The Girard Reader (13 page)

never could have any concrete content. It seems to emanate from the most superficial areas of

novelistic consciousness. To put reconciliation in its proper perspective we must look on it as

the conquest of a possibility that has long been denied the writer. The conclusion must be

considered as a successful effort to overcome the inability to conclude. The criticism of

Maurice Blanchot can help us in this task. Maurice Blanchot portrays Franz Kafka as the

exemplary representative of a literature doomed to inconclusiveness. Like Moses, Kafka's

hero will never see the promised land. This inability to conclude, Blanchot tells us, is an

inability to die in the work and to free oneself in death.

The impossible conclusion defines a "literary space" which is not beyond but this side of

reconciliation. The fact that this space is the only

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one accessible to our own time of anguish is disquieting but not surprising to anyone who

bears in mind the evolution of the structure of the novel. The fact would not have surprised

Dostoyevsky, who has already given us characters doomed to inconclusiveness and was

traversing Maurice Blanchot's "literary space" at the time he wrote
Notes from the

Underground
. This story, like so many of Kafka's and those of writers after Kafka, has no

conclusion:

The notes of this paradoxialist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.

Notes from the Underground
is the turning point between romanticism and the novel,

between the preceding inauthentic reconciliations and the authentic reconciliations which

follow. The great novelists cross the literary space defined by Blanchot but they do not stay

there. They push beyond that space toward the infinity of a liberating death.

In contrast to the incompleteness of the contemporary narrative, an incompletion which in the

best writers reflects not a passing fashion but a particular historical and metaphysical

situation, the conclusion of the novelistic work embodies not only a historical but an

individual possibility finally and triumphantly actualized.

The great novelistic conclusions are banal but they are not conventional. Their lack of

rhetorical ability, even their clumsiness, constitute their true beauty and clearly distinguish

them from the deceptive reconciliations which abound in second-rate literature. Conversion

in death should not seem to us the easy solution but rather an almost miraculous descent of

novelistic grace.

The truly great novels are all born of that supreme moment and return to it the way a church

radiates from the chancel and returns to it. All the great works are composed like cathedrals:

once again the truth of
Remembrance of Things Past
is the truth of all the great novels.

We carry within us a whole hierarchy of the superficial and the profound, the essential and

the subordinate, and we apply it instinctively to the novel. This hierarchy, which is often

"romantic" and "individualist" in character, conceals from us certain essential aspects of artistic creation. For example, we are in the habit of never taking Christian symbolism

seriously, perhaps because it is common to many works both mediocre and sublime. We

attribute a purely decorative function to the symbolism when the author is not a Christian,

and a purely apologetic function when he is a Christian. Truly "scientific" criticism would

discard all these a priori judgments and would note the amazing points of similarity among

all the different novelistic conclusions. If only our

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prejudices
pro
and
con
did not erect a watertight barrier between aesthetic experience and religious experience, we would see the problems of creation in a new light. We would not cut

off Dostoyevsky's work from all its religious meditations. In
The Brothers Karamazov
, for

example, we would discover texts as important for the study of novelistic creation as those of

The Past Recaptured
. And we would at last realize that Christian symbolism is universal, for

it alone is able to give form to the experience of the novel.

We must therefore look at this symbolism from the point of view of the novel. The task is all

the more difficult since the author himself sometimes tries to throw us off the scent. Stendhal

attributes Julien Sorel's "German mysticism" to the extreme dampness of his prison cell. But the conclusion of
The Red and the Black
remains a meditation on Christian themes and

symbols. In it the novelist reaffirms his skepticism, but the themes and symbols are

nonetheless present in order to be clothed in negations. They play exactly the same role as in

Proust or Dostoyevsky. We shall see everything which touches on these themes, including the

monastic vocation of Stendhal's heroes, in a fresh light which the author's irony cannot hide from us.

Here, as before, we must interpret the novelists by comparing them to one another. We

should not treat the religious question externally but if possible look on it as a purely

novelistic problem. The question of Christianity in Stendhal, the question of "mysticism" in Proust and in Dostoyevsky can be understood only through comparisons.

"If the seed does not die after it has been sown, it will remain alone, but if it dies it will bear much fruit." The verse from St. John reappears in several crucial episodes of
The Brothers

Karamazov
. It expresses the mysterious connections between the two deaths in the novel, the

link between the prison and Dmitri's spiritual healing, the link between the mortal sickness

and the redeeming confession of the "unknown visitor," the link between Ilusha's death and

the charitable work of Alyosha.

Proust has recourse to the same verse from the Gospel of St. John when he wants to explain

to us the part played by sickness, that younger sister of death, in his own creation. "When

sickness, like a harsh spiritual director, caused me to die to the social world, it did me a good

service for if the seed does not die after it is sown it will remain alone and will not bear much

fruit."

Mme. de la Fayette too could have quoted St. John, for one finds in
The Princess of Clèves

the sickness of Proust's narrator. This sickness comes at the same point in the novel's

development as in Proust and has exactly the same spiritual consequences: "The necessity of

dying, which she saw was very near, made her used to detachment and the length of her

illness made it a habit. . . . Worldly passions and activities appeared to her in the same way as

to people who have broader and

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deeper vision." This
breadth and depth of vision
belongs to the new being who is literally born of the death.

