Author: staceymeeker

English Department
University of Victoria
P.O. Box 3070 STN CSC
Victoria, BC V8W 3W1
Canada
rvanoort@uvic.ca

In what sense was Shakespeare an anthropologist? Harold Bloom credits Shakespeare with having “invented” the human.(1) This may be an overstatement. Anthropologists are supposed to study humans, not invent them. Of course, when Bloom says such things he is being deliberately belligerent. He presents himself as the last romantic, the last believer in the transcendence of art. As far as Bloom is concerned, Shakespeare provided us not merely with entertainment but also with ethical models for how to live the good life—good life here meaning above all an aesthetic life. “Shakespeare,” Bloom writes, “teaches us how and what to perceive, and he also instructs us how and what to sense and then to experience as sensation.”(2) Shakespeare teaches you how to see the world aesthetically.

The flip side to Bloom’s unabashed romantic aestheticism is what Bloom calls “French Shakespeare,” or the Shakespeare of the “school of resentment.”(3) French Shakespeare is really a corollary of the romantic Shakespeare in which Bloom so fervently believes. For if Shakespeare did indeed invent the human, as Bloom claims, then presumably we can un-invent or deconstruct this invention by showing the ideological assumptions behind the idea of Shakespeare himself. This “hermeneutic of suspicion” has been the dominant mode of criticism for almost half a century. Michel Foucault argued in his 1966 Les mots et les choses that “man” is an invention of nineteenth-century anthropology.(4) The sooner we realize this, the better. It’s not clear to me exactly what we are supposed to do after we have established the fact that man is a recent invention. Bloom clearly is happy with the idea. He just disagrees about who should be credited with the invention. It is not nineteenth-century anthropology that invented man but Shakespeare. Moreover, Bloom believes that since Shakespeare’s intelligence vastly outmatches ours, we are better off accepting his version of humanity, at least for the time being. For all Bloom’s romantic bombast, there is a certain humility in his belief that Shakespeare is the definitive anthropologist. But this humility before the aesthetic master (Shakespeare) is won at the cost of anthropology itself. Bloom’s anthropological universe is a purely aesthetic one. You pay homage to the bard in the hope that some of his genius will rub off on you.

Like Bloom, René Girard believes in Shakespeare’s transcendent status among literary authors. But unlike Bloom, Girard interprets Shakespeare’s greatness in explicitly anthropological rather than purely aesthetic terms. Shakespeare is great not because he taught us how to perceive the world aesthetically, but because he discovered an otherwise nonobvious anthropological or sociological truth. If the social order is to survive, it needs to constrain the contagion of mimetic desire. So for Girard, Shakespeare is quite literally an anthropologist or sociologist. Presumably the only reason he didn’t get his PhD in anthropology or some other related theoretical discipline, such as sociology, philosophy, or critical theory, was that these fields of study didn’t exist in his day. Instead he was forced to make do with the medium he knew and loved best, which was the theatre.

The idea that Shakespeare was a keen student of human behaviour, a philosopher or anthropologist of sorts, is not new. But the more one emphasizes the idea that Shakespeare was a social theorist, the more tricky it becomes to explain the fact that he was also, quite obviously, a dramatist, an entertainer of the people. Bloom gets around this problem by making the strong romantic claim that human beings are fundamentally aesthetic creatures. Shakespeare teaches us how to perceive and feel. Hence for Bloom there is no contradiction between the two conceptions of Shakespeare. Dramatist and anthropologist are one. The two are the same because poetry defines—indeed creates—humanity. We are homo aestheticus, not homo politicus. As Bloom well knows, this stance puts him at odds with his anti-romantic contemporaries, which is precisely why Bloom’s heroes don’t go beyond the mid-twentieth-century Shakespeare critic Harold Goddard. Believers in homo aestheticus are a dying breed in the universities.

Still, at least Bloom has a tradition he can refer to, even if he is perceived as quaint and outmoded by the more advanced—postmodern—members of this tradition. In contrast, when Girard writes on Shakespeare, he appears to be writing in a vacuum. Let me quote from the introduction of his major work on Shakespeare, A Theater of Envy:

My goal in this study is to show that the more quintessentially “mimetic” a critic becomes, the more faithful to Shakespeare he remains. To most people, no doubt, this reconciliation of practical and theoretical criticism seems impossible. This book is intended to demonstrate that they are wrong. All theories are not equal in regard to Shakespeare: his creation obeys the same mimetic principles I bring to bear upon his work, and it obeys them explicitly . . . The mimetic approach solves the “problems” of many a so-called problem play. It generates new interpretations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing,Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. It reveals the dramatic unity of Shakespeare’s theater and its thematic continuity. It discloses great variations in his personal perspective, a history of his oeuvre that points to his own personal history. Above all, the mimetic approach reveals an original thinker centuries ahead of his time, more modern than any of our so-called master thinkers.(5)To the question, “Why do we need another book on Shakespeare?” Girard has a bulletproof reply: Because you’ve never seen a Shakespeare like this before.

But the persuasiveness of the reply really depends upon whether you accept the premise. Is Girard as original as he claims to be? What is to distinguish Girard’s reading of Shakespeare from, for example, Francis Fergusson’s reading of the ritual origins of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, or John Holloway’s remarks on the sacrificial origins of Shakespearean tragedy?(6) More generally, can’t we see a connection between Girard’s ideas about sacrifice and the work of James George Frazer or Émile Durkheim in the early twentieth century, both of whom were highly influential among critics of the early and mid-twentieth century? What about the ironic, late-romantic readings of Shakespeare by Wilson Knight or Harold Goddard? Finally, don’t Girard’s ideas about tragedy sound very similar to Kenneth Burke’s?

But Girard’s Theater of Envy is almost totally devoid of references to previous scholarship, and this has understandably upset Shakespeare specialists. Girard explicitly rejects the idea that he is just another “Shakespearean” humbly providing another interpretation to the ever-growing mountain of Shakespeare scholarship. “Interpretation,” Girard writes, “is not the appropriate word for what I am doing. My task is more elementary. I am reading for the first time the letter of the text that has never been read on many subjects essential to dramatic literature: desire, conflict, violence, sacrifice.”(7) Interpretation is an inadequate word for Girard because interpretation is what everybody else is doing. His task is, as he says, “more elementary.”

When Girard says his task is more elementary, one is reminded of Durkheim’s use of the word in the title of his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Girard’s other key phrase, “for the first time,” is also noteworthy. Girard is saying he is the first interpreter of Shakespeare to read him in this elementary fashion. Where others have merely interpreted Shakespeare in terms of the content of his works, Girard proposes to go beyond this content to explore the elementary anthropological conditions of the theatre itself. Girard proposes to trace literary content back to its elementary form in ritual sacrifice.

Let me briefly rehearse Girard’s argument about the elementary structure of sacrifice. Sacrifice is necessary because desire is contagious. Desire, because it is always imitated from others, tends to get out of hand. If we all imitate each other, sooner or later a crisis of “undifferentiation” occurs, when all hands reach for the same object. To constrain the contagiousness of mimetic desire, it is necessary every now and again to punish those who seem to be responsible for it. It is not necessary that these victims really are the cause of the disorder. What is absolutely necessary, however, is that they are believed to be the cause. This “mimetic” account of desire leads Girard to his famous scapegoat hypothesis of culture outlined in his 1972 book, La violence et le sacré.(8)

With this simple theory Girard explains numerous puzzling facts in Shakespeare’s plays. Consider, for example, his discussion of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Proteus and Valentine are best friends. Proteus is in love with Julia, but he is torn between staying in Verona with Julia and following his best friend to Milan. Valentine goes to Milan and falls in love with Silvia. When Proteus decides to follow him there, he also falls in love with Silvia. Girard points out that Proteus, the more mimetic of the two friends, doesn’t really have a choice. Valentine so praises Silvia that Proteus imitates his friend’s desire and falls in love with the same woman. At the end Proteus tries to rape Silvia. She is saved only by the sudden appearance of Valentine, whose main concern seems to be that he has been betrayed by his best friend: “Oh, time most accurst, / ‘Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!” (5.4.71–2). Proteus, embarrassed by his poor behaviour, begs forgiveness of his friend: “My shame and guilt confounds me. / Forgive me Valentine” (5.4.73–4).(9) In a gesture that upsets audiences and critics alike, Valentine responds by offering Proteus the woman he (Proteus) has just attempted to rape: “And, that my love may appear plain and free, / All that was mine in Silvia I give thee” (5.4.82–3). Girard explains this apparently despicable action as a logical consequence of mimetic desire. Valentine feels guilty for having encouraged Proteus to desire Silvia in the first place. He realizes that he is partly responsible for what his friend has done. “The only peaceful solution,” Girard says, “is to let the rival have the disputed object.”(10) Girard reads this moment as a classic mimetic double bind. To remain friends, Proteus and Valentine must give up their rivalry for the same object. Valentine learns this more quickly than Proteus, which is why he is the first to give up Silvia. The important point, Girard says, is not that Valentine abandons Silvia to a would-be rapist, but that he abandons the rivalry of mimetic desire. By giving up the object, he gives up the rivalry. Luckily this spirit of renunciation is catching. Proteus refuses to accept Silvia. Instead he returns to the girl he originally loved, Julia. The play ends happily with Valentine marrying Silvia, and Proteus marrying Julia.

Girard’s book is full of examples like this. Often the readings are quite brilliant. Highlights for me include his reading of The Winter’s Tale, especially the final act in which Girard describes Leontes as a man tempted by the sight of Florizel and Perdita holding hands just as Polixenes and Hermione had sixteen years earlier. Will Leontes be able to withstand this second test of mimetic desire? Happily, sixteen years of repentance allow him to triumph over the temptation. He agrees to be a friend to Florizel without also falling in love with Florizel’s fiancée, the beautiful Perdita, who is the mirror image of her mother, Hermione, the woman whom Leontes believes he has killed in a fit of jealous rage. As Girard says, “The entire past seems resurrected.”(11) But this time there is a difference. Leontes does not make the same mistake the second time. Instead of treating Florizel as a rival, he treats him as a friend. The key lines for Girard occur when Leontes says to Florizel, “Your honor not o’erthrown by your desires, / I am friend to them and you” (5.1.230–1). Leontes has mastered his desire, and this is why he can be a friend to Florizel. Unlike his earlier self, or the Proteus of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Leontes has renounced the object of mimetic desire.

I could easily cite more examples of Girard’s reading of Shakespeare. But rather than simply repeat what Girard has said, I want to return to the question I began with. How does Girard justify his “mimetic” approach to Shakespeare? We have already seen that Girard claims that he is not simply offering another interpretation of Shakespeare. But if that is the case, then he can’t justify himself by citing the self-evident plausibility of his reading of Shakespeare, because that would be to concede precisely what he finds objectionable: that is, the assumption that there is no way to go beyond the aesthetic.

For many critics, of course, criticism is criticism of aesthetic texts, and that’s the end of the matter. Critics differ on how much latitude they’re willing to give to this idea of textuality. Bloom is a traditionalist because he restricts the text to Shakespeare, but many critics are willing to spread the wealth around a bit more. For this reason, I think it is wrong to read the new historicism as antithetical to aesthetic formalism. On the contrary, the new historicism is an attempt to expand the categories of aesthetic criticism beyond the canonical work to the surrounding cultural context. I think this is quite obvious, for instance, in the case of Stephen Greenblatt.(12)

Like the new historicists, Girard also claims that he is new. Implicit in this claim of newness is the sense that the aesthetic tradition has worn itself out and therefore needs renewing. Bloom’s representation of contemporary cultural criticism as an exercise in resentment may be a caricature, but it has the virtue of identifying our general disenchantment with the aesthetic. Bloom compensates for this disenchantment by raising his voice and plugging his ears. He imagines himself transcending his contemporaries to take his rightful place in a tradition of criticism that stretches from Johnson and Hazlitt to Bradley, Wilson Knight, and Harold Goddard. Girard’s claim to newness, however, is to present himself neither as the last romantic nor as a certified member of the disenchanted postmodern vanguard. Rather, his claim is that he is transcending the aesthetic tradition altogether. Shakespeare is great because he sees exactly what Girard sees: the futility of using art to conquer mimetic desire.

This conception of the aesthetic leads to a curious paradox. On the one hand, Shakespeare is a great dramatist who uncovers the mimetic structure of desire. On the other, he is a poor theorist because as a dramatist he is not at liberty to explain his theory in the straightforward logical fashion of a philosopher or anthropologist. Philosophers are not known for their capacity to earn a living by their writing alone. People are understandably unwilling to part with their hard-earned cash just to hear a philosopher lecture about the truth of his theory. Shakespeare’s solution to this dilemma, Girard says, was to be fiendishly clever. Knowing that merely stating the principles of mimetic desire in sober, logical fashion is unlikely to satisfy the crowds, who are expecting something with a bit more gore, sensation, and slapstick, Shakespeare disguised the theory by cloaking it in good old-fashioned tragedy and comedy. In other words, he wrote two plays in one. The first version of the play was for the regular audience, who were looking for pure entertainment. The second, ironic version was for the philosophers, hoping for something more profound.

In principle there is nothing wrong with this “two-audience” theory to describe Shakespeare’s method. You can strive to entertain everyone all the time, but if you wish to keep the attention of the more refined you will have to go beyond mere slapstick and gore. What is problematic in Girard’s use of the two-audience theory, however, is his apocalyptic application of it to modernity. Consider, for example, this remark from his discussion of Hamlet. After commenting that Hamlet is caught in the double bind between revenge and no revenge, Girard goes on to generalize Hamlet’s condition to all modernity:

In Hamlet, the very absence of a case against revenge becomes a powerful intimation of what the modern world is really about. Even at those later stages in our culture when physical revenge and blood feuds completely disappeared or were limited to such marginal milieux as the underworld, it would seem that no revenge play, not even a play of reluctant revenge, could strike a really deep chord in the modern psyche. In reality the question is never entirely settled and the strange void at the center of Hamlet becomes a symbolic expression of the Western and modern malaise, no less powerful than the most brilliant attempts to define the problem, such as Dostoyevsky’s underground revenge. Our “symptoms” always resemble that unnameable paralysis of will, that ineffable corruption of the spirit that affect[s] not only Hamlet, but the other characters as well. The devious ways of these characters, the bizarre plots they hatch, their passion for watching without being watched, their propensity to voyeurism and spying, the general disease of human relations make a good deal of sense as a description of an undifferentiated no man’s land between revenge and no revenge in which we are still living.(13)In his reading of Shakespeare, Girard remains blind to a key aspect of modernity: the capacity of its secular institutions to absorb resentment more effectively than its ritual precursors, including its precursors in Christian ritual. Girard tends to read modernity in a rather bleak either-or fashion. Either we must absorb the Christian lesson of forgiveness, or we must perish in a malaise of bad faith as we become increasingly disenchanted with the sacrificial institutions we no longer believe in but continue to use. The upshot is that the specifically aesthetic incarnations of modernity, in their various neoclassical, romantic, modernist, and postmodern guises, all get collapsed into one narrative of Christian demythologization.

Another way of putting this is to say that Girard subordinates his reading of literature to his reading of religion; in particular, to his reading of Christianity. The reason he can ignore the difference between classical, neoclassical, romantic, modernist, and postmodernist aesthetics is that next to Christianity, the difference between these aesthetic periods appears negligible. For Girard, the really significant difference, the one that trumps all others, is the difference between primitive religion and Judeo-Christianity. The role of literature in understanding this fundamental difference is at best ambivalent. Consider Girard’s explanation of Shakespeare’s turn to romance towards the end of the playwright’s career. These last plays, especially The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, are (Girard says) resolutely self-undermining. The Tempest is an allegory of Shakespeare’s career, beginning with Caliban who represents the monstrosity of mimetic desire, which Shakespeare had exploited to satisfy the audience’s relentless appetite for mimetic violence. When Prospero breaks his staff and promises to leave off magic for good, this is Shakespeare’s way of saying, “Enough already!” Tired of the mimetic games of the dramatist, Shakespeare announces his retirement. Presumably Shakespeare had learned his lesson; in particular, the lesson of the Gospels, in which forgiveness and love triumph over the violence and rivalry of mimetic desire. For Shakespeare, to continue to write drama would be merely bad faith.

