Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Part 1

psychos, lovers, & coquettes

Hi all,

A few updates before diving in. First, I have two events coming up in the next month, one virtual, and one live in NYC:

• This Saturday, October 9 at 2pm ET, I’ll be speaking to French novelist Victoria Mas about her acclaimed debut, The Mad Women’s Ball, which was also recently released as an Amazon Original film. This is a virtual event hosted by Albertine, and you can RSVP through them or via the French Embassy.

• On Tuesday, October 26 at 8pm ET, I’ll be in-person at Book Club Bar in NYC to discuss Portrait with COVETEUR beauty editor Ama Kwarteng, who wrote this thoughtful review of the novel (and was the first to connect it to Luke Burgis’s book Wanting and the work of René Girard). Proof of vaccination is required. NYC friends and readers: I would love to see you!

Second, if you missed my conversation with Luke about Wanting back in August, it is up on YouTube. I mention this because today’s newsletter, which is the first of two parts, dives straight into the depths of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard’s dizzyingly complex yet fiendishly logical 1961 work of psychosocial literary criticism (literary-critical psychosociology?), and Luke summarizes its central thesis with great clarity and accessibility. You may also want to check out his “Mimetic Desire 101” post, my previous newsletter on Gossip Girl, or this interview we did together before reading on. The new review of Portrait in Genealogies of Modernity by Trevor Cribben Merrill is likewise germane; Trevor is a Girard scholar as well as the author of the novel Minor Indignities (which I raved about last time).

A final word of warning: if you haven’t yet read The Portrait of a Mirror, there are spoilers below. Ok, enough admin. Before I veer too close to utility, let’s go.

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There are few more pleasurable experiences than reading a book that feels written specifically for you. It is, perhaps, why so many of us feel compelled to write them, “write the book you want to read” being clichéd advice for good reason. But in many ways I think it’s even more delightful to stumble across the alarmingly kindred mind of another. It makes one feel less alone. The loneliness angle of it was top of mind for me in coincidentally reading Kristen Radtke’s elegant, genre-bending graphic essay collection Seek You last week as well, but the book I’m really referring to here is Deceit, Desire, and the Novel itself. Reading it felt like unraveling the layers of my own mind to finally understand the individual knots that connect a familiar tapestry. Its laws explain everything about my novel—from why I felt compelled to write it, to its content, influences, and themes, to its public reception, to my response to the response. Girard even writes in these complex, palindromic sentences! I often had to read them two or three times, but with one (material) exception, I found his logic not just convincing, but irrefutable.

In DDN, Girard argues “The great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire.” He focuses on five of them to showcase the spiraling, almost mathematically predictable psychosocial dynamics they illustrate as the distance between the desiring “subject” (hero) and his “mediator” of desire progressively collapses toward the recursive loop he refers to as “double mediation.” Girard’s nomenclature is frankly pretty confusing, and Luke’s work is helpful here. “External mediation” is the same realm Luke refers to as “celebristan,” where the distances between subjects like us and mediators of desire like celebrities are far enough apart that there’s no shame in imitative impulses. Conversely, in the world of “internal mediation”—“freshmanistan” in Luke’s more intuitive parlance—everyone’s on the same level, caught between imitating everyone else in the ironic hidden battle for self-differentiation. This is precisely what I was getting at in Portrait when I wrote “nothing highlights difference quite like homogeneity.” I was thinking specifically of the business card scene in American Psycho, which exquisitely captures “internal mediation” becoming “double mediation” (you can find the original text from Ellis’s novel here, but Christian Bale nails it, in my opinion):

It’s tempting to write off Patrick Bateman’s behavior as deeply irrational—dude is way too worked up over a font. This is the “romantic” interpretation Girard describes as the mainstream critical mode of his day and is hot to expose (I’d argue it still reigns). The “romantic lie” here—that Bateman’s desire for Paul Allen’s business card is autonomous and spontaneous—has the enormous advantage of flattering the viewer. We are predisposed to dismiss Bateman’s pain as just punishment for such absurd pettiness and superficiality. No one should get that upset over a business card, we think, he is different from us. Ha ha. But Girard meticulously deduces the logic underlying Bateman’s escalating anguish:

In the world of internal mediation, the contagion is so widespread that everyone can become his neighbor’s mediator without ever understanding the role he is playing. This person who is a mediator without realizing it may himself be incapable of spontaneous desire. Thus he will be tempted to copy the copy of his own desire. What was for him in the beginning only a whim is now transformed into a violent passion. We all know that every desire redoubles when it is seen to be shared. Two identical but opposite triangles are thus superimposed on each other. Desire circulates between the two rivals more and more quickly, and with every cycle it increases in intensity like the electric current in a battery which is being charged.

We now have a subject-mediator and a mediator-subject, a model-disciple and a disciple-model. Each imitates the other while claiming that his own desire is prior and previous. Each looks on the other as an atrociously cruel persecutor. All the relationships are symmetrical (emphasis added throughout).

