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tealinGirard developed his mimetic theory when he went to the States to do a history PhD. Part of a PhD is teaching undergraduate courses, and because he was French he was given a French literature class to teach, despite not having any sort of literary background. Reading these novels, sometimes just a chapter ahead of the class, he was struck by the thematic similarities in them, and started looking for similarities across all great literature, when the literary establishment was more interested in differences. He found that jealousy, and the conflict arising from it, was a repeating factor in great books from every culture and across all time periods.
There is one format of story that keeps arising again and again. He found it first in 'El curioso impertanente,' a novella embedded within Don Quixote: A man is in a relationship with a woman. He wants to test her commitment, so he invites a friend to try to seduce her. The friend succeeds. Tragedy ensues.
This formula of a man imitating another man's desire for a woman, and the conflict arising from their rivalry, reappears continually* in both the books and the lives of the great writers. Shakespeare returns to it again and again; Girard identifies Proust and Joyce as particular fans of it, and claims it to be an obsession in Dostoevsky's later works. The Romantics – when the novel really took off as an art form – put great emphasis on the autonomy and originality of the individual, so it was interesting that their novels kept coming back to imitation. Girard titled his book on the subject Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Romantic lie and novelistic truth); the English translation, which couldn't make the pun available in French, took the title Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.
Once identified in this particular form in Romantic novels, it was easy enough to see the pattern in other forms in other places: mythology, poetry, everyday life – and, as a historian, in history. The dynamic plays out between individuals, between groups, and between entire nation-states: what was (is?) The Cold War but a mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale?
*It is usually the men desiring a woman, not the other way around. I am no literary critic, and my knowledge of the canon is limited, but I find it hard to think of a female example, though I'm sure they must exist. I suspect this is down to two things: most of the canon's writers are male, and women tend to be conditioned to avoid competition, to back down in the face of a rival rather than assert themselves. The one example that comes to mind is in Jane Eyre, where she and Blanche Ingram are set up as rivals for Rochester, but it was entirely his machination to make Blanche look like a rival in order to excite Jane's jealousy. So again it's a man trying to incite a mimetic rivalry which he expects to run the way it would do with men involved, i.e. competition, when in actual fact Jane just refuses to play. (There are class issues heavily involved in this as well, but it's hard to imagine them being the deciding factor if it were male jealousy at play.)
This isn't to say women are immune from mimetic rivalry – I can state emphatically from personal experience that they certainly are not – only that the particular manifestation of it that first caught Girard's eye seems to be predominantly a male-led thing.
Chapter 8: Breaking the Toys
There is one format of story that keeps arising again and again. He found it first in 'El curioso impertanente,' a novella embedded within Don Quixote: A man is in a relationship with a woman. He wants to test her commitment, so he invites a friend to try to seduce her. The friend succeeds. Tragedy ensues.
This formula of a man imitating another man's desire for a woman, and the conflict arising from their rivalry, reappears continually* in both the books and the lives of the great writers. Shakespeare returns to it again and again; Girard identifies Proust and Joyce as particular fans of it, and claims it to be an obsession in Dostoevsky's later works. The Romantics – when the novel really took off as an art form – put great emphasis on the autonomy and originality of the individual, so it was interesting that their novels kept coming back to imitation. Girard titled his book on the subject Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Romantic lie and novelistic truth); the English translation, which couldn't make the pun available in French, took the title Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.
Once identified in this particular form in Romantic novels, it was easy enough to see the pattern in other forms in other places: mythology, poetry, everyday life – and, as a historian, in history. The dynamic plays out between individuals, between groups, and between entire nation-states: what was (is?) The Cold War but a mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale?
*It is usually the men desiring a woman, not the other way around. I am no literary critic, and my knowledge of the canon is limited, but I find it hard to think of a female example, though I'm sure they must exist. I suspect this is down to two things: most of the canon's writers are male, and women tend to be conditioned to avoid competition, to back down in the face of a rival rather than assert themselves. The one example that comes to mind is in Jane Eyre, where she and Blanche Ingram are set up as rivals for Rochester, but it was entirely his machination to make Blanche look like a rival in order to excite Jane's jealousy. So again it's a man trying to incite a mimetic rivalry which he expects to run the way it would do with men involved, i.e. competition, when in actual fact Jane just refuses to play. (There are class issues heavily involved in this as well, but it's hard to imagine them being the deciding factor if it were male jealousy at play.)
This isn't to say women are immune from mimetic rivalry – I can state emphatically from personal experience that they certainly are not – only that the particular manifestation of it that first caught Girard's eye seems to be predominantly a male-led thing.
Chapter 8: Breaking the Toys
