Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction

Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy

Gary M. Ciuba

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807138656
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction -- Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy -- expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned -- and sometimes ritually sanctified -- victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they wrote.
In a comprehensive analysis of Porter's semiautobiographical Miranda stories, Ciuba focuses on the prescribed role of women that Miranda imitates and ultimately escapes. O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away reveals three characters whose scandalous animosity caused by religious rivalry leads to the unbearable stumbling block of violence. McCarthy's protagonist in Child of God, Lester Ballard, appears as the culmination of a long tradition of the sacred violence of southern religion, twisted into his own bloody faith. And Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome brings Ciuba's discussion back to the victim, in Tom Moore's renunciation of a society in which scapegoating threatens to become the foundation of a new social regime. From nostalgia for the old order to visions of a utopian tomorrow, these authors have imagined the interrelationship of desire, antagonism, and religion throughout southern history. Ciuba's insights offer new ways of reading Porter, O'Connor, McCarthy, and Percy as well as their contemporaries who inhabited the same culture of violence -- violence desired, dreaded, denied, and deified.

1
THE HANGED MAN AT OLD SARDIS CHURCH
The Culture of Violence and the Violence of Culture in the South

On July 5, 1933, in Clinton, South Carolina, the body of Norris Bendy was found, according to the Atlanta Constitution of the next day, “at Old Sardis church on the Calhoun highway. It was lying on the ground.” Bendy, a thirty-five-year-old “Laurens county negro,” had been arrested for striking Marvin Tollis, a twenty-two-year-old truck driver, during a Fourth of July altercation. Shortly after midnight, Bendy was “spirited” away from the Clinton jail by four white men, but Sheriff Columbus Owens subsequently claimed that he could not identify the abductors or trace the route that their car traveled. A few hours later when Bendy’s body was found by a deputy sheriff, it had been shot once and beaten extensively. Bendy’s arms and legs were bound, and his neck was circled by a rope. “Sheriff Owens said it appeared he had been hanged,” the newspaper reported. “The body was cut down and removed to the church.”

The account of Norris Bendy’s murder reads like a bit of newspaper marginalia. It is surrounded by reports of injury and death caused by truck accidents, of plans to celebrate the long tenure of the Episcopal bishop of Tennessee, of a forthcoming meeting of the Georgia Association of Commercial Secretaries in Elberton. Its brevity and lack of the sensational details that journalists sometimes reported to convey their outrage over mob violence make the piece seem as if Bendy barely deserves notice. Indeed, when a follow-up article was printed on July 7, the victim was incorrectly identified as “Norris Dendy.” The two articles about Bendy—each a barely six-inch-long column—are no more than minor notes in the larger story of 3,762 victims lynched in America between 1889, when such records began to be kept, and late 1933. In South Carolina, where Senator Coleman L. Blease boasted in 1930 that as governor he had not used the militia to protect African Americans against such killings and had asked not to be informed until the morning after a suspect was captured, readers might have interpreted the article out of apathy or animosity: an “uppity Negro” got what was coming to him.

However, such a reading would not have been unanimous in 1933. Governor Ibra C. Blackwood reflected a shift in popular sentiment when he described Bendy’s death as “a murder—not a lynching” in the July 7 Atlanta Constitution. Blackwood even assigned state constables to help local authorities investigate the case, and the newspaper noted that South Carolina’s last officially recognized lynching took place in 1930. At the end of 1933 the New York Herald-Tribune found evidence that mob violence was diminishing in America, for only seventeen people had been lynched as of December 3. The decline in such mock justice suggests that a different interpretation of the newspaper account might have been reached by readers who noted the arrest of Bendy but not of Tollis, the sheriff’s failure to guard his prisoner, the summary execution by an anonymous crowd, and the ferocity of the assault on Bendy’s flesh. They might have discerned that Norris Bendy was the victim of gradually escalating fury, which spread, like a contagion, from Marvin Tollis to the officers of the law and finally to the lynch mob that left a hanged body in the church yard.¹

Since 1933 readers have become even more schooled in the hermeneutics of suspicion so that they are accustomed to look for what has been slanted, silenced, or suppressed in such reports about mob violence. Commenting on how texts of persecution are interpreted, René Girard observes that when scholars review accounts of seventeenth-century witchcraft trials, they do not believe that the accused women and men actually killed their neighbor’s cow or son. Rather, readers perceive how the community has mythologized those whom it seeks to exclude because of their differences. Girard normally writes about the continental novel, Greek drama, the Bible, or Shakespeare, but when he offers another example of the way that accounts of victimization may get interpreted, he draws it this time from the American South:

