Welcome to 'Writing Fiction after Girard'
The Problem
In 1989, René Girard and Milan Kundera appeared together on French radio. During their conversation, Kundera told Girard that if he had read Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard’s 1961 essay about great novelists, before writing his first short stories, he would have had writer’s block.
“I had the double pleasure of reading you, and of reading you too late,” he said.
Fast forward to the year 2000. Newly graduated from college, I moved to Paris to become a writer. During my year abroad I found a footnote in Kundera’s essay Testaments Betrayed:
Finally an opportunity to mention René Girard. His Deceit, Desire, and the Novel is the best book I have ever read on the art of the novel.
I was twenty-two years old. Kundera was my favorite writer. I rushed to the bookstore (La Hune, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain) and returned with a copy of the French edition of Girard’s essay:
Mensonge romantique was, alas, a revelation. And before long, what for Kundera had been no more than an amusing hypothetical scenario was for me an all-too-real reality: I was blocked, incapable of writing fiction.
I had had the pleasure of reading Girard, but the misfortune of reading him too early.
What to do?
What this newsletter will be about
It took me countless hours of work, four or five failed novels, and nearly twenty years to “solve” the problem of writing after Girard.
Even after managing to complete a viable work of fiction, however, I had trouble articulating exactly how I had overcome the blockage.
(I would often say “Flannery O’Connor saved me from being paralyzed by René Girard,” but I don’t think anybody found this cryptic remark very helpful.)
Over two or three years of reading, writing, teaching, and lecturing, I struggled to find a less esoterically personal idiom in which to discuss the problem and offer a solution.
Finally, in November 2023, at
’s Novitate Conference, I participated in what proved to be a delightful panel discussion, “Deceit, Desire, and the Contemporary Novelist,” alongside and Taylor. I am grateful to Luke for creating a forum in which discussing the otherwise inhospitably narrow topic of writing fiction after Girard seemed quite natural. For the first time, I had the sense of communicating my experience of blockage and release in language accessible to anyone.At some point, I think, the video of that panel will be made available to readers of
. But who knows how coherent my remarks really were. And then, the conversation touched on other topics as well.It is my hope, then, that some thoughts in newsletter form will be of interest to anyone out there who might be struggling with the writing-after-Girard problem, as I did.
While the Problem gets at bigger questions that could matter even to people who don’t write novels or care about Girard, my target reader occupies the intersection of two overlapping sets composed of fiction writers and avid readers of Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.
How many of us there are I have no idea. Maybe even fewer than I think. But if that describes you, or even if it doesn’t, I hope you will subscribe.