Writing After Girard
With the exception of Camus’s The Fall, René Girard paid little heed to literary works created after World War II. Despite this relative indifference to contemporary fiction, his cultural theory of mimetic desire, scapegoating violence, and Biblical revelation has exerted an influence on some of the world’s most prominent living novelists and playwrights. In her biography of the French thinker, Cynthia Haven shows how Girard’s ideas inform J.M. Coetzee’s early stories, which offer what she calls “a textbook description of mimetic meltdown,” and even his later novel Disgrace.
Then there’s French novelist Mathias Énard, who won the Prix Goncourt—France’s top literary prize—for his novel Compass in 2015, the year of Girard’s death. Three years before, Énard had published a noir-ish novel entitled Street of Thieves whose narrator, Lakhdar, is defined by his Girardian triangular desire:
I appreciated the alcohol for the image it gave me, of a hard, adult male, who fears neither his mother’s anger nor God’s, a character, like the ones I wanted to resemble, the Montales, the nameless detectives, the Marlowes, the private eyes and cops in noir novels.
Like some latter-day Quixote, Lakhdar occupies one corner of a metaphorical triangle. The hardboiled detectives in the books he likes, his mediators or models, influence him from the triangle’s summit; and the glass of whiskey, consumed not for pleasure but as part of a role play, occupies the triangle’s third corner as the object of desire, a means of fusing with the admired model.
Of course, many authors have written variations on Don Quixote, and without explicit testimony from Enard it would be hard to trace the mediated desire in Street of Thieves back to Girard. In this case, though, we have such testimony: “When one is a novelist,” said Énard in 2015, “necessarily [Girard’s] Deceit, Desire, and the Novel almost takes on the appearance of a creative writing manual, in the sense that one says, ‘Oh, maybe if I take this in reverse I too could write like Proust or Dostoevsky by starting from this core insight about triangular desire.’ That’s the first reaction.”
Coetzee and Énard are not alone. Milan Kundera has cited Deceit, Desire, and the Novel with enthusiasm in his essays, calling it “the best book I have ever read on the art of the novel.” In The Possessed, novelist and critic Elif Batuman has written about taking a class at Stanford with Girard; Christopher Shinn, a contemporary playwright whose recent work was written with Girard in mind, has taught mimetic theory to his creative writing students at the New School; more recently still, A. Natasha Joukovsky has touted Girard’s ideas as the theoretical corrollary to her 2021 novel The Portrait of a Mirror.
Girard, then, is not only an academic theorist but a veritable agent of culture who has shaped the thinking of writers around the world, both by offering an inspired defense of literary truth and by uncovering a half-buried anthropological constant in some of the greatest titles in the canon, from Don Quixote to The Brothers Karamazov. Indeed, in the introduction to their edited volume on Girard and literary criticism, Pierpaolo Antonello and Heather Webb have said there “would be an entire monograph to be written on Girard’s influence on contemporary authors.”
Where there is influence, however, there is also the potential for anxiety. Consider Kundera’s statement to Girard on French radio in 1989:
There is a short story that I would not have been able to write if I had read your book on the novel beforehand, because you speak of a desire that is always inspired by the desire of someone else. I wrote a story that is called “Doctor Havel Twenty Years After” in which there is a great womanizer who is admired by a young acolyte and he so depends on the judgment of his model that he is capable of being only with the women that the latter recommends to him. […] So I said to myself, it’s almost the caricature—by the way, I like this short story—of what you wrote. So if I had read your book I would have been blocked. I would have said to myself, “Now you are making an illustration of what René Girard wrote.”
Where Enard hoped that by illustrating the concepts in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel he could write a great work of literature, Kundera could imagine Girard’s theory casting a paralyzing shadow over his creative efforts. In both cases, however, a relationship of subservience emerges, with theory at the podium and literature dutifully taking notes.
