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Rorty, Girard, and the Novel
Renascence: Essays on Values in LiteratureJuly 1, 2003 | McKenna, Andrew J
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how
they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range
of relevancies called the universe. (George Eliot, Middlemarch)
THE widespread attention that has accrued to Richard Rorty, described in a
recent book on his work as "one of the most original and important philosophers
writing today" (Rorty and His Critics x), is somewhat paradoxical, for he
advertises a pragmatism, that "delights in throwing out as much of the
philosophical tradition as possible" (Truth 130). Self described as an "enfant
terrible" in philosophical circles, he dismisses truth as a goal of inquiry, insisting
that we do better to forget epistemology rather than attempt to perfect it (Truth
298). The goal of all inquiry is simply to "make life better" (Philosophy and
Social Hope xxv), which he specifies as "devising ways of diminishing human
suffering and increasing human equality, increasing the ability of all human
children to start life with an equal chance of happiness" (Philosophy xxix).
Everything else he says is mere wordplay (xxv). For an unattainable objectivity
he urges that we substitute a vision of intersubjectivity as warranted by a
panrelationalism, according to which "There are so to speak relations all the
way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never
reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations" (Philosophy 53).
We know nothing that is unmediated by language, and we are ever only dealing
with the descriptions, not an essential, objective, or irreducible reality, which he
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breezily regards as a placeholder for religious belief, for unascertainable
foundations.
Because Rorty's devastatingly critical stance towards his own intellectual
community's activity is balanced by a warrant for literary studies as an
alternative to futile theorizing, his work is open to a dialogue with Rene Girard's
mimetic theory of human relations, as first developed in his ground-breaking
work of literary criticism, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, and subsequently
deployed as a full-blown anthropology (See Things Hidden). For Girard, too,
intersubjectivity is the basis for all interpretation (Theater 67, 340), though for
reasons to be discussed later, he prefers his own neologism, "interdividuality."
By this he means a decentered self, our "self/other-centeredness" (Theater 133)
which results from the way we copy one another's desires in pursuit of our aims.
It is a discovery he owes primarily to literary fiction.
From an empirical point of view, Girard has very different reasons for
dispensing with philosophical tradition than Rorty (See Bandera and Bailie), and
I am not going to argue that their ideas are everywhere compatible. They
interest us here for the confidence they advertise in literary masterpieces, but
just as much for the way they differ on this subject. Girard, for his part, is
prepared to argue for the truth, for the anthropological and human scientific
veracity, of his claims about human interaction and its moral implications that
certain works uncover, and he traces the source of these claims to judeo-
Christian revelation. Rorty, on the other hand, is notoriously hostile to religion,
which he mostly regards as a hindrance to broad-based humanitarian goals that
we can best pursue without it. We need, with Dewey and Habermas, to "get ridof the idea that humans beings are responsible to something nonhuman"
(Philosophy 238). We have progressed "from worshiping Gods to worshiping
sages to worshiping empirical scientific inquirers," and "with luck, this process
will end by leaving us unable to worship anything" (Essays 132). This sets the
two thinkers apart from each other in a way that is worth interrogating further, as
it concerns on the one hand the limits of philosophy to which Rorty is deftly
attuned, and, on the other hand, the interest of literature, for which he writes astrong brief against philosophy - though all the while overlooking, as I shall
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argue, its ramifications for an epistemology that, while resonating with Western
religious tradition, is grounded in widely observed experience.
Rorty's "panrelationalism" issues not only from his acute sense of linguistic
mediation, but also from the capaciously researched observation, in philosophy
and the natural and social sciences, that "there is nothing to be known about
anything save its relations to other things" (Philosophy 54). What holds for
things holds no less for people, which is doubtless why he views the self, after
Freud, Quine and Davidson, as a "centerless web of beliefs and desires"
(Essays 1), as "a centerless bundle of contingencies, of the sort which both
Foucault and Dewey shared with Nietzsche" (Essays 197). Following Girard, we
need to conceive of these bundles and webs interactionally and mimetically; our
beliefs and desires must come from somewhere, and if not from some
egologically centered self or the Mind of God, then from others, and from those
around us more likely than from those in our remoter past, from our parents and
neighbors rather than from Plato or Pascal. What contingency means, in human
relations at least, is proximity, involving us inextricably with the doings of other
human subjects who happen to be within reach of our attention, acts and
utterances - intersubjectivity in a word.
It is in just this sense that, in Je vois Satan, Girard states that we need to
substitute "mimetism itself for the "human subject, which "does not grasp the
circular process in which it is caught up" (112). In our "self/other-centeredness,"
we are inextricably in-between self and other; our mode of being, or non-being,
our non-entity, in sum, our essential eccentricity or relationality, is constituted by
mimetic desire which binds our identity to desires, beliefs, and actions thatothers model for us.
This is the paradox of the human self, the mysterious unity of self-centeredness
and other-centeredness in all human beings. Even though the two drives go in
opposite directions and can never become complementary, they are always
combined and their combination binds people inextricably to one another, even
as it tears them apart internally and externally. It becomes an endless source of
conflicts among entire societies as well as inside each individual. The more
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divinely self-sufficient we want to be, the more we turn ourselves into our own
idol, the more totally we surrender to others the modest degree of autonomy
that could be ours, the more we deliver ourselves into the hands of innumerable
tyrants. (Theater 147)
Idolatry and tyranny, the myriad submissions and abjections we unwittingly
participate in, are the consequences of our dissensions, which themselves
issue from misconstruing our relations with others as we mistake their desires
for ours and fail to recognize our interdependence as rivals and models for one
another. Because of Rorty's stated aversion to worship of any kind, I will have
more to say about idolatry later. Suffice it for the moment to observe that for
Girard, too, there is no such thing as an essential human nature and that we do
well to dispense with the "illusion of depth" (Truth 125) which Rorty ranks
among essentialist "nuisances" that distract thinkers from practicable goals. For
what is proper to desire, being mimetic, is that nothing is proper to it (Je vois
Satan 34); it is not the property of any single object or individual subject, but
must be conceived interdividually. This, he argues, is what our greatest
playwrights and novelists, rather than our philosophers, regularly seem to do.
