to unravel in tandem with social differentiation (friendship, kinship, betrothal, marriage). In her fevered imagination, the fundamental components of communal life are pressed past the threshold of sustainability and into “utter barbarism.” A satisfactory resolution can only be conceived in apocalyptic terms: it would be best for everyone concerned if they just ceased to exist. Time shoots backward and forward; it is both the end (“annihilation”) and the beginning (“barbarism,” Fanny’s own instinctual, pre-linguistic shudderings). But of course, it is neither; it is Fanny conceiving the end in terms of the beginning, thereby inadvertently conceiving the beginning in terms of the end; the present crisis triggers in undiluted form what Eric Gans calls the scenic imagination: this scandal evokes for Fanny the first scandal, the first scene.(14)

Yet Fanny’s acute, “primitive” sensitivity to the scandal (as much the result of her being vulnerably situated at Mansfield for so many years as of her nervous disposition) stands in stark contrast to the jaded newspaper account that broadcasts it; it is not the end of the world, after all, merely a juicy celebrity debacle in a second-hand scandal sheet. The scandal is, in this reckoning, a titillating commodity that boosts circulation. In the present day, it could even be a welcome boost to a celebrity’s sagging career. Austen’s genius in Mansfield Park is that she can use the same scandal both to telescope backward–using Fanny’s distressed imagination to capture the most primal sort of crisis in communal life–and to highlight what was already becoming the trademark of advanced secular culture: the market for never-ending scandal as foci of attention, the ongoing distraction of media, where scandal no longer constitutes a mortal threat but rather a perpetual source of cultural sustenance.

Fanny’s father (commenting that he’d have given both man and woman a good whuppin’ if he’d had anything to do with it) expresses the sterile, transient affront of a public fed a steady diet of outrage, whilst her mother cannot hold the scandalous events regarding her estranged sister’s family in her head more than a moment or two. In other words, no sooner has the scandal appeared than it has already passed through the “news cycle.” For the observing public, either some new development in this scandal will be needed, or some new scandal altogether. Yet the shallowness and crass prurience of this process (and what maltreated celebrity has not protested it?) should not blind us to its genuine power. Whereas in Pride and Prejudice Darcy is able to salvage the situation with Lydia and Wickham and contain scandal, in Mansfield Park Austen presents us with a situation in which scandal can no longer be so contained. Now putatively minor players–scandalized onlookers, a maid-servant with “exposure in her power” (306), newspapers–determine the pace and outcome of events.

The prestige players, by contrast, are overwhelmed, and their frustrated impotence is everywhere evident, e.g. in Mary Crawford’s letter above. For Henry, the erstwhile seducer, the affair is unexpected, unwelcome, and quickly and completely out of control. Maria hardly even owns her decision to cast herself into Henry’s arms; she is acting on a complex stew of mimetic imperatives that Henry has been thoughtlessly stirring through much of the novel. By the time the affair winds down, Maria is a knot of hissing rage (314), not unlike the incapacitated, nearly psychotic Mrs. Norris who will be her companion in exile: “. . . an altered creature, quieted, stupified, indifferent to every thing that passed” (304). Needless to say, these characters (Mary, Henry, Maria, Mrs. Norris) made much of their decisiveness and active vigor in earlier chapters. In the newer regime, power has passed to cultural forces–at once intrusively intimate and callously indifferent–that monitor the lives of the rich and famous, lives that spin reliably, desperately, and fascinatingly out of control.

“Every Age Has Its Improvements”

The question “What’s the world coming to?” comes up frequently in Mansfield Park, and when it does a less obvious partner question, “What did the world come from?” is often not far behind. That is, cultural degeneration and cultural origins are closely related subtexts in the novel. Scandal is the connecting thread, the common element that forces both into the foreground of plot. This is dramatically so with the examples above, where we see the scandal-mongering newspaper excerpt followed almost immediately by Fanny’s distressed Hobbesian reverie. A number of issues in Mansfield Park are treated in a similar way. As “modernizing” attitudes encroach inexorably upon the social scene, they are placed in strikingly primal contexts.

“Every age has its improvements” is Mary Crawford’s arch quip in the retired chapel at Sotherton, when she hears that household devotions there were discontinued a generation ago. The debate between Mary and Edmund Bertram begins here and continues with greater or lesser intensity until the penultimate chapter. Mary could be called the voice of desacralization, and Edmund the apologist of the sacred. Or, to put it more mildly–since neither are fanatics and consider their arguments rational and pragmatic–Edmund argues rather defensively that religion be taken somewhat seriously, while Mary rather aggressively insists that it not be. Austen disarms us by depicting this debate as enticing banter in the context of a powerful romantic attraction, but the disagreement is–to use Edmund’s own editorial understatement later–“of some moment” (310). It is about whose world view will prevail, and more broadly, whose world.

We know that it is Edmund’s world that finally prevails in the novel–or more precisely the restored order of Sir Thomas, under the tender reign of Fanny, with all the placidity and moral stasis this implies. However, back in the real world, we know that it belongs to Mary Crawford–a Pandoran free-for-all of relaxed mores, toughened hides, satiric irreverence, proliferating vanity and open self-aggrandizement. It is a world where religion–for goodness’ sake–is a “private matter” (62) and people (Mary already notes the trend) are becoming more relaxed about infidelity and marital breaches (310). Here again we see the jarring disjunction of Mansfield Park noted in the introduction; the novel manages to be both uncannily contemporary and disconcertingly retro at the same time. But, as also noted, when modernizing trends encroach upon failing tradition in Mansfield Park, we are likely to be launched back further still–back to the scene of origin, back to the garden.

No sooner do Edmund and Mary initiate their long debate in the chapel at Sotherton then they find themselves in a suggestively Edenic scene in its woods. As they wander its “serpentine” paths, Mary tempts Edmund with worldly ambition (through which he might ultimately gain access to herself in marriage) and away from his religious vocation (65-68). Just in case we miss these Edenic overtones, Austen doubles and augments them in the scene that follows, where Henry entices Maria to climb over the gate and commit symbolic adultery (70-71).(15) These scenes are certainly not morally equivalent; Mary and Edmund are as yet negotiating in a fairly open and honorable way about their potential as a couple. However, the structural equivalence of the two scenes points to other, structurally similar scandals percolating in the vicinity, to an “ecology” of scandal.

Henry Crawford does not just tempt Maria; he trips up Julia in competition for himself, he trips up Julia and Maria in competition with each other, and he trips up Rushworth in competition for Maria (and intends ultimately to trip up Maria in competition with himself). Julia and Maria trip up each other in competition for Henry, and Mary (unknowingly) aggravates a growing jealousy in Fanny about Edmund. Fanny is the most conventionally “scandalized” in these scenes (shocked by Maria and Henry’s exchanges) yet, precisely because her “naive” sensitivity to scandal immunizes her, ultimately the least undone by interpersonal treachery.

Temptation is the “minimal configuration” of scandal. In traditional Christian morality, scandal means leading another into sin, a sin substantially more grave than the sin enticed (c.f. Matthew 18: 6-9).(16) But this definition is evaluative rather than descriptive. Girard’s Gospel exegesis is more direct, or at least more to the point of Austen’s narrative: skandalon is the inter-personal obstruction, the “double bind” with its contradictory imperative: “Imitate me; don’t imitate me.”(17) Julia and Maria, for instance, do not simply “want” Henry: in the Sotherton scenes they are driven to visible agitation by each others’ potential victory. At the same time, they are conscious of the other’s agitation and wish to rub their respective noses in it, to “sweeten the pot.” Thus, they simultaneously model and obstruct each others’ desires. Henry plays the sisters off against one another, but more habitually operates as a classically Girardian “psuedo-narcissist”: he coaxes women to “fall in love” with him–that is, he models admiration for himself and artfully induces women to imitate it–then dumps them.(18) In the parlance of contemporary pick-up artists, Henry practices an advanced level of “game”–“game” simply being a conscious manipulation of the dynamics of mimesis that both feed and feed on scandal.

Though not without a comic side in the early chapters, Julia and Maria’s romantic entanglements become less and less “funny.” Austen, without relaxing her critique of them, elicits much more sympathy than one would expect for selfishly callous Austenian characters; they suffer intensely. The very real damage and psychic torment caused by interpersonal scandal confirms Austen’s vision in Mansfield Park as being genuinely moral and not (as has often been objected) stuffily moralistic.

The Edenic echoes in the Sotherton scenes extend beyond the temptations in the woods; they encompass the woods themselves. Sotherton is the focal point for the issue of “improvement,” wherein landholders strive to outdo one another in landscape design, recreating placid scenes with open prospects, scattered copses, and meandering approaches.(19) The pretext for the Sotherton outing is the assessment of Rushworth’s grounds for improvement. Rushworth has caught the mania from his friend Smith, who has stylishly rusticized his much smaller property and driven Rushworth to agitated envy (38-41). “Improvement” severs the symbiotic relation with the local farming community, which is literally shut out from view, either by the removal or by the judicious placement of greenery. Thus, tradition buckles once more under the advance of modernizing influences. “Improvement” is the most sustained depiction of mimetically driven market forces in Austen’s oeuvres. However, it concerns the most unlikely of hot commodities: the placid Arcadian paradise, uncontaminated by desire!(20)

Austen yet again underscores the Edenic note in the novel’s title, and yet again uses the encroachment of modernity upon failing tradition as an occasion to launch us back further still, to evoke the scenic imagination. Certainly, “improvement” is a perversely self-refuting “originary vision”; in the act of emptying a landscape of desire, one demonstrates the most advanced form of it. Yet the self-refutation is also self-revelatory and indicates an alternate vision which is being enacted by the young people in the woods: the garden spilling over with interpersonal scandal.

If the fad for “improvement” captures the encroachment of the market upon traditional rural life, the fad for private theatricals captures the corresponding encroachment of “loose” social mores upon the youth scene. The theatricals are introduced to Mansfield by Yates, an inconsequential parasite, after his own acting party has been precipitously broken up with a different social set.(21) In the masterfully developed theater episodes, Austen intensifies a number of scandalous elements, not least her own scandalizing alienation of many fans. Austen uncannily captures the texture of what will eventually become full blown youth culture–its flamboyant revels in suburban homes when Mom and Dad are gone on trips, or reality TV with its jealous undercurrents, selfish squabbles, and Warholian spotlight grabbing. At the same time, and true to the pattern we have been observing, the theatricals bring out unsettlingly archaic elements. The social dynamics at Mansfield take on an increasingly sacrificial cast, and the unexpected return of Sir Thomas throws the young people into a strangely disproportionate panic, an echo of some ancient terror.

School for Scandal

School for Scandal is one of the plays mentioned when the young people begin casting about for a suitable dramatic vehicle. Sheridan’s racy Restoration comedy would be unthinkable for performance at Mansfield, even for this group of freshly liberated youth, but its inclusion on the list is significant. The sense of scandal evoked by Sheridan’s title is actually a diluted one: connived naughtiness, risqué titillation. Closely related is its counterpart, that averse reaction without which the risqué could not titillate: scandal as “impropriety,” as bad taste, as setting the wrong tone, or a bad example. Impropriety generalizes temptation to the level of embarrassment, indicating a corresponding shift from guilt to shame, and indicating in turn lapsed cultural standards: appearing good rather than being good. (This, of course, is a key moral theme of the novel, and also one extended from its treatment in Pride and Prejudice.) Both senses of scandal (titillation and impropriety) come strongly into play with the introduction of the theatricals to Mansfield, and both imply the diffusion of scandal to a larger community: an audience to be titillated, a family to be threatened with impropriety, a neighborhood to be ruffled with unpleasant murmurs.

When Edmund tries and fails to put a stop to the theatricals, he appeals to this sense of propriety. He fails no doubt because the tickle of naughtiness is mightier than the frown of diluted virtue;scandal trumps scandal. But it is also because, if scandal means little more than embarrassment, it is arguably more scandalous to make a scene about the theatricals than to let them proceed. Edmund’s arguments, fairly compelling individually, are never completely explicable in toto and do not resonate well, even for sympathetic readers.(22) Even if we don’t think Edmund is being a fussing Malvolio, we cannot escape the impression that he very much appears to be one. The impetus for the theatricals seems unstoppable and the social pressure mounting against Edmund becomes immense. Austen already disgruntles half of her fans by having Edmund make such a fuss.

Finally, with the casting of Lover’s Vows, when it seems likely that Mary Crawford will play Amelia (a saucy tease) to someone else’s Anhalt (a stiff but feeling pastor), Edmund himself “throws in the towel” and takes Anhalt’s part. The mere introduction of a rival accomplishes in a moment what overt or covert temptation could not have accomplished in days or weeks. The last remnants of authority and restraint at Mansfield are thus removed. If Edmund cannot convince himself, how could he convince the rest of us?

That the characters Anhalt and Amelia so much resemble Edmund and Mary in real life is undoubtedly Austen’s most blatant authorial joke in the novel. But the stage couple also models by extension the Darcy-Elizabeth romance from Pride and Prejudice, and (with reversed genders) the Henry-Fanny courtship that will develop later in Mansfield Park. This ought to alert us to Austen’s authorial intent; the three “hottest” romantic interests in Mansfield Park (Anhalt-Amelia, Edmund-Mary, and finally Henry-Fanny) are stoked up very heavily in line with the expectations raised in Pride and Prejudice, but all three finally fail to launch (the first because of the abrupt cancellation of the theatricals).(23) Austen deliberately frustrates the basic premise of romantic comedy, the vicarious satisfaction of erotic expectations, and she does so with premeditated and systematic vengeance. The agony of Yates, constantly denied his glory on the stage, and each time so close to the moment of consummation, reproduces our own frustration with the novel. The long-running critical apologia for Mansfield Park notwithstanding (Trilling’s included), Austen has “earned” the ire of disgruntled readers, at least in the sense of having deliberately provoked it.(24)

Yet this rift with readers is in fact a crack through which readers “fall into” the narrative, and become themselves players on the set, participants in Mansfield’s intensifying scandals. Frustrated that Austen refuses to let us have a good time, we (at least, many readers and critics) begin to complain, but the complaints come increasingly to echo the more unguarded and unfair remarks in the novel (especially as they are directed at Fanny); we begin to sound like Maria and Julia, like Mary Crawford, like Tom, like Sir Thomas, like Mrs. Norris. As per Trilling’s observation, the “offense” of Mansfield Park does indeed guarantee its greatness, yet Austen has engineered the offense not, finally, to estrange us, but to include us, to draw us in, to make us participants. In the pattern of Edmund, we may object to Austen’s theater, but we find ourselves standing willy-nilly on the stage.

