Posts Tagged ‘René Girard’

Stanford’s William Mahrt, a leading scholar in early music, died today at 85. He conducted Gregorian chant for more than 60 years and inspired and guided generations of scholars. He directed Stanford’s Early Music Singers and St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola. He was also a personal friend. This is an article I wrote for Stanford Report about Bill Mahrt on October 2nd, 2007.

For nearly two millennia, the sound has been a regular pulse beneath the skin of Western civilization. It reverberated through Dante’s mind as he scratched out the cantos of the Purgatorio. It was the inaudible vein of thought running beneath the chords of Mozart’s Requiem. Crusaders trudged to the East with these melodies in their heart, but they were too late – Jerusalem had echoed with it centuries earlier. It was ubiquitous, universal – that is, until about 40 years ago.

William Mahrt directs the St. Ann Choir, which he says has had a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” 

The tide may be turning, and, if so, it will be William Mahrt’s moment in the sun.

The origins of Gregorian chant are enigmatic. It appears to have its roots in fourth-century Jerusalem. The link with Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) is the byproduct of early spin, based on what is probably an erroneous assumption that he composed and collected early chant.

The otherworldly effect of the music is hard to describe, but Mahrt, an associate professor of music at Stanford, recently gave it a try: “It is what we call monophonic – that is to say, it’s a melody that’s unaccompanied,” he said. “A free rhythm has an ability to evoke eternal things, more than passages tied down to regular time. It’s a sprung rhythm that has a freedom to it – like Hopkins’ poetry.”

Mahrt has conducted Gregorian chant for more than 40 years without a break. He is the director of Stanford’s Early Music Singers and of the St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto. He instructs singers in the mysteries of “the chant,” as well as the glorious polyphonic music that came after it. In fact, it’s possible that there is more chant sung in Palo Alto than anywhere else in the country, with the possible exception of monastic communities. Mahrt has inspired and guided generations of scholars and singers.

One of his star students, Kerry McCarthy, now an assistant professor of music at Duke University, is the author of Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd’s Gradualia and one of the world’s leading scholars on William Byrd, the preeminent English composer of the Renaissance.

“One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life was to come to Stanford and work with Bill,” McCarthy said. “The things I learned from him here I could not have learned anywhere else. Not just in the classroom, but in performance. Especially in performance.”

Acclaimed music writer and jazz scholar Ted Gioia recalls going to hear the St. Ann Choir, composed of students and members of the community at large, when he was studying for an MBA at Stanford. Often he found only a few fellow listeners in the pews.

“The thing I most miss about Palo Alto is going to those Gregorian Masses,” he said. “It’s so energizing. That was the best-kept secret in Palo Alto. Bill was the person who really opened my ears to that. He had a profound influence on my conception of music – through the force of his example.”

Mahrt’s work has indeed been quiet. Furthermore, he has encountered resistance from a church that has not always valued its own heritage.

“There’s a huge resistance from the clerical establishment to doing any of this,” said Stanford alumna Susan Altstatt, who has been a member of the St. Ann Choir since 1967. “Bill has lived a charmed life in this regard. Bill has managed to do what he’s doing by talking to bishops and priests and knowing what he’s talking about. He’s a hero, as far as I’m concerned.”

Mahrt explained the resistance: “Gregorian chant went out of style when the language was changed” – that is, when the universal Latin was changed to the vernacular English. “In the absence of any good solution about what to replace the chant with, I would say commercial interests stepped in and hawked a progressively cheaper and cheaper music, and the commercial interests still prevail today.”

For example, one of the leading publishers of “missalettes,” the flimsy and disposable paperbacks that include “new” church music, distributes 4.3 million of the quarterly copies a year and owns 10,000 music copyrights. That’s a lot of commercial interests.

The result was summarized by one disgruntled reviewer on Amazon.com: “The Roman Catholic Church, seeking to be more ‘relevant’ to its flock in the antispiritual climate of the second half of the 20th century, abandoned its ancient Latin liturgy and dignified music in favor of poorly worded vernacular texts and worse music. This music usually tends toward banal couplets set to insipid tunes strummed on ill-tuned guitars and whined into a microphone to the banging of a tambourine.”

Mahrt said there is a reason for the ill-tuned guitars and whining: “The standard of performance in recorded pop music is very high. A little combo in a church can’t possibly keep that standard. There isn’t the same standard for chant. Its whole criteria are different. Singers can master it in a different way.”

Unlike other kinds of music, McCarthy said, “You don’t have to have to have wonderful technique and learn to breathe from your diaphragm and so forth and have 20 years of voice lessons. It’s on a very human scale. It’s really self-regenerating. You can sing especially psalms for hours without getting tired, and there aren’t many kinds of music you can say that about.”

According to Mahrt, the St. Ann Choir has created a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” Members of the choir, which performs the year-round cycle of chant, are perhaps the staunchest advocates of the music anywhere: “This is one of the major cultural landmarks of Western society,” Altstatt said. “Its preservation is very important. It has to be sung – it has to come through the human voice. You have to be taught, in a living tradition. You can’t get it through a book. You get hooked on it, you internalize it and need to do it. It’s a splendid thing.”

In recent years, a younger audience, seeking music with a little more history and meaning than its usual fare, has become hooked in a different way: A generation has snapped up Gregorian chant and made recordings into crossover hits. In the last decade, the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos’ Canto Gregoriano would become one of the world’s biggest-selling classical compact discs, with worldwide sales topping 6 million.