So when, in his essay on "Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens," Rorty makes an
eloquent case for literature, the novel especially, it is one to which the mimetic
hypothesis gives more concrete and precise resonance. In this essay, Rorty
states his preference for novelists over theorists, for narratives over
abstractions, for "detail, diversity, and accident" over the temptations to
essentialism nurtured by the ascetic priest - a Nietzschean term he drolly
applies to Heidegger - in his attempt to "escape from time and chance" (Essays77). To the simplicity of the theorists, Rorty prefers the complexity and
particularity of the novelist, which, deploying "a diversity of viewpoints" and "a
plurality of descriptions" (78, 79), favors the toleration of differences and
chances for fuller human potential.
A distinctive feature of the novel that Rorty curiously does not even mention,
much less focus on, is intersubjectivity, more precisely the narrative of human
interaction, though he insists on this as a better name for objectivity. It is
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Girard's argument in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and other works that our
greatest story tellers uncover a pattern of mediated desire, which is the "inter-"
of our intersubjectivity. As a consequence, we do better to see the novel as a
more or less explicit theory of human relations (Deceit 3) than to oppose theoryand narrative, which is how Rorty conceives the issue. True enough, it's
relations all the way around, but where humans are concerned the name for
these relations is mimesis.
While praising Dickens, and Orwell's praise of him, as exemplary of the novel of
social protest which succeeded in contributing to much needed social reforms,
Rorty's appreciation here is focused on "the unsubsumable, uncategorizable
idiosyncrasy of the characters . . . who resist being subsumed under moral
typologies" (Essays 78). Instead he holds up Dickens as an exemplar for his
pragmatic goals:
[T]he names of Dickens's characters take the place of moral principles and of
lists of virtues and vices. They do so by permitting us to describe each other as
"a Skimpole," "a Mr. Pickwick," "a Gradgrind," "a Mrs. Jellyby," "a Florence
Dombey." In a moral world based on what Kundera calls "the wisdom of the
novel," moral comparisons and judgments would be made with the help of
proper names rather than general terms or general principles. A society which
took its moral vocabulary from novels rather than from ontotheological or ontico-
moral treatises would not ask itself questions about human nature, the point of
human existence, or the meaning of human life. Rather, it would ask itself what
we can do so as to get along with each other, how we can arrange things so as
to be comfortable with one another, how institutions can be changed so thateveryone's right to be understood has a better chance of being gratified. (78)
Now I don't see how replacing essences with proper names escapes
categorization once we apply those names to others as labels for their identity
or behavior. And we could wish that Rorty had gone on to read Kundera's
Testaments Betrayed, where in a footnote, the only one in the book, he cites
Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque as "the best I have ever read on
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the art of the novel" (184). But my principal objection is elsewhere, in Rorty's
inattention to these people's stories, to their interaction over time.
Rorty rightly perceives the novel as "the characteristic genre of democracy, the
genre most closely associated with the struggle for freedom and equality" (68).
In this, he confirms the thesis of Georg Lukacs and his student Lucien
Goldmann about the maturing of the genre in nineteenth-century Europe and
America as it proceeds apace with the post-revolutionary emergence of modern
individualism. But what Rorty does not see, as Girard does, is the novel's
thorough-going critique of modern individualism, which democracy promotes on
the one hand and thwarts on the other. This is by reason of the fact, as de
Tocqueville saw (Democracy in America, Vol. II, II, xiii), that equality nourished
forms of competition that erase differences among individuals.
This is not the case for all novels, especially not those labeled by Girard as
romantic, which are a monument to the lie of a true self in contention with social
forces opposing it. There is superior merit in certain works that, with Cervantes
and Dostoevsky, with Stendhal and Proust, with Flaubert and Mme. de
Lafayette, unveil an other-centered self, a centerless web indeed of mediated
desires and derivative beliefs. These are the works - and there are still many
others, as evidenced in the growing bibliography of Colloquium on Violence and
Religion (see Bulletin) - that are thereby rated as host to a "verite romanesque"
Altogether they compose a literary canon whose human scientific importance
has to be reckoned with, even by philosophers, or at least by the
panrelationalists among them. As Girard states of Shakespearean drama,
"everything can and must be explained mimetically, that is, rationally" (Theater35). Charles Taylor is correct in asserting that "the case against disengaged
subjectivity - he means "the punctual self... as pure independent
consciousness" (172) - "always has to be made anew" (514), and that case is
best made, on Girard's account, in our best novels and plays: "Only the great
masterpieces of Western theater and fiction acknowledge the primacy of
mimetic rivalry" (Theater 18).
