Martin Amis’in “Muhammad Atta’nın Son Günleri” Adlı Eserinde Mimetik Arzu ve Günah Keçisi Mekanizmaları

Abstract

René Girard, the French sacrifice theory doyen, bases her sacrifice and scapegoat arguments on cultural and literary representations and claims an end for the sacrificial rites and scapegoating mechanism in cultures and narratives after the exposition and deciphering of the stereotypes of persecution with Christianity. However, by referring to René Girard’s sacrifice theory, this study aims to argue that one of the greatest yet also most notorious writers of English fiction, Martin Amis, who recurrently touches upon such issues in his texts as racism, sexism, wars, capitalism, and terrorism, implies a modern enactment of the mechanism of mimetic desire and scapegoating in a literary work, that is “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” which revolves around the last days of one of the terrorists of 9/11. Amis’s short fiction will be subjected to a close reading so as to argue that despite Amis’s interviews and arguments associating terrorism with Islam and the Orient, the text deconstructs Amis’s allegations against Islamism and the Oriental, and when Amis’s text is considered as a modern and multi-layered representation of mechanisms of mimetic desire and scapegoating, the violence and terrorism are revealed to be issues which cannot solely be identified with a single milieu or a group nonchalantly. Instead, it will be clearly seen that the core drive for humans has always been the will to power and to ensure authority over the other throughout the centuries, whether it be primitive tribes, or civilized groups, or modern governments and nations, and such concentrations as a nation, community, or religion further worked to give their civilized members a cause to satisfy the primitive tendency to violence and carnage surviving in their repressed collective unconscious.