If you read, for instance, a newspaper report of a lynching in the South in 1933, when you see certain telltale signs in the text, you will know [that the murdered was a victim of false allegations and collective violence]; but a historian a thousand years from now—he may not know. The truth will lie only in a novel written by someone named William Faulkner. Then the sound historians will say that we should not believe the novel; we have the press, we have all the documents. In fact, however, it is only the novel that puts together all the signs. (“Discussion” 228)

Girard’s affirmation of Faulkner overlooks many other writers who also disclose such scapegoating. In particular, it overlooks the vigorous tradition of African American novelists from William Wells Brown to John Wideman that, according to Trudier Harris, has exposed how white Americans have sought to exorcise blackness. However, Girard’s tribute to Faulkner is helpful in the way it celebrates the crucial role that the fiction writer, especially in the South, can play in helping to understand violence and the texts of violence. Whereas Girard can imagine twentieth-century readers of a newspaper account about a 1933 lynching, like that of Norris Bendy, as detecting the victimization, he views such interpretation as becoming more problematic with the passage of years. However, to read how Charles Bon is excluded by Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, how Darl Bundren is seized and confined to the asylum in As I Lay Dying, how Lucas Beauchamp is nearly lynched in Intruder in the Dust, or how Joe Christmas is shot and castrated in Light in August is to uncover a violent process that a reader in the future may find obscured in a newspaper report. Fiction, for Girard, may reveal the facts about systematic persecution and execution that the historical record conceals.

If the articles on Norris Bendy’s execution are read by way of Girard’s theories about killing and cultural formation, by way of the critical vision that Girard identifies in Faulkner’s fiction, “certain telltale signs in the text” become more noticeable, require to be “put together,” and raise questions about mimesis, mob fury, and religion. Is there a similarity between the African American Bendy and the white Tollis that may be as significant as their obvious differences? What is the connection between such possible resemblance and their violent encounter? How is the fight between the two related to the vigilante execution? And why—why is the hanged body of Bendy left lying on the ground at Old Sardis church?

DEMYSTIFYING VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH

Of the 1,886 lynchings in the United States from 1900 to 1930, almost 90 percent took place in the South (Brearley 679). The death of Norris Bendy three years later in South Carolina confirmed with one more victim the South’s reputation for violence that had been noted in travel accounts from the late eighteenth century (Ayers 9) and that had become well established by the 1830s. Wayfarers from the North and from England recorded so many brawls, duels, and stabbings in their logs and narratives that to have omitted note of southern violence would have been almost more remarkable than to have reported it. Some nineteenth-century southerners argued that their bloody notoriety was more the invention of northern journalists than a verifiable fact and countered that mobs and criminals actually made the North a more dangerous locale (Bruce 3–4). However, statistics challenge the claim that Dixie’s reputation for quarrels and killings resulted purely from regional bias. Mortality figures from the 1850 census indicate that the South’s murder rate was seven times that of the North (Bruce 242n.). Early scholarly attempts to tally southern homicides confirm the propensity for violence. In 1880 H. V. Redfield, whose research in newspapers and official records pioneered the study of southern violence, found that southerners in the benchmark states of Texas, Kentucky, and South Carolina “kill one another at a rate about eighteen hundred per cent. greater than does the population of New England” (13). One year after Bendy’s death H. C. Brearley reported that from 1920 to 1924 the homicide rate in the South was slightly over two and a half times that for the rest of the country (681).²

Such a tradition of violence provides an even larger context for the questions raised by the newspaper accounts of Norris Bendy’s murder. It requires that this lynching be read against the background of how imitative desire, bloodshed, and religion have long been intertwined in the South. When Girard credits Faulkner’s fiction with telling the truth about hangings, he implies that it understands victimization in a way that differs markedly from traditional attempts to explain killings in the South or in America at large. D. H. Lawrence’s famous description of “the essential American soul” as “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” acknowledged how violence had become part of a national mythology (68). The license for such individual aggression and for collective fury in America has been traced back to the country’s bloody origins. Richard Slotkin claims that the Puritan wars with Native Americans established the archetypal countryman as the hunter who seeks regeneration through violence (178–79). And Richard Maxwell Brown contends that the American Revolution provided the often-imitated example for how violence is justified in reaching a supposedly honorable end (42). Since the South has become notorious as the most violent region of this violent country, commentators have repeatedly tried to identify some distinctive feature to explain its propensity for conflict and carnage. They have explored whether its violence might be traced to class structure, rural lifestyles, poverty, struggles to modernize, anomie, child-rearing practices, or peculiar qualities of interpersonal relationships. They have viewed the violence as the legacy of slavery, the frontier, Celtic settlers, and an obsession with honor. Clarence Cason even attributed the hot tempers to the hot temperatures. “The climate of the South also has an effect upon the nervous systems of the inhabitants,” he claimed in 90° in the Shade. “They like pepper in their food, strong coffee, and the excitement of fights” (12).³

