The Novelistic Incarnation and the Question of Truth

Abstract

Like many of you, I was overwhelmed by reading René Girard's first book Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, published in 1961.1 But I belong to a special class: Compared to all the young and less young readers and researchers who make up this assembly, I am what in high places, at the ARM [Association Recherches mimétiques], we do not hesitate to qualify as a “historical Girardian”: I read this book in 1961, thanks to Michel Deguy. And, of course, all his other books in the order of their publication. So I'm probably the oldest surviving groupie of René Girard. It's not a claim to fame, but it's in this way that I find a fellowship with you and that I'm happy to be before you. Indeed, I think that between Girardians, the differences matter less than the similarities.It is about another event, very recent, but directly linked to the previous one and also moving for me, that I am going to talk to you: the discovery of René Girard, biographie, the forthcoming book by Benoît Chantre, that I had the chance, once again, to read before everyone else. I read it passionately because of all the things it teaches us about the genesis of Girard's work and above all because it gives this work an extraordinary and indisputable unity.I had assumed the unity of Girard's work but Benoît Chantre's book confirms it: What is called the mimetic theory is not a whole made up of separate and detachable parts, like a three-stage rocket, to which we like to compare it. Even if the writing of mimetic theory has undergone the turbulence of world history and the biography of its author, the whole determines its parts; the whole comprehends the boundaries of the work, the first writings and the last, in both senses of the word: to be taken altogether, understood as a whole, or discarded altogether. Moreover, its radical nature prohibits any form of readjustment or compromise. Girard has said it expressly in his interviews: There is no “Girardian system” but at the outset, a very compact intuition that fertilized all his research. This same intuition allowed Girard to profit from the work of his contemporaries and to maintain real relationships with the thought leaders of his time, such as Goldmann, Deguy, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida, without ever turning away from his own path. This intuition takes shape even before the conception of a “triangular” desire on an individual scale, a desire that will subsequently become “mimetic” on the scale of human societies.By reading the biography of Girard by Benoît Chantre, I better understood the importance of literature in the genesis of what we call mimetic theory. Marx wrote that ideas are not born like mushrooms; they always reflect a state of social reality. Girard showed, on the contrary, that social reality is not merely reflected but revealed by great literature. And with Girard, brilliant ideas are of the order of an event, intuitions inspired by readings in tune with events in his life. Reading Girard's intellectual biography therefore holds some surprises, things we did not know and things that can shed new light on those we already know.A genuine surprise is to learn that the excellent title “mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque” of his first work was imposed on him by his publisher. Girard had titled his history of the novel, which is at the same time a history of desire, “L'incarnation romanesque.” At first, we will see what this mysterious title can mean; then, we will see that there are not only circumstantial reasons, linked to his teaching, to explain the confidence that Girard placed in literature, and not in philosophy and the human sciences, in his search for truth.It was in Girard's personal papers, described by him as “very important papers” and carefully preserved and carried around from one move to another, that Benoît Chantre found, among other things, the drafts of “the novelistic incarnation.” Now this is quite extraordinary, as we are witnessing the blossoming of the intuition that presided over the mimetic theory even before the conception of desire as “mimetic.” Girard, a young assistant professor, pressured by the American university imperative to “publish or perish,” had set to work. His first articles dealt with Saint-John Perse and Malraux. From these “apocalyptic” authors, who seek meaning in a fragmented world that has lost its bearings, he caught hold of an idea that gave meaning to his own inner exile: “The absolute is looming behind the absurd.”2 The absolute or the sacred is not part of the ideology of the modern world. In order to take its measure, Girard believed, it is necessary not only to resist the dominant mystification of positivism and progressivism but also to resist nihilism. He is grateful to Saint-John Perse for this double negation: “The senseless world whose meaning is served up to us by the rationalist philosophers is followed by a flat refusal of the broken world in which we find ourselves. The poet refuses to abandon the search for meaning.”3Girard's intuition is existential. It is always an event in his life, a founding event. He remembers how, as a child, he suddenly realized that he could read. And it is just as suddenly that the poems of Saint-John Perse, previously indecipherable, have become, in exile, like a light in his dark night: “I remember that it came suddenly, a bit like when I had learned to read the works I was assigned to teach: Balzac, Stendhal, Proust.”4 The poetry of Saint-John Perse opens the doors of the sacred. What does this intuition consist of? The sacred, amid the fragments of the world, can only be said poetically, in “the work of language.” Girard retains the image of an “immobile center in the middle of the movement.”5 In this early article, he remarks: “The sacred imposes itself with increasing force as we come into closer contact with nothingness.”6 Saint-John Perse defines himself as one of those “great adventurers of the soul . . . questioning the entire surface of the globe to understand the meaning of this terrific disorder.”7 But there is nothing “unreal” about the sacred here, as if it were the product of a “nihilating” imagination according to Sartre. The intuition that Girard attributes to Perse in his article is, on the contrary, an “intuition of being at the heart of nothingness.” In his poem the death of cultures displays their hidden source, the secret of their composition and their decomposition. The sacred is seen endowed with a reality that escapes rationalism and all its avatars, the idealism and realism of philosophers, the naturalism of writers, the positivism and progressivism of historians; it is