I said just now that Girard doesn’t really care about the difference between the various periods of literature because these seem insignificant when compared to the more fundamental anthropological problem of the origin of literature in sacrificial ritual. I think that the two-audience theory can help us unpack this problem. The theatre affords excellent opportunities for words to be supported by their actual flesh-and-blood contexts. This fact should not be underestimated. Despite what many philosophers believe, or used to believe, language is not primarily a means for communicating facts about the world. It is above all a means for producing what psychologists call “joint attention.”(14) The most elementary form of language, the ostensive, is a pointing gesture. But what is worth pointing at? Girard believes it is the scapegoat, the first cultural and historical object of joint attention. But paradoxically he also insists that this form of attention is nonsymbolic. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard writes, “I think that even the most elementary form of the victimage mechanism, prior to the emergence of the sign, should be seen as an exceptionally powerful means of creating a new degree of attention, the first non-instinctual attention.”(15)

Here are the essential ingredients of sacrifice, all packed into a single primal scene. Again Girard stresses that he is looking at the most “elementary form” of culture, the very first moment of “non-instinctual attention.” But there is a problem. The scapegoaters are both conscious and unconscious of what they are doing. They are conscious in the sense that this is a new moment of attention in which instinct has been superseded by something else, by a new type of attention that is therefore by definition the very first of its kind, unique in all human history. But they are also unconscious in the sense that this new type of attention is only a very minimal form of awareness. Girard really wants to say that they are in a state of semi-consciousness, a sort of liminal state between waking and sleeping where one is not really sure what one is doing. Perhaps noticing this ambivalence, Girard’s interlocutor, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, asks a very good question: “Would this already be a sacred victim?” Girard responds:

To the extent that the new type of attention is awakened, the victim will be imbued with the emotions provoked by the crisis and its resolution. The powerful experience crystallizes around the victim. As weak as it might be, the “consciousness” the participants have of the victim is linked structurally to the prodigious effects produced by its passage from life to death, by the spectacular and liberating reversal that has occurred at that instant. The double transference will determine the only possible meaning to take shape under the circumstances, and this will constitute the sacred and confer total responsibility for the event on the victim. It is necessary to conceive of stages, however, which were perhaps the longest in all human history, in which the signifying effects have still not truly taken shape. One would have to answer your question by saying that once the victim has appeared, however dimly, the process leading toward the sacred has begun, although concepts and representations are not yet part of it.There is no need to assume that the mechanism of awakening attention works right away; one can imagine that for a considerable period it produced nothing at all, or next to nothing. Nonetheless, even the most rudimentary signifying effects result from the necessity of controlling excessive mimesis; as soon as we grant that these effects can be in the slightest degree cumulative, we will have recognized them as forerunners of human culture.(16)

I don’t think Girard has adequately answered Oughourlian’s question. The key point is not the amount of violence in the scene, nor the tremendous contrast between violence and peace that Girard says the scene produces. Girard assumes that the sheer violence of the mimetic crisis is sufficient to generate an experience of the sacred. By bombarding your perceptual field with enough violence, you will eventually be compelled to see the sacred. But violence in itself is nothing new. On the contrary, nature is full of it. What is key is rather the representation of the violence and, more precisely, the collective form of attention that Girard says the violence leads to. For if the victim truly is to be represented as sacred, then this is already to say that the victim is an object of a collective attention, which is irreducible to the kind of indexical associations of purely individual perceptual experience.(17) Collective attention—symbolic representation—cannot originate unconsciously. On the contrary, the function it performs is by definition a conscious one—that is, to order and constrain the chaotic and largely unconscious associations of individual sensory experience. The joint scene of attention requires the individual not merely to attend to the object qua individual, but to attend to it as part of an intersubjective, collectively shared experience. In the scene of joint attention I attend to your attention to the object. And this relationship is reciprocal. Just as I attend to your attention to the object, so you attend to my attention to the object. Our relationship to the object is an instance of shared, collective attention, and this—the origin of joint attention—is indeed quite revolutionary in the history of hominid evolution. In the oscillation between other-model and central-object the word is born. This intersubjective oscillation is also what distinguishes the act of pointing from the indexical signals of animal communication. Animal signals remain unmediated by the intersubjective, joint attentional scene.

Girard’s ambivalence towards the uniqueness of this originary event is reproduced in his ambivalence towards modernity and Shakespeare’s place in it. Girard’s paradoxical claim that the originary scene is both conscious and unconscious, both a unique event in human history and an intermediate stage in a series of endless intermediate stages, applies equally to his understanding of Shakespeare. On the one hand, Shakespeare is a vast intelligence who exposes ruthlessly and definitively the myth of romantic desire. On the other, Shakespeare is a dramatist who must hide this mimetic awareness behind the mythologizing narratives of tragic and comic form. Shakespeare has the potential to be a unique event in human history, but unfortunately the medium he selected for sharing his discovery of mimetic desire inevitably meant that his anthropological insights would be buried behind a wall of conventional theatrical pieties. If we read for the theatrical pieties, we will miss forever the mimetic intelligence. This is the fate of all Shakespeare criticism before Girard. If we read for the mimetic intelligence, we are forced to dispense with the theatre altogether, which is why Girard argues that Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage in The Tempest is so critically self-referential. It is a deconstruction of the aesthetic myth of Shakespeare by Shakespeare himself.

So what can we learn from Girard’s reading of Shakespeare? I think we can learn a great deal from Girard, but I have to add a significant caveat. Girard’s ambivalence towards Shakespeare is a direct consequence of his ambivalence towards language. This is most clear in his hypothesis of the origin of sacrifice, which he sees as the fundamental cultural institution pre-existing even language itself. By claiming that the first act of scapegoating was unconscious and unrepresentable, Girard can say that all subsequent historical evidence that seems to contradict his hypothesis is merely a misrepresentation, a ruse distracting us from the reality of scapegoating. The technique of using the unconscious as a clever ruse has been made familiar to us by Freud. Because the unconscious is by definition elusive, it is always up to the one who is uniquely qualified in sniffing it out to let you know whether or not you have correctly identified the problem. The same rule applies to Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. If you don’t see how Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate the scapegoating hypothesis, then you just have to look harder. And you do that by training yourself in the technique of Girard’s peculiar brand of mimetic anthropology.

In the end, all claims to originality are by definition problematic. If you are the first to see things this way, then by definition nobody else does. But Girard’s claim goes one step further. Not only is he the first, he is also the last. By making scapegoating unconscious, he absolves himself of the inconvenience of ever being refuted. For how can you refute something of which you are unconscious? Any refutation can be immediately dismissed as yet another confirmation of the unconscious at work. One has been hoodwinked yet again by the ruse of scapegoating.

What is the solution to this conundrum? The solution is to admit that scapegoating depends upon representation, and that representation itself cannot originate unconsciously. Once we have conceded this, it remains up to the individual investigator to decide what to include in an anthropological hypothesis of origin. The real point of formulating such a hypothesis is not to be the first or the last, the most original or the most definitive. It is to provide a minimal starting point for dialogue on our fundamental humanity. That is the simplest way to define an anthropology. I hope that Girard’s work on Shakespeare will be read in this sense: that is, as an attempt to initiate a dialogue concerning Shakespeare’s contribution to human self-understanding—in other words, as a step towards a Shakespearean anthropology.(18)

Notes

1. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998). (back)

2. Ibid., 8. (back)

3. Ibid., 9. (back)

4. “Les mots et les choses” was translated into English as “the order of things.” See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). (back)

5. René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5–6. (back)

6. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949); John Holloway, The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961). (back)

7. Girard, A Theater of Envy, 5. (back)

8. La violence et le sacré was preceded by Girard’s 1961 study of the novel, Mensonge romantique et vérité Romanesque, in which Girard first proposed his theory of mimetic desire. In La violence et le sacré Girard applied the “mimetic” model of desire he discovered in the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Proust to the general anthropological problem of human origin, proposing a global theory of human society. Mensongewas translated into English in 1965 as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. La violence was translated into English in 1977 as Violence and the Sacred. (back)

9. All quotations of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson Longman, 2009). (back)

10. Girard, A Theater of Envy, 16. (back)

11. Ibid., 328. (back)

12. I discuss Greenblatt’s work in “The Critic as Ethnographer,” New Literary History 35 (2004): 621–61, and “The Culture of Criticism,” Criticism 49 (2007): 459–79. Both essays are reprinted in The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics (Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers, 2009). (back)

13. Girard, A Theater of Envy, 284. (back)

14. See, for example, Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), or his more recent book, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). (back)

15. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 99. (back)

16. Ibid., 100. (back)

17. See Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). (back)

18. This essay is an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press, June 2016. (back)

Paganism is a worldwide phenomenon, though rarely aware of itself as such. That is, paganism is sometimes self-aware: it sometimes labels itself as paganism. It is also often implicit, however, an organising logic behind an ostensibly diverse series of practices, beliefs, and attitudes. In its most self-conscious, explicit form, contemporary paganism claims firstness for itself—as the Ur-religion, a variety of indigeneity, and therefore, a generative centre of authentic culture and personal experience. Contemporary paganism’s PR says that paganism is a manifestation of the sacred in its pristine, prelapsarian state, which is to say, of culture and personhood, before these were sundered from nature. The identity of the supposed sunderers vary: they include: (1) individual thinkers, like Descartes, who becomes the very evil demon he strove to exorcise; (2) vaguely threatening ideologies, such as “the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview” (Capra 73); and (3) quasi-historical periods, like “the Dark Ages,” during which humanity buried its best instincts beneath the rubble of already-rotting European superstition and prejudice. Paganists see such influences as degenerative, in that they engender pernicious varieties of dualism, perhaps even dualism itself. In the pagan salvation narrative, paganism is capable of eschewing both kings and (domesticated) horses in order to put Humpty Dumpty (or Gaia) back together again.

In its most unabashed, religious articulation, paganism is organised around an anti- or emphatically non-Christian centre. There is a standard deconstructive move obviously available at this point: our supposed origin, paganism, is subject to a supplementary logic, whereby an ostensibly self-sufficient idea (paganism) is found to rest on what it considers a mere derivation or parasite, Christianity (See Derrida 17-59). Even the name, “paganism,” gives us an obvious clue. “Pagan” is a Christian term. The very idea of it requires a refuted Christian centre-point: understanding how this is so, as well as the complex ways in which it disavows its Christocentric nature, is the primary task of this essay. The pagan’s acceptance of a Christian self-appellation so that he may reject Christianity threatens him with performative incoherence.(1) Yet there is much for us to explore in the appeal, the structure, and the generative capacity of that incoherence. Paganism is a highly generative cultural field, and there are dangers in simply identifying and dismissing it. Summoning—albeit not citing—Girard, John Milbank has argued that there are reasons for concern with this phenomenon. For him, modern pagan patterns of behaviour have resulted from a reification of primitive ritual in the confused modern culture of the West. For him, these things constitute an ongoing danger:

Ritual violence, sacrificial violence, and violent initiation must already constitute to a degree a realm of theatre, and the continuous re-invocation of primitive ritual by theatrical modernity should therefore cease to surprise us—a modern “society of the spectacle” retreats from the pure liturgy of monotheism to a pagan theatricality. And like paganism, it invests its hopes in a controllable economy of violence where this much and no more blood was once shed to appease the gods, now this much and no more simulated violence, or rather as much simulated violence as you like, will appease our “aggressive urges.” (Being Reconciled 33)

This is the elusive end-point of an inquiry like ours: Milbank here contends that as modern society shakes off Christianity, it passes to a state different from, but standing in a new relation to, a new actual paganism. This new paganism shimmers in a modern city of Babel: peripheral at times, evanescent, occasionally dangerous. If we do not share Milbank’s fears (test cricket well fits his above description, but few have decried the pagan bloodlust of this sport) we do recognise a need for inquiry, and for interrogation of supposedly apolitical and harmless practices.

There is a need for a limited cultural empiricism which looks at the claims of paganism. Such an empiricism would let us frame the flotsam of discarded, fragmentary and borrowed pieces of culture or faith: mystical miscellany, Shamanism, tantric healing, psychedelic tourism, Hindu face painting, Taoist diets, Indigenous American drumming, and Egyptian belly-dancing. A vast selection of the rites of man or womanhood all jostle for position in a welter of intensity, desire, and the frenzy of market exchange. An Australian Aboriginal friend, drawing attention to this discombobulated syncretism, remarked: “you whitefellas don’t know what the f*** you’re doing—but it’s pretty funny to watch.” In this essay, we seek to make sense of some of these things and to understand how they function and offer value to some people today.

We situate our inquiry in the context of work by Eric Gans, and in particular his essay on body piercing (“The Body Sacrificial”). Then we provide a non-encyclopaedic overview of paganism’s principal tendencies. We then address the relationship of paganism to the Judaeo-Christian pattern of autocritique, and propose a view of paganism as a variety of autocritique and cultural counter-practice. This is best done within the context of Girard’s work on the dismantling of the violent sacred, principally Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (165-306). This, in turn, leads us to the issue of late twentieth century anthropology and its own searing self-critique. From here, we develop our major claim that it is less the religious practices that reveal the nature of paganism than it is the relations posited both to paganism’s array of objects, and to Christianity itself (which make sense of it). To stage this claim, we offer a novel comparative analysis of participant relations to objects in paganism on the one hand, and in the field of kitsch on the other. By so doing, we hope to contribute something both to the analysis of late modern culture in general and to the understanding of the nature of paganism specifically.

Converging Credulities

We know that pagans stake an originary claim. Less well known is the fact that non-pagans are happy to cite pagans where the latter critique Christianity. On Easter of 2013, the Richard Dawkins “Foundation for Reason & Science” circulated the following image, which appeared on Facebook pages all over the cyber-sphere:

There are no overt requirements (such as, say, being a diligent student of comparative religion) to see where this falls apart. What we witness here is less homology than homonymy, though even that is stretched. Unless inebriated, nobody pronounced “Ishtar” as “Easter”—or at least not until this poster was circulated. Even the etymologies diverge at the source: one is Assyrian/Babylonian and the other Anglo-Saxon. Beyond the linguistic and ethnological absurdities, we witness an intended moral lesson. Here the Christian is supposed to be stunned and scandalised by the revelation that the resurrection is somehow unrelated to rabbits (we can imagine forthcoming revelations: perhaps the saviour’s birth is only tangentially related to reindeer). In these and other such earnest atheist evangelist texts, the Vatican is construed as antagonist, as hawker par excellence of religious credulity (among other things). The rhetorical mode of the claim is peculiar, of more interest than the dubious assertion itself. In terms of our inquiry, it is part of what appears to be a sustained attempt to strip away from Christianity any capacity for origination: it is always, in this view, the culturally sickly version of an always prior pagan vim. If we in our turn do treat paganism as a derivative and secondary cultural formation, this is not to deny it the capacity for cultural innovation in its sphere, and perhaps, more widely; it is simply to note that its modern forms, both in name and in nature, occur after—or rather, within—Christian history.(2)

Methods of Cultural Analysis: Piercing and Paganism

In 2000, Gans made use of the then-emergent World Wide Web to explore the issue of piercing. He opened his essay with this comment:

No one who seeks to understand the underlying unity of all human culture can fail to be struck by the revival of primitive sacrificial practices in our own era. Body piercing is perhaps the most striking of these revivals. From its punk beginnings in the 1970s, piercing has become ubiquitous, together with a family of associated practices of “body modification” ranging from tattooing to castration and other “nullifications” carried out deep in the underground of our culture. (159)

To this we would add that a revival does not bring anything like primitive, sacrificial paganism back to life—rather, it is an iteration that creates something new, something decidedly modern, and un-self-aware in its modernity. Paganism is always an alteration/repetition. (If Hegel were present and looked at this phenomenon, he’d likely shout “Aufhebung!”—paganism is both a perpetuation of itself and its own negation.)

Gans’s suggestion that these fields are hidden in the underground of contemporary culture applies only to its lack of self-awareness. To take a metaphors of London’s train system, of underground and overground trains, it might be better to call both piercing and paganism decidedly overground systems: they are in plain view, but little understood; many travel in them, but few know the mechanism.(3)

Gans identifies several features that are relevant also to our own inquiry. To Gans, body modification, 1) is linked to sacrificial rite, 2) negates, 3) revives, and 4) has a dimension which is private. Later, citing Bourdieu and Baudrillard, he adds another characteristic, explaining that behind the pagan impulse is a longing for a society in which production and consumption are reunited (176). Gans structures his inquiry by exploring piercing in terms of its aesthetic aspect, its erotic aspect, and its political aspect.(4) He sees a number of virtues in body piercing and its cultures. He remarks that

Arts of body modification add real information to the world. These anarchically mimetic activities of self-creation are what make the market system function, not just in the obvious sense, by providing opportunities for purveyors of piercing operations and jewelry, but in the deeper one of enriching the unpredictable dialogue among members of society. (174)

Like piercing, the practices of paganism offer us real and new anthropologically significant information about “post-Christian” belief systems.

Piercing is often part of the pagan field as well, but paganism raises a variety of issues that go beyond piercing or tattooing. Paganism is replete with half-articulated or at times painfully over-articulated beliefs about the nature of the world, and for this reason, we find a somewhat richer cultural field to analyse. These allow an extension of Gans’s analysis. Like him, we can use the resources of the internet, as well as of international festivals and gatherings. We are certainly not the first to venture an analysis of this field. There is a searching scholarship we will cite when relevant on paganism from a number of cultural critics. Similarly, there is useful commentary on related fields such as New Age and Gothic practices and what might be called, in deference to the Birmingham School of sociology, “everyday medievalism.” Unfortunately in the place where the richest source of analysis ought to be—Cultural studies—we find preciously little of value. What Cultural studies typically finds in paganism is what it finds everywhere: refutations of Adorno and productive/consumptive “resistance” to hegemonies. In other words, like Narcissus, in the clear waters of paganism, cultural studies sees itself once again.(5)

What is Paganism?

The dictionary tells us paganism is “any of various religions other than Christianity or Judaism or Islamism.” This sounds like a negation, and so it is: most of the time, though, the negation is specifically Christian. In its Latin origins, the descriptor “pagan” referred simply to village folk from the country, who practised folk religion “naïvely” in opposition to the new sophistication of Christianity. That would make pagans in our time advocates of bumpkinism, if not bumpkinists themselves. But this usage has, of course, aged: at least since Inherit the Wind (1960 Stanley Kramer film), it is now the Christian who is considered the arch-bumpkin.

In our time, as Paganism.com tells us, paganism includes all sorts of things, and indeed, “No offense intended if we left your particular path out” (Paganism.com). Yet one path is most decidedly out. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “Je vois plusieurs religions contraires, et partant toutes fausses, excepté une [I see several contrary religions, and consequently all false, except one]” (202); for pagans, it seems, the opposite injunction holds true: “Having experienced the e pluribus unum of Christianity, I look out to see a wealth of religions and other odds and ends before me, and leave aside therefore the one most proximate to me, and cleave instead to all these others in its place.”

Now it is certainly true that many societies called “pagan” in the past have been unaware, or were relatively unaffected, by the appellation. These societies, however, were only pagan in the sense that Christian societies labelled them as such. About them, we have little or nothing to say, because the worlds they construed lie outside the terms of modernity. The pagans we explore are in a defined sense 1) modern, and 2) Christian, and can only be understood once these two characteristics are understood, counter-intuitive as this claim may initially sound. They comprise a heterogeneous series of social groupings which, even from the outset of modernity, have sought various horizonal breaches—of rationality, of capitalism, of hegemonic social order—and have done so in the name of a deliberately non-Christian spirituality.

Paganism and Romanticism

There are rich theoretical links between paganism and Romanticism. In the marketplace of paganisms, there are many to choose from. One listing of pagan festivals declares that it is a site “Only for Pagan festivals! All fields listed here must be Pagan/Wiccan/Asatru in nature; not herbal workshops, not psychic fairs, not Renaissance faires, not pirates fests, not camping parties, etc.” (faeriefaith.net). For some the first of May might be known as May Day, but to the pagan community it is Beltane, “The Celtic May Day. It begins at moonrise on May Day Eve” (www.thewhitegoddess.com). While some host it offering music and showers and toilet amenities, others offer a richer menu, including “a traditional Walpurgasnacht [sic], sensual May Games (for couples)” as part of a “fundraiser to protect . . . this sanctuary” (annwfnceremonies.weebly.com).

