REWRITING SCAPEGOAT TEXTS: Mimetic Desire and the Dynamics Of
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REWRITING SCAPEGOAT TEXTS: Mimetic Desire and the Dynamics of Rivalry in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang Barbara Fidyk BA (Hons) Newc. Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2009 School of Humanities and Social Science Faculty of English DECLARATION This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made to the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Associate Professor Nancy Wright who offered invaluable direction and support in the early years of writing this thesis. I acknowledge special recognition of Dr Dianne Osland, for reading and perceptively commenting upon a number of draft chapters, for encouraging me to continue and complete this work, and for her generosity in always making time to assist and advise. This thesis has been completed as a result of her clear directions, her ability to inspire, and her encouragement to continue. Dr Rosalind Smith has also been extraordinary in seeking clarification of ideas, in skilfully and generously guiding me throughout the process, and in her diligence during the final stages of the thesis. I would like to especially thank my family and friends for the encouragement and support they have given me during the years I worked on the dissertation. ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to MY FAMILY iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION……………………………………………………………………..i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………ii DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………..iii CONTENTS…………………………………………………………………………..iv ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………. v ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………………….vii INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER ONE: In the Skin of a Lion …………………………………………….29 CHAPTER TWO: The English Patient……………………………………………...70 CHAPTER THREE: Jack Maggs………………………………………………….114 CHAPTER FOUR: True History of the Kelly Gang……………………………….157 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………..199 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………….204 iv ABSTRACT This thesis examines a new kind of literary history developed in four postmodern historical romances: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang. By foregrounding their intertexts, these novels expose acts of violence and terror directed against scapegoats, particularly those constructed as criminals, who are perceived to threaten social stability. The novels of Ondaatje and Carey transform these criminals from social transgressors to heroes, from victimizers to victims. They first reconstruct and expose the social dynamics of specific historical contexts drawn from their precursor texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Herodotus’s Histories, Great Expectations and Lorna Doone, and then create a form of communal history, which for the first time voices the suppressed narratives of the disenfranchised. The theoretical framework used in the analysis of each text and its intertextual “double” is developed through analyses of desire and imitation in space as well as time. The thesis links René Girard’s theory of rivalry and violence in mimetic desire to Julia Kristeva’s and Susan Friedman’s theories of reading at the point of intersection between a text and its precursors, newly allowing the application of Girard to the complex intertextual dynamics of the sub-genre of metahistorical romance. This approach reconfigures this sub-genre as a form of simultaneous and paratactic history. It adapts Amy Elias’s and Brian McHale’s theories of spatial tropes as literary techniques which collapse, onto one plane, or juxtapose, different historical periods, characters and events, as a means to examine the “dark areas” of history. In this process the thesis considers each modern text and its precursor to explore the role of Girard’s rivalrous doubles within and across texts in activating or interrupting cyclical violence. The historical scapegoats, given the opportunity to v recognize and tell their histories in the modern texts, generate a new form of communal history, which challenges earlier depictions and celebrations of violence and the persecution of scapegoats. These new histories recoil from violence and reconstruct scapegoats through attention to the complex intersection of political and legal policies, cultural values and practices informing their previous historical representation. They allow Girard’s cycles of violence to be broken, reimagining the scapegoat not in terms of singular identifications as anarchist, spy, convict and outlaw, but as multi-faceted, able to be renewed in multiple identifications as heroic. vi ABBREVIATIONS SL In the Skin of a Lion Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh EP The English Patient HH Herodotus: The Histories JM Jack Maggs GE Great Expectations TH True History LD Lorna Doone JL The Jerilderie Letter vii viii INTRODUCTION All historical fiction, it could be argued, engages the past by returning to previous accounts of history and remaking the grounds on which they have been established. In the four novels examined in this thesis, however, the remaking of history is also a remaking of a specific literary past. In In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang, literature’s engagement with the past is insistently alluded to through a range of references, focused on a central intertext. For In the Skin of a Lion that intertext is The Epic of Gilgamesh; for The English Patient it is Herodotus’s The Histories; for Jack Maggs it is Great Expectations and for the True History of the Kelly Gang it is Lorna Doone. This thesis examines the ways in which each explicit intertext, in combination with a host of others, bring the past into the historical present for particular political purposes. These four texts use spatial metaphors to reconfigure, rather than simply repeat, the patterns of violence represented in their intertexts, advocating new forms of communal history as a way of breaking old habits of rivalry, conflict and scapegoating. Central to the revision of literary history examined in this thesis is the concept of mimetic desire. According to the cultural theorist, René Girard, all desire is mimetic and mimetic desire leads to rivalry and conflict. In theorizing mimetic desire, Girard argues: “Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash. Thus, mimesis coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict” (Violence 146). The repeated acts of collective violence generated by that conflict create the central cultural figure of the scapegoat, whose function is to restore cultural order and stability. Girardian theory is used in this thesis to analyze the figure of the scapegoat in Ondaatje’s and Carey’s texts, where a juxtaposition of text and intertext newly 1 allow that scapegoat to be recognized not only as the victimizer but also as the victim. In this exchange, pre-existent power relations are exposed and reimagined revealing, as Chris Fleming argues, that those emerging as scapegoats tend to be “marginalized figures or outcasts often existing on the fringes of society” (51). Girardian analysis, focusing on the revelation that “violence belongs to all men” and “anybody can play the part of the surrogate victim” (Violence 257), uncovers a pattern in these four novels, which is enabled by genre: all four novels fall into Amy Elias’s category of metahistorical romance. Elias holds that the term “metahistorical romance …encompasses both postmodernist and postcolonial fiction” (188). Both Ondaatje’s and Carey’s novels are discourses in postmodernism in that they both problematize history, are fundamentally contradictory, and political in intent. While all four novels are examples of poststructuralism, manifested in the diverse and destabilizing discourses located across the texts, Carey’s novels are also postcolonial in challenging the discourse of colonialism. Carey’s and Ondaatje’s texts articulate an alternative way of communicating the histories of marginalized people and the scapegoats who represent them. For Elias the metahistorical romance “incorporates an understanding of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of the historical sublime” (188). She defines the historical sublime as a traumatic history, a history that hurts, such as the violent subordination of colonized subjects, which is obscured by the ideology of imperialism. In Ondaatje’s novels the historical sublime is expressed in the oppressive working conditions of Toronto’s workers and the physical and emotional damage to war victims while Carey’s novel addresses the cruel consequences of transportation, and the victimization of the Irish working class in 2 colonial Australia. Elias’s emphasis on the historical sublime underpins the focus of my argument on violence to historical scapegoats. At the same time, I acknowledge and use the insights of two prominent experts in the field of metahistorical fiction, Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon. For Elias, the form of metahistorical romance is characterized by its narratological