The Girard Reader (26 page)

fortuitous. It can only result from a collective appetite for real victims, stirred up no doubt, by

a severe drought and by the tensions that it stirs up in the community.

If some would-be interpreter insisted that the accounts on which we base our certainty of real

victims are too contaminated with fantastic data to be regarded as a plausible source of

information on any subject, he would be regarded as naïve or worse still, he would be

suspected of sympathy for the witch hunters.

Is it possible to say that, even though our Venda myth and a medieval record of deluded

witch-hunting may be quite alike in regard to both the themes and the organization of these

themes, the differences between the contexts in which medieval texts on the one hand and

myths on the other are situated justifies the different interpretation of the two texts?

Are the differences so important between the application of the scapegoat theory inside our culture and its application outside that the second becomes illegitimate?

I already mentioned the first difference and main difference. Myths contain material more

fantastic and less circumscribed than the material contained in medieval texts, and the

language in which they are couched is more alien to our rationality than the language of even

the most fantastic witchcraft accusations in the Western world.

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True as this may be, a detailed examination will show that the nature of the fantastic material

is similar at bottom in both types of texts and that many myths, among which I would include

our Venda example, are less fantastic than many medieval texts that we find intelligible as

traces of scapegoat persecution.

A second difference is that, in the case of medieval Europe, we have a great deal of historical

background which helps us place the text in a light favorable to the type of interpretation that

faces up to the probable reality of the victims and of the violence they suffered. In the case of

myth we have practically no background information.

It is true, of course, that we know a great deal about the Middle Ages and almost nothing

about the societies from which myths originate. This difference is clearly the reason why we

do not dare interpret similar texts in a similar way when they come from the second rather

than from the first context.

Our knowledge of what the historians call the witchcraft epidemic of the late Middle Ages

certainly plays a
role in our readiness
to bring forward the magical accusation hypothesis. In a medieval context, historians are always willing to read the various themes and their

structural arrangement as clues to a scapegoat polarization. In a mythical context, this

willingness is not there. The hypothesis of a magical accusation is never mentioned by the

students of myth.

But this readiness does not really depend on precise historical information. It is easy to show

that our reading of historical witch-hunting, or analogous persecutions, is not always based

on detailed knowledge of when and where the document originated, or in what

circumstances. In the case of Guillaume de Machaut, for instance, we have no indication of

place or time; we do not even know in which city the poet resided during the Black Death

epidemic.

The reading in terms of a scapegoat polarization requires no background knowledge except

for a general awareness of a rampant fear of witchcraft in the society where Machaut was

writing.

If that awareness is always there, at the ready, in the back of our mind, when we are

confronted by the right kind of text, such as our Venda myth, we cannot fail to wonder if the

interpretation of the fantastic material in terms of a fantastic accusation might not click with

the other themes and provide us with the perfect explanation, the one that makes everything

intelligible.

Our little experiment with the Venda myth demonstrates that in our refusal to go to

scapegoating as an explication of our Venda myth, the context is everything. We refuse the

right interpretation because we have no historical background to back it up. But the context is

everything not because it is really useful but because it modifies our willingness to read the

text as it can be read. The medieval context provides no

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information that is not available as well in the case of myth-making societies.

In order to generate myth, the fear of witchcraft does not have to reach the acute level that it

did at the end of the Middle Ages. All we have to assume is that this fear was present in the

societies from which myths originate. This is a most reasonable assumption. In the more

specific case of the Venda people, we know for sure that magic is an important part of their

belief-system and that even today, witchcraft accusations are widespread and a major cause

of violent crime.

The law of contamination by the unbelievable is not merely suspended: it is reversed. There

is now a law of contamination by the believable.

The fact that the author presents the fantastic accusations as true makes him, in principle, less

reliable as a man and therefore as the author of the text we are reading. This is true, and yet,

paradoxically but logically, it makes the text that he produced under the influence of

scapegoating more rather than less reliable in the portion of it that is potentially reliable, the

material that relates to the "punishment" of the "culprit," or "culprits," i.e., that violence inflicted on the victims.

How can that be? The very credulity of our author suggests the existence of a mood in the

community, conducive to violence against the victims. The probability that the violence

really occurred is increased rather than decreased by the presence of the fantastic elements in

the text. This is an essential point that is always ignored and that I have not defined properly

until now.

The conjunction of themes is too significant to be fortuitous. There is still a chance that it

could be fortuitous if we only had one example of such a text, or even a few. The more we

have, the more a fortuitous assemblage of themes seems unlikely. If this reasoning is sound,

and I doubt very much that it can be challenged, our next question will be the following:

Why, in the case of historical texts, are we willing to resort to the scapegoat explication and

not in the case of myths?

The decisive difference between medieval historians and students of myth is not in the texts

they interpret. It is not the presence or absence of historical knowledge. It is that the first are

willing and the second unwilling to entertain the possibility that an accusation and scapegoat

mechanism might be involved in the genesis of thematically and structurally similar texts.