Rehearsing the roles of Anhalt and Amelia is an intensely arousing experience for Edmund and Mary. It creates the irresistible impression that their differences are resolvable, and cements their attraction precisely at a time when they (and we) might have begun to understand their essential incompatibility. Maria in the meantime has taken the part of the “fallen woman” Agatha, and Henry that of Agatha’s bastard son Frederick. Their arousal is, if anything, more intense. It is made putatively “safe” by Maria’s engagement with Rushworth (which was supposed to put her off limits to Henry) and the roles themselves (since the mother-son relationship enables warmth but seems to rule out amorousness). Julia, in the meantime, has been pointedly edged out in the casting (bluntly signaling Henry’s preference for Maria) and watches spitefully from the sidelines. She formulates a silent curse on Maria, hoping for some “public disturbance” that will bring scandal vengefully down upon Maria’s head (113-14). This is an extraordinary and highly significant bit of oracular black magic, and it is self-fulfilling to the extent that it defines Julia’s role later as a passive enabler in Maria’s disgrace. Meanwhile, Rushworth fidgets helplessly as Henry makes ever more brazen love to his willing fiancée. Fanny is the only one to notice anything objectively amiss in all this, yet, for this unspoken thought crime, Fanny continues to provoke howls of protest among readers.

For Austen, this is all according to plan: readers (as proposed above) are beginning to act like characters. Yet they mimic characters not only individually, but collectively; readers are being drawn into the dynamics of scapegoating, which come increasingly to dominate the narrative. This is the next level of scandal. The stumbling block becomes the stone the builders rejected, which in turn becomes the cornerstone (c.f. Matthew 21:42).(25) Scandal manifests itself both as collective victimization and as the prophetic indictment that undermines it (but, in Mansfield Park, almost never unambiguously one or the other).

Only in Northanger Abbey does Austen ever develop comparable scenes of crowd pressure, when Catherine Morland is cornered twice by her peers at Bath to join ill-conceived excursions. In Mansfield Park, alone among Austen’s novels, the dynamics of this encircling crowd are developed in a sustained way. Collective victimization is tied finally not only to the tawdry frenzy of mass media in the case of Maria (discussed earlier), but even to the tortured psychology of “victim status” (e.g. the disturbing personal disintegration of Mrs. Norris, who in the last chapter feels–not unjustifiably–that everyone is excluding and persecuting her). Fanny’s defining moments in the novel will be when she refuses Henry Crawford and single-handedly resists an encircling crowd that is (as in the theater episodes) both smotheringly solicitous and irrationally accusatory.

Exclusionary dynamics are present from the beginning of Mansfield Park, notably in Fanny’s vulnerable isolation in the household since she was transplanted to Mansfield as a child. Exclusion begins to take a jagged edge in the form of “two against one” with the Sotherton scenes: Julia and Henry exclude Maria, Maria and Henry exclude Julia, Henry and Maria exclude Rushworth, Mary and Edmund exclude Fanny. In the theater episodes, however, exclusion begins to approach the level of “all against one,” of genuine scapegoating. The needle designating the excluded one jumps swiftly and erratically in these scenes. Edmund’s opposition to the theatricals, and the pushback from the group, make him odd man out for a time. Then Julia is excluded from Lover’s Vows and becomes the sullen outsider, watching resentfully from the fringes. Very soon after, Fanny is conspicuously “ganged up on” in the theater episodes, then yet again later, both times pressured to take a part in the play against her will. The first time she is rescued by Edmund. The second time (Edmund, now compromised, is part of the circle of solicitation) she is rescued by the unexpected return of Sir Thomas.

The return of Sir Thomas instantly reverses the dynamics from all against one to one against all. The collective panic that ensues is strikingly similar in tone and syntax to Fanny’s horrified reverie at Portsmouth:

How is the consternation of the party to be described? To the greater number it was a moment of absolute horror. Sir Thomas in the house! . . . after the first starts and exclamations not a word was spoken for half a minute; each with an altered countenance was looking at some other, and almost each was feeling it as a stroke the most unwelcome, most ill-timed, most appalling! . . . every other heart [than Yates’ and Rushworth’s] was sinking under some degree of self-condemnation or undefined alarm, every heart was suggesting “What will become of us? what is to be done now?” it was a terrible pause; and terrible to every ear were the corroborating sounds of opening doors and passing footsteps. (121)

Austen heightens the sense of dread by splitting this scene down the middle, precisely at the division of the first and second volumes. As with Fanny’s reverie, speech is reverse-engineered by horrified panic into a sub-linguistic state: “starts and exclamations” give way to a “a terrible pause,” half a minute of intense silence. Collective attention (“each with altered countenance was looking at some other”) draws together the sense of panic and “self-condemnation” but stalls at the point of articulation: “undefined alarm,” and the unspoken stutter of uncertainty (“What will become of us?” “What is to be done now?”). It is–dynamically, though not perhaps in exact particulars–a very “Gansian” moment. At the peak of collective desire (a dress rehearsal, where even Fanny is at the point of giving in), interdiction intrudes, overwhelming, unchallengeable. A catastrophe cannot be avoided, yet its immediate effects must at all costs be deferred. A thick, tense, terrifying, pregnant gap opens up which needs to be filled with something, with speech, with shared signification.

The Dæmon of the Piece

Sir Thomas is the law. He is Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai to find the Israelites engaged in a pagan orgy (Exodus 32).(26) He is the thief in the night. He is the only character with a sufficiently commanding presence to interdict, to be taboo. As the novel proves, this is not nearly enough, but order and restraint are restored to Mansfield for a period, and a highly interesting period it is.

In a radical overturning of literary convention, the typically overbearing Sir Thomas tries to talk his daughter Maria out of a loveless but advantageous marriage with the idiotic Rushworth. However, Maria must marry Rushworth; having been unceremoniously dumped by Henry after Sir Thomas’ return, she now must demonstrate at all costs that she is not “pining away” for him. This is a stunning repudiation of the liberating desires that so consumed the young people in the preceding chapters: it is the tyrannical imperatives of mimetic desire, not the tyrannical father, which force Maria into a loveless marriage! Nonetheless, Sir Thomas (as if recollecting his conventional role) will soon try to pressure his meek little niece into a marriage with Henry.

Henry’s new scheme is to deploy his well-honed pseudo-narcissistic strategies to break Fanny Price’s heart. Fanny’s persistent resistance, stronger than anything Henry has yet encountered, is both an intense “turn on” and a novel challenge–a completely new level of “game.”(27) However, under the imposing external mediation of Sir Thomas, Henry for the first time–like a planet wobbling under the influence of some new gravitational force–finds himself imitating what an upright man might be like. This process is never completed (a genuinely tragic element in Mansfield Park), but it is far from superficial; it actually begins to transform Henry. We get a glimpse of what “good” mimesis could be, mimesis without scandal: how the formation of a man like Henry might be directed by relatively good models rather than vicious ones like his uncle.(28) Henry’s scheme steadily “morphs” into an honorable one under the watchful eye of Sir Thomas.

Observing Fanny’s affection with her brother William also teaches Henry something about love and passion; he longs to elicit the same effusive warmth from Fanny. Here again, positive mimesis–conforming to the good seen in an other–stands in dramatic contrast to scandalous mimetic entanglement. This is indeed the core of Austen’s positive moral vision in Mansfield Park–not the reactive puritanism decried by critics like Kingsley Amis (or uneasily defended by critics like Trilling). The antidote to scandal is not taboo, but love. Sir Thomas’ indulgent coronation of Fanny, when he throws a coming out ball for her, further exalts Fanny in Henry’s eyes (no doubt as Sir Thomas intends). Henry falls in love with Fanny and begins to openly court her.

In refusing Henry, Fanny must now resist an encircling “embrace that smothers,” a nearly unanimous pressure to accept Henry’s proposal. This intense circle of solicitation (distinctly recalling the converging group pressure during the theatricals) is also a circle of persecution (Fanny’s exile to Portsmouth anticipates Maria’s expulsion in the last chapter). And, as noted, the circle includes no small number of readers and critics.

Sir Thomas, Edmund, the Crawfords, and apparently every male attending the ball all insist on finding Fanny–contrary to the accumulated wisdom of so many angry readers–not only loveable, but, on increasing occasions, exceptionally lovely. When she is noticed, her company is sought out, not shunned. Mary Crawford–who knows a thing or two about attractive personalities–seems to find her charming, and certainly more interesting than her cousins. Nevertheless, the routine litany of Fanny’s outrages is before us: she is unlikable, unlovable, a tedious bore, an intolerable prig, a sickening prude, a dour puritan, a dry hypocrite, a repulsive goody-goody.(29) The biggest scandal of Mansfield Park is undoubtedly Fanny Price herself, and the more intrepid of the scandalized critics press on for answers: What went wrong? Why Fanny Price? What is she doing here? However, an entirely different question may be in order: Why is so much vitriol routinely heaped upon this shy, harried teenager, entirely out of proportion to anything she does or doesn’t do?

There are many answers to this. The scandal of Fanny Price is almost as large and variegated as the scandal of Mansfield Park itself, and really merits a separate treatment. However, at least one part of the answer is straightforward enough, and has been touched upon earlier: it is because Fanny refuses Henry Crawford, and in so doing spoils the romantic denouement that Austen has been painstakingly preparing for us. We are denied any vicarious erotic satisfaction (for Fanny’s refusal also prevents the Edmund-Mary match from falling into place). There is no doubt that the usual objections to Fanny would evaporate in an instant were the match with Henry to go forward.

Again, Austen provokes this response in order to get readers to reproduce the scapegoating taking place in the narrative. Though several of Austen’s best critics have fallen into this trap, Nina Auerbach’s brilliant and brilliantly wrong essay takes it to majestic extremes that merit particular attention.(30) Auerbach means to transcend the usual objections to Fanny and explore her seriously as Austen’s intentionally unpleasant creation. Thus, Fanny is not just an unlovable stick-in-the-mud; no, Fanny is a dark, brooding, repellent figure. She casts a sickening cloud of resentful disapproval over the theatricals. (Here Auerbach performs a fascinating projection of Julia’s experience onto Fanny.) However, though Fanny sullenly excludes herself from the theatricals, she also gains obsessive control over them (Auerbach now projects Mrs. Norris), both through her vampiric enjoyment of the rehearsals and her maniacal domination of the script (that is, her unobtrusively useful assistance as a prompt).

Thus, everything Fanny does–whether she escapes to the east-room to feel downcast, tries to have a good time, or tries to try to make herself useful–establishes her monstrosity. And Auerbach is quite insistent about the monstrosity: Fanny is a vampire; she is the undead; she is a cannibal; she is Beowulf‘s Grendel; she is Frankenstein’s hideous, lumbering brute (of all the monstrous comparisons the most appropriate insofar as Frankenstein’s creation is an explicitly scapegoated figure). Thus Auerbach not only projects onto Fanny the unhinged psyches of Maria and Mrs. Norris in the final chapters, but actually appropriates Mrs. Norris tortured characterization: Fanny is “the dæmon of the piece” (304).

However, unlike Mrs. Norris, Auerbach does not hate Fanny Price; she is in awe of her. The Girardian circle is thus complete; Auerbach carries the scapegoating of Fanny all the way to deification, to myth. Yet, much like Trilling, not to mention the present study, she is struggling to comprehend the offense of Mansfield Park. Auerbach inadvertently discovers it not by identifying it, but by acting it out. The real offense is not the monster (which must be imported from various Romantic texts) but the mimetic contagion that compels us to see one.

However, she is by no means entirely wrong–and perhaps more intuitively right than wrong. There are “monsters” in Mansfield Park (that is, scapegoated victims), and they do glower resentfully from outside the charmed circle and haunt the novel’s bland ending. In projecting the resentment first of Julia and finally of Maria and Mrs. Norris onto Fanny, Auerbach indirectly identifies the real “dæmons of the piece,” who are none other than Maria and Mrs. Norris themselves.

The banishment of these two figures is certainly essential to the establishment of domestic felicity at Mansfield. Maria’s expulsion is also necessitated by Sir Thomas’ high-toned sense of honor and decorum: she must be removed to avoid scandal, to not set a bad example in the neighborhood that might corrupt the youth in his and other households (315). Yet, as is so often the case with Mansfield Park, scandal scandalizes itself. Maria’s expulsion, the only nearly complete example of scapegoating in any of Austen’s work, must be seen as extremely problematic.(31)

The problems with Maria’s expulsion are manifold. We have already been given cause to question the collective condemnation of Maria in the form of the debasing media treatment–so ubiquitous in our age but never quite right even when the subject is guilty. Throughout the novel we have also witnessed the many individual and collective moral failures (of Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, Julia, Tom, Henry, Mary, even Edmund) that contribute to Maria’s downfall. Austen carefully reviews this distribution of blame in the last chapter, and also explicitly notes the glaringly sexist dispensation of justice that exiles and disgraces Maria for life but lets Henry off with little more than his own moral hangover (318). It is indeed hard to see Maria’s exile as much more than a matter of expedience. Most dubious of all, Maria’s exile puts into effect the preposterous counsel of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice regarding Lydia and Wickham: “You ought certainly to forgive them as christians, but never admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing” (430). Though Mr. Bennett derides Mr. Collins’ advice–“That is his notion of Christian forgiveness!” (430-431)–Sir Thomas enacts it almost to the letter.(32) This is certainly a clue that Austen is not “on board” with Sir Thomas, and if Kingsley Amis had noticed this point alone, he would undoubtedly have written a very different essay.(33)

Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt and Misery

Austen begins the last chapter with these words, then ironically proceeds to do just that, to itemize all the guilt and misery in the aftermath of the novel’s scandalous implosion. Despite the placid epilogue of the very last pages, there is no moral “closure” in Mansfield Park. Taboo fails morally because (as Maria’s case shows) enforcement can no longer be anything but arbitrary and sacrificial. There is a strong correspondence to the Gospel of John with its incident of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-11), and Girard would refer us further to the Gospel Passion itself. This is not to say that all victims are innocent (Austen’s kind of moral realism would not support such a facile “Girardianism”) but that all scapegoaters are guilty. How indeed can we punish adultery any more without perpetrating a different injustice? As Mary Crawford says, “Every age has its improvements”; her conveniently desacralized world is gaining ground, yet it is not in spite of Christianity, but because of it.

In the current ethos, sacrificial operations must be handed over to the less reputable end of the media (as Austen already understands). Either that, or accusations are phantasmagorically displaced onto someone else, like Fanny Price! With the collapse of the sacrificial order, scapegoating actually takes on more fierce, unstable, irrational forms, and nothing demonstrates this better than the reactions of readers themselves. Furthermore, the loosening of taboos liberates only relatively, before more insidious and penetrating forms of oppression–the imperatives of mimetic desire–arrive to take their place. (Is there any character less “liberated” than Maria Rushworth?) Scandal cannot be eliminated through relaxed social norms; it merely takes different and often parallel forms.

Scandal bubbles up in Mansfield Park at all levels: sin; temptations to sin; interpersonal obstructions; improprieties that shock, titillate, or send whispers of gossip through the community; public disgrace and public downfall; victimization and prophetic indictment; expulsion and the tawdry sacrificial machinery of the media. Scandal boils over and out, into the reading experience, irritating and outraging readers, and then further still, into the community of readers, who come unwittingly to reproduce the gestures of scapegoating manifested ever more intensely in the narrative. In many more ways than one, Austen’s story becomes our story, whether we like it or not, and especially if not.