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This is a claim to which Taylor's anthropology, which is plausibly Rorty's as well,
is hospitable: "I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: .... A self exists
only within what I call 'webs of interlocution'" (36). But we need to be willing to
acknowledge all the stress and strain, push and pull, fraction and fissure -rivalry, in a word - that weave and inhabit such webs. The novelist typically puts
flesh on those bones. As Taylor asserts against Habermasian optimism about
"ideal speaking communities," "the fact that the self is constituted through
exchange in language . . . doesn't in any way guarantee us against loss of
meaning, fragmentation, the loss of substance in our human environment and
our affiliations" (509-10). On the contrary, the author of Madame Bovary and
The Sentimental Education to witness, the self is just as much deconstituted,dispersed, imbecillically and murderously mediated by linguistic and cultural
exchange as it is constituted by them. We learn this, too, from the author of
Demons (whose most recent translators, Peaver and Volokhonsky, prefer
Girard's reading of Dostoevsky to all others), in which such a loss of substance
devolves toward cultural self-destruction, a town literally set ablaze by the
romantic and nihilistic synergies that befuddle its inhabitants in a way that
divides a narrative tone between hilarity and horror.
"A language only exists and is maintained within a language community," writes
Taylor, "and this indicates another crucial feature of the self. One is a self only
among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those
who surround it" (35). As Rowan Williams states, we need "to think through
what it might be to be alive and concrete only 'in' an other, [since] just this
thought is what our language and experience of being in time constantly invite
us towards" (165). This is the very stuff of novels and plays, which philosophers
of intersubjectivity cannot ignore, though they rarely delve into the inter-
references and interferences, into the frictions and conflicts that such a view of
human reality necessarily implies.
I have no doubt that we can add Dickens to the company I have adumbrated
above, for there is a crucial dimension of his novels that Rorty's freeze-dried
version of his accomplishment neglects utterly, namely, that in a number ofsignally important cases his characters undergo a substantial change in their
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conflictual relations with others, a radical transformation of the kind that Girard
likens to a religious conversion. I am thinking for instance of Mr. Gradgrind in
Hard Times, whose adhesion to a doctrinaire positivism - "nothing but Facts, sir;
nothing but Facts!" - is sundered by the havoc it wreaks in the lives of his forlornchildren, and who consents to breaking the law to save his wayward son from
retribution for which he feels morally responsible. I am thinking, too, of old
Dombey, whose smug favoritism of his ailing son over his loving daughter is
virtually converted to humble adoration of her amidst the ruins wrought by his
family pride when it encounters in his second wife a pride that is as
symmetrically blind, unyielding, and self-destructive as his own. I am thinking of
Martin Chuzzlewit minor, who is inalterably changed for the better by theministrations of a servant whom he felt it his birthright to despise. His arrogant
vision of conquest and self-advancement, his very nineteenth-century ambition
of being a self-made man, gets its just deserts in the new world, the go-getter
America that Dickens so cruelly and tellingly mocks, as does our own Mark
Twain, as a land of opportunism for hawkers and scoundrels, as fraud's own
best frontier. This character is humbled by a veritable "descent into hell" and a
near-death experience of the kind that Girard describes as the preface to
redemption, to reconciliation among humans, for some of Dostoevsky's
characters, like the old Stepan Verkhovensky in Demons, or the young
Raskolnikov, the would-be Napoleon, in Crime and Punishment.
I say for some characters, because others remain in a hell of their own
construction, like Dostoevsky's underground man, whose comically romantic
construct, "I am one and they are all," ensures a zero-sum competition which
will always end in self-defeat and self-contempt. I shall have more to say of this
character, as definitive of human possibilities, in my conclusion. We find such
self-doomed characters in Dickens. Consider, for instance, the hypocritical
Pecksniff: his idiosyncrasy, if you will, is to utter gospelized principles of self-
effacement as a means of self-aggrandizing manipulation of old Chuzzlewit; he
is finally consigned by the novelist to comically repetitious delusions of self-pity.
Uriah Heep, in David Copperfield, is of the same stripe, but his line - "I'm so
'umble" - is thrown out as a strategy to ensnare others by manipulating
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perceptions of value. 1 take Dostoevsky's Lebedev in Demons, whose mantra is
"I'm vile," as a caricatural homage to Dickens here. Old Chuzzlewit's rivalry with
his symmetrically headstrong grandson as to the choice of a bride, we need to
add, is the chief narrative engine of the novel that strategically bears the singlename of rival doubles. Rivalry as contagious and self-destructive is the
structuring principle of all the conflicts in Bleak House, whose hilariously
endless "Jarndyce and Jarndyce" lawsuit - a conflict of proliferating doubles -
precedes and engulfs the lives of all the characters whose pretense is to
dominate and resolve it to their own advantage.
I am thinking, too, of the self-sacrificing renunciation of Sydney Carton, in A
Tale of Two Cities, which is real because it is fatal, not manipulative. His deed
of substituting himself for a guillotine-bound victim is self-described as "a far, far
better thing than I've ever done before." It is a thing which Dickens's readers are
persuaded to subscribe to as well, to the enduring credit of the scriptural model
by which this deed is prescribed, namely "no greater love has any man than to
give up his life for a friend."
I am thinking, finally, of Ebeneezer Scrooge, whose perhaps definitive film
portrayal by Alistair Sim remains very faithful to the text of A Christmas Carol,
which narrates a radical conversion from avarice to altruism via a passage
through death that we can describe as imaginary or supernatural, as oneiric or
prophetic in the religious sense; it doesn't matter which. What matters is
Scrooge's gratitude for being alive, which he is now incapable of not wishing to
share, which he cannot dissociate from gratitude for the opportunity to assist
others in their lives. I think we can connect his gratitude with Rorty's reflectionson Heideggerian Gelassenheit:
The gratitude in question is not the sort which the Christian has when he or she
thanks Omnipotence for the stars and the trees. It is rather a matter of being
grateful to the stars and trees themselves - to the beings that were disclosed by
our linguistic practices. Or, if you prefer, it means being grateful for the
existence of ourselves, for our ability to disclose the beings we have disclosed,
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for the embodied languages we are, but not grateful to anybody or anything.
