636
PETER BROOKS
that he is finally motivated by hatred of it. The root of the problem
is the Girardian conception of literature moving toward - and hence at
its best fostering - a "conversion" and a "cure" for all of us who are
living in the world of mirrors and mirages decreed by the romantic
imagination, feeding on monstrous misinterpretations fed us by romantic
critics and unauthentic novelists. Must our heroes renounce Promethean–
ism?
If
we have been romantics and sons of Prometheus for some time
now, it is because Prometheanism seems the most admirable gesture in
a world where
de'us
is at best
absconditus
- especially when Prometheus
is the artist. Kaplan's eminently sane humanism is a good antidote to
Girard: humanism need not mean idolatry, investment of the Other with
a "phantom divinity" which, according to Girard, is worshiped by all
non-Christian systems. But Girard is a polemical anti-humanist, and
indeed a reactionary. His trump card is of course Dostoevsky, and he
closes his book by quoting Alyosha's fervent replies to the children at the
end of
The Brothers Karamazov:
but can we be dismissed as romantic
liars for finding equal force in Ivan's questions?
It
is notable that Girard's argument leads him to a denial of
"novelistic freedom" - the freedom of a novelist's characters from an
aura of interference and manipulation by the novelist - held as a central
artistic tenet by writers as diverse as Stendhal, Sartre and James: he
confesses himself unable to see any sense in which a novelist's characters
can be "free" if the novelist himself is. The "critics of freedom" have
simply been blind to the presence of the mediator and the processes of
metaphysical desire, which in fact control all novelistic life; freedom is
an invention of those last romantics, the Existentialists. This argument–
which preserves all the book's confusion about the locus of the structures
it is discussing - seems to me both to vitiate much of Girard's psycho–
logical perceptiveness, and to reduce literature to something debased and
possibly debasing. Girard's literature finally has little of the dynamism,
agility and intellectual toughness which seem to me to define Stendhal,
Proust and Dostoevsky; it finally too closely resembles therapy, or liturgy.
The kind of interrogation of literature worked by James Guetti in
The Limits of Metaphor
seems to me more subtle, more profound,
infinitely more likable and finally - though Guetti starts, not with any
philosophical structure but with the outlook and tools of empirical
stylistic analysis - quite as radical. Guetti's argument is complicated,
sometimes excessively involuted, and it is difficult to summarize.
Essentially, he is concerned with the problem of imaginative failure in the
modern novel: an attempt to overreach, to establish through metaphor
"ineffable" significances which finally are beyond the reach of language
and reveal its insufficiency. Beginning with
Moby Dick,
Guetti sets up a
