For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth

Great Books

22 Eric Gans mensonge romantique. If transcendence is an extra-worldly mode of being, then the novelist himself can escape the fallen world of his characters only within the ontological sphere of the artwork; in the real world he must be considered as much a prisoner of desire as anyone else. For once we admit the possibility that the artist is not a captive of mimetic desire, that his contribution to society, by showing us the path to salvation, is itself a form of salvation, then the fallen world of the novel no longer corresponds to our world at all. If even a single social praxis can escape the mimetic spiral, then all can evade it, for there exists a proven path to transcendent meaning through worldly action. The function of art is to display and make us vicariously relive the originary passage from immanence to transcendence. The novel becomes the exemplary cultural form at the historical moment when it seems possible to find in the life-world a path to transcendence lived by its inhabitants but inaccessible to their consciousness. Unlike the “noble” heroes of tragedy, the characters in a novel have no presumed source of significance other than the novelist. The sacralization of the real that we call “realism” reflects the emergence of a society based on exchange, in which the individual can never fully master the whole. But whatever value the protagonist is or is not successful in producing in the world of the novel, the protagonist is himself a value, a sacred figure, however lowly, because his existence is the product of the unique will of the “godlike” novelist. However grateful we must be to this esthetic soteriology, which provided the ideological ground for the novels of Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce, we should be reluctant to adopt it as our anthropology. In René’s model of human relations, mediation drives out content. We are constantly reminded that individuality is an illusion of difference held by people whose reality is that of symmetrically “interdividual” equivalence with their fellows. Each sees himself as unique, yet all are the same. The Girardian weltanschauung is that of the final scene of Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis (1945), where the romantic protagonist, Baptiste, is swallowed up in a mob of merrymakers all wearing clown costumes identical to his own. Jesus has supposedly freed us from mimetic desire by revealing the scapegoating mechanism behind the “old” sacred. But René’s version of imitatio Christi, although it may have a place for acts of self-abnegation, has no ethic of worldly action; how are we to do good in a world that lacks a model of authentic individuality? The same indifference to the specific content of worldly experience is visible in René’s model of homogenesis. His generative scene of culture is only residually the origin of the sign. Somewhere René calls the remains of the sacrificial victim “the first sign.” But in Peirce’s terminology, these remains are René et moi 23 an index, not a symbol; like animal signals, they belong to the same universe as their object, unlike the symbolic signs of human language that reside in a “vertical” world motivated only “arbitrarily” by their referents in ours. In René’s scenario, the scapegoating mechanism provides the peace in which the content of human culture can begin to accumulate, but the linguistic and other signs that embody the collective memory of this peaceful accumulation are treated as transparent to their object, as though language itself added nothing to the referents it came into being to represent. The result is a world of opaque imitation whose self-awareness can be explained only by divine intervention. If the Hebraic tradition of which Christians see Jesus as the culmination is privileged to reveal the “things hidden since the foundation of the world,” this is understandable only as God’s plan, not as the result of an anthropological dialectic. Nowhere, to my knowledge, does René reflect on what peculiarities in the ethical organization of the Hebrews made them, among all the peoples of the ancient world, the “chosen” discoverers/inventors of monotheism. Similarly, in finally and definitively demystifying the scapegoat mechanism , Jesus is said to have revealed to us the totality of what we need to or can know about our dependence on mimesis. René’s own anthropology, and a fortiori all future anthropological reflection, is no more than the recalling of what had been...