The moral tensions implied by the contesting senses of “scandal” in Mansfield Park are the same moral tensions of our world: manners versus morals, guilt versus shame, liberty versus license, tolerance versus prurience, prophecy versus preachiness, justice versus mercy. Readers find these tensions exceedingly difficult to negotiate (especially as they are expecting a delightful Romantic comedy on the order of Pride and Prejudice), but there is no reason it should be otherwise. Austen herself does not really resolve any of these tensions, but rather presses them to the limit of their irresolvability. And this is the final but– because the resolution never arrives–perpetual and ingenious offense of Mansfield Park.

The virtual presence of human communication is not—today nor in the beginning—simply an “open channel,” but an essentially suspicious one. It is this suspicious nature of linguistic communication, its requirement of guarantees, that is at the basis of the severity of the norms which pervade language at all levels, from the phonetic to the logical and esthetic. Each speaker in proposing his linguistic model to one or more of his fellows in effect recreates a crisis in which the significance of the information conveyed provides the power of reconciliation. (Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, 78)

Paul Ricoeur, in his The Symbolism of Evil, traces the progression from defilement, to sin, to guilt as an index of the progression from the ethical to the moral:

“Guilt,” in the precise sense of unworthiness at the core of one’s personal being, is only the advanced point of a radically individualized and interiorized experience. The feeling of guilt points to a more fundamental experience, the experience of “sin,” which includes all men and indicates the real situation of man before God, whether man knows it or not…. But sin, in its turn, is a correction and even revolution with respect to a more archaic conception of fault—the notion of “defilement” conceived in the guise of a stain or blemish that infects from without. (7-8)

The defilement of the communal space occurs when some prohibition has been violated—the intention behind the violation is irrelevant (it could have been an accident, say spilling some liquid used in the ritual); the contamination or pollution must be cleansed, and this can also only be done through strictly prescribed ritual means. Meanwhile, one only sins when one deliberately violates some divine command, and one is only guilty when one can be judged (and judge oneself) according to standards of probity that are shared but also internalized within each individual.

From the standpoint of the responsible individual capable of guilt, “defilement” is an extremely primitive way of thinking about violation, one that can only be a source of violence itself, that we are fortunate to have transcended, and that, to the extent we must recognize it at all, should be reduced to arcane rituals to be interpreted allegorically or neurotic quirks. All this is indicated by Ricoeur’s reference to the “correction” and “revolution” the concept of sin effected in our understanding of “fault.” But we hardly need Ricoeur to tell us that. How could Jesus’ claim that one is defiled not by what one puts into one’s mouth, but by what comes out of it, not have settled the matter? But if everything human can be found, albeit implicitly or potentially, on the originary scene, it follows that nothing found on the originary scene is ever lost. Defilement, or its possibility, is undoubtedly present on the originary scene: the sign has to be emitted “properly,” or recognizably, by all participants, and the failure to do so, even due to slowness or inadequate mimetic capacities, would pollute the scene, i.e., leave lurking unacceptable levels of menacing violence. It is easy to understand why Judaism, Christianity, and then modernity would want to eliminate all trace of the “irrationality” of defilement; but it should also be possible to understand that trying to do so has only reproduced in new forms that same sense of “pollution,” and can be implicated in the worst violence of 20^th century’s crisis of modernity.

Indeed, the investment by both Nazism and Communism in discourses of defilement might lead us to redouble our efforts to expunge its apparently indelible traces. We can recognize these traces in the tropes of “infection,” “pollution,” “contamination” and so on applied to both the race and class enemies of these regimes; and it would therefore be possible to reduce these regimes to a recrudescence of primitive, “compact” societies in revolt against the market order. But the power of White Guilt is also the power of defilement—otherwise, it would not have proven so “contagious” so as to “contaminate” even those (Western) countries that defeated Nazism; nor would it continue to prove itself so impervious to attempts to direct attention back to more “rational” articulations of individual act, intent, and acknowledged social norms. I wouldn’t propose changing the name of the condition in question to “White Defilement,” but we could take the mysterious power of White Guilt to indicate that sinfulness and guilt are constructed with the materials of defilement, rather than by replacing them.(1)

A sense of defilement, of some derangement of the communal and even world order that implicates one even if you not only didn’t commit but resisted with all your might, is a perfectly proper response to the crimes of genocide and totalitarianism—it is denying that sense, then, that is “irrational.” The mapping of the genocidal space by historian Raul Hilberg in terms of perpetrators, victims and bystanders (with this final, and novel, category implicitly extendible ad infinitum) suggests a series of circles of the “tainted,” with no one excused due to ignorance or incapacity. Even for someone born after the event the obligation to testify on behalf of the victims attaches, and no obligation to testify could ever be fulfilled once and for all. The perceived irrationality of that sense of defilement leads to the irrationality in the practices through which we seek to ward off the dreaded derangement of being, and which lead us to invest more and more in deferring ever more vague threats (we speak of this in terms of “slippery slopes”).

I would suggest that the most originary form of defilement, and the form in which it most readily presents itself for our inspection today is that of error, and I will propose what I will call “originary mistakenness” as a new way of speaking about mimetic rivalry and crisis and the resources available for deferral. The one who makes a spelling, pronunciation, or grammatical mistake, or commits some solecism (or, for that matter, “misreads” a situation, “misunderstands” a text, “misses” a “hint,” and so on), is as “blameless” as the one who accidentally disrupts some ritual space; and the mistake evokes a very similar sense of unease and fragility—everyone around feels compelled to show that they would never make such a mistake, first of all by demonstrating some recognition of its mistakenness. I suggest that this is because the error, whether grammatical or in any other unsatisfied convention, is a sign of infinite desire: making a mistake exposes one as imitating what one doesn’t know how to imitate, and therefore what one doesn’t understand, and the only reason for doing so is an “empty” and insatiable desire to be included in the very community one has just demonstrated oneself unsuitable to join. Naturally all mistakes don’t have the same high stakes, but the possibility of granting entrance to one capable of merely adopting the required forms as means of advancement turns the norms of the community themselves into an object of desire, and possible possession, and they can therefore no longer serve as reliable means of mediation. In that case, defilement can be seen as originary mistakenness.

While recognizing that we can speak of mistakes among animals (I have been informed many times by nature shows that the reason sharks attack humans is because they mistake them for seals or other marine mammals) and even in DNA replication, leading to the emergence of new species, I will suggest that mistakenness is specifically human. This is the case because only with humans does the mistake emerge simultaneously with the norm according to which we could judge it to be a mistake and therefore affect one’s relations with one’s fellows. We can see the simultaneity of norm and mistake on the originary scene. If we assume that one member of the group must have aborted his gesture first, then it follows that that individual could not really have known what he was doing. This makes sense if we speak, not of an aborted gesture (Eric Gans has himself spoken of the ambiguity of the phrasing here) but as what it actually is, an aborted act of appropriation. It only becomes a gesture with its imitation by the rest of the group. In this case, no member fully intends the meaning of the sign. There would be an emergent realization of what they have all done in the also emergent contrast between the grasping and the withholding that each can see in all the others. To use linguistic terms, anything that looks like a grasping motion is marked; anything that looks like a withholding motion is unmarked, as reflecting the power of the central object; or, to put it another way, the members of the group presence to each other. To get to that point, though, an accentuation of the shape of the aborted act so as to convert it into gesture must have taken place in its circulation through the group, and we can only think of such an accentuation in contrast with an insufficiently shaped or distinguished gesture (one which had not convincingly separated itself from the act, perhaps because it was still too much like grasping, but perhaps because it looked too much like sheer fright)—the insufficiently distinguished gesture is the first mistake, and the shaped one the first sign. My argument will assume that this mistakenness accompanies normativity in each act of signification in the way (to borrow Saussure’s famous metaphor for the signifier-signified distinction) each side of a sheet of paper accompanies the other. There is always a position on the scene from which anyone can look more like they are grasping or routed than withholding. Mistakenness appears as a fully fledged mistake when we have a visible confrontation of rules extrapolated from the same model: when, pragmatically, the people involved cannot see themselves as following the same model.

It is worth noting that Gans, in his account of the evolution of the primary linguistic forms in The Origin of Language, proposes that the imperative, at least, began as a mistake: the first imperative was an “inappropriate ostensive”(2). But we need not stop there: the first interrogative was a prolonged, which is to say, botched imperative, diverted part way through by the uncertainty of its fulfillment. The first declarative, the negative ostensive, is an on the face of it ludicrous attempt to offer a word in place of a thing. In each case, the mistake is not corrected but “completed” and thereby changed into a new kind of sign: the “interlocutor” brings the object in response to the inappropriate ostensive, and ceases his command or demand in response to the negative ostensive, thereby complementing the other in creating the new speech form. The mistake, in each case, is engirded by a new norm, and it is instructive to look at what seems to happen here. The interlocutor, confronted with an initially unintelligible sign, simply remains on the scene with the other, and since sustaining the scene requires sense, that sense is supplied: the object is made present, or the sharing of the sign marks its absence. The grammarian, on the other hand, expels the other from the normative scene.

Gans, in his subsequent discussion of linguistic diversification (within the ostensive realm) following the emergence of the sign says that, in new potential crises,

[t]o take too much time in communicating a piece of information is to commit an error not linguistic but practical, the hearer’s potential for anger tending to increase with the duration of his subjection to the speaker’s linguistic model. Thus this time will tend to approximate the minimum required for the hearer to absorb the information conveyed. (78)

So, taking too much time would be an error because, far from deferring violence, it would intensify it. I think we can assume, then, a complementary tendency to err on the side of brevity, which is to say the abbreviation of the sign. This error might often be simply that, a gesture which doesn’t fulfill its aim, but it would become a new sign or “idiomatic” revision of the sign as soon as it “took.” The new sign might replace the old one for use in the most intense situations (brevity would then “mean” urgent”), or it might take effect at a lower threshold of danger (brevity would then mean “trivial”). Here we would have the “two-place hierarchy of signs constitutive of the opposition between sacred and profane representations” (79) required if the sign is to refer to objects different from the original one, or one of equal desirability. Interestingly, Gans then goes on to say, regarding this dynamic of unequally significant signs, that “if we assume that the ‘profane’ sign attracts from its addressee an interest of a certain intensity, then this interest too can be deceived by a relatively insignificant referent, which will therefore tend to acquire for its designation a newly differentiated sign.” Again, it seems to me that error is driving the process here: in this case, the intrinsic interest in the other’s sign leads the addressee’s attention to an otherwise uninteresting object and hence a new word. The “gradual lowering” of the threshold of danger, and hence of significance, leads to diversity because of “the suspicious nature of linguistic communication” (78): the linguistic community’s “requirement of guarantees” “provides the impulse for a vocabulary richer in information” (80) because, I would suggest, that “suspicion” (the normativity of language) produces both error (abbreviations as well as prolongations) and the determination to locate the objects that would correspond to such errors.

Consider, as well, David Olson’s account, in his The World on Paper, of the emergence of writing, in the context of his argument that it was writing that made language visible as an object of analysis, and the “syntax” of graphic representations used for record keeping that made awareness of syntax in language possible. Olson writes:

Subsequent developments [following the earliest hieroglyphic writing systems] which gave rise, eventually, to the alphabet may be traced in large part to the consequences of borrowing. A shift in what a script “represents” is a consequence of adapting a script to a language other than that for which it was originally developed, an activity that led logographs to be taken as representations of syllables and later for syllables to be taken as representations of phonemes.

The first syllabary was the result of using Sumerian logographs to represent a Semitic language, Akkadian. To represent an Akkadian word such as “a-wi-lu-um,” man, with Sumerian logographs, the Akkadians simply took the Sumerian graphs which could be read as “a,” “wi,” “lu,” and “um,” ignoring the fact that in Sumerian each graph would represent a separate word… Reading Akkadian would then be a matter of pronouncing this series and the graphs would now be taken to represent syllables of Akkadian rather than words as they had done in Sumerian. (80-1)

Now, making use of a script in a new way, one which ignores its previous uses, is not itself a “mistake.” But the “consequences of borrowing” which Olson refers to must include the two central elements of any mistake: some understanding of what the sign to be appropriated is meant for; and the use of it in a way that would be marked as misuse by those fluent in the use of that sign. We could describe such appropriations as a knowing re-purposing of the sign in question—Olson’s description would allow us to do so. It seems to me more economical, though, to assume that an attempt to use another’s writing system, which is to say to acquire a capacity one does not have (as opposed, say, to considering replacing the alphabet one has with another), would involve a genuine attempt at imitation. Indeed, the shift from logographic to alphabetic writing is best understood as an example of what Michael Tomasello, in his Origins of Human Communication calls the “drift to the arbitrary”:

Are certain obscene gestures “arbitrary” or are they iconic representations of real actions? Many such gestures were at one time iconic, and then they became more arbitrary over historical time—but they were conventional, in the sense of shared, throughout. In any case, our proposal here will be that first came shared conventions, and then there was a kind of “drift to the arbitrary” over historical time. (219)

Tomasello attributes the drift to the arbitrary to the entrance of learners and outsiders, who must imitate the sign before having acquired the shared intentionality of its original users, into the group: “outsiders, who are missing some common ground as a basis for ‘naturalness,” may have a difficult time comprehending and parsing the communicative signs of others” (304). In that case, such a drift from the iconic to the arbitrary would result from a series of failed attempts either to make an iconic gesture understood to someone from another community (or to understand, i.e., respond to, the gesture—if we can separate those two phenomena), followed by a re-norming along more purely conventional lines. In this case, all language change must be driven by much mistakenness and re-norming as each sign user sees the consequences of the other’s borrowing of his sign; and language is a process of change from the very beginning. (Although we should note that Gans, just as much as Derrida, would have us acknowledge that there is an element of arbitrariness in even the most iconic sign, since the sign emerges not naturally but in an event that could have not happened.)

The anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir noted that in certain Native American tribes,

definite points of contact have been established between speech defects and “mocking-forms,” with consonantal play, on the one hand, and between the latter and myth-character forms with consonantal play, on the other. I am inclined to believe that the observation of consonant substitutions such as take place, with involuntarily humorous effect, in the speech of those that articulate incorrectly, has set the pace for the consciously humorous use of the same or similar substitutions in both mocking and, directly or indirectly, myth-character forms. (191)

So, mistakes in speech that mark individuals within the community are incorporated into idioms which in turn make their way into the representation of mythical characters. This provides a very interesting model for thinking about the process of idiom generation through the norming and re-norming of mistakes. As many teachers have noticed, singling out a mistake made by students in front of the classroom can easily, through sheer mimetic power, get it repeated rather than rejected by other students. One could attribute this effect to student inattention—perhaps they simply copy whatever is written on the board. I’m not sure how important the difference is—as human beings, mimetic beings, what else could overtake us while inattentive other than attraction to some powerful model or the habits inculcated through adherence to one? Either way, rather than mark it for exclusion, it may be better to have students make conscious use, in the creation of idioms, of incorrect articulations. While all mistakes may not be equally viable candidates, for the more “striking” ones a strategy of incorporation rather than extirpation is the more productive approach.

