A Solution

And some choice excerpts from "Deceit, Desire, and the Contemporary Novelist"

Writer’s Block, or Writer’s Guide?

First: to all who have subscribed, thank you for your interest in the incredibly niche topic of this newsletter. I hope you will find some intellectual diversion here, if not the long-awaited antidote to your Girard-induced writer’s block. Thank you also to

Luke Burgis

, who has very kindly mentioned the launch of this newsletter over at Luke Burgis Newsletter (formerly Anti-Mimetic). Luke has also posted the video of the “Deceit, Desire, and the Contemporary Novelist” panel from the 2023 Novitate Conference he organized. You can find the video and Luke’s post about it here:

Deceit, Desire, and the Contemporary Novelist

In this, the first full-fledged post of ‘Writing Fiction After Girard,’ I’m going all in. Since I dangled the prospect of a solution like a lure on a hook, I’m going to do my best to formulate from the outset the approach to fiction that helped me to deal with The Problem. I’m also going to try to get to the bottom of what makes the insights of Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel so tricky for at least some novelists to handle.

I qualify my sentence with an “at least some” because, as Luke points out in his post about our conversation, the three of us on the panel disagreed about whether reading Girard has been primarily a help or a hindrance to us. Right out of the gate,

a. natasha joukovsky

, who read Deceit, Desire, and the Novel after publishing her first novel (the brilliant Portrait of a Mirror), said:

I’m going to be in the minority I think here and say that I found reading Deceit, Desire, and the Novel made it easier for me to write fiction. My second novel in progress has been less painful, more fun, more delightful than the first one, which felt wonderful but also just very scary, very labored. And I think part of that is being able to put a name on mimetic desire…

Later in the conversation she added:

The illumination was a way to talk about something I already knew rather than feeling like I was being told something that in and of itself was new. And I think that that plays into the idea of whether Deceit, Desire, and the Novel is a writer’s block or a guide to writing a book. To me, it feels very much like a guide…

(And yet, she also mentioned that the narrator of the novel she is working on now “is a modern-day prophet, a modern-day Cassandra, and that sense of knowing too much is part of what I’m channeling into the next book.”)

As for

Brandon

Taylor, he, too, found his literary concerns reflected in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: “I realized that my fiction all along without knowing it had very much been sort of exploring these themes of mimesis and desire…”

Brandon said Deceit, Desire, and the Novel “felt like someone putting a name to this deep force that is moving through the universe,” and that it gave him “this rich vocabulary to describe a set of social relations and social interactions.” But he ultimately seemed to fall into the writer’s block camp:

What was so hampering about it and feels so hampering about it now […] is the clarity of [Girard’s] mind. He just like shows you down to the bottom of the well and you see where the endpoint is. And I feel like that endpoint is for me so very distressing. And I found I was viewing every relation within a story I try to write…I would see the endpoint of those relationships and I wouldn’t be able to sort of get back to the sort of like mushy Whartonian transcendence…

So does Natasha’s inconvenient failure to be paralyzed by Girard undermine the whole premise of this newsletter? I don’t think so. Her professed preference for aesthetic fiction and the cheeky Wildesque title (

quite useless

) of her Substack are hallmarks of a writer brimming with confidence in the value of art and beauty. And I’m going to argue that such confidence is precisely what it takes to, so to speak, “metabolize” Girard’s theory.

The Need for Theory

In his post about our Novitate Panel discussion, Luke defines the writing after Girard problem as follows:

One could argue that Girard’s insights in his first book (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel) reveal too much, in a way that could cripple a novelist. It has the potential to make them creatively stuck, believing that they can never again write anything real—something that is not mimetically mechanistic, for instance.

The turn of phrase “mimetically mechanistic” suggests characters who behave rigidly and deterministically in accordance with the laws of mimetic desire—characters who are, as Brandon put it in his remarks, “just sort of along for the ride.” It also suggests a novelist whose capacity for invention is constrained by fixed rules, preset frameworks—one who cannot enter into the nuanced complexity of reality in a relaxed, receptive way because he is more beholden to an abstract system than to the things he sees.

Such a novelist could be characterized as lacking confidence in his art, an art in which “reflecting power,” as Proust called it, is paramount. In a more general sense, he could be seen as uncertain about the possibility of arriving at any kind of worthwhile insight by attending carefully to things as they are, and by seeking to do more than make perfunctory contact with them.

