How not to be a poser

On René Girard's Deceit, Desire & the Novel, and other stuff

INDIFFERENCE

We usually think of indifference as a cold and callous emotion, and it has been said that the opposite of love is not actually hate but indifference. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think maybe indifference is the antithesis of them both. The feeling of being on the receiving end of indifference can be disorienting in a status-driven, social-media-obsessed world where entire identities are often constructed upon the validation of others. The inability to obtain positive or negative recognition from a fellow human often throws the system into chaos. 

But therein may lie the power of indifference. What of the individual who practices indifference? That individual, not needy for social or psychological validation from others, would be unassailable. If desire for affirmation is a psychological vulnerability—a self-hostage situation—then judicious indifference could be its opposite—a state of total emotional freedom. 

The indifferent person always seems to possess that radiant self-mastery which we all seek. He seems to live in a closed circuit, enjoying his own being, in a state of happiness which nothing can disturb. He is God.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Of course, a total lack of care for how one’s actions affect others isn’t exactly healthy. It might even be a bit psychopathic. An internal compass is our most valuable tool. The thing that lets us gauge when to trust—and discard—the judgement of others is a touchy instrument. Most of us are bound to make mistakes—either believing too eagerly in flattery or accepting criticism too uncritically, trusting too readily or being too cynical. Worse, we’re really shit at choosing role models and often do so for some pretty sketchy reasons.

This is not a new dilemma, but it’s one that received an unusual and thought-provoking examination by French anthropologist, philosopher, and literary critic René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, a deep look at literature through the lens of his emerging theory of mimetic desire. 

Winston Malone of The Storyletter recently posted about Girard’s theories as they relate to writing, which led to a good conversation in the comments, and Shaina Read of Kindling suggested I write a little about it. I am far from an expert on Girard’s work, and it’s been years since I read his other writing and two years since I read this book, so I’m a bit rusty on all of it. But I thought I’d share a few thoughts from my notes on the subject as I understand it.

---

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel was the first of many books Girard would write over his long career when his theories were still mostly confined to literature. The book attempts to explain the complexities of human nature as revealed through insightful characterization and storytelling, so it’s right up any book nerd’s alley. Girard uses examples from several classic (mainly French) novels to demonstrate his signature theory that imitation is the key to understanding human behavior.

It’s a good entry point for non-specialists—especially those with literary leanings—because his examples are drawn from somewhat familiar characters and stories rather than laden with abstract or obscure scholarly references. I skimmed a bit of it because I was unfamiliar with several of the works he cites, and the discursive French style can be a little trying at times. However, the conclusions about human behavior he draws from the pages of select novels are fascinating, thanks to the close observations these authors brought to their characters. With a handle on this theory, a significant slice of human behavior comes into sharper focus and offers potential clues about some of the more inscrutable stuff like copycat killers and social contagions. For interested readers, this book might demystify some of humanity’s insanities.

Threesome

Photo by RYNA studio on Unsplash

In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard describes a phenomenon he calls “triangular” desire. To briefly summarize, this form of mimetic, or imitative, desire is a threesome consisting of:

• The subject (the one who desires)

• The object (the thing desired)

• The mediator (the subject’s idol, model, or rival in obtaining the object)

According to Girard:

The true desire is not the object but the one who possessed it first—or rather what that possession represents for the seeker. His idol/rival is the mediator and center of his real desire, the object simply exists as proof of his sincerity or worthiness, not as an organic desire in itself.

So, for example, the woman doesn’t necessarily LIKE the $3,000+ luxury handbag; she wants to BE LIKE a woman who would own such an accessory. Her true desire lies with the woman she idolizes and what that woman represents to her, i.e., style, wealth, status, etc. The desired object is ultimately a symbol—a prop to be used in the act of imitation, of masquerade. Subjects are clearly not living their own authentic lives but aspiring to the lives of others, and this will always make the aspirant something of a poser. Authenticity here is impossible because no mere copy, no imitation, ever lives up to the original. 

