The Plague in Literature and Myth

Author(s): RENE GIRARD

Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language , 1974, Vol. 15, No. 5, A Special Classics
Issue on Myth and Interpretation (1974), pp. 833-850
Published by: University of Texas Press

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 RENE GIRARD

The Plague in Literature and Myth

THE PLAGUE IS FOUND EVERYWHERE IN LITERATURE. IT BELONGS TO

the epic with Homer, to tragedy with Oedipus Rex, to history wi

cydides, to the philosophical poem with Lucretius. The plague
as background to the short stories of Boccaccio's Decameron
fables about the plague, notably La Fontaine's "Les Animaux m
la peste"; there are novels, such as Manzoni's / Promessi Spo
mus' La Peste. The theme spans the whole range of literary
nonliterary genres, from pure fantasy to the most positive and s
accounts. It is older than literature - much older, really, since
ent in myth and ritual in the entire world.
The subject appears too vast for a brief exploration. Undou
but a descriptive enumeration of literary and mythical plague
of little interest: there is a strange uniformity to the various tre
of the plague, not only literary and mythical but also scientific a
scientific, of both past and present. Between the matter-of-fact,
tistical account of Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year an
hysteria of Artaud in Le Théâtre et la peste, the difference
range, turn out to be minor.
It would be exaggerated to say that plague descriptions are
but the similarities may well be more intriguing than the i
variations. The curious thing about these similarities is that t
mately involve the very notion of the similar. The plague is u
presented as a process of undifferentiation, a destruction of spec
This destruction is often preceded by a reversal. The plague
the honest man into a thief, the virtuous man into a lecher, the
into a saint. Friends murder and enemies embrace. Wealthy
made poor by the ruin of their business. Riches are showered
pers who inherit in a few days the fortunes of many distant
Social hierarchies are first transgressed, then abolished. Politi
ligious authorities collapse. The plague makes all accumulated
edge and all categories of judgment invalid. It was traditionall
that the plague attacks the strong and young in preference to
and old, the healthy rather than the chronically ill. Modern
do not believe that great epidemics really singled out any particu
viduals or categories. The popular belief must have arisen from
Texas Studies in Literature and Language
XV.5 (Special Classics Issue 1974)

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834 RENE GIRARD

that it is more surprising and shocking to see the death of the young and
healthy than of the old and the sick. The scientific view, it must be noted,
fits the eternal ethos of the plague just as well and better than the popu-
lar tradition. The distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately de-
stroys all forms of distinctiveness. The plague overcomes all obstacles,
disregards all frontiers. All life, finally, is turned into death, which is the
supreme undifferentiation. Most written accounts insist monotonously on
this leveling of differences. So does the medieval danse macabre, which,
of course, is inspired by the plague.
This process of undifferentiation makes sense, obviously, and poses no
special problem in the sociological sphere. The belief that a great plague
epidemic can bring about a social collapse is not difficult to accept or ir-
rational in any way; it can be based on positive observation. At the be-
ginning of the modern age, when plague epidemics had not yet disap-
peared and the spirit of scientific investigation was already awakened,
texts can be found that clearly distinguish the medical plague from its
social consequences and yet continue to see a similarity. The French sur-
geon Ambroise Paré, for instance, writes:

At the outbreak of the plague, even the highest authorities are likely to flee,
so that the administration of justice is rendered impossible and no one can
obtain his rights. General anarchy and confusion then set in and that is the
worst evil by which the common wealth can be assailed ; for that is the moment
when the dissolute bring another and worse plague into the town, (emphasis
mine)

This sequence of events is perfectly positive and rational. The reverse

sequence is no less so. A social upheaval can bring about conditions fa-
vorable to an outbreak of the plague. Historians still argue whether the
Black Death was a cause or a consequence of the social upheavals in the
fourteenth century.
Between the plague and social disorder there is a reciprocal affinity,
but it does not completely explain the confusion of the two that prevails
not only in innumerable myths but in a good number of literary plagues,
from ancient times to contemporary culture. The Greek mythical plague
not only kills men but provokes a total interruption of all cultural and
natural activities; it causes the sterility of women and cattle and prevents
the fields from yielding a crop. In many parts of the world, the words we
translate as "plague" can be viewed as a generic label for a variety of ills
that affect the community as a whole and threaten or seem to threaten
the very existence of social life. It may be inferred from various signs
that interhuman tensions and disturbances often play the principal role.
In the passage just quoted, Paré separates what primitive thought