Around the world, bewildering varieties of summer and winter solstice gatherings take place to connect the human tribe with its genesis. Despite the centrality of this event to many varieties of paganism, we find a grab-bag of practices and promises. The Pagan Spirit Gathering in Earlville Illinois, to take but one instance, has run since 1981, and now hosts

Summer solstice rites, a Magical gift circle, a candlelight labyrinth of 1000 candles, Drum circles, Sweatlodge ceremonies, Rites of Passage, plus Women’s and Men’s rituals. . . . Workshops are given daily on a wide range of Pagan topics. Previous subjects have included Wiccan ways, Goddess spirituality, Celtic Studies, Creative arts, Healing, Shamanism, Chanting, Dancing, Drumming techniques, and various network meetings. (faeriefaith.net).

In their effort to describe what they do, the main site for this event explains that it offers:

to create community, celebrate summer solstice, and commune with Nature in a sacred environment. Sponsored by Circle Sanctuary, PSG is open to a long-time practitioners as well as newcomers of a wide range of Nature religion traditions, including Wiccan, Contemporary Pagan, Druidic, Heathen, Celtic, Baltic, Greco-Roman, Isian, Shamanic, Hermetic, Animistic, Egyptian, Native American, Afro-Caribbean, Taoist, Pantheistic, Ecofeminist, and Nature mystic.

It is open to almost anyone—anyone, except a Christian believer, or perhaps, an avowed atheist who thrives in the modern world.

Without commenting on the specifics of any of the actual practices or faiths, we can note a straightforwardly structuralist table of binarised traits:

Pagan—affirmed negation	Christian—implied
Gemeinschaft	Gesellschaft
Community music (“Volk”)	Passive observer
“ethnic”	“White, unmarked”
Natural	Artificial
Warm	Cold
Tantric and other sex-delay	Instrumental sex, basic
Divine or Mother Feminism	Bureaucratic
Mystical/intuitive	(Ir)rationalist/detached

Not all these traits are observable in every variety of paganism. This does not stop it from having cultural force. We have suggested elsewhere that Romanticism is a “field” in that it is something that despite having diffuse causes itself, nevertheless exerts a powerful magnetic force of its own. Paganism is not even as logically ordered in its practices (let alone its “beliefs”) but it too exerts a powerful pull of its own.

The Autocritque

A group of Westerners, academics perhaps, stands in a circle listening to an indigenous ceremony. They cannot understand the words, and perhaps they do not need to. At the end of it, as they stand in silence, they nod quietly, even reverentially, and then carry on as if nothing happened. This is a quintessentially modern, even postmodern, scene. Yet its self-account is entirely traditional—and its premises are an inherently Romantic, if not always sentimental, rendering of an imaginary past.

As we pointed out in our earlier analysis (Fleming and O’Carroll, “Understanding Anti-Americanism”) of the American tendency to self-condemnation, cynical motives ascribed by Western commentators to any and all Western practices did not stop the West from actual oppressive behaviours. In that respect, we might accept a fragment of what Deleuze and Guattari colourfully described as the deliberate chaos of capitalism, such that as they said, “The more it breaks down . . . the better it works” (151)—except it is not deliberate. Paganism appears to be a part of the West that seeks to escape its place in Christendom—but in its negations only reinforces its part in a wider ensemble. Still, paganism is potentially a major form of autocritique—even if it only rarely is able to understand itself as such. It works from within Western longings and Christian frameworks to putatively reject both. In its deepest desires, it is a redemptive, healing impulse, a desire to find footing for artifice, a genuine attempt to substitute a kind of community in place of selfish individualism, and perhaps to atone for damage done in the most Christian and Western way possible.

Now, non-Christian pagans were nothing like any of the things we are seeking to describe. Girard’s work on the processes of mimesis and of primitive sacrifice puts paid to any idea of modern paganism being anything like that which it imagines itself as being (Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 170-181, Evolution and Conversion, 234-267, “Generative Scapegoating,” 73-148). If these societies worked well, “working” involved stabilisation of conflict through brutal and, to our eye at least, arbitrary murder (including in some societies, of children, such as twins). By modern standards, the process of sacrifice is brutal, unacceptably so. But the Westerners would wish to save this culture from extinction as if it were some species of exotic plant rather than a living and contemporary milieu: to the contrary of its original logic, insisting on certain humane modifications, the sacrifice can go ahead, but loses thereby the significance it originally held. Moreover, by being subjected to Western values, the culture also loses its world-conferring capacity, which is now subordinated to those same Western values. This brings us to the discipline that studies other cultures, the one that has, perhaps more than any other, been racked by self-doubt of a most autocritical variety. Anthropology may have had the capacity to teach these terrible truths had it also had the capacity to sketch historical contexts to its endless fieldwork forays around the world. Instead, though, it has offered a variety of cultural multiplicity that led many to think of Western Christendom as the most deliberately brutal of oppressors. We need to understand anthropology especially when we look in ways themselves anthropological at pagan practices, not just to understand the practices, but also, to orient the analysis of participant and observer relations to those practices. For even those who mock them are affected by them.

Anthropology and White Guilt

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the discipline of anthropology was convulsed by a ferocious series of autocritiques. Perhaps the most poignant of these was the critical self-reflection conducted by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Tristes tropiques. Derrida examines Lévi-Strauss’s “writing lesson” in full recognition that Lévi-Strauss is seeking to be self-critical, is seeking to avoid further damage, as he sees it, to the Nambikwara. Commenting on the naivety of Lévi-Strauss’s approach to writing, and to his implicit acceptance of the idea that Western style writing itself is exigently evil, Derrida remarks scathingly that the Nambikwara “do not make use of what we commonly call writing” (110), even if all of the features that Lévi-Strauss attributes solely to writing were to be found in the tribe’s speech.

In accepting Derrida’s point that a Western writing script was hardly going to do the damage Lévi-Strauss ascribed to it and that the Nambikwara already had “writing” and hierarchies of subordination of their own, it is still the case that anthropologists were the ones whose disciplinary orientation towards a pristine original culture made them most susceptible to a deep version of the autocritique. For anthropology’s task had been to record the ways of other peoples and cultures, often from the point of view of preserving their record, but also, from the point of view of understanding the world of humanity in general.

In the later 1980s, a movement to make anthropology more accountable took an even firmer hold, and a debate broke out between the new reflexive anthropologists and the old school anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins who saw the new upstarts as mere armchair observers with nothing useful to say. Those in the reflexive school took their departure from a beautifully written introduction by James Clifford to the book Writing Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. In it, Clifford attacked the impartiality of anthropology by taking on one of its masters, Bronislaw Malinowski, and examining his personal diaries against his scientific anthropology. “Cultures,” Clifford wrote, “are not scientific “objects” . . . [culture] and our view of it are produced historically, and are actively contested” (18). As a result, our truths are always “partial” (as he puts it in his title [“Partial Truths”] with both senses intended).

As accurate as the picture may be, as devastative as the literal deconstruction of the master in his own words may seem, this is but another case of the autocritique at work. Its motivation—to care for others, to be responsible indeed for others—is profoundly well-placed, and is to be commended, as indeed is Lévi-Strauss’s in his own work. Irrespective of the accuracy or otherwise of their scholarship, what gathers all these writings is an autocritical sense of guilt, of a sense of wrongs having been done that need correcting. This, it bears saying, is one of the finest aspects of Western Judaeo-Christian thought, but it also bears saying that there is nothing exceptionally bad about Western behaviours vis-à-vis the conquering behaviours of any other cultures in history. To the contrary, these autocritical impulses are what are remarkable both in their effect, and in their sustained and ongoing nature. Moreover, if we take the Western self-account of its history as an inventory of cultural dead-ends, military brutalities, and political betrayals, we are in danger of recognising the validity of its lists of empirical claims, but missing the epistemological stance that is the condition of possibility for such history to be written.

If anthropology in the traditional sense affords insights into its own practices via its own critically reflexive practitioners on the one hand, as well as into the structure of the time and space terms of the Western point of view, it is only Generative Anthropology that seems to provide the scope for grasping the peculiarity of the Western autocritique itself. This can now be expressed as follows: Paganism provides a profound series of scenes for Generative Anthropology to explore. Paganism makes crucial and contradictory claims about the West, namely 1) the West is utterly exceptional, and 2) it is also utterly derivative. The first aspect concerns the West’s moral culpability and singularity of its bloodlust, corruption, and debasement; the second aspect views its cultural forms (even its science) as inherently parasitic, with even its chief attainments being plagiarised from non-Western sources. This brings us to the view of pagans as both before and beyond the political order.

The Politics of Paganism

In taking up the politics of paganism, we encounter complexities. We note that while Gans saw few critical-political issues in the case of piercing, we must here express a rather darker tone. Many before us have looked at the genesis of this thought in extremist politics. The idea that paganism has a politics would seem strange to many of its practitioners who are nowadays, if anything, apolitical—or at least whose politics is so nominal and utopian it amounts to being apolitical. The paradoxes here are not simply resolved, and perhaps are not resolvable.

Since 1945, many have wondered at how a civilised, Christian society like Germany could perpetrate the horrors of Auschwitz. Many who perpetrated it were indeed practising Christians, acting as Hannah Arendt argued, on orders (and by delegation, giving orders) via a logic of the banality of evil. Yet at the centre of the monstrous enterprise, once we get past the mechanics of war and gas chamber, we find a confused picture that includes alongside orthodox Christianity a strongly thematised paganist anti-Christianity. Much of Hitler’s regime was overtly and deliberately neo-pagan in its orientation—and to that extent it represents to date the only “successful” attempt at putting neo-paganism into practice on a large scale. A Christian negation of Christianity is, to put it mildly, a complex social text—and the work of reading it is hard.

It is easy to obscure this political history in a world of Druidic festivals and Western shamanism. But the words of the following camp song are suggestive of a need to be cautious of the paganist self-account, and indeed of its anti-Christian history:

We are the happy little Hitler Youth;
We have no need of Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
Not Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots.
Singing we follow Hitler’s banners;
Only then are we worthy of our ancestors.
I am no Christian and no Catholic.
Baldur von Schirach, take me along.”

Hitler Youth Camp Song (qtd. in Helmreich, p. 267)

The Hitler Youth’s camp song is at once a philosophical cry and a pedagogic song for a renewed golden age of paganism. The man named in the song, Horst Wessel, himself composed the Nazi party anthem. Von Schirach, the composer of this song, was the Reich Youth Leader.

Nineteenth century pagan-politics also touched philosophy. Much work has been done on the political line joining the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (Human All-Too-Human, the first link in a chain of spectacular philosophical works that included the Will to Power edited and shaped politically by his sister, Elizabeth) and Adolf Hitler. It is not the line drawn by pop commentators on philosophers that interests us here. In nearly all respects, the thought, integrity, and dignity of the great nineteenth century philosopher eclipsed those of the resentful, manipulative, shallow, and sentimental dictator as well as many of the more recent commentators on him. But on one point Hitler and Nietzsche were united: both were vehemently and programmatically paganist; their modernism entailed a particular kind of anti-Christianity, and both endorsed a distinctive variety of pagan festivity.

And Hitler established a unique species of political rally and festivity. “Who was greater, Christ or Hitler?” wondered one nameless orator at a Hitler rally. It’s an odd question, given Hitler’s attempt to move beyond the Christian paradigm. But therein lies the point:

Christ had at the time of his death twelve apostles, who, however, did not even remain true to him. Hitler, however, today has a folk of 70 million behind him. We cannot tolerate that another organization is established alongside of us that has a different spirit than ours. We must crush it. National Socialism in all earnestness says: I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me. . . . Then ours is the kingdom and the power; for we have a strong Wehrmacht, and the glory—for we are again a respected nation, and may God will, in eternity. Heil Hitler!”

Speech given at a German student rally (qtd. in Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler, p. 201)

All this is not just a matter of pagan “philosophy,” a matter of mere words overlaying some other kinds of practices. The moral compass of modernity has material dimensions, and consequences. The Nazi attempt to return to pre-Judaic religiosity was physically enacted in attempts to revivify the myths and rituals of the Germanic tribes. Göring recognised the ancient sacred sites and actively pushed re-enacting events like the winter solstice. The edition of the German Farmer’s Almanac from 1935 (published by the Ministry of Agriculture) replaced Christian holidays with celebration days for Thor and Wotan). These dates and days are themselves practices; but the ideas are too: when a Nazi sympathiser such as Jung suggested that Nazism was the revival of Wotan, we need to examine what this means not just as a textual exercise, but as part of the entire edifice of modernity.

At stake in such texts, we find certain patterns. To start with, there is the now familiar opposition of the pagan and the Christian (as in Nietzsche and Hitler, of course). Judaism and Christianity are viewed by paganists as being “anti-nature” and, as such, as undermining “organic” social order, which is predicated on hierarchy. If paganists today do not all subscribe to such an order, most do not question it. The compatibility of paganism then, and perhaps now, with any political order is an aspect of the field that merits ongoing attention and care.(6)

On Kitsch, Cool, and Indigeneity

We turn now to pagan commodity-relations, and do so via a consideration of their participant-stance. We would like you, even as you read these Western words, to solemnly bear witness to pagan prayer.

I call on you Brighid; in a time of need.
I ask your assistance and blessing for one who is ailing
Someone is ill, and she needs your healing light. (Wigington)

A radical need for healing pervades the pagan (and New Age) industry. The pagan’s path is one towards connection, and healing. As one site puts it, “a laugh, a hug, even a pat on the back or soothing tone” can make a difference (“Healing”). In this prayer, Patti Wigington invites the reader to deploy a ritual even with the implied consent of a friend, to “ask the goddess (or god) of your tradition to watch over the ailing individual and assist them with healing” (Wigington). The ritual involves candles being lit, and the prayer being said after focusing on the person in question.

At stake is a scene of sorts, and to evoke it, we take it up in relation to kitsch. When we do so, we notice something remarkable: despite many obvious reasons for attraction, few intellectuals avow such attraction or membership. This is despite the fact it comports surprisingly well with what many intellectuals value. Few, however, apart perhaps from Lyotard in Just Gaming (pp. 9-41), claim explicit allegiance to it. We believe the reason for this reticence is more aesthetic than ethical or epistemological: what prevents humanities academics, even Cultural studies academics, from widely publicly avowing their pagan status is that they see it not so much as wrong but as tasteless. A group who would otherwise feel comfortable with the semiotic rehabilitation of indigenous and folk traditions, with attacks on Western decadence, association with the “counter-culture,” with a dissociation from Judeo-Christian decay, and so on, cannot become pagans because it is far too kitsch. Paganism would be palatable if it were not so embarrassing.

We can sketch a comparison of the fields of kitsch and of paganism for what each says about the other. Each field requires a distinctive relationship of its participants to its fetish-objects—and how those who partake in it are viewed from outside. We begin with some ideas Gans has proposed on kitsch itself. For Gans, kitsch is less pop culture than middlebrow culture—that is, what we identify as what someone else mistakes for high culture. In our view, the peculiarity of kitsch is not so much its tastelessness—which is far more widespread—but that people, somehow mysteriously, aren’t offended by it (Eric Gans, “A Rembrandt in an Elevator” Chronicle XCII). In this purview, kitsch is failed high culture; it signals a certain kind of transcendence, although that signal will end up looking more like a flashing Sacred Heart of Jesus decal than the Sistine Chapel.(7) Kitsch promises the aesthetic distance of high culture and delivers mawkish sentiment.

For us, however, kitsch is not just a label of aesthetic designation (as the fact that the same aesthetic object can be cool suggests), but rather, it is primarily a designation of spectatorial distance. This is a kind of double scene, for it concerns not only the objects and those who are fixated on them, but also, the scenic quality of kitsch-observation itself. The sophisticate only looks at the object for a moment before then fixing his or her gaze on those embarrassing people who are looking at the object; “kitsch” refers to those who receive pleasure from such aesthetics more than the aesthetics itself. As such, people in the know reject not simply the kitsch object, but laugh or wince at those who get pleasure from it. Kitsch is also that object—after Adorno and Benjamin—that signifies the “cheapness” of the market, the rejection of the auratic and singular qualities of the art object.

Kitsch per se cannot be made cool, and so the modern humanities academic, a sort of Cool Hunter in extremis, cannot be seen with it. S/he will not get into the nightclub if kitsch is there, too. At least, not without spectatorial ironisation; kitsch can be transubstantiated, bread made body, by transforming it into camp: camp is kitsch viewed with inverted commas: the distance that the fan of kitsch-as-kitsch cannot attain. Jeff Koons, that reductio ad absurdum of pop art, has built a career out of making the garish more garish by making it bigger, while making our contemplation of it all the more cool by inserting that distance. Kitsch becomes anti-kitsch through a knowing wink delivered by someone, someone in the know to another in the same scene-observing-scene.

How does paganism relate to this? The difficulty is that paganism is a form of kitsch that cannot be made camp because its sacred objects resist desacralisation. A drag queen can hang a picture of Jesus ironically, but he or she cannot do the same with a dream catcher or an inukshuk. There are many cultural features that determine this asymmetry, but we’ll mention only one here, the relation of camp—and paganism—to indigeneity. Modern paganism unfailingly defers to a kind of ethnic firstness, or indigeneity. This gives the pagan consumer two product lines to select from: the first allows for identification with an ethnic other (to play didgeridoo and then go on holiday to pay for sweating), the second allows for identification with a kind of white firstness, so we have contemporary druids, wiccans, Romuva-nians (Lithuania), Asatru-ians (Nordic), and assorted European practitioners of “cunning-craft” (like witchcraft).

What identification with indigeneity (or firstness) entails is a bypassing of the kinds of exemplary violence with which the modern West—and the pre-modern Christian West—is now associated. To be a pagan is to assert “Don’t blame me—despite appearances, I’m not really white anyway. Deep down, I’m a rasta—and it’s so much me that it forces itself out of my body, popping from the top of my head, in the form of these dreadlocks.” Alternatively, it is to assert “Ah yes, I am white—but my cultural allegiances are indigenous, like you; I represent that road not taken, the road of the peaceful druid.”