Girard’s studies in mimesis and murder point inquiries into southern violence beyond the Mason-Dixon line, beyond even American history. They suggest that such hostility should be understood not only as a problem of a particular region or nation but also as an example of a generative mechanism at work in all culture. To view southern violence as cultural rather than just local does not deny that there are specific causes for such aggression that are endemic to the South. Instead, such an approach seeks to analyze and connect these regional factors in terms of the larger work of culture. It seeks to answer John Shelton Reed’s objection to many theories about southern violence—“the origins of the trait cannot explain its persistence”—by focusing on the underlying dynamics that lead to violence regardless of the immediate cause (141). Finally, it seeks to explore how violence is related to one of the chief products of southern culture, modern southern fiction. Since Girard’s theories about violence and culture developed from his study of novels and drama, he regards imaginative writing as playing a critical role in understanding the culture of victimization. Literature can reveal how desire may lead to violence, how violence may climax in scapegoating, and how scapegoating may generate the culture that disguises and deifies its origins in desire. Such analysis and excavation is the story behind so many of the stories from the twentieth-century South.

Girard’s study of literature and culture has led him to argue that violence, like the kind that led to the murder of Norris Bendy, originates not in the self alone but in what he calls interdividuality, the mimetic relationship between the self and the other.⁴ This psychosocial approach rejects explanations of violence that attribute it to some fundamental human instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud theorized that the self is driven to regress toward absolute peace, toward an inorganic state, ultimately toward death. However, the self avoids its own destruction, as Freud claimed in Civilization and Its Discontents, by diverting these potentially suicidal urges outward into attacking others. Whereas Freud understood thanatos as being redirected by eros, Konrad Lorenz studied how a similar instinct for violence actually promoted survival in the animal kingdom. In On Aggression he argued that animals resort to force as an evolutionary adaptation to defend territory, to guarantee the perpetuation of the fittest, and to establish hierarchy. Humans share these same inborn impulses to fight, according to Lorenz, but whereas other animals limit violence through appeasement rituals, humans have lost the mechanisms that might keep them from intraspecific aggression. Girard criticizes the concept of instinctual violence because, whether psychoanalytic or ethological, it predestines individuals to being ruled by some force beyond their control. Moreover, it conceals how imitation may lead to conflict and makes such contention seem one-sided rather than generated by mutual rivalry (“Discussion” 124–25). Whether the instinct is viewed as serving death or life, Girard argues that such theories about inborn drives divert attention from the way that violence originates in the mimesis that both attracts and obstructs models and disciples (Things Hidden 409–15).⁵

Rather than emphasizing the innate origins of violence, Girard has more in common with theorists who posit the interpersonal basis for violence. For example, he would agree with Leonard Berkowitz, who contends that violence comes about as one possible response to frustration. Berkowitz has studied how thwarted individuals may direct their anger toward harming the actual obstacles to their goals or displace their rage onto similar and easily accessible individuals. Girard would agree with Albert Bandura, who emphasizes the lifelong role of modeling in all social learning, especially in aggression. Bandura argues that aggression results from imitation of violent examples and that such assault is more likely when doing injury has already brought rewards to the model and perpetrator. And Girard would agree with James Gilligan, whose work with prisoners, particularly with those judged criminally insane, has convinced him that violence is caused by attempts to replace acute shame with a conviction of pride, power, and honor (110). Reaching similar conclusions from principles in “self theory,” Gerda Siann contends that when individuals feel devalued, they may use force to assert the self and humiliate others (241–42). Although Girard draws his early insights from literature rather than from interviews, field studies, and experimental observation, he resembles these theoreticians in maintaining that violence may result when the self confronts some obstacle, that violence reflects a desire to affirm the frustrated self, and that violence may provoke further counterviolence. What Girard contributes to such clinical and laboratory research is a vivid understanding of how violence may be caused and spread by mimetic desire.

Girard’s analysis of modern continental fiction has directed him away from a purely linear concept of desire. Romantics view desire as originating spontaneously in the autonomous self. Even if Deleuze and Guattari recognize the collective nature of desire, they long in Anti-Oedipus for a return to a schizophrenic state of solitary and unmediated desire. Freudians, on the other hand, emphasize desire as finding a goal in cathexis. Even if Lacan understands self-formation in terms of the other, he imagines desire as arising out of the loss of the phallus (Things Hidden 402–9). In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Girard focuses on neither the subject nor the object of desire but on the triangle that they form with a mediator. Girard posits a compelling sense of unfulfillment at the center of the subject. It lacks, and so it longs. Such metaphysical desire leads to mimetic desire. As the self seeks to fill up this emptiness, it takes as a model some individual who seems to possess the fullness of being for which the subject yearns. The self desires according to that other rather than to itself, wants what another wants—love, power, wealth, celebrity, success, godhead—because the other wants it. Subtitled The Self and Other in Literary Structure, Girard’s first book explores how fiction from Cervantes to Proust reveals the social construction of desire.

