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Deceit, Desire and the Novel

Deceit, Desire and the Novel by René Girard. I never thought I’d read a book on comparative literature but I was interested in learning about Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. It involves a triangular relationship: the object of desire, the subject who desires and the mediator, who either owns the object or is also interested in it. Girard argues that the subject only desires the object because of the mediator, hence the “mimetism” (copying).

The intensity of the desire depends on how close the subject is to the mediator. Closeness in this case is with respect to similarity: a peasant and a king would be further apart than two rival peasants. Girard uses several works of literature to make the case for his theory such as Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Dostoyevsky’s the The Underground Man, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

I feel like this book is rather repetitive and could have been a lot shorter, but it got me very interested in reading some of the works mentioned.

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This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.