The scenes of popular culture, kitsch, and paganism are thrown into sharp relief by the James Cameron film, Avatar. This film offered an astonishingly detailed and beautiful image of an imaginary off-world pristine indigenous lifeworld—which a brutal West, with its flying metal machines and missiles, then proceeds to destroy. A “good” Westerner fields suspicious natives to help overthrow the re-enacted invaders, and to right and rewrite a colonial history in a fantasy of “good” aliens and evil earthly colonisers. The essential peacefulness of the aliens is depicted in ways that would befit any paganist guilt-vision: the white hero is redeemed by betraying his own invasion force and siding with the victims of exploitation, and those he joins share with him an immanentist-essentialist faith system that allows him to rediscover his own cosmic place in the universe. What makes the scene sickeningly guilt-ridden rather than comically kitsch, however, is the attachment of the narrative to the real stories of colonisation and histories of peoples whose realities are charged with an ethical load that kitsch simply cannot bear—even if the lovely huge-eyed aliens and fairy lights would not be out of place in a plastic dolphin shop. The evocation of such harsh realities of course fails as anything other than under-thought entertainment because unlike Hollywood, intercultural realities are rather more complex than a redemption fantasy of this kind can suggest. (Further, the anti-colonialist impulse behind movies like Avatar is often revealing of an ever deeper kind of colonial impulse, wherein the white hero—who has seen the goodness of indigenous culture and is able to adopt it and internalise it so easily—is the one who ultimately saves that culture from destruction and suddenly assumes the position of leader! The white person, in other words, shows the indigenous person how to be indigenous.)

The Cameron-esque redemptive impulse is deeply problematic, of course. In some of their contortions—looking at the chivalric impulse of the modern intellectual to rescue an other and in so doing rescue him or herself (Fleming and O’Carroll, “Notes on Generative Anthropology”)—the modern intellectual follows the same path as the pagan, although with more cool and far greater obliqueness and prolixity. Indigeneity cannot be made camp because of contemporary interdictions which prevent semiotic recoding; so now paganism is left as intellectually and politically appealing for a wide range of “sophisticated” people, at the same time as it cannot be explicitly endorsed by them because it is so aesthetically naïf.

Coda: Humanism and Plantism

We have offered an interlaced variety of commentary based directly on the work of Eric Gans and René Girard. At the most basic level, without Generative Anthropology, it would not be possible to frame paganism and kitsch scenically—in relation to mimetically conceived cultures of margins and centre; we’d not be able to offer a certain reading of indigeneity in terms of romanticism. Girard’s work, in its analysis of mimesis, was perhaps latently scenic, but Gans brought this element to light in a way that Girard himself never did.(8) More directly, Girard allows us to grasp the logic of the Christianisme déplacé of white, Western “paganism,” and the sources of its moral critique. (See Fleming, René Girard, 147-9.) The fact that is possible to offer a Girardian analysis without repeatedly citing his name, and without a barrage of conceptual neologisms, suggests that this now is a field sufficiently well established such that it no longer needs—in this venue at least—ongoing explication and explanation.

Even so, there is value in pointing out that its subtlety can lead people not to see it at work at all. With psychoanalytic theories (for instance, and by contrast), the complexity in analysis invariably comes in the form of comprehending the theories themselves; after attending to Lacan’s theory of the “symbolic” one scarcely has enough energy left to make a cup of tea, let alone analyse social relations. Another tradition, that of anti-psychiatry, as evinced by Félix Guattari, is wonderfully, indeed comically, symptomatic of the labours involved:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. (Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 50)

“We can clearly see…” Clearly! (And we note here Guattari’s deliciously ironic “dismissal” of “binarism.” He is obviously the kind of non-binary thinker who thinks it advisable to opt for non-binarism over binarism. Perhaps all Cretans are binarists.)

With both Girard and Gans, the parsimony of theoretical modelling means that the complexity of analysis must come in through the level of historical and philosophical nuance involved in actually looking at the world. The extraordinary weight and/or baroque beauty of many theoretical models in the humanities means that one can just drop them anywhere and the analysis will be done for you, whether or not it illuminates anything other than the theory itself.

It is regularly lamented that the humanities are in some state of “crisis” and that funding is being pulled away at an alarming rate. But what has been most tragic about this is that the people often calling loudest about this crisis have themselves forged whole careers on undermining the humanities. One of Minnesota University Press’s more recent book series is called “Posthumanities.” The Posthumanities is the home of posthumanism. And “posthumanism”—in the words of one of its most well-known exponents—removes “the human and Homo sapiens from any particularly privileged position in relation to matters of meaning, information, and cognition” (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? xii). What a removal—not only the human, but Homo Sapiens too! The word “privileged” here is signal, in the sense that it captures both an epistemological and an ethical position—the posthumanist is not just keen to see differently, but—like a good parent—wants to revoke certain “privileges.” Shorn of its ethical pose, posthumanism is in many ways still the playing out of one of the main currents of radical structuralism, perhaps best sampled in the high drama denouement of Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses:

L’homme est une invention dont l’archéologie de notre pensée montre aisément la date récente. Et peut-être la fin prochaine. Si ces dispositions venaient à disparaître comme elles sont apparues . . . alors on peut bien parier que l’homme s’effacerait, comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable. [That man is an invention of recent date is something that the archeology of our thought easily shows. And it may be nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared . . . then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn on the sand at the edge of the sea’] 398.

But where shall we stop? No sooner had the most recent spate of posthumanist thought emerged that it appeared that this face, too—and perhaps now faces-in-general—may also become a victim of tides. The newest form of posthumanism might be called postposthumanism. It might—but it’s not; it’s usually called “Plant Studies.” Titles in the Minnesota UP series mentioned above include: Plants Have So Much to Teach Us, All We Have to do is Ask; Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life; and Insect Media. Where once talk of “posthumanism” implied addressing non-human animal life, posthumanism itself has been criticised for privileging animal life over vegetation. It is not a one-off: Brill’s series “Critical Plant Studies” hopes to fill a perceived gap in philosophy.(9) It was inaugurated by Michael Marder’s Plant Life, which explored “the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of instrumentality” (surprise, surprise!). As with such revolutionary work, the indications so far are that horticulturalists, botanists and hobby-gardeners don’t care even slightly. Not that this stops the enthusiasts. Witness the program for a session at a recent conference:

Still, what is good about Plant Studies and Thing Studies (when Thing Studies eventually becomes a thing in itself) is that they actually foreground a kind of anthropology, indeed one which they themselves are forced to thematise. And where the ostensible focus of Plant Studies is ontological, its real impetus is ethical (which is also true of GA). In this universe, animals and plants are to be welcomed back, as if reality were some grand cosmic party to which some guests (plants and animals) were not invited and that we should invite them forthwith. But although anthropological and ethical themes are foregrounded in these kinds of work, their bases are rarely justified. It is assumed that welcoming animals back into the fold will ensure that they get a better go of things. But there’s no such guarantee. The Australian-South African writer, J. M. Coetzee, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald that:

The campaign of human beings for animal rights is curious in one respect: the creatures on whose behalf human beings are acting are unaware of what their benefactors are up to and, if they succeed, are unlikely to thank them. There is even a sense in which animals do not know what is wrong—they do certainly not know what is wrong in the same way that humans do. Thus, however close the well-meaning benefactor may feel to animals, the animal rights campaign remains a human project from beginning to end. (“Exposing the Beast”)

Coetzee’s point is as obvious as it is rarely stated. He points to a cultural pattern, a social pattern, and of course, an anthropology which deserves explication. With the work of Girard and Gans, we could hardly be in better hands.

Stanford Memorial Church, January 19, 2016

On the last page of his great book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1979, René Girard wrote the following lines. According to Martha’s wish I will first read it in French so that René’s native tongue is heard during this memorial. I regret that I am unable to say it with his beautiful Provençal accent which he kept during all his American life:

Je crois que la vérité n’est pas un vain mot, ou un simple «  effet  » comme on dit aujourd’hui. Je pense que tout ce qui peut nous détourner de la folie et de la mort, désormais, a partie liée avec cette vérité. Mais je ne sais pas comment parler de ces choses-là. Seuls les textes et les institutions me paraissent abordables, et leur rapprochement me paraît lumineux sous tous les rapports.

An approximate translation could read as follows:

I do not believe that truth is a vain word, no more than a sham as many contend today. I believe that from now on everything that can divert us from madness and death is intimately linked to that truth. However I am unable to address these things properly. I am only good at reading texts and analyzing institutions, but this sheds an incredible light on our world.

It is vertiginous to consider that René has now the possibility of contemplating that truth without mediation. At least, that’s what he believed when he pondered over Saint Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians: “Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” But what do these little words: “now”, “then”, mean or refer to? And what truth is that?

Once René told his daughter Mary that he had managed—and that is true—to produce the first truly secular account of this fact that should be the central focus of any science of the human: all known human societies are governed by what anthropologists of the old school named the sacred—all societies save one: ours, which we call modernity. And this because our modern world is shaped by the Christian message and the latter is responsible for the de-sacralization of the world.

We know that the truth, human but revealed, that René has been searching for all his life has to do with the relationship between violence and the sacred. I cannot believe that what happened during the night of November 13^th to 14^th of last year was a sheer coincidence. Just a few hours before the first memorial service for René was celebrated in the church of Thomas Aquinas here in Palo Alto, Paris was struck by a series of abominable terrorist attacks. The cruel irony is that René’s hypothesis, as he liked to call his fundamental insight, provides the best account for this insane deployment of violence.

It’s neither the place nor the time to flesh out what René could have said about the wave of terrorist violence that is sweeping the world today. Only this: “They hated me without reason” says the Gospel of John that René preferred to quote in this translation. The usual version is “without a cause.” But the Greek original (dôron) refers to the gratuitousness of God’s gift to the world. Isn’t it astounding that the violence Christ is victim of should be referred to by the very word that serves to designate the absence of reason that presides over God’s love for us ? The terrorists’ violence certainly has a million causes that have been analyzed by as many scholarly articles. But as far as reason is concerned, this violence doesn’t go beyond murderous imbecility. In his last book, the most pessimistic of all, René Girard prophesized that this violence which he called “essential” was about to carry off everything in its path.

The novel is the quintessential modern literary genre, and its emergence in the seventeenth century is a classic problem of literary history. The novel’s appearance is connected to the emergence of Modernity, so a theory of the novel is also more or less a theory of Modernity. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist, the novel is distinguished by polyphony: the author orchestrates distinct voices in ways not found in monologic genres like epic. In this perspective, Dostoevsky is the paradigmatic novelist, the most successful at bringing singular perspectives into productive dialogue. The novel’s form, for Bakhtin, is symptomatic of larger social changes in Modernity: as medieval hierarchy breaks down, class and geographic mobility increases, and formerly isolated groups are brought into creative contact with each other.

René Girard, in contrast, does not share Bakhtin’s overriding concern with form. Girard’s interest lies squarely with content. For Girard, the realist novel demystifies romance and the illusions of desire. Girard derives his theory of mimetic or mediated desire from his reading of leading novelists such as Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky. For both Bakhtin and Girard, the novel genre serves as primary evidence for an ambitious theory about the meaning of Modernity and, for Bakhtin, language itself. Working with the same genre, however, they come to widely divergent conclusions. My goal in this essay is to bring their theories into dialogue, bridge the gap between them, and show how their theories complement each other in fruitful ways. I’ll begin by reviewing and evaluating Girard’s theory.

Girard published Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque in 1961, and the English translation followed a few years later. The title can be translated literally as romantic lie and novelistic truth. (The word play on romantique and romanesque does not translate into English, unfortunately, and the English translator, Yvonne Freccero, apparently settled for an alliteration: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, published in 1965.) The realist novel is often defined by its contrast with romance, but Girard articulates this opposition in a new way. The “lie” of romance is that one’s desire for the beloved is singular and spontaneous, that the beloved is unique and perfect, and that union with the beloved will bring complete happiness. The romantic believes, “no one loves ______ like I do.” The “lie” applies not only to romantic desires but human desire in general: for example, modern consumer society, in which people define themselves by, and take great pride in, their taste in music, food, clothing, and other goods.

The realist novel, according to Girard, reveals the truth of desire, that desire is mediated by an other or others. Desire is not original and spontaneous, but rather an imitation of another’s desire. Desire is social, not individual. Girard distinguishes simple appetite, which we share with animals, from desire (DDN 3). Babies are born with an appetite for food, but they are not born wanting brand-name consumer products; such desires must be learned, and they are learned by imitation. Girard notes, “the most skillful advertising does not try to convince that a product is superior but that it is desired by Others” (DDN 104). The human condition is desire, insofar as we are social animals. Desire is based on something more fundamental: imitation, which is quasi-instinctual—a powerful learning method, but also an expression of competition. When two people desire the same object, they compete for its possession, resulting often in conflict. While desire can be mediated by literary representations, as with Don Quixote and Emma Bovary, often there is a specific human model. Because the desires of the individual and the model converge on the same object (or person), the model then becomes a rival, an obstacle to the goal of desire. Girard argues persuasively that the goal of desire is not actually the ostensible object, but rather the rival, who is transformed by desire into a quasi-divine being, either angelic or demonic.

Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote is often considered the first novel, and it illustrates Girard’s theory perfectly. Don Quixote has given up his life to the imitation of the “most perfect” knight, Amadis of Gaul, on whom his desires for adventure and romance are modeled. Girard’s genius was to take this obvious point and from it create a theory of the human with far-reaching implications. Madame Bovary, from Gustave Flaubert’s novel, is a modern day Don Quixote who is likewise inspired by her reading of romance. Flaubert’s demystification is more cruel than Cervantes’ in that her adulterous affairs are desperately sordid, and they end in suicide, madness, and the poorhouse, for her orphaned daughter.

Girard notes that the mediator of desire can be “external” or “internal” to the social world of the desiring individual. When I imitate the desire of someone I know, this can lead to rivalry for the same object of desire, as in the classic love triangle; such is internal mediation. In contrast, Don Quixote’s mediator is external. Since he doesn’t have any contact with Amadis of Gaul, there is no possibility of entering into conflict with him. External mediators are preferable to internal mediators for this reason, and they can serve as positive role models. Many critics, of course, see Don Quixote’s illusions as ennobling. But the fact remains that he has enslaved himself to a false ideal. Girard is aware that Don Quixote is a comic figure, and that his novel is not just a simple morality tale warning us against reading too literally. Nevertheless, Don Quixote is deluded, and from a religious perspective his life is wasted. Girard disagrees with the Romantic and modern critics who take Don Quixote as heroic in his illusions. Girard points out the essential vanity in Don Quixote’s attempts to “rescue” the helpless: “The victim to be rescued is never more than a pretext for asserting oneself gloriously against the whole universe” (DDN 144). Accordingly, Girard places great weight on Don Quixote’s final deathbed return to sanity when he repudiates his chivalric illusions.

Girard finds a historical development in the novel genre from depictions of external mediation in early novels such as Don Quixote, to the representation of internal mediation, which is more messy and complicated. Dostoevsky’s mature novels exemplify the latter. In his novels, we find individuals who are obsessed with their mediators in perverse ways, such as the husband, Trusotsky, of The Eternal Husband. One of the peculiarities of mimetic desire is that the beloved is not considered worthy of romantic love unless a mediator confirms the desire. So Trusotsky introduces his fiancée to his rival, creating a love triangle which frustrates the achievement of his desire. With internal mediation, the subject and model become mediators for each other, leading to an escalation of rivalry and conflict, often resulting in the anarchic situations not unusual in Dostoevsky’s novels. In the novelistic representation of internal mediation, individuals often take actions which frustrate the achievement of their desires. Any object of desire that can be actually attained becomes ipso facto worthless. The true object of the desire is the “being” of the rival, but because this goal is inherently unattainable, individuals seek for ever more inaccessible objects. While Don Quixote, at least, achieves a semblance of transcendence in his quests (with his local fame), the modern protagonist is condemned to the endless pursuit of frustrated transcendence. The only true transcendence, for Girard, is to be found in Christianity, through the renunciation of mimetic rivalry and the embrace of Christian love. God is the only valid mediator for desire.

What makes the novelistic revelation of mimetic desire so revolutionary is that its operation is essentially unconscious. The individual remains convinced that his desire is spontaneous and original, and that only the evil obstacles to his desire prevent him from achieving the utopia of fulfilled desire. The individual is oblivious to the fact that he often goes out of his way to create impediments. One might object that Don Quixote is aware that his desire is modeled on Amadis of Gaul, but he remains unaware that the world of romance is entirely fictional, and so he remains essentially deluded. He is convinced that only the evil “enchanters” who constantly deceive him prevent the full achievement of his dreams.

The most important context for the great novels, for Girard, is the life of the novelist. The novelist is a former romantic who has suffered acutely from the illusions of desire. Since romantic desires are so blinding, he must undergo a quasi-religious conversion that illuminates his darkness. The novelist is one who has experienced the delusions, the degradations, the disappointments of mimetic desire most acutely in his own life. Only one who drinks this wine to its last bitter dregs can finally see through to its ultimate emptiness and vanity. In this way, the novelist is able to decisively renounce his previous life and find reconciliation with himself and others—an experience which constitutes the raw material for his novels. The great novels lead the reader through this experience, plunging us into the world of romantic betrayals, struggles, and chaos. At the end of such novels, the protagonist finally renounces his former life and achieves peace. Raskolnikov’s redemption at the end of Crime and Punishment through the ministrations of the Christ-like Sonia is exemplary in this regard. Romantic lies are so overwhelming that only such a radical conversion is able to overcome them. So while the truth of desire can be expressed in rational propositions, only by a terrifying journey through fiery “hell” can individuals finally arrive at the base of Purgatory hill and begin the labor of repentance. The Künstlerroman conforms to this pattern, telling how the artist became the person capable of writing the novel we are reading.