But the commotion and hoopla miss the point, Mahrt said. “Chant does arise out of silence, and it goes back to silence,” he said. “In our own culture, we sometimes don’t have any silence. I think among students, for instance. They go into the dorms and the walls are thumping 24 hours a day. There is never a chance to be alone, in silence, within your own residence. But the fact is, I think, myself, the best location for the contact with God is in silence.

“When silence occurs, then you can look interiorly and find an order and a purpose that the noise of the media running day and night obscures. So, likewise, the chant, which is pure, a single melody, is not complicated, arises out of silence and goes back into it, as a way of returning to that interiority.”

Early interest

Mahrt grew up in a small farming community in eastern Washington – a place where “church music” meant sentimental hymns sung by a “little choir of ladies who sang to a harmonium.” His University of Washington master’s thesis as a pianist was the work of Robert Schumann. Mahrt discovered the chant at the University of Washington. Dominican friars, who were Catholic chaplains at the university, desperate to augment their choir, told him, “You have to sing chant for Holy Week.”

“It’s the hardest chant of the year in some ways. So we did it,” he recalled. “And I said this is what I’ve been missing. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I joined the Cathedral Choir and sang chant there for the next two-and-a-half years.”

He headed to Stanford to study Mozart and also joined the St. Ann Choir, which had been launched by one of the university’s mathematics professors in 1963. A year later, the professor departed for another university and handed the reins to Mahrt. The year was a landmark in chant in another way: That was the year the Catholic Church began using local languages in the liturgy, and the chant was all but abandoned.

“Our choir was started one year before the language changed – if we had tried to start one year later, we might not have been able to do it,” Mahrt said. “I saw this music becoming less and less popular with people who were entranced with folk music.”

The leap from Mozart to the chant was not as radical as might be supposed; Mahrt points out that “certainly Mozart grew up knowing chant – a very 18th-century chant.”

“Most composers through the 19th century – in Austria, France, Italy – simply had chant in their background, and in their daily experience of church. It’s something the history books don’t tell you,” Mahrt said.

Mahrt carried on for the next 40 years largely alone. He said he knew his decision to dedicate his life to chant’s preservation would meet conflict, struggles and disappointments. “It’s worth it. Somebody’s got to keep it. It has to be kept alive in various places throughout the world. So we’ve got to do it.”

His persistence may be paying off. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a musician, has taken an interest in restoring musical traditions, as well as encouraging the Latin Mass. The 1,700-year-old Gregorian chant might be an idea whose time has come again. In fact, it might be an idea rather hard to kill.

“One wonderful thing about chant is it’s almost viral,” said McCarthy, who has started her own chant group at Duke. “People who learn it tend to go somewhere else – academics, especially, tend to be migratory birds. When we move to the new place, we start a chant group ourselves. I calculate that in about 60 years, we’ll have taken over the world.”

Mahrt’s group has spawned spinoffs across the United States, besides the one at Duke. Alstatt’s daughter Alison, who is doing doctoral work in medieval music at the University of Erlangen in Germany, joined the St. Ann Choir when she was 11 and has started a group in Berkeley, where she had been a student at the University of California. There are now groups in Los Angeles, Cleveland and Arkansas.

Mahrt has even found a substitute to direct the choir – finally allowing him to take a more active role in promoting chant nationally and internationally, given the recent renewal of interest. Does he feel free at last, after four decades of being tethered to the annual cycle of chant? Mahrt looks up in wonderment at the question: “It’s a fulfillment, not an oppression. I miss it when I go away. It is a routine, but the music and liturgy are all part of the rhythm of life.”

Postscript from jazz scholar and Substacker Ted Gioia on January 1, 2025: “Not many knew that Gregorian chant and medieval/Renaissance polyphony flourished in Palo Alto — but I’d be there, and I’d see René Girard there too. It was all because of William Mahrt—a beatific soul (who also encouraged my jazz teaching at Stanford, at a time when some were skeptical about its legitimacy). He we beloved by those who knew him.”

The tributes continue to pour in:

From David A. Lawrence: “Bill’s unprecedented accomplishments as both a scholar and the leader of the St. Ann’s Choir are well-documented. What I feel compelled to add, in the wake of my shock at the news of his passing, is what an entirely sweet human being he was. In a profession that does not lack competition for awards, accolades and promotions, Bill was kind to everybody. In my 50 years at Stanford I never once heard anyone mention a harsh word about him. In addition, he was a superb teacher. In my early years on the faculty I would disguise myself as a student and sneak into his classes. Of course Bill knew about it, and had absolutely no problem with it. I was particularly struck by the fact that, while his primary focus may have been on a composer like Guillaume de Machaut, nobody taught the music of Johannes Brahms with greater insight and sensitivity than Bill. I will miss him terribly—both professionally and personally. Rest in peace, dear man.

From Patrick Hunt: “As usual, Cynthia Haven’s insight, gentle appreciation and honed writing go to the heart of a matter, in this case Mahrt’s beloved legacy on medieval chant. I was always struck by Mahrt’s meditative quietude and humility, never one to seek attention even when so well deserved. Well done, Cynthia!”

