highbeam research article jan 01 2013(29)

7/27/2019 HighBeam Research Article JAN 01 2013(29)

1/26

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


2/26

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


3/26

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


4/26

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


5/26

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


6/26

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).


7/26

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


8/26

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


9/26

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,


10/26

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,


11/26

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.


12/26

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


13/26

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


14/26

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.


15/26

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


16/26

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


17/26

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


18/26

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


19/26

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


20/26

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,


21/26

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


22/26

"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


23/26

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]


24/26

(C) 2003 Haggerty Museum of Art (75.18)

Marquette University

Gift of Gertrude Bergstrom

[Reference]Works Cited

Alison, James. The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes. New

York: Crossroad, 1998.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.

Bailie, Gil. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York:

Crossroad, 1995.

Bandera, Cesareo. The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis

of Modern Literary Fiction. University Park: Penn State UP, 1995.

Brandom, Robert B. ed. Rorty and his Critics. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.

Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. Internet:

Gans. Eric. The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. Berkeley: U

of California P, 1985.

---. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 1993.

Girard, Rene. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary

Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965.

---. Je vois Satan tomber comme un eclair. Paris: Grasset, 2000.

---. Shakespeare: A Theater of Envy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.


25/26

---. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Trans. Stephen Bann and

Michael Meteer. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987.

Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper

Collins, 1995.

McKenna, Andrew. '"The Law's Delay': Cinema and Sacrifice." Legal Studies

Forum 15:3 (1991).

Nietzsche, Friederich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.

New York: Vintage, 1967.

---. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Baltimore: Penguin, 1968.

Rorty, Richard. Essays on Heidegger and Others. New York: Cambridge UP,

1991.

---. "The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature." Canton. 16:1

(Summer, 1996).

---. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.

---. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999.

---. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers 3. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1998.

Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. London: G. Alien, 1898.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

Watzlawick, Paul. Pragmatics of Human Communication. New York: Norton,

1967.

Weil, Simone. Attente de Dieu. Paris: Fayard, 1966.


26/26

Williams, Rowan. Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement. Edinburgh:

T&T Clark, 2000.

McKenna, Andrew J

COPYRIGHT 1999 Marquette University Press

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-438749651.html

HighBeam Research is operated by Cengage Learning. Copyright 2013. All

rights reserved.

www.highbeam.com
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-438749651.htmlhttp://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-438749651.htmlhttp://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-438749651.html

highbeam research article jan 01 2013(29)

Documents