An Anthropological Breach: René Girard and Konrad Lorenz on Ritualization, and Its Consequences for Literary Criticism

1. Statement of the Problem

The question of violence remains open and fluid, despite the large number of investigations devoted to this subject. Moreover, modern criticism, which sets itself against hermeneutics as a paradigm of the humanities and attempts to create an alternative way of representation (such as is found in the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Franklin Rudolph Ankersmit), brings the problem of violence into the foreground. "There [can be] . . . no genuinely aesthetic experience without a moment of violence—because there is no aesthetic experience without epiphany, that is, without the event of substance occupying space." ¹ Yet the literary criticism that uses "violence" as a core notion remains problematic. The roots of this issue are visible in the works of two authors who have considered the problem of violence in conceptual ways, Konrad Lorenz in On Aggression and René Girard in Violence and the Sacred.

2. The Multisignificant Reference

In the first chapter of Violence and the Sacred, Girard refers to an experiment described by Lorenz. ² Lorenz's ethological works were important for Girard, even though the basic materials that Girard used are primarily ancient literature and ethnographic studies. In 1963, Konrad Lorenz published Das sogenannte Böse, translated into English as On Aggression, in which the Austrian ethologist convincingly proved that aggression was one of the major animal instincts. Lorenz explained why intraspecific aggression was a major focus of his research: "In reality, the struggle Darwin was thinking of and which drives evolution forward is the competition between near relations," ³ because "what directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the 'eating enemy' but the competitor." ⁴ Lorenz believed that aggression directed at an individual of the same species is not harmful but carries a species-saving function. Aggression supports protective properties in a species, one form of protection being the mutual repulsion of its individuals away to a space of their own. Separation based on competition provides optimal usage of a biotope.

Lorenz also shows how some actions arising from phylogenies lose their initial function and become purely symbolic ceremonies—rituals. One example, rituals of reconciliation or greeting, occurs as a result of the reorientation of attack movements. "Wherever redirected rituals of appeasement are observed, the ceremony is bound to the individuality of the participating partners. The aggression of a particular individual is diverted from a second, equally particular individual." ⁵ Lorenz deduced that the major function of aggression is individualization. This was his main scientific discovery. He observed that the intensity of individualization in a society depends on the intensity of aggression.

From the ethological point of view, the theory of culture proposed by Girard is nothing but the transfer of the ritualization process found by Lorenz in animals onto the human community. Indeed, at first glance, the unanimous violence that makes the victim responsible for the preceding mutual violence reminds us of Lorenz's "redirection of aggression," which is "characterized by the fact that an activity is released by one object but discharged at another, because the first one, while presenting stimuli specifically eliciting the response, simultaneously emits others which inhibit its discharge." ⁶ According to Girard, unanimous violence (during which a ritual sacrifice emerges) forms the culture and society as such. This ritual is a source of all archaic religions because it serves two important functions: lowering the level of violence within the group and strengthening public relations. ⁷

The similarity of these two models leads Girard's interlocutors in Evolution and Conversion to suppose that "according to Lorenz's ethological observation, one can already identify in certain species behavioral patterns that form what we may call 'instinctual scapegoating.'" ⁸ Responding to this supposition, Girard agrees that the current data on the behavior of animals give rise to such comparisons. Nevertheless, he believes that Lorenz's ethological project cannot fully describe the dynamics of the "scapegoat mechanism" because it does not take into account the specificity of the human community, which consists in the formation of the symbolic order: "they [ethologists] don't...