All idioms are built upon the cornerstone of mistakenness. I should note that I am using mistakenness conceptually and heuristically here—one could note, of course, that creative writers generate idioms all the time and know exactly what they are doing. But there is much that they don’t know about what they are doing, and their highly conscious activity implies more, not less, tacit knowledge and unconscious mental activity. To put it another way, I am making an argument about what is entailed in “creativity”: applying some sign to some new domain (a helpful definition of intellectual creation) involves responding to the sign from the position of an unintended addressee (almost as if an eavesdropper were to suddenly answer a question). The process, I am proposing, is no different from that which, in Gans’s hypothesis, led to the co-invention of the imperative: in working with a sign that finds nothing in the real or imaginary scene to complete, some kind of external supplementation is provided—the creator, then, may not be making a mistake, but he or she certainly allows him or herself to draw upon reserves of mistakenness.

The ethical consequences, it seems to me, are as follows. If the mistaken is marked, then, and we unmark ourselves by enforcing the norm against the polluting mistake, then rather than intensify the marking of the error of which we are rid, we can allow ourselves to be marked by deliberate innovations that risk being mistaken and unmark others by constructing idioms around their mistakes. Such an ethics of language would break with metaphysical normativity, grounded in well formed propositions and the presumed model of a well ordered reality. We can never be certain of understanding each other but we can be certain of misunderstanding each other—there will be mistakes in every exchange of signs. We can try and reduce misunderstandings but with a few exceptions the law of diminishing returns sets in quickly as each marks the other as source of the misunderstanding. But if error is simply the application of a rule in some situation where another rule claims it doesn’t belong, mistakes can be treated as reciprocal interference in each others’ freedom—rather than striving for the transparency of traditional notions of dialogue, we would embrace a more digressive model of discourse in which I try to follow, refine and enhance the rules I take the other to be following. Mistakes, in this case, can be revelatory, as they put forward other rules, which can always be articulated in some way.

An acknowledgement of our originary mistakenness would radically transform our attitude toward risk, and there is little today that is in more desperate need of transformation. It would be very easy to see White Guilt as an indemnification policy against the risks involved in resentments held by anyone not firmly invested in the existing system, and the increasing terror of risk of any kind can be seen across all our institutions to the point where it is nearly paralyzing us. The realization that everything is interconnected intensifies the fear that any mistake can bring everything down, but it could just as easily lead us to notice all kinds of redundancies and back-ups that are also part of our interconnectedness. The real threats to the market system are the desperate attempts to avoid its breakdown—I would go so far as to assert that no such thing would have happened if the government just stayed out of the financial meltdown in September 2008. Enormous amounts of wealth would have been lost, but before too long people would have been buying and selling, lending and borrowing, saving and investing again, perhaps first of all on the margins of the current system dominated by the alliances between the government regulators and the huge financial institutions. Accepting our originary mistakenness will eliminate the terror of contagion, contamination and defilement, in its contemporary form of various “domino theories,” which tell us if one crucial piece goes down it will bring everything else down with it. Even if it does, something will get up again, and we can put our energies into that inevitably risky something.

The insight that we are fundamentally mimetic beings should put the question of error or mistakenness at the top of our concerns. When, after all, is imitation error free? When does one ever get the model “right”? On the other hand, who determines whether I have done so or not? If you are too close to the model, you risk unwitting parody, or a shameful failure to grasp the setting within which the model has acted, a setting different from the one in which you are to act. If you are too far then the model won’t be recognizable in your actions at all, and if your desire is set by the model, you will fail to gratify it. But determining what is just right must be left to the averaging out of subsequent imitations and representations of imitations until a norm emerges which enables us to share in the resentment towards mistakenness. Needless to say, mistakenness will corrode that normativity from the very beginning.

But it is not so obvious that it is meaningful to say that imitations can be mistaken, because there is no natural norm against which imitation can be measured, and hence mistakenness must be located on the originary scene as well. The constitutive mistake of imitation, I would suggest, is taking the model as origin—a mistake, of course, because the model is himself just imitating someone else. The more completely we emulate the model, constructing a formal unity out of his approach to the object, the more his relation to the object appears self-generating and self-contained. This mistake is what makes the sign both necessary and possible, because only then could the model’s abdication of his claim to the object become an act for me to imitate as well.

Mistaking the model as origin can take two forms: one, assuming the model is blithely unaware of you; two, assuming the model is dead set against you. In the first case, blithe unawareness, the self-contained model seems not to attend to the arrangement of attention amongst the others—their attention simply automatically follows his own, including everyone but yourself. In the second case, that of being dead set against you, everyone’s, following the model’s, attention is directed towards the means of your exclusion. The two possibilities represent the extremes of an absence of attention and a dangerous intensity of attention. The imitator oscillates between these two attitudes toward the model, but they crystallize into the aim of interposing oneself between model and object—that would both force the model’s attention, and turn his antagonism toward you back towards him, in such a way that you get the drop on him. The form of the imminent confrontation on the originary scene in this construal, then, entails each figure getting a little in between the other and the object and that is what would bring things to a standstill: there’s no way you can get in between the other and the object if he is positioning himself in between you and the object. But this standstill would involve ongoing adjustment, as each makes the mistake of seeing the other move toward the object and of appearing to move toward the object while really trying to block the other. And the only way of ending the stand-off is for someone to mistake the gesture as a invitation to partake of the object, and initiate the sparagmos. This is originary mistakenness and our originary defilement: to be irremediably in between, tainting the origin that being in between places us at.

Accepting originary mistakenness implies accepting normativity as well. Indeed, a mistake is only a mistake once it has been disclosed as such to a normative intelligence. Norm and error emerge simultaneously. The mistake is the sign of infinite desire and therefore also of incalculable danger—the norm is the resentment of the center that contains this danger by marking the error as such and refining the sign so that it fixes the mistake: just as someone might exaggerate the correct pronunciation of a word in response to someone’s mistake. All idioms, however informal or idiosyncratic, distinguish between norm and error. If anything, the “grammarians” defending certain forms of slang may be more demanding than the worst martinet in the classroom: think of the likely consequences for a gang member unable to use the group’s jargon properly or any normal teenager who doesn’t deploy words like “whatever” or “dude” properly or use the exclamation “really?” with the right intonation.

I don’t see the recuperation of “defilement” as a way of displacing the ethical advances made by concepts like “shame,” “sin” and “guilt.” But those concepts are rather problematic, and the introduction of defilement as mistakenness might help us to see why. We assert that some should feel ashamed of themselves, that they are right to feel guilty, that they have sinned, in each case imputing free will to the doer. It rarely makes sense, though, to assert that someone “shouldn’t” have made a mistake—it’s such a tautology that the statement seems obvious but trivial and question-begging. Even more, if we trained our attention upon all conceivable mistakes, so multifarious, complex and shifting are the various rules of human interaction that we would hardly be able to attend to anything else. That is why the match between free will and shame, sin or guilt is invariably imperfect: people often experience these feelings even when there is no good reason for it (not to mention not experiencing it when they have good reason to do so). On the other hand, what is a good reason, and how do we know? We end up attributing originarity, or infinity to such emotion—we are more guilty, more steeped in shame, than we can ever know or begin to make amends for. There is something “there” before we transgress, even in our hearts: our mistakenness regarding appropriate regard for the center, our confusion of our desire with the resentment of the center.

It is interesting that people today often speak about making mistakes when previously they would have spoken about doing wrong. (Consider the by now familiar political locution: “Mistakes were made.”) On the individual level it’s probably an attempt to minimize responsibility—after all, we all make mistakes! At the same time, though, it does open one’s conduct to a more thorough inspection—if I have done wrong, I am expected to suffer the consequences and make it right, and if I do it’s no one else’s concern and, more broadly, we have well established institutions and procedures for dealing with wrongdoing in the form of shame, sin and guilt; if I’ve made mistakes an inspection of the entire scene is called for because the consequences of those mistakes may have spread without limit. Noting the mistakes underlying the sinful, shameful or guilty behavior provides a means, then, for reintegrating the “offender” back into the community by re-staging his relation to the model he “mistook,” and even if punishment and restitution is necessary to fix the mistakes, a study of the mistakenness at root will help construct the idioms of correction. If we sense that some feel “too” guilty, or ashamed for no good reason, perhaps it is because their mistakenness has been insufficiently attended to—in other words, we may not have asked what model they take themselves to be following, and how. And noting the mistakenness that just happened to broach the threshold of visibility might further make visible other mistaking of the shared model—and one kind of mistake, of course, may be failing to insist sufficiently upon normativity at the “right” time.

Originary mistakenness provides an alternative heuristic to what I have been calling the “grammarian” one, which presupposes a shared model and measures and punishes deviations from it: something will be mistaken in any utterance or gesture (some context overlooked, some shifting of emphasis askew, some possible response unanticipated), and if we train ourselves to attend to that mistakenness then much that is invisible in the utterance or gesture becomes visible. What has become visible is the idiomatic character of all semiosis: we can identify what is formulaic in a free expression, and free in a formulaic one: mistakes break up the cliché and the commonplace. I have seen students speak of “loosing their focus”; of being “weary [i.e., wary] of nationalistic excesses”; of some “point” being a “mute” one; of two functions “complimenting” each other and much more (any teacher can no doubt generate many examples of their own). I recently heard Sarah Palin say that the excitement in conservative circles regarding the upcoming elections was “palatable.” In these cases, where near homonyms occupy overlapping semantic domains (if your focus is loosened, aren’t you in danger of losing it; aren’t we wary of nationalistic excess because we are weary of its consequences; if a point is moot, in the sense of no longer practically relevant, isn’t it for all intents and purposes—or, to cite another mistake, “for all intensive purposes”—”mute”; wouldn’t something that complements you be worthy of being complimented; and, isn’t “palpable” excitement also quite “palatable”?) we have the articulation of the iconic and arbitrary, oral and written, dimensions of language, and in these articulations we can locate the generation of new idioms.

Mistakenness raises the question of pedagogy, and any cultural problem, being a question of the transmission of models, is a problem of ensuring the rough equivalence of the new generation to the models put forward for them; but also, of course, of providing them with the capacity to mold those models so as to address novelties. We can think about the “drift toward arbitrariness” as an ongoing process, one that simultaneously involves the re-creation of spheres of iconicity in grammatical, phonetic and gestural forms and that is cultural as well as linguistic, since the drift is determined by the entrance of outsiders into the sign community (including the new generation of outsiders, or children). The forms of mimetic pedagogy we have inherited, ultimately from the Greeks, relied upon an intensified iconicity carved out of the spread of arbitrariness: you become like the teacher, who models a particular mode of inquiry or attentiveness, and thereby extricate yourself from the chaotic world of desire and undirected resentments. I don’t think that mode of pedagogy, which treats mistakes as shameful because they introduce drift into the pedagogical arena, works any more. Perhaps a pedagogy that doesn’t know where the student is going, that simply places before the students the basic questions, practices and materials constitutive of a disciplinary space, and takes mistakes, the ever-generative mismatch between model and pupil, as its point of departure, will be able to accept more arbitrariness and a create more minimal forms of iconicity. Such a pedagogy would be interested in the most minimal conditions under which the mistaken and the normative could share the same object and co-regulate their practices so as to keep it in view; and such a pedagogy might be able to move through less institutionalized cultural spaces and conjoin attentions in new ways.

More specifically, it might be noted that all the mistakes I pointed to a paragraph back involved the “infection” of writing by speech: as linguists like Roman Jakobson and Dwight Bolinger(3) have argued, this is a very common feature of language, as words that sound alike tend to converge on similar meanings and words with similar meanings tend to become closer in sound: mistakenness, then, is both the drift toward arbitrariness and the restoration of the iconic dimension of language in the face of that drift. The question of error pervades language from the very beginning, I have suggested, but becomes much more explicit once languages become written and standardized. The mistakes I have mentioned, whose occurrence is, perhaps, accelerated by the use of spell check, reverse the process of standardization, which involves the protection of the written language from the contamination of speech— resisting constantly changing punctuation, slowing the drifts of meaning, marginalizing slang, and so on.

As Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and David Olson, have shown, print culture institutes ways of thinking radically opposed to those of oral culture. Writing segments language—into sounds, syllables, words and sentences—and in doing so also shows us that the reality made available by language can also be segmented—and therefore analyzed, studied, modified and recombined. As can the mental habits which enable us to treat reality. Education, in print culture, means the protection of the habits of print from the encroachment of the habits of orality: formulaic, repetitious, additive, literalistic and overly metaphorical, and so on. But there’s no way of systematically presenting and familiarizing students with all the possible ways in which orality can contaminate writing—the successful student is the one who immerses himself in the culture of writing by closely following the models presented him by the educational system and the culture at large.

But what if the period in Western history in which one could assume that an ever increasing number of young people desired such immersion has ended—in part because the basic minimum of literacy needed for most career paths is readily available to most, in part because of the proliferation of electronic technologies that render traditional literacy less attractive and in some cases obsolete. Rather than mounting futile defenses against the rising tide of neo-oral barbarism, we might reify the boundary between orality and literacy as a way of preserving and enhancing the intellectual habits indebted to the latter. As Michael Polanyi argues, a better guide to the generation of knowledge creating spaces (disciplines) than abstract principles and concepts (which we seek to define, clarify and calcify) is the maxim, a quintessentially oral mode of conserving experience and knowledge. Unlike concepts, which presuppose privileged members of the discipline entrusted with the purity of conceptual applications (method), maxims, or “rules, the correct application of which is part of the art they govern,” include a rule-of-thumb, collaborative component that encourages innovation: “maxims can function only . . . within a framework of personal knowledge” (31). The encrusted maxims of traditional society, of course, have little credibility today; what might be productive, though, is the construction of maxims out of the confusion and provisional restoration of the boundary between oral and literate. My little takes on the mistakes I listed above were already embryonic maxims: say, “loosen it or lose it”; “compliment and you will find you have complements”; “if you don’t moot the point it will become moot and you will find yourself mute”; etc. Such maxims are the basis of new idioms of inquiry that establish disciplinary spaces and it is in and through such spaces that long chains of declarative sentences emerge and issue in shared imperatives and ostensives—and it is through such articulations of declaratives with imperatives and ostensives that culture is created and sustained.

If we were to treat mistakes as anomalies around which disciplinary spaces, idioms and maxims were to be created, it follows that we would notice a lot more mistakes (rather than politely overlooking them most of the time, as we do now in social settings; or ridiculing or punishing them in more competitive environments); indeed, one could even imagine the perverse result that mistakes, and a proliferation of them would constitute marks of privilege. This final result, though, is not really possible, because deliberate mistakes would no longer be mistakes—they would, rather, be a kind of rule following that would generate its own distinctive modes of mistake making and fixing. If deliberate mistakes are impossible, even unthinkable, what is in fact easily conceivable is the setting of tasks in such a way that mistakes are far more likely. If you ask someone (in a school assignment, in an inter-personal confrontation, in a piece of performance art, or publics their representatives) to act simultaneously according to two different rules, they are bound to err according to at least one of them. What they will also do, though, is generate at least the preliminaries of a new, idiomatic, rule that would govern a new set of practices. I suspect emergent, post-millennial cultures, if we live to see them, will be able to tolerate a great deal of planned mistakenness, even if complete tolerance is no more desirable than the saturation of all social sites with ritual sacrality.

