Rewriting scapegoat text: mimetic desire and the dynamics of rivalry in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and The English patient, and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs and True history of the Kelly gang

This thesis examines a new kind of literary history developed in four postmodern historical romances: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang. By foregrounding their intertexts, these novels expose acts of violence and terror directed against scapegoats, particularly those constructed as criminals, who are perceived to threaten social stability. The novels of Ondaatje and Carey transform these criminals from social transgressors to heroes, from victimizers to victims. They first reconstruct and expose the social dynamics of specific historical contexts drawn from their precursor texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Herodotus’s Histories, Great Expectations and Lorna Doone, and then create a form of communal history, which for the first time voices the suppressed narratives of the disenfranchised. The theoretical framework used in the analysis of each text and its intertextual “double” is developed through analyses of desire and imitation in space as well as time. The thesis links René Girard’s theory of rivalry and violence in mimetic desire to Julia Kristeva’s and Susan Friedman’s theories of reading at the point of intersection between a text and its precursors, newly allowing the application of Girard to the complex intertextual dynamics of the sub-genre of metahistorical romance. This approach reconfigures this sub-genre as a form of simultaneous and paratactic history. It adapts Amy Elias’s and Brian McHale’s theories of spatial tropes as literary techniques which collapse, onto one plane, or juxtapose, different historical periods, characters and events, as a means to examine the “dark areas” of history. In this process the thesis considers each modern text and its precursor to explore the role of Girard’s rivalrous doubles within and across texts in activating or interrupting cyclical violence. The historical scapegoats, given the opportunity to recognize and tell their histories in the modern texts, generate a new form of communal history, which challenges earlier depictions and celebrations of violence and the persecution of scapegoats. These new histories recoil from violence and reconstruct scapegoats through attention to the complex intersection of political and legal policies, cultural values and practices informing their previous historical representation. They allow Girard’s cycles of violence to be broken, reimagining the scapegoat not in terms of singular identifications as anarchist, spy, convict and outlaw, but as multi-faceted, able to be renewed in multiple identifications as heroic.