456
PARTISAN REVIEW
able mythological figures so far employed in Hollywood. The fool has
his own history. Mr. Polly was the type of many scape-goat-fools in the
Engli:::h novel, Rip van Winkle in the American. Both were inferior
to Chaplin on the screen. The Germans may
be
said to have created
the scapegoat leader or in other words to have formed themselves up
in a column with the goat at their head and all marched into the
desert together.
This is in fact the only method by which a scape_goat may be
employed for revolutionary purposes. To have an efficient scapegoat
makes for contentment and good behaviour. From their own point
of view, our rulers do well to encourage the proletarian adulation of
gangsters on the films, if not indeed to allow a substantial criminal
class to flourish within the social framework on the American pattern.
The members of the hostel staff will no doubt bear this in mind.
A final point of mythological interest. The human scapegoats of
the ancient world, although frequently the representation of God,
were invariably chosen for some physical peculiarity, deformity or
condition of sickness. Moreover, to give them a positive, fertilizing
function in addition to their primary task in the expulsion of evil,
they were in some communities chastised upon the genital organs 'with
squills and branches of the wild fig.' Contemporary creators of literary
scapegoats have unconsciously returned with increasing clarity to
these original types.
Especially has the criminal scapegoat tended of late towards ab–
normality. Graham Greene's simplest exemplar, the killer in
A Gun
for Sale,
has a hare-lip of which he is constantly and bitterly conscious.
In the film, in which Alan Ladd plays the part, this lip is changed
for a wrist deformed by the killer's mother with a flat-iron. Popeye
in William Faulkner's
Sanctuary
and Slim in
No Orchids for Miss
Blandish
are both impotent. Popeye avails himself of a common fer–
tility symbol, the corn-cob. The boy in
Brighton Rock
is not impo–
tent, but he experiences great difficulty. He is a creature of markedly
low physique.
The Bernanos .priests are at once
ill,
of stubborn conscience and
socially inept or marked out to be outcasts. The good ones are un–
trained, country youths whose scrupulosity tortures them very nearly
to the point of madness. There is also a peculiar fitness in the priest's
black robe.
If
we take the view that human society ought to develop in the
direction of greater individual responsibility, we shall of courie de-
