Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky by Rene Girard
Prusak, Bernard G
PRIDE & PROPHECY Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky Rene Girard, edited and translated by James G. Williams Bernard G, Prusah Dostoevsky's characters are often vile things,...
...He calls us back from idolatry...
...In this regard, it is pertinent to recall that Ralph Ellison wrote, in his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, "I associated [my narrator], ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground...
...It is Girard's signal insight that such "conflicts of desire keep occurring not because strongly individualized desires strongly oppose one another, but for the opposite reason...
...But they suffer from a paradox...
...Too bad, we might want to say: rather than bother us, he might have flown away or been squashed like Kafka's metamorphosized Gregor...
...They are gadflies and scorpions and-according to the philosopher Rene Girard-the darker side of ourselves as well...
...Taking the narrator of the Notes at his word, Girard proposes that Dostoevsky's characters only "push to extremes...what you yourselves would dare to take only halfway...
...As Americans, we jealously guard our rights and cultivate our particularities...
...Girard has been elaborating upon this thesis since the early 1960s...
...This book not only illuminates Dostoevsky's novels, but provides us another perspective on Girard's career...
...he reminds us, writes Girard, that "[a]t the heart of everything there is always human pride or God...
...Last year, in respective rites of consecration in France and in the United States (where Girard has lived for fifty years), the French Academy recognized his lifetime ozuvre, and Crossroad published a Girard Reader, edited by James G. Williams...
...And yes he is: sick and sickening...
...For Girard, "It is not the disincarnate thought that interests us but the thought embodied in the novels...
...Dostoevsky gives the lie to the self's bad faith...
...I wonder if Girard's thought is not, ironically, basically still "egocentric": Everything swirls back to the self, however "intersubjective" it has become...
...If we can believe that God so loved the world, and every one of us, that he became incarnate and suffered even death, then the need for recognition tumbles away...
...he defrocks, as self-exalting, the piety of renunciation...
...Dostoevsky's characters feel the need to distinguish themselves against others, but besides this principle cannot say what for...
...Surely it is messier and more variant...
...But his art is also "literally prophetic...
...As Girard reflects, "[P]ride is essentially contradictory, self-divided and torn between the Self and the Other...
...How the self goes, so goes the world...
...but I am unwilling to agree that he thereby gives us the key to the riddle of life...
...Though Girard has gone on to bigger and better things, here his thinking is cutting and fresh...
...mimetic desire," as Girard calls it, terminates in violence or scapegoat-ing, petty or not...
...But copying engenders rivalry...
...But Dostoevsky's "underground" people do exist, and they talk and talk and talk, and sometimes kill...
...In the end, Girard argues, Dostoevsky "reveals the exile, the rupture, the suffering" that flow from pride...
...Whatever the persuasiveness of Girard's thinking, it demonstrates that being somebody is, at times, a more complicated and counterintuitive production than we might think...
...I am a sick man," begins the Notes from Underground...
...Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevski/, published in French in 1963, is the latest of his books to appear in translation...
...What is sick here, though, is that "the against precedes the for...
...They reveal the hidden, rotten truths good citizens like to paper over: as Girard also puts it, the logic of "tendencies and propensities present in all human beings...
...PRIDE & PROPHECY Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky Rene Girard, edited and translated by James G. Williams Bernard G, Prusah Dostoevsky's characters are often vile things, grotesques, caricatures of human be-ings...
...Of course it is we as selves who act, but there is little sense here of institutions as creative bodies-of families, communities, companies, countries fostering authentic interest, God or not...
...But who loses...
...Like Dostoevsky, Girard is unrelenting...
...To be somebody, Dostoevsky's characters must do and say the things outstanding persons do and say...
...Indeed, there has developed over the last twenty years something of a "Girardian" system, propagated by a gang of "Girardians...
...Though they fancy themselves to exist apart from the world-to be uniquely special-they need and crave its recognition...
...But this is a historically and culturally specific claim...
...Girarcl acknowledges that, "in the course of history, Western individualism took over little by little the prerogatives that had belonged to God...
...Is the cult of the self endemic to all cultures, or a sickness afflicting only particular ones...
...They are catapulted, then, into an awful but all-too-everyday game of king of the hill...
...He exposes, finally, the machinations of fanatical pride in apparent humility...
...Now this makes for an attractive apologia, but it is a hard pill to swallow...
...Girard begins with the fact that Dostoevsky's characters aspire to originality: They want to be somebody...
...I never managed to become even an insect...
...So they must copy the same desires...
...It is by no means, however, passe...
...They do not belong to families or communities, but exist-abstractly, precariously-beaten back onto themselves, fixated and obsessed...
...He does not dismantle Dostoevsky's novels into philosophical propositions or ideas, but seeks to draw out the logic governing Dostoevsky's characters...
...They can only be somebody if others play along...
...This book therefore anticipates both Girard's theological "turn" and the "Girardian" thesis that Christ saves us from the vortex of violence that is, otherwise, the first and last word of human culture...
Vol. 124 • April 1997 • No. 8
