In an earlier post I mentioned that I had received an eagerly awaited book by Lyn Cowan called Tracking the White Rabbit: A subversive view of modern culture. I absolutely adore the book. In fact I have already put in an order for another copy so I can give it to a friend of mine—and I don’t do that often because usually one’s reading tastes are idiosyncratic and personal. But this book!

I suppose partly this is because these essays seem so familiar. Her writing style is loose and deeply metaphorical; her essays suggest that she has a “pointed” view on some things; she is happy rolling around in the shadows, with ambivalence and impermanence. Dude! I approve!

OK, so that manifestation of adoration over, here is one of the niggly, wiggly ants stirred up out of the nest by one of her essays. (The deal is that each and every essay has booted the ant nest so I expect more of these “responses” will make it to tailfeather.)

In this case I am referring to the essay “The archetype of the victim.” The purpose of the essay is to distinguish between the social (outer) and psychological (inner) aspects of the victim archetype. She does this with great success and shows how North American culture has, to a large extent, lost contact with the inner aspects—the divine sacrifice—of the victim archetype.

Once you have been stomped, this latter aspect is the way to re-establish some sense of purpose, meaning and a sense of control over the outcome of one’s inner life. One returns to a sense of  personal control by accepting the sacrifice, and thereby, accepting the vulnerability and limitations of being human. There are things that happen to us over which we have no control. When those things are really bad they constellate this inner victim, which demands attention, and we suffer, and our society suffers, if we do not give it.

I can go with much of this although I would use different metaphorical ways of thinking about the process. What niggled at me was this sentence on the second page of the essay at the end of the sixth paragraph:

And since the victim is, by definition, powerless, the primal emotion that always accompanies victimization is fear.

I’ve been the victim of a number of nasties and for the most part I would agree that fear has been a common response—along with rage. But the odd thing is that the two worst things in my life did not include fear although the sense of powerlessness was literally overwhelming.

In the one case I’ll tell you about, my infant son died only 2 days after his birth. He was born with a heart defect that could not be repaired and his natural growth processes meant that he would die, slowly, of a lack of oxygen to his brain. Once I got him back from the specialist with that news, I just held him until he died.

So there you go. Overwhelming, fall down on the floor, grief. Total powerlessness to protect my child. But not an once of fear, neither for myself nor for him. No rage either. Perhaps it is the case that I am not a victim here and so my quibble isn’t justified.  I agree that  the sense of powerlessness is the gift of victimization, one that is terrible and horrifying to bear, but one that is a glimpse of our impermanence, of the truth of our condition. But I’m not sure that pain and powerlessness are sufficient conditions for  the constellation of the victim archetype.

I think perhaps that rage and its cousin fear are also necessary. Rage and fear are almost certainly shadows of each other. That is, if you are enraged, your shadow is fear. If you are terrified, your shadow is rage. My question is whether victimization is only about being powerless as the quote suggests. I actually think that the archetype is constellated in the marriage of powerlessness and rage. When my son died, there was no rage and, therefore, no fear. So whether I can be considered a victim with regard to the death of my baby, depends upon whether the victim archetype is really about powerlessness alone, or whether it is about the pairing of powerlessness and rage.

One of the things at stake here is the realization that powerlessness need not necessarily be “storied” as enraging or terrifying. Having said that, rage and fear are natural responses. I like rage. It feels healing, clean. Yet rage assumes the possibility of justice. It demands an equalization of position, a return to a social balance. So if one’s vulnerability is forcibly enacted and made public by another person or by a human institution, our history as a social species tells us to demand justice because by doing this we can restore the power balance and help ensure our continued life within the human community.

It is also completely understandable that we should fall back on our inbuilt remedy in non-human cases. Like the times when cows were tried for murder when they killed their humans, we want to read our social system onto the world so we can redress our evident vulnerabilities. But that is fundamentally silly. We can make cows honorary humans (I wonder if the executioner and his family ate the “honorary human” after the execution), we can make up divines to enact postmortem justice, but that doesn’t make it so.  When a child is born without an aorta, there is no fault to find. There is no way to redress the balance and so fear and rage are not necessary responses. Death and grief like that just is.

So, either I am not a victim with regard to my son’s death and powerlessness is not a sufficient condition for the constellation of the victim archetype, or I am, and fear is not a necessary reaction to utter vulnerability.

I don’t know. What do you think?