Beyond the most primitive and stereotyped acts, when we speak of mistakes we are speaking about unintentionally violating rules. Rules are notoriously hard to define and describe—for one thing, they always presuppose certain conditions and involve exceptions, so you need meta-rules for determining when the rules apply; for another, much of our knowledge of rules is how-to, tacit knowledge that can’t be made explicit. But this just means that rules, at least the rules of language and everyday interaction (as opposed, say, to the artificial rules of games) operate, to a great extent, below the level of declarative statements, in the area of ostensives and imperatives. The beginnings of rule would be in the extension of an ostensive into an imperative: something one points to along with actual or possible others “orders” one to carry out some act. The most economical way of thinking about what such an imperative would be is that it is a command to preserve the possibility of issuing that ostensive another time. When we say “that ostensive,” though, we don’t just mean the same object, but the same aspect of the object in the same kind of critical situation—but all of that can’t be reproduced, so “that ostensive” will be progressively refined with each instance of obedience to the imperative (and the same qualifications apply to “the imperative” as to “that ostensive”). This “refinement,” in turn, must mean that we assume a confirmatory ostensive following the obeyed imperative, confirming, that is, that the imperative has in fact been obeyed.

A rule, then, is the iterable articulation of an ostensive, a derived imperative, and a confirmatory ostensive. If we don’t share the same ostensives we wouldn’t recognize each other’s signs anyway, so our focus should be on the imperative and concluding ostensive: mistaking the ostensive-imperative link would be making an obscene joke at a family gathering, in front of the kids; mistaking the imperative-ostensive link would be laughing at the joke. In both cases, we have what we might call a “dangling” imperative—an acted upon imperative without ostensive grounding or confirmation (one person laughing at the obscene joke doesn’t confirm the imperative to make such a joke—the general silence confirms the lack of confirmation). The originary grammarian expels such an imperative from the scene by issuing an unquestionably grounded and confirmable replacement. Those who acknowledge our originary mistakenness, though, seek to supply the ostensives which might ground and confirm the imperative—for example, by integrating the obscene joke into family lore, while perhaps categorizing it with analogous, anomalous instances so its mistakenness would not simply be erased; or, more riskily, joining in the laughter at the joke and turn it into a challenge to the bounds of propriety at that occasion. These kinds of moves are modes of deferral operating at the most preliminary cultural level—deferring the punishment customarily issued and the purging ordinarily demanded for mismatched imperatives and ostensives.

The actions of one can contaminate or defile the whole to the extent that we all share the same “thing,” as, for example, one infected person will poison a shared food or water source—that is why the notion of defilement loses its power in a market society where we exchange things in increasingly indirect ways. White Guilt, our contemporary mode of defilement, derives from our sharing the non-sacrificial, which is to say, normalized, removal of the Jews from the scene during the Holocaust—according to the Auschwitz theology which at the very least shadows all contemporary thought, if we aren’t victims or perpetrators we are bystanders, by however many degrees. To put it crudely, the Nazis offered a solution to the problem of our modernity(4), and so we all share complicity in the crime—except to the extent that we actively and overtly repel all the “slippery slopes” that led to the crime: not just anti-semitism (ultimately not even, because anti-semitism was just a “symptom”), but nationalism, individualism, institutional loyalty, normativity, or any other way in which I take a piece for myself or some “we” at the however indirect expense of some “them” and, even worse, justify it by some appeal to nature or necessity. White Guilt is an experience of defilement because it assumes that only a universal sharing of some common substance will prevent the splitting up into individuals and groups that will renew the process of scapegoating.

Universal mistakenness respects the anthropological intuition embodied in White Guilt: not only in spite of, but because of the advanced market economy, there are collective crimes, resulting from shared fantasies about the common good as de-contamination, that we all participate in; even more, those fantasies are of a scene in which everyone circulates the sign with equal efficacy, a kind of fantasy perpetuated by metaphysics and the Enlightenment faith in shared understanding through unhindered linguistic exchange. If we all spoke with each other freely and frequently, our discourse would approximate that of each other—we’d pronounce alike, we would recognize the same commonplaces and gestures, we would approach a shared sense of correctness and refinement. But there would still be lots and lots of mistakes, because that’s how signs circulate, and it is just as discourse becomes freer and more frequent across accustomed boundaries that we will be choosing whether to enforce grammar or participate in new idioms by undergirding dangling imperatives.

In other words, aside from the post-genocidal collective guilt we all share, we all partake of language. No one can ever have more than a piece of language, under strictly regulated conditions; at the same time, language change results from what everyone does with their little piece. I can’t decide whether and how nouns and verbs agree in a sentence anymore than any member of the group can decide upon the size of the kill brought home for dinner, or the number of the group itself—but language also reaches into the gift and market economies and offers innumerable possibilities for innovation. An ethics or cultural politics of originary mistakenness would seize on mistakes as possibilities for innovative turns, for, we might say, husbanding our resources for deferral; while, at the same time, proposing new idioms that would carry with them norms that, in their collisions with other normative centers, would create new mistakes. In a sense, originary mistakenness points us to a practice that I believe is unprecedented: taking responsibility for the historicity of our linguistic being through deliberate strategies of inclusion and renewal.

        Nor less, I trust,
To them

William Wordsworth’s antecedent here is the “beauteous forms” of the Wye river valley near Tintern Abbey, which he has carried in his mind for the past five years and is now seeing again

. . I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:–that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,–
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.(1)

These famous lines, widely received as beautiful and thus apparently effective in creating the peace they depict, would seem a paradigmatic demonstration of the “power” not just of a “mood” but of a representation thereof, fully bearing out Eric Gans’s claim that “romantic art is generative anthropology because it teaches us about the scene of origin.”(2) This momentary mood, this corporeal suspension, this lifting of the weight of sociality and all its collectively unintelligible imperatives of mimetic desire, is surely allied to the originary moment of aesthetic contemplation, the moment of transcendence itself, that empowers all seeing into things.

But it is also, just as surely, a moment with properties and contexts, and it behoves us to attend to them. For example, we risk reductiveness to speak of “joy” as a generic term for the temporary release of mimetic tension. Even if it does involve that, or even causes it, it is more than that.

Schiller may have fallen into such reductiveness when he said that “all art is dedicated to joy,”(3) and this in turn may point us to some of the limitations in the German poet’s practice, at least by comparison. His “Ode to Joy,” for example, begins with these undoubtedly uplifting lines:

Joy, of flame celestial fashioned,
Daughter of Elysium,
By that holy fire impassioned
To thy sanctuary we come.
Thine the spells that reunited
Those estranged by Custom dread,
Every man a brother plighted
Where thy gentle wings are spread.

Alas, though, those wings, gentle or not, clearly aren’t spread everywhere or over everyone, because a very few lines later, we have:

Who has won a maid belovèd
Join us in our jubilee.
Whoso holds a heart in keeping,
One–in all the world–his own–
Who has failed, let him with weeping
From our fellowship begone!(4)

All human beings are brothers in this joy, except those who, well, aren’t, and one needn’t be a deconstructionist to grasp that the joy might depend on the exclusion. Shall we even call it the scapegoating? This circle will not be unbroken. Here, one might say that Schiller teaches not so much about human origin as about that somewhat later stage at which resentment of a usurping human being replaces originary resentment of the object at the centre of the scene. More prosaically, he reminds us of the persistence of an inescapable human sociality, and that not every Romantic celebrates the marginalized. Those who have experienced, however briefly, the absence of a single heart, may feel the sting of this double lash: not just that failure and its tears, but the punitive expulsion from the comforts of even so abstract a community as universal human brotherhood.

Wordsworthian joy, always more carefully delimited and situated, seems to have different properties, more productive, even generative potentialities. Mind you, there are shadows if not of schadenfreude, at least of a familiar Romantic posture of alienation and superior difference:

. . . this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature did never betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us…

Earlier in the poem, Wordsworth has spoken, in an undying line, of the way joy has allowed him to hear “The still, sad music of humanity.” Clearly, though, one can hear the music of other people better when, well, one can’t. It’s sweeter, and sadder, when it’s still. But perhaps one may concede a pragmatic psychological logic here–joy, and emphatically not one’s own sufferings or victimhood, creates the capacity for sympathy. Joy is that which does create the capacity to sympathize with, indeed, conceive the universe, beginning with the human other. This too reminds us of the profound achievement of the originary scene: the aesthetic moment, its capacity to release us from resentment and appropriative desire, makes possible every kind of human accommodation.

Anyway, Wordsworth is not Byron and was not received the way Byron was. Few have professed to be much affected by Wordsworth the man or by his persona. Readers have not wanted to be him, or much cared if he didn’t want to be them. Wordsworth’s modelling was of experiences one did not need to be Wordsworth to have, and thus are less likely to be the subject of rivalry. One may say this, despite the frequent complaints about his more than ordinarily ineluctable presence on his own scenes of representation–what Keats rejected as the “egotistical or wordsworthian sublime”(5)–a criticism widely echoed. I say “despite” but only in the sense that malgré must be heard as parce que, as Girard tells us. It is a curious fact, in short–one worth wondering about–that so many readers have found it possible to spurn Wordsworth, but not his joy.

What is joy? Perhaps John Locke is an appropriate authority here, given Gans’s recent characterization of him not only as “the primary theorizer of history’s most successful model of large-scale human interaction” but as an optimist “more concerned with the outcome of the originary scene than with the crisis it resolves.”(6) Locke gives us this: “Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of present or assured approaching possession of a Good.” One of his examples: “A father, in whom the very well-being of his children causes delight, is always, as long as his children are in such a state, in the possession of that good; for he needs but to reflect on it to have that pleasure.”(7) From an originary perspective, of course, the “Good” is much less interesting here than the “consideration,” the “reflecting.” Gans, in defining resentment, notes that it is not strictly an emotion, unlike “sadness, joy and anger” which are “roughly equivalent” to emotions “found in other mammals.” Resentment, though it leads to passions, “has at its core a scenic representation,” an “idea,” namely “injustice.”(8) But by Locke’s account, and I would say by Wordsworth’s as well, joy requires such an idea too–an imagining, a reflecting, a representation. Joy is a thing of the mind, the mind reflecting on the possession of something desired, or as Wordsworth clearly suggests, the mind transforming objects through desire, through their joyfully anticipated or imagined possession, by representing them upon the internal scene, then externally, as in poetry. Might Locke’s joyfully anticipated or imagined possession, indeed, stand as another definition of originary representation? Or perhaps of one phase in the oscillation thereof. At the very least, albeit in a more fundamental way than Schiller probably intended, joy and aesthetic experience would seem to have much in common. Although Locke does not say so, one may assume that when the considering or reflecting ends and possession of the Good itself takes place, joy is no longer the word to be used. Sparagmatic satisfaction or discharge, we might say in originary terms. (Political peace through private property, in a larger-scale human context.) Once joy migrates from the mind, it is no longer joy, exactly. In Wordsworth’s version, perhaps we would say the “mood” passes, and with it the “seeing into the life of things.”

Equipped with this preliminary, indeed tentative, originary understanding of joy, perhaps we can turn to joy in history, including Wordsworth’s and our own moment. There is a generally helpful account by Adam Potkay (who also cites Locke), which holds Romantic joy as something that “breaks down the boundaries that separate self and other, humanity and nature.” It is thus, and readers of Wordsworth’s equally famous “Intimations” ode will instantly see the point, “the original passion of infancy, reconnecting us, blissfully, to a stage in life before we were born.”(9) (From this stage, we recall, the Wordsworthian babe comes “trailing clouds of glory.”(10)) The Romantic quest for the unmediated, for transcendence of human sociality, has no more fitting and pervasively imagined goal than this, the most unattainable. But Wordsworth, in the Ode, faces this, and offers us joy in surprisingly Lockean terms. The mature man may still find it, albeit in “our embers,” but through “the philosophic mind” and “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”(11)

Potkay notes that Romantic Joy is unstable–unlike happiness, which is merely vulnerable–transitory, endlessly capable of modification, and much less subject to intention. This is common sense, and we probably don’t need to again unlimber the heavier term “oscillation.” But the contrast is perhaps useful. “Happiness is a technology of the self, a fashioning and indemnification that elevates inner integrity, constancy and wisdom over external mutability, loss and death. Joy, by contrast, is an expansion and at least partial loss of the self.”(12)

Happiness is a full economy, that is, a whole system of exchanges, which, as long as it is in good operating order, and for all its profits and losses, is able to keep the wolf of desire from the door. It is sustained by rather than identical with technologies of self-creation in a market of differences which has not overwhelmed the happy woman or man. To distinguish joy, the episodic, the self-submerging, is again to distinguish a phase in the originary experience. Happiness is surely a product of the sparagmos, of that grateful release of resentment. An adequate identity is one product of the division of the spoils. But Joy cannot quite be the moment of stasis either, of mere contemplation, as that has too much of the prohibition in it still. In joy, contemplation, the moment of virtual gratification, begins to incline, one might guess, to tilt, to slope, towards literal appropriation: towards the fulfilment of all promises. Joy is perhaps the mind’s awareness of its own potential energy, its own incipient if unwilled motion.

“Towards the fulfilment of promises,” of course, which every Romantic knows or says he knows, will indeed not be fulfilled by appropriation. Hence the melancholy of Romantic joy. Hence also the “gratuitousness” as Potkay puts it, of all joy.(13) Surprising, unforeseen–an unforeseen foreseeing as it were, of an unexpected Good–maybe above all unearned. Happiness may be pursued as one notable pre-romantic triumphantly proclaimed to an awakening world,(14) but to the Romantic joys themselves awaken something more of a feeling of humility, even loss.

“Says he knows,” because the payoffs are there, we hardly need list them–see the early, unjoyful Byron, the celebrity Byron–this is the “constitutive hypocrisy” of Romanticism, as Gans calls it.(15) But is the melancholy-joyful poet modelling such a payoff? In Wordsworth’s case, at least, if he is doing so, he hides it better than does Byron.

Wordsworth explicitly represents, though, models, a joy with “power,” the “deep power of joy.” But if it is not power to appropriate, power to do what? Here we may begin to inquire into at least one deployment of the representation of Romantic joy, its modelling for its market.

It must be, in some manner, the power to be free of desire but to know of, intimately anticipate, the fulfilment of desire. One more specific answer Wordsworth’s poetry certainly gives us, is that it is the poet-model’s paradoxical power to be “lord of that he does not possess,” in the phrase of the later Romantic Edward Thomas.(16)

“Tintern Abbey” begins, but only begins, with a representation of a natural scene and of an experience of it.

