James and the Originary Scene

James's mature art is above all an art of the sacred. His work is neither philosophical nor political, ideologically engaged nor culturally transgressive, except as a means to engage his primary question: what is the relation of art to the sacred, and of both to the well-lived life? This question emerges from religion rather than philosophy, in the sense that it does not look to practically disengaged reason for a response, reason in the form of sustained theorizing. T. S. Eliot was right ¹ --James's fiction is hostile to ideas, that is, to ideas isolated from an intensely realized pragmatic context. Despite the phenomenological, deconstructive, and ideological readings James's work has tolerated, none can claim more than that the fiction permits those readings, that the theory's conclusions or procedures have some analogue in the writing. But there are very few passages in James of overt philosophizing or the kind of speculative digression we see in modernist and postmodernist works. What is in the fiction, however, is a concentration-- especially at moments of crisis and resolution--on the language of the sacred: on the theater of sacrifice and violence, on the performance of ritual, and on the meaning of the term "sacred" itself. James is not "religious"; his art does not serve a transcendent entity, or glorify a righteous cause, or try to see through the mere phantom of life to the mystic essence behind it. But his work does persistently ask whether art can provide what religion once could--a sense of the enduring significance of our experience, a medium through which we awaken our deepest resources of consciousness--or whether these yearnings are fundamentally dangerous, inspiring a self-absorbed neglect of the everyday, the ordinary facts of life.

In contemporary literary theory, two figures stand out for their insistence that religion continues to provide us with the key to understanding culture: René Girard and Eric Gans. Their cultural anthropologies work from the basic premise of religion: that the "human" is an irreducible natural category and that ritual first marked the primary difference between humans and other animals. Culture-- representations that enable self-reflection on and perpetuation of the human community--emerged from primitive rituals and must still be understood with reference to their original functions. The sacred, for Gans and Girard, is the primary sign of both communal and individual identity, the marker of absolute difference that preserves relative differences. James shares the Girardian and Gansian conviction that the sacred is at the essence of human culture, but his work ultimately escapes their models of sacred art.

Girard postulates an originary scene of culture, a real historical moment that marks the transition from the pre-human to the human proper. The moment occurs at the scene of a murder; according to Girard, "between what can be strictly termed animal nature on the one hand and developing humanity on the other there is a true rupture, which is a collective murder, and it alone is capable of providing for kinds of organization, no matter how embryonic, based on prohibition and ritual" (97). Our species' greater capacity for mimesis eventually led to a generalized conflict that was resolved by the channeling of collective aggression against a single victim, the scapegoat. The scapegoat distracts the mimetically charged proto-community from an object of appetitive desire that had focused and intensified their desire:

As rivalry becomes acute, the rivals are more apt to forget about whatever objects are, in principle, the cause of the rivalry and instead to become more fascinated with one another. In effect the rivalry is purged of any external stake and becomes a matter of pure rivalry and prestige. [. . .] If the object is excluded there can no longer be any acquisitive mimesis [. . .]. There is no longer any support for mimesis but the antagonists themselves. (26)

Imitation itself becomes the participants' chief goal, mimetic conflict over the object giving way to unanimous mimetic aggression against...