First, is the reading of historians really certain? They suffer from a bad reputation among

interpreters influenced by the radical skepticism of our age. Is it really certain that real

victims lie behind the medieval texts? Are not the historians too easily satisfied with a sloppy

handling of their texts, are they not more credulous than they should be, more credulous than

the students of myth who, under the influence of radi-

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cal thinking and literary theory, deny all possible referentiality to their texts? Are they a little

soft on the referent, perhaps too easily satisfied with a naïve view of the relationship between

a text and an extratextual reality?

In order to show that the historians' certainty of reaching real dramas behind their texts is

well founded, we must go back briefly to the arrangement of themes that characterizes both

myths and medieval texts of persecution.

Why am I convinced that the fantastic theme of our Venda myth is a magical accusation of

the first wife mimetically embraced by the whole community? The explication is convincing

because it explains not merely the long first paragraph of our myth, the accusation itself, but

the other themes of the myth, the drought, the drowning of the woman, the consequences of

that drowning.

The interpretation is so complete and perfect that it suspends the law of contamination by the

fantastic. Or rather what happens here is more drastic and paradoxical than a mere

suspension. The law is turned upside down. While still unbelievable in the absolute, the

divine snake and the whole story of the first wife are so believable as a magical accusation

that it makes the other themes more believable than they would be in and by themselves, in

the absence of the magical accusation. Instead of being diminished by the fantastic theme, the

likelihood that an innocent woman really died by drowning is increased. The potential

referentiality of the myth as a whole is considerably increased.

Instead of a contamination by the unbelievable, we now have the very reverse, a

contamination by the believable. As we realize that the drought provides the ideal terrain for

the first wife's accusation, the drought becomes more believable. And so does the drowning

of the woman. And so do the beneficial consequences of that drowning. The more we look at

any one of these themes in the light of all the others, the more believable everything becomes.

All this believability adds up to an extremely coherent interpretation, but the anti-referential

critics will not be satisfied that it adds up to a certainty. Good interpretations are a dime a

dozen, they say, and of no interpretation can it be said that it is the one and only true

interpretation. There is no such thing as an authoritative interpretation.

This may well be true for a poem of Mallarmé, but our Venda myth is not a literary text and,

against those who want to assimilate all texts to poems, we must assert that the interpretation

I just gave is not hermeneutical in the ordinary sense if we deny hermeneutics the ability to

reach what I do not hesitate to call the truth of the text, its absolute truth. We can and must

say that the scapegoat explication is true without reservations of any kind. We must reject

interpretive pluralism as absurd and dangerous nonsense, at least in this one domain, po-

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tentially destructive of a certainty on which our very essential liberties depend.

In order to validate this affirmation, I will first show that historians are right to regard as

absolutely certain the reality of victims whose existence we know only through testimony of

texts fundamentally unreliable since they embrace fantastic data as if they were the truth.

The reality of the Jews and the non-Jews mentioned by Machaut and others as having been killed at the outset of the Black Death epidemic is a historical certainty, even though the

victims are presented as guilty and all the texts we have must be regarded as untrustworthy,

the work of untrustworthy authors.

The "even though" is really a "because." Far from making the account of the violent deeds reported by them untrustworthy, the untrustworthiness of the authors paradoxically increases

the probability that they are speaking the truth.

In order to see that this paradox is not really a paradox, we must reflect on the specific nature

of the believable and unbelievable data in the texts at issue, and the relationship between the

two.

When large numbers of human beings become hysterical enough to regard as entirely truthful

the grotesque accusations against would-be witches, or the Jews during plague epidemics, the

consequences are quite predictable. Once awakened, the crowd's appetite for violence

demands to be nourished. The best possible nourishment, of course, consists in the presumed

culprits and, even in the eventuality that they be protected by the authorities, the crowd is

numerous enough to take justice into its own hands in order to destroy the people in whose

guilt it believes.

In the historical world the logic of the fantastic accusation that results in some form of

violence against the accused is so logical that, when we find it in a text we automatically

assume that it may well correspond to a real sequence of events.

Let us imagine two texts. The first one tells us simply that some violent disturbances have

occurred because of alleged facts of witchcraft and that some people have been killed. The

author does not even mention the accusations against the victims. He seems rational and his

account must be taken seriously, but no more seriously and perhaps a little less, given the

temper of the times, than a very similar account in which typical witchcraft accusations

would be included and would be treated as absolutely convincing evidence, unquestionable

truth. This second author may well be less reliable than the first in an absolute sense, but he is

just as reliable and even more reliable relative to the affair that he reports. The reason for his

greater reliability is what we can infer from his own text. When he wrote it, his mental

attitude and his mood were precisely the ones that the judges had to share with him, if there

was a trial, or the violent mob, if there was no trial, in order

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to behave as violently with the presumed culprits as the text claims that they did.

Between the events reported by the author and his attitude toward the possible victims there

is a mutual fit, an appropriateness that reinforces the probability of the reported violence