A theory of genre must not only distinguish the genre from other genres but also explain the genre’s emergence. For Girard, the novel is rooted in the ground prepared by the Christian revelation, and explaining his take on Christianity requires a brief excursion into his anthropology of sacrifice and human origins, which he developed from his theory of mimetic desire. First of all, Girard makes a sharp distinction between myth and the Bible. Myths generally represent in disguised form an originary human murder or scapegoating, which Girard argues founds and structures the pre-historic human community as a sacrificial order. The Bible, in contrast, reveals the truth of the founding murder, especially the New Testament Passion of Christ, which presents Jesus as an innocent scapegoat. The violence of his death is human not divine. The opposition of Bible and myth is analogous at a broader level to the opposition of novel to romance. Girard argues that mimetic desire leads to scapegoating: when several people compete for the same object, a mimetic crisis ensues which endangers the existence of the group. The crisis is resolved, according to Girard, when the group finds a scapegoat who is held responsible. The scapegoat is demonized and then killed, channeling and purging the violence of the crisis. But afterwards, the scapegoat is associated with the peace which results from his death, and then divinized, becoming a sacrificial deity who requires periodic, symbolic repetitions of the founding murder. The story of Christ’s Passion demystifies this basic human pattern, revealing the innocence of the victim.

How does Christianity prepare the ground for the novel? The influence of Christianity can be discerned at two levels, the larger social-political evolution of the West, and in the conversion of individuals. Girard’s emphasis on conversion in his theory derives from New Testament Christianity, which calls for repentance and faith resulting in a new identity, e.g., from Saul to Paul. Girard maintains that Christian conversion is not comparable to or derived from any of the numerous pagan cults or philosophies in the ancient world (MT 265-8). As we have seen, the denouement of the great novels often represents the conversion of the protagonist, and the insights of the novel result from the conversion experience of the novelist. Such a conversion is not always overtly Christian, but it does involve an insight into the vanity of romantic illusions and the mimetic nature of desire. But how does the Passion story relate to mimetic desire? We can observe mimetic behavior in the events surrounding Christ’s Passion, for example, the crowd’s demand for the release of Barabbas and the death of Jesus; and Peter’s repudiation of Jesus after his death when he is surrounded by hostile non-believers. Girard interprets Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek” as a refusal of mimetic conflict.

In terms of the social-political evolution of the West, the New Testament demystifies the sacrificial nature of traditional hierarchies, creating a skepticism about the divine nature of political authority with far-reaching consequences. Christianity frees individuals from the illusion that “sacred” violence is necessary, leaving them with the stark choice between God or Satan. Girard interprets Satan as the biblical metaphor for mimetic influence leading to violence. The Christian revelation is so radical, according to Girard, that it took many centuries for humans to fully understand and put into practice its revelations.(1) Theologians commonly misunderstood Christ’s death on the cross as a sacrifice analogous to pagan sacrifice.

Cesáreo Bandera has examined Medieval and Early Modern literature in terms of the Girardian theory of the Christian revelation. For Bandera, the key issue is the representation of heroes who serve as models of identity. The epic hero, who triumphs by military might, is essentially anti-Christian according to Bandera. Medieval artists sometimes tried to assimilate Christ to pagan concepts of a hero, picturing him as the Pantocrator, Ruler of the cosmos. The task for writers, which took many centuries, was to go beyond the epic concept of heroic identity (based on sacrificial violence) and find new models. Cervantes’ Don Quixote was a crucial step in the demystification of heroic models. Don Quixote transcends the binarism of the sacred because he is neither idealized nor demonized (cf. Thersites in Homer’s The Iliad).(2)

In religion, the later medieval focus on the sufferings of Christ was decisive in ushering in a new model of identity, one which recognized the sinful, fallen nature of the self. Other significant developments include the Devotio Moderna movement, the Imitatio Christi, Christian mysticism, and Jesuit spiritual exercises; all of which paved the way for Erasmus and the Reformation. As Catholics, however, both Girard and Bandera have a largely negative view of the Protestant Reformation. Bandera sees Protestant iconoclasm as regressive form of sacrifice, what Girard calls “Satan driving out Satan” (Bandera, TSG 236fn). In Girard’s interpretation of this New Testament episode, Satan is essentially the action of driving out, of sacrificial expulsion; so that “Satan driving out Satan” is a false reformation that merely reproduces the logic of sacrifice.(3) Girard sees Protestantism as symptomatic of the Early Modern dissolution of sacrificial order, and the inability of existing traditions to find any workable replacements:

Today, almost a thousand years later [after the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom in 1054], we are witnessing the breakdown of the Reformation. There are now thousands of Protestant churches. Protestantism is coming apart at the seams, crumbling really. Yet some of the new churches display more spiritual fervor than the old ones. (TOWSC 77)

The breakdown of the sacrificial order in the Early Modern period has ambivalent consequences in Girard’s reading. On the one hand, humans are (at least partially) freed from the lies that justify killing the innocent. We no longer countenance the execution of accused witches, for example. The destruction of such idolatrous illusions allows for the development of modern science and medicine. But on the other hand, we lose the traditional protection (i.e., scapegoating) against mimetic violence. Secularization means that “men become gods for each other.” The novel takes as its subject matter this new world of internal mediation, which escalates as we become more secular. Modernity allows for the insights of the great novelists into the hell of internal mediation. The stories and novels of Franz Kafka exemplify the nightmarish world of internal mediation and frustrated transcendence which typifies Modernity at its worst.(4) Despite the dangers created by demystifying sacrificial illusions, their destruction is still necessary for the possible turn to non-sacrificial truth and peace.

Girard’s basic insight—that the novel explores the workings of desire in the modern world, revealing its mediated nature—is solid, well-supported, and, indeed, revolutionary—because of its profound anthropological implications. Nevertheless, we need to consider its limitations. The most obvious objection to Girard’s theory is that it is too narrow to encompass such a diverse genre as the novel. Girard speaks mainly about what he calls the “great novels” of his chosen major novelists. So to that degree, he himself limits the scope of his theory. At the same time, however, he often makes generalizations about “the world of the novel,” and the clear implication is that his theory accounts for the main raison d’être of the genre, even if some novels fit better than others. Moreover, the opposition of mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque implies a way to classify novels according to their perspective on desire—a classification which corresponds broadly to a distinction between popular (i.e., romantic) and more serious novels. In this way his theory can be (and has been) expanded to account for more that just his chosen great novels. Furthermore, insofar as desire is fundamental to what it means to be human, all realist novels afford a perspective on the workings of desire in the modern world.

The main limitation of Girard’s theory, in my view, is the binary nature of his distinction between the sacrificial and the non-sacrificial, an opposition he insists is not dialectical; he argues they are true contraries which cannot be synthesized. But in this way he creates a Manichean world-view that ironically reproduces the very binarism of the sacred that he, better than anyone, has demystified. For example, Girard consistently denounces Romantic individualism as a form of the mensonge romantique, the illusion that one is special and unique. To some extent Girard has a valid point; if one’s identity is defined by one’s desires, and desire is mediated, then the self is by definition social and mediated, not autonomous. Girard opposes this false individualism to the true individualism offered by Christianity: “passion” as opposed to “desire” (RFU 43).(5) But individuals, in novels as in life, do not fit into such black and white categories. Girard imposes a theological framework which is foreign to the representation of life in novels, even his chosen novels.

Girard insists that there is no alternative to mensonge romantique besides the Christian refusal of violence and mimetic slavery. I agree this is a valid distinction—a true opposition—but a false dichotomy. Girard ignores how practical belief in individualism actually functions in Modernity. What actually distinguishes one person from another? We should remember that difference is ultimately a question of perception and belief. There are real differences in values, abilities, and achievements, of course; but what matters for social order is the perception of difference; because it is perception/belief that governs behavior. A superiority which must be constantly proved, for example, does not function effectively: a man who always needs to draw his gun to prove his authority is less effective that one whose authority is respected by the community.

We know from Girard that the basic enemy of social order is the sameness that results from imitation, because it stimulates rivalry and conflict. It follows that difference is what enables social order and peace. The most obvious and important form of difference, historically, is the division of individuals into different groups; for example, rulers, priests, and workers. The worker is inhibited from imitating the ruler or priest, competing and thus conflicting with them. The different classes of society are not equal but rather arranged into a hierarchy. Girard’s work on scapegoating suggests that hierarchy can be seen as an institutional form of sacrifice: the interests of the lower classes are sacrificed to the interests of the ruling classes. Insofar as class divisions are arbitrary and unmotivated, this is true. But this ignores the fact that everyone benefits from social order, as Hobbes pointed out in his social contract theory. Furthermore, class divisions are not completely arbitrary; aristocrats were originally warriors distinguished by their skill in battle. When class status is hereditary, of course, then its original justification is weakened over time. Kings and aristocrats have always appealed to the sacred to justify their position. Girard argues that the sacred is really a disguised form of sacrificial violence. Christianity, in contrast, asserts the equality of souls before God. Christianity’s historical appeal was due, in part, to the weakness of traditional justifications of class status. In the Renaissance, traditional hierarchy was undergoing a process of disintegration, a process which results in Modernity. This is the essential context for the emergence of the novel. What is at stake in larger terms is not the false alternatives of Christianity or apocalypse, but simply different means to social order.

As Girard points out correctly, the disintegration of cosmic hierarchy poses problems for social order; problems which the novel takes for its subject matter, usually at the local rather than national level. What Girard didn’t recognize, or at least didn’t fully appreciate, is that individual difference can also serve to preserve order. If I believe that I am special and unique, then I am relieved of the burden of trying to compete with others. In a similar fashion, if I have an external mediator, a personal hero who far exceeds me and everyone in my social group, then I needn’t feel resentment when someone in my group receives recognition that I feel is excessive, since my hero far exceeds both of us in both achievement and recognition. What each person needs is a scene on which they can successfully compete and earn recognition. The West offers many such avenues, the Internet being an obvious example. If I’m perceived as different, then I don’t need to be the best. I’m the best at being me. This is the ideology of individualism, derived largely from Protestantism, and it allows for the continued existence of the modern world, indeed, drives it.(6) Individualism is not a panacea, of course, and there is plenty of free-floating resentment resulting in occasional outbreaks of violence. The crux is that recognition or centrality has to circulate in Modernity. Everyone needs to feel they have a voice. Someone who monopolizes the limelight arouses our resentment (although they may also fulfill our fantasy of centrality). Marxists see the ideology of individualism as a conspiracy to mystify the “truth” of class society. Yet everything is relative. Compared to the Medieval and Renaissance periods, our society really does offer widespread opportunities to talent and discipline irrespective of class status, race, or gender. And there is really is substantial fluidity of class status (or more accurately, simply wealth) in the modern world. The myth of Marxism is that utopia is possible, a myth hundreds of times more destructive than the petty but constructive illusions of individualism. It’s true of course that individualism tends to undermine many of the traditional bases of community. But community can be oppressive just as often as nourishing. Our highest value is ultimately freedom, and we retain the freedom to form (or leave) a great variety of associations at our choice.

The “divine” hierarchy that structured ancient and medieval societies worked by repressing mimetic desire through taboos and prohibitions. This structure worked for most of human history, enabling the species to continue. The modern world, in contrast, allows for the liberation of desire, with laws mainly directed to the protection of rights and enforcement of contracts. Each of us can aspire to the stars, and we are encouraged to do so. At the very least, each of us can work for and create a better life for ourselves. Whereas unrestrained mimetic desire was a destructive force in the ancient world, the modern world harnesses desire and the resulting competition as positive forces for progress. In economic terms, if the free market runs on desire, then it becomes necessary to understand desire, not just its destructive illusions, but also its potential for enriching our lives. The novel explores the complex (and often counterintuitive) ways that desire works in the modern world: essential information for thriving or simply surviving. The “marriage market” in Jane Austen’s novels and others is one example. The “marriage plot” of so many Victorian novels teaches young men and women to restrain their immediate desires in order to achieve their enduring desires. Girard’s view of desire in binary terms is ultimately too narrow. He has acknowledged that desire can be good, but his theory still depends on a sharp distinction between sacrificial and non-sacrificial. He hypothesizes that culture originates in the violent scapegoating of a human individual. This originary legacy creates a Manichean and even conspiratorial world view in Girard’s theory. But Eric Gans, with his Originary Hypothesis, has demonstrated convincingly that culture can be explained more economically as the deferral of violence.(7) Culture is built on the mutual exchange of sacrifice, at all levels. Exchange, and the deferral of desire, are the originary and still essential operations of culture. The maturity of the individual, in or out of the novel, involves the recognition that not all sacrifices are reciprocated, and they don’t need to be. In Christian terms, it is enough that God recognizes my sacrifice.

One area of agreement between Girard and Bakhtin is an understanding of human culture as fundamentally social. Girard makes this point within the context of psychology, however, while Bakhtin focuses on language. The insight that language is social is the foundation for Bakhtin’s linguistic and literary theories. He begins his seminal essay “Discourse in the Novel” by observing:

verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning. It is this idea that has motivated our emphasis on “the stylistics of genre.” (259)

Bakhtin has a strong sense of language as structure, a recognition of what’s called “the content of form.” By his definition, language has a certain autonomy or agency, resulting from its social nature:

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intention; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (“Discourse” 294)

Unlike pure structuralism, Bakhtin clearly allows for individual agency. What is most original about his quasi-structural approach is his emphasis on the plasticity and diversity of discourses and how they interact. Bakhtin allows more room for creativity and freedom in the structuralist “prison-house of language” than most neo-Marxists.

The best way to introduce Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is by reviewing his understanding of language. His key linguistic concept is heteroglossia, a term that requires some unpacking. We know that any group of people, to the degree of its isolation from others, will develop its own way of speaking—a distinctive vocabulary, jargon, characteristic speech and writing patterns— professions, for example, locales, hobbyists, enthusiasts of all kinds, economic classes, time periods, even families. In communication theory, such groups are called discourse communities, and individuals belong to a variety of such communities and speak in a variety of ways, according to which group they are addressing. Even “an illiterate peasant,” Bakhtin writes,

miles away from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless lived in several language systems: he prayed to God in one language (Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth language. (“Discourse” 295-6)

The language of a particular discourse embodies a distinct set of values, a way of viewing the world. Language is not, then, a transparent representation of the world, nor is it a straightforward expression of an individual’s intentions; different forms of language express different ideological perspectives on the world (“Discourse” 271). Insisting on the diversity of discourses within any language, Bakhtin opposes any linguistic approach which views a language as a monolithic whole (“Discourse” 265, 270, 288). Heteroglossia refers first of all to the stratification of language into discourses, so that no utterance is neutral and transparent (“Discourse” 272). Furthermore, different discourses are constantly interacting with each other, spreading their influence, so that any particular utterance may exhibit a dialogue between discourses. Such interactions typically involve some struggle, to the extent that the values of each discourse conflict with each other.

The individual’s relationship to the various discourses of his environment is fraught with struggle. Authoritative discourses— religious, political, moral—come to us as an alien force, full of the intentions and accents of others:

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. (“Discourse” 293)

In fact, the individual is defined by just this process of appropriation and adaptation: “The ideological becoming of a human being, in this view, is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (“Discourse” 341). Individuals must exercise agency in their relationship with the language of those in authority. Such authoritative discourses are not without value; they may embody necessary norms of behavior. But the word of authority, initially, comes from outside, from the past, from tradition, demanding our acknowledgement and limiting our freedom. The individual must struggle with such voices, discarding some and acknowledging others, so that they become “internally-persuasive” discourse, an element of identity and a means of agency. Novels sometimes portray this struggle: for example, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck feels torn between the authoritative discourse on slavery and his own human feelings for the escaped slave Jim.

For Bakhtin, language is “always-already” dialogic, always orientated to a potential audience, always responsive (whether in sympathy or hostility) to the concerns of others, even in our most private thoughts. The stratification of discourses, and their constant interaction with each other at every level, including any particular utterance, constitutes what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, which he considers the defining nature of language.

An utterance can take different postures towards its own heteroglossia, seeking to exclude or embrace it. Some literary genres such as epic seek to create a monologic, unified perspective that embodies the traditions of a culture. The novel, on the other hand, embraces heteroglossia, providing a variety of different ideological perspectives on the world. In the novel, any particular discourse is relativized, revealed as limited, as existing only in dialogic relationship with other discourses and perspectives. Some of the dialogic styles of the novel are specifically literary in form, such as skaz, when the narrator mimics the oral speech patterns of one of the characters. But the particular virtue of the novel is that the genre draws on virtually all of the available written and oral discourses of a language, with or without quotation marks.

For Bakhtin, the novel’s embodiment of a great variety of discourses, and its particular attitude towards different discourses, are what define the genre. Such a stylistic definition is rather unusual; the novel is usually defined by its content and only secondarily by its style, because the basic form is narrative, which the novel shares with romance and epic. In an important sense, for Bakhtin, the novel is “about” language, specifically heteroglossia. He connects the emergence of the novel to the “epistemological turn” in philosophy with Descartes, and the novel is likewise fundamentally epistemological in its orientation (“Epic” 15). The novel’s great discovery is that every discourse is a form of knowledge, and that an utterance is meaningful only in the context of discourse. According to Bakhtin, the novel, ideally, does not employ any master discourse or narrative voice which governs and judges the other discourses from a superior perspective. Indeed, the best novels question the legitimacy of any such master discourse. The novel is self-aware and self-critical in a way foreign to other genres (“Epic” 6). Bakhtin acknowledges, however, that some novels exemplify his theory better than others. He even characterizes some novels as “monologic” in comparison to other more “dialogic” examples. But such novels are monologic only as compared to other novels, and the genre as whole is still distinguished from other genres by its dialogic nature. Bakhtin classifies novels according to the degree which they reveal heteroglossia. He doesn’t explicitly rate novels in this way, but his favorites are clearly the more heteroglossic.

The novel and its revelation of heteroglossia have clear socio-political implications. The novel is a subversive genre in Bakhtin’s reading because it relativizes and questions all forms of authoritative discourse, creating a carnivalesque context where traditional power relations are upended. Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel is Bakhtin’s great exemplar of literary carnival, but he also finds carnivalesque elements in Dostoevsky and others. In general, Bakhtin loved comic literature—Rabelais, Charles Dickens, and Lawrence Sterne, for example—and his theory of the novel works particularly well with comic novels, which often parody the voices of authority (“Epic” 21-28). Parody, of course, is a great example of dialogic discourse. The value of the novel is tied up with its subversive tendencies. (We should note that although he typically framed his discussion of subversion in Marxist terms, the political authorities in Stalinist Russia found his work threatening, and his books were suppressed until relatively recently.)

