The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (34 page)

In the next decades, Girard developed mimetic contagion into an anthropological theory, using it to explain historically and geographically diverse manifestations of social violence
from Chukchi blood feuds to the cult of Dionysus. But he first presented mimetic theory in a book about literature. In this first book,
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
, Girard posits mimetic desire as the fundamental content of “the Western novel.” Don Quixote, it turns out, doesn’t really want any of his ostensible objects (Dulcinea, Mambrino’s golden helmet, etc.); what he wants is to become one with his mediator: Amadís of Gaul. It’s only because his imitation of Amadís of Gaul demands a beautiful lady that he invents Dulcinea. According to an analogous delusional mechanism, Raskolnikov only thinks he wants the pawnbroker’s money—in fact, he wants to be Nietzsche’s Superman. Emma Bovary only thinks she wants Léon—she actually wants to be the heroine of a romance. Julien Sorel only thinks that his ambitions are directed toward beautiful women and brilliant promotions—what he really wants is to achieve some Napoleonic ideal of authentic being.

Because the mimetic desire of the novelistic hero is never directed at its true object, which is in any case unattainable, it is fundamentally masochistic, violent, and self-destructive. “Great” novels, for Girard, are those that end by exposing the illusory and pernicious quality of mimetic desire. This exposure takes place in a fever or a penal colony, through suicide or by the guillotine, in the form of a “deathbed conversion”: the hero transcends his egoism and renounces the values that have driven the novel up to that point. Don Quixote falls into a fever, realizes he isn’t really a knight, and dies a Christian death; Madame Bovary swallows arsenic; Raskolnikov turns himself in; Julien renounces Mathilde and submits to the guillotine. “Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended,” Girard writes. “The hero sees himself in the rival he loathes; he renounces the ‘differences’ suggested by hatred.”

As suggested by the emphasis on conversion narrative, mimetic desire is a fundamentally Christian theory. Just as “the false prophets proclaim that in tomorrow’s world
men will be gods for each other
,” so does mimetic desire entail worshiping another human being as a god, with inevitably disastrous results. There is one and only one human who actually is a god, and that’s Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it is only by taking Christ as a model for our actions that we can redeem mimetic desire as a positive force.

Although I am unconvinced that mimetic desire is the fundamental content of the novelistic form, or that humans’ mimetic desires can be channeled productively only by imitating Christ, Girard’s theory unquestionably explains a great deal in the work of certain novelists, particularly those such as Stendhal and Dostoevsky, who were deeply engaged with Christian thought and the practice of a Christian life.
*
The solution is particularly convincing in the case of
Demons
. Girard characterizes Stavrogin—whose name combines the Greek
stavros
(cross) and the Russian
rog
(horn), suggesting the Antichrist—as a test case of the ultimate mediator of desire: one who has no desires himself. “It is not clear whether he no longer desires because Others desire him or whether Others desire him because he no longer desires”; in any case, Stavrogin is trapped in a deadly cycle:

No longer having a mediator himself, he becomes a magnetic pole of desire and hatred . . . all the characters
in
The Possessed
become his slaves . . . Kirillov, Shatov, Pyotr, and all the women in
The Possessed
succumb to Stavrogin’s strange power and reveal to him in almost identical terms the part he plays in their existence. Stavrogin is their “light,” they wait for him as for the “sun”; before him they feel they are “before the Almighty”; they speak to him as “to God himself.”

Stavrogin, Girard continues, is “young, good-looking, rich, strong, intelligent, and noble,” not because Dostoevsky “feels a secret sympathy for him,” but because the test subject must “unite in his own person all the conditions for metaphysical success”—it has to be without any effort on his part that men and women alike “fall at his feet and surrender to him.” Stavrogin is “rapidly reduced to the most horrible caprices,” ending with suicide; this is how Dostoevsky illustrates the price of “the ‘success’ of the metaphysical undertaking.” Because the purest culmination of mimetic desire is self-annihilation, Stavrogin’s demise is accompanied by “a quasi-suicide of the collectivity”: Kirillov shoots himself; Shatov, Liza, and Marya indirectly bring about their own murders; and Stepan Trofimovich self-destructs in a fit of madness.

