Pharmakon, Pharmakos, and Aporetic Structure in Gulliver’s “Voyage to... the Houyhnhnms” James E. Gill One approach to the problem of reading Gulliver's fourth voyage which has not, as far as I am aware, been attempted is an examination of the satire in terms of scapegoating mentalities and mechanisms, and so I would like to approach Part IV of the Travels in one of those admittedly partial efforts to understand the peculiar “deferring” nature of its sym- bolism, argument, and plot by taking a cue from both deconstructionist and “sacrificial” as well as reader-response or “entrapment” critics.’ I es- pecially borrow from Jacques Derrida in “Plato's Pharmacy,” René Girard in The Scapegoat, and Andrew J. McKenna’s penetrating Violence and Dif- ference, a work which examines the parallels in the thought of Derrida and Girard. Rather than the mélange or succession of generic modes or contexts which Frederick N. Smith and others have recently studied in the Travels as decentering or “exploding” its meaning, I am concerned to deal with some of the displacements and deferrals of satiric effects in Part IV of Gulliver which may be said to entrap the reader through the devices and themes of pharmakon and pharmakos—the cure-poison and the physi- cian-scapegoat—as these relate to the symbolism of Yahoo and Houyhnhnm and as they are related to Gulliver's desire to remain in and his exile from Houyhnhnmland. I hope to show how a satiric scheme—one doubtless sup- porting a logocentric view but also self-deconstructive—employs the radical differential devices (i.e., deferring and displacing devices) of the cure/poison and of successive scapegoatings in ways that suggest but do not always con- sciously embrace deconstruction of its own procedures. The resulting struc- ture is “aporetic,” one which defers closure by suggesting an ongoing “sacrificial crisis.”* Beginning with Girard, I wish briefly to explain what I believe to be the relevant aspects of his sacrificial theory, even as elaborated or modi- fied by several of his critics and followers. The process of victimization, according to Girard, is complex and arises from complicated rivalries, including the “hidden” rivalry (either “imitative” or “emulative”)—in which model may also become obstacle—between follower and leader as182 © James E. Gill well as between equals or enemies.® It produces what Girard calls the “sacrificial crisis”: “a crisis of distinctions . . . affecting the cultural order _., a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual rela- tionships” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred 49). The victim of persecution or the scapegoat is not, according to Girard, collectively persecuted be- cause she is different—most societies, as Girard observes, tolerate variant behavior; s/he is rather persecuted because s/he threatens a society's system of differences. No matter how weak and impotent such scapegoats may appear to be, they are credited with sinister powers if in their being and/ or actions they are seen as attacking “the very foundation of cultural or- der, the family, and the hierarchical differences without which a distinc- tive social order might not exist. In the sphere of individual being and action they correspond to the global consequences of an epidemic of the plague or of any comparable intellectual disaster (such as those imagined, for example, by the opponents of evolutionary theory). It is not enough for the social bond to be loosened; it must be totally destroyed” (Girard, The Scapegoat 15) ot threatened with disaster. In actual persecutions, the victim—from society’s point of view as victimizer—possesses certain traits: he is an outsider; it is feared that he possesses sinister powers; he is in some sense physically or morally monstrous; and the victim's expul- sion rids the community of perceived dangers. But in myth and ritual the scapegoat may also be curiously innocent, may possess healing pow- ers, and may even in some sense cause a “belief in transcendental powet that is .. . double and will bring . . . both loss and health, punishment and recompense” (44). From this doubleness can arise even a belief in the curative and creative power of “generative scapegoating” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred 106), and texts which depict violent persecution may take the perspective of either the persecutors or the victims. The scapegoat, or pharmakos, combines both the capacity to endanger and, if even only ina privative way, to heal the community. ‘As Derrida observes, the “pharmakos (wizard, magician, poisoner)” is both a physician and a scapegoat. ‘The evil and the outside, the expulsion of the evil, its exclusion out of the body (and out of) the city—these are the two major senses of the character and of the ritual. . .. The ceremony of the pharmakor is thus played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace. Intra muvoslextra muros. The origin of differ- ence and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected. Beneficial insofar as he cures —and for that venerated and cared for—harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil—and for that, feared and treated with caution. Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed. The conjunction, the coincidentia oppositorum, ceaselessly undoes itself in thePharmakon, Pharmakos, and Apotetic Structure * 183 passage to decision or crisis. The expulsion cf the evil or madness restores sophrosuné (Dissemination 132-33). Now the relevance of this general scheme to satire is most interesting since satire makes many of the same claims that the “victimary hypoth- esis” makes in that it records rivalries between different positions, both punishes the monstrous and presumes to cure, and both alienates and re- stores. The term “satiric victim” is strangely double since it may refer to the entity which is attacked within satire, whether by the satirist or by agents whom the satirist attacks (the satirist may excoriate knaves who victimize fools, for example). The satiric victim is often credited with sinister powers and is seen as threatening society in fundamental ways. On the other hand the satiric victim may be risible or pitiful because he may appear to be no match for the forces arrayed against him—she may be victimized by other satiric victims. The satirist himself may be threat- ened and either cowed or driven to take desperate measures—the poet in The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, for example, at first wants only relief from the importunities of his admirers as well as enemies and from this retir- ing position is driven to diatribe. And the satirist, according to tradi- tional satiric theory, may purge himself of unhealthy emotion at the same time that he purges society of polluting attitudes and agents. Even so, by curious reversals, the satirist, like the persecutor, may incur blame—may be satirized—and the victim may in some way—by cure or even by his absence from it—contribute to the re-establishment of community. In all this there is a powerful complicity between the victim and the vic- timizer since scapegoating probably is possible because of the victimizer’s assumption of an imaginary consubstantiality with the offending party—an interpretation of the victim’s motives and beliefs in terms of desiderata and their antitypes. Victimizer and victim can achieve, in a limited sense, an understanding and sometimes even a kind of sympathy each with the other in ways which may repel either or both as well as a third party and render both culpable. Horror at real or imagined evil involves a kind of “mimetic” alienation from the self and even from one’s society. What is desired or admired can be perceived and imagined in terms of what is feared and hated, and the hatred and fear of violence-as-difference, for example, can produce violent, reactive thought and behavior. Represen- tation of the desirable through its antitypes may thus become an inher- ently and sometimes uncontrollably violent process in quite complex ways, and thus the victim “is not a property of the system . . . but the impropriety that the system seeks to ignore in order to function.” In this case the victim stands for “sacrificial, exclusionary mechanisms that are blind to their own violence, which is ever imputed to the element they expel” (McKenna 189-190).