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141 Reading Religion, Literature, and the End of Desire Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque at Fifty R eading Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque again after fifty years, it is hard to forget the thrill of first encounters. “You know, Sancho, that Amadis of Gaul is the most perfect example of knight errantry, of knight chivalry, that ever was.” Cervantes wrote these words? In Don Quixote? It is all about borrowing one’s desires from others, not only in the limited sense of duplicating or copying, but as Aristotle describes our relation to poetics in general, or the Greeks spoke of their relation to Homer? Cervantes’s massive novel is suddenly readable in an entirely new fashion. It is not about the romantic individualism we have been conditioned to expect of this Hidalgo hero, but about imitative desire. And not only Don Quixote, but Sancho Panza as well. For Sancho imitates Don Quixote as Don Quixote imitates Amadis of Gaul. In fact, the two behaviors may be systematized as external and internal mediation. External mediation, Girard teaches us, means borrowing your desires from a source that has no possibility of entering your world, and internal from a source closer to home. And what is more, the literary reader is doing the same thing, so that the nature of literary fiction itself comes into play. Reading Don Quixote as a romantic individualist, as a hero of the fantastic and the nostalgic, we have been borrowing our desires no less than the characters Religion, Literature, and Desire 142 The Prophetic Law whose narratives we continue. What a powerhouse of a book on Cervantes, imitative desire, fictional writing, and Western literary history Girard has written! Had Girard written nothing more, his place in the history of literary criticism would have been assured. Cesáreo Bandera was one of the first to acknowledge the extraordinary power of Girard’s insights.1 Don Quixote is seminal, not only in the history of the European novel, but in the shaping of our perceptions of literature in general from the eighteenth century on. Girard has altered the fundamental romantic postulate of radical originality by which we have constructed the literary (and extra literary) universe for some two centuries now. But there’s more. The same analysis applies to Flaubert, Girard tells us. All that we have said since the turn of the century about “bovarysme” is partial or, perhaps more precisely, misguided. Drawing upon the work of Jules de Gaultier, Girard expands its conception and reach. The heroine of Madame Bovary is another Don Quixote. Her bovarysme is not middle class ennui, nineteenth-century French cultural boredom, as we have been taught, but the blockage of her childhood desires, the ones she learned being raised in a convent from the romantic stories she read there in secret, and that she will try to live out in her own life to such disastrous ends. Nineteenthcentury French cultural life is not that different from seventeenth-century Spanish life in this regard, Girard seems to be saying to us. They are both about middle-class European cultural pastimes, and the culture of reading. But there’s more still. Stendhal is also doing the same thing. The Red and the Black is about the desires of a peasant’s son, Julian Sorel, and his rebellious ambition to live the life of Napoleon. He reads the Memoirs of Saint Helena and the Bulletins of the Grand Army as Don Quixote reads the adventures of Amadis of Gaul. The whole discussion of ressentiment that Max Scheler would raise in connection with Nietzsche thus needs to be expanded. Stendhal’s characters are examples of the vaniteux, but that vanity has more perdurability than we might have expected and extends to the hero as well. History is just one more setting for the distance already forecast in Don Quixote. So are the relations that sociologists study. Elsewhere than in The Red and the Black, Stendhal writes about love, and Denis de Rougemont describes well the formulaic pattern in which “happy love has no history” and “romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon, Religion, Literature, and Desire 143 and doomed by life itself.”2 Thus, borrowed desires and their consequences would seem operative in this setting as well. Three novelists, then, would describe three heroes—the romantic individualist who distinguishes himself from prosaic counterparts, the cultural sophisticate who distinguishes herself from bating associates, the historical rebel who distinguishes himself from vain...

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