thinking ABOUT the significance (and symbolism) of hickey getting stuck Outside the carnivale tent. keywords are substitution and the abject

That is one of my favorite parts of the episode!  There’s so much information packed into what amounts on paper to a stage direction: Hickey leaves the tent.  Largely recycled commentary of mine, written out in list form, because I am lazy, and also love lists:

• If the tent is meant to be England- an archetypal, idealized England, a dream England, a simulacrum of England, ‘Home’ with a capital ‘H’- and Hickey is expelled from it, that tells us everything we need to know about Hickey’s place in Victorian English society.  Granted, both times he leaves England, or ‘England’, it’s his own fault: for reasons unknown, he has to get out of England quickly, under an assumed name; Des Voeux tartly tells Hickey off for pissing in the tent.  Des Voeux’s “You’re not in a stable” is both a connection to the abject*/animal, to ordure and lack of physical control, to beasts of burden, and to Hickey’s social class, as a laborer, a beast of burden, himself.
• The phrase “Better to have him in the tent, pissing out, than outside of the tent, pissing in” comes to mind.  Expelled from England, from English society, long before the carnival, Hickey has been outside, pissing in, sowing discord, culminating in his mutiny.  If one extends the metaphor, either poetically or unto absurdity, Hickey has been filling a boat with liquid: what is supposed to be outside, is now inside, creating a topsy-turvy world in which nothing functions according to its role, dictated by utility and by human reason.
• Yet, it’s only as an outsider that Hickey is in a position to help others, as everyone else is inside of the tent, including Dr. Stanley, who goes back into the tent for his final act, and Silna**, who wanders in, wounded and dazed, desperate for any help she can find.
• Finally, I always enjoy Hickey’s “Let a man in”.  It’s the second time, I believe, that he refers to himself in the third person, though not by name, the first being in “Go For Broke”: “Help a mate up”.  The two utterances form a kind of triptych with his final piece of self-narration: “A man called Cornelius Hickey told me…”  The first two instances I’ve characterized as vampiric scenarios.  In the first, Hickey is in a grave- but he’s not dead.  In the second, Hickey asks to be invited into England/home.  The artificial construction of his requests intrigues me; he never says ‘me’, as though he must distance himself from the fact of himself***.  You’d help a mate up.  You’d let a man in.  Whatever Hickey is, it seems, is in some way neither a mate nor a man- nor, entirely, himself****.
  

* There is it, @catilinas!

** In a way, Silna does see England, though it’s not Goodsir’s England, or not how he wishes England to be.  To Silna, it’s gaudy, artificial, loud, bright, and violent, and she nearly dies there.

*** “Je est un autre”, “I is another”.

**** Like, literally, because Cornelius Hickey is not his name, is not him.  In a sense, Hickey is always beside himself.  Hickey, the self-doppelganger.

OH YOUR MIND! this has similarities to my list but is not my list so consider:

• hickey leaves the tent so he can piss, and in doing so misses crozier’s speech. this is the sequel to hickey skipping crozier’s speech at franklin’s funeral so he could shit in gibson’s bed.* These Things Are Connected. it also means hickey misses crozier’s command “remove your masks” which is. extremely symbolic
• substitution and mimesis time: there’s lots. episode 6 is the one where i went crazy because it fits girard’s ideas about Festivals Gone Wrong so perfectly: by flirting with the chaos of the mimetic crisis you can resolve that crisis safely, but there’s always the chance of the crisis Actually Happening. carnivale is extremely mimetic bcs it has Masks (hide identity or replace it with something else), background vibes of Scurvy and Lead Poisoning (imagery of sickness and (mimetic) contagion), and the whole thing is a Substitution for england. once you see carnivale as a ritual that reenacts the mimetic crisis (which makes stanley’s self-immolation a failed sacrifice that instead of ending the crisis just pulls more members of the community into it (on fire)) then you see hickey who is a member of the community who goes outside / member of outside the community who goes outside and you’re like oh, scapegoat hours!
• BUT there are Other movements that go inside/outside/inside! the stage direction is More than hickey leaving the tent. it is crozier entering the tent, hicket leaving the tent, silna entering the tent. like a series of displacements (=substitutions). ive said before but the three of them are the trio of Getting Your Left Arm Fucked Up And Having Two Names. hickey Assembly people for a mutiny gets substituted with crozier Assembly people to march out; hickey getting stuck outside yes shows him as an outsider, but when paired with silna going Inside substitutes them so that silna becoming an insider means hickey thinks he can take her place as an outsider (-> controlling the tuunbaq).
• anyway girard has this whole thing about scapegoats who benefit a community either being people who leave and wander around for a while and then come back and help, or strangers who wander in and help and then leave. this fits! making a hole in the tent by stabbing macdonald is Literally a scapegoat relieving pressure on the mimetic crisis in the short term but maybe making it worse in the long term bcs in doing so he creates a Hole in a Boundary (-> loss of distinction -> even more mimetic crisis) and also Kills A Doctor, when doctors are the ones who prevent Contagion (of the mimetic crisis)

*he also missed franklin’s funeral for david young bcs he was doing graverobbing. are the only speeches he’s actually their for before his own lashing and then his own execution? wow

I like your list a lot, @catilinas!

• In a sense, Hickey befouls the speeches, solemn, somber occasions/shows of the captains’ authority, by being absent/desecrating at a remove.  Hickey’s presence/being is heavily associated with filth, down to the tantalizingly vague charge of “dirtiness”, but what makes him such a destabilizing influence is his being a piece that doesn’t fit, is problematic to the whole whether inside of the whole or outside of it*.
• I really like all of the content about festivals/rituals gone wrong.  Is Stanley’s death really a sacrifice?  It has sacrificial elements- does it, ever- but Stanley’s intention is… Stanley’s intention is, I think, somewhat obscure, even to Stanley.  He clearly doesn’t want to go on, and he believes that he’s sparing the men from worse suffering in the future, but there’s something, I feel, somehow apologetic about his death**.  A sacrifice is, by definition, a part of the whole given up voluntarily for the good of the other parts of the whole***.  Stanley just wants it all to be over.  Is it a sacrifice because of its imagery, gone wrong because Stanley had the wrong intentions?
• That’s a very good point about the Silna-Hickey substitution.  Who does Silna assemble, though?  Or is that apart from the Hickey-Francis-Silna parallels, something that is exclusively part of the parallel between Francis and Hickey?
• I think that Hickey saving the trapped people was destabilizing to the narrative/the metatextual reading of the narrative: Hickey does something selfless and heroic, therefore Hickey in some essential way ceases to be Hickey… then, he stabs Dr. MacDonald, and everything is back to normal.  After that point, one would be forgiven for thinking that Hickey had fully assumed his role as villain.  Hickey never loses his nuance as a character, never lapses into caricature, but he goes from being often unpleasant, often nasty, and potentially dangerous to be a full-on threat to everyone and everything around him.  He becomes “more Hickey than Hickey”.
  

* Hickey being within the world of The Terror, in a sense, excreta: one can’t hold it in because it would make one sick; once expelled, one must then figure out how to deal with something unpleasant and hazardous, and how to reconcile both its troublesome existence and the troublesome need to expel it. 
So, here we are, back at the abject.

** In a way, Stanley is almost self-scapegoating by not only partaking of the same gruesome fate he inflicts on others, but by making his death public.

*** A kind of excretory process. 
I will stop talking about that, now; I promise.