PETER
BROOKS
tion (Hegelian in origin) is important and promising: the presence in
the novel of mediated or triangulated dC'sire, whereby one desires only
what is given value by another's desiring: where desire by another be–
comes desire to be the Other. "Man," according to Girard's epigraph
from Max Scheler, "possesses either God or an idol"; ido latry of the
Other is a product, once again, of Romantic naturalism, and the ex–
istence of mediated desire has been concealed from us by the romantic
critic's insistence on individualism and autonomy, his apology for solips–
ism. H ence the "romantic lie" of Girard's French title
(Mensonge
romantique et verite romanesque)
is that literature (or criticism) which
reflects mediated desire without revealing it, and the "novelistic truth"
a superior literature which lays bare the presence of the mediator.
Girard's reading of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and
Dostoevsky in terms of this structure often gi\·es impressive results; his
method is such that he can strike through to an C'ssential configuration
in each of these writers - most impressively to Stenclhal's theory of \"anity"
and the dimensions of snobbism in Proust - and rC'ad them in ("onjunrtion
with one another, as illuminating each other·s engagement in essentially
the san1e enterprise. Yet there is a persistent uncertainty as to where
Girard has situated the reality he is talking about: is desire according
to the Other a sociological fact with historical dimensions, a phenomenon
of all consciousness, a phase of literary awareness?
If
it is all of these,
how are they interrelated, and what is the primary term? Girard's
vocabulary begins to trouble one: mediated desire is a "deviated tran–
scendence" which "profanes" our "divine essence." The all-embracing
framework is held back until his elucidation of the novelistic ending,
which in all great novelists includes a renunciation of desire, a repudia–
tion of Promethean pride, a transcendence which is both reunion with
the desireless self and reconciliation with the Others: a reconciliation
between the individual and the world, man and the sacred; a conversion
in which the hero denies his past self and looks forward to a resurrection.
Christian symbolism alone is universal, claims Girard, because it alone
is capable of informing the novelistic experience - by which he means,
I think, the experience of the novelist working on experience.
One grants that the great novelistic ending may record a new
wholeness of the self, but isn't the word "transcendence" fraudulent?
Transcendence toward \\"hat? Has the hero really be rome desireless
(vide
Friedman on Lawrence for an implicit rebuttal ). or has he rather il–
luminated and focused his desiring? Does the conclusion ill fact elicit
denial of all the hero has been? Such a view gives curious status to all
the experience dramatized in the book: Henry James claimed that the
novelist worked from a love of his created life; Girard seems to suggest
