The Unenviable Position

Writing Advice from René Girard

My previous post issued a warning to fiction writers: read René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel at your own risk! It also summarized the sacramental theory of fiction that served as an antidote to my mimetic theory-induced writer’s block, and ended with a promise to do a sharp 180 in the next post and share some Girardian writing advice, since after all, overwhelming though the French thinker’s influence has sometimes been, nobody else has taught me as much about literature as he has.

This post might long since have been written, except that a couple of weeks ago my wife and I welcomed our fourth child into the world, bringing newsletter-ing (which, I confess, was already proceeding at a fairly slow pace) to an abrupt halt. Back at it on the other side of that happy event, I am going to write this post in listicle form, maximizing my chances of producing at least two or three bite-sized chunks and making the thing modular enough that I can break off easily should my services be required for more pressing matters, such as making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches or bringing a child to a friend’s house.

1) “Why I Teach My Students René Girard”

To make life even easier for myself, I am going to begin by sharing Girardian writing advice from someone entirely more qualified to dispense it than I am. As I mentioned in my previous post, playwright

Christopher Shinn

(who won an Obie for playwriting and was a Pulitzer finalist for his play Dying City) has taught Girard to his creative writing students at the New School. He has also written about Girard for LARB, and drawn on the French thinker’s insights to craft his plays. In 2016, Shinn gave a mini-lecture (about three minutes) that explains Girard’s theory and what he thinks dramatic authors can learn from it:

Traditionally students are taught that a protagonist has an objective, a desire, which they pursue, and an antagonist or an inner conflict blocks their way. But I think what Girard unlocks is that what truly makes for compelling drama is the symmetry of multiple protagonists battling for the elusive object. 

Shinn gives the example of Blanche and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. A novelist might cite the rivalry between Charles Swann and the Comte de Forcheville over Odette de Crécy in Proust or Julia Flyte competing with Brenda Champion for the affections of Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or [fill in the blank]. Watch the whole video (three minutes and change):

Shinn elegantly recaps Girard’s insight that those we think of as antagonists are very often first and foremost models of desire (the guy in the next cubicle about whom I’m always complaining to my wife—is he truly the devil incarnate, as I claim, or might my inability to find anything or anyone else to talk about betray a fascination that, if it were pointed out to me, I would vehemently deny?). The romantic, self-justifying work of fiction tends to portray the antagonist as an interloper who stands between the protagonist and his goal (a title change at work, say). The action of the story brings about the elimination of the antagonist (“You’re fired!”) and enables the protagonist to achieve his goal, which remains as desirable as ever (“I am now a senior product evangelist!”).

For Girard, on the other hand, the goal, rather than preexisting the agon between hero and rival, is engendered by the rivalry. This means that merely defeating the rival is insufficient to ensure a happy ending. Unless the protagonist undergoes some profound inner change, some “conversion,” to use Girard’s term, achieving the goal, rather than making the hero happy, will simply devalue the goal, which derived its luster from the rival’s interest in it (“I am now a senior product evangelist”—cue sad trombone).

The “novelistic” structure (“multiple protagonists battling for the elusive object”) introduces the fundamental problem of the extinction of desire. And it puts the protagonist in the position of having to grow in maturity and wisdom or get caught in increasingly destructive cycles of conflict. Its ascetic message stands in contrast to that of the romantic work, which achieves its low-cost closure at the villain’s expense.

2) “Memory is the salvation of the writer and of the man Marcel Proust.”

I began to draft what would become my novel Minor Indignities soon after reading Richard Russo’s Straight Man, which as I recall (I haven’t gone back to it since) is a beautifully crafted and very funny campus novel. 

At about the same time I read that book, a friend (now a legal scholar, though he still had literary aspirations at the time) came to Paris for a few days. Seated on a café terrace in sweltering July heat, we had a long conversation about art in which I vented my literary frustrations as women in burkas carrying shopping bags from Cartier and Hermès strolled by on the sidewalk. My friend, who understood more about my predicament than he let on, responded with an anecdote about a writer who had been toiling for years to finish a space invasion-murder mystery mashup with an ensemble cast of bizarre characters and a jigsaw-puzzle plot. Rejection after ruthless rejection greeted his attempts to find a publisher for this baroque masterpiece. Filled with compassion, the writer’s girlfriend finally told him gently: “Why don’t you just think back on your past and write about things that happened to you?” (Memory being not only a source of salvation, but also a black hole of confusion and self-deception, I’m probably getting the anecdote mostly wrong, but the gist of it is what matters.) The writer did as she suggested, with enviable results.