(Essays 48)
Scrooge rejoices in his bed-curtains - "They are here - I am here" - in the same
vein. he exults in the winter weather, via the use of free indirect discourse, a
narrative strategy that redeploys discursive attribution in such a way as to
involve, engage, compromise the reader in his perceptions:
Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist;
clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; golden
sunlight; heavenly sky; sweet fresh air, merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!
The cold is jovial, paradoxically piping, the air is sweet, not for being what they
are but simply in that they are. We find no reference to an omnipotent creator
God here; clergy and church are rarely commended as authorities by the writer
whom Orwell calls '"a good tempered antinomian'" (quoted in Essays 79).
Scrooge's glee is Dickens's own, as creator and character merge in defining
moments of revelation, of reconciliation that Girard describes as the conclusion
of A Ia Recherche du temps perdu. jubilation here is ontological, not theological,
or at least not confessional or credal. It arises as if in response to the
philosopher's perennial question, "why is there something rather than nothing?"
- though I suspect that the novelist's lightheadedness in Dickens (and Balzac,
for that matter) is the more realistic response in its jollity than the Heideggerian
solemnity with which that question is so often entertained. Where humor is not
exercised at another's expense, as a weapon, it is evidence, it is confidence, of
our not being divinities or masters, of the gladness of being at all.
RORTY writes that "Dickens did not want anybody to be transformed, except in
one respect: he wanted them to notice and understand the people they passed
on the street" (78). But that is a very big, all inclusive exception; it changes
everything. Rorty's minimalist, privative phrasing says too little for an author
whose hopes for social reform depended so much on a total transformation of
one's relations to others, as borne by the devastation of delusional self-esteem
or self-aggrandizement. Here is Scrooge's notice of a boy passing in the street,
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whom he hails to buy a turkey to send to Bob Cratchit: "An intelligent boy! said
Scrooge, A remarkable boy! . . . What a delightful boy! . . . It's a pleasure to talk
to him." This giddiness expresses joy for the fact that the boy is - it is not a
streetwise IQ test. Scrooge's words express no understanding of the boy, norgratitude to his presumed creator, merely elation in the fact of his existence, of
his being there to answer his call. To will him to be at all is necessarily to wish
him well. Ontological wonder, the philosopher's enthusiasm, is not dissociable,
as the story moves on, from a healing purpose that will be directed towards the
crippled Tiny Tim. Our culture takes this story to its heart because it knows, we
know, it tells a truth - not as a hieratic authority, but as a story, a truth story that
rejoices as much in the existence of bed curtains as in our being around tograsp them thankfully. For the novelists of our realist tradition, the ontological is
confederate with the ethical.
It is significant in this regard that Dickens, along with Dostoevsky whom he
influenced so powerfully, were the first novelists to bring children into the
thematic center of focus and to allow for a view of the world from their initially
blameless perspective. Along with Mark Twain,1 these writers share with the
gospels the intuition that our dealings with children as adults is a decisive gauge
of ethical evaluation, indeed the fulcrum in our sense of moral balance. The
mistreatment of children is a stumbling block in the biblical sense of scandalon
to any and all complacency about the difference between good and evil,
between true and false. What the authors of Nicholas Nickleby and David
Copperfield and Brothers Karamazov undertake is to offer a view of the world
from the perspective of the certifiable victims of its institutionalized practices. "If
I forget thee, Jerusalem . . . ," intones the drunken father in Brothers Karamazov
to his dying son, in resonance with the biblical text (Psalm 137) that directs our
attention admonishingly to human suffering. Rather than reduce Dickens
biographically to resentment about his own neglect as a child, we need to see,
with Eric Gans in The End of Culture, that resentment as the cultural generator
of insights, of revelations, from a perspective that is epistemically generalizable
and humanly, pragmatically actionable.
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The perspective of the victim cannot be relativized to anything else; it is not
further reducible, pace Rorty, to other redescriptions or recontextualizations, not
at least for our best novelists (and playwrights: I am thinking of the young
Hedwig in Ibsen's Wild Duck, the sacrificial victim of her father's self-pityingdelusions). It stands out and apart from "a flux of continually changing relations"
(Philosophy 47). It is the measure, the standard, the canon, in the original sense
of the word, by which we distinguish between what we know to be false and
what we know to be true with certainty. It is, so to speak, absolute, and we can
find as many statements by Dewey as we can by Rorty himself that confidently
underwrite this certainty. Here, for instance, is Rorty quoting Dewey on "the
pragmatic theory of truth," of what is '"true in the pragmatic sense of truth: itworks, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts individuals into more
experiential, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily skeptical relations to life'" (Truth
78) - the unexaminable, irreducible, or pragmatic, assumption here being that
life is good, that what is true is good for life, as opposed to death-dealing
practices.
