Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: Rene Girard and Literary Criticism
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Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: Rene Girard and Literary Criticism
357eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628951738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2015 |
| Series: | Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 357 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Heather Webb is lecturer in the Department of Italian at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Selwyn College. She specializes in medieval literature and culture with a particular interest in Dante. She is the author of The Medieval Heart and a number of articles on Catherine of Siena, Dante, and Giovanni da San Gimignano.
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Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel
René Girard and Literary Criticism
By Pierpaolo Antonello, Heather Webb
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2015 Michigan State UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-173-8
CHAPTER 1
Jealousy and Novelistic Knowledge
Maria DiBattista
In the repertoire of emotions that fascinate, when they do not dismay, René Girard, jealousy occupies a preeminent and ultimately fateful place. In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Girard identifies jealousy as one of the "vices" of internal mediation and seconds Stendhal's warning against jealousy as one of the distinctly "modern emotions." As this formulation suggests, jealousy for Girard is less a moral failing than a symptom of an ontological sickness endemic to the spiritual culture of modernity. According to his diagnosis, the jealous lover disguises the true nature of his affliction by attributing all his sufferings to a possessive "temperament" rather than to the more fundamental spiritual disorder that is its actual source.
This is one of the primary deceits Girard sets out to expose and cauterize, as it were, at its ontological root in mediated desire. Girard discredits the jealous lover's sustaining belief that his desire is spontaneous and that the cause of his sufferings exists outside rather than within him. Just the opposite is the case, Girard insists: the lover desires only what the Rival, in his hidden but actual role as Model and Mediator, desires. The torments of jealousy originate in the lover's unacknowledged and helpless enthrallment to the Rival, an enthrallment that itself conceals an even deeper desire to possess what the Rival possesses so that one might become the Rival. Only thus, according to the terrible and delusional logic of mediated desire, does the jealous subject believe he can be cured of his desire and attain that fullness of being that is he has been yearning for all along.
Girard's diagnosis does not stop here, however. He goes on to claim that this spiritual malady is endemic to times and cultures when the distance between the desiring subject and the mediator begins to contract, thereby allowing "these two spheres to penetrate each other more or less profoundly." We come full circle in arriving at the one of the central and perhaps the grandest claim advanced by Deceit, Desire, and the Novel — that "it is in internal mediation that the profoundest meaning of the modern is found."
Both when it is used to describe a particular emotion and when it is evoked to characterize a cultural epoch (the age of the novel), the word modern acquires an imposing but essentially negative prestige. Girard's attitude toward the modern is one of the most striking features of his work, but it is also one of the most confounding. To take the immediate case in point: In what sense can jealousy be regarded as a modern emotion? Modern seems a term ill-suited to describe an emotion that most would regard as a perennial presence rather than a recent arrival in the annals of human desire. This was my first, admittedly intuitive response to Girard's depiction of the modern emotions, but in its wake came another, more enduring perplexity that quickly hardened into a concrete question: how does, indeed how could the idea of the modern, a distinctly temporal term, comport with Girard's account of the geometric structure of desire whose value, not to mention whose truth, consists in giving us fairly accurate measurements of the movements within and between immaterial, a temporal spiritual states?
Girard himself insists at the outset of his magnificent study that triangular desire is not a gestalt, but rather constitutes "a systematic metaphor" that "has no reality whatever": "The real structures," he writes, "are inter-subjective. They cannot be localized anywhere." Girard seems to anticipate and subsequently answer objections like mine in arguing that triangular desire represents a radical change in the way human beings understand and experience their own selfhood. Imitative or mediated desire emerges and flourishes, he asserts, within a culture where God is either dead or denied or so removed from the horizon of the human world that his reality only declares itself as an absence that can never be compelled to make its presence known, much less felt. Understandably, the Self feels cut off from the divine inheritance, with its promise of plenitude of being. The denial or absence of God does not eliminate transcendency, however, "but diverts it from the au-delà to the en-deçà." The Self, in an act compounded of pride and desperation, looks to find in the Other what is so grievously missing in itself. The Self finds the divinity it is looking for, although not in its original or genuine form. In Girard's arresting phrase, the Other is taken for a god; that is, the Other appears to be a self-sufficient and blessed being who enjoys all the benefits of what Proust calls, with how much irony it is not easy and perhaps not even wise to decide, "a real existence."