. . . again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur–Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of a more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.(17)

But unlike Rousseau the solitary walker, Wordsworth is here neither the unanimous victim of other people, nor in full possession either of the place or of his experience of it. These “beauteous forms,” are subject to “something of a sad perplexity” because they are both remembered and more or less simultaneously experienced, both self-consciously represented . . and elusively and evanescently present. The true subject of the poem, as many have noted, is time, and the incipient alienation occasioned by the fundamental, indeed ontological distinction between the virtual and the appropriable. The poem’s joy is shaded and heightened by the instability and melancholy attendant upon this recognition. “Even if this be but a vain belief,” says Wordsworth of those stirring words about seeing into the life of things, sounding a note of uncertainty that recurs several times in the poem. Even if I have misunderstood, even if I lose this very receptiveness to joy . . still, still, “I would believe” in what I have experienced and what others, beginning with my sister at my side, will experience.

It is a natural scene, of course, and nature, as Wordsworth also says, “never did betray the heart that loves her.”(18) (The red in tooth and claw stuff is more Byron’s line–see the cannibalism scene in Don Juan.) But if Nature may not be possessed, even in the heights of joy, if its resistance to possession is even somehow crucial to that joy, this is not true in any simple sense of interdiction. That, for example, one may not build a cottage on it, or put a fence around it, or trust your free-ranging chickens to it, if one is truly to enjoy it. Rather, it is more the “implicit interdiction” of the originary experience recreated in beauty, as Gans phrases it in a recent “Chronicle,” making reference to Kant’s linking of beauty to a “reaction to autonomy.” Even when alone in a landscape we find beautiful, Gans speculates, “we fear . . the implicit force of mimetic rivalry.”(19)

This seems the moment to digress to Byron, that master scorner-and-manipulator of mimetic desires. Byron and Nature–something about which this most social of poets wrote comparatively little, and when he did, was accused and is still accused of having an atypical and rather ungainly Wordsworthian moment.(20) Of not quite being himself. This is not entirely fair, though.

Let us begin by acknowledging the obvious. Byron and the other Romantics made a major contribution–however motivated–to the representation of the natural world as desirable to the maturing market. Later defenders often disavow Romantic nature-love, and they are probably wise to do so, their game necessarily being not to betray naive desires, especially as they skirmish with those from whose lips drop terms like “tree-huggers.” Nonetheless, where would they be without the Romantic ideology? Deplorable as Western environmental depredations have been, one might look at the still worse records of countries, like China, which have yet to have their “Romantic period,” or, like Russia, had only a weak version of it followed by a ferocious repudiation in favor of an anti-transcendental materialism. Acid rain has threatened North American lakes, but the Aral Sea is almost gone. At any rate, if the minerals and materials extracted from the earth are certainly in circulation in the global market, so also are more shareable experiences of the earth’s beauty. The latter, too, are recognized as not necessarily renewable resources. Those wanting to preserve nature want their market value to rise, want to encourage greed for them. Byron certainly did.

The peace so many Romantics claimed to have experienced in nature was the peace of apparent “external mediation,” (Girard’s term) which is to say, the suppression or evasion of those reciprocal and rivalrous effects of desire they associated with cities–the burgeoning world of “internal mediation.” In the simplest terms, the natural scene acts in much Romantic poetry as an ally against these other people–the prototypical and now familiar alliance, really, between the alienated solitary and the unspoiled, or spoiled natural world, alike menaced by sociality, by the Other. Such a Romantic first and always experiences human pollution; the first complained-of besmirchment of the natural world is not material, but social, in particular by the rebel’s own society–not chemicals and chainsaws but the poisonous presence of overly familiar people and their rivalrous desires. The language of protest remains much the same after the products of industrial economic activity are added to the score. This is not, or at least was not initially an attribution of victimhood to nature–rather, of course, to the sensitive Romantic himself.

Gradually, though, in Byron and others, there is some eroding of this posture. I must omit my demonstrations–they are in print elsewhere.(21) Nature, to summarize, begins to have on him the kinds of effects he was hoping he and it together would have on others. Nature really allies itself to no one–the scientific form of this cruel recognition will need another half-century to find full expression, but it is emergent in Byron’s day. There is no cessation or even reduction of the competitive processes of the natural world. Or, as we might also say, nature is not scenic. The reward of symbiosis, or of the instinct to protect similar genetic material, is not centrality or identity, but only soulless survival and re-production. Human beings may profess their love and respect for nature, to each other. But nature will not echo such professions, or listen to them. The solitary Byronic hero on his Alp succeeds in the market in the sense that he attracts considerable imitation, and experiences the exaltation of his difference. But in his later poetry, Byron is coming to recognize the concession of his own autonomy implied by his strategy.

It is the old pathetic fallacy, really, this aspiration to an alliance with nature. To arguments for something like a “natural contract,” in Michel Serres’ phrase, Byron’s better poetry might ask: What can it possibly mean to establish a contract with a mediator–or even a “subject”–who by definition cannot participate in any kind of reciprocity? If one were to say, “I will try not to act on my desires to your detriment if you try not to inspire so many of those desires in me,” what possible answer could one expect to receive? And if there is no answer? Eventually our sun will go nova, and go out–as Byron himself describes it in a great, short poem entitled “Darkness.” A particle of dust in the immensity will drift out of the light.

The problem of preserving the tiny fragment of the natural universe we inhabit is finally a social problem, the division of a limited feast. It is doubtless not best thought of in terms of a one-to-one relationship between man and some equality or partner called Nature. The feast will best be preserved for everyone not through some once-and-forever renunciation of our (natural) desires or imperious re-conception of our relationship to them–some kind of re-sacralization of our social existence–but through the development of culture, which is to say, through the ongoing management and refinement of desire through representation, the continued leaving-behind of the zero-sum game of sacrificial society.

What, then, can the still-beautiful, still-effective evocation of joy in Wordsworth–to return to him–contribute to this process? The question I am opening up might be designated that of “the pragmatics of non-appropriative desire.”

Let me quote Eric Gans again, writing of “a universal characteristic of consumer society: its paradoxical affirmation by means of the market of values inaccessible to market exchange.”(22)

This sounds a bit like marketing transient, priceless joy over obtainable and sustainable happiness. Gans notes also that even if “the exchange of goods and services takes place in private . . the exchange of signs of consumption is in principle public; people can see what each other are consuming”(23) and that this is crucial to the successful recycling of resentment.

Wordsworth consumes experiences in nature, represents himself doing so, represents the joy of such experiences, and represents such experiences as inherently fragile and contingent, impossible to own. Coleridge and others on the right were alarmed: this looked a lot like a kind of pantheism, making the earth, in effect, paradise. And clearly, joy is a word very often associated with religious experience of one sort or another.

Still, as Gans tells us, “the sacred, in the most general sense of the term, is the process whereby mimetic desire is transcended in representation.”(24) Wordsworth does not sacralize nature–thus risking various kinds of resentment–rather, he describes a process, at whose brief but repeatable apogee, one may experience freedom from desire, and thus joy. He aestheticizes the natural scene–it is “beautiful” on the model of representations, because it is only obtainable virtually. Many before have done this, of course, but there is a more explicit, a more self-conscious registration of the point in this poet, whose sustained pertinence is reflected in his literary-historical stature. One of his most beloved utterances, after all, longingly contrasts a lost sacrality in Nature with the “getting and spending” of the market world, but does so with unforgettable representations of the absent: “Proteus rising from the sea” and “old Triton” blowing “his wreathèd horn.”(25) Everywhere in his poetry may be read Wordsworth’s version of originary revelation, of the ubiquity of lost immediacy in the ineluctable human scene of desire, of the resentments that must but can be calmed (and by which means), of the fragility as well as irreplaceableness of the mind’s delights. You can know joy but you cannot have nature, or at least, that is what Wordsworth tells us and what most of us in the still-Romantic West pay lip service to. And lip service is better than no service at all, one might say. Isn’t all representation lip service paid, (deferring awhile the biting, rending, and swallowing) ?

Surely–to bring these pragmatics down finally to policy–originary analysis need not commit us to the “Cornucopian” position on the environment.(26) We may quickly concede that the production of material goods, of Locke’s private property, the expansion of GDP, has been a crucial and effective way of deferring violence, and we abandon it at our considerable peril. Even the slightest recession of the great tide of such goods causes long-established open societies to teeter on the edge of political abysses. Resentment will not be satisfied with less–only something more than such goods can do this, and a return to the sacrificial order of restraints upon appropriative desire is not available–despite the longings of authoritarians of the left, right and green–and always was more violent than the market solution anyway. Still, there are good and goods, and it is not as though a limitation on one kind of them is unprecedented. It was and is a practical problem, caused by us. That is how and why humanity came into existence–to solve, however temporarily, the practical problem that it also caused. Desire always makes goods limited–if there is one dilemma humanity has lived with, it is this. Those concerned about the practical problem of the earth’s carrying capacity ought to use GA as an analytical tool for understanding the variety and evolution of the means of deferring resentment, and for making the case for the next stage of that fuite en avant that our heuristic discerns as human history. Because the virtual deferral of appropriative desire is hardly a foreign concept when thinking about managing scarce resources in the name of human community–it was the first solution to the first problem, and in some form or other it will doubtless be the last . . . to the last.

The popular legend of author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson seldom notes the strength of his reflections regarding interdividuality and ontological sickness in the postmodern esthetic. Considering Eric Gans’s esthetic evolution, outlined in Originary Thinking, Thompson’s The Rum Diary, stands on the boundary between the modern and postmodern esthetics and demonstrates a subtle perspicacity for the mimetic nature of desire as described by René Girard. As an aspiring author, Thompson had at least two modern American novels, The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, in mind as he set out to write The Rum Diary. Though his style resembles those of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Thompson depicts desire as metaphysical and interdividual, where the moderns usually consider desire to be object-focused and originating from within an essential self. In The Rum Diary, the metaphysical and interdividual nature of desire is explored through the narrator Paul Kemp’s reflections on his involvement in the mimetic sexual and economic ambitions of the novel’s other characters. This movement of desire engenders the resentment that drives the narrative toward its scenes of collective violence. Like his model Fitzgerald, Thompson is reluctant to implicate his narrator directly in scenes of victimage. However, Kemp’s inner monologue betrays his complicity as he reflects on the interdividuality of sexual desire and the mimetic machinations of the market. Hence, Thompson’s first novel is a testing ground for the deeper social and anthropological insights that characterize his best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

Eric Gans posits an evolving esthetic intuition of the originary scene in literature as it develops from modernism to postmodernism. In the modern esthetic, the originary self confronts the resentment that created it by placing base objects in the sacred centre of its supposedly unmediated desire (Gans 190). The movement to postmodernism is characterized by a rejection of the fallacy of unmediated centres of desire (205-206). This development represents an attempt to comprehend the ethical, which functions to produce and control resentment. Thus, “[e]ach artwork is an experiment that tests the limits of an ethical system against our intuition of originary crisis” (21). An esthetic work’s representation of the ethical (or the renunciation of resentment producing desire) corresponds to a point in an evolving vision of the originary scene, which appears in the relation of a resentful periphery to a sacred centre (22). The novelistic conclusion of conversion, as it “consists in the renunciation of metaphysical desire” (Girard 1966: 293-294), is elusive in the modern American novel because the form of self-critique tends to be weak in its articulation of desire as interdividual. In The Rum Diary, this is significant because the narrator (in modernist fashion) attempts a self-criticism that demonstrates an awareness of the originary ethical scene, while refusing to fully represent himself in the circle of desirous, resentful victimizers. The modernists and their ethics significantly influence Thompson’s novel. As a youth, he copied out the entire text of The Great Gatsby in order to assume Fitzgerald’s style and cadence (Wenner 12). When he began to write The Rum Diary, he described the novel to a friend as “The Sun Also Rises in Puerto Rico” (47). Drawing from these sources, Thompson’s first work reflects the underdeveloped, but growing, originary intuition of his modern models, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises both employ the structure of the surrogate victim mechanism and typify Gans’s vision of the modern esthetic, while avoiding the conversion conclusion needed to confront the interdividual resentment they express. As an outsider and criminal, overcompensating for his low upbringing, Gatsby bears the stereotypes of persecution outlined by Girard (1986: 24). He is drawn into mimetic rivalry (Fitzgerald 130)–becomes lost in a crisis of non-differentiation (143)–and is murdered after absorbing responsibility for a crime he did not commit (162). He is rejected by everyone including the narrator, Carraway (154), who leaves Gatsby to the destiny created by his masochistic(1) obsession with Daisy. Carraway finishes his narrative in a tone of pacific acceptance rather than admitting the resentment that accompanied his own position in the circle of desiring subjects (178-179). Gatsby, as the centre of the scene of desire, is a low subject, who is heroicized by the structure of the surrogate victim mechanism. As per Gans, Fitzgerald’s choice of Gatsby as the central desire-object is in line with the modern esthetic’s tendency to favour shockingly trivial objects and reinforces the modernist idea that individuals choose the objects that enthral them (Gans 208). Thus, the esthetic effect of Carraway’s depiction of mimetic scapegoating is invoked without the admission of complicity that could suggest an exit from deferred desire and its accompanying violence. Hemingway uses a similar structure in The Sun Also Rises when he places self-defeating sexual obsession in the esthetic ring formed by desiring subjects. In The Sun Also Rises, the esthetics of the originary scene are evident in the symmetry between the circle of desiring male characters around Brett and this periphery’s interplay with the physical and cultural spectacle of bullfighting (Hemingway 194, 219). The male characters vie with each other for Brett’s approval the way the matadors vie with the bulls for the crowd’s applause. The narrator Barnes’ physical inability to consummate his obsession with Brett allows him to feign indifference to the infinite deferral of his desire (34-35), rather than critically engaging the mimetic nature of his fascination with the inaccessible other. The resentment of other characters, in particular Brett (39), is given full examination, while the narrator’s own masochistic obsession is never completely unpacked. Near the end of the novel the narrator glibly sums up the emptiness of his self-defeating desire saying: “That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right” (243). The narrator’s perspective is the strongest guide for the reader in identifying mimetic desire, which Hemingway does not suggest as the source of his continued frustration. Thus, Hemingway’s narrative, though structurally contingent on scenes of thwarted mimetic desire, lacks the critical self-reflexivity to fully unveil the originary scene of victimage and interdividual desire structuring the narrative. It is from these renditions of the originary scene that Thompson takes his esthetic cues. However, encountering the sense of aporia inherent in the zeitgeist of the nineteen-sixties onward, Thompson’s work becomes a “metavision of human history [, which is] . . . indifferently without crisis and all crisis” (Gans 218). This movement derives from his troubled reflections on the nature of his desire and his hedged consideration of involvement in the ongoing crises. The Rum Diary‘s narrator, Kemp becomes a postmodern observer as he vacillates between depicting the central object as inaccessible or consumable (217-218).