One tempting response to this plight is to “suspend” the “freestanding intellectual or social framework,” as Brandon said during our discussion. Put theory on hold, temporarily forget about it, and your writing can proceed unsullied by external influences, in a pure face-off with reality. This is more or less how playwright Christopher Shinn (who has taught mimetic theory to his students in playwriting at the New School, and who wrote a remarkable trio of plays partly inspired by Girard) said he avoids being “oppressed by ideas”:

Tom Ue: In your interview with Maura Junius (2013), you discussed the influence of Girard’s mimetic theory and Shakespeare, who ‘follows the logic of unconscious mimetic desire brilliantly’. How do you avoid being oppressed by these ideas? 

Christopher Shinn: The way to avoid being oppressed by ideas is to always write from the unconscious, in an undirected and free way. That’s not to say that the unconscious is untouched by ideas and ideology, but I think it’s less so than the conscious mind.

But Shinn’s qualified answer (“that’s not to say the unconscious mind is untouched by ideas and ideology”) hints at what I suspect is a fatal drawback of this strategy: our frameworks can never really be suspended. We might drop Girard, but we would end up embracing Freud. Not only that, but we wouldn’t want to suspend those frameworks even if we could. Conceptual frameworks are what enable us to grasp the world as having logic and meaning. They can oppress us, yes, but without them we would be as helpless as a builder without a blueprint or a surgeon without an understanding of anatomy. And then, if we’re operating within some intellectual framework, on some level we must think it’s worthy of our adherence. Why would we want to bracket out our way of making sense of the world at the very moment we engage in the act of writing, which is precisely an attempt to find meaning in things?

So I will refrain from fulminating against theory or conceptual knowledge or ideas as such. What I want to suggest instead is that we must choose our frameworks well. This is because the theory of the novel to which, implicitly or knowingly, we adhere will in large part determine the degree of creative freedom we can hope to enjoy as we sit down to write one. This, at least, was the case with me: the solution I stumbled upon to the problem of writing after Girard consisted not in putting theory aside, but in adopting a different kind of theory.

The Trap

The French novelist Matthias Énard once said that he first saw Girard’s book as the ultimate “creative writing manual,” a shortcut to genius that might enable him to reverse-engineer a Proustian or Dostoevskyan masterpiece. That was my experience as well, as I tore through Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque in my tiny studio in the winter of 2001. Except that I probably fell even harder than Énard. In fact, I was so bedazzled that it was soon impossible for me to conceive of a novel that I would want to have written that would fail to convey everything conveyed in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

I had no solid grounding in philosophy or theology or classical literary criticism, except for what I had gleaned from studying continental literary theory and postmodern philosophy in college. So Girard’s incredibly compelling theory of the novel became my theory of the novel—my framework—as well as my introduction to unexplored regions of the genre’s history (at that time I had not read Stendhal, Flaubert, or Proust). And given the depth of my investment, it is hardly surprising that I took for granted Girard’s implicit position that the telos of the novel—its loftiest and most serious raison d’être—was to reveal the mimetic nature of desire.

This was the trap into which I fell. For since, as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel has it, in the literary masterpieces mimetic desire is still an “implicit” or at best an “already half-explicit” system, Girard’s theory, by making the mimetic nature of desire fully explicit, did the job of the novel—revelation, disclosure—better than the novel itself could. In the same breath, in other words, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel supplied an understanding of the novel’s purpose and accomplished that purpose with superior clarity and rigor.

From this it seemed to follow that if you persisted in writing novels after reading Girard, you were necessarily settling for a second-best option. In other words, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel offered actual knowledge about how desire works, while a work of fiction offered only the shadowy, inchoate beginnings of such knowledge. Girard himself would make a version of this claim in his later book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World:

There are better things to do at this point than endlessly amuse ourselves with paradoxes to which the great writers have already committed every resource in the domain of literature. The shimmer and play of mimesis are in themselves uninteresting. The only interesting task is to integrate all of this into a rational framework and transform it into real knowledge. 

If, like Kundera, you had already gone down the road of being a novelist by the time you encountered Girard, well, it was too late and you could keep puttering away at your fiction writer’s workbench. But if you reached the conclusion that theory offered a higher form of rationality before embarking on your novelistic oeuvre, as was the case with me, the shock would force you to question the value of what novelists do, now that there was another, better way of doing the same thing.

