Of the French intellectuals of the last century, the one who deserves the most attention and respect is the one who most people have never heard of: Rene Girard. This is a shame. While Foucault (a pedophile), Derrida (a nihilist and anarchist), and Badiou (a Maoist) have seen their work studied past all usefulness, Girard was relegated to the margins: first to Buffalo and then to English seminars and lastly to seminaries. His close reading of the Western Canon would have done him in if his Catholicism hadn’t first.
Girard had a fascinating take on literature, and his theories on the novel, desire, and civilizational violence seem especially prescient during these days when we so badly need a scapegoat. He’s less edgy and transgressive than his countrymen (if you care for such posturing), and he has little interest in desecrating meaning, language, or the human person. For these reasons, he’s worth a curious person’s time.
I encountered Girard by chance. His name appeared twice in one day—once in an old essay by Roger Scruton and again in a post by an anon on twitter. This double-shot caught my attention and eventually I found my way to Deceit, Desire & the Novel, Girard’s first book. Loaded with insight into the art of the novel and flecked with sharp aphorism, this book puzzled me enough to read more of his work. I don’t claim an expertise in Girard’s work, and I don’t always buy what he sells (I’m not sure about his theory that myths are forgotten memories of societal violence), but I find his dignified, anti-anti-ism refreshing and valuable.
For those wanting to know more about Girard, I recommend The Girard Reader, a greatest hits collection with interviews and an introduction to frame and support Girard’s key ideas. I also recommend Girard, Theology, and Pop Culture, a new collection of essays that attempt to take Girard into modern cinema, comic books, and church, including a piece by yours truly. If you have a couple of hundred bucks (!) to spend on an academic text, you could do worse.
This series of interviews with Girard introduces the man and his ideas. His take on literature and life might capture you like it did me.
War on Reality—and Us
If you feel like you’ve lost grip on reality, there's a reason: You’re bombarded by lies. These lies pour from the mouths of government and media. In Canada, we have a military eager to turn its propaganda machine against its own citizens. In the UK, officials terrorized citizens with the help of a “nudge” unit—psychologists employed to leverage fear against the people to push pandemic measures. (For more, listen to Laura Dodsworth, author of the investigative report, State of Fear, speak about state propaganda with Trish Wood.)
We are living through what Alex Gutentag calls a “War on Reality.” A war on reality inverts (and demolishes) truth: You save lives by killing people; you turn science from a method of inquiry into a doctrine of faith (and scientists into priests); you prolong social and economic pain until people say “uncle”; and you turn language into mush, altering definitions to uphold lies and hide incompetence.
For the last year-and-a-half, I’ve been watching this war play out and wondering how other generations might have responded, what we can do to exit this madness, and whether trust in institutions can be restored.
On these topics I could rage for hours. I won’t—for now.
I do think, sometimes, about how Girard might read the history we’re living. I wish he were alive to comment because I struggle to see the current moment in Girardian terms. This might be because this story isn’t over. It might also be because, with an information war raging all around us, the story itself becomes impossible to read. It loses coherence. It changes depending on the source. And, given the interventions of state propagandists, it has been obscured on purpose so that blame cannot be painted on the guilty party—those people who let their errant desires lead us to hell—but is instead smeared onto innocent victims, who we then cast from society.
If I understand Girard correctly, the smearing of guilt on the innocent only happens if we let it happen. Girard claims historical events have exposed and nullified the scapegoat mechanism. Unlike the ancients, we, today, cannot claim ignorance to how society redirects social rage onto innocent parties. We have to accept what we—through our esteemed leaders—did to ourselves.
But will we?
God Punished Me
[A brief interlude in a grocery store with my old, fictional friend Joe.]
I recall a moment many years ago, back when my twin daughters were seven months old. Amy worked the night shift, nursing the girls and keeping them occupied when they woke up crying. Amy had it rough, especially when the girls were teething, and I’d have to get up and help her quiet the girls. She danced one kid and I danced the other. Around seven in the morning, the girls fell asleep, and Amy crashed, and I showered and slept in the van for a half-hour—safe if the babies woke up screaming. Half-asleep, I motored through the day, fueled on caffeine and donuts, and we’d do it all again in the evening.
On weekends, I worked the early morning shift. I loaded the girls into the van and dumped them into the double-decker stroller we bought used and pushed them through the 24-hour grocery store. One frigid January morning, the girls slept in the stroller as I shopped for diapers, frozen French fries, frozen egg rolls, frozen battered chicken breasts, frozen pizza, ice cream, and everything else we needed for the week. I loaded the food into the stroller’s undercarriage and filled two baskets that hung from my arms. I called it my Saturday morning workout.
I finished shopping at about five-thirty in the morning and pushed the stroller (the girls now awake and cooing for breast milk) into the express checkout, the only lane open at this time in the morning. A man in an electric scooter was in front of me. I pegged him at about 80-years-old. He wore plaid pajama bottoms, his eyes were jaundiced, and he had a cruel scab flaking off his forehead. He sat in his chair while the woman working the cash rang through the crackers and cheese slices he was buying.
The man turned when put my frozen pizzas on the conveyor belt. He smiled a sooty smile at my girls and coughed into his hand.
“What are they, five months?” he asked.
“Seven,” I replied.
“Girls?”
“Yeah.”
“Twins. That’s nice.”
“It is nice.”
He smiled at the girls, and they inclined their heads to get a better look at the man. I emptied my baskets and out of the corner of my eye watched my girls and the old man stare at each other. They were still staring when I had finished unloading our haul.
“They’re very curious,” I told the man.
“There’s lots to be curious about this world,” he said, not taking his eyes off the girls. “Hello!” he said. “You’re both very pretty.”
“Sir?” said the cashier.
The man held out his credit card to the cashier without taking his eyes off my girls. He turned in his seat only to scratch his name on the slip.
“They’re precious,” he said to me, then blew the girls a kiss. “You’re beautiful.”
He hit a button on his handlebar, and his electric scooter zipped forward and carried the man down the aisle at the front of the store. My girls turned to look at me, unsure about whether to cry.
“That’s an old man,” I told them.
I paid for our groceries and jammed the bagged groceries into the undercarriage. What I couldn’t fit I’d have to hang off my arms. I shoved the bags under there, risking bruising Amy’s pears than having my arms ripped out of their sockets.
As I struggled, I heard a buzz and looked up. The old man had returned. He’d looped through the store and pulled into the vacant checkout lane next to us.
“When it was my time to have beautiful children like this,” he said to me, “I was too busy whoring around. I had a girl for a while, a great girl. I didn’t treat her right,” he said, “and God punished me for it.”
Before I could work up a response, he put his scooter in gear and gunned for the exit. The cashier hadn’t heard what he had said. My girls shifted in their snowsuits and mewed, nearing the end of their patience for sitting in the stroller. I hauled us and everything we’d bought to the van, loaded the heavy bags, buckled the girls into their car seats, and stowed the stroller in the back.
I saw the man in his electric scooter waiting for the lights to change so that he could cross a snowy six-lane road. I blew past him as fast as I could.
Robert Grant Price is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories, My Girlfriend, the Hologram. He is on twitter @pricerobertg