René Girard, Novelist

Revelations from a new biography

A New Biography

Just a few months ago, in September 2023, French essayist Benoît Chantre, René Girard’s late-career editor and his collaborator on Battling to the End, published a sweeping intellectual biography of the French thinker. René Girard: Biographie (Grasset), which is currently one of five finalists for the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie, comes in at 1,135 pages (about 200 of them endnotes) and more than half a million words. It’s the result of more than a decade of intense and patient research and writing, as I can attest from first-hand experience—in the summer of 2014 Benoît and I took a three-week road trip together so that he could consult archives and interview Girard’s former colleagues in New York City, Buffalo, Bloomington, Bryn Mawr, and Baltimore. And this trip represented only a fraction of the fieldwork that went into the massive tome.

The new bio offers several “scoops,” as you might expect, but also innumerable fresh insights into Girard’s friendships, career, and intellectual development. As you might also expect from a book of such imposing length, it relies heavily on Girard’s letters and unpublished manuscripts, including early drafts of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which was initially to be titled L’Incarnation romanesque, “Novelistic Incarnation.” For the time being, I have no idea when, or if, an English edition will be published. What I do know is that the book’s cover image, a photograph by SUNY-Buffalo Distinguished Professor and filmmaker Bruce Jackson, captures something mischievous and childlike in Girard that I don’t think any other portrait of him really does:

Jackson and his wife, Diane Christian (SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor; courses taught: “Eng 375: Heaven Hell & Judgment”), knew Girard back when he was a professor at SUNY Buffalo (1968-1976, minus a sabbatical year or two). I don’t know in exactly what year the cover photo was taken, but it may have been around the time Michel Foucault was a visiting professor at Buffalo (1970-72). J.M. Coetzee, who had yet to publish a work of fiction, was also there, teaching in the English department (1968-1971).¹

In France, Chantre’s bio, which includes excerpts from Girard’s surprisingly extensive correspondence with Derrida, has already gone some way toward reestablishing the theoretician of mimetic desire and scapegoating as a major figure in twentieth-century French intellectual life alongside better-known thinkers such as Foucault, Barthes, and Deleuze. Among other signs of this: Tiphaine Samoyault, author of a biography of Roland Barthes, gave René Girard a great review in Le Monde.

That recognition is definitely long overdue, even if Girard, who declared himself “disgusted” by deconstruction’s denial of the real, was often at odds with his radical peers, as illustrated, for example, by “Delirium as System,” his takedown of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. The sometimes fierce antagonisms aside, after reading René Girard: Biographie it’s difficult to understand how François Cusset’s French Theory could have neglected to acknowledge Girard’s role in launching and shaping the intellectual trends discussed in that book. Chantre reveals, for instance, that Foucault read and admired Violence and the Sacred—in which he is, incidentally, approvingly cited. Here are a couple of excerpts from a letter Foucault sent Girard in July 1972:

My dear René,

Voilà, I have read Violence and the Sacred, slowly, meticulously, sentence by sentence […] because it was necessary to push back against the desire to get carried away, to run along with or behind the text, to get as soon as possible to the end of the riddle and the proof […] / [Y]ou are the first to have escaped from the injunction of difference and from the suspicion of identity. / But I realize that I must sound like a pedant. It would be better to tell you that I am captivated (and I believe that I am not the only one), that I would like to see you again and talk more about it. / Come to Paris…

Coetzee, too, was captivated. Chantre writes: “John M. Coetzee, future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, who […] shared an office with Diane Christian ‘where people were constantly coming to talk about Girard,’ was strongly influenced by Girard.” An endnote cites a 2014 email that Coetzee sent Christian, who had written to the novelist at Chantre’s request:

You ask about Girard. Girard was in Comp Lit when I was in Buffalo, so I never got to meet him. But I was very conscious of his presence on campus, and read pretty much everything that he published. The mark of his thinking is clearly to be seen in several of the essays collected in my book Giving Offense. […] He is a seminal thinker if there ever was one.

In her own biography of Girard (the first, published in 2018, and as winsome and approachable as Chantre’s is dense with primary source material and philosophical reflection) Cynthia L. Haven suggests that Girard’s influence can also be detected in Coetzee’s novels, especially 1974’s Dusklands, Coetzee’s first work of fiction, which, she says, “gives a textbook description of mimetic meltdown.”