Flailing Attempts at Liberation

More than once I tried to renounce novel-writing. But for whatever reason, whether stubbornness, rank ambition, or deep artistic vocation, the renunciation refused to take. The practical difficulty was that whenever I sat down to write a novel the need to pile up concrete details struck me as a tedious and pointless waste of time. A few years back, César Aira published a piece in The Paris Review about his creative struggles that reminded me of my own sorry predicament:

Eventually I realized where the problem lay: in what has been called “the invention of circumstantial details,” that is, precise notations concerning the place, the time, the characters, their clothes, their gestures, all the things that set the scene. It began to seem ridiculous and childish, this fussiness in the realm of fantasy, this information about things that don’t really exist. But without circumstantial details you don’t have a novel, or you do but it’s abstract and disembodied, and what’s the point of that?

The root cause of my disenchantment with detail was that I yearned to get straight to the essential content—mimetic desire. All the accidents that went into a novel’s form seemed to be merely a shell from which that content wanted to be released (or which had to be built up around the content in order to create a vehicle for it).

The lesson I learned is this: so long as we think of novels as functioning primarily as bearers of incompletely articulated conceptual insights, we will be hard-pressed to write one. Everything that is the proper of fiction (circumstantial details, plot, character, and so forth) will seem like a barrier to reaching the fullness of the insight, or conversely like a lifeless adjunct to it. As Elif Batuman wrote in The Possessed, “If novels were about what [Girard] said they were about, their production should cease.”

For a long time I continued to oscillate between unsuccessful attempts at renunciation and frustrating efforts to unring the bell of mimetic theory. For extended stretches I was completely paralyzed. In between those bouts of writer’s block, I worked on many different fiction writing projects. The novel I spent the longest time trying to get right was about two college students, one of them a lovelorn depressive whose girlfriend has just dumped him, the other a mischievous schemer taking a course on the sort of classic French novels (think Dangerous Liaisons) that feature depraved noblemen in frock coats treating their love affairs like military campaigns.

The schemer character has the idea of using the amorous strategies from the novels to help his rejected friend claw back his ex-girlfriend. Each of the strategies concerned some aspect of mimetic desire. For example, one that I called “Stendhal’s Maxim” stated that “given two sisters A and B, to make B fall in love with you, begin by courting sister A.” This yielded the protagonist’s attempt to cozy up to his ex-girlfriend’s roommate, which misfired when he became infatuated with the decoy love interest, forgetting about the ex-girlfriend and throwing the whole scheme into disarray.

Perhaps the high-concept premise was not so bad (it still makes me smile, a little). But Luke’s “mimetically mechanistic” phrase definitely applies to that novel. Even its title—The Theory of Absolute Coquetry—telegraphed its source material, and, ultimately, its regret at having to be anything so lowly as a novel at all.

I could not bring myself to give up writing fiction. But the only fiction I was able to write was, on the whole, mechanical, repetitive, and drab. Instead of being grasped in its vital actuality, each story element, from the color of a character’s hair to the conversations he had with his friends in the cafeteria, tended to become the lifeless pendant of a preexisting idea.

The way out, as I said above, was not to wipe the slate of my soul and mind completely clean so as to face reality with a gaze uncorrupted by theory. It was, instead, to replace Girard’s theory of what fiction does not just with a different theory, but with a different kind of theory. In order to be able to enter into the contours and asperities of reality without feeling constrained by abstract concepts, I needed to be taught that doing so was valuable in itself.

Step Right Up, Ladies and Gentlemen!

Somewhere in the depths of my creative discouragement, I discovered the essays of Flannery O’Connor, and through them a Catholic intellectual tradition of which I had been unaware. O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners is not exactly an unknown work. Some of my writer friends would smile politely when I went on about it, as one does at a child exclaiming over an experience he thinks he is the first in the history of the world to have had. But none of them, I think, had become fascinated with René Girard to the degree that I had, so they had trouble understanding the reason for my excitement. The passage that struck me like a thunderbolt was in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”:

The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art.

