Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
In terms of Durkheim's thesis introduced earlier, we might say that
displacement is the mechanism by which more traditional
nomos
-
cosmos
relationships migrate into secular narratives. Anyone who has ever noticed
that Western romances are typically populated by Christ figures is already
partially attuned to this notion. Such stories center around heroic figures
who are merely human rather than divine protagonists, but the quests they
undertake are nevertheless patterned after the life, death, and resurrection
of their biblical counterpart. The frontier hero of the American Western is
such a character, a mysterious figure who emerges out of the wilderness to
perform sacrificial deeds for a community that is likely to be ambivalent or
even hostile to him. Even so, he suffers death (at least symbolically) for this
community by personally facing down its greatest evil: the outlaw. When he
rises up from his near death, we find that his sacrifices have brought rebirth
to the people, but he must depart from them into the west—into this secular
narrative's displaced version of the upper world of heaven. The recognition
of such associations, according to Frye, indicates that some aspect of the bib-
lical
dianoia
, namely its theme of divine redemption, has been transferred
from one realm into another. The perfect
nomos
, the “obedience” of the Son
of God which overcomes sin, has been displaced as “liberty,” a value that
now seems to arise from the
cosmos
of America's frontier landscape and to
assure us that the
nomos
of American democracy can overcome the tempta-
tions of lawlessness.
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The secularization of biblical themes that we detect in American West-
erns indicates that, like the narratives of evolutionism, they descend from
the Enlightenment. Both are exercises of displacement in which the notion
of providence has been naturalized to denote the design of a seemingly
immanent destiny associated now with the term progress. In applying this
concept to the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, I am overstepping the reach
of Frye's theory somewhat by applying his notion of displacement to the
realm of history. But here I again take my cue from the related work of
Hayden White, who has already bridged this gap by showing that every
genuine history is also a narrative. Without a narrative form, a historical
account is without human meaning. It becomes merely a “list of events” that
has no “social center” by which to locate events “with respect to one another
and to charge them with ethical or moral significance.”
72
I believe that evolutionism is a displacement of a displacement. It is an
effort to scientize a familiar Enlightenment narrative of historical progress
which was already a displaced version of the Baconian narrative. While sev-
eral Enlightenment texts might illuminate the middle phase of this process,