From John O. Robison: Bill came to Stanford as a young professor in September 1972, when I had just finished my MA and was beginning the doctoral program. I always thought that hiring Bill was one of the Stanford Music Department’s greatest accomplishments! He was such a tremendous teacher and mentor during my doctoral years at Stanford, and most of my research projects were done under his guidance. Whenever it was time to delve into a new research project, he would simply say “Okay, what do you want to do next?” and let me pursue that topic (anywhere from c. 1000 to 1800) to its fullest potential. I flew out to California for his 80th birthday party in March 2019, gave him one of my Ralph Marlin fish ties as a small present (which I am sure he never wore), and had a nice time explaining how important his mentorship has been to me as a performing musicologist working in vastly different areas of research. He was a very kind person, one who was incredibly dedicated to chant and Catholic church music, and whose presence will live on through all who were fortunate enough to know him. – John O. Robison, Prof. of Musicology, University of South Florida

Interest in René Girard from an unexpected source: the current issue of Air Mail, which describes itself as a “mobile-first digital weekly that unfolds like the better weekend editions of your favorite newspapers.” Dramatist, novelist, and poet Matthew Gasda writes: “We are all Girardians now—whether we know it or not. The concepts minted in the early 1960s by the late French literary critic and philosopher René Girard explain the pathologies of the smartphone age as elegantly as Freud’s explained bourgeois neuroses at the turn of the last century.”

Gaspa is a voice worth listening to. Two years ago, the New York Times noted: “Matthew Gasda spent years writing plays on his electric typewriter, and almost no one seemed to care. With Dimes Square, his depiction of a downtown crowd, he has an underground hit.” And so he’s been a voice worth listening to ever since.

Which is especially good for All Desire is a Desire for Being, just out with Penguin Classics U.S. (The U.K. edition was published last year.) You can buy the book here. Meanwhile, read Gasda’s review of the book.

He continues: “While Freud was renowned in his own time, Girard, who died in 2015, is still far from a household name. A distinguished scholar and the author of nearly 30 books, he never broke through to a mass audience like his contemporary Harold Bloom, who transitioned from high theory to cultural critiques in the 1990s. Girard was not a public intellectual; he was a quietly influential, if recondite, academic: the Velvet Underground, not the Beatles.”

“Just as you don’t need to be a Marxist or a Freudian to find class struggle or the Oedipus complex useful, you do not need to be a Girardian, or a Catholic, to find Girard useful. Girard’s dogged attention to what he calls, echoing Nietzsche, the ‘eternal return’ of the scapegoat mechanism (the cruelty and stupidity of the mob) deserves our attention. Girard warns us, with moving pathos, that we are always on the verge of reprising the horrors of history; we are still prone, especially in times of crisis and change, to retribution and revenge (digital or physical).”

He continues: “All Desire Is a Desire for Being is not a reissue but a new collection of essential essays and aphorisms selected by [Cynthia] Haven. It’s the ideal way to read Girard, who only ever had one big idea. He was the kind of thinker Isaiah Berlin would have called a hedgehog, not a fox. But what an idea. Mimetic rivalry is a profound and disturbing discovery, and Girard dedicated his long and distinguished career to its explication. If he is right, we have to question whether the world we are actively creating—or perhaps passively re-creating—is not very, very wrong.”

Read the whole thing here. The bad news: it’s behind a sort of a paywall. The good news: all you have to do is include your email address at the bottom of the page to get access. Enjoy.

Oedipus was one of René Girard‘s ongoing interests, and his interpretation of the Greek myth was controversial and groundbreaking. Hence, one of the liveliest presentations during last summer’s Paris conference for the French theorist’s centenary was anthropologist Mark Anspach‘s short talk on the subject. Anspach is the editor of 2020’s The Oedipus Casebook: Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. (You can read previous posts by and about him here and here and here and here, among other places.) He began this way:

Last year, French television broadcasted a noteworthy debate between two eminent figures. On one side, a 1960s student activist who later served in the European parliament. On the other, a philosophy professor and former minister of education known for his critiques of French theorists of the ‘60s. I will quote highlights from their debate in the original French to avoid losing any nuances, and then I will attempt an English translation.

And then there will be a quiz.

First in French:

––Tu dis que des conneries.
––Ta gueule!
––La tienne, pauvre crétin.

Now in English:

––You’re spouting pure BS.
––Shut your face!
––You shut yours, you pathetic dumbhead.

When I saw media accounts of this dialogue, I immediately thought of… Sophocles! That is because my view of the Greek playwright was shaped by the late, great Stanford thinker René Girard. As we will see, the quoted lines illustrate the same dynamic of conflict that Girard uncovers in the dialogues of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King.

So now the quiz. The first question is: what was the debate between the former student activist and the philosophy professor about?

Well, based only on the above excerpts, there is no way to know. I quoted from the most heated moment of the dispute, when passions ran highest. But in that moment, the original theme of the debate was forgotten. As Girard tells us, when a conflict escalates, the rivalry itself comes to the fore and the original object of the dispute is lost from view.

That doesn’t mean that the dispute is not originally motivated by real differences in political ideology or conceptual outlook. This brings us to my second question: which of the lines quoted were spoken by the activist and which expressed the Weltanschaung of the philosopher?

Once again, there is no way to know. Even if you studied for this quiz by reading every book either of them ever wrote, it would still be impossible to guess who said “Shut your face” and who replied “You shut yours.” No matter how far apart the antagonists were at the outset, their differences dissolve at the height of their rivalry. As Girard holds, the more a rivalry intensifies, the more the antagonists resemble each other.

Yet the more they resemble each other, the more each is convinced he is right and the other is wrong. As it happens, it was the philosophy professor who said “You shut yours.” At the moment he spoke, he had good reason to believe he was right. Was not his rival wrong to insult him by saying “Shut your face”? He should have kept his big mouth shut!