It is in the distressed and impoverished inner landscapes of a world from which the gods may have fled (but not the need for them) that jealousy as a modern emotion begins to germinate. Jealousy, like envy and impotent hatred, is a primary sign and symptom of the deviated transcendency that invests the Other with divinity. Yet unlike envy and impotent hatred, which are self-consuming passions spawned by ressentiment, jealousy offers an opportunity to become more outward looking in a more curious and a potentially more self-enlightening way. Jealousy conduces to a knowledge uniquely available to it — novelistic knowledge, let us call it, a concrete knowledge of the "real" and distinct and, most importantly, independent existence of other people. Jealousy does not impress or even interest Girard in this capacity. Girard's Truth is as invariable as it is transcendent. For Girard, "desire is one"; "the exceptions to the rule of desire are never more than apparent," he insists. We will not find this rule expounded in any modern treatise on the afflictions of the soul and heart. It belongs to the novel, whose rise coincides with the spiritual pandemic of deviated transcendency, to reveal the secret of our desire, a secret that only the novel can at once harbor, disguise, and expose.
For Girard, then, the novel offers us the most complete as well as most profound record of modern desire and its vicissitudes. This record always and inevitably attests to the same essential Truth: that our desire is never spontaneous, but is determined by the Mediator who, once chosen, is blindly and slavishly imitated. Any competing or ancillary knowledge of the Other — or even of oneself — that does not confirm this truth would not be knowledge such as Girard pursues, values, and understands it. Girard gives us, then, a compelling, spiritually demanding and exalted but nonetheless incomplete conception of the kind of particularized knowledge (as distinguished, however finely and painfully, from essential Truth) the novel can disclose.
For novelistic knowledge reflects and entertains a dynamic notion of the relations between the desiring Self and the desired Other, a relation in which jealousy plays a dominant and not always negative role. Even its etymology declares its fittingness for the double offices Jealousy can perform in monitoring the life and conduct of the beloved. Jealousy derives from the Greek zelos, or zeal, a word that conveys both the idea of jealousy but also of emulation or rivalry. Girardian mediation, it would seem, is latent within this classical understanding of jealous zeal. Here is how the classicist Carl Buck parses this ur-Girardian word: "Most of the words for 'envy' ... had from the outset a hostile force, based on 'look at' (with malice), 'not love,' etc. Conversely, most of those which became distinctive terms for 'jealousy' were originally used also in a good sense, 'zeal, emulation.'"I cite Buck because he alerts us to an older, but still active and more positive meaning lurking in jealousy — jealousy as zeal in a "good" sense. Jealousy is not, after all, an emotion of uniform consistency. It is composed of various, sometimes discontinuous states of feeling, not all of them degrading to the dignity or intellect. Imitative desire can metamorphose into a jealous zeal not merely to possess but to know the beloved. Girardian accounts of novelistic desire overlook this potential and positive transformation. This strikes me as a significant oversight. "Positive" jealousy has the potential to realize one of the fundamental moral goods of the novel — the concrete, if not disinterested knowledge of the Other as a separate existence.
This is a potential explored with great sympathy (as well as cunning) in Roland Barthes's A Lovers Discourse, which also assigns jealousy a prominent place in his inventory of amorous feelings. In reflecting on the sorrowful case of Goethe's Young Werther (who is for Barthes the paradigmatic amorous subject), Barthes remarks that Werther "shows himself to be anything but jealous." Only when Werther's epistolary account of his ecstatic sorrows yields to the fully dramatized narrative of the book's final panel does the rivalry between Werther and Albert, Charlotte's fiancé, become acute and acrimonious. Barthes seems to ratify here the Girardian law of mediated desire: it is the rival who activates desire.
Yet for Barthes, the same cause yields different effects and results in a somewhat different kind of movement. It is, Barthes proposes, "as if jealousy appeared in the simple transition from I to he, from an imaginary discourse (saturated by the other) to a discourse of the other — of which Narrative is the statutory voice." Barthes treats jealousy as a figure of transport and transition. Jealousy for him is that heightened charge of feeling that conveys the lover out of his self-insulating, compulsively circular discourse, which, although it contains a great deal of the fictive, stubbornly resists the objectifying details that bring novelistic fiction into the sphere of actual life. Jealousy is zealous in its desire to possess and know the most trivial facts as well as the defining life circumstances of the Other (the primary object of novelistic discourse), not just the physical body of the loved one (the primary object of the lover's discourse).
Barthes plays on this etymological cognate of jealousy in rebelling against the Freudian dogma that all lovers think themselves unique, thus making jealousy a "normal" rather than exalted or transgressive state. Jealousy, he insists, "is ugly, is bourgeois: it is an unworthy fuss, a zeal — and it is this zeal which I reject." In this rejection, Barthes shows himself to be a remarkable lover, but no novelist. Nonetheless, Barthes helps us see that jealousy not only masks the craving to become another by possessing what the mediator/rival possesses; it also disposes us to acknowledge the separate and uncontrollable existence of the Other. Jealousy is the statutory voice of narrative not just because it expresses the inevitable theme of novelistic or mediated desire, but also because its zealous pursuit of the Other is the route to novelistic knowledge, which is the knowledge of the inalienably separate existence of Other people.