“Mimetic Rivalry” brings a heightened dimension to the simple idea of modeling oneself on another. When the subject despises rather than adores the mediator, mimetic rivalry ensues. Girard claims this happens when the subject and mediator are relative equals. I think of it like when a dog has no interest in a bone until another dog is chewing it. People often compete like this with material goods, job opportunities, romantic interests, etc. Have you ever noticed how people suddenly seem more attractive when someone you dislike starts to date them? (So-and-so could do much better!) Healthy or not, mimetic rivalry is real, as is its potential to escalate into conflict.

The essential point is that these desires form externally to the subject:

Stendhal uses the word “vanity” (vanité) to indicate all these forms of “copying” and “imitating.” The vaniteux—vain person—cannot draw his desires from his own resources; he must borrow them from others.

In this early work, Girard doesn’t seem to be saying ALL desires are “borrowed,” though eventually, he would revise his theory to make that questionable claim. Here, he’s just saying that much of what humans do is vain and imitative, and very often, we don’t find something interesting until someone we admire/envy has or does it first. Celebrities, advertisers, tech companies, politicians, etc., all count on this copycat effect to spur our desires.

And, sure, we all do it. Most of our imitations are quite natural and innocent. We see something we like or admire and we adopt it. No harm done. But it has its darker side that surfaces when it becomes a means to an end. We all have idols and rivals buried deep in our unconscious. Maybe we even display them in the open. 

But is that all we’ve got?

Passion

Mimetic desire sounds pretty bleak and unappealing as a motivation. Are we, as writers, artists, and human beings, trapped in this sad triangle—doomed to be followers, modeling ourselves on others, nursing petty rivalries, fighting over one another’s scraps? Surely there is more to life?

Girard signposted another path:

Passion is the opposite of vanity. Distinguished by emotional autonomy, spontaneity of desires, indifference to the opinion of others. The passionate person draws strength of his desire from within himself not from others.

This is the place for the writer to focus—not on what others are doing, or why, or what has brought them success, but on discovering which of our desires are genuinely organic and following those to their creative conclusion.

Within reason, of course. We understand intuitively that there’s a balance to be struck between the cohesion of society and how far we can push those boundaries in pursuit of our passions. Too many artists have given free rein to their desires with the false claim that it is necessary to fulfill their creative vision or express their “true selves.” Many have attempted to justify their licentiousness, debauchery, and even violence under this guise. I call bullshit on this. If an artist’s “true self” is a degenerate douchebag, he’s not an artist—he’s a vaniteux. He’s not tapping the inner well of creative passion—he’s tapping his vanity. Using the pretext of “art” to indulge in one’s darkest and most destructive proclivities is like using the priesthood to indulge in pedophilia. It’s a perversion of the sacred. Not everything deserves tolerance—indeed, the social fabric can be stretched but will unravel without a hem.

AUTONOMY

We constantly mimic and conform to those around us, and it’s not always about vanity. When the entire culture eats most meals with utensils instead of hands, following this is not about posturing: it simply demonstrates a shared commitment to the social contract. When a member of society refuses to assimilate basic cultural norms, it signals to others that this person is a trust risk.

On the other hand, ostentatiously eating your Snickers with utensils because you think it makes you look classy is mimetic desire in action:

The natural desire to adhere to a social order differs from the particular conformity we choose when we mold ourselves in the image of an idol. The recent “influencer” phenomenon is perhaps our culture’s lowest and most vain example of this. Still, it’s nothing new to human nature—influencer culture is simply exploiting this tendency deliberately for profit. As with my goofy example of handbags, I think the same applies to books and other cultural objects that signify an aspiration that appeals to us. Do we always sincerely like the works of this artist or that band, or do they project something about the person we wish to be perceived as, the status we aspire to? Books often function the same way, with titles serving as passports to some and red flags to others.