What the philosopher may not see in the heat of the moment is that, by opening his own mouth and saying “You shut yours,” he is behaving exactly like his antagonist. In fact, he is imitating him. Rivalry fueled by imitation is what Girard dubs mimetic rivalry. As Girard shows, conflicts intensify through mutual imitation, moving toward ever greater reciprocity and symmetry.

The more symmetrical a conflict is, the harder it is to say who’s right and who’s wrong. Indeed, if you look at the reasons invoked by each side, you will often find that both parties are right. The philosopher was right in that his antagonist should not have said “Shut your face.” But his rival was equally right in that the philosopher should not have said he was spouting BS.

Each party sees half the truth: the half that applies to the other. To speak the truth about the other’s role in a dispute without recognizing that the same truth applies to ourselves amounts to scapegoating the other. It amounts to scapegoating even if the other is guilty as charged.

This is a key point. A scapegoat does not have to be innocent. To single out one of the rivals as uniquely responsible for the rivalry is itself a form of scapegoating. If each of two antagonists is guilty, if each speaks only half the truth – the half that applies to the other – then the scapegoating is mutual or reciprocal. This kind of reciprocal scapegoating is typical of mimetic rivalry. It is part of the symmetry that characterizes the rivalry.

Tit-for-tat escalation

But symmetry is not the whole story. There is also a tendency to escalation. Each party tries to get the better of the other by launching a bigger insult, a bolder accusation, a stronger blow. This can be understood as an attempt to break free of the symmetry by establishing what Girard in Oedipus Unbound calls a “dissymmetry” capable of re-differentiating the antagonists.

The philosopher does not merely respond in kind to the phrase “Shut your face” by replying “Shut yours.” Responding in kind would leave both parties on the same footing. He also adds a new observation designed to transcend the tit-for-tat exchange. It is as if he were saying: “You tell me to shut my face. I tell you to shut your face. It may look like we are the same. But there is a difference between us. And that difference is that you are a pathetic dumbhead.”

The precise term used was “cretin.” Strictly speaking, cretinism is a form of mental disability caused by thyroid insufficiency. Now, our philosopher is a lucid and intelligent man. Do we take him at his word when he asserts that his adversary is suffering from cretinism? Of course not. We assume that he is speaking out of anger. We react as the chorus in Oedipus the King reacts amidst the debate between Oedipus and Tiresias. “It is anger, I think, that inspires Tiresias’s words,” says the chorus, “and yours too, Oedipus.”

The debate between Oedipus and Tiresias is at the heart of Girard’s analysis. Oedipus hopes Tiresias will shed light on the murder of the previous ruler, Laius. According to Creon, the oracle blames the plague in Thebes on the fact that this crime was left unpunished, and Oedipus has vowed to hunt down whoever is responsible. But when Oedipus questions Tiresias, the renowned prophet stubbornly refuses to answer.

Oedipus grows increasingly exasperated. Finally, he declares that Tiresias must be guilty himself. Tiresias retorts that it is Oedipus who is guilty. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard interprets Tiresias’s words as “an act of reprisal arising from the hostile exchange.” By accusing Tiresias of being behind the murder of Laius, Oedipus prods him into “hurling the accusation back at him.”

Oedipus dares Tiresias to repeat the accusation. Not only does Tiresias repeat it, he tops it with a new, more terrible charge, insinuating that Oedipus is the son of the man he killed and of the widow he married. It is as if Tiresias were saying: “You accuse me of killing Laius. I accuse you of killing Laius. It may look like we are the same. But there is a difference between us. The difference is that you, Oedipus, are a patricidal motherlover!”

Is Tiresias right? Is Oedipus guilty?

From hunter to hunted

Violence and the Sacred suggests that Oedipus is not guilty. In that book, Girard uses Sophocles’ tragedy to introduce the concept of the surrogate victim or scapegoat. Oedipus, an outsider with a lame foot, is a scapegoat made to bear sole blame for the plague in Thebes. The accusations of patricide and incest leveled against him are typical mythic accusations. As crimes that abolish the most fundamental kinship distinctions, patricide and incest are signifiers of raging undifferentiation.

The plague itself, an illness that strikes everyone without distinction, has the same meaning. The real plague, the gravest crisis afflicting Thebes, is the breakdown of distinctions, the plague of undifferentiation to which the protagonists contribute by hurling back and forth the same accusations. Each accuses the other of being responsible for the crisis.

The question is who will succeed in making the accusation stick. When Oedipus ultimately accepts the charge of patricide and incest, he becomes the monstrous embodiment of undifferentiation. The loss of difference is laid at the door “not of society at large, but of a single individual.” The social crisis is resolved at the expense of a lone victim. The mythic nature of the accusations of patricide and incest suggests that Oedipus is innocent. In his later works, Girard emphasizes the scapegoat’s innocence.

But in Violence and the Sacred, Girard also highlights the role played by Oedipus himself in the scapegoating process. In Sophocles’ play, Girard writes, the “entire investigation is a feverish hunt for a scapegoat, which finally turns against the very man who first loosed the hounds.” Oedipus is the man who loosed the hounds. He tried to pin the blame for the crisis on Tiresias and Creon. He took part in the game of reciprocal accusations that was one with the crisis afflicting Thebes.