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 835

unites - the medical and social components of the mythical plague. His
language, however, is interesting. The social components are described
as another and worse plague. Anarchy is a plague; in a sense, it is even
more of a plague than the disease itself. The former unity is broken, and
yet it is remembered and preserved in the stylistic effect of using the
same word for two distinct and yet curiously inseparable phenomena.
The medical plague has become a metaphor for the social plague; it be-
longs to what we call literature.
Judging from the role of the plague in Western literature up to the
present, this metaphor is endowed with an almost incredible vitality, in a
world where the plague and epidemics in general have disappeared al-
most altogether.1 Such vitality would be unthinkable, of course, if the so-
cial "plague" were not always with us, as fear or as reality, in some form
or other. This fact is not enough, however, to account for the more ob-
scure and yet persistent aspects of the metaphoric configuration as well as
for what appears to be the real need it fulfills with a great many writers.
Indeed, an analysis of significant texts reveals definite analogies between
the plague, or rather all great epidemics, and the social phenomena, real
or imagined, that are assimilated to them. One such text belongs to Dos-
toevsky's Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov has a dream during a
grave illness that occurs just before his final change of heart and at the
end of the novel. He dreams of a worldwide plague that affects people's
relationships with each other. No specifically medical symptoms are men-
tioned. It is human interaction that breaks down, and the entire society
gradually collapses.

He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange
plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. . . . Some new
sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were
endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once
mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and
so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they con-
sidered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so
infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the in-
fection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought
that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat him-
self on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to
judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not
know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of
senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even

1 Concerning the symbolic significance of disease in modern literature, see the

suggestive article of Gian-Paolo Biasin, "From Anatomy to Criticism," MLN, 86
(December, 1971), 873-890.

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836 RENE GIRARD

on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be
broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting
and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the
towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was
summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned,
because every one proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they
could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on
something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite dif-
ferent from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and
killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and things
were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and
further.

The plague is a transparent metaphor for a certain reciprocal violence

that spreads, literally, like the plague. The appropriateness of the meta-
phor comes, obviously, from this contagious character. The idea of con-
tagiousness implies the presence of something harmful, which loses none
of its virulence as it is rapidly transmitted from individual to individual.
Such, of course, are bacteria in an epidemic; so is violence when it is imi-
tated, either positively, whenever bad example makes the usual restraints
inoperative, or negatively, when the efforts to stifle violence with vio-
lence achieve no more, ultimately, than an increase in the level of vio-
lence. Counterviolence turns out to be the same as violence. In cases
of massive contamination, the victims are helpless, not necessarily be-
cause they remain passive but because whatever they do proves ineffec-
tive or makes the situation worse.
In order to appreciate Raskolnikov' s dream, we must read it in the con-
text of Dostoevsky's entire work, of that self-defeating mixture of pride
and humiliation characteristic of Raskolnikov and other Dostoevskian
heroes. The victims of the plague seem to be possessed with the same
desire as Raskolnikov. Each falls prey to the same megalomania and sees
himself as the one and only superman: "Each thought that he alone had
the truth and looked with contempt at the others. "
This desire implies a contradiction; it aims at complete autonomy, at a
near divine self-sufficiency, and yet it is imitative. The divinity this desire
is trying to capture never fails, sooner or later, to appear as the divinity
of someone else, as the exclusive privilege of a model after whom the
hero must pattern not only his behavior but his very desires, insofar as
these are directed toward objects. Raskolnikov worships Napoleon. The,
possessed imitate Stavrogin. The spirit of worship must combine with
the spirit of hatred. To reveal the secret of this ambivalence, we need not
turn to someone like Freud. There is no secret at all. To imitate the de-

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 837
sires of someone else is to turn this someone else into a rival as well as a
model. From the convergence of two or more desires on the same object,
conflict must necessarily arise.
The mimetic nature of desire can account for the many contradictions
in the Dostoevskian hero; this one principle can make his personality
truly intelligible. Imitative desire necessarily generates its own living ob-
stacles and comes to view this failure as a sign of the model's omnipo-
tence, as convincing proof, in other words, that this model is the right
one, that the door he keeps so tightly shut must be the door to heaven.
Mimetic desire cannot keep its illusions alive without falling in love
with its own disastrous consequences and focusing more and more on the
violence of its rivals. The mimetic attraction of violence is a major topic
of Dostoevskian art. Thus, violence becomes reciprocal. In the dream of
the plague, the expressions "each other, one another" recur constantly.
The great Dostoevskian novels describe mimetic breakdowns of human
relations that tend to spread further and further. The dream of the
plague is nothing but the quintessential expression of the Dostoevskian
crisis; and, as such, it must extend that crisis to the entire world, in truly
apocalyptic fashion.
From Dostoevsky, I would like to turn to another writer, Shakespeare,
who appears very distant but is really very close in respect to the prob-
lem at hand. I want to compare the dream of the plague, a specific pas-
sage in Crime and Punishment, to a specific passage in a work of Shake-
speare, the famous speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, a text that
rests, in my view, on the same conception of a cultural crisis as the dream
of the plague in Dostoevsky.
First, it must be observed that Troilus and Cressida revolves entirely
around a view of mimetic desire analogous if not identical to the one
just detected in Dostoevsky. The topic of the play is the decomposition of
the Greek army stalled under the walls of Troy. Disorder begins at the
top. Achilles imitates Agamemnon, both in the sense that he seriously
aspires to his position, he wants to become the supreme ruler of the
Greeks, and in the sense that he derisively mimics and parodies the
commander-in-chief. Mimetic rivalry spreads from rank to rank and
brings about a complete confusion:

So every rank
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation.