I recently perused comments on a Story Club with George Saunders (paywalled) post wherein he asked subscribers to respond to the recent New Yorker article “The End of the English Major. One commenter wrote:

A few months ago, I had a brilliant young Stanford-educated engineer show me the list of books his business mentor had given him to help him find his way in the world. I won’t name the books but they were the typical Silicon Valley self-assured nihilists spouting over-confident dross unhinged from reality. Aghast, I sent him a pile of books - some Saunders, Foster Wallace, Austen, Mantel, Rilke, Douglas Adams ( Hitchhikers Guide being the best business advice book of all time). [It goes on like this.]

To date, 78 commenters endorsed this. Again, mimesis is not about what we sincerely LIKE but what we want to BE LIKE—the pack we want to run with, the status we hope to gain. But we see how individuals can also become the bone fought over by rival dogs. Social lives are complicated!

This is one reason autonomy is crucial to keeping the shit at shoe level.

Snobbism

While we’re at it, let’s take a brief aside on snobbism. Girard described snobbism as a “Sterile oscillation between pride and shame,” by which maybe he meant that the snob counterintuitively behaves the prideful way he does because of his inherent sense of inferiority, which he overcompensates for by being an arrogant asshole:

“We shall never despise the snob as much as he despises himself.” The snob is not essentially despicable; he tries to escape his own subjective feeling of contemptibility by assuming the new being which he supposedly procures through snobbism. The snob thinks he is always on the point of securing this and behaves as if he has already done so. This he acts with intolerable arrogance. Snobbism is an inextricable mixture of pride and meanness, and it is this very mixture which defines metaphysical desire.”

This manifests in several ways, but the most familiar, of course, is displaying preferences for the “right” sorts of things, whether they be books and art, foodstuffs, fashions, philosophies, points on a map, etc.

The snob does not dare trust his own judgment, he desires only objects desired by others. That is why he is the slave of the fashionable.

There’s certainly no reason to pity snobs, but also no reason to fear them. Best, in fact, to ignore them.

Individualism

Photo by Miti on Unsplash

Individualism, on the other hand, is the antithesis of mimesis and snobbery. Girard’s ideas about spontaneity and autonomy versus mimetic desire reminded me of Joseph Campbell, most known for his comparative studies of world religion and mythology and development of the Hero’s Journey archetype. He spoke a lot about what separated the West culturally and philosophically from everywhere else and determined that it was our emphasis on the importance of the individual. Individualism is often misunderstood, distorted, and condemned as self-seeking, egotism, or narcissism. But this is not what Western individualism aspires to, or what I believe Campbell meant when he spoke about the West’s celebration of individualism as its defining glory:

We have two great Europes—the Europe of Greece and Rome, and the Europe of the Celts and Germans. And the stress on the individual—the individual not as the subject of the state, but a citizen of the state, the state being the vehicle of his will—this is European. And already in the in the Greek understanding of what happened at Marathon and Thermopylae and so forth, you have the appreciation of themselves as very different from the whole Orient. There was enormous respect for the Egyptians, for Egypt, but they were the Orient. And in the Orient, you don't have individuals. You have people have certain types, certain memberships, certain races, certain strata of society.

We're beginning to get it back. I say the Orient is overtaking us again. But there have been moments in European history—this little peninsula of consciousness in the field of the great Eurasian-African world mass—where the individual has stood forth. . . .

What is put on you by the society relieves you of personal responsibility. This is the attitude of the soldier. A good soldier is not responsible for what he does, he is responsible for how well he does it. And that's the attitude of Oriental life. When a draft comes along, and a Western individual becomes a soldier, very often he has a terrific psychological crisis to face because he has to move into another order of virtue. And it's the order of the earliest sort of humanity where there are no individuals but only agents of an impersonal order. And then no one's responsible for the order either, because that comes down from ancestors. So no one's responsible for anything. And you have an absolutely cold-blooded situation. (High Period of Arthurian Romance-1967)

This is not to suggest that other non-Western cultures are not exceptional in their own right. Of course they are. But when people exist as avatars for whatever social class or group they are shunted into, their individuality is constrained—or erased—by it, along with avenues for their creativity, curiosity, and aspiration. It’s important to recognize, especially in the face of growing occidentalism, what a rare and fragile thing it is that defines Western civilization.