If Girard is right, Oedipus may well be an innocent man wrongly accused of patricide and incest. As shown in The Oedipus Casebook, the evidence against him is not as solid as one might think. But Oedipus is not wholly innocent. He accuses others of responsibility for a crisis in which he himself shares the blame.

What is important for Girard in his early writings is not the substance of the accusations of incest or patricide or murdering Laius. It is the fact that Oedipus accuses others of guilt only to discover that he himself is guilty. That is the feature of Sophocles’ tragedy that first drew Girard’s attention and ultimately led him to his famous scapegoat theory.

In an early essay in Oedipus Unbound, Girard compares Sophocles’ hero to the Proustian snob: “The snob has no other model than the snob. He therefore has no other rival.” That is why the snob trumpets “his hatred of snobbery.” Seen in this light, “Oedipus’s excessive indignation, his zeal to track down the culprit, are revealing.” They call to mind the passion with which the Proustian snob denounces snobs. So it is that Oedipus “accuses Creon and Tiresias of the crime he himself committed.”

To use the language of Girard’s later writings, Oedipus scapegoats his rivals. To single out one’s rival as uniquely responsible for the rivalry is itself a form of scapegoating. This type of scapegoating is taking place all around us today. The degeneration of public debate into exchanges of insults is a clear sign of crisis. In this sense, the situation we are living through now is not unlike the one portrayed in Oedipus the King. If we see Oedipus purely as an innocent man accused of patricide and incest, then his experience will seem distant from our own. But if we see him as a person who accuses others before realizing that they are not free of blame themselves, then perhaps Sophocles’ play can help us navigate the present crisis.

It’s hard to pick a favorite essay from my new anthology, All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings – all of the pieces by French theorist René Girard are exceptional, otherwise I wouldn’t have picked them – but the essay on Peter’s Denial is certainly high on the list. So I was very pleased when the University of Notre Dame decided to publish the piece in its eminent Church-Life Journal, under the editor and friend Artur Sebastian Rosman, who is also a Czesław Miłosz scholar.

An excerpt from “The Question of Mimesis and Peter’s Denial“:

After Jesus had been arrested, the disciples fled in all directions, but Peter alone or, according to John, Peter and another disciple, followed at a distance right into the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace, and, I quote: “there he remained, sitting among the attendants, warming himself at a fire.” John says that “the servants and the police had made a charcoal fire, because it was cold, and were standing round it warming themselves.” And Peter too “was standing with them, sharing the warmth.”

The text shifts to inside the palace, where a hostile and brutal interrogation of Jesus was taking place. Then we shift back to Peter and, again I quote:

Meanwhile Peter was still in the courtyard downstairs. One of the High Priest’s servant girls came by and saw him there warming himself. She looked into his face and said, “You were there too, with this man from Nazareth, this Jesus.” But he denied it: “I do not know him,” he said. “I do not understand what you mean.” Then he went outside into the porch; and the girl saw him there again and began to say to the bystanders, “He is one of them,” and again he denied it.

Again, a little later, the bystanders said to Peter, “Surely you are one of them. You must be; you are Galilean.” At this he broke out in curses, and with an oath he said: “I do not know this man you speak of.” Then the cock crowed a second time; and Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, “Before the cock crows twice you will disown me three times.” And he burst into tears.

Auerbach makes some shrewd comments on that text: “I do not believe,” he writes, “that there is a single passage in an antique historian where direct discourse is employed in this fashion in a brief, direct dialogue.” He also observes that “the dramatic tension of the moment when the actors stand face to face has been given a salience and immediacy compared with which the dialogue of antique tragedy appears highly stylized.” It is quite true, and I am not averse to using such words as “mimesis” and “mimetic realism” to describe the feeling of true-to-life description which is created here, but I do not think that Auerbach really succeeds in justifying his use of the term “mimesis.”

Careful and sensitive as he is as a reader, Auerbach did not perceive something that is highly visible and which should immediately strike every observer: it is the role of mimesis in the text itself, the presence of mimesis as content. Imitation is not a separate theme but it permeates the relationship between all the characters; they all imitate each other. This mimetic dimension of behavior dominates both verbal and non-verbal behavior. Peter’s behavior is imitative from the beginning, before a single word is uttered by anyone.

In Mark and John, when Peter entered, the fire was already burning. People were “standing round warming themselves.” Peter too went to that fire; he followed the general example. This is natural enough on a cold night. Peter was cold, like everybody else, and there was nothing to do but to wait for something to happen. This is true enough, but the Gospels give us very little concrete background, very few visual details, and three out of four mention the fire in the courtyard as well as Peter’s presence next to it. They mention this not once but twice. The second mention occurs when the servant girl intervenes. She sees Peter warming himself by the fire with the other people. It is dark and she can recognize him because he has moved close to the fire and his face is lighted by it. But the fire is more than a dramatic prop. The servant seems eager to embarrass Peter, not because he entered the courtyard, but because of his presence close to that fire. In John it is the courtyard, upon the recommendation of another disciple acquainted with the High Priest.

A fire in the night is more than a source of heat and of light. A fire provides a center of attraction; people arrange themselves in a circle around it and they are no longer a mere crowd; they become a community. All the faces and hands are jointly turned toward the fire as in a prayer. An order appears which is a communal order. The identical postures and the identical gestures seem to evoke some kind of deity, some sacred being that would dwell in the fire and for which all hands seem to be reaching, all faces seem to be watching.