Rorty comments on the "generous anger" that Orwell hails in Dickens, in
preference to the "savage indignation" of the satirist and the ideologue bent on
social reform, and he extends this characterization to the work of Harriet
Beecher Stowe and Martin Luther King:
The generosity of Dickens's, Stowe's and King's anger comes out in their
assumption that people need to turn their eyes toward the people who are
getting hurt, notice the details of the pain being suffered, rather than needing to
have their entire cognitive apparatus restructured. (Essays 80)
I think Rorty is wrong here in contrasting just what many a novelist brings
together within a narrative arc. The attention to details is in a reciprocal cause
and effect relation to a drastic restructuring of the character's cognitive
apparatus, such that he or she sees the world really for the first time- as
"Glorious! Glorious!" to cite Scrooge as an instance.This revolution in
perception and feeling is possible once circumstances, which are usually as
catastrophic in Dickens as they are in Dostoevsky, allow the character to
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withdraw from worldly rivalries that produce such childhood victims as we find in
these writers.
There is, for our best novelists, an epistemics of interaction here. For within
such rivalry, things are only what they seem to others, and only have the value
that others in every sense assign to them. To the extent that our attention is
directed by models and rivals, mimetic desire to possess the objects that they
signal to us shunts the sensory paths to anything like their genuine perception.
This is the negative experience of ju lien Sorel, whom Stendhal describes at
numerous points as insensitive to the real charms of Madame de Renal
because of his rivalry with the world she inhabits. This is the positive experience
of Proust's narrator, but only after illness causes him to abandon all hope of
worldly and literary success, and it issues in an apocalyptic conception of the
novel as at once a partner and collaborator in Creation and "as the true Last
judgment." This vision of eternity matches Scrooge's resolution: "I will live in the
Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within
me." In spite of all that has been written about Dickens's Carlylean
transcendentalism, his work does not commit us to illuminism or animism.
Dickens does not believe in the actuality of such apparitions or Spirits in any
narrowly "objective" sense, but in what they symbolize, which is a kind of
panrelationalism as a redemptively lived experience. We critics regularly make
the same mistake with Balzac when we subordinate his narratives to a
preexistent belief system from which the novels are thought to issue. We must
not subordinate the novel to a philosophy, which is ever only a by-product, and
a poor one at that (like the cranky positions taken in Dostoevsky's Diary of a
Writer), of more fundamental and concrete revelations that emerge from their
tales of human interaction. Scrooge's words are not the expression of any sort
of mysticism, but of something which for Dickens and Proust is the program for
an achieved realism, as it issues from living, in the last words of Proust's work,
"dans Ie temps." It is a way of recounting our experience of the world, which is
especially our encounters with others, in which perceptive, affective, and ethical
dimensions of our experience are inseparable. The "canonical" novelists'
imaginative reconstructions are, as Gans notes, "a discovery procedure" (see
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Originary Thinking) en route to anthropological universals.2 In sum, there is a
cognitive and redemptive transformation that so many of Dickens's characters
"go through hell," so to speak, to achieve, and it is also what, with and by all his
attention to detail, he seeks to occasion in his readers.
If Pragmatism is to contribute, as Rorty says, "to a world-historical change in
humanity's self-image" (Philosophy 132), it finds its strongest allies in the
novelists of our Western literary canon as they articulate, or rcdescribe, certain
foundational intuitions from judaic and Christian revelation. Rorty wants to
distinguish between "people who tell stories and people who construct theories
about that which lies beyond our present imagination, because beyond our
present language" (Essays 80), but it is Girard's contention that our best story
tellers are among our best theorists about what lies just within our grasp, which
Proust, in Le Temps retrouve, calls the "impressions" revealed by Literature,
and which in other contexts is called the Kingdom of God, if we have eyes to
see and ears to hear. In sum, and this is largely the point of my essay, the
pragmatist who hopes for a culture more favorable to human possibilities will
find in the mimetic hypothesis a greater ally than Rorty, in his aversion to any
unifying theory, would be disposed to accept.
Both Rorty and Girard deplore a politically correct Western self-hatred that is
coursing through our academies - this motif is Girard's point of departure in Je
vois Satan - and for the same reason, which is ably expounded by Rorty in
conceding to an image of the West as "racist, sexist, and imperialist" (Essays
81). But, he qualifies decisively:
it is of course also a culture which is very worried about being racist, sexist, and
imperialist, as well as being Eurocentric, parochial, and intellectually intolerant.
It is a culture which has become very conscious of its capacity for murderous
intolerance and thereby perhaps more wary of intolerance, more sensitive to the
desirability of diversity, than any other of which we have record. I have been
suggesting that we Westerners owe this consciousness and this sensitivity
more to our novelists than to our philosophers or to our poets.
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Rorty's suggestion is in line with Cesareo Bandera's argument, in The Sacred
Game, about our literary tradition as well, though Bandera argues further that
the peculiar institution of poetic - rather than mythical fiction issues from an
epistemic legacy born of our religious one. he is building on Girard's argumentthat this increased and ever widening "worry," to use Rorty's term, our disquiet
and consequent solicitude about victims, what Girard calls our "universalized
compassion" in Je vois Satan (256-7, 261), draws its strength and confidence
from religious convictions born of the definitively revealed innocence of the
victim of sacrificial practices, such as we find in the psalmists, the prophets, and
the passion narratives. Our hermeneutic suspicion of totalizing mendacities is
born of a foundational suspicion of scapegoating mechanisms that is authorizedin Hebrew and Christian scripture. "We have to take enlightenment where and
as we find it," writes Rorty (Rorty and His Critics 149), while routinely ignoring
Nietzsche's insistence, in Genealogy of Morals (III, 27), that our truth-seeking
rationality is heir to the religious tradition it repudiates.