Freedom

One of the most interesting (and perhaps controversial) concepts in Girard’s book, via Stendhal, is that:

it is harder to live life as a free man than as a slave . . . only those who can conquer freedom deserve it.

Faced with an infinite menu, many become overwhelmed by limitless choices—by the act of choosing. Anarchic systems fail. Borderless countries collapse. Open-ended projects are never completed.

Men who cannot look freedom in the face are exposed to anguish. They look for a banner on which to fix their eyes. There is no longer God, king, or lord to link them to the universal. To escape the feeling of particularity they imitate another’s desires; they choose substitute gods because they are not able to give up infinity.

Freedom and chaos are not synonymous. We need order to thrive. We look to those whose vision funnels infinity into something we can grasp. We can’t create something from nothing, and half the job of creation is exclusion—deciding what something is also means deciding what it is not, just as the sculptor removes all the stone that isn’t the statue. The question of freedom is not whether order is necessary but who defines it—ourselves or others? Because abdicating the choice does not obviate the need. 

SPONTANEITY

Where spontaneous desire is invigorating and pure, borrowed envious desire is corrosive and toxic.

Passion may not necessarily lead to success (and vanity often does, unfortunately.) But whether speaking about writing or life generally, there’s some consolation in pursuing a course we know to be ours alone. There’s also clarity. Borrowed desires are an intellectual and emotional dead end. But we can still discover our own desires. That’s our compass.

In another of Campbell’s lectures, this time addressing the great Grail romances of medieval Europe (which I wrote more about here), he spoke about the kind of passion Girard praised:

Also in the Grail legends, what was the Wasteland that the Grail hero was trying to reawaken to life? The Wasteland was Europe of the twelfth century where everybody was believing what he had to believe and doing what he had to do. And if something awakened in him, it was crushed. Wolfram von Eschenbach makes this very, very clear in his poem Parzival.

And who would go on to be the savior of this community, of this world? The one who acted out of his own spontaneity, and whose heart was noble. I don't like to say it, but there are people who don't have noble hearts. But the expectation is that the salvation of the world was to come from one with a noble heart acting out of that spontaneously.

Simply following one’s desires isn’t enough, because those can often arise from vanity. Spontaneous desires come from a good and productive place. In this worldview, if a desire manifests as something ignoble, it probably derives from a mimetic desire or rivalry to begin with. Giving rein to such desires is spiritual and social poison.

It is through spontaneous life, and the leading of that we can save our society. Now when T.S. Eliot picks up the idea of the Wasteland for our society, it's simply this: of people doing things they're told to do. People going into business because it's where you earn your money and you get those five things that Professor Maslow spoke about: prestige and security and all that. Is that what you're living for? That's the key to the wasteland life. (The Grail Quest and the Wasteland)

Indeed, perhaps T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland is more of a Girardian hellscape of mimetic desire than anything else?

Disillusionment

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash

One of Girard’s more astute observations is the inevitable disillusionment with the object once it is obtained. Perhaps this is why pursuing these objects leaves their subjects empty and why this mimetic world feels like such a Wasteland. The object—whatever it may be—only seems to retain its power while it remains an abstract goal, whether it represents a material gain or a social advantage. The object, previously on an altar, is profaned once won, and the ecstatic, spiritual pleasure it signified quickly dissipates. It’s a disappointment that quickly gives way to buyer’s remorse. Imitation can’t live up to the real thing.

In Girard’s model, the Grail can’t heal wounds or make one immortal—it’s just a cup, and believing in the quest was the real thrill. What’s more, it can’t initiate the holder into the new being he hoped to become once he’d attained it. (Imagine the old man’s dismay when he discovers the young trophy wife can’t make him virile again.) So, the subject must either realize his folly and evolve or find a new object for his questing.