The statutory voice of narrative is embodied in the Proustian narrator, who has little in common with Werther: "Is he even a lover?" asks Barthes, and then decides, "He is merely jealous." Marcel might claim the opposite, that he was merely a lover until he became jealous. Only then can he begin the emotional travail and obsessive researches whose end will be his beginning as a novelist of his own life. Jealous desire activates a quest whose goal is not complete possession, but total knowledge of the beloved. George Eliot, one of Proust's early and beloved tutors in novelistic desire, anticipates this Proustian insight in contending that "Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart." Proust's researches into lost time aspire to such omniscience and for this reason, the jealous man — Swann in particular — is a primary figure of identification for the Proustian narrator.
That novelistic knowledge results from jealous researches rather than more impersonal and detached investigations into the lives of characters should not be deemed a moral detriment to the novel's objective representation of life. Quite the contrary. In his zealous investigations of the daily habits, the inner motives, the hidden dreams, and the practiced deceptions of his characters' lives, the novelist is not content with telling us all we need to know (a purely utilitarian knowledge of other people). The "true" novelist will only be satisfied in relating all we can and indeed must know — the subtlest fold of the heart. Marcel comes to understand this emotional dynamic in his jealous love for Albertine: "It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and what people think for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a dizzy kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything." Proust acknowledges that omniscience is the inducement with which jealousy lures the lover into endless suppositions about the external facts and inner life of the loved one. These suppositions, in which love aspires to gain complete knowledge of the Other, are doomed to frustration. But the opposite is also true. The novelist who does not display any jealous interest in his characters may present us with a narrative that purports to represent what people think and feel, but such an account is in danger of devolving into a parody of realism, since what it recounts is not so much who people are but how little we care to know about them.
For Proust, jealousy is inherently novelistic because it counteracts our habitual indifference toward others and makes us at once curious and mystified by the sights, events, and persons that previously had seemed either transparent or too trivial to attract our notice. The power of jealousy to arouse our emotional interest and stimulate our curiosity is revealed, with that amazing casualness with which Proust typically introduces his most essential discoveries, during one of the narrator's last conversations with Swann at an afternoon reception hosted by the Princess of Guermantes. The narrator seeks to ascertain the truth of a rumor that Gilbert, Prince of Guermantes, has repudiated Swann. Swann, who knows he is dying, appears more amused at the falseness of the story than concerned for his social reputation, and so instead of answering Marcel directly, responds with a digression expatiating on his own temperamental incuriosity: "People are very inquisitive," he observes. "I've never been inquisitive, except when I was in love and when I was jealous. And for all that that taught me! Are you jealous?" The narrator replies that he has never experienced jealousy and therefore does not know what it is. To which Swann replies:
Well, I congratulate you! [je vous en félicité]. When you are a little bit jealous it is not altogether unpleasant, from two points of view. For one thing, because it enables people who are not inquisitive to take an interest [s'interresser] in the lives of others, or at least of one other person. And then, it gives you quite a sense of the sweetness of possession [la doceur de posséder], of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not allowing her to go off alone. But that is only in the very early stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete. In between it is the most frightful of tortures [le plus affreux des supplices].
Swann is not being wholly ironical when he describes the sweet and pleasurable sensations that marked the early stages of his amorous disease. For the story of Swann's love has confirmed that both in its initial and final stages, jealousy, which sickens, can also be a revitalizing and even rejuvenating affliction. Thus we should only give partial credit to Swann's claim that jealousy taught him very little and then only what was painful. The narrative tells a different story. Jealousy temporarily "cures" Swann of his spiritually debilitating habits; his caddishness as an impulsive and inconstant lover; his disinclination toward sustained mental reflection; the cultivated superficiality of his social persona, exemplified in his inveterate tendency to enclose any serious thought in ironic quotation marks. Jealousy disrupts the narcissism, indifference, and laziness that regulates Swann's social existence and in fact determines so much of our social relations, an indifference and laziness that confine our knowledge of what people think and feel to the vagaries of rumor, the questionable testimony of anecdote, and the distortions of gossip. Jealousy awakens our curiosity at the expense of our indifference — and of course jeopardizes our immunity to the contagious fascination of the Other. Curiosity is zealous and as Swann notes, acquisitive, where indifference is complacent and indolent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel by Pierpaolo Antonello, Heather Webb. Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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