The postmodern esthetic that distinguishes The Rum Diary from its modern models is manifest in its recognition that desire is contingent on the centres of mimetic attention undergirding cultural history. The Rum Diary represents a transitional phase between Gans’s vision of the modern esthetic and the postmodern esthetic in so far as it comprehends the scene of desire as interdividual, while retaining the modern voice of the psychologising, self-sufficient outsider. In The Rum Diary, Thompson’s style is modern in its tendency to affirm the spontaneity of individual desire when compared with his later, most popular and postmodern work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Friend and Pulitzer Prize winner, William Kennedy, has commented on the depth of Thompson’s early faith in the modern novel. Remembering a conversation they had about The Great Gatsby, Kennedy explains that Thompson did not believe Gatsby’s time was over. Instead, he “thought of himself as Gatsby, and he reveled in that kind of fate–that green light always receding, boats against the current, borne back into the past” (Wenner 45). Though The Rum Diary‘s narrator, Paul Kemp, admits desire in the form of his modern predecessor, the confessions of desire, resentment and self-loathing make the novel postmodern by admitting an “awareness of the paradoxicality of the esthetic . . . [which renders] impossible the reification of the esthetic object as either an unattainable icon or a picture of desire” (Gans 218). Thompson exposes the paradox of the central object of desire by repeatedly confronting Kemp’s inability to bridge “the distinction between the inaccessible and the consumable” (218). Gans further unpacks the difference between the two esthetic periods, thus:

Modernism could not affirm the actuality of the communal center that secretly guaranteed its existence because it denied that the esthetic-imaginary scene was defined by the communal, centralizing activity of representation. This gap in modernist self-consciousness, which led to the subordination of anthropology to individual psychology, would become apparent only when the limit of expansion was felt to have been reached. (208)

In his attempts to emulate the moderns, Thompson reaches the limits of individual psychology and moves beyond into anthropology. Initially, Thompson’s narrative seems to adopt the modern tendency to blame the market for suggesting desire instead of allowing the individual to choose. However, the novel quickly recognizes the market as a manifestation of human entrapment within metaphysical desire: greed and lust. In this way, The Rum Diary‘s speaker is implicitly critical of the illusion of individual object-focused desire.

Paul Kemp describes his ambition as constantly shifting to objects designated by those around him and repeatedly dissolving into violent crisis. In the first mediated instance of desire, Kemp spots a girl, Chenault, boarding the same plane as him, on the way to Puerto Rico. He describes her has having “a fine little body and an impatient way of standing that indicated a mass of stored-up energy” (1998: 8). The radiating energy that attracts Kemp resembles Girard’s exposition of the strength and agility attracting Proust’s protagonist’s fixation on a group of girls at Balbec in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (384-385). Chenault’s illusion of self-sufficiency fascinates Kemp and, in his attempt to grasp it, he admits that he becomes violent, shoving and intimidating an old man who obstructs his progress (Thompson 1998: 9-10). However, after losing sight of Chenault, Kemp quickly admits shame at his grasping and the violence it precipitates, reflecting,

[t]here was not much hope of finding her now and I was not optimistic about what might happen if I did. Few girls look with favour on a man of my stripe, a brutalizer of old people. I remembered the expression on her face when she saw me with the old man pinned against the window. It was almost too much to overcome. (10)

Reflection upon this pattern of fruitless, aggressive pursuit of suggested desire resulting in violence will dominate Kemp’s inner monologue throughout the novel. At this early stage of the narrative, Kemp only admits the suggested nature of desire obliquely. He does not yet fully acknowledge that Chenault mediates his desire for her “fine little body”. Instead, his desire simply appears, which is in accordance with the modern tendency to depict desire as spontaneous and derived from within an essential self.

Increasingly, Kemp’s co-workers and superiors mediate his desire and appear to be subjectivities motivated by mimetic greed and lust, whose objects consistently evaporate. Kemp encounters Chenault again at the home of his friend and co-worker Yeamon. He happens upon them making love in the surf at their remote paradisiacal bungalow. His description immediately betrays his elevation of Chenault, thus far the novel’s central object, to the realm of the inaccessible: “At first I thought I was having a vision. The scene was so idyllic that my mind refused to accept it. I just stood there and watched” (37). Embarrassed, he leaves. When he returns, he finds Chenault and Yeamon still in swimming wear; he then mentally admits the mediated nature of his desire: “I glanced enviously at Yeamon, wearing nothing but a pair of black trunks. I felt like a bill collector, standing there in a coat and tie” (38). Chenault remains the inaccessible object mediated this time through Yeamon. Kemp confesses his desire and the seeming impossibility of its fulfilment saying, “[s]he was so close to naked, and so apparently unaware of it that I felt helpless. . . . Yeamon suggested that we take the speargun out to the reef and look for some lobster. I quickly agreed, feeling that almost anything would be preferable to sitting there and stewing in my own lust” (39). Later in the mimetic frenzy of a carnival on an island off Puerto Rico, Kemp’s acquisitive mimetic impulse appears as he watches the naked couple sleep on a beach and reflects that no one could blame him if he killed Yeamon and raped Chenault on the spot (143). His frustrated and violent fantasy foreshadows an actual circle of mimetically desiring subjects focused on Chenault as a sexual object. Later that evening, at party during the carnival a room full of dancers

made a big circle and in the middle of it [was] Chenault . . . Chenault . . . wore . . . [a] dazed, ecstatic expression as the man reached out and eased her panties over her hips and down to her knees. . . . Yeamon broke loose. He leaped in to the circle and they were on him immediately, but this time he was harder to pin. . . . The melee stopped the dance. For and instant I saw Chenault standing alone; she looked surprised and bewildered . . .. She looked small and naked and helpless, and then I saw the man grab her arm and start pulling her toward the door. . . . Once I thought I heard her scream, but it could have been anyone. (155-156).

This scene exemplifies the narrative’s recital of Girard’s formulation of originary acquisitive mimesis. The circular configuration of the dancers around the objectified girl combined with overt sexuality and rivalry typifies the configuration of the originary scene. Further, the non-differentiation of the “melee” and ritual context of the carnival both harmonize with Girard’s theory of generative violence, which asserts that a non-differentiated crisis precedes sacrificial resolution (1977: 79). Here too, Thompson abandons the modern penchant for individual psychological analysis to focus on the mob phenomenon that underlies the Caribbean carnival, with its syncretistic amalgam of pagan and Christian rites. Girard’s anthropology illuminates what Thompson’s scene depicts, when it notes: “[b]eyond the sexual symbolism is the violence that gives shape to the events and that literally inscribes itself–first as cultural order, then as sexuality hidden behind that order, and finally and openly as violence, which underlies all possible meanings” (1977: 141). After the carnival, Kemp and Yeamon reluctantly give up attempts to find Chenault and return home relieved to have survived (Thompson 1998: 164). Esthetically, the climactic dance, fight and apparent rape of Chenault have functioned as apogee for the novel’s action. As a central object of desire, Chenault is at once inaccessible and easily consumable in the vein of Gans’s postmodern esthetic. However, the motif of the female central object embattled by competing males–found in Thompson’s favoured modern authors–is the self-conscious vehicle of this ambiguous postmodern esthetic. Thus, Thompson’s vision hangs on the esthetic of the originary scene of victimage, while simultaneously exposing the potential brutality existing within mimetic desire and the culture it engenders.

To further this theme, Kemp’s reflections on the role of mimetic desire in the market demonstrate how his narrative stands between the esthetics of the modern and the postmodern. In this struggle, Puerto Rico is an object that Kemp’s newspaper is attempting to sell to American investors to avert communist expansion in the Caribbean (Thompson 1998: 69). Though Kemp quickly and contemptuously perceives the capitalist agenda, he just as quickly becomes complicit in achieving its aims, both personally and for his superiors. After agreeing to write a travel article that will help turn a pristine bay into a mega-resort, Kemp says, “I was being paid twenty-five dollars a day to ruin the only place I’d seen in ten years where I’d felt a sense of peace” (134). Earlier, after seeing the luxurious home of the public relations manager in charge of financing his advertisements for Puerto Rico, Kemp’s mimetic consumerist impulse is made explicit: “I decided that when I got a little more money I would look for a place like this for myself. The one I had now was good for a start, but it didn’t have a porch or a garden or a beach, and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t have those things” (125). Simultaneously recognizing his mimetic desire and the destructive potential it has as a tool of the market, Kemp wonders how he can rid himself of “[t]hat maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat” (134). At this point, the narrative is confronting the gap that separates the modern and postmodern esthetics with regard to the market. As Gans explains, the early “esthetics [Romanticism and Modernism] founded their quest for the originary on the denial of the historical validity of the market; the postmodern resignation to the permanence of the market appears in turn to deny the validity of this quest” (Gans 207).

In both the sexual and the economic realms, Kemp begins to recognize the transient nature of his ambitions and thus, the metaphysical nature of his desire. When Chenault, who was once so full of sexual vivacity, inexplicably returns from the carnival, Kemp describes her changed appearance: “She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain–and now, looking at Chenault, I wanted to slam the door and go back to bed” (169). These delicate illusions are contingent on their continued inaccessibility. Now that Chenault comes to Kemp for help, having been easily and publicly appropriated, she is too accessible and therefore lacking in the metaphysical being Kemp perceived in her at the beginning of the novel (8). Further, Chenault has opted to go to Kemp instead of Yeamon, who previously mediated Kemp’s desire for her. This enhances Chenault’s accessibility to the point where the desire that drives Kemp no longer designates her as a value-laden object. This is metaphysical desire par excellence as described in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, where Girard explains that “[t]he value of an object grows in proportion to the resistance met with in acquiring it. . . . This process of transfiguration does not correspond to anything real, and yet it transforms the object into something that appears superabundantly real” (295-296). Kemp’s intuition of the nature of desire, aligns with Girard’s in his recognition of its ultimate insubstantiality. He relates his sense of desire through the metaphor of a passing Caribbean day:

[there were] good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.

Then came noon and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn’t stand the heat. When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was–cheap, sullen, and garish–nothing good was going to happen here.

Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got hold of, and never would. (Thompson 1998: 190-191)

This passage illustrates Kemp’s growing resignation to the effusive nature of a desire that promises ever renewed and unique objects. Here again, Thompson departs from his modernist models’ tendency to seek after the newest esthetic experience. As Gans explains, “[t]he disillusion that defines postmodernism is more profound than the mere discovery that newness is not indefinitely cumulative, that the latest style is not guaranteed to be more original than the preceding. The modernists . . . had . . . adopted [the mocked bourgeoisie’s] . . . belief in historical progress” (209). Unlike his modern models, Thompson has his narrator reluctantly and resentfully articulate a desiring-self that is complicit in the market’s redundant production of deferred desire. Accordingly, when Kemp makes plans to visit the objectified Chenault after leaving Puerto Rico (Thompson 1998: 203), the reader must take the view that the central esthetic object will remain both inaccessible and consumable.

Though many of Kemp’s reflections consider the deferral of desire, consumption occupies a large piece of the novel’s narrative. Early on, the possibility of imbibing the essence of Puerto Rico drips from Kemp’s descriptions of his wild nights and days. In one instance, after a night of heavy drinking at local casinos, Kemp goes swimming in the surf and makes love to a stranger on the beach (32-33). This incident foreshadows the role that excessive consumption of alcohol will play in the narrative by increasing the volatile potentiality of scenes involving acquisitive mimesis. Accordingly, Kemp’s description of a carnival on the island of St. Thomas is a riotous portrayal of unbridled consumption. These episodes make a deep impression on the mood of the novel, as in this vivid description:

About two hundred people had looted one of the big liquor stores. [. . .] Cases of champagne and scotch lay broken in the street, and everyone I saw had a bottle. They were screaming and dancing, and in the middle of the crowd a giant Swede wearing a blue jock strap was blowing long blasts on a trumpet. (146-147)

Thompson’s ability to use absurd details to emphasize the hedonistic decadence of a scenario appears in this passage. The Swedish figure is a centrepiece in a melee of appropriative mimesis. He is clearly one of many drunken revellers and, in this sense, common. Yet, in the modernist style described by Gans, Thompson sets the insignificant Swede up as an esthetic object, which is cast into the “public space of desire” in order to shock his reader’s bourgeois consumerist sensibilities (Gans 129). This stylistic habit resonates most with the scenes of riotous self-indulgence found chronicled in Hemingway and ironically observed in Fitzgerald. Coupled with these episodes of indulgence are Kemp’s aspirations to better his position in economic terms. He reflects with pleasure on the material acquisitions his new success brings him (Thompson 1998: 120-123). These ruminations on acquiring consumer objects undercut Kemp’s view of himself as a bohemian hedonist, which again resonates with the theme of anti-consumerist modernity versus postmodernity’s acceptance of the market’s role (Gans 129). Thus, Thompson’s vision succeeds beyond the modern faith in the perpetual newness of “’scandalously’ insignificant objects” (129) to the indefinite present of resentment, where communal central objects oscillate between the attainable and the inaccessible.

Though The Rum Diary culminates in a collective murder generated by mimetic resentment, representing a return to the anthropological critique that will characterize the postmodern esthetic (214), the speaker does not attain to Girard’s criteria for novelistic conversion. Kemp’s co-workers murder their editor for withholding pay, but Kemp is not directly involved in the killing (Thompson 1998: 197). Kemp, like the narrators in The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, does not consider himself complicit in the collective murder or expulsion. Here, Thompson’s ideal of protagonists who are self-righteous, autonomous outsiders mimics the modern motif, which Girard has exposed in an essay entitled, “Camus’s Stranger Retired” (1978, 34). Thus, The Rum Diary misses the conversion ending that would be truly revelatory. This is in keeping with Girard’s reflections on the development of authors such as Camus and Proust, who in their youth write self-aggrandizing fantasy and only in their later years are able to see the dishonesty of their early work. However, Thompson has been clear sighted enough to depict the mimetic impetus behind the violent originary scene in the novel’s culminating murder, which signals both an ending and new beginning for Kemp, who must leave Puerto Rico (Thompson 1998: 203). The mimetic desire of Kemp’s fellow reporters manifests itself as greed, which turns to resentment and finally murderous rage (196-199). Though Kemp removes himself from the scene of the murder, the killing becomes the scene of reconciliation for Kemp and his rival Yeamon. When Kemp returns to his apartment, Yeamon is there and Kemp agrees to help him escape from the island (202). Thus, Kemp becomes an accessory to the murder. Additionally, Kemp and Yeamon’s reconciliation over the body of their former employer resonates with the pacific effects engendered by the surrogate victim mechanism (Girard 1977: 8). Despite his best efforts to escape the violent final phase of resentment’s progress, Kemp’s previous admission of his ensnarement in mimetic desire infers his partial involvement in the final bloody scene. His post-murder involvement in the collective killing can be understood as a remark on the impossibility of total immunity from the machinations of resentment and its often violent fallout. However, Kemp never reflects directly on this problem. In his later work, Thompson’s journalistic tendency to elide his role in the events he observes is reconsidered as he pioneers Gonzo(2)–a form of journalism that places the speaker at the centre of the events described.