Fresh from my reading of Straight Man and fired up by that anecdote, I repaired to my seventh-floor walkup, opened my laptop, and began a deep dive into my memories of college, trying to produce a fiction that would transpose them rather than being a literal memoir-ish recreation of that time in my life. A burst of effort over just a few days yielded about thirty pages far better than anything I had written up until then.

At the risk of eliciting a smile of knowing irony from my reader, I must insist that Girard played no (conscious) role in this process. Anything Girardian about those thirty pages came either from long, osmotic exposure to his thought or from the universally acknowledged fact that college freshmen are simply among the most mimetic creatures on earth (

Luke Burgis

even coined the term “freshmanistan” to capture this reality).

But from having read Proust (and Girard on Proust—Deceit, Desire, and the Novel was my entrée to In Search of Lost Time) I was convinced, if only on an abstract, intellectual level, that memory plays an essential role in fiction writing, bringing the author into immediate contact with the savor of lived experience, “felt reality,” and in the process undoing the spell of mimetic desire, which, as Girard points out, tends to play weird tricks with time:

In the quarrel which puts him in opposition to his rival, the subject reverses the logical and chronological order of desires in order to hide his imitation.

The kind of profound memory that Proust calls “involuntary” or “affective” reinstates that logical and chronological order, granting subjective access to la vérité romanesque—instead of “I have zero interest in being accepted by the New York literary establishment,” “I’ve been trying and failing for years to place an article in The Paris Review.” So the fact that what I had written was based on memories—memories transposed and selected, embellished, edited, combined, and reconfigured in the interest of art, but memories nevertheless—made me suspect I was on the right track. 

The only problem was that I had no idea where to go from there. The story got up to about October of the main character’s freshman year, and there it stopped. So for five or six years those thirty pages remained on my hard drive as I stubbornly revised a high-concept novel set at Harvard (a university I did not attend) and involving characters and situations that bore little resemblance to college life as I had known it. Not surprisingly, nobody, including me, ever really liked that book, which I eventually had the good sense to abandon.

3) “Th[e] movement toward slavery is one of the basic prin­ciples of novelistic structure. Every authentic develop­ment in the novel, no matter how broad its scope, can be defined as a transition from mastery to slavery.”

Strange though it may seem, these rather obscure lines, of an almost Aristotelian pithiness, were a great help to me. What Girard means by “slavery” is not self-evident. It’s a Hegelian word (the “master-slave dialectic”), but Girard gives it his own twist. It stands for the radical loss of autonomy that comes of failing to dissimulate desire. 

The protagonist in a novel feigns indifference for the purpose of seduction. In The Red and the Black, Julien goes on a trip to remove himself from the Hôtel de la Mole, where he has been engaged in awful mind games with Mathilde, the haughty heiress daughter of his powerful noble employer. 

The character is interiorly preoccupied but he retains enough agency to take steps to reverse the current of desire. Before long Julien is again the master; Mathilde, driven to distraction by his absence, becomes his slave. 

In Proust’s Within a Budding Grove, Marcel stops replying to Gilberte Swann’s letters, and is gradually cured of his obsession with her. But unlike Mathilde vis-à-vis Julien, she never comes back to him; she does not become his slave. 

Later in the novel, Marcel, the sickly adolescent with an artistic temperament, becomes the slave in his relationship with the sporty, sensual Albertine. He is no longer capable of the tactical measures he used to detach himself from Gilberte. What he says to Albertine (“I think we should break up!”) is flagrantly contradicted by his actions (he keeps her under strict surveillance, interrogating her to see if she will lie about her infidelities).

“Julien is a hero-master,” writes Girard, “Marcel is a hero-slave.” 

Sometime around 2006 or 2007 I wrote a short story in which the main character became disenchanted with his girlfriend, left for college, cheated on her, and at once experienced a resurgence of interest in her. At that very moment, however, she began to pull away from him, plunging him into a state of obsessive jealousy. This story (which was partly inspired by one of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales) was lacking in both stylistic flair and dramatic intensity. But its structure was exactly the opposite of the novel I was then working on (the aforementioned Theory of Absolute Coquetry), in which the main character metamorphosed from a loser into a player. 

