Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism ed. by Pierpaolo Antonello and Heather Webb (review)

René Girard's radical claims about subjectivity, mimetic rivalry, and literature as a purveyor of truth that exposes 'the Romantic lie' of authentic desire are so comprehensive that one might forgive his critics for suggesting that, in his work, great novels always seem to mean the same thing. This volume of essays, which stems from a series of conferences held in 2011 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, is, then, all the more impressive for demonstrating the rich productive potential and continuing relevance of Girard's thought, and constitutes a major achievement. Although the book does not aim to provide an introduction to Girard's project, its prose is lucid and engaging, so that even relative newcomers will be able to navigate most essays with ease and find stimulating food for thought. The first part of the volume focuses on theoretical considerations in which Girard's work is read alongside thinkers as diverse as Freud, Hegel, Deleuze, and Weil, among others. The second, longer, part consists of case studies that explore and at times challenge Girard's treatment of literature as a heuristic tool. The contributors do not shy away from addressing controversial aspects of his work. Politics is one such critical blind spot, for as David Quint argues in his reading of Dickens, to surrender the wish to trade places with someone else might also mean to abandon the fight for justice and equality. Manuele Gragnolati and Heather Webb's piece on Dante similarly seeks to release desire from the grips of debased envy by emphasizing its pedagogical and salvific functions, just as Maria DiBattista and Jan-Melissa Schramm re-appraise, in turn, jealousy in Proust and self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century British narrative. Whilst the Introduction alludes to under-theorized questions of sexuality, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey's essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini acts as a corrective to the heterosexual normativity of the Girardian model, the collection's literary corpus is composed exclusively of male writers. For a study that is so remarkably wide-ranging — analysing works in English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish; crossing periods and genres from the classical panegyric and medieval Occitan hagiographical poem to novels, plays, and short stories from the nineteenth century onwards — the absence of women writers is conspicuous. In her book What Is a Woman? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Toril Moi demonstrated the fertility of Girard's work for thinking about gender, and it is a pity not to find similar engagement here. (A pity too, on another note, that such a handsome volume contains so many typographical errors in the French quotations.) Girard's thought emerges from conceptual twists and narrative turns, and these essays testify to its dynamism by attending to the ways in which his 'script' can be (re)written. Thus Rosa Mucignat's view that cultures also operate in relations of rivalry and imitation casts mimetic desire on a global stage where centre and periphery constantly shift. Trajectories also become far less predictable: acutely mindful of the polysemic slipperiness of texts, contributors such as Karen S. Feldman suggest an altogether more complex, unstable, and open-ended hermeneutics. The renunciation of false idols is a recurring theme in these pages, whether it be the self-reflexive conversions undergone by characters or indeed those of writers themselves. How fitting, then, that this important and invigorating volume should have for its coda Girard's own account of this experience.