It Does Not Give Answers: On Caren Beilin's "Revenge of the Scapegoat"

Caren Beilin | Revenge of the Scapegoat | Dorothy, a publishing project | 2022 | 176 Pages

Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat is a book about desire, community, and family—but mostly it is story about pain and what we do with it. The novel, if it can be called that, focuses on making invisible anguish visible. It speaks to the psychic ails of childhood and the chronic suffering of bodies. An autofictional narrative centers Iris, (later Vivitrix Marigold), a woman who is chronically ill, in a wreck of a marriage, working an exhausting and unfulfilling job, living in a house that is the embodiment of her deceased mother's failed attempt to create a new life. She is possessed by an inescapable desire to “make use of every part” of the devastating letters her father has just sent her.

Her father’s letters contain strange ultimatums and demand love from a child made scapegoat to the failures of a dysfunctional family. Their reminder of the role she was forced to inhabit as a youth throws the 36-year-old Iris into a spiral of physical and mental pain. Shirking the advice of almost everyone in her life to destroy the letters, she instead embarks on an absurd journey at their behest. Fresh anger propels her. She attempts to make something new of the power these letters possess. The process leads her to new encounters with the very meaning of family, ego, survival, and the human propensity to narrativize our lives in order to make sense of our selves and those around us.

Within this so-called narrative, Beilin’s circuitous and at times unhinged dialogue implores the reader to consider what a community, what a family even is; what contemporary society, conversation, and writing are. The absurdity of these fictions wraps fluidly around real-life exchanges and theoretical discussion. The autofictional novel opens with direct nonfictional transcripts of conversations Beilin is having with her friend Ray, where they discuss being the family scapegoat, a position they both held as children. The purpose of the scapegoat, Iris and Ray theorize, is to be tortured in order to keep the family whole:

I was my family’s scapegoat. There was hatred I was meant to hold in the place of a loved self. The letters included in the package delivered to me last July were some of the finest proof of that anyone has ever seen.

Iris needs to escape from the realities of her life: an absentee husband in alcohol recovery who micro-doses heroin in order to stay “sober;” her students who are capable of writing brilliantly but only in emails stating why they cannot or will not do what she has asked them to do for class; her precarious occupation as an adjunct writing professor. 

I think they knew what their literary power was when they wrote me these sometimes problematic emails, considering I was this part-time woman they were dumping all of this No energy onto as if I were their single oppressor. Maybe in the superlative arc of the universe I was their most approachable oppressor, that’s fair, but the best writing for anyone is an accident or at least it feels like a big oblong coincidence.

Iris knows what it is to be an artist in the world, which in her case is mostly a pain in the feet. Encapsulating the experience of abject alienation and pain with characteristic dark wit and humor, Beilin renders Iris’s two feet as personifications of Bouvard and Pécuchet, characters from a Flaubert novel who spend their days griping and reminding her with every step of their excruciating physical presence. She trades the house her ailing mother left her for Ray’s ailing Subaru with more than 700,00 miles on it. The engine is a smoking french woman curled up in bed. “A smoking woman looks like a person deciding on something, but what is it? What is your decision? TELL ME.” Iris demands a response from her femme fatale of a car. It dies on the side of a country road. She abandons it.

Bouvard and Pécuchet are not happy, covered in cow pies and feeling worse than ever. Iris collapses from pain in a field. Unable to move, she soon finds she is also trapped under the hoof of a cow who places just enough pressure on her heart to pin her in place. After an eternity, Iris, Bouvard, and Pécuchet meet Caroline, owner of the heart-stepping cows and the mARTin—a museum open only one month a year. The cows are part of an exhibition flown in from Germany. Caroline quickly hires the chronically ill and nearly immobile Iris as a cowherd and leads her inside for a meal.

Inside Caroline’s house, Beilin’s musings wind together with beautifully tense juxtaposition. Suspended in this state of narrative instability, Revenge of the Scapegoat’s frequent monologues often exist simultaneously and interweave as if Beilin has taken each half of two separate conversations and placed them next to each other. One character might be winding deeper into social theory and existentialism while the other thinks only of food.

I’m more suggesting, Vivitrix, that there’s a simultaneity of realities working along one another. I guess that is kind of a bifurcation but it’s slipperier and weirder and more dangerous than there just being psychological preconditions that then enable this explosive act of violence—killing your family.

Says Caroline while cooking a starving Iris (now Vivitrix Marigold) French-style scrambled eggs at an excruciatingly slow pace. She continues:

It is more like that explosive unthinkable act of violence is there and is equally normative, and it has as much of a command, and we want it as much as we want the family. It’s a death drive that is in its own way productive, and it’s not just annihilating, right, it’s like constructing a sacrifice, or it’s constructing the sacrifice of itself. There is a command that comes, and you can hear a mixed music in it, and it is both ‘Have this thing’ and ‘Destroy this thing.’ And how do you be at peace with that?

Vivitrix responds with an inquiry about one of the letters her father had written her years earlier, which she now realizes Caroline had read without permission while she had been analyzing the wallpaper in the bathroom. Eventually she gets her meal, and sets about herding the cows and creating a highly secretive show for the mARTin, the reveal of which is one of two that end the novel.

Revenge of the Scapegoat isn’t roleplaying resistance, the way typical female-led dystopias allow a reader to briefly see themselves as the novel’s suffering protaganist in the midst of an allegorical liberation struggle, the reader wearing the painful shoes of a woman who resists a larger power structure. Instead, it offers literal painful shoes, satire in order to wring humor from our own absurd and oppressing lives. Humor is a way to cushion the exhaustion: of theory; of deep examination; of life as dull and painful and exuberant and inane. It does not give answers. It suggests one look inside, and gives permission to make light of the darkest moments.

Beilin’s suggested resistance is a little bit easier to act upon because its inciting pain is in the soles of feet, aching joints, family history and childhood, academia and email threads. Threads that carry off the page as if they were part of a coffee shop conversation with a friend, because they are. Revenge of the Scapegoat is experimental autofiction, conversational and theoretical. It feels like stumbling on a recording of someone else's absurd therapy session, which might be real or an art project or both—which is now stuck in your broken Subaru’s tape deck—which you won’t be able to stop listening to, even if you want to.