So I do not want to contradict Rorty's brief for literature or the novel, but, on the
contrary, take what he has "been suggesting" seriously, more so than he does,
and see in it the elements of a scientific hypothesis, the mimetic one, so that we
can locate an anthropological basis for what he describes in another winning
essay as "The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature." In this essay he
deplores the pseudo-scientizing of literature departments, whose
deconstructive, new-historical contextualualizing, and debunking methodologies
are portrayed as following the downward path of philosophy when it reduced
issues to the dryly analytical methods of logical positivism. The result is a smug
"knowingness" that he cannot prefer to inspiration. Thus we find him
romantically opposing understanding and hope, knowledge and self-
transformation (13), intellect and imagination (16), whereas Girard's
fundamental anthropology reconciles these polarities. With a bow to Matthew
Arnold, Rorty expresses "the hope for a religion of literature, in which works of
the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration
and hope for each new generation" (15). It is Girard's argument that our best
works succeed Scripture, not replacing it so much as expanding and extending
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its insights, bringing them, so to speak, up to date and back down to earth. The
mimetic hypothesis is, admittedly, a large vision, whose explanatory power is
being essayed over a wide variety of academic disciplines. Not every one of its
aspects is available to empirical verification according to conventional canons oflaboratory investigation. Some of them, perhaps the most important aspects,
can only be worked out through an anguished "crucible of doubt," as
Dostoevsky styled his own discovery procedure through fall and redemption, by
which we are lead to more self-knowledge than ever dreamed of in our
philosophies.
RORTY sees a future for anti-essentialism as one in which "we shall stop
yearning for depth, and stop trying either to worship heroes or to hunt down
criminals. Instead, we shall settle for useful tools, and take them where we can
find them" (Philosophy 197). In Rorty's quest for "equipment for living," to use
Kenneth Burke's phrase for literature (in The Philosophy of Literary Form), he
can do no better than our best novelists, who take up our story where they find
it, typically in their own historical setting, and for so many of whom there is no
reality that goes deeper than the neighbor, the brother, the parent or friend who
fills the role of model, or obstacle, or rival, or all three, for "my" desires. For
Girard, we cannot dissociate such insights from Scriptural revelation. In Israel's
prophetic tradition, in the gospels and epistles, we are ceaselessly reminded
that there is no reality that goes deeper than the victim under our heel or higher,
for practical purposes, than the one on the cross. According to Western
religious tradition, this is the same person, whose Sermon on the Mount warned
us away from rivalries that lynching can no longer resolve or absolve. I cannot
think of a logical or, in Rorty's sense, pragmatic, objection to these insights. The
business of worshiping heroes and hunting down criminals is party to a
sacrificial enterprise of inclusion and exclusion, of stereotyping, as Girard indicts
it in The Scapegoat, which Scripture belies as a blindness to the mimetic
violence upon whose misconstruction and misrepresentation culture is founded.
It is romantic literature in the Girardian sense, which includes all such mythic
representations as we find in popular novels and films (see McKenna, "The
Law's Delay'"), that invents heroes to hunt down criminals, so that we as
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members of the human community may overlook our own mimetic participation
in violence.
We find this pattern of fall and redemption in Dickens and others not because it
is prescribed by Scripture but because it is observed by the novelist, often in his
own personal experience. This is the case regardless of whether, with Mme. de
Lafayette and Dostoevsky, the writer is a believing Christian, or whether with
Proust, Stendhal, and Camus, for instance, he or she is an agnostic or atheist.
This is not theological but anthropological revelation, born of experience we can
all understand and that the novelist can, by myriad narrative strategies, make us
acknowledge as our own.
Part of our cognitive problem, at least, is, as Rorty rightly apprehends,
rhetorical, stylistic, literary in the broadest sense, the problem that he
thematizes constantly in terms of final vocabularies and redescriptions. I find
this a poor choice of words for someone as focused on language as Rorty is, for
it still has something of the statically ontological about it, as if it were a question
of finding different, better, i.e., more useful names and adjectives for things and
people, for human affairs generally. What will still dominate such language is
copulative rather than active verbs, and assertions that are informed by a
substantive notion of reason rather than narratives informed by a procedural
one.3 It is a vocabulary to which philosophers are customarily wed, so that we
find Rorty intoning against fixed conceptions of "the way the world is," "the way
things really are." The novelist is typically interested in the way things happen
across time and space among human beings, in what goes on, in "le monde
comme il ??," as the French Enlightenment writers were still able to formulate it.When we substitute intersubjectivity for objectivity, we need as well to attend to
Hannah Arendt's insistence on life being an open narrative (The Human
Condition V, esp. Ch. 25) rather than as a mirror in which certain unchanging
verities are reflected or as a lens through which they are more or less clearly
perceived. I interpret the recent respect garnered by Arendt among
philosophers as resulting from the exhaustion of essentialist projects. Another
writer overdue for attention is Kenneth Burke, whom Rorty wisely consults fromtime to time, but not yet for his "dramatistic" conception of reading, in which
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human interaction, the agonal dynamics of reciprocity, rather than conceptual
delimitation, is focal. "God loveth adverbs," as we learn from a writer cited by
Taylor (chap. 13.1). We have to think, as novelists do, of our lives in terms of
story rather than structure, in which active verbs and adverbs have at least anequal share with nouns, adjectives and copulatives. But we also have to see
how this story unfolds within the unchanging structure of mediated desire, the
triangle of subjects relating to objects principally via the reciprocally active and
passive involvement with other subjects.
