Of course you have all fastened on the same point, as richly provocative as Burke himself. 'Who is to say whether the scapegoat process precedes the law, or vice versa? Their operations are mutually reinforcing.' Carter, following Burke, is most interested in what follows after a Asocial language@ is in place, where law and scapegoat seem to reinforce each other. Burke begins with the law, which creates guilt, which requires purgation through transfer. Like the mutually reinforcing suspicions of child and parent which Girard so eloquently analyzes in his chapter on Freud in VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED, Afrom this point on@ it doesn=t matter whether suspicion or accusation, law or desire came first. But the jewel of Girard=s eloquence, and his decisive reduction of Freud=s proliferation of psychic agencies to the mimetic hypothesis, is his defense of the child=s innocence, who is the last to know that his candidly mimetic desires are appropriative, incestuous and illegal. First come the hypocritical adults.

To answer Carter=s thoroughness in including Girard in his reconsideration of Burke, by including Burke in our consideration of Girard, we need to refine the model Carter substitutes for Girard on two essential points, by carefully elaborating Girard=s model of spontaneous violence, and by elaborating the consequences for the history of (relatively) successful cultural hypotheses or rationalisations (religious, judicial) about what keeps or loses the peace, especially its consequences for modern behavior.

To understand ritual sacrifice, we need Girard=s Ainside@ model which elegantly accounts for the benign and malignant fruits of human association solely by means of the mimetic hypothesis. If humans imitate each other=s behavior, sooner or later they will imitate each other=s desire. As Girard suggests, acquisitive mimesis accelerates into conflictual mimesis.To the human who is closest to the mimesis of appropriation, dissociation, submission, or preventing future violence with preemptive violence are possible alternatives. But sooner or later, every associate must decide what to do about the spread of violence.

Ritual rationalises the success of spontaneous violence, to secure the peace that only the gods can give. The subject of everyone=s rivalry and opposition cannot but be seen as monstrous and like all inhuman things which threaten the human community, sacred. Violence and the sacred are one. All elements deemed sacred are touched by divine violence and must be, like the sacred victim, returned to them.

The inside model for the mechanism of scapegoating as Girard describes it is purer in its logic and determinism than Burke=s model of purgation. But that is not all. Primitive culture does not arrive at the sacred, at ritual sacrifice, by some >human= or linguistic predilection or weakness for blaming others, for purging guilt. Ritual is not the outgrowth of a bad habit. Ritual follows the development of spontaneous violence.

In VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED, Girard refines Levi-Strauss=s crediting of primitive taboo for Ataking the biological facts [of reproduction] into account@ by suggesting that only taboos could bring about the >experimental= conditions necessary to discover these facts. If we refine Burke similarly, we may suggest that ritual inaugurates the social significance of the process of purgation. The modern interpretation of scapegoating as purgation follows rather than precedes sacrifice. The model of purgation may be the most persistent rationalisation of sacrifice humans have produced, a model which survived and flourished with the scientific revolution, whose benefits we still draw on.

We no longer have scapegoat ritualsBthe term itself makes it impossibleBrather, we have something simpler and sadderBa predilection for blaming others for what we do, including scapegoating. We can only suggest a possible strategy here for elaborating Girard=s model for the historical evolution towards the modern, what he has termed the Ahistorically unprecedented release from mimetic effects@ (THINGS HIDDEN, 36). I want to begin with a defining example of release from (not a purge of) mimetic violence, by discussing the woman taken in adultery from the Gospel of John, discussed most recently by Girard in Aautomatismes et liberté.@ (1995)

The woman brought before Christ is already placed for collective judgement (A¦n mXså@), in the middle of the group of accusers and the crowd already listening to his teaching. His answer to those who wish him to add his accusation to theirs, requires her persecutors to judge themselves first, singly: Ò VnamVrtatoV ßm¢n pr¢toV XpzaÛt¬n balXtw liqon . To act singly, to cast stones one by one, each must claim a personal innocence not guaranteed by the collective act of lapidationBin fact, each individual hesitation acknowledges the personal risk of being denounced by the others as a hypocrite, perhaps instigating a mimetic free-for-all. In general, one must say for all that they can no longer bring themselves to do violence. Everyone leaves in order, one by one, the elders first (eÍV kaqz eÍV arxVmenoi apÎ t¢n presbutXrwn), leaving the woman still standing in the middle, presumably or passively accusing herself (until Christ releases her). Christ has triggered the transition from collective to self-accusation (but also self-control), the boundary situation between ritual and psychology, primitive and modern. Finally, it is a beautiful pedagogical scene: the accusers arrive as a mob, but they are released from violence and leave like a schoolful of orderly students.

II. ATowards the purification of war@ (Burke)

Perhaps Burke=s most famous phrase underlines his belief that rhetoric can purge violence, dramatistic practice can cure psychic wounds. (Burke frequently identified his novel TOWARDS A BETTER LIFE as spiritual autobiography and therapy; the book stages a mimetic free-for-all, evidently to purge him of enslavement to defeated rivalry and self-persecution). What could be wrong with that, whether or not purgation or sacrifice came first?