These lines remind us of Raskolnikov's dream: "They gathered together

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838 RENE GJRARD

in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would
begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers
would fall on each other."
Mimetic desire also dominates the two protagonists. No less than the
political and the military, the erotic aspect of the play is an affair of
worldly ambition, competitive and imitative in character. We would have
to call Cressida "inauthentic" if we did not suspect that the ideal of au-
tonomous desire by which she will be judged is itself a fruit of rampant
imitation. The lovers are always open to the corruptive suggestion of
spurious models or to the even worse advice of Pandarus. They are really
nonheroes, always caught in a game of deception and vanity which is to
real passion what the behavior of the army is to genuine military valor.
No individual or psychological approach can do justice to the scope of
the phenomenon. That is why the high point of the play is that speech in
which Ulysses describes a crisis so pervasive and acute that it goes be-
yond even the most radical notion of social crisis.
The central concept, Degree, from the Latin gradus, means a step, a
measured distance, the necessary difference thanks to which two cultural
objects, people, or institutions can be said to have a being of their own,
an individual or categorical identity.

Oh, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick ! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores

But by degree, stand in authentic place ?

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows ! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe.
Strength should be the lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead.
Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

The image of the untuned string clearly reveals that the cultural order
is to be understood on the model of a melody, not as an aggregrate,
therefore, a mere collection of heterogeneous objects, but as a ' 'totality"
or, if we prefer, a "structure," a system of differences commanded by a
single differentiating principle. Degree in the singular seems to define a

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 839

purely social transcendence, almost in the sense of Durkheim, with the

difference, however, that cultural systems in Shakespeare are always lia-
ble to collapse; and it is with such collapse, obviously, not with the sys-
tems themselves, that the tragic writer is preoccupied.
If mimetic desire has an object, it is Degree itself; Degree is vulnera-
ble to criminal attempts from inside the structure. The thought appears
irrational, but it is not. It does not mean that Degree is something like
an object that could be appropriated. It means exactly the opposite. If
Degree vanishes, becomes "vizarded" when it becomes an object of ri-
valry, it is precisely because it is really nothing but the absence of such
rivalries in a cultural order that remains functional. The crisis, therefore,
is a time of most frantic ambition that becomes more and more self-
defeating. As these ambitions are mimetically multiplied, reciprocal vio-
lence grows and the differences dissolve; the * 'degrees" leading to the ob-
ject and the object itself disintegrate. It is an ambition, therefore, that
"by a pace goes backward / With a purpose it hath to climb."
As in Dostoevsky's text, all constancy of purpose disappears, all useful
activities are interrupted. The desire in each man to distinguish himself
triggers instant imitation, multiplies sterile rivalries, produces conditions
that make society unworkable through a growing uniformity. The pro-
cess is one of undifferentiation that passes for extreme differentiation -
false ' 'individualism." Finally, even the most fundamental distinctions
become impossible. Shakespeare writes that "Right and wrong . . . lose
their names," and this is duplicated almost to the letter in Dostoevsky:
"They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider
evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to
justify."
In both texts the dominant idea, more explicit in Shakespeare, is that
regular human activities, however reciprocal their final results, can take
place only on a basis of nonreciprocity. Constructive relationships of any
type are differentiated. Ulysses certainly betrays a strong hierarchical and
authoritarian bias. One should not conclude too hastily that the interest of
his speech is thereby diminished. The concepts with which he operates,
the very notion of the cultural order as a differential system susceptible
of collapse, imply the essential arbitrariness of cultural differences.
When the difference goes, the relationship becomes violent and sterile
as it becomes more symmetrical, as everything becomes more perfectly
identical on both sides: "Each thing meets in mere oppugnancy" It is a
relationship of doubles that emerges from the crisis. We would mis-
understand this relationship if we interpreted it as a coincidentia opposi-
torum, in the tradition of philosophical idealism, or as a mere subjective
reflection or hallucination, in the vein of psychological "narcissism," an

