256
LESLIE EPSTEIN
to a contemporary audience it is useless. Yet the doctrine that what
blackens whitens is the essence of desacralization. Only by generating
the sacred, naming and miming the sin, can it be discharged.
What is from the point of view of Israel a desacralization, an ex–
change of mana for the mundane, is, from the goat's vantage point,
a consecration, a shouldering of divinity. The goat comes to possess
the sanctity of the group and so is a threat to it, a source of recon–
tamination. It cannot be killed because it cannot be touched, and
in
any case its flesh and bones would infect the ground it fell upon. The
only thing to do with this goat, holy, dangerous, criminal, is lead it,
in
all its dubious glory, away, into the wilderness where its mana can
dissipate itself, run off harmlessly into the earth like electricity.
So
potent is its contamination that the "fit man" who takes it away must
wash his clothes and bathe his flesh before returning to his people. Thus
do men create gods so that they may remain nonentities.
Tragedy, then, contrary to everything the English anthropologists
and the drama books have taught us, is not designed to renew energy
but
to
insure its dissolution. A victim is consecrated that the group may
be profane. The hero is chosen for a certain combination of loftiness
and vulnerability, high station, perhaps, and insolence, which at one and
the same time allows him to represent the group's virtues and vices,
its wcial ideals and its inner rebelliousness. The establishment of the
hero's position as emblem of his people (a coronation ceremony, a rid–
dle solved) is equivalent to the laying on of hands in Leviticus. The
hero's ability to contact and act out the sins of the heart, the repressed
fantasies of the group, would of course be the declaration of iniquities.
It is at this point that the hero is flooded with
menos,
sudden insight,
a flash of inspiration, a superhuman power, and it is here that king
and chorus, hero and audience, part company. The community of men
fall away, their energy depleted, like a burned-out rocket; but the hero
is ignited with the sanctity of the transgressor, the criminal. He is holy,
not to be touched, not
to
be looked upon, fit for nothing but wilder–
ness. There he wanders, less
daemon
(as Lionel Abel has called him–
but the name suggests a divinity with personal control over and interest
in the affairs of men, when it is the hero's impersonality and isolation
that is crucial to his journey) than
Jinni,
one of those lonely Arabian
gods, without worshippers, a perpetual stranger. The only community
willing to accept him is the society of his ancestors, and at exile's end,
untouchable still, he does not die by any man's hand but, like Oedipus,
simply expires, used up, worn down, worn out, worn away, fading off
in a blaze of borrowed passion.
Artaud's distinction between culture and . art, a theater of cruelty,