The verse from St. John serves as an epigraph for
The Brothers Karamazov
, and it could

serve as an epigraph for all novelistic conclusions. Repudiation of a human mediator and

renunciation of deviated transcendency inevitably call for symbols of vertical transcendency

whether the author is Christian or not. All the great novelists respond to this fundamental

appeal, but sometimes they manage to hide from themselves the meaning of their response.

Stendhal uses irony. Proust masks the true face of novelistic experience with romantic

commonplaces but he gives the stale symbols a profound and secret brilliance. In his work

symbols of immortality and resurrection appear in a purely aesthetic context and only

surreptitiously do they transcend the banal meaning to which romanticism reduces them.

They are not operetta princes; they are true princes disguised as operetta princes.

These symbols make their appearance long before
The Past Recaptured
, in all the passages

which are both an echo and annunciation of the original experience. One of these passages is

devoted to the death and funeral of the great writer Bergotte:

They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who

was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

Bergotte is famous and Proust obviously is thinking of his posthumous glory, to that

consolatrice affreusement laurée
which so irritated Valéry. But this romantic cliché is no

more than a pretext in this passage: it is merely an excuse to introduce the word

"resurrection," without disturbing the external positive and "realist" order. The death and resurrection of Bergotte foreshadow the death and resurrection of the author himself, the

second birth from which
Remembrance of Things Past
springs. The true resonance of the

sentence just quoted is derived from the expectance of that resurrection. Along with the

images of deviated transcendency we can discern the outlines of the symbolism of vertical

transcendency. Contrasted with the demoniacal idols who drag the narrator down into the

abyss are angels with outspread wings. We must interpret this symbolism in the light of
The

Past Recaptured
: "The greatness of Proust," André Malraux correctly notes, "became evident when the publication of
The Past Recaptured
revealed the significance of a literary

achievement which, up to that point, did not seem to surpass that of Dickens."

It was
The Past Recaptured
, to be sure, which gave Proust's creation its meaning, but other

novelistic conclusions contributed to that meaning as well.
The Brothers Karamazov
makes it

impossible for us to

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consider the resurrection of Bergotte simply a romantic commonplace. And in the same way,

The Past Recaptured
, which Proust first entitled
Perpetual Adoration
, makes it impossible for us to see in the religious meditations of
The Brothers Karamazov
merely religious

propaganda, external to the novel itself. If Dostoyevsky suffered so much while writing those

pages it is not because he found it a boring task but because he considered them of prime

importance.

In the second part of
The Brothers Karamazov
little Ilusha dies for the sake of all the heroes of Dostoyevsky's novels, and the communion which springs from that death is Balzac's and

Proust's sublime lucidity shared by many. The structure of crime and redeeming punishment

transcends the solitary consciousness. Never did a novelist make such a radical break with

romantic and Promethean individualism.

The conclusion of
The Brothers Karamazov
is borne on the highest crest of Dostoyevsky's

genius. The last distinctions between novelistic and religious experience are abolished. But

the structure of experience has not changed. It is easy to recognize in the words "memory,"

"death," "love" and "resurrection" found in the mouths of the children of this novel the themes and symbols that inspired the creative ardor of the agnostic author of
The Past

Recaptured
:

"We love you, we love you!" they all caught it up.

There were tears in the eyes of many of them.

"Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya shouted ecstatically.

"And may the dear boy's memory live for ever!" Alyosha added again with feeling.

"For ever!" the boys chimed in again.

"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?"

"Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other

with joy and gladness all that has happened!" Alyosha answered, half laughing, half

enthusiastic.

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Chapter 5 The Goodness of Mimetic Desire

This is an excerpt from an interview of Girard conducted by Rebecca Adams in November of

1992 and published as "Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with René Girard" in

Religion and Literature 25
, no. 2 ( 1993): 9-33. This selection is taken from pages 22-26. It is important as one of Girard's recent clarifications that mimetic desire is good in itself; it is the

basis of love even though it often -- and inevitably in terms of the history of the human race -

- takes destructive forms. It cannot be renounced by the Christian because what Jesus

advocates is imitation of himself just as he imitates God the Father. This clarification is found

also in
Quand ces choses commenceront . . . Entretiens avec Michel Treguer
( Paris: arléa,

1994), 70-71, 76.

Rebecca Adams:
Let's go on with some more theological implications of your arguments. At

the end of
Things Hidden
, then, you make the statement that to follow Christ means to "give up" or renounce mimetic desire, yet the hominization section implies that mimetic desire is

the only kind of desire there is. There seems to be a covert suspicion, throughout the theory,

of real agency. The theory of mimetic desire itself seems to entail an -- again, almost

Augustinian -- idea of the bondage of the will. Freedom of the will is an illusion which must

be renounced. But in your thought, it's not even as if we once had real agency before the

"fall," as Calvin, for instance, believed.

René Girard:
No, that impression is not true. I believe in freedom of the will. Jesus says that scandals must happen, and he tells his disciples that they will all be scandalized when he is