ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter begins in the Book of Genesis when Cain kills his brother Abel. God punishes Cain with exile—describing him explicitly as a “wanderer”—and his punishment makes Cain the ancestor of cursed and desolate wanderers from the Ancient Mariner to the Flying Dutchman. Wandering as punishment takes an ironic historical twist when societies, as in the Elizabethan “poor” laws, begin to designate wandering as a crime. What remains specific about Cain’s punishment is its endlessness. God condemns Cain not only to wander but also to wander endlessly. As a mythic figure of endless wandering, he resembles—to alter Joseph Campbell’s famous image—an antihero with a thousand faces. The hero’s journey is circular: the hero leaves on an adventure, overcomes a crisis, and returns home changed. Cain’s journey is linear and open-ended: he begins in exile, undergoes continuous crises, overcomes nothing, and never returns. Cain also raises questions about how we treat contemporary wanderers, punishing them even as we defend an arbitrary, shifting national border that did not exist when Homo sapiens wandered, freely, out of Africa.