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84O RENE GIRARD

approach adopted by Rank, for instance, in his essay on Don Juan and
the double.
With Shakespeare, as earlier with the playwrights of classical antiq-
uity, the relationship of doubles is perfectly real and concrete; it is the
fundamental relationship of the tragic and comic antagonists. It is pres-
ent among the four doubles of A Comedy of Errors, where it is almost
identical to the relationship defined in Troilus and Cressida and drama-
tized in all of Shakespeare's plays. The fact that the doubles constantly
run into each other in a desperate effort to part ways can be viewed either
in a tragic or in a comic light. This is as true of Dostoevsky as it is of
Shakespeare. The relationship of conflictual symmetry and reciprocal fas-
cination portrayed in the novels is fundamentally identical to what is at-
tempted very early in the short story entitled The Double.
Thus, the speech of Ulysses closely parallels Raskolnikov's dream of
the plague. In both these texts the authors find a way to conceptualize
and generalize the same type of relationship that, in the rest of the work
and in his other works, is developed in dramatic or novelistic form. The
convergence of these two writers is particularly striking in view of their
obvious differences of language, period, style, genre, etc. In order to be
complete, the parallel should also include, on Shakespeare's side, the
metaphor of the plague; and, of course, does. In the passage quoted
above, the idea of disease occurs repeatedly. Even though it does not play
as prominent a role as in Raskolnikov's dream, the plague proper is not
absent; it figures among the various and more or less natural disasters
that accompany the crisis, as in a kind of mythical orchestration:

What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth,

What plagues and what portents, what mutiny
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture !

Looking back upon the preceding remarks, we must note that' we are
no longer dealing with a single theme, with the isolated plague, but with
a thematic cluster that includes, besides the plague or, more generally,
the theme of epidemic contamination, the dissolving of differences and
the mimetic doubles. All these elements are present both in the text of
Shakespeare and in the text of Dostoevsky. I shall give more examples
later, and they will show that this same thematic cluster almost never
fails to gather around the plague in a great many texts that may appear
to have very little in common. Some of the elements may be more em-
phasized than others; they may appear only in an embryonic form, but it
is very rare when even one of them is completely missing.

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 841

First, however, we must complete our thematic cluster. Another ele-

ment, which has not yet been mentioned, may be the most important of
all, the sacrificial element. This sacrificial element may be limited to the
assertion that all the death and suffering from the plague is not in vain,
that the ordeal is necessary to purify and rejuvenate the society. Here is,
for example, the conclusion of Raskolnikov's dream: "Only a few men
could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, des-
tined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth."
Something very similar is present in Artaud's Le Théâtre et la peste:
"The theater like the plague is a crisis which is resolved by death or cure.
And the plague is a superior disease because it is a total crisis after which
nothing remains except death or an extreme purification. " Death itself
appears as the purifying agent, the death of all plague victims or a few,
sometimes of a single chosen victim who seems to assume the plague in
its entirety and whose death or expulsion cures the society, in the rituals
of much of the world. Sacrifices and the so-called scapegoat rituals are pre-
scribed when a community is stricken by "the plague" or other scourges.
Our thematic cluster is even more common in myth and ritual than in lit-
erature. In Exodus y for instance, we find the "ten plagues" of Egypt to-
gether with the incident of Moses stricken with leprosy and cured by
Yah weh himself. The "ten plagues" are a worsening social breakdown,
which also appears in the form of a destructive rivalry between Moses
and the magicians of Egypt. Finally we have a strong sacrificial theme in
the death of the firstborn and the establishment of the passover ritual.
The sacrificial element is sometimes an invisible dimension, some-
thing like an atmosphere that pervades every theme but cannot be pin-
pointed as a theme; its status must be ascertained. An analysis not of the
entire Oedipus myth, but of the mythical elements that appear in
Sophocles' tragedy, Oedipus the King, may help shed some light upon
that problem.
In the opening scenes of the tragedy, the city of Thebes is in the throes
of a plague epidemic; and the solution of the crisis becomes a test of
power and prestige for the protagonists, Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias.
Each of these would-be doctors tries to place the blame on another, and
they all turn into each other's doubles. Here, too, the tragic process is one
with a worsening "crisis of Degree," one with the plague itself, in other
words. The tragic conflict and the plague are in the same metaphoric re-
lationship as in Dostoevsky or Shakespeare, except, of course, that this
metaphoric character is less explicit, as if the task of uncovering the ele-
ment of violence hidden behind the mythical plague were initiated by
Sophocles but less advanced than in the work of the two other writers.
In the light of our analyses, the tragic conflict of Oedipus the King

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842 RENE GIRARD

amounts to nothing more and nothing less than a search for a scapegoat,
triggered by the oracle, which says, "a murderer is in your midst; get rid
of him and you will be rid of the plague." How could a single individ-
ual, even the worst offender, be responsible for whatever social catastro-
phe may be at stake in the "plague"? Within the confines of the myth,
however, not only is the significance of the strange medicine unques-
tioned, but its efficacy is actually verified. We must assume that the pre-
scription works, that the discovery of the "culprit" cures the plague. The
reciprocal witch hunt brings the crisis to a climax; then, the focusing of
the guilt on Oedipus and his expulsion constitute a genuine resolution.
The whole process is comparable to a "cathartic" purge.
A fascinating possibility arises. Even though the reasons adduced are
quite mythical, the reality of the cure may be a fact. Behind the entire
myth there could be a real crisis, concluded by the collective expulsion or
death of a victim. In this case the oracle would be truthful in part. What
is true is not that there is, as a "real culprit," a man who bears alone the
entire responsibility for the plague. Such a man cannot exist, of course.
The oracle is really talking about a victim who is "right," in the sense
that against and around that victim everyone can unite. Oedipus may well
be the right scapegoat in the sense that the accusation against him really
"sticks" and restores the unity of the community. This restoration is tan-
tamount to a "cure" if, as Sophocles himself appears to suggest, the
plague is the same crisis as in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, a crisis of mi-
metic violence. The polarization of all fascination and hatred on a single
victim leaves none for the other doubles and must automatically bring
about their reconciliation.
How can the required unanimity be achieved if no one among the po-
tential victims is likely to be either much more or much less guilty than
anyone else? How can the mythical "guilt" become solidly fixed on a
more or less random victim? The mimetic doubles are concretely alike;
there is no difference between them. This means that at any time even
the smallest incident, the most insignificant clue, can trigger a mimetic
transfer against any double whatsoever. The positive effect of such a
transfer, the end of the crisis, must necessarily be interpreted as a confir-
mation of the "oracle," as absolute proof that the "real culprit" has been
identified. A faultless relationship of cause and effect appears to have
been established.
The process just described implies that the random victim must be per-
ceived as a "real culprit," missing before and now identified and pun-
ished. This random victim, in other words, will never be perceived as
random; the "cure" would not be operative if its beneficiaries realized
the randomness of the victim's selection.

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 843

All this goes without saying, and yet it needs very much to be said be-
cause the unperceived consequences of these facts may be decisive for the
myth as a whole. We just said that the entire responsibility for the crisis
is collectively transferred upon the scapegoat. This transfer will not ap-
pear as such, of course. Instead of the truth, we will have the "crimes" of
Oedipus, the "parricide and the incest" that are supposed to "contami-
nate" the entire city. These two crimes obviously signify the dissolving
of even the most elemental cultural differences, those between father,
mother, and child. The parricide and the incest represent the quintes-
sence of the whole crisis, its most logical crystallization in the context of
a scapegoating project, that is, of an attempt to make that crisis look like
the responsibility of a single individual. Even today, these and similar ac-
cusations come to the fore when a pogrom is in the making, when a
lynching mob goes on a rampage. The ideas of parricide, incest, and also
infanticide always crop up when cultural cohesion is threatened, when a
society is in danger of disintegration. The nature of the crimes attributed
to Oedipus should be enough to make us suspect that we are dealing with
some kind of lynching process. And this suspicion has been present for
many years; it has prompted many investigations. Unfortunately, schol-
ars keep looking for a possible link that could be historically documented
between the Oedipus myth and some particular scapegoat-type ritual.
The results have been disappointing. The question of relating myth to
ritual or ritual to myth is a circle that can be broken here by asking a
more decisive question about the possible origin of both in a spontaneous
lynching process that must necessarily remain invisible because of its very
efficacy.
If the collective transfer is really effective, the victim will never appear
as an explicit scapegoat, as an innocent destroyed by the blind passion of
the crowd. This victim will pass for a real criminal, for the one guilty ex-
ception in a community now emptied of its violence. Oedipus is a scape-
goat in the fullest sense because he is never designated as such. For the
genuine recollection of the crisis, which allows for no differentiation
whatever between all the doubles^ the two differentiated themes of the
myth are substituted. The original elements are all there, but rearranged
and transfigured in such a way as to destroy the reciprocity of the crisis
and polarize all its violence on the wretched scapegoat, leaving every-
body else a passive victim of that vague and undefined scourge called
"the plague." A lynching viewed from the perspective of the lynchers
will never become explicit as such. In order to apprehend the truth, we
must carry out a radical critique that will see the mythical themes as sys-
, tematic distortion of the former crisis.
The spontaneous scapegoat process now appears as the generative