The sacredness of human violence persists in the idea of Aventing anger@, or the remarkably common warning Adon=t get me angry=. Anger reveals itself as our last god or instinct in such a phrase, as we indicate ourselves as peaceful, but unable to control the god or instinct anger once it is roused. Is it not time to release ourselves from this materialistic self-regarding, which measures the insults to us in cups or buckets so that payback is precisely in full?

In AThe Treacherous Years of Postmodern Poetry in English@ (1994) I discussed four contemporary poets writing in English who theorize a nonviolence specific to a particular historical situation of collective violence: two British poets, Jon Silkin and Geoffrey Hill, try to write a poetry Aafter Auschwitz@ that doesn=t assume English innocence from antisemitism; Robert Bly writes against the Vietnam War, and Seamus Heaney positions himself against sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. My title came from a letter Henry James wrote when The Great War began, admitting that the years in which he had written his finest work were all the while unwittingly preparing for war. I argued that when these poets were read collectively, one began to see a surprising release from mimetic violence.

Since then I have been reading World War I poetry, attempting to fill in the obvious historical gap between James and post WWII, to mark with greater care strategic moments of development in a genealogy for 20C anti-war poetry in English. Any consideration of this body of work must include Wilfred Owen. It is easy enough to say that he wrote against war, although there is in his representation of suffering fellow soldiers an unnerving sense that this atrocity fathered poetry, Aan ecstacy of fumbling@ as it is described in his poem ADulce et Decorum Est A (and which W.B. Yeats shrewdly characterized as Aall blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick@).

Yet there is another element in Owen=s poetry unrecognized by Yeats, and never adequately considered in the criticism, even though Jon Silkin took the title of his book on The Poetry of the Great War from the poem by Owen I wish to discuss: AOut of Battle@. The speaker of the poem feels himself descending into some tunnel, some definitive trench in Hell occupied by dead soldiers, one of whose address to him concludes the poem, Alifting distressful hands, as if to bless@, with these lines:

AOut of Battle@ stands out from the genre of Great War poetry. How? By focusing on this remarkable and inclusive gesture of peace rather than blaming someone else for war.

I want to place Owen=s poem in the larger context of the way modern literature represents the revelation of scapegoating which Girard sees as the defining moment of modern culture. Albert Memmi determined almost forty years ago (in PORTRAIT DU COLONISATEUR) that we must polarize the field of human relations in postcolonial theory: there is no uncertain ground in the metropolitan center or the colonies--the colonial can only become a colonisateur who refuses or accepts domination of the colonisé. Thus we have what Edward Said calls in THE CULTURE OF IMPERIALISM (1993) the Agrand narratives of emancipation@ on one side, and what we might profitably term persecution texts which >comfortably promote racist myth=(as Chinua Achebe=s famous essay says of HEART OF DARKNESS) to help plot the profound shift in authority from the great colonial empires of the 19C to the much more mixed and various world community we have today.

As I tried to argue at our Stanford conference, we cannot fully account for the historical and geopolitical moment to which we have arrived (part of which is our common hermeneutic for discovering the victims of nationalist, racist, and sexist myths, reading persecution texts from the point of view of the persecuted) without including the limited but specific contribution to this hermeneutic, of disaffecting colonists like Marlow, or like Owen=s enemy soldier, who lose their appetite for violent persecution. The great modern writers often give us hybrid or mixed texts, not equally divided between persecution and revelation, but changing, however reluctantly, from the former to the latter.

We must approach that element of the modern hermeneutic which treats gender in a similar manner. Feminist critics have never been able to polarize Virginia Woolf=s fictional characters into great heroes and enemies of women=s liberation, because her fictional oeuvre is devoted to the more elementary and foundational stage of recovering the anonymous and unlikely protofeminists both female and male who made the public and collective feminism of her own time and the future possible. The great modern writers like Conrad and Woolf offer a theoretical accompaniment to Girard=s hypothesis which helps to further characterize the peculiar quality of modern victims and their persecutors.

For the most part, Great War poetry in general, (and most of Owen=s poetry), is written by soldiers-as-victims (one might truly call it a subaltern poetry) and displays a polarization akin to the situation of Memmi=s colonisé, a hostility against the civilian metropolitan centers, all who contributed to war by not resisting it. We have Siegfried Sassoon=s memorable image in ABlighters@ of a soldier on leave fantasizing a tank rumbling through the theatre seats of the war-mongering English public:

Sassoon=s anger is easily understandable, which perhaps means that he gives us an easy target with whom we may be righteously angry. Despite the efficacy (at times) and perhaps even the emotional satisfaction of a radical or revolutionary polarizing of attitudes into two camps for or against collective violence, we must learn as well how to count in for the sake of peace those enmeshed in violent antagonisms who give up, like Owen=s >enemy= soldier, like the accusers of the woman taken in adultery, not yet able (perhaps never able) to fully articulate a refusal of violence, but more simply Aloath and cold@ to do violence anymore.

CTHE PHILOSOPHY OF LITERARY FORM, Vintage Books, New York, 1957.

Ellmann, Richard and O=Clair, Robert, THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY, Second Edition, Norton, New York, 1988.

--Aautomatismes et liberté.@ in MÉCANISMES MENTAUX MÉCANISMES SOCIAUX, Grivoix, Henri, Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1995.