There is nothing specifically Christian, there is nothing specifically Jewish about that role of fire; it is more like primitive fire-worship, but nevertheless it is deeply rooted in our psyches; most human beings are sensitive to this and the servant girl must be; that is why she is scandalized to see Peter warm himself by that fire. The only people who really belong there are the people who gravitate to the High Priest and the Temple, those who belong to the inner core of the Jewish religious and national community. The servant maid probably knows little about Jesus except that he has been arrested and is suspected of something like high treason. To have one of his disciples around the fire is like having an unwelcome stranger at a family gathering.

The fire turns a chance encounter into a quasi-ritualistic affair and Peter violates the communal feeling of the group, or perhaps what Heidegger would call its Being-together, its Mitsein, which is an important modality of being. In English, togetherness would be a good word for this if the media had not given it a bad name, emptying it entirely of what it is supposed to designate.

This Mitsein is the servant girl’s own Mitsein. She rightfully belongs with these people; but when she gets there, she finds her place occupied by someone who does not belong. She acts like Heidegger’s “shepherd of being,” a role which may not be as meek as the expression suggests. It would be excessive in this case to compare the shepherd of being with the Nazi stormtrooper, but the servant maid reminds us a little of the platonic watchdog, or of the Parisian concierge. In John she is described as precisely that, the guardian of the door, the keeper of the gate.

This Mitsein is her Mitsein, and she wants to keep it to herself and to the people entitled to it. When she says: “You are one of them, you belong with Jesus,’ she really means, ‘You do not belong here, you are not one of us.”

We always hear that Peter acts impulsively, but this really means mimetically. He always moves too fast and too far; but still, why move so close to the center, why did the fire exert such an attraction on him?

Read the rest here.

Finally! All Desire is a Desire for Being, a Penguin Classics anthology of Stanford Prof. René Girard‘s “essential writings,” is officially out this week! To my knowledge, the French theorist is the first Stanford faculty to be celebrated in the eminent series. I was honored that Penguin invited me to create this collection of Girard’s finest essays.

Prof. William Johnsen, who directs the publication of a series of books on René Girard and his mimetic theory at the Michigan State University Press, spoke about All Desire is a Desire for Being at the Paris centenary conference for Girard’s 100th birthday, at the Institut Catholique de Paris last week. Here are Bill Johnsen’s words on that occasion:

Since All Desire is a Desire for Being is 95 percent pure Girard, it would seem that only the editor’s preface, selections and apparatus would be left to discuss. That’s all fine, I love what is in it, I am really happy to see especially the piece on Nietzsche from Paul Dumouchel‘s collection which shows the high-flying, often joyful colloques that Jean-Pierrre Dupuy and Dumouchel organized to integrate Girard with his intellectual peers in the Eighties, but I want to emphasize where Girard now appears (Penguin) and what that means: as my President says, this is a big deal.

In his interviews with Nadine Dormoy in 1988, René Girard attributes the 20,000 dependable French readers of serious books to the Écoles, and the smaller American audience to the silos of academic specialization. I have heard the same figure of 20,000 assured readers from Benoît Chantre so I assume that French readership is steady.

In 2006 I was invited by Girard and Robert Hamerton-Kelly to be Publications Chair of Imitatio, a project funded by The Thiel Foundation. One of the earliest projects was the public launch of Achever Clausewitz and Imitatio in Paris in 2007.

Imitatio had begun supporting production costs for books on mimetic theory at Michigan State University Press to find this readership. (We all should be grateful for their more than ten years of support, the slowest startup in Thiel’s stable). When Lindy Fishburne of The Thiel Foundation later assumed the directorship of Imitatio, she urged us to follow our core mission, to develop Girard’s ideas, to find them a greater recognition and circulation worldwide but also in the English-speaking world to catch up with the breadth of his readership in France and Europe.

I have spent my entire adult life in universities. As the editor of the series, I had some plans for how to spread ideas from the university to that outer world by influencing teachers who would influence their students who leave when they graduate, but I had no idea on how to approach the public directly, or whether America, despite its number of educated readers (my university alone granted 9,500 degrees this last spring), had any number approaching 20,000 dependable readers of serious books.

If Girard was besieged by reporters in Paris after Achever Clausewitz was published in 2007, nothing like that happened in America in 2009 when we published it in English as Battling to the End. In 2011, at a conference on Mimetic Theory and World Religions at Berkeley, I suggested to Cynthia Haven that she write a book about René Girard, something personal and accessible enough to help find him a wider audience in English. Girard had told me in appreciation that Haven had written specifically about the Clausewitz book in The San Francisco Chronicle, as well as other public venues in her one-person publicity campaign.

Evolution of Desire (2018) is informative both about Girard and his ideas, placing him effectively in a historical context by reference to his life and work and interviewing many people who knew him. She is both respectful and warm to her subject. It would be impossible to disentangle the circumstances that have made her book so popular: Girard himself, this century’s recognition of him with honorary degrees and awards, his election to the L’Académie Française, several organisations worldwide devoted to his work. But Haven has played a key role with her book and her reputation – she is a well-known and respected serious author for serious readers who bridges the academic and the public book world. She has her sights always on the dependable core readership of serious books in English.

My field is British Studies, I could go on and on about Penguin so I need to just summarize here. Penguin books has been the most successful venture in gaining a wide audience for serious books in English for the last one hundred years. Nothing else even comes close. So congratulations to Cynthia on publishing All Desire is a Desire for Being at Penguin, and to everyone else working in mimetic theory: this is a big deal, so buckle up.

