Deceit, Desire and the Novel
Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Original French title: Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque), published in 1961, is the first book by literary critic and anthropologist René Girard.[1] Its focus is the author's novel take on how desire in "true novelisitic works" is exposed as being imitative (mimetic) as opposed to "spontaneous" as the majority of second-rate literary works (such as Girard labels them) tend to depict it.
After a quote from Cervantes' Don Quixote, in which the titular character explains to his squire Sancho that the ideal life of a knight errant must be focused on the imitation of Amadís de Gaula, the hero of a popular medieval Spanish novel, Girard's book starts thus:
Don Quixote has surrendered to Amadis the individual's fundamental prerogative: he no longer chooses the objects of his own desire—Amadis must choose for him. The disciple pursues objects which are determined, or at least seem to be determined for him, for him by the model of all chivalry. We shall call this model the mediator of desire. Chivalric existence is the imitation of Amadis in the same sense that the Christian's existence is the imitation of Christ.[2]
This initial observation is then generalized by Girard, in the rest of the book, to a small number of major literary masterpieces like those of Stendhal, Marcel Proust and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In the French original, Girard opposes these great works, which he calls romanesques, to the vast majority of all other novels published since the early 19th century which he calls romantiques. These two French words, both deriving from the root roman (which means "novel" in French), are not used by Girard in their ordinary sense. In particular, the latter, romantique, which usually refers to the early 19th century litterary movement romanticism, is here given a much wider sense. Girard turns it into a qualitative label which he applies to all literary works which only "reflect" the mimetic nature of desire without actually revealing it as do the small number of superior works which he calls romanesque. In the English translation by Yvonne Freccero first published in 1965, romanesques is translated as "novelistic" while romantique is straightforwardly rendered as "romantic" and these choices are justified in a translator's note.
This book, which contains the basic tenets of Girard's Mimetic Theory, is universally considered to be the foundation of all his subsequent works[3].
References[edit]
- ↑ Haven, Cynthia (November 4, 2015). "Stanford professor and eminent French theorist René Girard, member of the Académie Française, dies at 91". Stanford University. Retrieved November 4, 2015.
- ↑ Girard 1966, p. 2.
- ↑ Müller, Markus (June 1996), "Interview with René Girard", Anthropoetics, II (1), retrieved November 1, 2008.
External links[edit]
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