Masochism

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

We are masochists when we no longer choose our mediator because of the admiration which he inspires in us but because of the disgust we seem to inspire in him.  

Girard offers Tristan as an example:

Isolde would be less attractive if she were not the promised wife of the king, for it is to royalty, in the most absolute sense of the word, that Tristan aspires.

That aspiration didn’t work out so great for Tristan. Examples of such masochism still abound today, including a “royal” specimen that shall remain nameless. But less haughty individuals, from shock jocks to mass shooters, also revel in infamy—actively courting the disgust of a mediator. Girard cuts to the bone with this prescient description of the virtue-signaling inherent in masochism and the satisfaction derived from it:

The masochist doesn’t want to crush the wicked so much as to prove to them their wickedness and his own virtue; he wants to cover them in shame. . . the masochist turns this hatred into a duty and condemns everyone who does not hate along with him.

If that sounds painfully familiar, Girard has no shortage of insights like this into both human nature and society. I come back to this one in particular:

The revolutionaries thought they would be destroying vanity when they destroyed the privileges of the noble. But vanity is like a virulent cancer that spreads in a more serious form throughout the body just when one thinks it has been removed. Who is there left to imitate after the “tyrant“? Henceforth men shall copy each other; idolatry of one person is replaced by hatred of a hundred thousand rivals . . . democracy is one vast middle-class court where courtiers are everywhere and the king is nowhere.

When we have systematically slain all the old myths, the old heroes, what’s left? Influencers? Activists? Advertisements? Some unholy hybrid of them all? We have no role models because we have infinite role models. And all of the useless. What now?

Fulfillment

Photo by Niilo Isotalo on Unsplash

Indifference is never simply neutral; it is never pure absence of desire… but a desire of oneself.

Campbell believed an incident in the text of the thirteenth century anonymous Grail romance, Queste del Saint Graal, perfectly encapsulates the essence of this uniquely Western desire.

When the Arthurian court sits down to a banquet, and an image of the veiled Grail appears before them, Arthur’s nephew Gawain proposes that the company go on a quest to behold it unveiled:

And now we come to the text that interested me. The text said: they thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path. Because where there's a way or path it is someone else's path. . . .

You can take your instructions and your guidances from others, but you must find your own path. And this is the quality of the European spirit, which for other cultures is so silly and romantic. What is it we are questing for? It's the fulfillment of that which is potential in ourselves. And in questing for it, it's not an ego trip. It is an adventure to bring to fulfillment that which is to be your gift to the world—which is yourself. There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled; you become a sign, you become a signal. And this is, I say, the way to find, and live, and become the realization of your own personal myth. (A Path Of Your Own)

“To find, and live, and become the realization of your own personal myth.” Is this not what we strive to do when we write? Why, then, would any artist want to mimic another? Girard said our true path lies in “emotional autonomy, spontaneity of desires, indifference to the opinion of others”—the artist’s holy trinity, the means for counter-mimesis. Yet, authors and artists are among the most mimetic creatures on Earth. We’re constantly told to “emulate the greats.” Play the charades. Fake it until we make it. Everywhere we see writers frantic to let each other know they read the cool books, have the correct opinions, use the approved vocabulary, go to the fancy schools, know the right people. . . . 

Who cares?

These are all other people’s paths. None are the spontaneous produce of an original, organic, uniquely weird mind. None of them represent the real you or me—the only you or me that will ever be. We have only this one life and one chance to be our genuine selves. Why be anything else?

---

---

References:

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Mythic Living, lecture 1.4.2, The Grail Quest and the Wasteland, ℗ 2011 Joseph Campbell Foundation Publications

Personal Myth, lecture 1.4.5, A Path of Your Own, ℗ 2011 Joseph Campbell Foundation Publications

The Arthurian Tradition, lecture 1.6.3, High Period of Arthurian Romance, ℗ 2012 Joseph Campbell Foundation Publications