Rorty is right to insist that we do not escape from time and chance. Our
encounters with others through chance or choice is itself a product of chance to
a great degree, for we do not choose the chances, as Pascal rightly insisted,
that make certain choices available to us. This is what makes us unique in a
way that our being is participial, contingent, incomplete, historical, in a word. No
one has exactly the same array of encounters and reactions as another, though
on the other hand these encounters and their repercussions form a pattern that
is astonishingly consistent in the tales of our best novelists. Our chance
encounters with others through time make us the volatile and variable subjects
of a unique story, but as these encounters are necessarily mimetically
contingent and conditioned, all these stories are variations of the same story. 1
think this is what Proust meant when, in Le Temps retrouve, he figured all great
novels as one novel, one vast, manifold, and luminous structure that he likened
to the at once variegated and uniform architecture of the Gothic cathedral.
There is both order and disorder in our lives, and the cognitive quest for the
former on the part of thinkers in every field of inquiry, including novelists, is notfutile, not delusional. There are freedoms and chances for it that are frustrated
by mimetic patterns to which we do not knowingly or willingly succumb. What is
delusional is what Rorty indicts as the tendency of thinkers "to hypostatize the
central terms of one's newly created vocabulary, to treat his term ('Reason,' 'the
movement of History,' 'Language') as the One True Nature of God" (Essays
137). Such terms as those, and still others we can mention (nature, instinct,
libido, and more lately, neurobiological networks) are, in Burke's handyvocabulary, "god terms," and the excessive credence we lend to them, and also
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demand for ourselves as their mouthpieces, Js pernicious according to Rorty:
"For this strategy helps one see oneself as a prophet, or perhaps even a
redeemer. It helps one see one's own inner transfiguration as assuring the
transformation of the human world, and in particular of the social arrangementswhich have left the needs of others unsatisfied" (Essays 137). he is thinking of
Marxism here, and the terrors it has wrought. he precedes this criticism with the
observation that "the worship of some such hypostatization is the characteristic
temptation of intellectuals" (136), and I doubtless appear to be doing just that
with the notion of mimesis, which names a ubiquitous dynamic among humans,
an anthropological universal.
But it is in just this that the mimetic hypothesis is anti-foundationalist in any
ontological or hypostatic sense. The mobility and contagion of desire deprives
our species of any stable roots, and the self of any stable identity. Mimesis
identifies not a human essence or a nature but a dynamic structure that is
fraught with unforeseeable feedback loops; it identifies a complex pattern in
human relations whose understanding is indispensable to the effort we make to
improve them. This effort is in accord with the minimal expectations prescribed
by Paul Watzlawick for properly scientific knowledge when he writes that "the
search for pattern is the basis of all scientific investigation: where there is
pattern, there is significance" (Pragmatics 36). This is a view to which Rorty's
prescription for scientific understanding is hospitable: "On a pragmatist account,
scientific inquiry is best viewed as the attempt to find a single, unified, coherent
description of the world - the description which makes it easiest to predict the
consequences of events and actions, and thus easiest to gratify certain human
desires" (Philosophy 149). Mimesis is the term for the uncertainty of human
desires, their essentially mediated, derivative, eccentric and temporal or
historical dynamic. As an explanatory principle for human agency and
interaction, it is not proposed here as an object of worship, but as a means of
understanding the delusions that Rorty names with that term.
I welcome Rorty's critique of worship here, for his target is the same as Girard's,
and in Western religious tradition it goes by the name of idolatry, which is noless virulent among us for evolving shifts in vocabulary, for the replacement of
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one idolized concept or historical figure for another. The constant in this
essentializing process is a wholesale - I would say: mimetic - capitulation to
some aleatory celebrity, to what Pascal called "fe?prestiges illusoires"
Rorty awards this insight about hypostatization to Nietzsche, of whom he is
critical of doing the same thing "in his occasional attempts to proclaim himself
superhuman." Nietzsche and Rorty after him extends judaism's critique of false
worship to a host of cultural representations, final vocabularies, but there is no
sense on Nietzsche's part of the failed rivalry with Wagner that his parodie title
implies and that fuels his demystifying fervor, his apprehension that "there are
more idols in the world than there are realities" (Twilight of the Idols 21). A more
penetrating account is to be found in Nietzsche's contemporary, John Ruskin,
who appends these observations to Volume II of The Stones of Venice, where
idolaters are "considered as members of this or that communion, and not as
Christians or unbelievers:"
Idolatry is, both literally and verily, not the mere bowing down before sculptures,
but the serving or becoming the slave of any images or imaginations which
stand between us and God, and it is otherwise expressed in Scripture as
"walking after the Imagination of our own hearts." And observe also that while,
at least on one occasion, we find in the Bible an indulgence granted to the mere
external and literal violation of the second commandment, "When I bow myself
in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing," we find no
indulgence in any instant, or in the slightest degree, granted to "covetousness,
which is idolatry" (Col. iii.5; no casual association of terms, observe, but again
energetically repeated in Ephesians v. 5, "No covetous man, who is an idolater,has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ"); nor any to that denial of God,
idolatry in one of its most subtle forms, following so often on the possession of
that wealth against which Augur prayed so earnestly, "Give me neither power
nor riches, lest I be full and deny thee, and say, 'Who is the Lord?'" (385-86)
Ruskin goes on to observe that one person's "apparent idolatry" is another's
"spiritual worship," and vice versa. I see his insight as more useful to us
because where Nietzsche and Rorty after him see a strategy of self-glorification,
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Ruskin, like Girard in Je vois Satan, links the first commandment to the tenth,
and idolatry to desire, envy, covetousness. Nietzsche and Rorty are focused on
the objects of false worship, Ruskin on the intersubjective dynamic which
generates it. His insight is closer to what Dostoevsky thoroughly explored inDemons, where Pyotr Verkhovensky's nihilistic and murderous ideology is
predicated on his worship of the sovereignly detached, indifferent and god-like
Stavrogin, who is at once his model and rival for supremacy in society. This too
is what drives Smerdyakov to murder old Karamazov in hope of becoming the
avatar of his alter ego, his nihilistic half-brother Ivan. And it is Ivan's repulsion
for his virtual double that induces his nightmarish conversation with the devil,
whom Dostoevsky represents as a hackneyed imitator, a burlesquecaricaturizer. Rather than the august prince of darkness vaunted by the
Romantics, the author reveals the devil as a shady, vulgar mimic.