Girard and the Novel

According to Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, the great writers accessed profound truths about human nature and culture that it now falls to theory to articulate more completely and rigorously. One big takeaway from Chantre’s bio is that this notion of a passing of the baton from the creators to the systematizers (“Literary interpretation . . . is the continuation of literature,” DDN, p. 3) mirrors the course of Girard’s own literary and intellectual development, which involved a struggle to free himself from what he described as the “religion of art.” As René Girard: Biographie reveals, for a long time Girard himself aspired to be a novelist. For several years in the early- to mid-1950s the young instructor burned the midnight oil typing out drafts of a campus novel set in the fictional American town of Bloomingdale and featuring a twenty-five-year-old French instructor named, at least in some drafts, Gilles Bernier. As late as 1957, the year he received tenure at Johns Hopkins, Girard was still very much concerned about the future of the novel, and predicted that the genre would find new life when a rising generation rediscovered the work of Marcel Proust.  

But in the late 1950s, without abandoning what Chantre calls his “essential confidence in the powers of literature,” Girard, who was then reading and teaching the great 19th- and 20th-century novels, would begin his turn to literary theory. Traces of this shift can be found within the fragmentary drafts of his campus novel itself. In a footnote, Chantre provides an excerpt from a page written in January 1955. The narrator (presumably the aforementioned Gilles Bernier) expresses himself, writes Chantre, “not without exaltation”:

My manuscript awaited me; my system was becoming clearer little by little; having started from aesthetics I was ending up with a synthesis that, step by step, contaminated all the objects of my meditations, with such facility that I experienced frequent doubts as to the seriousness of the undertaking. Exile was a theory of understanding, an ethics and an aesthetics. There was nothing that could not be contained in the following formulation: become another so as to become oneself.²

“That the manuscript of this novel appears today in the form of abandoned sketches,” Chantre concludes, “shows that the strategy of [Girard] the teacher was not able to be transformed into a novelistic strategy—or rather, that the fact of entering into the arcana of the ‘great novels’ prevented our ‘demystifier’ from becoming a novelist himself.”

With the early versions of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel well underway, Girard seems to have set any lingering literary ambitions aside, though as late as 1959 he still took a keen interest in the contemporary French novel, as articles from that period show. To judge from his few references to them, he did not think very highly of either nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet (who once told me at a reception at UCLA that Girard’s ideas were instrumental in helping him to forge his conception of God) or screenwriter and Prix Goncourt-winning novelist Roger Vailland, both of whom he viewed more or less as “romantic” writers, in the specific sense he gave that term. The final chapters of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel are sharply, and at times sarcastically, critical of the post-war French literary scene. 

Girard did, however, greatly admire Albert Camus’s La Chute (1956), which he saw as its author’s thinly veiled self-critique, and also Nathalie Sarraute’s 1959 novel Le Planetarium, which he even gave a glowing review, in French, in The French Review. He later also expressed his admiration for Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness, going so far as to say that if he were ever to rewrite Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, the Franco-Czech maestro would enter the pantheon of triangular novelistic geniuses. On the whole, however, I think it’s fair to say that the mature Girard, his literary dreams a thing of the past, was skeptical of the novel form’s ability to renew itself after Joyce and especially after Woolf, whose 1936 masterpiece The Waves he once described in an interview with Richard Golsan as “the ultimate and supreme novel, a novel that puts an end to the genre of the novel…”

“Hampering” or “Liberating”?

In my “solution” post (which I hope you will read—it’s the reason I started this newsletter), I outlined my struggles to write fiction after encountering Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which, I argue, implicitly defines the novel in such a way as to ensure that theory will always beat literature at its own game. My way of getting around this problem was to embrace what has been called the “sacramental imagination,” which helped me to understand at a gut level that the novel is a “slow infinity,” which states its meaning not at any one discrete point in the work, but through the patient unfolding of a complete dramatic action.

I hoped that the solution I had stumbled upon in the essays of Flannery O’Connor might be of help to other writers who, like me, had struggled to digest Girard’s influence. That there were such writers out there seemed like a reasonable assumption, especially given the number of prominent contemporary novelists I already knew about who were in the same boat I was, or at least in an adjacent boat. As I noted way back in my introductory post, Milan Kundera raised the possibility that Girard’s theory could lead to writer’s block; French novelist Matthias Énard has acknowledged the tension between theory and his practice as a fiction writer; novelist and critic

Brandon

Taylor said that he found Girard’s theory “hampering” during our Novitate Conference panel; and Elif Batuman went so far as to argue that if Girard were right about what novels do, “their production should cease.”

And yet I am starting to think that I’ve been peddling a cure that many writers simply don’t need. Many fiction writers, that is, just don’t experience Girard’s ideas as an occasion of writer’s block. To my knowledge, for example, J.M. Coetzee has never expressed any reservations about the impact of Girard’s theory on his writing. As I mentioned previously, playwright

Christopher Shinn

and fiction writer

Joshua Hren

have taught Girard in their creative writing classes, and to varying degrees (I think this would be more true of Shinn than of Hren) have found inspiration in his mimetic theory for their own work. In what is perhaps the most confounding rebuke to my thesis, novelist

a. natasha joukovsky

has said that Girard’s insights, which she had yet to encounter when working on her (incredibly mimetic, in both the Auerbachian and Girardian senses of the word) first novel, have actually made it easier for her to write her second. And in a similar vein, fiction writer

Katy Carl

replied to my “A Solution” post with some of the reasons why she has found Girard’s theory “liberating” rather than frustrating.

