For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth

My Life with René

46 Cesáreo Bandera Why this underlying indictment of literary fiction in the great literary masters at the dawn of the modern era? I think the answer must be related to the exploration of the mimetic character of human desire, for which literary fiction is a particularly appropriate instrument, given the fact that it is itself an expression of mimetic desire. Along the path of such an exploration, the modern author is bound to find the same mimetic violence that the tragedians or Virgil found. But as they converge toward that point of endlessly reciprocal violence, their attitudes will diverge entirely. For the pagan poet, that is the moment when the poetic vehicle turns from daring and dangerous complicity with the violence it portrays to becoming the vehicle for the sacrificial resolution of the violence through the elimination of the heroic victim. In the case of the modern Christian author, there is no such turning around of the poetic vehicle. The poetic complicity with the violence is not transformed; it simply becomes increasingly clear. There is no Christian poetic catharsis. The poetic vehicle, literary fiction, does not become part of the solution. All it can do is point beyond itself, renounce itself, acknowledge the fact that it fails to solve anything. As a result, disastrous self-destruction becomes inevitable. Christian hope is not a form of literary desire. But in this negative sense, in its self-renunciation, literary fiction does tell the truth. In fact, as long as it is ready to renounce itself, perhaps nothing can show the true mimetic character of the apocalyptic disaster as clearly as literary, that is, poetic, fiction. That is the enormous difference that separates Sophocles and Euripides from Shakespeare. That difference is clearly implied by Girard’s work, but the explicit letter of his text may sometimes obscure it. In my work on the Quixote, I have become increasingly aware of the connection that Cervantes establishes between Don Quixote’s madness and what he describes at some point as “dark primeval anarchy,” a state of total chaotic violence.7 In other words, Don Quixote’s madness is serious business to Cervantes . And yet the tone of the book is light, funny, and very entertaining. In some ways, the novel itself hides the gravity of the madness. It turns it into a joke, something ridiculous, laughable, and in doing so it sets the danger aside; it sends it away to the margins. But from there, from the margins, it still haunts the novel. We get the feeling that Don Quixote is playing with fire, that he is in real danger. But he is not aware of that danger. He can reason quite well about everything, as long as it does not touch on the subject of knight errantry, for as soon as that happens, his sense of reality is lost. This is why Don Quixote is called a madman “in patches,” or “streaks,” which is to say, mad but not all the time, not completely mad.8 This is also why there is still hope for him in the eyes of Cervantes. The author never My Encounter with René Girard 47 loses sight of that final goal: to rescue the madman from his madness. Most nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers do not like that final rescue. A sane Don Quixote, an Alonso Quijano “the good,” who recovers his sanity by “the mercy of God,” has no appeal for them. And, in a certain sense, they are right: a cured Don Quixote, a sane Alonso Quijano, a typical hidalgo living peacefully in a place Cervantes “does not want to remember,” is a totally uninteresting character from the point of view of literary fiction, even though he is an intelligent and decent man, well liked “by everybody who knows him.”9 It is this poetically uninteresting goodness that must be rescued in the end from the mimetic attraction, the satanic lure, of poetic glittering. I say “satanic” because Don Quixote’s cure at the end, on his deathbed, is clearly presented by Cervantes as an act of conversion “by the mercy of God.”10 In other words, without such divine mercy, mad Don Quixote would really be on his way to hell. His madness is a disease of the spirit. And at the root of it is his mimetic fascination with radiant Amadís, “the sun of knight errantry.”11 He has in fact given Amadís the place that properly belongs to God. He...