A business card has the power to unravel Patrick Bateman because it’s not about the business card at all; his desire is metaphysical. It’s the same desire that’s driven him to Wall Street—and rape, and murder. “There is only one metaphysical desire but the particular desires which instantiate this primordial desire are of infinite variety,” explains Girard. What Bateman really wants to be is “master of the universe”—and not just a master of the universe but the master of the universe—the master of masters: his colleagues’ god. The business card scene is notable not for its satirical indictment of an evil man who isn’t like us, but its veracious portrait of a desirous man who is. It is uncomfortable precisely because we are like him—or at least have the capacity to be. What actually separates Bateman from us is not what he wants, but his terrifying inability to hide it. The novel is famous, albeit highly controversial, thanks to the romantic lie, but Ellis’s true genius rests in exposing the fine line between American Psycho and human psychology.

The five “great novelists” Girard himself chooses to support his theory are Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoyevsky. I’ve never read Stendhal or Proust, but as the Ellis scene illustrates, that hardly matters—it wasn’t strictly necessary to have read any of them. Girard might just as easily have chosen Austen, Eliot, Tolstoy, James, and Wharton (indeed, both Eliot and Tolstoy get passing acknowledgment). The patterns of mimetic desire arise time and again. Emma realizes she loves Mr. Knightly only when Harriet’s confesses to; Casaubon grows madly jealous of Will in spite of his limited affection for Dorothea; Anna’s fasciation with Vronsky is overtly mediated by romantic novels; Ralph’s fortune doesn't give Isabel Archer freedom—it gives her a new set of models and mediators. Where to even start with The Age of Innocence? Ellen and May are cousins—similar—waging a double-mediated war over Newland. May’s superior dissimulation and positively ferocious cunning wins his physical presence, but it is Ellen, at a distance, whom Newland deifies.

In retrospect, it was precisely the moments in these novels veering closest to exposing the mechanics Girard describes that I sought to imitate in The Portrait of a Mirror. To imitate and, I should say, press to their extremity.

Vivien and Wes’s interactions follow the mechanics of internal mediation in past novels (I was thinking explicitly of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina), and reveal the inadequacy of attaining the desired object in curing metaphysical desire. As Girard explains in the second chapter of DDN, “Men Become Gods”: “at the origin of bovarysm . . . is the failure of a more or less conscious attempt at an apotheosis of the self.” Sexual desire is merely the reflection of what these characters are really chasing, hence why sex cannot sate it. Vivien and Wes both understand this conceptually; it’s outlined in the prologue to her exhibition: “Art, in its broadest sense, is perhaps our only real chance for apotheosis. It is not through life, but rather its mimesis, its artistic mirror, that we glimpse the possibility of living forever” (emphasis added). Vivien makes the connection to Wes explicit: “As a human being, she thought, he was reminiscent of a work of art: a well-valued one, prominently displayed in an exclusive gallery, so obviously expensive she wouldn’t even dream of asking the price.” Wes demonstrates similar thinking in worshiping Vivien from a distance, etc. Their understanding stops just short of self-application—until their tryst still leaves them wanting.

Dale and Diana’s attraction is, of course, tied to metaphysical desire too; they are constantly deifying each other. There’s the whole MercuryCard “pay like a god” catchphrase, which Trevor brilliantly analyzes in his review, finding even greater meaning than I consciously applied to it. In Paris, Dale thinks Diana looks “less like a nymph than a goddess,” and, when they manage to resist each other anyway: “that the ultimate act of power isn’t getting what you want, but rather sacrificing it willingly. Because that is an act of power over yourself, of power over power. And what kind of mortal has that?” Their mutual resistance was, I think, what I’d thought of as the novel’s “innovation”—the thing I hadn’t quite seen before, and thus felt compelled to write. Then I read this in DDN:

To imitate one’s lover’s desire is to desire oneself, thanks to that lover’s desire. This particular form of double mediation is called “coquetry.”

The coquette does not wish to surrender her precious self to the desire which she arouses, but were she not to provoke it, she would not feel so precious. The favor she finds in her own eyes is based exclusively on the favor with which she is regarded by Others. For this reason the coquette is constantly looking for proofs of this favor; she encourages and stirs up her lover’s desires, not in order to give herself to him but to enable her the better to refuse him.

And then I read this in DDN, and nearly fell off my chair:

When the two rivals are very close to each other, double mediation ends in double fascination. Askesis for the sake of desire becomes involuntary and causes paralysis. The two partners are faced with very similar concrete possibilities; they thwart each other so successfully that neither of them is able to approach the object. They remain opposite each other, immobilized in an opposition that absorbs them totally. Each is for the other his own image emerging from the mirror to bar his way.

It’s pretty hard not to see Narcissus in the center of this mirror!

Dale and Diana diverge from Wes and Vivien—and Emma, Anna, Patrick, etc.—not in their subjection to the laws of mimetic desire, but in their superior understanding of them. They not only understand double mediation conceptually; they uncommonly realize it applies to them—they flat out discuss it. And while their restraint is agonizing, their mutual understanding of their own illusions also genuinely makes them feel less alone. Diana and Dale’s self-awareness has become so sophisticated that at moments they’ve made the opposite blunder: instead of mistaking desire for love, they’ve mistaken love for desire. At such times, their restraint is no longer due to coquetry so much as the fear of destroying their metaphysical bond. The recursive function has passed the point of stability of meaning, but instead of descending into Dostoyevskian madness like a couple American Psychos, they’re frozen: living figures on Keats’s Grecian urn.

Thanks for reading, and look out for part two, which will include some of Girard’s blistering takes on snobbery plus why the only thing I disagree with is his conclusion.

Very best,

Natasha

https://natashajoukovsky.com