Unpacking Ritual

This short and dense book has managed to dispel a prejudice I had harbored for a long time against Girardian readings of ritual and sacrifice in literature. By Girardian, of course, I mean René Girard, the French theoretician of myth and the sacred recently rewarded for his life-time achievement by being elected to the Académie Française in 2005. His work goes back to 1961, when he published a book that is now a classic, Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque (Romantic Lies and Fictional Truth), in which he analyzed the meaning of the works of Dostoievski, Stendhal and Proust. Girard concluded that only novels can tell us the "truth" in so far as they stage a psychology of imitation in which we can understand that we desire only what other people desire. Fiction would provide the central mode of access to a hard truth that we want to repress in the name of Romantic spontaneity and our trust in subjective immediacy. We are reluctant to admit that our loved objects as much as our elective affinities are structured by other people's gazes, discourses and fascinations. Proust would provide the key to such an analysis of desire that owes a lot to Lacan's early formulation about the mirror stage. For Girard, whereas canonical novels tend to disclose the triangular structure of desire, Romanticism aims at a poetic apprehension of unmediated objects. I only call up this book to signal that Girard's preoccupation with novels is very old, yet, in most of his recent works, he appears more religious and mythical as he finds in the Bible but also in Greek tragedy and in Shakespeare one of those "things hidden since the foundation of the world" he is fond of unearthing.

These "things" boil down to an understanding of the main mechanism that constitutes social groups. Girard founds everything on the transformation of sheer agonistic mimetic violence into ritual violence. The key for him is the choice of a sacrificial victim who will be given the function of ritual scapegoat, a magical function endowed with ambivalence and guilt but that ensures the group's cohesion; the social unit reconstitutes itself by recovering the purity lost when violence pitted individuals against the others. Such a theory is indeed broad and exciting, and can be paralled with Georges Bataille's concept of waste and of the "accursed share." It often sweeps glibly across the most varied myths, religions, anthropological patterns and data and seems to reduce literary patterns to a predetermined Procustean bed. What stands out is the role played by sacrificial victims that redeem mimetic aggression—this impulse is common to all religions, lurking in all the mythical narratives of our human origins. Christ figures one of the main scapegoats, and he is likely to be found hidden in countless narrative patterns. Girard's corpus becomes then less concerned with novels than with classical myth and tragedy and of course Biblical narratives from Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac to the synoptic stories of the Passion. By contrast, the domain of the novel is left to formalist scrutiny. It remains to be shown how these heady theories can bring anything to the study of modernism, a domain in which the presence of submerged myths and rituals never allows one to bypass formalist considerations of plot, voice, style, intertextuality, all the devices that foreground an opaque or unreliable narration and the intransitivity of texture, diction, style, language and all the attendant surface effects.

This is what Cousineau sets out to do, with considerable subtlety. He does not take risks when choosing his corpus, which is made up of five novels or novellas usually taken to be typically "modernist": The Turn of the Screw, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby and To The Lighthouse. Most of the time, he combines a thematic approach, that is an investigation of key Girardian signifiers like "victim," "sacrifice," or "holocaust" (which occurs close to the end of Gatsby) with a...