Girard’s interpretation accounts for Stavrogin’s psychic emptiness, for the desperate mania of others to be near him and to co-opt him into their philosophies. It answers Stavrogin’s question “What the devil do you need me for?” It explains the metaphor of demonic possession and, through the idea of mimetic contagion, the mass effect on the whole town. It also accounts finally for the role of Stepan Trofimovich in the novel: it is Stepan Trofimovich’s “Russian liberalism,” the valorization of self-fulfillment, the deism, freethinking, and Francophilia, that create the vacuum embodied by Stavrogin. “Stepan Trofimovich is the father of all the possessed.
He is Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father; he is the spiritual father of Shatov, of [Darya], of [Liza], and especially of Stavrogin, since he taught them all,” Girard writes. “Everything in
The Possessed
starts with Stepan Trofimovich and ends with Stavrogin.”

The strange thing is that, during the “demonic” years of my graduate-student career, Girard himself played the role of Stepan Trofimovich: the pedagogue-father who gave birth to monsters. It wasn’t just mimetic sickness that we had, my classmates and I, but the
idea
of mimetic sickness, and we had learned it from him.

When I returned to Stanford after fifteen months of trying to write a novel, the department dynamics had changed completely. There were two years’ worth of new admits. Unlike the other students in Luba’s and my class—an extremely efficient young man who completed a PhD on the Chinese reception of Shakespeare in just four years; a Romanian girl who briefly studied unreliable narrators before dropping out of the program and moving to Canada—they had coalesced into a community, taking classes together, reading one another’s papers, going to lectures, discussing their work long into the night.

“They’re so . . . enthusiastic,” Luba said, not altogether approvingly, with reference to these students. She had just gotten back together with a college boyfriend and had moved off campus. My relationship with my college boyfriend was, by contrast, increasingly strained. I found myself spending less time at home or with Luba, and more time on campus with my new classmates.

The circle was polarized around Matej, a fast-talking philosophy major from Croatia, who combined Stavrogin’s “masklike” beauty—narrow glinting eyes, high cheekbones,
too-black hair—with a long-limbed, perfectly proportioned physical elegance, such that his body always looked at once extravagantly casual and flawlessly composed. The first time I saw him—as it happens, in an introductory meeting of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky seminar, which neither of us ended up taking—the overall effect struck me as excessive, almost parodic. But the more time I spent around Matej, the more vividly I realized that I was for the first time in the presence of pure charisma, the real thing. It was an elemental power, like weather or electricity. Recognizing it had no effect on your physical response.

Like the related phenomenon of charm, charisma resides largely in speech. Matej, who had spent the last three years working for a radio station in Zagreb, had a deep, mesmerizing, immediately recognizable voice, as well as a rhetorical talent for provoking conflicts with one hand while smoothing them over with the other, making concessions and winning them at the same time, producing the impression on everyone involved that great, collegial, and somehow intimate progress was being made in the working out of ideas.

I knew of at least two extremely smart and attractive women who were in love with Matej. Both were dating other men, whom Matej befriended. He then behaved very flirtatiously with the women. The flirtation was cloaked in a kind of gallantry that everyone found exciting, until one day they suddenly didn’t. One of the couples broke up; the boy transferred to Harvard and the girl, a formerly lively and charming person, wandered around campus like a ghost, her eyes red, talking about her cats.

Then there was my comp lit classmate Keren. She and her boyfriend, Ilan, a linguist, were inseparable from Matej. The three of them shared a car, and one summer they all lived together in Berlin. Keren and Matej were office-mates
and spent a lot of time alone in each other’s company, but Ilan and Matej would also sometimes go watch basketball together, without Keren. Matej, like Stavrogin, had a magnetic effect on both sexes.

It was a great mystery how Keren and Ilan managed to stay together despite Matej. I asked her about it once, in a roundabout way; she told me that she and Ilan were committed to each other for the foreseeable future, but that they both understood and accepted that each might not be the most intensely thought-about person in the other’s psyche 100 percent of the time. “You know how intense things can get with the people you work with,” she said.

