Interesting pronoun shifts here--almost as though Tolkien himself was unsure of quite how to properly denominate Book IV's signature creature. First is the fact that there doesn't appear to be any clear moment when we shift from calling the guy "Gollum" to "Sméagol". What's more, the two names continue to be used interchangeably, making it all the more difficult to properly track when we're referring to the ring-obsessed demon or the age-old former-hobbit hidden underneath--which of course compounds the confusion Frodo and Sam are likewise feeling about this creature.
Then of course there is just the problematic term "creature" itself--is this a man or a beast? Tolkien himself can't seem to make up his mind--Gollum/Sméagol is referred in turn as "it" and as "he/him," with little apparent rhyme or reason. Our erstwhile anti-hero is in turn dehumanized and rehumanized from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes sentence to sentence. Somehow these endless pronoun shifts have unsettled me more about this character than all of the arid wasteland of Mordor.
Dual-identities is of course the overriding them of Gollum--as Tolkien likewise makes explicitly clear, Sméagol is Frodo's mirror image, in both the sense of his opposite and his monstrous double. Has René Girard ever commented on Lord of the Rings? The famed French philosopher probably thinks such "pop" literature was beneath him, which is a shame, cause Gollum/Sméagol seems custom built for Violence and the Sacred. For the 1972 study likewise focuses upon monstrous doubles, mimetic desire for the same scarce resources (in this case, the single Ring of Power)--and of course likewise features a "Pharmakos", the Greek root of our English word Pharmacology. "Pharmakos" is loosely defined by Girard as simultaneously the poison and the cure (like the Ring that both poisons and extends life), which has absorbed all the potential for vengeance and violence of the larger community, and must become the sacrificial scapegoat cast out from society in order to short-circuit the never-ending cycle of retributive violence.
In Girard's model, the scapegoat, since it is the sacred talisman that prevents the spread of self-destructive communal violence, even eventually came to be worshipped, and at last deified, which is thus the ancient root of monarchy. Hence, Louis XVI was ironically correct to claim divine right for his kingship--which divinity he was literally fulfilling as the sacrificed Pharmakos during the Reign of Terror. The Pharmakos, then, is both what you desire and what repulses you--the monstrous double.
In one sense, the Ring is clearly the Pharmakos here--it has absorbed all violence and desire for power into itself, and consequently everyone desires it even as they fear it. It is the scapegoat that must be destroyed to short-circuit the endless cycle of violence. But Gollum is a Pharmakos, too--and as we all recall of from Return of the King, he is the one who will be killed to bring about this necessary sacrifice of the Ring. Here is where Tolkien, despite all his other vaguely-drawn characters, makes a key insight into human nature--those who repulse us do so precisely because of how much they are like us, not from how different they are. Frodo comes to recognize this as well: he sees in Gollum what he could be, indeed what he is already becoming. The tragedy of Gollum isn't that his addiction got the best of him, but rather that he succumbed for the rest of us, so we wouldn't have to. To quoth Isaiah, "There is no beauty in him that we should desire him." By his stripes we are healed.
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