The Girard Reader by René Girard Page A

worldviews peculiar to internal mediation. They all
    depend directly or indirectly on the lie of spontaneous desire. They all defend the same illusion of autonomy to which modern man is passionately devoted.
    It is this same illusion which the great novel does not succeed in shattering although it never
    ceased to denounce it. Unlike the romantics and neo-romantics, a Cervantes, a Flaubert, and a
    Stendhal reveal the truth of desire in their great novels, but this truth remains hidden even at
    the heart of its revelation. The reader, who is usually convinced of his own spontaneity,
    applies to the work the meanings he already applies to the world. The nineteenth century,
    which failed completely to understand Cervantes, continually praised the "originality" of his hero. The romantic reader, by a marvelous misinterpretation which fundamentally is only a
    superior truth, identifies himself with Don Quixote, the supreme imitator, and makes of him
    the model individual .
    Thus is should not surprise us that the term "romanesque"  2. s till re-____________________
    2. In the French original, constant association and opposition of romantique and ro-
    -43-
    flects, in its ambiguity, our unawareness of all mediation. The term denotes the chivalric
    romances and it denotes Don Quixote ; it can be synonymous with "romantic" and it can indicate the destruction of romantic pretensions. In the future we shall use the term
    "romantic" for the works which reflect the presence of a mediator without ever revealing it
    and the term "novelistic" for the works which reveal this presence. It is to the latter that this book is primarily devoted.
    ____________________
    manesque , with their same radical and different endings, tried to convey something of an
    essential, yet elusive, difference between the works which passively reflect and those
    which actively reveal "mediated" desire. The two words are not interchangeable, to be
    sure, but their opposition alone is fully significant. The essay must not be read as the
    indictment of a narrowly, or even broadly defined literary school . Neither is it an effort to
    circumscribe the genre of the novel. The author is aware that Jean Santeuil is a novel and should be classified as such if classifications were the order of the day. Jean Santeuil can
    nevertheless be viewed as "romantic" within the context of the essay, in other words by
    contrast with the "romanesque" -- novelistic -- Remembrance of Things Past . Similarly, Chateaubriand Mémoires d'outre-Tombe is not a novel but it partakes somewhat of the
    "romanesque" by contrast with the romantic René . Unlike the categories of literary
    historians, which are mechanistic and positivistic, the present categories, even though they
    are not Hegelian, are still dialectical. They are not independent labels stuck once and for
    all on a fixed amount of static and objective literary material. Neither are they literature-
    proof receptacles in which that same material would be contained. They have no value in
    themselves; no single category can be appraised separately. Oppositions are essential; their
    terms should not be dissociated. The whole system alone is truly significant and self-
    sufficient, in accordance with a structural hypothesis.
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    Chapter 4 Desire and the Unity of Novelistic Conclusions
    This selection is the concluding chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel . Here Girard
    summarizes his argument that in the best work of the great novelists such as Cervantes,
    Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoyevsky, the novelistic (nonromantic) conclusions
    represent conversions from the death to which rivalrous desire leads. In the great novels the
    authors attain a profound communion of Self and Other, intuit in their protagonists their own
    similarity to the Other who is a model-rival (see under Model/Mediator)* or even a model-
    obstacle (see under Model/Mediator),* and find liberation from the pride of romantic
    individualism. The climax of