For his first two years at Stanford, Matej had a roommate, Daniel, whom he rapidly reduced to a state of near paralytic dependence that persisted long after they stopped living together. Daniel and Matej had been assigned to each other by the housing services, on the basis of their shared two-pack-a-day smoking habit. Daniel, a mathematician, was overweight, although not grotesquely so, and would have been a pleasant and entertaining person were it not for a kind of deep, inexplicable pathetic quality that he seemed to be at great pains to convey to others, even to the point of aggressiveness. He had a knack for attracting people even more forlorn than he, who then became his demons. One of them, a homeless guy called Bobby, eventually moved into Daniel’s apartment and refused to leave; you could always find him lurking on the balcony, making insulting remarks. Daniel, meanwhile, became increasingly unable to make even the smallest decisions without first pouring out his heart to Matej, who patiently listened and then explained at great length the impossibility of his actually advising Daniel one way or another, because he, Matej, was powerless to cure Daniel’s ontological sickness.

To my bemusement, after having met me only a few times with Matej, Daniel began addressing me long e-mails full of the most detailed and depressing confessions, many of them health-related. “I think I have never had sex with a woman,” he wrote once. “Also, I haven’t done laundry in almost a month and all my underwear is dirty.” After debating for a long time how and whether to reply, I counseled him to go out and buy more underwear. Daniel wrote a full single-spaced page to thank me for this brilliant advice. He began telling me dreams he’d had about me. In these dreams I inevitably appeared as a benevolent figure, floating several feet off the ground.

Among my friends, only Luba was unaffected by Matej. “It’s true there was some addictive quality about him,” she said later. “I felt it, too. I remember sitting on that bench outside the library. He would start talking, and you would be unable to get up and leave. But afterward, hours had gone by, and what had he really said? It was all empty.”

Was it really all empty? All of it? I still don’t know. Sometimes I think it was, other times I think it wasn’t. At any rate, the rest of us spent much of our time in much the way Luba described, reading until late at night in the library, periodically reconvening outside to drink coffee and smoke Matej’s cigarettes. The library became the psychic center of our lives. We all dreamed about it—intense, elaborate dreams. Keren, for example, dreamed that I had filmed a “protest documentary” about the early Friday closing hours, the restriction of graduate-student loan privileges, and the overcrowding of dissertation study carrels; this mordant social critique, which I had apparently shot digitally in collaboration with Keren’s high-school classmate Anat (“in reality, now a belly dancer in Tel Aviv”), had been screened in the library basement, where it actually fomented a violent revolution and resulted in the severe beating of one of the library guards.

In retrospect, the beating of the library guard probably derived from the story of Miguel, the genial three-hundred-pound guard who sat at the front desk, checking IDs and bags. Miguel stood out from among the other library workers, who fit a more or less Dostoevskian mold: a tiny old woman whose organism seemed designed to combine maximum disgruntledness with minimum body mass; a giant white-bearded Santa Claus look-alike who spent all his breaks sitting outside under an olive tree, playing a balalaika. But Matej said that Miguel had confessed to him, late one night when the library was almost empty, that he had an incurable cancer, and would be dead in four months.

This story, which restored Miguel to the Dostoevskian milieu of his workplace, nevertheless accorded with neither his robust physique nor his jovial demeanor. “If he really had cancer, why would he still be checking bags at the library?” someone asked.

“What do you expect him to do, spend his last hundred and eighty days in Disneyland?” Matej demanded.

But four months passed, six months, a year. Miguel was still checking bags, still smiling and saying “Take care, guys,” like some obscure warning.

It turned out that Matej and I were both usually up past four in the morning, and I got in the habit of occasionally going back to his place after the library closed at midnight. Daniel would be in the bathtub, solving math problems; sometimes he would fall asleep, and we would hear him snoring. We sat in the living room, where Matej put away five or six bottles of beer and became more forthcoming about his past.