- Joyous SacrificeOn the Scapegoat as Voluntary Victim in "Song of Myself" and "Howl"
"For never are the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved."
—Plato, Republic IV, 424c
Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Ginsberg's "Howl" both contain the description of a voluntary self-sacrifice, symbolically committed by the poets themselves. In this article, we propose to study these sacrificial representations, and the mechanism underlying them, in the light of René Girard's scapegoat theory, in order to show the function that these sacrifices play in society. The analysis is also based on formal considerations, especially the use these two poets make of the long free verse, also called "verset."1
The theme of sacrifice and the identification of the poets with Christ have already been analyzed, but never according to Girard's theory. Many studies have actually identified the importance and centrality of these messianic references. They are a pivotal moment of the poems: There is a "before" and an "after" the sacrifice, which is the moment when everything changes. Thus, in [End Page 81] his analysis of "Song of Myself," Ed Folsom interprets the section that tells the sacrifice from a psychological point of view: According to Folsom, Whitman is encouraging readers to overcome their suffering to rise up again, as if he was saying "we all have a cross to bear," and giving us, through the image of the resurrection, hope for the future.2 This universalizing interpretation can also be found in the analysis of James E. Miller Jr. According to Miller, Whitman is "implying humankind's identification with the universalized experience of Christ." The poet rejects the role of the beggar that he had taken before and resurrects with more power.3 Similarly, Thomas Crawley writes that the passage is a "climactic one," "where the poet identifies himself and all men with the crucified Christ."4
For "Howl," critics often recognize two distinct moments in the poem: a moment of descent, followed by a rise. The poem is thus compared to Dante's Divine Comedy: "The structure of 'Howl' roughly corresponds to that of The Divine Comedy."5 Meyers mentions that Ginsberg quotes the last words of Christ on the cross, but he does not explain the role of the sacrifice in the poem. The interpretation that is closest to a Girardian reading is that of Dorothy Van Ghent. She points to the mythical structure of "Howl" and other works of the Beat generation: "The distinguishing characteristic of the Beat Generation is… the fact that they have a myth. The myth follows authentic archaic lines, and goes something like this. The hero is the 'angel-headed hipster.' He comes from anonymous parenting, parents whom he denies in correct mythological fashion. He has received a mysterious call-to-the-road, the freights, the jazzdens, the 'negro streets.'… Where he goes is hell, the realm of death, ruled by the H- or Hades-Bomb. The hero is differentiated from the mass of the population of hell by his angelic awareness: he knows where he is. He knows that you are in heaven, so he acts like a damned soul. His tortures—the heroic 'ordeals' of myth—send him into ecstasy and he bursts into song, song filled with metaphors of destruction.… The Beats say they are a religious movement, and the Beat literature constantly reveals the far and visionary goal of the hero's quest—the return to the Kingdom, the transcendent kingdom of love and brotherhood and life."6 Girard's theory gives an explanation of this mythical structure.
This article adds yet another interpretation of these symbolic sacrifices. The interest of this reading according to Girard's theory is to show the profound resemblance of the two poems, despite the surface differences. It reveals the same underlying mechanism and brings together scattered elements studied separately. All themes that can be spotted in poems can be explained by the mechanism of the scapegoat. This approach does not contradict all others, but explains them at a deeper level. [End Page 82]
the sacrifice
"Song of Myself" and "Howl" both contain a representation of a voluntary sacrifice: The...