The Genius of Rene Girard 8 July 2008

Girard quipped that “it is not play that envelops the sacred, but the sacred that envelops the notion of play” (The Girard Reader, 23).  He is referencing the sacred nature of chance and dice games, but the principle applies to his understanding of rite, religion, and mimetic desire.  Through religious rituals we – humanity, Roman, postmodern intellectual or Hittite – play at being a part of heaven.  The sacrifice in a worship ceremony is a mimic of the God or god whom we are worshipping.   Pagans deify the human who can both be the cause of a plague and the savior from it.  If a goat is sacrificed to Dionysius, it is a picture both of his chaotic world being destroyed and also of the restoration of peace through his death.  The difference between Dionysius and Christ – one crucial difference but not the only one, at least – is that Dionysius really did bring on a sacrificial crisis through his own guilt, whereas Jesus accepted the crux of the crisis in place of the real “scapegoats” (i.e., us).

The sacrifice of the human heart, a feature inherent in all forms of paganism, is unacceptable to the Christian God because it is a sacrifice that mimics a guilty divinity – an Oedipus who has blood on his hands.   The religious ceremony itself is a picture of heaven, or of the dwelling of the pagan god.  Shakespeare said that the world is a stage.  In Girard’s terms, this is true because it is the home of humanity, a troupe of mimics.  This world is a picture of the next.  The world is a stage because religious worship is essentially a play.

Troilus & Cresside: a Casualty of Hazy War 24 April 2008

I don’t remember what I called the finished paper ackshully (I know, it was just last term too) but here’s the abstract.

Much of the play Troilus and Cresside takes place in a thematic no-man’s-land, an indecisive gray place that sets the tone for the rest of the acts.  Far from the besieged Trojan kingdom and rough Greek war-camp of Homer, Shakespeare paints a Troy that is bustling with city business and a Greek camp with a Persian degree of luxury.  At the end of the day the two enemies are happy to sit back and raise glasses together in friendship, and while the enemies commune, neither elicits the audience’s sympathy. 

This ambiguous background signals that all is not well.  Misplaced trust and uncertain values are fought for at the price of true love, honesty, and anything that is worth fighting for, and Shakespeare makes this poignantly clear.  Troilus and Cresside is a sordid play.  Love is diseased, love is “fortune’s food” (5.2.198), and, above all, a lover cannot be held to his word.  Instead of dismissing the play as the offshoot of Shakespeare in a cynical mood, the case can be made that Troilus and Cresside is making the point that Troy was ready to fall because it had nothing to stand on.

Ah, poor Yorick, I remember it well – the paper ackshully ended up being on absolute value and worth.  But here’s the abstract schpiel – ballywell commercial, wot?