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844 RENE GIRARD

process of myth, the true raison d'être of its themes and notably of the
plague, which must be viewed, I believe, as a mask for the crisis leading
to the scapegoat process, not only in the Oedipus myth but in countless
other myths of the entire world.
Oedipus, it will be said, is a religious hero as well as a villain. This is
true, and it is no objection - far from it - to the genesis just outlined.
The difference between the founding process of myth and the scapegoat
processes we may know of and understand is that the first, being the more
powerful, literally goes full circle from unanimous hatred to unanimous
worship. The juxtaposition of the one and the other is intelligible. If
the polarization of the crisis upon a single victim really effects a cure, this
victim's guilt is confirmed, but his role as a savior is no less evident. That
is why Oedipus and behind him the more remote but parallel figure of
the god Apollo appear both as bringers of the plague and as benefactors.
This is true of all primitive gods and other sacred figures associated with
the mythical "plague/' They are both the accursed divinities that curse
with the plague and the blessed ones that heal. This duality, it must be
noted, is present in all primitive forms of the "sacred."
I have already suggested that the present hypothesis bears also on rit-
ual, that a sacrificial action or immolation is generally found, frequently
interpreted as the reenactment of a divine murder supposed to be the de-
cisive event in the foundation of the culture. In the preparatory stages of
a ritual immolation, symmetrically arranged antagonists hold warlike
dances or real and simulated battles. Familial and social hierarchies are
reversed or suppressed. These and many other features may be interpret-
ed as traces of some "crisis of degree" climaxed by its habitual resolution,
the collective transfer on a single victim. We may suppose that ritual tries
to reenact this entire process in order to recapture the unifying effect
mentioned earlier. There are sound reasons to believe that this purpose is
generally achieved. Being still unable to perceive the threat that internal
violence constitutes for primitive society, we cannot recognize in ritual a
relatively effective protection against that threat.
If the preceding and obviously too brief remarks are not unfounded,2
the conjunction between the plague and sacrificial ritual, first in primi-
tive religion and later in literature, becomes fully intelligible. Primitive,
societies constantly resort to ritual against anything they call the plague.
That may comprise very diverse threats ranging from the crisis of mi-
metic violence and less acute forms of internal tensions and aggressions
to purely exterior threats that have nothing to do with reciprocal vio-

2 Fot a more complete exposition of the collective transfer and single victim
process as mythical genesis, see my La Violence et le sacré (Paris, 1972).

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 845

lence, including, of course, real pathological epidemics, even the plague

in the modern scientific sense.

Ritual tries to reproduce a process that has proved effective against one
kind of "plague," the most terrible kind, the epidemic of reciprocal vio-
lence that never becomes explicit as such. It is my opinion that the scape-
goat process, through religious myths, notably the myths of the plague,
plays a major role in disguising and minimizing the danger its own po-
tential for internal violence constitutes for a primitive community. This
minimization must be viewed in turn as an integral part of the protection
that myth and ritual provide against this same violence.
Certain lines of Sophocles and Euripides make it hard to believe that
these writers did not have an intuition of collective mechanisms behind
the myths they adapted, an intuition that is still incomplete, perhaps, but
far superior to ours. These mechanisms are still well attested historically.
In the Middle Ages, for instance, social catastrophes, notably the great
plague epidemics, usually triggered persecutions against the Jews. Even
though they have become less productive in terms of mythical lore, these
mechanisms, quite obviously, are far from extinct.

We are now in a position to understand why the mythical plague is

never present alone. It is part of a thematic cluster that includes various
forms of undifferentiation and transgression, the mimetic doubles, and a
sacrificial theme that may take the form of a scapegoat process. Earlier,
I said that the plague, as a literary theme, is still alive today, in a world
less and less threatened by real bacterial epidemics. This fact looks less
surprising now, as we come to realize that the properly medical aspects
of the plague never were essential; in themselves, they always played a
minor role, serving mostly as a disguise for an even more terrible threat
that no science has ever been able to conquer. The threat is still very
much with us, and it would be a mistake to consider the presence of the
plague in our literature as a matter of formal routine, as an example of a
tradition that persists even though its object has vanished.
Not only the plague but the entire thematic cluster is alive, and its
relevance to our current psychosociological predicament becomes evident
as soon as specific examples are produced. The continued vitality of all
our themes must correspond to a continued need to disguise as well as
to suggest - the one and the other in varying degrees - a certain perva-
sive violence in our relationships.
I will give three examples, each so different from the other two and
from the texts already mentioned, at least in terms of traditional literary
values, that direct literary influence cannot account for the presence of
the pattern. The first is Artaud's already mentioned Le Théâtre et la peste.

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846 RENE GIRARD

Much of this text is devoted to a strange account of the medical and so-
cial effects not of a specific outbreak but of the plague in general. In a
long pseudoclinical disquisition, Artaud rejects all attempts at making
the transmission of the disease a scientifically determined phenomenon;
he interprets the physiological process as a dissolution of organs, which
may be a kind of melting away, a liquefaction of the body or on the con-
trary a desiccation and a pulverization. This loss of organic differentia-
tion is medically mythical but esthetically powerful because it patterns
the pathological symptoms on the breakdown of culture, producing an
overwhelming impression of disintegration. This apocalyptic vision is
quite close to Dostoevsky's dream of the plague, but this time, in keeping
with the destructive ethos of contemporary art, it is a cause for fierce
jubilation.
At first glance it seems that, in spite of its intensity, the process of un-
differentiation does not culminate in the doubles. The doubles are there,
though - less explicit, to be sure, than in Dostoevsky and Shakespeare
but unmistakable nevertheless - notably in those passages that hint at a
purely spiritual contamination, analogous to the mimetic hubris of our
first two examples.

Other victims, without bubos, delirium, pain, or rash, examine themselves

proudly in the mirror, in splendid health as they think and then fall dead with
their shaving mugs in their hand, full of scorn for other victims.