Gonzo’s confident candour is largely absent in The Rum Diary, where Thompson’s narrator only reluctantly expresses his desire’s contingency on the other. This is clear in his diffident admissions of jealousy and frustration (1998: 10). Though it exists, explicit discussion of the character’s involvement in mimetic desire is often limited. One such limited discussion is found in the novel’s fictionalized preface, where Kemp provides a gonzoesque, first-person retrospective:

I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser: I was never idle enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. . . . At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along, on a senseless odyssey. . . It was the tension between these two poles . . . that kept me going. (5)

The preface is written in the past tense, which suggests it is an addition to the completed novel. It should be remembered that Thompson never considered the book his best work and it was published only to secure much needed funds (Wenner 331). This may indicate that Thompson added the preface to contextualize the limited depth of the youthful impressions the rest of narrative contains. In the preface, Kemp expresses suspicion regarding his own restlessness as an actor–an imitator–in pursuit of some unrealizable dream. Juxtaposed to this sense is the individualist’s thoughtless self-righteousness: “I was never idle enough to do much thinking, but I felt . . . that my instincts were right“. These apparently contradictory afterthoughts emphasize the hesitancy of Thompson’s introspection in this first novel. Considering the strained circumstances of The Rum Diary‘s publication, his agent recalls Thompson’s early inability to delve deeply into analysis of conflict in interpersonal relationship: “He had a generous heart, which gave him so much conflict, and that led to . . . self-abuse and abuse of others. He couldn’t deal with that part of himself consistently. What a great, great writer he would’ve been–to have been able to bring that into his prose. . . . he really needed it in The Rum Diary” (331). Released for publication long after the mature and self-conscious Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson would have had time to reflect on how The Rum Diary fails to give a clear analysis of the narrator’s experience of desire. As Thompson’s career as a journalist developed, Gonzo emerged. Gonzo forces Thompson to remain mindful of the interdividuality of the self in scenes he observes (Wenner 127). Writing in this style allows Thompson to more fully articulate many of The Rum Diary‘s incomplete insights into the scene of desire. The contradictions expressed in the preface of The Rum Diary exist because of a partial elision of the narrator’s involvement in mimetic desire and collective violence–themes that the speaker openly engages in Thompson’s Gonzo masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In this work, Thompson’s ability to place himself at the centre of chaotic mimesis and remain lucid allows him to commentate with wit and authority on the darker side of desire.

Nonetheless, the seeds of Gonzo journalism are present in The Rum Diary. Its foundations appear primarily in the consistent first-person perspective of the novel, but also in its setting. Thompson lived in Puerto Rico while he wrote novel and, like Kemp, worked as a journalist (Wenner 44). Like Yeamon, Thompson lived with his girlfriend in a remote beach bungalow (47). The use of real life experience is typical of many novelists and is therefore not a definitive trait of Gonzo’s radically personalized perspective and analysis. However, by making use of these actual events The Rum Diary presages Thompson’s later more self-reflexive work. The scene in The Rum Diary, where Kemp, Yeamon and Sala are beaten by a mob and thrown into a Puerto Rican jail for refusing to pay a bar tab (Thompson 1998: 82-83) is taken from an actual incident (Wenner 48). Kemp’s first person description of the beating and the jail are vivid and engaging, while providing an internalized self-critique (Thompson 1998: 90). Kemp (and, in this case, Thompson) are the focus of a mob’s appropriative violence, which precedes and prepares for the scenes of Chenault’s rape and the editor’s murder. Considering these episodes against Kemp’s aforementioned analysis of his own complicity, it seems clear that Thompson’s apprehension of the scene of collective desire and violence is evolving with his reiterative experience of desire’s volatile scenicity within his life and writing. Despite this development, the mob incident is represented in The Rum Diary as pure fiction, where Thompson’s later Gonzo style conceives of itself as objective reporting. Thus, the foundations of Thompson’s Gonzo style are latent in the fundamental veracity of the personal experiences he describes.

In Gonzo fashion, the real persona of Hunter S. Thompson (a witty drug addled journalist) invades all of his best work and is indispensible to his rendering of the scapegoat mechanism inherent to the American dream. Before his suicide in 2005, Hunter Thompson attracted a cult following based on this romantic personal image, which exploded with the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Played by Johnny Depp, Thompson’s avatar, Raoul Duke vaunts across the screen as an observer-participant in Las Vegas’ brutal mimetic frenzy. Duke’s insatiable appetite for all manner of intoxicants is reflective of Thompson’s real life excesses (Wenner 242). This self-conscious thematization of excessive consumption becomes an important tool in Thompson’s critique of the collective scene of desire as it appears in Fear and Loathing.

Where The Rum Diary‘s narrator expresses regret over his involvement in the machinations of the market, the narrator of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas makes an ironic comment on gratuitous consumption by taking the contemporary market’s excess even further. In Fear and Loathing, Thompson’s narrator depicts his complicity in the gross appetitive desire of Las Vegas, thus creating a sardonic portrait of Horatio Alger’s(3) American Dream, as manifested in the decadence of the late twentieth century. Throughout the novel, Duke refers to Alger and identifies with his vision. In one instance, when he prepares to skip out on a hotel bill after running up massive room service charges, Duke wonders, “[h]ow would Horatio Alger handle this situation” (Thompson 2005: 70) ? Again, at the end of the novel, after posing as a clergyman in order to buy drugs, Duke reflects, “I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger” (204). Early on, Duke explains his journey by saying he is on his “way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream” (6). These high ideals and aspirations take a sarcastic tone in the mouth of the drug addled Duke as he and his attorney stumble through the glitz and pseudo-glamour of the Vegas strip. The combination of Duke’s illegal and copious intake of intoxicants with lofty national ideals becomes a wry comment on the excesses of contemporary Western self-indulgence. Duke and his attorney find the heart of the American Dream at a rotating merry-go-round bar in the mega-casino Circus Circus, which typifies Thompson’s sense of irony by casting a cheap casino gimmick as the “main nerve” of the American Dream (2005: 47-48). The circular configuration of the bar evokes the originary scene with an intoxicated Duke as the central figure to a periphery of casino gamblers and readers. By making his vertiginous intoxication in a casino the focal point of a sacred national ideology, Thompson parodies the self-deluding fallacies of an ideal advanced upon ravenous acquisitive mimesis. In this way, Thompson expresses the ambiguity of the postmodern condition, which is at once disgusted by and enamoured with its contingency on consumer capitalist immoderation. This theme runs throughout the novel and resonates with Gans’s vision of the postmodern esthetic, which Thompson first begins to articulate in The Rum Diary. By juxtaposing his nefarious dealings and excess against the high ideals of Alger, Thompson trades the “modernist aggression against the market . . . [for] irony toward the market. [He] . . . learns to take the philistinism of consumer society seriously by inventively affecting not to take it seriously” (Bartlett 133).

Necessarily, such insights require a keen awareness of the mimetic nature of the self. As a journalist on assignment, Duke imitates the behaviour he observes and parodies the ubiquity of mimeticism in the society he critiques. As he walks through a casino floor in the early hours of the morning, he observers the gamblers still at their games: “Who are these people? . . . there are a hell of a lot of them–still screaming around these . . . crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the . . . pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino” (Thompson 2005: 57). Imitating his subjects, Duke decides to join in and puts some money down on a game. When he loses, he adopts the mindset of the players he observes: “No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing. The important thing is to cover the story on its own terms” (57). This self-reflexive experience of mimetic desire is a major development from the bewildered portrayal of frustrated metaphysical desire described in The Rum Diary‘s allegory of a passing Caribbean day. In the second half of Fear and Loathing, Duke prepares to cover the District Attorney’s conference and explains that his story on the Mint 400 “had been an observer gig, this one would need participation” (91). Going even further than when Thompson was researching for Hells Angels, Duke’s role-play involves adopting a false police officer identity (140-141) and inventing law enforcement stories to swap with newfound colleagues (145). The adoption of an affected persona, assumed to infiltrate the subgroup he observes, further exemplifies Thompson’s abilities as a social critic and American subculture ethnographer. In this sense, Thompson discovers undercover investigative journalism to be a truly postmodern form, as it “presents its works as the products of conventions, of the insights of a historical other rather than a visionary self” (Gans 129). Thompson does not attempt to report objectively on what he observes. Instead, he allows his surroundings, with their conventions and cultural-historical context, to shape the story he tells.

As in The Rum Diary, the mimetic desire of the market precipitates a violent crisis in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This time, the speaker is able to come to terms with his own complicity. “The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized” (Thompson 2005: 173), Duke explains as he reflects on how his own excess had gone beyond what even Las Vegas could tolerate: “I’d abused every rule Vegas lived by–burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help” (173). The admission of “abusing the tourists” refers to Duke’s involvement in a dubious sexual encounter between his lawyer and a teenage girl named Lucy, who has traveled to Las Vegas from Montana. Duke arrives at his hotel room to find his attorney has slept with the teenager after giving her a hit of LSD (114). Duke is concerned that, when Lucy comes down, she will accuse the men of rape (116). In order to convince his attorney of the risk he is taking in his continued relationship with Lucy, Duke ironically unfolds an elaborate plan to pimp Lucy to the police officers at the district attorney’s convention (114-115). The effect of the plan on the reader and the attorney is to recoil at the brutality of Duke’s imagination. His attorney sums up his shock when he says, “I knew you were sick, but I never expected to hear you actually say that kind of stuff” (115). Duke insists that Lucy must be gotten rid of. In an aside to the reader, he considers killing Lucy and feeding her body to the lizards in the desert (118). However, he ultimately decides to abandon the girl by sending her (still high on acid) to another hotel where she will wait in vain for the men to contact her (119). Duke freely admits the ethical deficiency of his decision saying, “I felt like a Nazi but it had to be done” (115). The whole episode acts as a kind of confession, in which Thompson’s narrator demonstrates the extent of his participation in the ugly victimage mechanisms of Las Vegas, where “they kill the weak and deranged” (104). The successful expulsion of Lucy restores peace to Duke and his attorney’s friendship and allays Duke’s fears of criminal prosecution. Thus, the episode offers a clear example of the surrogate victim mechanism operating in the cutthroat world of the Las Vegas strip: home to Thompson’s American Dream.

When compared to the collective scene of desire involving Chenault in The Rum Diary, the Lucy episode goes further in demonstrating the narrator’s complicity in violence as it proceeds out of collective appropriative mimesis. The centre and desiring-periphery configuration of the dance scene around Chenault appears again in Duke’s proposal to turn Lucy into a prostitute. “We can set her up in one of these back-street motels, hang pictures of Jesus all over the room, then turn these pigs loose on her . . . Hell, she’s strong; she’ll hold her own” (114-115), says Duke. The mention of hanging images of Christ in the room is suggested as a way to pacify Lucy, who, Duke has discovered, is a Christian. However, the inclusion of the bizarre detail inverts the usual configuration of desiring subjects around the victimized Christ and places him in the crowd of victimizers, who are focused on a desire-object and surrogate victim: Lucy. This ironic turn demonstrates Thompson’s understanding of the collective configuration of every scene of desire, no matter how elevated or base. As a pimp, Duke’s sardonic fantasy makes him part of the periphery that benefits from Lucy’s exploitation. Thus, the fantasy goes further in admitting complicity in exploitation than Kemp does in his rape fantasy involving Chenault (1998: 143), or his observer position in the scene of Chenault’s violent appropriation at the carnival (156). Though Duke’s expulsion of Lucy is far less brutal than his imaginary proposal, such self-implicating candour is a result of Thompson’ s Gonzo style, which exposes the facts of his involvement far more than the fictionalized peripheral role his speaker plays in The Rum Diary.

What Thompson begins to indicate in The Rum Diary, and articulates in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that (as a form) fiction is not sufficient to defer the resentment experienced within the self and observed in the world. For Thompson, there must be an amalgam of journalistic realism and a rendering of subjective experience that refuses to elide the speaker’s involvement in victim-hungry mimetic systems. Such honesty collapses modernism’s individualist self-justification and forces a reappraisal of the whole collective scene. Consequently, Thompson participates in “[t]he postmodern debunking of the esthetic utopia of modernism[, which corresponds] . . . to the demise of the anticapitalist social utopias that accompanied it” (Gans 129). Thompson began writing The Rum Diary in the early nineteen sixties and published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in nineteen seventy-one. During this time, he watched a late surge of anticapitalist modernism disintegrate with the demise of the nineteen sixties youth movement. In Fear and Loathing he recalls the end of the counter-culture movement: “We had all the right momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . now . . . with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark–that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back” (Thompson 2005: 68). Despite his nostalgic tone, Thompson is critical of the “central illusion [of the movement’s drug culture, which produced] a generation of permanent cripples, [and] failed seekers” (178-179). In the preface to The Rum Diary Thompson categorizes his speaker as one such seeker (1998: 5) and, in Fear and Loathing, admits that “their loss and failure is ours, too” (2005: 178). Thompson identifies the culmination of the sixties counter-culture failure in “[t]he orgy of violence at Altamont [,which] merely dramatized the problem. . . . [T]he illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation” (179-180). This violent clash between counter-culture groups(4) exemplifies the non-differentiation of warring doubles. Ironically, violence–and the resentment it expresses–are exactly what the counter-culture movement sought to end. By speaking so frankly about The Movement’s failure, Thompson’s “[p]ostmodernism discovers that there is no historical horizon beyond which desire is fulfilled and resentment disappears–resentment can never be abolished, only deferred” (Gans 129). The seeds of this realization are dormant in The Rum Diary, where the possibility of finding an outside to the market is questioned (Thompson 1998: 134). Ultimately, this questioning forces Thompson to confront his own complicity in the market he resents. By the time he writes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the events of the sixties have demonstrated to him that “the originality of individual desire . . . [is] the central illusion . . . of life in market society” (Gans 129). When contrasted with Paul Kemp’s outlook, the experiences of Raoul Duke exemplify “the historical moment in which the mimetic nature of desire can be understood, and the originary hypothesis explicitly formulated” (129).

The Rum Diary represents a young writer’s effort to revive the early modernist resentment for the market, only to begin a hesitant exposition of the modernist myth that desire originates within an essential self. In the process, Thompson stumbles into the new postmodern esthetic. When the novel’s film adaptation debuts, expected in 2011, the contemporary postmodern esthetic will certainly influence the presentation of Thompson’s evolving style. How will producer and star Johnny Depp (D’Alessandro, par. 2) develop Thompson’s early intuitions on the nature of desire? It will also be interesting to see how complicit Depp’s character is in the narrative’s conspiratorial murder. Will Depp go beyond Thompson by allowing his central character to recognize his complicity in collective violence? If the trajectory of Gans’s esthetic evolution is accurate, the postmodern filmmaker will attempt to further explicate the mimetic and anthropological themes in Thompson’s fledgling novel. This will mean making Kemp’s complicity even more clear to the audience than Thompson’s original work does. Whatever the film’s bent, Thompson’s early instincts regarding the nature of metaphysical desire and their developing social consequences are strong. Unlike Thompson’s models, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, The Rum Diary admits a great deal about the interdividual nature of desire. In addition, his early vision anticipates the postmoderns’ uncertainty in their experience of the esthetic object. In this way, The Rum Diary is a testing ground for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas‘ exposition of lust and greed in the American Dream. In Fear and Loathing, Thompson places himself at the centre–as close as possible to communal objects of desire. From this position, he is able to reflect upon desire as a communal phenomenon, the victims of which belong to everyone.