All Desire is a Desire for Being is becoming a reality! I got my advance copies of the new Penguin Classics anthology of René Girard’s “essential writings” this week. (You can pre-order a copy here.) It was an honor to contribute to his legacy with Penguin Classics, as we near his hundredth birthday on Christmas Day. To celebrate, I am republishing an article you may not have seen before. It was published June 11, 2008, by Stanford News Service. I had met the “French polymath” (that’s how the Google “knowledge panel” identifies him nowadays) only a months before. This would become the first of many interviews, essays, and books about the French thinker.

This article and many others from the Stanford News Service are now archived and no longer publicly available. So in the centenary year of René’s birth, I thought I’d make at least this one available to all of you. Enjoy!

The story goes like this: In 2004, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a professor of  French at Stanford, is attending a conference in Berlin when he is  confronted by a man in a café who asks, “Why did you become a Girardian?” Dupuy replies in a beat: “Because it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis.”

Did it really happen? Although the event was witnessed, Dupuy responds  with a Gallic shrug and an Italian saying: “Si non e vero e ben trovato.” The American equivalent might be Ken Kesey‘s dictum, “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

In any case, the anecdote illustrates the kind of effect René Girard, the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and  Culture, Emeritus, at Stanford and one of the immortels of the  Académie Française, has had on people. Aficionados of the scholar even have a name: Girardians.

Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005,  published this spring by Stanford University Press, explores the  literary side of Girard’s thinking over his long career-a career that originally focused on literary scholarship but that has gradually embraced anthropology, religion, sociology, psychology, philosophy and  theology. French Professor Michel Serres, another immortel (America has only two, and both are at Stanford), has called him “the new Darwin of the human sciences.”

Girard’s Achever Clausewitz, published last year in France by Editions Carnets Nord, will be published in English by Michigan State University Press this winter. The book, which takes as its point of departure the Prussian military historian and theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), is considered by many to be groundbreaking. Its implications place Girard, known mostly for his studies of literature and archaic cultures, squarely in the 21st century.

“It doesn’t take much insight to realize that wars have been getting  worse every time – worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total. Well, Clausewitz is about that,” Girard explained. “Therefore my book is a very end-of-the-world sort of thing.”

Girard lives a sequestered life in the academic burrows of Stanford, but his influence abroad is seismic. Even French President Nicolas Sarkozy cites his writings. While Girard walks the Stanford campus virtually unnoticed and unrecognized, in Paris, visitors say, reporters were on his doorstep every day after the publication of last year’s book.

The “Girard Effect” may become more prominent worldwide with a foundation, Imitatio, that has been established to promote his ideas. (Dupuy is its director of research.) Imitatio launched its research program with a conference at Stanford in April, with about 40 scholars from around the world attending. The Colloquium on Violence and Religion, an independent association of international scholars, also studies mimetic theory and publishes an annual journal, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture.

Although Girard will turn 85 on Dec. 25 (he was born in Avignon), he is not resting on his laurels. Achever Clausewitz signals a new development of his line of thought, and he is already working on his next book, which will focus on St. Paul. Are there any more projects envisioned?

“Thousands more!” Benoît Chantre, his French editor and interlocutor for Achever Clausewitz, said and smiled.

Scapegoats and sacrifice

Girard’s thinking, including textual analysis, is a sweeping reading of human nature, human history and human destiny. His contention is controversial: Religion is not the cause of violence, as many suppose; it was, in archaic societies, a way of solving it.

Here’s why: People are social creatures, and their behavior is based on imitation to a much greater degree than generally supposed. How else to explain why a generation decides at once to pierce their tongues, or why stocks rise and fall? How to explain how a child learns language? Even our desires are not our own; we learn them from others.

“We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires,” he said during a lecture at Stanford’s Old Union in February. “We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths – but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.”

Envy and resentment are the inevitable consequences of this drive toward mimesis. These emotions, in turn, fuel conflict; it occurs whenever two or more “mimetic rivals” want the same thing, which can go to only one. It might be a woman, a presidency or a research grant. Many religious prohibitions are meant to regulate and control such 
conflict.

“When we describe human relations, we lie,” Girard said. “We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion.”

In literature, such mimetic desire can create comic masterpieces: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a classic he frequently cites. Or it can inspire the novels of Balzac, in which the characters strive to outdo each other in snobbery and imitative social values. Such imitation can even be totally imaginary. Don Quixote wishes to be a knight errant, because he is imitating the heroes in the books he has read.

On a societal level, such conflict seeks a release, and the outlet is a scapegoat. A third party-often an outsider, a foreigner, a woman, someone who is disabled, the king or president-is blamed and demonized for having caused the conflict. Scapegoats are not seen as innocent victims; they are seen as the guilty cause of the disorder. The calls mount for the sacrificial victim, and the mob itself creates a sense of harmony.

“Joining the mob is the thing that people don’t realize. They feel the unity but don’t interpret it as joining the mob,” Girard said.

The mob prevails. The victim is killed, exiled, pilloried or otherwise dispensed with. Rivals reconcile, and peace and unity are restored to the community.

“If you scapegoat someone, it’s a third party that will be aware of it,” he said. “It won’t be you. Because you will believe you are doing the right thing. You will be either punishing someone who is guilty or fighting someone who is trying to kill you, but you are never the one who is scapegoating.”