The proud self-examination is hubristic pride, reaching out for supreme

mastery, even over the plague, immediately defeated, massively contra-
dicted by the instant arrival of the disease. Still apparently intact, the vic-
tim dies, "full of scorn for the other victims." An unquenchable thirst to
distinguish himself turns the apparently healthy man into a double of all
other victims, his partners in violence and death. The mirror, every-
where, is an attribute of the doubles.
The sacrificial theme is there too: first, as earlier indicated, in the re-
juvenation that the plague and its modern counterpart, the theater, are
supposed to bring to a decadent world, but also in more subtle touches
that may be limited, at least in one case, to one single word. At one point
the author imagines some kind of surgical dissection performed on the
victims not with just any knife but with a knife that, for no immediately
apparent reason, is described as being made of obsidian. Anthropologi-
cal literature knows of knives made of this material and used on human
flesh, the Aztec sacrificial knives. In the context of our analyses, it is not
excessive to suppose, perhaps, -that the couteau d'obsidienne, in conjunc-
tion with the victims of the plague, was prompted by a reminiscence of
human sacrifice.

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 847

The second example is the film work of Ingmar Bergman in which the
plague, the dissolving of differences, the mimetic doubles, and the sacri-
ficial scapegoat are recurrent themes. If one particular film should be
mentioned in connection with the doubles, it is certainly Persona. Two
characters only are constantly present, a nurse and her patient, a totally
silent actress. The entire work is dedicated to the mimetic relationship of
these two, never a communion, really, but the same violent dissolving of
differences as elsewhere. Another film, Shame, makes the conjunction of
the mimetic doubles and of a plaguelike contamination quite manifest. A
senseless civil war is being fought between two perfectly undistinguish-
able parties. This absurd struggle of rival doubles gradually spreads into
a general infection, a literal ocean of putrefaction. Here, as in many con-
temporary works, the old mythical plague literally merges with such
positive threats as radioactive fall-out and industrial pollution, both of
which "function," of course, exactly like the plague and constitute dis-
turbingly appropriate "metaphors" of individual and social relations in a
state of extreme degradation.
One may single out The Seventh Seal as one film of Bergman in which
the interplay of all the elements in our thematic cluster is quite spectacu-
lar. The mimetic doubles are there, and Death is one of them. So is a
real medieval plague with its cortège of Flagellants. In the midst of all
this comes the brief suggestion of a mob scene, a collective transfer
against a very random and at the same time quite significant scapegoat,
an actor, a mime, the very personification of mimesis.
The third example is both literary and cinematic. It is the famous short
story by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, which was recently made into a
film by Lucchino Visconti. My own comments are based on the short
story, which remains, I believe, the more striking of the two in the pres-
ent context.3
An older and famous writer, Aschenbach, goes to Venice for a rest. As
he arrives, he notices another elderly man who clings desperately to a
group of younger people. His modish attire and the rouge on his cheeks
turn this pathetic figure into a monstrous mask of pseudo-youthfulness.
Later, the protagonist will permit a hairdresser to paint his face and dye
his hair, which makes of him the exact replica, the perfect double, of the
grotesque vision encountered at the beginning.
In the meantime, at the hotel and on the beach, the artist has come
under the spell of a Polish adolescent. The differences of age, language,
and culture, as well as its homosexual character, make this silent attach-

3 A paper on "The Plague in Death in Venice" by Ruth Ellen Perlman, a stu-

dent at SUNY/Buffalo (Spring, 1972 ' first made me aware of the short story's
relevance to the present investigation.

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848 RENE GIRARD

ment more than a mere transgression; it is really a destruction and a dis-

solution of the old man's entire life.
The sense of decay is heightened by the plague and the rumors of
plague that are abroad in the city. The sacrificial theme is present, of
course, first in the hero's dream of a primitive bacchanal during which
animals are slaughtered and, no less decisively, in his sudden death
the next morning, which seems a retribution for his surrender to the
forces of cultural disintegration. The writer has become the very embodi-
ment of the plague. He literally sides with the epidemic when he chooses
not to inform the Polish family of its presence in Venice, thus increasing
their exposure to danger. He delights in the plague, and the plague will
literally die with him since, as he dies, everybody is leaving Venice and
the drama is resolved.
In our three contemporary examples the plague and associated themes
are all present; our entire cluster is strikingly intact. It even has more
thematic consistency than in Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky. The
plague is a less transparent metaphor in Thomas Mann and Artaud than
in Crime and Punishment, Troilus and Cressida, and even Oedipus the
King, This very opacity confers to the plague a great evocative and es-
thetic power. The doubles, too, appear in a light of romantic mystery, in
contrast with the unadorned severity of the tragic rapport.
Such opacity, it must be noted, belongs to myth - distinguished, of
course, from its tragic adaptations - as well as to modern literature. If we
limited ourselves to these chronological or cultural extremes, which is
what recent investigators tend to do, the conjunction between the plague,
the doubles, and the sacrificial scapegoat would remain unintelligible.
Many specialists, of course (for instance, the psychoanalysts), have all
sorts of answers ready for us. Unfortunately, these ever-ready answers
shed no real light on the texts. As for the literary critics, they usually re-
ject not only these superficial answers - which is good - but also the
question itself - which cannot be good. In a misguided effort to protect
the integrity of literature against all possible enemies, they refuse the
open and equal dialogue between literature and anthropology they them-
selves should promote. We should not cut off literature from the vital
concerns of our age. We should not divorce esthetic enjoyment from the
power of intelligence, even from scientific investigation. We cannot sim-
ply ''enjoy" the plague and be quiet - like old Aschenbach, I suppose,
awaiting in pure esthetic bliss whatever fate may lie in store for us.
I find Shakespeare more bracing than Aschenbach. One reason is that
he does not despair of the truth. If we had not turned to him earlier, we
could not have made sense out of our thematic cluster. The brightest light
available is still there. Shakespeare does not use the plague as verbal vio-