The passage both described and named my condition. Of course, I would not have said that material things were evil. But in a sense, that is how I acted. As O’Connor says in the same essay, “the world of the fiction writer is full of matter.” And my unformulated assumption was that escaping from that matter-rich world was the only way to reach the fullness of insight. I took for granted that to get to knowledge and understanding and wisdom you had to rise up out of messy, murky fiction into the light of theoretical truth. In other words, my impatience to circumvent the tangible was an outgrowth of my belief that the telos of the novel was to reveal mimetic desire.

O’Connor gave me a new understanding of the novel’s aim. “The business of fiction is to embody mystery in manners,” she wrote, compressing an entire aesthetic program into a single forceful line. The fiction writer seeks meaning, beauty, truth, insight. But the sort of hard-to-distill (and yes, useless) insight that comes to us as a result of experiencing a complete dramatic action, not the sort that could ever be adequately summed up in an abstract soundbite (O’Connor sarcastically gives an example of one: “The theme of my story is the economic pressure of the machine on the middle class”). What a novel says, she insisted, can only be said by writing a whole novel. The intellectual meaning exists but is untranslatable into some other kind of discourse.

This theory of fiction was underwritten by Christian dogma and theology, as well as by St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding that human beings come to know things, including the highest and most rarefied things, through the senses. One might have thought this dogmatic character would make for greater constraints on the act of writing than some other theory. But the opposite was true: it was liberating.

Why? Because it did away with the separation of spirit and matter characteristic of “mimetically mechanistic” fiction, in which there is a purely extrinsic relationship between a story’s constitutive elements and its animating set of ideas, such that the characters are just “along for the ride” and the novelist must ask himself anxiously at every turn whether what he is writing conforms to the pre-established framework he has set out to illustrate.

For O’Connor fiction’s concreteness was not an impediment to reaching the higher realities, or a mere adjunct to them. It was the conduit through which they could be touched, seen, tasted. “The artist,” O’Connor wrote, “penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality.” She also quoted Joseph Conrad for whom the aim of the novelist was “to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe.” She commented:

That sounds very grand, but it is really very humble. It means that he subjected himself at all times to the limitations that reality imposed, but that reality for him was not simply coextensive with the visible. He was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one…

For O’Connor, it was the medieval tradition of biblical exegesis that best grasped this intertwining of the visible and the invisible. According to this approach, the literal level of a story or image can house multiple, non-literal levels of meaning, “grasping different levels of the real in the one situation and in the one taste of perception,” as William Lynch puts it. Just as we can come to knowledge of God with the help of analogies drawn from the natural world, so too, by a complex kind of double entendre, a “dynamic interplay” between levels of being (Lynch), a story or novel can, at least in principle, ascend to lofty regions of meaning while remaining grounded in the finite world of sense data.

(For example, in O’Connor’s stories, an ordinary car can assume the guise of a pulpit, a coffin, and “a death-in-life symbol”; a snatch of seemingly vacuous conversation between a sophisticated Jesuit priest and a group of sari-clad students after a lecture on Vedanta can be at once a typical, eye-rolling piece of New Age philosophizing and a dead accurate prophecy concerning a main character.)

For me, the practical result of absorbing O’Connor’s sacramental theory was that working with the humble materials of fiction, in particular the concrete details and everyday actions that make up its warp and weft, no longer seemed like a boring distraction from some higher, more important intellectual task, or like a mere add-on to the spiritual core of the work. Those materials were in themselves means of access to insight, and choosing and shaping them became part of the main event. This did not make writing fiction easy; it made it difficult, in the ordinary way that structuring and fleshing out a story is difficult, rather than in the strange, existential way it had been difficult before.

This, then, was the solution I found to the problem of writing after Girard: cultivating what has sometimes been called the sacramental or analogical imagination, as outlined in O’Connor, but also in the authors whom O’Connor read, in particular William Lynch (to whom what I have written here is greatly indebted) and Allen Tate. 

Adopting this sacramental theory of fiction (an ongoing process) did not preclude depicting mimetic desire or learning from Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In my remarks at the Novitate Conference, I mostly discussed the paralyzing effect that Girard’s ideas had on me as a young, aspiring fiction writer. But I also said that Girard “taught me so much” and suggested that his notion of creative “conversion” is among the insights his theory offers novelists. Girard’s ideas were a great help to me as I was conceiving my novel Minor Indignities. I intend to devote the next post to a couple of the fiction-writing lessons to be found in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, including an observation about narrative structure.