a reality that escapes the closure of the conceptual thinking and is born aloft by images. To evoke this “beyond the absurd,” this beyond death, which is the sacred, metaphor reveals itself more lucid and more powerful than the concept.Even before the “novelistic revelation” of “a desire that from the outset is oriented toward death,” Girard has an intuition of an “apocalyptic” sacred that gives meaning to history, and he has chosen literature as a source of inspiration for the “demystification” that he is about to make of . . . literature. The young Sartrean professor Girard seeks the authenticity of a work in its ability to resist a dominant mystification: It is for the hero of a novel to assume his freedom, and for that, he must cut the ties that link him to a worldliness ruled by bad faith and inauthentic desires. The conclusion of the novel La Princesse de Clèves, for a Sartrean, would express this freedom: Her husband has died and nothing prevents Madame de La Fayette's heroine from marrying the Duke of Nemours, with whom she experiences a shared amorous passion. Yet she has arrived at “greater and more distant views”; she renounces her love and the world altogether and retires to a convent to die. A sublime action, but one that could also be described as suicidal and driven by pride. The reading that René Girard makes of it, in an article written well before Deceit, Desire and the Novel, is altogether different. What we find there is his intuition of the sacred: The sacred imposes itself with all the more force as we rub shoulders with nothingness.In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard emphasizes the lucidity of the Princess of Clèves: She leaves the Duke of Nemours and the romantic world to escape the hell of jealousy, too aware that “only obstacles” have strengthened the ardor of the passion she inspired in the man she loves. But in a text that Girard has reworked several times entitled “Les vues grandes et éloignées de Madame de Clèves,”8 the heroine's self-control is not the subject; it is her death that is at stake, and this death is sacrificial. We learn that in one way or another, every great novel is “autobiographical,” in the sense that the author of the novel, even if at the beginning he distinguishes himself from it, maintains links that become closer and closer to its main character as the novel progresses. Distancing himself to mock his heroine, Flaubert ends up with the acrid taste in his mouth of the poison that kills her and confesses, “I am Madame Bovary.” The coincidence of Madame de La Fayette ending up being confused with Madame de Clèves, at the precise moment when the princess, who wanted to be different, discovers herself identical to all women, this perfect coincidence cannot be accomplished, says Girard, other than in the “sacrifice” of the heroine by the novelist. At the end of the novel, her amorous passion, which makes her look like all women, is replaced by a “Christic” passion, the final and redemptive point of the novel, a dying that evokes the Pauline “old man” whom we must slay within us in order to be reborn.Readers sense keenly this “fictional incarnation.” The novelist is embodied in her heroine. The heroes of novels “are not creatures in the same way as other characters because it is by creating them that the novelist creates himself,”9 writes Girard. By creating them or by killing them? By creating them first: The hero or heroine is not a character that the novelist disposes of as he pleases, as he disposes of other characters—it is “an abrupt crystallization of a will,” writes Girard, in short, an individuality endowed with a force, which Madame de Clèves calls “virtue,” “honor,” “fidelity,” and which Julien Sorel calls “duty,” Raskolnikov “remorse,” Des Grieux “love.” This “force, (I quote), which uproots them from the novelistic world is the very one which guides the novelist's hand.”10 To put it in other terms, the novelist, Madame de La Fayette, embodies herself in her heroine to enact her exit from the world, to free herself from and as we would are the way of the that the is embodied in her that the is a is to that the novelist does not just look at the from the it from the In literature, the writes Girard, does not on and but on the free from the to the But what Girard will call novelistic more than an of the novelist with her It a death and a To a from desire, to this point of from which it to know the of and to the world and history, the heroine must be and therefore put to By the Princess of Clèves, Madame de La Fayette into the world and is as a Her an to a It is this that the novel In conclusion to his article on Madame de La Fayette, Girard must not seek the to the in or in some of but in the that Madame de Clèves for her with the Duke of And this because it like the by her we are to it. us seek it the novel of it is the novel novelistic work would therefore be an of The novelistic from the killing of a But for the to for “the of to into the of which is the meaning of novelistic the author of the novel must with his And not only the author, but the as the novel will not itself to be that is to to the or that one would like to make of by a of the novel itself of its or of reading its I Benoît the between the first and the Madame de Clèves, which is also the between the novelist and the princess, the that the novelist from its all the that social to it, the novelistic from the of desire a intuition of the sacred therefore served as a to a that of a death would be the of “The sacred imposes itself with all the more force as we rub shoulders with wrote Girard in his first article on Saint-John This is in the of Deceit, Desire and the Novel, in a from like a to to the social world, it did a for if the does not it is it will and will not novelistic therefore has not only a or but an and even himself any more than from to René Girard, even before his did not hesitate to of the heroine as a of as a to his in “Les vues grandes et éloignées de Madame de The of a “novelistic by the author over his is for him to the of as a to his Girard the to these characters of novels who have according to in order to be by the of the novelist. A Sartrean will be to about these characters who are by the of but in their know to But Girard with this of he the heroes as it is because he refuses to make them are not of desire, he but of the of of and they and To like Girard has beyond the to himself at the at the very of the novelistic not only has an it is a as we have which for between the differences but because the same of the great they are also the of the Princess of Clèves, Girard himself to the of a novel of from the in which he the modern or The hero is the Des who will also the world, or