The Girard Reader (57 page)

and must be interpreted. It is not a matter of crafty priests coming and taking over in order to

oppress people, an impression one might get from certain modern theologians and critics. To

put it simply, the multiplicity of the Gospels is a call to interpretation.

J.W.:
That's what your work is about, isn't it? Especially now. The multiplicity of the

Gospels is a call to interpretation.

R.G.:
Yes. There are contradictions, no doubt, but these are minor. The fallibility of the disciples, the multiple experiences represented, the clear differences in style and focus among

the evangelists -- these for me are all signs of authenticity.

J.W.:
Allow me to review one thing before we leave this topic. You said that for you the

resurrection is an objective event. Do you distinguish between "objective" as you use it here and "historical."

R.G.:
I am not certain I understand the difference. You see, the thing about the Gospels is

that there may be tiny mythical infiltrations in them, but their basis is not mythical. The

mythical mentality can take them and construe them mythically, but quintessentially they are

the destruction of myth. Early Christian faith intuits or understands the nonmythical element

and discerns, one way or the other, the mimetic

-281-

phenomena that are unraveled. The structure of mythology is repeated in the Gospels, but in

such a truthful way that the mythological structure is unmasked. The fathers of the church

saw this, but were not able to express it in terms of generative scapegoating and the liberating

representation thereof. Our mimetic interpretation is less important than their faith but, if it

can help our own vacillating faith a little, it is useful.

Part of the problem in the history of Christian interpretation, beginning already with the

fathers, was that the Passion was for them a unique event. That is understandable of course.

They saw it as a unique event, a single, unique event in worldly history. It is indeed unique as

revelation but not as a violent event. The earliest followers of Jesus did not make that

mistake. They knew, or intuited, that in one sense it was like all other events of victimization

"since the foundation of the world." But it was different in that it revealed the meaning of these events going back to the beginnings of humanity: the victimization occurs because of

mimetic rivalry, the victim is innocent, and God stands with the victim and restores him or

her. If the Passion is regarded not as revelation but as only a violent event brought about by

God, it is misunderstood and turned into an idol. In the Gospels Jesus says that he suffers the

fate of all the other prophets going back to Abel the just and the foundation of the world (

Matt. 23:35; Luke 11:50).

So what theology needs is a corroborating anthropology. This anthropology will open up the

Gospels again to their own generative center and witness.

J.W.:
You have already presented an atonement theory, in effect. Would you care to say

more about it?

R.G.:
The word "atonement" is unique to English as far as I know. Atonement is what the French, I believe, would call
expiation
. Atonement is "at-one-ment," becoming reconciled with God, and this is the work of Christ.

J.W.:
The doctrine that has dominated Christian thought, certainly since Anselm, is the

satisfaction theory. According to it, the justice of God and God's honor are satisfied by the

one who dies, who is allowed to be scapegoated for the sake of all.

R.G.:
What you can say, in my view, is that the Father is working on a sort of historical schedule. Christ comes at the right time, at the right hour. I think Gil Bailie's paper (already

cited) is very important because it suggests that kenosis, emptying, here the emptying of the

personality, is crucial. Bailie refers to Jean-Luc Marion,
God without Being
, and helps me

understand it. I had struggled with the book. I think the title "God without being" could be translated as "God without the sacred" -- God without sacred violence, God without

scapegoating.

J.W.:
This reminds me of Levinas, one of whose books is
Autrementqu'être

-282-

qu'être (Otherwise than being). Levinas's main target, of course, is Heidegger, whom he

associates with the concept of being.

R.G.:
I would say that "being" in this case is the wrong being. One should not prescribe a general elimination of the word "being" or any concept of being from our vocabulary,

although I acknowledge that Levinas's and Marion's concerns are commendable.

Perhaps people like Thomas Aquinas, who live in a Christian period, tend to minimize evil.

But the danger now is probably the opposite, that is, minimizing the idea of God as a source

of peace and being, due to the sway of Heidegger's thought and our general ontological

impoverishment. We must not retrospectively foist this alien idea of God upon Thomas and

Augustine. Both Levinas and Marion are too unconditionally Heideggerian in their

conception of being. Heidegger's conception of being is insightful with regard to our age, but

should not be indiscriminately projected back onto the past, even if we do not necessarily

agree with Thomas and Augustine on everything. Heidegger's being, I think, is the sacred, the

violent sacred. His
Introduction to Metaphysics
shows this clearly, but that set of lectures in 1935 was not simply an anomaly. You can find similar things in
Being and Time
and in the

"later," mythopoetic Heidegger.

Some novelists reveal Heidegger's being as idolatrous desire. All the desire of Proust is

disclosed retrospectively as mimesis of the violent sacred. In Proust, desire is redeemed by

the fact that it is no longer desire; it has become a serene recollection. This transformation is

insufficient to make Proust into a Christian, but as pure recollection, his former desire is

emptied of mimetic rivalry and it is represented more truthfully than it can be when still

transfigured through mimetic rivalry. This peaceful representation gives us a glimpse of true

being, formerly pushed aside by the sacred transfiguration of mimetic desire. Sacred

transfiguration of desire is why time has been
perdu
, wasted away.