To a large extent, Bakhtin sees the novel as a relatively independent literary development; he doesn’t adhere to any crude Marxist “reflection theory,” whereby literature is a passive reflection of economic developments. Nevertheless, he does recognize that the novel is a child of the modern world, expressing some of its unique advances. Certain developments in Early Modern Europe parallel the dynamic structure of the novel. Bakhtin writes,

Polyglossia had always existed (it is more ancient than pure, canonic monoglossia), but it had not been a factor in literary creation; an artistically conscious choice between languages did not serve as the creative center of the literary and language process. . . . The new cultural and creative consciousness [of the novel] lives in an actively polyglot world [i.e., Modernity]. The world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly. (“Epic” 12)

The progress from a feudal economy to capitalism is crucial, of course; the increase of trade brings about enormous changes, bringing formerly isolated areas into contact with a wider world; and trade also brings about new possibilities of social mobility. In a very literal sense, different languages and discourses are brought into dialogue with each other, such that history parallels novelistic structure. As Bakhtin observes, the particular form of the novel is

powerfully affected by a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships. A multitude of different languages, cultures and times become available to Europe, and this became a decisive factor in its life and thought. (“Epic” 11)

Bakhtin has enjoyed phenomenal influence in the wake of post-structuralism, especially by neo-Marxist critics interested in forms of subversion. His work on language and his various neologisms have become essential features of the current theoretical landscape, and for good reasons. But we need to dig deeper into his key concept of heteroglossia in order to understand what is really at stake in the relationship of different discourses. It’s been observed that Bakhtin’s theory is utopian, but what exactly is missing? He maintains that real contradictions drive the process of dialogism and that such dialogue is open-ended and unfinalizable; he resists the move to any easy synthesis. But the possibility of real conflict is missing; instead we find only a vaguely-motivated dialogue. The basic problem with Bakhtin is that he lacks any real sense of the anthropological function of language in deferring violence. As we’ll see in our discussion of Dostoevsky, what brings discourses and voices into dialogue is mimesis, the same force that creates their contradictions, which are not merely logical, but real conflicts of interest. The deficits in Bakhtin’s theory must be remedied by Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, or else we are left with a romantic aestheticizing of language and literature.

By the same token, we can also see that Girard lacks any theory of language, so his theory of the novel would benefit from Bakhtin’s sensitivity to different discourses. Yet Girard does not take kindly to any variety of structuralism. He writes,

In Bakhtin the notion of the carnivalesque designates the form of what no longer has form and thereby remains the prisoner of formalism, like rites themselves. The notion of the dialogic inflicts all sorts of miseries on the linguistic structures, strives radically to weaken them, multiplies their substitutions and oscillations, but nonetheless in the final analysis remains the prisoner of linguistic structuralism. To escape the latter, it would be necessary to understand that the total of this operation always equals zero. This would instantly free us from all methodological préciosité and grant us access at last to the doubles [created by mimetic desire], that is, the essential. (TDBB 46)

Girard assimilates linguistic form to sacrificial “rites,” and he reads Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque” as simply a lack of form resulting from the weakening of sacrificial order in the Renaissance. Structural analyses, Girard suggests, are ultimately tautological and even nihilistic: “the total of this operation always equals zero.” We would be better off, Girard claims, to forego structuralism altogether and focus instead on the psychology of mimetic desire. But the forms of discourse cannot so simply be assimilated to sacrificial “rites”; they are actually a necessary feature of language and linguistic analysis. The claim that any particular form is sacrificial, valorizing certain terms and denigrating their opposites, is central to Deconstruction. And Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, far from being “the form of what no longer has form,” actually serves to counter the sacrificial in discourse, hence its popularity among poststructuralists.

We can further our dialogue here by considering Fyodor Dostoevsky, who constitutes a prime theoretical exemplar for Girard and Bakhtin, both of whom have a book devoted to him. For Girard, Dostoevsky provides acute insights into post-Christian Modernity and internal mediation. Bakhtin, on the other hand, finds a radically new form of the novel with Dostoevsky that he characterizes as “polyphonic.” Rather surprisingly, Bakhtin seems to define polyphony as a technique in characterization rather than style or discourse (more on this below). In a polyphonic novel, the characters assume a certain independence such that they are not controlled by or subsumed under the author’s perspective, as in previous novels; as a result, we respond “as if the character were not an object of authorial discourse, but rather a fully valid, autonomous carrier of his own individual words” (Bakhtin, PDP 5). Bakhtin writes,

A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. In no way, then, can a character’s discourse be exhausted by the usual functions of characterization and plot development, nor does it serve as a vehicle for the author’s own ideological position (as with Byron, for instance). The consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness. (PDP 6-7)

What is the relationship of heteroglossia and polyphony? Bakhtin emphasizes the novelty of polyphony, calling it “a completely new type of artistic thinking,” “a fundamentally new novelistic genre” (PDP 3, 7). At the same time, however, he acknowledges that polyphony is dialogic to an extreme degree:

In Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel we are dealing not with ordinary dialogic form, that is, with an unfolding of material within the framework of its own monologic understanding and against the firm background of a unified world of objects. No, here we are dealing with an ultimate dialogicality, that is, a dialogicality of the ultimate whole. (PDP 18)

So there is a dialogic dimension to polyphony, although it is an extreme form, “an ultimate dialogicality,” which leads one to suspect that polyphony is related more closely to heteroglossia than his insistence on polyphony’s novelty might otherwise lead us to conclude. When tracing out the literary roots of the novel, he finds that dialogic artistic prose “leads to Dostoevsky” (PDP 109). Perhaps surprisingly, however, he admits that Dostoevsky’s novels are not actually stylistically diverse in the ordinary sense; nevertheless, he maintains they include “dialogic relationships” which are “metalinguistic” (PDP 181). He explains,

Dostoevsky’s works astound us first of all by their extraordinary diversity of types and varieties of discourse, types and varieties, moreover, that are present in their most extreme expression. Clearly predominant is vari-directional double-voiced discourse, in particular internally dialogized discourse and the reflected discourse of an other: hidden polemic, polemically colored confession, hidden dialogue. In Dostoevsky almost no word is without its intense sideward glance at someone else’s word. At the same time there are almost no objectified words in Dostoevsky, since the speech of his characters is constructed in a way that deprives it of all objectification. What also astounds us is the continual and abrupt alternation of the most varied types of discourse. Sharp and unexpected transitions from parody to internal polemic, from polemic to hidden dialogue, from hidden dialogue to stylization in serene hagiographic tones, then back again to parodistic narration and finally to an extremely intense open dialogue—such is the agitated verbal surface of his works. (PDP 203)

What Bakhtin describes here is discursive, but polyphony finds expression in the words of the characters and their dynamic and unexpected interactions, leading him to describe polyphony in terms of character. Paradoxically, what makes the characters seem so independent (of authorial control) is their deeply dialogical (or mimetic, in Girardian terms) relationship to others.

Polyphony and heteroglossia share some structural features. Just as discourses have their own life independent of the author in heteroglossia, so the characters in polyphony have their own life independent of the author; and there is no master discourse or perspective which governs the various discourses and characters—leading to the “unfinalizability” (PDP 252) which some critics have identified as the heart of Bakhtin’s theoretical project. Of course, in a novel, even character is ultimately discursive; so we are justified, I believe, in viewing polyphony as another, more intense, variety of heteroglossia. If so, then Bakhtin’s theory of the novel remains centered on heteroglossia. If heteroglossia is defined by heterogeneity, we shouldn’t be surprised that there is more than one type of heteroglossia.

We need to go further into what Bakhtin means by the “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” in polyphony. In practical terms, I would submit, this means that characters act and speak in unpredictable ways, and as a result are hard to classify as unambiguously good or evil. Furthermore, major characters often have distinct, more or less developed ideological and sometimes philosophical perspectives. Wayne Booth sees polyphony as an issue of realism or objectivity (xx). In other words, people really are independent and unpredictable, and Dostoevsky is faithful to this basic human reality. Polyphony is “realistic” in the sense that it is rooted in an important anthropological insight, but ultimately polyphony is an aesthetic effect, similar to what Freud calls the uncanny. Simply put, Dostoevsky’s characters have an uncanny liveliness to them. In Freud’s famous essay on the uncanny, he mentions the theory of Ernst Jentsch, who traces the uncanny experience to an unresolvable “uncertainty . . . [about] whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” (Freud 227). Freud comments that Jentsch’s theory is accurate as far as it goes but is more descriptive than analytical. What is needed, however, is not Freud’s Oedipus theory but rather Girard’s anthropology of desire. As per Jentsch, the uncanny involves the ambiguous animation of something non-living, often a doll or a dead person. What “animates” things or people, making them uncanny, is desire. In Eric Gans’s Originary Hypothesis, on the originary scene, the mimetic desires of the humans are projected onto the central object, a dead animal which becomes, for the group, ambiguously animate. Desire is precisely the uncanny in Girard’s theory, the most familiar but also the most “other” or threatening (Cf. Freud’s analysis of the German word Unheimlich). Desire is “animated” because mimesis seems to operate by itself, without conscious intention, and thus erupts in strange and unexpected ways. The uncanny is typically found in surreal literature but can be produced by certain realist works also. As a literary effect in Dostoevsky’s novels, a character becomes uncanny when we thought we had them identified as a type (the “automaton” in Jentsch’s definition), but they act in an unexpected way, asserting the centrality of their own uncanny desire, which is modeled on our own (or the protagonist’s, with whom we identify), yet uncanny because threatening. Only Girard’s theory gives a convincing explanation of how alterity can be based on sameness: “The more desire aspires to difference, the more it generates identity” (TDBB 96). The mimetic desire of the other is modeled on our own, but that very sameness produces the threat of conflict and violence, the perception of alterity. The destabilizing oscillation of attraction and repulsion is essentially mimetic. Again we see that Girard supplies what is missing with Bakhtin. Girard’s thesis that Dostoevsky is the premier psychologist of mimetic desire in Modernity is entirely convincing. Polyphony ultimately concerns Dostoevsky’s novel representation of a world decentered by desire; traditionally a fictional cosmos is structured around the desire of the protagonist, to which everything else is subordinated, either in opposition or support. The real world is not like this, of course, which is one reason why we have different expectations for life and fiction. But what makes Dostoevsky’s polyphony so compelling is not its realism (fidelity to experience), but its disruption of our narrative expectations through a hypermimeticism among the characters. Polyphony includes the desire of the reader in its dialogical transmutations (more on this below). As Bakhtin notes, Dostoevsky’s characters often seem to know what the other is thinking, even when they can’t admit to themselves that such is their thought. For example, when Alyosha, in The Brother’s Karamazov, tells Ivan that Ivan is not guilty for their father’s death (Bakhtin, PDP 255). Another uncanny mimetic effect is the paranoia rampant in Dostoevsky’s works, e.g. The Eternal Husband and The Double. Dostoevsky’s characters are continually haunted by the voice of the other. Bakhtin comments on the underground man (from Notes from the Underground): “In everything he senses above all someone else’s will predetermining him” (PDP 236). Bakhtin’s reading of Dostoevsky requires Girard’s mimetic theory to support it.

Girard observes that Dostoevsky’s mature novels take place in a contemporary world in which “men become gods for each other.” In other words, men have generally abandoned God and religion, and with those, the possibility of transcendence. The Christian revelation has the ironic effect of ushering in secular Modernity by dissolving the old sacrificial order. Without God as an external mediator, humans take each other for mediators, creating the rampant rivalry found in Dostoevsky’s works. Girard pays close attention to Dostoevsky’s personal history, and he views Notes from the Underground as Dostoevsky’s first mature work, demonstrating that he had overcome his youthful romanticism. The narrator of Notes from the Underground is so mimetic that he views virtually everyone as a rival and obstacle; he sees their indifference as a personal insult, a challenge. Anyone who views him with sympathy, like the prostitute Liza, becomes for that reason worthless in his eyes. The underground man suffers simultaneously from excessive vanity, delusions of grandeur, and the most abject inferiority complex. He demonstrates with great clarity the slavery involved in mimeticism. Girard argues cogently that the value placed on freedom by the underground man (and taken up by existentialists), his refutation of rationalism, is a red herring. The underground man is not free at all; even though he acts contrary to his rational self-interest, everything he does is intended to impress the “other” in one way or another; he is enslaved to what he imagines that others think about him.

Bakhtin’s interpretation of Notes from the Underground is in some ways quite similar: “The Underground Man remains in his inescapable opposition to the ‘other person’” (PDP 254). Everything he says and does constantly anticipates, and resists, what others might say and think about him:

What he fears most of all is that people might think he is repenting before someone, that he is asking someone’s forgiveness, that he is reconciling himself to someone else’s judgment or evaluation, that his self-affirmation is somehow in need of affirmation and recognition by another. . . . But precisely in this act of anticipating the other’s response and in responding to it he again demonstrates to the other (and to himself) his own dependence on this other. He fears that the other might think he fears that other’s opinion. But through this fear he immediately demonstrates his own dependence on the other’s consciousness, his own inability to be at peace with his own definition of self. With his refutation, he confirms precisely what he wishes to refute, and he knows it. (PDP 227)

Bakhtin’s analysis here advances Girard’s interpretation, although without the central mechanism of mimetic desire. But Bakhtin also adds important insight not found in Girard. In the underground man’s confession, Bakhtin identifies a peculiar rhetorical feature he calls the “loophole” (PDP 233):

A loophole is the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final meaning of one’s own words. If a word retains such a loophole this must inevitably be reflected in its structure. This potential other meaning, that is, the loophole left open, accompanies the word like a shadow. Judged by its meaning alone, the word with a loophole should be an ultimate word and does present itself as such, but in fact it is only the penultimate word and places after itself only a conditional, not a final, period. (PDP 233)

The underground man is constantly anticipating every possible reaction, objection, or other possible interpretation to what he says, and includes them all in his discourse. The result is that everything he says becomes conditional. He is impossible to pin down to any position. And this “unfinalizability” is finally the underground man’s most important characteristic. He resists every possible definition of himself, so that he can’t be identified even as a character in a novel. The underground man consciously resists the reader’s desire for closure or even understanding. For Bakhtin, there is an implicit self-referential dimension to the underground man (and all Dostoevsky’s heroes):

The Underground Man not only dissolves in himself all possible fixed features of his person, making them all the object of his own introspection, but in fact he no longer has any such traits at all, no fixed definitions, there is nothing to say about him, he figures not as a person taken from life but rather as the subject of consciousness and dream. And for the author as well he is not a carrier of traits and qualities that could have been neutral toward his self-consciousness and could have finalized him; no, what the author visualizes is precisely the hero’s self-consciousness and the inescapable open-endedness, the vicious circle of that self-consciousness. (PDP 51)

In the above passage, Dostoevsky elaborates on what he means by polyphony, and what I call the uncanny dimension of his characters, which is properly meta-fictional. The underground man is continually surprising everyone, including himself and his author; at the same time he is utterly predictable in his obsessions. He is a fictional character, who by definition is fixed by the words of the author. In that sense, he is a doll, an inanimate body, a puppet. But he continually exceeds the boundaries of the fiction, taking on uncanny life. He is surrounded by doubles, of course, everyone whom he takes for rivals; but he is also his own double; his character includes the other within himself, leading to what Bakhtin notes as the “inescapable perpetuum mobile of the dialogicized self-consciousness” (PDP 230).

Mikhail Bakhtin and René Girard have produced two highly original theories of the novel genre, along with brilliant analyses of particular novels. They both take Dostoevsky as a primary example for their theories, and as we saw, their readings of his novels bear significant similarities. We may wonder if Christianity is a common thread connecting these three authors. Bakhtin was accused by the Soviet authorities of participation in a prohibited Russian Orthodox group, but there is no certain evidence one way or another, and his religious convictions remain an open question. His sympathy for the profoundly Christian writer Dostoevsky, however, is probably not coincidental in this regard. The Christian anthropology of fallen humankind, subject to rivalry and conflict, may be a decisive factor for both Bakhtin’s and Girard’s theories. Bakhtin and Dostoevsky were also influenced by Christian utopianism, but we have seen that mimetic rivalry is the anthropological subtext of Heteroglossia and Polyphony. Bakhtin’s theory of language and the novel requires to be supplemented with Girard’s theory of desire. And both Girard and Bakhtin suffer from the lack of any rigorous understanding of language, its ethical function in deferring violence and the scenic nature of representation. Their work, however, remains irreplaceable for scholars of the novel and Modernity.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 259-422.

——. “Epic and Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 3-40.

——. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Bandera, Cesáreo. A Refuge of Lies: Reflections on Faith and Fiction. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.

——. The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

Booth, Wayne. Introduction. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. By Mikhail Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. xiii-xxvii.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Standard Edition Complete Works, Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 219-252.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.

——. Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

——. The One by Whom Scandal Comes. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014.

——. Resurrection From the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. Trans. James G. Williams. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2012.

——. “To double business bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Goldman, Peter. “The Meaning of Meaning in Kafka’s The Castle.” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology 15.2 (Spring 2010). Web.

——. “Why Generative Anthropology?” Chronicles of Love & Resentment. No. 445, Jul 13, 2013. Web.

O’Shea, Andrew. Selfhood and Sacrifice: René Girard and Charles Taylor on the Crisis of Modernity. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Notes

1. See Cesáreo Bandera on the time needed for the West to grasp the radical nature of the Christian Revelation, The Sacred Game, p. 234. (back)

2. For Bandera’s Girardian reading of Medieval and Renaissance literature, see The Sacred Game and A Refuge of Lies. (back)

3. For the New Testament references to Satan driving out Satan, see Mark 3.22-26, Matthew 12.24-28, and Luke 11.15-20. (back)

4. But see Peter Goldman, “The Meaning of Meaning in Kafka’s The Castle.” (back)

5. For a different critique of Girard on individualism, see Andrew O’Shea’s Selfhood and Sacrifice. Briefly, he argues that Girard’s critique of individualism, by itself, is nihilistic, since it allows the individual no agency or real identity. Girard’s theory of conversion is meant to address this impasse, but O’Shea argues the old self of conversion is constructed as an “other” whose sacrifice enables the literary community to continue. (back)

6. On the importance of individualism for the emergence of the novel, see Ian Watt’s classic and still useful account The Rise of the Novel. (back)

7. For a brief overview of the Originary Hypothesis and Generative Anthropology, see Peter Goldman, “Why Generative Anthropology” (back)

1. The Unenviable Position

“The triangle of desire,” writes Girard in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, “scarcely interests anyone but vaudevillians and novelists of genius,” (MRVR, p. 115). With this thought in mind, I would like to examine what initially struck me as an enigmatic passage in Les Origines de la culture, the French translation of the book-length interview with Girard conducted by Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Girard is making his patented comparison between Proust’s Jean Santeuil and La Recherche, and in attempting to define the difference between the two works, the first of which is an unfinished youthful novel, while the second is of course the masterpiece, he says the following: “comme un bon comédien, l’écrivain sait qu’il ne peut écrire de la bonne littérature qu’à ses dépens, en mettant en avant son propre désir mimétique” (230). Translation: “like a good actor, the writer knows that he can only write good literature at his own expense, by putting his own mimetic desire ‘out there’.”