DOSTOEVSKY is often touted as a novelist of ideas, as if his chief merit were
that of an amateur philosopher. Mimetic theory enables us to discover in him a
religious anthropologist of the first order. We already find this idolatrous
dynamic in Notes from the Underground, whose narrator's own nihilism in Part I
is shown in Part II to be a function of his bungled rivalry with absolutely
everyone - clients and classmates, peers and prostitutes, servants and Sunday
strollers - whom he encounters in his social world. Attention to the needs of
others that Rorty cites is a thoroughly admirable concern, but attention to the
modeling role of others - rather than of abstract ideas - in the formation of one's
own self-conception goes just as unexamined in Rorty's critique of philosophy
as it does in the tradition he criticizes. And, I might add, as it does in most
readings of Notes, whose first part with its challenges to determinism and paean
to desire so fascinates intellectuals that they do not see how the second part
deconstructs it, how the narrator's tortuous ruminations, his intellectual quarrel
with prevailing ideas of his time is a function, a by-product, of his thwarted
rivalry with others in the outside world from which he has retreated to his "stink
hole."
An authorial note at the end of the text tells us that he will never emerge fromhis underground; he is a hopeless case of what Nietzsche diagnosed as
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"l'homme du ressentiment" (On the Genealogy of Morals I, 10; see also III, 15n).
But this framing commentary prevents us from confusing Dostoevsky with his
nihilist "protagonist" (he is ever only an antagonist, his action always being
reaction). The end of the narrative includes a vision of hope that I think Rortymust approve and that is no less positive for being rejected by the narrator.
The decisive moment of his encounters with others is with the prostitute Liza, to
whom the narrator confesses his spiteful abjection while expressing his hatred
of her for being the occasion of his mortifying self-disclosure. This is a chance
for her to react to his vituperations with reciprocal loathing and malice, or with a
symmetrically consequent self-abasement, but she does not take the bait; she
does not react in kind, or reciprocate as expected when he rudely dismisses
her:
"Why don't you get out of here?"
But here an extraordinary thing happened.
I was so used to imagining everything and to thinking of everything as it
happened in books, and to picturing to myself everything in the world as I had
previously made it up in my dreams, that at first I could not all at once grasp the
meaning of this occurrence. What occurred was this: Liza, humiliated and
crushed by me, understood much more than I imagined. She understood from
all this what a woman who loves sincerely always understands first of all,
namely, that I was unhappy. (II, ix)
The young woman fails the test we most often underwrite when we reciprocateanother's enmity. She abstains from the rivalry that determines all the narrator's
relations with others, and that will finally determine his ultimate rejection of her
compassion and his lasting self-confinement to the underground.4
In Liza's (non)reaction, we have a phenomenal and phenomenological instance
of what Simone Weil writes about as an attention that "suspends thought,
leaving it available, empty and penetrable by its object" (92). It is "not looking for
anything but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is going to
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penetrate it" (93). Weil states that a sense of our own mediocrity, even
obtuseness ("betise"), is favorable to such attention, as can be the travail of
peasants and workers to the extent that their long-suffering condition immunizes
them from delusions of social preeminence, of "consideration social" (96). ForWeil, this attention brings us closer to God, but only to the extent that love of
one's neighbor is of the same stuff, "de la meme substance" (96).
Those who suffer have no other need in this world than of people capable of
paying attention to them. The ability to pay attention to another's suffering is a
very rare, very difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle . . . . The
fullness of love for your neighbor is simply being able to ask him: what are you
going through? It is knowing that the suffering person exists, not as a unit in a
collection, not as an exemplar of a social category labeled "unfortunate," but as
a human being, exactly like us, who has been stricken and marked inimitably by
suffering. For that, it is sufficient, but indispensable, to know how to direct
toward him a certain gaze. (96-97)
This is the "miraculous," "extraordinary" attention that Liza pays to her
tormentor, and Weil insists that it is available to us "en dehors de toute
croyance religieuse" (97). Whether or not such attention brings us closer to
God, whether or not there is a God to be closer to, there can be no doubt that
Weil has described the essential, irreducible issue that Rorty wants
philosophers and every other thinking (inter)subject to attend to. Rorty does not
need the mimetic hypothesis to pursue his benevolent goals; the wealth of
Western religious tradition as further rationalized by our Enlightenment values is
authorization enough. But if he wants to enlist our best novelists as hispreferred cognitive allies in this pursuit, the mimetic hypothesis offers the single,
unified, coherent description that he says we need. A prescription for attention
to others, for weal or woe, is not unavailable to philosophers, to non-fiction
writers in general, Ruskin and Weil to witness, but it is the specialty of novelists
to whom Rorty rightly directs our thoughtful and sensitive regard.
[Sidebar]
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(C) 2003 Haggerty Museum of Art (75.18)
Marquette University
Gift of Gertrude Bergstrom
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Bandera, Cesareo. The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis
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Brandom, Robert B. ed. Rorty and his Critics. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.
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