J.W.:
You have only recently made a published statement about your experience of Christian

conversi
on. 5. W
ould you recount this experience and indicate its importance for your life and research?

R.G.:
It was intimately connected with my work on my 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
. 6. I
was engaged in debunking, and of course recognizing mimesis is a great debunking tool because

____________________

5.
Quand ces choses commenceront . . . entretiens avec Michel Treguer
, 190-95.

6. Girard's first book was published in French in 1961, but here he refers to a period

somewhat earlier than his conversion in 1959.

-283-

it deprives us moderns of the one thing we think we still have left, our individual desire. This

debunking is the ultimate deprivation, the dispossession, of modern man. 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. 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. I think this has been the case with a number of great writers. Their first

conception of their novels was very different from what it became ultimately. The author's

first draft is an attempt at self-justification, which can assume two main forms. It may focus

on a wicked hero, who is really the writer's scapegoat, his mimetic rival, whose wickedness

will be demonstrated by the end of the novel. It may also focus on a "good" hero, a knight in shining armor, with whom the writer identifies, and this hero will be vindicated by the end of

the novel. If the writer has a potential for greatness, after writing his first draft, as he rereads

it, he sees the trashiness of it all. His project fails. The selfjustification the novelist had

intended in his distinction between good and evil will not stand self-examination. The

novelist comes to realize that he has been the puppet of his own devil. He and his enemy are

truly indistinguishable. The novelist of genius thus becomes able to describe the wickedness

of the other from within himself, whereas before it was some sort of put-up job, completely

artificial. This experience is shattering to the vanity and pride of the writer. It is an existential

downfall. Very often this downfall is written symbolically, as illness or death, in the

conclusion. In the case of Proust and Dostoyevsky it is explicitly presented as a change in

outlook. Or to take Don Quixote, on his deathbed he sees finally his own mimetic madness,

which is also illness and death. And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great

work of art possible.

Once the writer experiences this collapse and new perspective, he can go back to the

beginning and rewrite the work from the point of view of this downfall. It is no longer self-

justification. It is not necessarily selfindictment, but the characters he creates are no longer

"Manichean" good guys or bad guys.

So the career of the great novelist is dependent upon a conversion, and even if it is not made

completely explicit, there are symbolic allusions to it at the end of the novel. These allusions

are at least implicitly religious. When I realized this, I had reached a decisive point in the

writing of my first book, above all in my engagement with Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky's

Christian symbolism was important for me. Demons presents Stepan Verkhovensky, whose

deathbed conversion is particularly moving, but there is also the end of
Crime and

Punishment
and

-284-

The Brothers Karamazov
. The old Verkhovensky discovers that he was a fool all the time and

turns to the Gospel of Christ. This is the existential conversion that is demanded by a great

work of art.

When I wrote the last chapter of my first
 book, 7. I
had had a vague idea of what I would do, but as the chapter took form I realized I was undergoing my own version of the experience I

was describing. I was particularly attracted to the Christian elements, for example, Stepan

Verkhovensky's final journey and turn to the Gospel before his death. So I began to read the

Gospels and the rest of the Bible. And I turned into a Christian.

Now this experience of an intellectual-literary conversion, as you might call it, was an

enjoyable one. I was teaching at Johns Hopkins at the time, and I had been invited to teach a

course every week at Bryn Mawr. So I traveled there and back every week by train. I

remember quasi-mystical experiences on the train as I read, contemplated the scenery, and so

on. But this initial conversion did not imply any change of life . . . up till the day I found out

that I had a cancerous spot in the middle of my forehead. I went to a medical doctor, a

dermatologist, who was -- how shall I say? -- remote, unsympathetic, distrustful of me.

Perhaps he feared he wouldn't be paid. He removed the bit of tissue which turned out to be

cancerous. From that time on I was pretty scared, because he never told me that this type of

cancer was eminently curable and usually did not return after it was removed. So to me it was

as though I was under a death sentence. For all I knew, I had melanoma, the worst form of

skin cancer. A complication was that I had some swelling of that area of the forehead, which

turned out to be due to acne.

So my intellectual conversion, which was a very comfortable experience, self-indulgent even,

was totally changed. I could not but view the cancer and the period of intense anxiety as a

warning and a kind of expiation, and now this conversion was transformed into something

really serious in which the aesthetic gave way to the religious.

So I had an extremely bad period, and this period coincided with the liturgical period of Lent

in 1959. I was thirty-five years old. I was aware of the liturgical period, though I had never

been a practicing Catholic. The doctor himself had been somewhat concerned about the

swelling, so he evacuated it. I will never forget that day. It was Holy Wednesday, the

Wednesday before Easter. Everything was fine, completely benign, no return of the cancer.

Immediately after that experience, I went to confession and I had my children baptized. My

wife and I were remarried by a priest. The priest to whom I went for confession was an

Irishman, whose religious

____________________

7. "The Unity of Novelistic Conclusions," which is included in its entirety as chapter 4 of the Reader.

-285-

and cultural background was a little alien to me. He had a hard time understanding my

experience.

J.W.:
You noted in the interview with Treguer
 8. t
hat Holy Wednesday is the traditional end of the period of penance.