Of course, there is nothing unprecedented about writers borrowing from philosophers and theologians. We think no less of Dante’s Commedia for expressing the ideas of Aquinas (the poem has been called “the Summa in verse”); Proust’s debt to Bergson does not diminish the achievement of In Search of Lost Time; and Walker Percy’s admiration for Pascal and Kierkegaard enriches his novels.
But the notion of mimetic desire has an unusual status because it was itself gleaned from literary masterpieces, where in Girard’s view it acts as the lowest common denominator of creative genius. Mimetic theory not only belongs to the same artistic space as a work of fiction, but also claims conceptual mastery over that space. And just as in Girard’s framework the model of desire soon becomes an obstacle when the subject reaches for what the model possesses, so too in the creative process the insights in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel can serve fiction writers as a model of what great literature looks like, only to become an obstacle when achieving the goal simply reinforces the theory’s overpowering authority. “If novels were really about what [Girard] said they were about,” Elif Batuman writes, “then their production should cease.”
When Girard wrote Deceit, Desire, and the Novel various brands of formalist criticism dominated literary studies. Breaking with academic consensus, his book affirms the primacy of content, dissolving differences among writers. For him, great literature’s raison d’être is the prophetic revelation of mimetic desire and scapegoating. Shakespeare and Proust wrote in different eras and in different genres, but both authors point us back to Christianity by showing the inevitability of human mediation and the hell of mimetic rivalry. In the process, these and other authors—assuming we manage to understand them as Girard believes we should—deprive us of our individual autonomy and force us to acknowledge our scapegoats, destroying myths both ancient and modern.
For Girard, then, great works of literature disrupt the scholarly and literary status quo by disclosing—partially and imperfectly—deeply disturbing truths about human nature and culture. To distill mimetic desire and scapegoating from literary masterpieces is thus to supercharge literature’s prophetic function by bringing these incompletely articulated ideas fully into the open. By the same token, to inject this explicit knowledge back into a literary form would be tantamount to a regression, a return to sacrificial ritual and catharsis-based aesthetics. In other words, Kundera’s sense of having experienced a brush with terminal writer’s block, like Batuman’s grad school frustrations, gets at something essential about Girard’s theoretical project, which, if we accept that the purpose of literature is revelation, effectively supersedes traditional narrative.
Once, at a seminar at Stanford, I reminded Girard what Kundera had said to him on the radio about narrowly escaping writer’s block. By then in his eighties, the French thinker laughed: “Yes, the mimetic theory exists to prevent people from writing novels.” His remark was an offhand witticism. And yet it squares with his on-the-record pronouncements. In a 1993 interview with Richard Golsan, Girard affirms that the novel died with Virginia Woolf. He sees her modernist masterpiece The Waves (1931) as pushing the revelation of mimetic desire to its logical endpoint. “The Waves,” he says, “is the ultimate and supreme novel, a novel that puts an end to the genre of the novel…”
He had already argued in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978) that the mimetic phenomenon is by now too obvious to need further literary description:
There are better things to do at this point than endlessly amuse ourselves with paradoxes to which the great writers have already committed every resource in the domain of literature. The shimmer and play of mimesis are in themselves uninteresting. The only interesting task is to integrate all of this into a rational framework and transform it into real knowledge.
Leonid Pasternak The Passion of Creation
It’s high time, in other words, for the artists to hand off the baton to the systematizers. By this measure, Girard’s own theory would carry on where Proust and Shakespeare left off. And indeed, in the English translation of 1961’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Girard describes his project as “the continuation of literature.”
How, then, should fiction writers approach the mimetic insight? Should a warning label be affixed to Deceit, Desire, and the Novel to keep unsuspecting novelists from reading a work liable to place them in a bind? Or is the obstacle illusory, the result of a misunderstanding about the relationship between theory and literature? In part two of this article, I will lay out some of the “solutions” that I see Batuman, Enard, Shinn, and Kundera offering in their works of fiction.
Trevor Cribben Merrill is the author of Minor Indignities (Wiseblood Books).