The passage on slavery in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel helped me to see that the structure of my short story was in some way similar to the structure of Proust’s novel—its hero was a “hero-slave”—while the structure of my novel was quite the reverse of the “mastery to slavery” dynamic—its hero was a “hero-master.”

Finally, as the rejection emails piled up in my inbox, I began to entertain the previously unthinkable thought of writing a whole novel with the same structure as my short story. By turning The Theory of Absolute Coquetry on its axis, so to speak, and making my protagonist the “seducee” rather than the seducer, I might be able to dig into the feelings of anguish and obsession missing from its current version. I ended up constructing Minor Indignities out of three “movements toward slavery,” each one of greater amplitude than the last.

4) “We are normally so egotistical that we cannot place ourselves in the unenviable position. We have to brag even when we invent fiction. The great novelist is someone who stops doing that.”

In 2006 my friend Scott organized a seminar with Girard and a few others in California. Each of the participants gave a presentation. Girard’s was an improvised lecture on the creative development of Marcel Proust. The above quote, excerpted from his remarks, is a succinct summary of what is perhaps the most essential lesson he has to offer fiction writers. In its simplicity, it may be more helpful to beginners than to seasoned pros. But then, as Philip Roth said, “You begin every book as an amateur.”

In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Girard cites Jules de Gaultier, who in his essay Le Bovarysme says that snobbery is “all the means used by a person to prevent the appearance of his true self in the field of his consciousness, in order to project continuously into it a finer character in which he recognizes himself.” It is by now a commonplace that the façades we parade on social media are intended to blot out the “true self.” Authoring books, too, can be a way to curate a public image, as writers from Rousseau to Norman Mailer have demonstrated (“We have to brag even when we invent fiction”).

In his 2006 lecture, Girard did his signature bit about flattering authorial self-portraiture and score-settling in Marcel Proust’s early, unfinished work of fiction, Jean Santeuil. “The hero of this first novel is always seen in a romantic and favorable light,” he writes in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In one scene at the theater, Jean, having been rudely disinvited at the last minute by some snobbish acquaintances, is rescued by a prestigious noblewoman who invites him into her box and showers him in attention. Her other guests are equally fawning. Proclaiming his eagerness to hear Jean’s ideas about Ruskin, the King of Portugal adjusts the young man’s necktie and then strolls arm in arm with him in full view of the other spectators. The wicked snobs who disinvited Jean behold his triumph with anger and envy, and are themselves disgraced. 

This is fantasy written out as truth. In his later masterpiece, however, Proust ceases to project “a finer character” and portrays fantasy as fantasy. In The Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, there is also a scene at the theater with characters roughly equivalent to those in Jean Santeuil, except that they stand in a very different relation to one another.

Proust places Marcel, the protagonist, in “the unenviable position,” outside and below the prestigious noblewoman’s box, just another face in the anonymous throng gazing up at her and her companions with yearning and envy from the orchestra seats. The aspiring socialite imagines that those nobles are like water gods and goddesses high in their “baignoire” (“theater box,” but also “bathtub”), disporting themselves in the guise of ordinary human beings before withdrawing into the dark recesses to perform mysterious rites that mere mortals like himself are unworthy to behold. Girard’s point is that in order to write this radically revised scene, the novelist necessarily had to acknowledge in himself the snobbery that in the earlier version he had ascribed exclusively to the hero’s enemies.

When we take our first cut at a story or a novel, most of us are just as egotistical as the young Proust. We may even have wanted to become writers out of resentment, so as to carry out in fiction the vengeance we were too weak or afraid to exact in real life. My friend

Joshua Hren

, who runs the fiction writing program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston (and who teaches Deceit, Desire, and the Novel in his creative writing courses), says that his students often turn in first drafts that present the author’s alter ego as the good guy and the fictional instantiations of his real-life enemies as villains.

So how do we stop doing that? Hmm… I was afraid you might ask that question. Are those a child’s cries I hear? The duties of fatherhood call—it seems that I am being urgently summoned to make a peanut butter sandwich.