Loads of Learned Lumber

Friday, May 1, 2020

René Girard, _A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare_

IN WYNDHAM LEWIS'S The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare, he observes, "Troilus and Cressida is the one play that no shakespearian [sic] critic ever approaches without a baffled 'hem!' and a sense of treading on dangerous ground. It is an eccentric integrant of the series that will not fit in with the smooth picture he [i.e., the critic] has been able to compose elsewhere...".

Lewis has a point here--but he did not foresee Girard. In Girard's analysis of Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida is the central exhibit, the subject of six of A Theater of Envy's thirty-eight chapters. (Midsummer Night's Dream gets eight, Julius Caesar and The Winter's Tale five each, Hamlet one, LearMacbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra zero; Richard III gets half a chapter, the other histories zip.)

Girard (1923-2015) might turn out, years hence, to be a figure on the scale of Freud or Marx--a thinker with a big idea that explains nearly everything. For Marx, the big idea is class conflict, the driver of history. For Freud, the big idea is the unconscious, unacknowledged determiner of what we do and how we feel. For Girard, the big idea is mimesis--that we are basically imitative creatures. We decide what we want mainly by seeing what other people want, and then adopting their desires as our own. (At the very least, Girard completely explains middle school social life.) Since we all end up wanting the same things, rivalry ensues, competition, conflict, eventually violence. If we are lucky, the violence evolves into a myth of "a founding murder," the sacrifice of an innocent that we can ritually re-enact to remind ourselves not to let things get so far out of hand.

Girard finds pieces of this scenario in a variety of Shakespearean plays. The sexual version forms the core of the plot in Midsummer Night' s Dream, Lysander and Demetrius seemingly most interested in whatever the woman the other is interested in. Julius Caesar is the political version, Rome's most powerful men all converging on the same prize, Brutus trying to engineer a "sacrifice" that will create peace, but the murder stubbornly remaining a murder, with civil war ensuing.

Troilus and Cressida is the whole enchilada. Pandarus goads Troilus into obsession with Cressida by describing how avidly others are obsessed with her, then goads Cressida into obsession Troilus by describing how avidly others are obsessed with him. The background for this erotic mimesis is another political mimesis, as Greeks and Trojans kill each other out of desire to secure what the other side desires--Helen. But as in Julius Caesar, the sacrifice--the brutal, cowardly slaying of Hector-- fails.

In The Winter's Tale, though, Leontes' jealousy (his fear and rage that his friend Polixenes wants what he, Leontes, wants) leads to two deaths, but ritual remembrance has the astonishing effect of restoration and healing.

A really worthwhile book--new angles on Shakespeare are relatively rare, and I learned a lot.

Rather like Freud (via Ernest Jones) on Shakespeare, though, Girard sometimes seems to congratulate Shakespeare on having intuited what he, Girard, actually described and named:
"With his awareness of the victimage mechanism and its religious consequences, [Shakespeare] reached an anthropological vision that has remained undeciphered to this day but is finally becoming intelligible, thanks to the same mimetic theory that enabled us to unravel the significance of the comedies" (209).
His original audiences, who knew not Girard, could not really have been able to understand how far ahead of his time Shakespeare was:
"For which spectators were such marvels conceived as we have in this play, still totally misunderstood and disdained after four centuries?" (236)
But Girard, unlike Freud, seems sometimes to be onto himself, as in this remark about an earlier Shakespeare explicator, Stephen Dedalus in the "Scylla and Charybdis"episode of Ulysses:

"...Egomen's reasoning: 'Since Shakespeare knows everything about mimetic desire, and so do I, and since no one else does, except for a few towering asters, I must be a towering master myself'." (264-65)

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