Because such imitation is potentially destructive, Girard’s work sometimes gives the misleading impression that all mimesis, all desire, is evil. However, at its best, this emulation can lead to fulfillment, for it provides the self with models of physical, spiritual, ethical, and intellectual excellence that can be happily copied. In such positive mimesis the model does not cling to the ideal as an exclusive possession but allows it to be shared or duplicated, and the disciple does not want to eliminate or replace the model but re-present it.⁶ Yet if mimetic desire may consummate in co-presence and communion, it may also degenerate into resentment and rivalry and outright aggression. The disciple may view the model not just as the pattern for desire but as an actual obstruction to the desired end, and this impediment may only intensify the disciple’s desire for what has been denied. The model, in turn, may view the disciple as a threat to its jealously guarded well-being and ardently defend that status against any usurper. As desire gets doubled, the disciple’s imitation makes the model view its position or possession as even more valuable, and the model’s attempt to preserve its distinction exasperates and exacerbates the envious disciple. When such doubles confront each other, often in mutual frustration, they tend to lose their focus on the original object of desire and become obsessed with the other as rival and obstacle. The result is that they may strike out in violence to eliminate their counterparts and to affirm the singular mastery of the self.⁷

In Violence and the Sacred Girard pursues the widespread effects of such imitative antagonism. Influenced by his studies in anthropology and Greek tragedy, he expands a literary theory about how mimetic desire works in the European novel into a cultural theory about how violence animates the primitive, ancient, and modern worlds. Girard contends that violence, which is begun in mimesis, is perpetuated through mimesis. Violence invites duplication, for a raised fist typically provokes a raised fist in return. Violence also replicates itself, for the user is often forced by some counterforce to use more and greater force. Each outburst generates ever greater reprisals; each reprisal incites new and always escalating outbursts until the original dissimilarities between model and disciple begin to be eradicated in reciprocal antagonism. The two become what the model dreaded and what the disciple only desired in an entirely different way—the same.

This mimetic rivalry may convulse an entire community. Since desire is spread by imitation and imitation is spread by desire, the model-disciple relationship may expand beyond any single pair of doubles and get reproduced throughout a group. As desire circulates, the disciple copies the model, the copy, in turn, is copied by others, and the reduplication provides further models for further disciples. New or variant forms of imitative desire may generate their own family of doubles so that mimesis gradually becomes rampant. When selves increasingly come to resemble each other, the sheer multiplicity of the mimicry risks proliferating the same kind of envy that fuels individual antagonisms. Models and disciples, indeed models as disciples and disciples as models, may resort to aggression to establish a degree of distinction, to claim that they alone have the right to the contested plenitude. As the conflict between doubles becomes continually redoubled, the progression may eventually produce a mob in which everyone is fighting everyone else to prove that he or she is not everyone else but the sole truly sublime self. Laws might once have restricted the aggression; rituals might once have provided an outlet for such hostility. However, during what Girard calls “the sacrificial crisis,” no code of conduct and no secondhand offering can limit the mimetic antagonism. What replaces the initial desire for the contested ideal is the desire for violence. Although violence seems like the ultimate signifier of absolute difference, it actually collapses differences, for it makes all the same by making all into warring doubles. There is no longer any distinction; there is only mimesis on a mass scale, only the imitation of violence.

This chaos may spiral toward the community’s destruction, or the clash and confusion may end in its own confounding and herald the community’s salvation. Girard contends that the mimesis which gave rise to violence may climax in a violent act of mimesis. The society in conflict may collectively turn its hostility and hysteria against a randomly chosen member who is representative of the strife-filled group. Just as the upheaval began when competing members imitated a desire to gain something, it ends when collaborating members imitate another desire to get rid of someone. Mutual antagonists copy the violence done by one of their own and against one of their own, polarize their fury onto a surrogate, and turn the violence against all into the violence against the lone object of communal exclusion. Since all the members of a society in crisis have become the doubles of each other, a “single victim can be substituted for all the potential victims” (Violence 79). This surrogate is often found among those who are already marginalized for physical, social, economic, psychological, or sexual reasons, inasmuch as any difference draws attention to itself in a world where all other distinctions have been effaced and replaced by violence. However, the choice of victim is purely arbitrary. There is no causal connection between the crisis and the one killed. Indeed, Girard claims that crimes are often invented to mediate between the two and to magnify the heinous significance of the innocent individual. To avoid confronting how purely wanton is this murder, the community typically views its double and victim as a monster deserving to be slaughtered. For if the actual ran...