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 The Plague in Literature and Myth 849

lence against an indifferent world. He is not interested in words as

shields or weapons in the dubious battle of individual ressentiment.
What concerns him most is the myth and the truth of his own language.
In our contemporary examples, the thematic elements of our cluster
are juxtaposed a little like colors on the flat surface of a modern paint-
ing. It takes Shakespeare to realize that these themes are not really on a
par, that they are not really even themes, and that it is a misnomer to call
them so. The plague is less than theme, structure, or symbol, since it sym-
bolizes desymbolization itself. The doubles, on the contrary, are more
than a theme; they are the unperceived reciprocity of violence among
men. They are essential to the understanding of sacrifice as a mitigation,
a displacement, a substitution, and a metaphor of this same violence. The
closer the writer gets to the fundamentals of that process, the more the
plague and other metaphors become transparent. Sacrificial values dis-
integrate, disclosing their origin in the unifying and reconciling effect of
a spontaneous scapegoat. If the scapegoat process described above is the
resolution of the crisis and the source of mythical meaning, it must also
be the end of tragedy and the restoration of Degree. Shakespeare does
not simply repeat; he reveals the entire process.
In Romeo and Juliet, for instance, it takes Shakespeare no more than
six words to suggest our entire pattern of metaphoric and real inter-
action. The famous cry of the dying Mercutio, A plague on both your
houses, is not an idle wish. It is already fulfilled in the endlessly destruc-
tive rivalry of these same two houses, Montagues and Capulets, who turn
each other into perfect doubles, thereby bringing the plague upon them-
selves. At the end of the play, the Prince equates the death of the two
lovers with the plague of their families : See what a scourge is laid upon
your hate. The two statements are really the same. Both are uttered in
extremis, as a revelation of the truth: the first by a dying victim; the sec-
ond as the last judgment of the sovereign authority, always a sacrificial
figure in Shakespeare, and a potential scapegoat.
The death of the lovers is the entire plague, in the sense that it repre-
sents the climax of the scourge, the plague finally made visible and, as a
consequence, exorcised by its very excess; the plague is both the disease
and the cure. A sacrificial death brings about the end of the crisis and the
reconciliation of the doubles. Talking to Capulet, Montague aptly calls
the victims Poor sacrifices of our enmity.
Thus, a scapegoat mechanism is clearly defined as the solution to the
tragic crisis, the catharsis inside the play that parallels the catharsis pro-
duced by that play, the catharsis twice announced and proposed to the
spectators at the very opening, in an enigmatic little prologue that con-
tains literally no other idea: Romeo and Juliet, we are told,

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850 RENE GIRARD

Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage.

The word catharsis originally refers to the purifying effect of a particular

sacrifice. Shakespeare needs no etymology to see through Aristotelian
estheticism and to reveal in the most concrete and the most dramatic
fashion that all drama is a mimetic reenactment of a scapegoat process.
In his tragedies, Shakespeare reproduces the cathartic mechanism of all
tragedy; but he underlines it so forcefully that he lays it bare, so to speak,
forcing us to ask questions that run counter to the cathartic effect, ques-
tions that would tear the entire dramatic structure asunder if they were
seriously asked.
In his comedies, Shakespeare openly derides the sacrificial pattern. In
the Pyramus and Thisbe episode of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the
play that comes immediately after Romeo and Juliet, he parodies the ca-
thartic system of this first play. He comes closer to a full revelation of
the sacrificial values hidden behind the plague and other mythical or
tragic metaphors than our contemporaries, including those like Artaud,
whose frontal attacks against sacrificial values ultimately regress into the
crudest forms of sacrifice. Contrary to what we believe, we may not be in
a position to criticize Shakespeare. He may be the one who criticizes us.
Rather than trying to judge him from above, from a necessarily superior
"modern" viewpoint, we should try to recover some major intuitions of
his that obviously escape us. We must have lost them somehow and
somewhere, unless, of course, they have yet to be grasped.

Stanford University
Stanford, California

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