So who is right? The dark pessimists, perpetually fretting over whether the genre they practice has been superannuated by Girardian theory? Or the serene pragmatists, happy to borrow a useful insight no matter the source, gratified to find a personal intuition reformulated in elegant theoretical language, but basically unconcerned about said theoretical language’s socio-historical ramifications? In my “solution” post I detailed my membership in the former group but ended up taking sides with the latter, suggesting that the novelist with confidence in the value of art will have a much easier time dealing with Girard than one with a case of theory envy. But it’s worth pointing out that great writers often perceive their literary environment, and even the very genre that is their stock and trade, as mired in decadence. I’m thinking of Shakespeare, who was so fed up with having to write revenge tragedies, yet at the same time so addicted to the stage (and, yes, I’m taking this insight from Girard), that he ended up writing Hamlet, a play about a man who recognizes that revenge is senseless yet goes ahead and offs his father’s killer anyway.

What is clearer to me than ever after reading the new biography is that Girard saw himself as moving beyond the novel form in a way that was both personally decisive and consistent with the genre’s obsolescence. In one of the fragments for L’Incarnation romanesque (which would later become Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque), Girard writes: “To find a way of ‘speaking novel’ [‘parler roman’] is in a certain way to transcend the novel towards its truth […] it is a question of bending the novel in the direction of its own genius, in the direction that is its own, but along a path on which many novelists stopped, interrupted by death, or perhaps discouraged, perhaps falling back to the lowest level.”

In order to work through the central insight into mimetic desire that would eventually lead him to the ideas articulated in Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden, Girard had to give up his own literary efforts. I think it’s notable, though, that he didn’t just throw them in the trash. He hung on to his manuscripts, which probably lived in some cardboard box, traveling from city to city, home to home, gathering dust until the day his widow finally passed them on to his biographer. Of course, their survival could have been as much an accident, the result of oversight, as a deliberate conservation. My best guess, though (and it is only a guess), is that those unfinished fictional sketches remained important to him long after he stopped working on his novel, if only as Proustian mementos of his “pre-conversion” life. It is true that many academics in a situation of precarity, as Girard was in the early 1950s (he had been fired by Indiana University and then bounced around from Duke to Bryn Mawr before landing at Hopkins), have redoubled their efforts to write a Zombie movie screenplay or feverishly revised the novel hidden in the bottom drawer. It is probably no accident that the end of Girard’s literary aspirations coincided with his promotion to associate professor. But René Girard suggests, rightly I suspect, that Girard’s desire to become a fiction writer was more than just an instinctive strategy for coping with career uncertainty (even if it was also that). It was deeply felt, and may have been hard for him to renounce. “Girard’s method can be described as ‘sacrificial,’” writes Chantre:

“Finishing off” [achever] an author consists in formulating his insights or his ‘sketchy ideas’ by pushing them all the way to their logical conclusion. Just as the novelist sacrificed his character on the altar of the novel, the ‘novelistic’ critic will sacrifice the novelist on the altar of literary truth. Such a metaphor says a great deal about Girard’s eventual abandonment of the drafts of his novel, a gesture that was the prelude to the “putting to death of the old man” so often evoked in his classes at Bryn Mawr.

The implication of this, if I’m reading it right, is that Girardian theory is itself founded on a sacrifice—the sacrifice of Girard’s youthful literary aspirations, the death of the novelist in him, “the old man,” to use his own Pauline language. There is something very admirable, even beautiful, about this renunciation, which bore so much fruit in Girard’s life. At the same time, it confirms for me that those of us who have experienced Deceit, Desire, and the Novel as both an inspiration and an obstacle to writing fiction are picking up on something real, the deep drift of Girard’s thought.

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1. A rare kind of intellectual ferment was happening in Buffalo when Girard was there. The governor of New York was, it seems, determined to make SUNY the equal of California’s public university system, and the empowered English department chair at Buffalo, checkbook in hand, raided departments up and down the East Coast in search of top talent. In addition to Girard, Coetzee, and Foucault, SUNY-Buffalo faculty at the time included novelist John Barth (who upon his arrival had recently published “The Literature of Exhaustion” in The Atlantic), poet Robert Creeley, Leslie Fiedler, whose Love and Death in the American Novel advances an outrageous and surprisingly compelling thesis about American fiction, and Shakespearean C.L. Barber, author of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy.

2. In case it isn’t clear, everything cited here from Chantre’s bio, which is written in French, has been translated by me for the purposes of this post.