In a sleight of hand that unsettles Girard’s critics, the fact that there is no proof is proof. It is not that the scapegoaters suppress the history of their scapegoating, he said, “scapegoating itself is the suppressing.”

For this reason, tragedy and religion in ancient Greece are inextricably entwined. Take the story of Oedipus. A plague is destroying Thebes, and whom does the mysterious oracle find at fault? The outsider, the lame newcomer king, whose expulsion brings peace to the city-state. Euripides’ The Bacchae is the same-disorder is tearing apart the society and the women are going crazy. Pentheus, the young leader, is at fault-his collective murder brings sanity and harmony to Thebes.

“The first culture which rebels against that system is the Jewish culture,” Girard said. He explains that the Bible is actually counter-mythical. Over a period of centuries, the books of the Old Testament begin to catch on to mankind’s scapegoating mechanism. While they describe and even celebrate violence, they gradually begin to question and fight it as well.

For example, many of the psalms “show a narrator who is surrounded by a crowd of good-for-nothings, who are trying to encircle him and turn him into a victim.” The story of Job also is revealing: “It’s a small community, but he’s been the dictator for years. Everybody loves him, he does no one any harm,” Girard said at the Old Union lecture. “One fine morning he wakes up, and everybody is against him. His three ‘friends’ are ready to explain how bad he is now. And everybody is ready to explain how bad he is at the same time. He has turned from the absolute hero to the scapegoat of the community. Job is like a long psalm and shows you what happens to communities. No myth will  ever show you that.”

The climactic victimization is with “the announcement of what we call the Passion.”

“Jesus accepts to be the victim, and we don’t really know why,” he said. “There, what the Gospel said is that it is God himself who has allowed all this scapegoating, and says, ‘You can forgive me, since now I am ready to become your victim myself.'”

Thus, the world has arrived at a dangerous point, Girard said. The mechanism of scapegoating has been seen through; the escape valve is gone. War no longer “works” and no longer resolves mimetic rivalry among nations. While wars were once organized and carried out by states, concluding with a treaty and one side’s defeat, now individual actors can instigate acts of war in a free-for-all.  Moreover, the actors may insist on their own martyrdom to aggravate the conflict, rather than resolve it.

In an interview in Le Point last year, Girard presented the dire worldview that made Achever Clausewitz controversial: “The world wars marked an important step in the rise of extremes. September 11, 2001, was the beginning of a new phase. Today’s terrorism still has to be thought through, because we haven’t yet grasped that a terrorist is ready to die in order to kill Americans, Israelis or Iraqis. What’s new here in relation to Western heroism is that suffering and death are called for, if necessary by experiencing them oneself.”  We search in vain for scapegoats: “The Americans made the mistake of ‘declaring war’ on al-Qaida without knowing whether al-Qaida exists at all.

“The era of wars is over: From now on war exists everywhere. Our era is one of universal action. There’s no longer any such thing as an intelligent policy. We’ve almost reached the end.”

An existential downfall

Girard’s misgivings about war and a potential apocalypse are the extension of a long thought that has evolved over decades. The road was marked by various points of illumination: One light-bulb moment occurred during a “conversion” experience when he was a young professor at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1950s.

He explained to James Williams, in an interview included in The Girard Reader, the epiphany that was connected with the writing of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: “I started working on that book very much in the pure demystification mode: cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of the atheistic intellectuals of the time. I was engaged in debunking, and of course recognizing mimesis is a great debunking tool because it deprives us moderns of the one thing we still have left, our individual desire.”

“The debunking that actually occurs in this first book is probably one of the reasons why my concept of mimesis is still viewed as destructive,” he said. “Yet I like to think that if you take this notion as far as you possibly can, you go through the ceiling, as it were, and discover what amounts to original sin. An experience of 
demystification, if radical enough, is very close to an experience of conversion.”

He described his eventual realization this way: “The author’s first draft is a self-justification.” It may either focus on a wicked hero, the writer’s scapegoat, who will be unmasked by the end of the novel; or it may have a good hero, the author’s alter ego, who will be vindicated at novel’s end.

If the writer is a good one, he will see “the trashiness of it all” by the time he finishes his first draft-that it’s a “put-up job.” The experience, said Girard, shatters the vanity and pride of the writer. “And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible,” Girard said.

While he speaks easily of conversion, original sin and redemption, however, one visiting scholar wondered why he seemed to circumvent a related theme: the imperative topic of forgiveness. But it’s hard to beat Girard at his own game. Only a few months earlier, Girard had spoken at an informal philosophical reading group in History Corner for several dozen faculty and students.

Girard recapitulated the story of the Old Testament Joseph, son of Jacob, bound and sold into slavery by his “mob” of 10 half-brothers: “They all get together and try to kill him. The Bible knows that scapegoating is a mob affair.” Joseph reestablishes himself as one of the leaders of Egypt and then tearfully forgives his brothers in a 
dramatic reconciliation. It is, he said, a story “much more mature, spiritually, than the beginning of Genesis.”

The story is unlike any in archaic literature: “It’s a very beautiful  story, which like many biblical stories, is a counter-mythical story,” he said, “because in myth, the lynchers are always satisfied with their lynching.”

But at the reading group, he suggested his audience might not have noticed this before. After all, they had been trained to think that the Bible was a completely backward book, superceded and preceded by better efforts, with little that was new to the world. In short, Girard dropped the cat among the pigeons.

They erupted into debate. Girard slouched back in his chair a little, smiling softly and watching the feathers fly.