For some time I was puzzled by this reference to an actor. There were ways to account for it, given that Proust devoted some memorable pages to the genius of the stage actress La Berma, but the sentence still seemed obscure. Then I read Evolution and Conversion, the original English edition. There I found the following: “like a good comedian, the Proust of La Recherche knows that he can write good literature only at his own expense, at the expense of his own mimetic desire” (176). The discrepancy between original and translation at the end of the sentence can be explained by the French reluctance to repeat words—no doubt “at his own expense” followed by “at the expense of” raised a red flag. The translation of comedian by comédien, instead of as “comique” or “humoriste” (stand-up comedian), is also easily explained by the false cognate. There’s another possible explanation, however: the comparison of Proust to a stand-up comedian is startling because stand-up comedy and the exquisite novelistic art of the great French author seem to operate on such different cultural planes. It’s as if the translator were unwilling to believe that Girard could be referring in the same breath to an icon of world literature and a vulgar form of popular entertainment.

Whatever the reason for the mistranslation, the reference to stand-up comedy made the sentence seem a bit clearer. But it was only when I stumbled upon a passage in Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du mondethat everything was finally illuminated.

The passage comes toward the end of Des choses cachées, in the context of a discussion of Proust, Freud, and narcissism. For Girard, Freud’s theory of narcissism ascribes too much reality to the phenomenon, which in Proust’s great novel is revealed as a mask donned for the purposes of amorous or social strategizing, or as an illusion projected onto the apparent indifference of a group of girls or socialites. In the earlier Jean Santeuil, however, the narcissistic position was given more consistency. The main character was shown hobnobbing with aristocrats beneath the envious gaze of his snobbish enemies, “living the dream”—a dream in which Proust, by the time he wrote La Recherche, had ceased to believe.

Girard analyzes the well-known passage in the second volume of La Recherche in which Marcel first encounters “the little band” of girls, among whom, although he does not yet know her, is his future mistress Albertine. Intimidated and fascinated by the athletic bodies strolling nonchalantly together down the beach, the rather sickly and over-intellectual Marcel sees in them the embodiment of self-contentment, and longs to join this enchanted circle of scornful and immodest teenagers. It is at this point that Girard makes some remarks about Freud’s vision of the professional humorist:

Freud ascribes a formidable narcissism to the comedian. Freud conceives professional humor as mockery at the audience’s expense, as an expulsion of the audience. In reality, the opposite is true: if the stand-up comic behaved like the little band, he wouldn’t make the audience laugh. There is nothing laughable about the little band for the narrator; it’s fascinating, terrifying, but certainly not laughable. To make the audience laugh, you have to make them laugh at your own expense, and it is Proust, of course, who is right. . . . To make others laugh, one must find oneself, or place oneself deliberately, in the position of the victim . . .

When Girard says “victim” here, I don’t think he means the consenting victim, the Lamb of God, who is expelled because he refuses violence. Rather he means the victim of mimetic desire. The latter repeatedly finds himself excluded from a group not because the group is particularly bent on excluding him, but because his desire transfigures precisely the most unwelcoming groups and individuals. So Girard means that instead of occupying the unassailable “narcissistic” position, instead of trying to fascinate the audience, the successful comedian has to place himself in the position of the one who desires—and believes in—the ineffable bliss of being welcomed into the closed narcissistic circle: “la petite bande” of insolent girls on the beach in Balbec or the carriage in which Odette disappears with Forcheville and the Verdurins to the horror of Charles Swann in Swann in Love.

The simple sentence from Evolution and Conversion compresses a wealth of insight into just a few words. Girard paints a picture of the author as someone who uses his own mimetic desire as material for a comic performance. But is the comparison accurate? Is Girard right about professional comedians?

I know of one stand-up comedian who deliberately places himself “in the position of the victim,” with exactly the results Girard predicts: the French-speaking comic Gad Elmaleh. Known to American audiences for a small role in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Elmaleh has enjoyed success on stage with “The Blond,” a stand-up routine about envy. Being “blond,” according to Elmaleh, is not primarily about the color of one’s hair; it’s something more essential, a state of mind, even a “concept.” The Blond is the successful other guy whose achievements and aplomb put each of us to shame. Muscular, successful, and chic, the Blond never makes a mess when he eats a sandwich. He isn’t afraid of flying. His kids are perfectly obedient. At the ski resort, the Blond flies down the most difficult slopes, eliciting cries of admiration from one and all (and especially from the comedian’s own girlfriend). Meanwhile, Elmaleh himself struggles to get off the chair lift without falling down.

If Elmaleh speaks of the blond as a “concept,” this is because in reality the Blond does not exist as such. His apparent perfection is a figment of the comedian’s desire, a chimera that exists only when viewed from the outside, from the envious perspective, much like the little group’s apparently narcissistic outward closure in Proust’s novel. The Blond himself, if one were to question him, might boast of his achievements and let us believe in his perfect mastery. Deep down, however, he no doubt also has his Blond—a perpetually victorious rival whom he is unable to surpass.

The success of Elmaleh’s material depends on the nonexistence of the Blond as a concrete individual and his universal existence as an archetype of frustrating otherness. “Blondness” is everywhere and nowhere, a mirage of desire. Today’s social media are a good example. Studies have shown that spending extended periods on Facebook breeds unhappiness: we know that our own lives bear only a passing resemblance to the selectively edited versions of them that we present to the world, but we cannot shake the suspicion that everyone else’s flattering photos reflect an objectively blissful existence we will never attain. To avoid looking like the hapless exception to the rule, we post photos of ourselves in only the most desirable situations (“Look at me in these awesome seats at the concert!”). We strive to be “blond” in order not to be excluded from the happy circle of “blondness.”

The key to the comedian’s routine is the way the characters are positioned with respect to each other: as Elmaleh recounts his humiliating encounters with his unflappable, multi-talented nemesis, we experience everything from the normal guy’s insecure vantage point, while the Blond remains a cipher, his gaze masked by reflecting ski sunglasses, his demeanor cool and self-composed.

If Elmaleh were to rewrite his material from the Blond’s perspective, his routine would fall flat. Tranquil and content, the object of admiring glances on the slopes as he soared gracefully off a ski jump, the Blond would once again bask in the flattering attention of beautiful women and wealthy jet-setters, while the average Joes (and their girlfriends) contemplated him with envy in their hearts. But this time the comedian would take on the Blond’s role. He would make fun of the losers who fear flying or can’t perform a schussboom without ending up in a snowdrift. He would relate his languorous fireside conversation in the ski lodge with a famous actress who gave him her room number. Mere boasting, however, likely wouldn’t make anyone laugh.

“One day,” Gad Elmaleh solemnly vows at the end of his stand-up routine, “one day, ladies and gentlemen—I will be the Blond.” The vow hovers between naïveté and self-mockery. The comedian plainly understands that the Blond is nothing more than a figment of a perpetual longing for mastery—blondness is forever unattainable. But the final pirouette would not be so funny if the vow were not also deeply sincere. The comedian serves himself and his desire up as sacrificial offerings for the audience’s enjoyment. And if Girard likens Proust to a stand-up comedian, perhaps Elmaleh is in turn more Proustian than one might suspect. His current girlfriend, after all, is Charlotte Casiraghi, eighth in line to the throne of Monaco…

2. The Dialectic of Vanity

With NBC’s Cruel Intentions revival in the works, the world of French libertines is poised to make a comeback on the American cultural scene. Meanwhile, overseas, Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons, a theatrical adaptation of Laclos’ novel, is enjoying a successful run at the National Theatre in London. These productions fit neatly into our cultural moment of dating apps and sexual assault, tapping into our aspirations to sexual fulfillment and our fears of coercion and excess. They also testify to our ongoing fascination with the character of the seducer, coolly exerting a magnetic charm over his numerous conquests, who in virtue of their multiplicity necessarily mean less to him than he does to each of them. At Yale University’s annual “Sex Week” in 2008, writes Helen Andrews in First Things, one of the featured speakers was a professional pick-up artist named Matador “hawking his ‘Mystery Method’ for seducing women.” The lecture was apparently well attended, suggesting that our contemporary obsession with sex is only partly about sex. Still deeper needs are at stake, beginning with the need to feel desired and desirable in a world of uneasy relations between the sexes. Becoming a “player” offers a solution to the problem of the modern male ego lost in the vast crowd of modern male egos. Sex is a side benefit, perhaps, but it may not always be the primary goal.

As René Girard taught us long ago, however, using love as a tool for self-aggrandizement comes with its own set of risks. “Modern vanity,” he writes in a 1959 article that, incredibly, has scarcely aged—a testament to Girard’s insights, but also to a general socio-cultural stagnation—”dreads nothing more than sheer indifference.” Becoming and staying divinely invulnerable is hard work. The slightest misstep could lead to rejection, which in a world of limitless freedom is impossible not to take personally. In the zero-sum game of seduction, each partner strives to impress his or her disdain upon the other, who is simultaneously doing the same back. The first to flinch is consumed by what Girard describes as “a weird fascination,” which may result—for example—in an ill-advised volley of text messages or an overly effusive email. The other’s feigned indifference, offered credible support by this show of interest, may then cease to be merely an act. “Since the two partners are haunted by the same mirage of divine autonomy, the first who reveals his desire will never be desired, and he will see his dependence turn into utter enslavement” (36-37). Little wonder that so many adolescents today take prescription medications for anxiety. The more one seeks to imitate the chilly mastery of the Vicomte de Valmont and his modern epigones, the more one is exposed to the danger of an inopportune and humiliating obsession.

In a popular song entitled “Vade Retro Telephone,” the French singer-songwriter Bénabar offers a candid look at the tribulations of modern love. A young man has just left a young woman’s apartment after having spent a first night with her. He wants some confirmation that she is as interested as he is (that they have just slept together is no guarantee). He longs to call her but fears coming off as clingy, so vows to wait at least three days before giving in to his desire:

Le combiné dans les mains j’hésite et je raccroche
Pas pressé d’ passer pour celui qui s’accroche
Fébrile et collant ça donne pas vraiment envie
Lointain et distant, j’ sais pas pourquoi mais c’est sexy
Même si je ne pense qu’à elle, si je rêve de la revoir
Vade retro téléphone, elle ne doit pas le savoir
Nos meilleurs techniciens se sont penchés sur la formule
C’est trois jours au moins le résultat de leurs calculs

The receiver in my hands, I hesitate and hang up
In no hurry to come off as the one who’s been hooked
Feverish and clingy isn’t exactly a turn-on
Far away and distant—I don’t know why, but it’s sexy
Even if all I can think about is her, and seeing her again
Vade retro telephone, I can’t let her know this
Our best technicians have looked into the formula
Three days at least is the result of their calculations

The song’s title, which refers back in a secular mode to the medieval formula for exorcism (and possibly also to Mark 8:33—”Get behind me, Satan!”), suggests that the temptation to call is a grave one, with high stakes. Should the young man succumb, he will compromise not only the woman’s perception of him as a paragon of virile self-sufficiency, but also his own peace of mind. The agony of self-denial is preferable to the still more acute suffering of knowing that one has lost the upper hand through a shameful lack of will-power.

The Bénabar song humorously addresses the predicament faced by young people navigating love relationships in a world where the old rules no longer apply. When divorced from yesterday’s courtship rituals and the moral constraints that accompanied them, lovers can no longer pattern their behavior on a set of scripted moves. More than ever, they find themselves forced into taking their cues entirely from each other, which greatly increases the chances of miscommunication. One imagines, for example, that while the young man may think of her as serenely unruffled, the young woman in the song may be waiting for him to call as anxiously as he is contemplating the possible negative repercussions of doing so. The very delay by which he hopes to ward off her disdain could easily have the unintended consequence of convincing her that he is no longer interested. By the time he finally does get in touch, she may have decided to console herself with someone else.

In his introduction to a recent edition of Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, Harvey Cox affirms that Tillich’s phenomenology of anxiety still applies in the twenty-first century. “Researchers who observe how young people rely on their iPads, Facebook pages, and cell phones have noticed a certain jittery anxiety in their behavior,” he notes (xvii). “Videos of such young people indicate that they grow tense and fidgety if they have to stop using their devices even for a short time. Have they missed a call or message? Should they send a text, however trivial, to someone, anyone?”

Cox sees their absorption in these exchanges as an attempt to avoid “facing the precariousness of their own being.” In other words, as a mask for a deeper existential anguish. Bénabar’s song points to a more concrete sort of anxiety, generated less by uncertainty about the meaning of everything than by doubts about one’s own worth as reflected in others’ opinions and perceptions. The screens of our devices are mirrors in which we contemplate a self-image perpetually subject to judgments over which we can exert at best only partial control. In the domain of love, where personal investments are strongest, the resultant anguish has the potential to become extraordinarily intense.

The problem posed by the dialectic of vanity and the non-reciprocity of desire is almost entirely missing from current discussions of sexual libertarianism. This is all the more surprising in light of the prevalence of the latter topic. From Tom Wolfe’s 2004 I Am Charlotte Simmons, a neo-naturalist satire of contemporary campus life, to articles on sexual assault and the campus hookup culture in newspapers, magazines, and online media outlets, sex—and especially sex on campus—has occupied a privileged place in our national consciousness over the last decade or so. Some of these stories suggest an epidemic of casual sexual encounters at the expense of long-term, committed coupling. Others downplay the phenomenon, which seems to involve only a minority, or even spring to the defense of casual sex. Newspaper headlines blame the hookup culture for campus sexual assault; college professors publish their research on hooking up in academic journals.

Though there is no consensus on the meaning and value of the hookup culture, the academic literature, as surveyed in one article in the Review of General Psychology, points to “the entanglement of more intimate and emotional aspects with sex” and “competing interests at multiple levels” that “result in young adults having to negotiate multiple desires, and multiple social pressures” (161–176).

Might the Girardian dilemma of the seducer have some part in all this? Could the anguish of rejection and the fraught quest for invulnerability be lurking somewhere behind the various “competing interests” and “multiple desires”? The scholarly literature offers only vague answers. The studies reveal contradictory motives for and attitudes toward no-strings-attached sex. The very men who deliberately pursue such encounters confess to harboring deeply ambivalent feelings about them. Women frequently initiate hookups yet often regret having done so. A brief tour of the literature leaves one with the suspicion that the hookup culture, far from simplifying the pursuit of sexual pleasure, has brought a host of unintended complications in its wake.

3. How (Not) to Write a Girardian Novel

The day after René Girard’s death in November 2015, novelist Mathias Enard was interviewed on French radio. He had just been awarded the Prix Goncourt for his novel Boussole, and he must have been in a generous frame of mind. Even so, his words in praise of Girard were effusive: “I am very touched by this death,” he said. “I discovered his thought rather late. . . . It was a revelation for me. More than a revelation, René Girard was a long infusion. . . . He offers keys to reading, doors to understanding, whether in books or in the world on a daily basis.” There followed a humorous admission: upon first encountering Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Enard thought he had found a secret recipe for producing great literature: “When one is a novelist,” he said, “necessarily [Girard’s book] 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.”

Could a writer use Girard’s book to reverse-engineer a masterpiece? Let’s imagine an aspiring novelist at work in his seventh-floor walk-up in the fifth arrondissement of Paris. He’s a young American studying abroad, and he recently managed to get his hands on a copy of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (in the original French, of course), which he read in only two days, neglecting to eat and bathe during that time. The book’s thesis about triangular desire is now burned into his brain’s neural networks. No longer does he want to be just any old novelist—he wants to be the sort of novelist that Girard would have written about, a novelist of genius. With great excitement, he sits down at his desk to write a “triangular” novel, impatient to join the ranks of the literary giants—Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendhal…

When he thinks about it (his computer is still booting up), our aspiring writer is amazed not to have noticed triangular desire before having read Girard. It’s really so obvious, after all. To live in the bustling world he glimpses from the windows of his minuscule chambre de bonne—a world of celebrity spokespeople, extravagantly expensive contemporary art, and stock market bubbles—is to be exposed on a daily basis to Girard’s ideas writ large. Just watching people go by on the sidewalk is a lesson in the mimetic power of fashion…

But enough idle musing—the screen glows in front of him, and it’s time to get down to work. He types a few words and deletes them, wondering whether his novel should be about someone buying items they don’t need because of TV ads, or about a collector bidding millions on an abstract canvas to outdo a rival, or perhaps about an amateur investor who falls for the hype surrounding a stock just before the market crashes. Or maybe he should write about his friend Ludovic, who suffers from pathological jealousy?

He outlines a few ideas, but they feel remote from his own experience, and therefore arbitrary. So, without quite realizing he is doing so, he turns to his own life. And his memory comes up with… nothing, or at least nothing that could be characterized as triangular desire. Sure, he wanted more than anything in the world to get into Harvard when he was in high school, but that had nothing to do with prestige—Harvard was just a great place, with a gorgeous campus and exactly the right sort of classes and programs. As for aspiring to become a writer, that’s a dream he’s always cherished, probably from the womb. The writer’s life, all cafés and book signings, would, he believes, suit him perfectly. In the arena of love, he flatters himself that (unlike Ludovic) he’s something of a player, with a growing number of conquests to his credit. Deep down, it’s true, he pines after the girl he has come to think of as the One, who broke up with him three years back. Though she is now married and working for an NGO in South Africa, he still secretly hopes they will end up together.

But none of this has anything to do with mimetic desire. With a frown, he scratches his head. What to do? His eyes fall on his copy of Mensonge romantique, open on the desk beside his laptop to a chapter entitled “Technical Problems in Cervantes, Stendhal, and Flaubert.” Only a few minutes ago it all seemed so easy. The masterpiece was going to write itself. Now he’s stuck. He sighs, drums his fingers on the desk.

Then, in a flash, it occurs to him: why not write a novel about a young author who, in a world dominated by memes, trends, and hype, is immune to mimetic desire? Invulnerable to the ploys of advertising, indifferent to the shifting currents of fashion, his main character would be an original outlier in a world of sameness. Armed with René Girard’s theories, he would embark on a campaign to enlighten others about their enslavement to imitation. And in due course he would fall victim to the crowd’s rage, and end up a martyr to the very mimetic passions he tried but tragically failed to cure. This idea strikes him as promising. Inspired, enthusiastic once more, he bends over the keyboard and begins to type…

Here we have a dualist narrative system, admittedly presented in a rather cartoonish way. Our Girardian novelist views the concept of mimetic desire as “a mere social satire,” a tendency Girard noted in Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (63). It is to him at once the most obvious thing in the world (the only reason Ludovic wants us to go to that nightclub is that it’s hard to get in!), and the most improbable (but my dream of getting into Harvard had nothing to do with selectivity or prestige); a bland truism (Ludovic always wants what he can’t have!), and a fantastical myth (when I want something that I can’t have, it’s not because I can’t have it—it’s because that thing is truly worth wanting). It depends on whether he’s looking around at others, or engaging in an inventory of his own desires.

We all tend to apply this sort of double standard. When scrutinizing our friends’ motives, we readily spot traces of mimeticism (“He’s only dating her because she comes from such a prominent family”; “He doesn’t actually like that painting, he just wants to see himself as an art connoisseur”). But when we contemplate our own behavior, we mistake the effects of mimetic desire for objective givens of the world around us: the obnoxious, self-involved heiress becomes our most compatible dream partner, and the abstract canvas an inexhaustible source of aesthetic bliss.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the second cousin once removed of an impoverished branch of the Kennedy family tree is the One, and that the 12′ x 12′ black monochrome is worth every penny of the $150,000 we spent on it. Who can say? What’s suspicious is not the idea that an object could possess unique and valuable qualities, but the systematic habit of ascribing others’ desires to triangular snobbery while professing the incorruptible authenticity of our own motives. The truth has trouble reaching us, as if the self were surrounded by an invisible force field. Little matter, then, that we have read Girard and know all about triangular desire. Like our expat novelist in his dismal garret, we reroute whatever knowledge we might acquire from Deceit, Desire, and the Novel away from ourselves and toward others.

Mathias Enard eventually abandoned the idea that Deceit, Desire, and the Novel could offer an alchemical formula for literary creation: “One realizes obviously that not only does [Girard’s book] go way beyond that,” he said, “but also my novelistic practice cannot be subordinated to a model, my novelistic practice… will resist my own attempt to theorize it.” He must have come to sense that the problem of creative writing goes deeper than a mere theoretical understanding of triangular desire. Learning to spot the effects of mediation around us is easy, especially in today’s world, where free-floating desires encounter a never-ending succession of models on the screens through which we filter our lives. The more challenging obstacle to producing good literature (or, for that matter, good literary criticism) is dualism, and, fundamentally, pride. The stories that pride whispers to us are the very ones that found their way into our Girardian novelist’s first literary effort. So long as he continues to believe in these specious alibis, he’ll see himself as a shining exception to the otherwise implacable rule of desire.

4. The Process of Transfiguration

To my knowledge, the late historian Tony Judt wrote only once about René Girard, and then merely to mention him in passing at the beginning of an essay about trains published in The New York Review of Books in 2010:

According to literary theorist René Girard, we come to yearn for and eventually love those who are loved by others. I cannot confirm this from personal experience—I have a history of frustrated longings for objects and women who were palpably unavailable to me but of no particular interest to anyone else.

This short passage gives a serviceable definition of mimetic desire: we take cues from someone else about who to love, and the result is the well-known Girardian triangle composed of the desiring subject, the model of desire, and the object on which the desires of both converge. But does the triangular pattern hold true for everyone and every desire? Could there be other ways of desiring, which have nothing triangular about them? After all, if we are to believe Judt, he himself flouts the Girardian rule. His desire travels straight from subject to object; he is a Quixote without an Amadis, a Jules sans Jim. The theoretician of triangular desire is puzzled. According to everything he knows and believes, desire is unfailingly mimetic. To deny this is to fall prey to one of those self-serving myths of autonomy that Girard places under the heading of the romantic lie.

Why, then, does the self-deprecating portrait Judt sketches ring so true? His frustration is already funny; that he should be rejected by women nobody else wants is doubly so. By comparison, the idea of systematically falling for people others love sounds like the typical stuff of academic theory, or the implausible plot of some network sitcom. In two sentences, Judt manages to cast doubt on the applicability of triangular desire to his own love life. He plainly isn’t trying to make himself look good—the account he gives of his “frustrated longings” places him in a less enviable position than would the relatively decorous “yearning” of the first sentence.

The mimetic triangle, however, has a way of rising from the ashes just when we thought it dead and buried. Take those “frustrated longings” for “palpably unavailable” women. In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard examines this very pattern—a man gripped by fierce desire for a woman who, deploying the strategies of coquetry, withholds her affections from him. There is no rival, and apparently no triangle; the woman’s indifference fuels the man’s frustration. Without a third party to serve as “mediator,” how can Girard claim that this scenario meets the conditions for triangular desire? The author is prepared for this objection: “…the presence of a rival,” he writes in Mensonge romantique, “is not necessary, in sexual desire, for this desire to be qualified as triangular.” We can conceive of a

triangle whose three vertices are occupied by the lover, the beloved, and the body of the beloved. Sexual desire, like all triangular desires, is always contagious. To speak of contagion is necessarily to speak of a second desire bearing on the same object as the original desire. To imitate the desire of one’s lover is to desire oneself thanks to that lover’s desire (110).

This idea can be turned around: to imitate the desire of one’s mistress is to desire her thanks to her self-desire. Her unruffled glances and laconic text messages indicate cool self-possession. We gravitate to those who appear to love themselves; no third party is needed to complete the triangle formed of the frustrated intellectual repeatedly checking his cell phone, the objectively undesirable woman (“of no particular interest to anyone else”), and that same woman in her bewitching, maddening role as model of desire.

Put the two scenarios together—a woman who desires herself via the affirmation provided by her lover; and a lover who pines after his mistress thanks to her alluring self-desire—and a circular process of feedback reinforcement is set in motion. The man’s desire bolsters the woman’s; hers feeds into his. The more she pulls away, the more eagerly he pursues her. His phone calls come in bunches; his text messages multiply. Soon she is positively repelled. Her unavailability solidifies, becomes, to use Judt’s word, “palpable.” From the subject’s perspective, she appears to withdraw into a world sealed off to him, whose hermetic outward closure is asserted all the more implacably the more he seeks to penetrate it. And so the scenario that seemed at first to have nothing to do with triangular desire can be accounted for in a plausible way with that very theory.

This is possible because triangular desire is a metaphor, not a physical configuration. The metaphor captures the workings of an intersubjective structure, and this structure explains how an objectively undesirable object could be perceived as intensely desirable. The novelists Girard analyzed in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel were “interested neither in the insignificant reality of the object nor even in the transfigured object,” he wrote, “but in the process of transfiguration. The great novelist has always been that way. Cervantes is interested neither in the barber’s basin nor in Mambrino’s helmet. What he finds fascinating is that Don Quixote should confuse a mere barber’s basin with Mambrino’s helmet…” (221-222). The Girardian critic is fascinated neither by the woman of “no particular interest to anyone else” nor even by the woman for whom Tony Judt feels a “frustrated longing.” He is interested in the process by which the first becomes the second (or by which the second reverts to the first).

Sufficient first-hand experience with this process can make the subject turn away from “easy” mediators and gravitate toward those—like the statue in Don Giovanni, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy points out in a recent essay—who are hard and unforgiving. Thus do the most blasé and seemingly autonomous among us have a tendency to suffer the cruel torments of silence and disdain.

A case in point: Witold Gombrowicz’s early short story, “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer,” which tells of a young writer’s encounter at the theater with a polished, well-dressed gentleman—Lawyer Kraykowski—who unceremoniously drags him to the back of the ticket line he has tried to cut, and coolly ignores him. By the next day the young man, who is also the story’s narrator, has transformed the ferocious rival into an adored model: “Ah, ah—he was walking along and whistling and occasionally waving his cane, waving his cane… I immediately paid the check and followed him—and, admiring the slightly sinuous motion of his back, I reveled in the fact that he knew nothing of it, that this was my own, inside […] Oh, I could have stared for hours at the place where his hair ended in an even line and his pale neck began” (6). With his back turned, Lawyer Kraykowski is in a little Olympian world all his own; the young writer is excluded from the circle, wallowing in his own interiority (“this was my own, inside”). But the narrator stands beyond his former self. He has enough sense of humor to admit that what was inside was not, in fact, his own. To convey this he describes a restaurant scene:

[Lawyer Kraykowski] didn’t pay me the slightest attention; he devoted himself to the ladies, leaning toward them, then looked about, scrutinizing the other women there. He spoke slowly, with relish, looking through the menu:

“Hors d’oeuvre, caviar… mayonnaise…poularde…pineapple for dessert—black coffee, Pommard, Chablis, brandy and liqueurs.”

I ordered:

“Caviar—mayonnaise—poularde—pineapple for dessert—black coffee, Pommard, Chablis, brandy and liqueurs” (7).

Gombrowicz’s punctuation is as eloquent as are the duplicate orders: the ellipses in Lawyer Kraykowski’s speech indicate pauses, reflection; the dashes in the protagonist’s indicate the mechanical repetition of what came before, the absence of thought—pure imitation. The story goes on to narrate a bizarre episode of self-defeating sexual generosity. In a striking illustration of triangular ambivalence, the narrator does everything in his power to further Lawyer Kraykowski’s affair with a doctor’s wife—but once he discovers them embracing on a park bench he shouts the secret of their adultery to the world, forcing them apart. The story concludes with the narrator, now hospitalized due to his exertions, vowing: “I’ll follow him! Yes, I’ll follow him! Everywhere I shall follow that guiding star of mine! But it’s unclear whether I’ll return alive from the journey; these emotions are too strong. I may die suddenly on the street, by the fence, and in such a case—a card must be written—they should send my body to Lawyer Kraykowski” (16). The story turns out to be a last will and testament in which the subject “leaves himself,” as it were, to the mediator!

Lawyer Kraykowski is an ordinary Polish gentleman; it is the protagonist of Gombrowicz’s story who mistakes him for a living deity. Although it is grafted onto the geographical Faubourg Saint-Germain, through which you and I can walk today in the eastern part of the 7^th arrondissement of Paris, the magical “Faubourg Saint-Germain” exists purely in the mind of the Proustian snob. What fascinated Gombrowicz, what fascinated Proust, is that a mere lawyer could be perceived as a terrible god, or that for a time, long after the French nobility had lost its political power, le Faubourg could have shimmered in the eyes of a young aesthete gazing at the hôtels particuliers on the Rue de Varenne.

5. Coda: The Magic of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel

Stendhal, Girard observes in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, tried to write comedies like his literary hero Molière. He failed, but those years of effort “transformed his soul.” He eventually renounced his dream of becoming a playwright, but not his goal of becoming a great comic author. “All novelistic works tend toward laughter,” writes Girard, praising the satirical humor of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the comic genius of Bouvard et Pécuchet. Proust’s crowning achievement, he says, is his most bitterly funny character, the proto-Dostoevskian Baron de Charlus.

Girard’s own criticism is notable not only for the elegance of its prose and the beauty of its images (who can forget the fable of the man who, unwilling to believe the treasure he is seeking is nowhere to be found, looks for it under a boulder too heavy to lift?), but also for its sense of humor. This is not a matter of “laugh lines” or any of the usual effets de manche of comic writing. It’s a sort of glow that lights up every corner of the essayistic space. It intensifies here or there, perhaps, as in the analysis of the bidding war between de Rênal and Valenod in The Red and the Black or in the comparison between the underground man’s look-at-me-not-paying-attention-to-you histrionics and the clench-jawed anti-rhetoric of l’écriture blanche. In the main, however, the comic quality of Girard’s essay is thoroughgoing, an unbroken texture.

This ability to transform mimetic desire into literary-critical comedy is, I believe, the single most important source of the magic in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. It is connected to the exceptional rigor with which Girard depicts the laws of mimetic desire. “There are in Balzac many intuitions parallel to those of the novelists studied in this book,” Girard writes. “But the web in which the desiring subject is trapped is full of rents through which often enough the author himself or his personal representatives slip. In the novelists we have chosen to study the cloth is so closely woven, the thread so strong that it is impossible for anyone to escape the unyielding laws of desire without escaping the desire itself.” (168). The same can be said of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Patterns take precedence over anomalies, sameness over difference. Impersonal forces trump the self-determination of the individual will. The daisy chain of unrequited desire in Racine’s Andromache is emphasized at the expense of the precious singularity of each isolated love story; the drawing rooms of Proust become a series of worlds orbiting around one another like the gears in a machine of snobbery. Childish imitation, sexual sadomasochism, political partisanship, economic activity, advertising, and coquetry are all explained by means of the same simple principle of human relations. The arabesques of desire, like the topiary hedges in a parterre garden, are perfectly symmetrical. There is no flaw in the chain-mail, no breach through which a spontaneous desire might be allowed to wriggle free.

But this rigor comes at a price. “The observer,” Girard writes, “does not want to descend, in the truth of desire, all the way to the point where this truth would concern himself just as much as the subject of his observations” (187). If Girard had not himself faced the resistance he describes, he would not have been able to testify so convincingly to its strength. If he had not also eventually overcome it, he would not have been able to write Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

In a radio interview with Robert Harrison, Girard explained how his own early amorous relationships helped him to write his first book. After he turned down a girlfriend who wanted marriage, she got over him, at which point he found himself drawn to her once more. When she wanted commitment, her desire fueled his narcissism, making him wary of giving in; but when she denied herself to him, his self-love collapsed. The current of desire switched direction and began to flow away from him and back toward her. It was then that he realized she was his model of desire.

Girard’s remarks suggest something both obvious and difficult to grasp, namely that the literary comedy that is Deceit, Desire, and the Novel would have been impossible had Girard held himself aloof from the laws of desire. The magic of his work is inseparable from his willingness to sacrifice his vanity for the sake of truthfully representing those laws.

As our readers are aware, René Girard passed away last November shortly before his 92nd birthday.  The present issue was conceived as a modest memorial to him. All the articles in this issue pay tribute in one way or another to René Girard, who was my teacher and whom I consider the honorary founder of Generative Anthropology.

About Our Contributors

Ben Barber is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, where he holds a Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Scholarship for his research on the influence of Shakespeare’s representations of mimetic desire upon the poetic vision of Lord Byron. In 2012 he received an MA in English from the University of Victoria, where his research focused on honor and mimetic rivalry in early modern drama.

Andrew Bartlett has been teaching academic writing as a member of the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia (a suburb of Vancouver) since 1998. His book Mad Scientist, Impossible Human: An Essay in Generative Anthropology (Davies Group Publishers) appeared in 2014 and is available on Amazon.com. He has presented papers at annual meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and at GASC (the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference). From 2009 to 2014, he was President of the GASC. His current research is trying to negotiate between the originary hypothesis, creation theology, and human-animal studies.

Thomas F. Bertonneau teaches English at SUNY Oswego. He is a regular contributor to Modern Age, Intercollegiate Review, and The University Bookman, as well as to Praesidium and Anthropoetics. His “Karen Blixen and the Apocalypse of Man” will appear in the forthcoming (Spring) number of Modern Age; his article on “Sacrifice and Sainthood: The Short Fiction of Walter M. Miller in Context” is forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies. Bertonneau has contributed a study of Walter Pater to Adam Katz’s anthology of GA criticism, also forthcoming.  With Kim Paffenroth of Iona College, Bertonneau has written The Truth is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction, published in June 2006 by Brazos Press and available for purchase at Amazon.com. New among Bertonneau’s affiliations is his election to the editorial board of Pashuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (Research in Foreign Languages), a Persian-language quarterly published from the University of Tehran that annually issues an English-language or French-language special number.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris and Professor of Political Science, Stanford University. He is a member of the French Academy of Technology, a spinoff of the Academy of Sciences, and of the Conseil Général des Mines, the French High Magistracy that oversees and regulates industry, energy and the environment. He chairs the Ethics Committee of the French High Authority on Nuclear Safety and Security. He is the Director of the Research Program of Imitatio, a foundation devoted to the dissemination and discussion of René Girard’s mimetic theory. His most recent work has dealt with the topic of catastrophe. Among his recent publications in English: On the Origins of Cognitive Science. The Mechanization of the Mind (The MIT Press, 2009); The Mark of the Sacred (Stanford University Press, 2013); Economy and the Future. A Crisis of Faith (Michigan State University Press, 2014); A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis (Michigan State University Press, 2015).

Chris Fleming is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of René Girard: Violence and Mimesis and one of the editors of the Bloomsbury series, Violence, Desire and the Sacred. His most recent book is Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid (co-written with Emma A. Jane).

Peter Goldman is Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He serves on the editorial board for Anthropoetics and is also a board member of the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC). Peter teaches classes on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and film studies. His publications include articles on Shakespeare, Reformation literature, film studies, Generative Anthropology, and Kafka. His current project is a book on Shakespeare and the problem of iconoclasm.

Trevor Merrill is Lecturer in French at the California Institute of Technology. He did his doctoral work at UCLA with Eric Gans and was a Fellow of the Association Recherches Mimétiques in Paris. He is the author of The Book of Imitation and Desire, an essay on mimetic desire in the novels of Milan Kundera.

John O’Carroll is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst NSW, Australia. His research interests lie in the area of the philosophy of communication, postcolonial theory, and Western epistemologies of landscapes (especially in Australia and the South Pacific). He has also taught at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji Laucala campus).

Richard van Oort is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, and the author of The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics (Davies Group, 2009) and Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment (University of Toronto Press, 2016).