more be by it, in order to to a he has in love He from to to and to his by into it It's an exit from the world from just the of an a into at the end of which this will free himself from of the says to his individuality and new This which is realized by the of the hero and thanks to the of the novelist, very to a creates new which the cannot in the that the author, with his Girard the again, the novelistic from the of desire, about a This is that of the author and his character whose are by the of the novel, “a man of who has from to whom the must be the that author, and is no that of the world that the hero but that of the novel that the world and reveals its Girard “The hero is therefore the between the novelist and the of the novel, as the perfect is the between the world and its He from the of the novel, from this world in which he is and his passion him by to the of the and above the world in which he does not will have understood that the for Girard the heart of novelistic only reveals himself in the death and of his Madame de La Fayette and the are revealed to as only in their “novelistic a death followed by a this of the above the is more of the of the who himself as a than of a and between the author, the and the The on it to me, that the author of the had to with himself and within himself a an he shared with “The the one who this “I am and they are and to the novelistic can therefore be like all the great works the of an the moment of the novelistic the which was the of the writing of the “very important papers” and the of his of in the one that in the of Deceit, Desire and the Novel, many things It time for Girard to “the man” of his Sartrean and become the new that of his time to free himself from the of and to the of the world in of the of would like to take of what Girard's first some published and us about the genesis of Girard's work, and the in is this importance to Chantre us that “The has become Deceit, Desire and the He also us that René Girard this The his of the To of the to of is to the of the too of the closure of conceptual The sacred, that hidden form of all the great is death in the of life. The novelistic has this of the at of the and the we have it also makes it to works as as La Princesse de Clèves and discovery is this of But before that, another discovery was also for of and the of the It is the discovery of the form of the great their It is this that new as between the novel of an and the novel of a into In literature, this is It the of the to the and the of at the source of the it reveals the of the and the the of that refuses to It is a double and says Benoît Chantre, to the to be the of Girard therefore himself with this discovery of This would him to this of that was his first published work. He will to the whole the revealed in the of Benoît Chantre that, in the of death and his is as the novelist his on the of the novel, the novelistic will the novelist on the of Girard can novel is in a way to beyond the novel its We know that we can be of the novel, once again, in a that is we that it is a of the novel in the of its own in the which is its but on the which many have by death, or to the is because the of the novel is a the of in the of the will Girard to and the of the intuition from reading the great This was like a “the that there was no meaning suddenly there was meaning It was a real but not it was like a that is and will or Girard that the of the novels is inspired by that of the of and The embodied hero is both in the world and at with it. The great novels are made of a into hell followed by an or a which is like a to death, followed by To the who him for “the of Girard that the novel is to the of and that this can only be revealed if it is and in a he you have to to the point the from the us to think of the conclusion of Deceit, Desire and the Novel, which with the redemptive conclusion of of is born And to these of And To the But in of that which In Saint-John Perse, Girard had as we have an intuition of being at the heart of It is at the of what Girard will as a that the of novel characters take in Girard's thought has from the and that is also he is There is no the of the with that of the the does not . . . . The is which even to to But this does not in and a The of the novel is by the of the individual and the of the as Girard is novelistic according to his It is in literature such an important in his search for and in his life. Girard by the poetry of Saint-John Perse, that the is It the to within the the within the when they are as is the with in literature, make it to to make new and therefore to find to the reality of human The novel itself is a says Girard, as it makes a world up from its a new world on the of an novelistic is a title it is a as we have for a of on the of character in a novel is only made of the of to be embodied in a there is also a literature, the text to be It was even very at the time when Girard in to of when of literature is it is to that a text is it embodies a it to of it has a that must be by And this is double for Girard, who a work both to an reality and to the of the work, which would be like the of this Chantre in his book that the of this of novelistic the young Girard from his and the way to for This an or has an and is a in the sense that “the first would be a if it were not followed by a which it in a redemptive (I Benoît is for Girard a a of It us away from from The of the work set up the of the world is also for the an to another for “The of the novelist, says Chantre, is like the he death and The of the novel a in death from which a Girard, it is the that in the great a that of death and What as we see in the conclusion of great is the this and Benoît Chantre of a of that Girard's a that is being of came to his And his own did not Girard, the refusal of this of is the is what the that which does not see and is always in search of a The of life, the that Girard will to the is this that was in both senses of the will have understood that great literature, work according to Girard, into the of and itself of between the author, his character or and the It is the in the of a “novelistic This can be in the of the the novelist himself of killing the “old man” in and of himself from one novel to another or within his novel, as in the novelist of and Mensonge romantique in 1961, Michel had very the of the work and the by Girard to take of his and the of the In a Girard assumed of the is the escape from the of the the from to what calls if it is not is at the of the and the a of shared And we understand that this death to which is the of a has an meaning even more than an It could only be in novels and in the of René Girard, it the for a that cannot be without