Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The originary event is a crisis occasioned by the transformation of mimetically enhanced appetite into desire and deferred by the initiative of a first to substitute a sign for the attempt to appropriate the object of desire; the sign is repeated by the other participants because it attributes to this object a transcendental difference or significance that defers the possibility of its dangerous presence in the world of its desirers. The originary object of desire is no less desired for becoming sacred; on the contrary, its inaccessibility to immediate appropriation completes the originary paradigm of desire, and of the resentment that accompanies desire’s frustration. In its turning away from appropriation, the first sign expressed originary resentment at the inaccessibility of its referent; resentment is at the root of all narratives and indeed of all cultural phenomena. On this model, a story is an imagined series of events that take place in the world constituted by the originary scene (yet outside the sacred space of its ritual reproduction) in which the resentment occasioned by desire is deferred by revealing the ultimately transcendent nature of its object. Submission to the narrator is analogous to submission to the mimetic mediation of the first in the originary event, just as the desires we espouse under the narrator’s influence are analogous to the desire aroused by the originary central object.”

— Eric Gans, New Thoughts on Originary Narrative · Saturday, May 26th, 2007 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment