René Girard Part I: Truth in Literature and the Dramatic Arts
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
René Girard is famous for developing the theory of mimetic desire. At its core is the simple idea that we imitate the desires of others. Our physiological needs fulfilled, we look to people we admire to inform us about what is it we should be after. So far, you wouldn’t think there’s a great revelation here, right?
But the theory goes deeper, and deeper. One of its big claims is that the process of imitating others, labeled mimesis, is a fundamental aspect of life, not only human, but also animal. There is talk about “mirror neurons” and the essential role of imitation in intelligence and building of skills and knowledge. Infants learn with marvellous speed by imitating the environment around them, and specially by imitating their parents. The process does not involve making decisions or judgments; it is much deeper than that. Decisions and judgements are paraphenomena, at least relative to the fundamental nature of mimesis.
As adults we like to think that we make autonomous decisions. As modern men and women, we are obsessed with the idea of originality. To Girard, these are delusions.
I can get on board here. I happened to have read countless university admissions essays. It is amusing to witness the obsession of applicants to appear original, induced, to be fair, by the expectation of academic admissions departments. In their very attempt to be different, the applicants become essentially indistinguishable from each other.
We have all seen countless commercials offering products that would enable us to be unique. We fall for them without noting that the commercials are broadcast to millions. When we walk into a fast fashion store, we look for the shirt that will make us stand out, forgetting that there will be thousands of shirts of that same design sold that season.
We have seen countless TV shows and films depicting dramatic heroes as authentic individuals battling the slavish conformity of the masses. Thousands of us then imitate those heroes. And we inevitably fail. Through our failure we can arrive at two conclusions: either we “just don’t have what it takes”, or what we were striving for reveals itself to be somehow fraudulent.
To the delusion of authenticity specifically from literature and the dramatic arts, Girard dedicates a whole book, titled “Romantic Lie and Romanesque Truth” (direct translation from French). He calls it, well, the romantic lie. He contrasts the romantic lie with romanesque truth, which is revealed only in the highest form of literature, all of which is unified in that truth. Romanesque truth is basically the revelation of the romantic lie. The process of revelation is what provides the high catharsis to the reader.
In the dramatic climax of a romanesque novel, the hero does not finally acquire the object of his desire. Such an acquisition in fact cannot happen. The happily-ever-after does not exist. A romanesque novel starts with the hero setting off for the object of his desire. As the plot unfolds, he is assailed by the perfidious nature of that object. He faces disappointments, betrayals, rivalries. Finally, the hero undergoes some kind or other of spiritual collapse. It is in this collapse that he encounters the truth: it was his desire itself that was his undoing. His desire was not what he thought it was. It was not authentic. It was not after the object itself; it placed no value in the object. The desire was neither sovereign nor noble.
The desire of the hero springs from a humiliating awareness of his human inadequacy and proportionally frenetic need to overcome it. The hero is facing the spiritual void, the existential problem; he is longing for purpose; he is dealing with his mortality. He is longing for the divine. The degree to which he assuages it with mimetic desire measures the degree of what we call his vanity.
To another French essayist, Rémi Brague, the modern mind is defined precisely by how it has decided to respond to the problem of this metaphysical inadequacy. The modern age was born with the ‘modern project’ to make man autonomous. The autonomy is to be wrested from nature, from social bonds, and from the divine. Man was to become the measure of all things, rather than an object of measurement that may or may not come up short, or inadequate.
While Brague reveals the problem of modernity with the light of classical philosophy, Girard puts the lie to the modern idea of human autonomy from the perspective of his mimetic theory. Girard does not oppose man’s autonomy as a bad metaphysical choice for the solution to the problem of inadequacy. Rather, he claims that the modern man deludes himself when assuming that he is, can be, or even wants to be independent. All literary work that believes in and promotes this delusion is labeled ‘romantic’ in Girard’s narrow and negative sense.
At the heart of the romantic delusion of autonomy lies the mistaken belief that we genuinely desire objects. In fact, objects are secondary to our desire to be the kind of being that, in our mind, the possession of that object signifies. And the image of such a being we cannot create for ourselves ex nihilo, as it were; rather, we always find someone else, our model or mediator, whom we imitate. To be exact, we imitate what we perceive to be the model’s desire; we strive after the same ephemeral object we think they posses, or are striving after themselves.
The modern project is the project of achieving human autonomy in all fields: political, spiritual, artistic, technological. In parallel to the historic development of technology as a means of achieving autonomy, we see the development of the romantic lie in literature and dramatic arts. The romantic lie is what we really mean when we talk about how “fake” Hollywood is. Girard’s theory allows us to articulate our critique with much greater eloquence.
I am not sure when this modern genre of the authentic hero started, but Girard mentions early Italian novellas and chivalric fiction in the sixteenth century Iberian Peninsula. It is this latter form of fiction that was read by the first romanesque hero, Don Quixote. Many consider Don Quixote the first modern novel, and Girard agrees for the specific reason that it is the first instance of the romanesque revelation in the novel form. Don Quixote is presented as delusional precisely because he suffers from the romantic lie, and at the end of the novel he undergoes a conversion and recognizes his folly. Specifically, he denounces his erstwhile model, Amadís de Gaula, as what can be called, to use Biblical terminology, a false idol.
Cervantes’ famous work is the first instance of romanesque truth in a modern novel. However, Girard argues that, in a less explicit form, it plays a central role in classic Greek tragedies. To Girard, the tragic conflict stems from protagonists who are self-assured about their authenticity or uniqueness, and whose self-assurance produces a blindness, the “tragic fault”, that causes them to come into conflict with others who challenge that authenticity.
The tragic problem is a problem of differentiation. Think Oedipus undifferentiated from his father, Laius, his father, and from Tiresias, a rival prophet; think of king Pentheus usurping the turf of the god Dionysius in Bacchae; think of the struggle to differentiate two slain brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, in the play Antigone.
Girard argues that Greek tragedy constitutes a partial revelation of archaic myths, which, in his analysis, originated as coverups for foundational events of murder. From his second book, Violence and the Sacred, and onwards, Girard deals with ancient and primitive societies extensively. He moves away from dramatic arts and focuses on this idea of foundational murder, which had previously, and more famously, been brought up by Sigmund Freud. He connects the foundational murder to sacrificial rituals.
René Girard sees sacrifice as the universal method of regulating violence. He traces the root of all collective violence to what he terms mimetic crisis, a social state in which mimetic desires of all have escalated a web of rivalries to a pitch, and there is the imminent danger that an endless and devastating chain of violence will break out. The danger was much greater in primitive societies, which did not have one, overpowering source of authority to deliver conclusive justice through a legal code. Instead, such societies were liable to endless tit-for-tats in the form of blood feuds or intertribal warfare.
During ancient mimetic crises, it has often happened that citizens, pent up with violent urges ready to be unleashed, will fix their wrath on a single victim. They will vent their violence on the victim by coming together to murder him. This process of scapegoating is itself mimetic: just like they imitated each other’s desires, individuals now imitate each other’s preferred ‘evildoers’.
The scapegoat must be someone outside any group with a means to retaliate for the murder, so that the murder may be “the final word” of violence. Furthermore, involvement of the whole of society is required for the murder to produce unity. For the murder to have a purging effect, the participants must be convinced that the victim is actually guilty - ignorance or méconaissance of the victim’s true role as what we today call a “scapegoat” is necessary.
The selection of a single scapegoat has the tremendous practical value of re-unifying the society and imbuing conflict with collective meaning, with a story that later becomes instituted as myth. The mimetic crisis that triggers the murder is itself liked to a general collapse of differentiation, a plague-like state of affairs in which citizens roles are jumbled, the authority differential collapses (“when degree is suffocate” in the words of Shakespeare’s Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida), and the people become monstrously alike in their hatreds, violence, and covetousness. The murder of the scapegoat restores differentiation by redistributing social roles and making citizens work in a harmonious unison.
After the murder has been committed, the citizens find themselves marvellously relieved of wrath and in harmony with each other. Girard explains that such an event was seasonally re-enacted by primitive societies through the ritual of sacrifice, for the purpose of maintaining peace that came the first time around. The sacrificial victim, whether human or animal, took the place of the original victim of the mob. The original victim for its part typically becomes deified.
“Scapegoat” was originally an English-language term for the sacrificial animal of the ancient Hebrews, who would ritually cast the sins of the community on a goat and then cast the animal into the wilderness. Girard argues that the scapegoating mechanism is foundational to all human culture. Eventually, he ends up tackling the significance of Jesus Christ as the final sacrificial victim, the Lamb of God to end all mimetic strife. His views are not challenged by the Catholic Church.
Read more in the book Catharses.