Why does Rene Girard Calls Hamlet A Dull Revenge?

Hamlet Dull Revenge by René Girard

Mr. Casaubon called the future volumes . . . the Key to all Mythologies. —George Eliot, Middlemarch Here are two readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Which do you think we should be teaching in our schools and universities?[1] Reading 1. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, has no desires of his own, and therefore has no being, properly speaking. The best he can do is to find another person to emulate, since that’s the only way anyone ever develops the motivation to do anything. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth. Reading 2. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, is full of body thetans, harmful residue of the aliens brought to Earth by Xenu seventy-five million years ago and disintegrated using nuclear bombs inside volcanoes. Since it is still some time until the practice of auditing comes into being, Hamlet has no chance of becoming “clear”; it is no wonder that he displays such melancholy and aimlessness. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.[2] Whatever you make of the first, I’m rather hoping that you feel at least a bit uncomfortable with the second. If so, I have a follow-up question for you: what exactly is wrong with it? Why not rewrite the textbooks so as to make it our standard understanding of Shakespeare’s play? Surely you can’t fault the logic behind it: if humans have indeed been full of body thetans since they came into existence, and Hamlet is a representation of a human being, Hamlet must be full of body thetans. What is more, if everyone is still full of body thetans, then Shakespeare is doing his contemporaries a huge favor by telling them, and the new textbooks will be doing us a huge favor by telling the world. Your worry, presumably, is that this whole body thetan business is just not true. It’s an outlandish hypothesis, with nothing whatsoever to support it. And since, as Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,”[3] we would do better to leave it alone. I think you see where I’m going with this. The fact is, of course, that the first reading is just as outlandish as the second. As I’m about to show (not that it should really need showing), human beings do have desires of their own.[4] That doesn’t mean that all our desires are genuine; it’s always possible to be suckered into buying a new pair of boots, regardless of the fact that they are uglier and shoddier than our old ones, just because they are fashionable. What it means is that some of our desires are genuine. And having some genuine desires, and being able to act on them, is sufficient for the achievement of authenticity. For all we care, Hamlet’s inky cloak could be made by Calvin Klein, his feathered hat by Diane von Furstenberg; the point is that he also has motivations (to know things, to be autonomous, to expose guilt, to have his story told accurately) that come from within, and that those are the ones that count. To my knowledge, no one in the academy actually reads Hamlet (or anything else) the second way. But plenty read works of literature the first way.[5] René Girard, the founder of the approach, was rewarded for doing so with membership in the Académie française, France’s elite intellectual association. People loved his system so much that they established a Colloquium on Violence and Religion, hosted by the University of Innsbruck, complete with a journal under the ironically apt name Contagion. More recently, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, loved it so much that he sank millions of dollars into Imitatio, an institute for the dissemination of Girardian thought. And to this day, you’ll find casual references to the idea everywhere, from people who seem to think it’s a truth, one established by René Girard. (Here’s a recent instance from the New York Times opinion pages: “as we have learned from René Girard, this is precisely how desires are born: I desire something by way of imitation, because someone else already has it.”)[6] All of which leads to an inevitable question: what’s the difference between Girardianism and Scientology? Why has the former been more successful in the academy? Why is the madness of theory so, well, contagious? A four-stage theory Before we get to that, let’s take a closer look at just how peculiar the Girardian theory is. There are, in fact, four parts to it, each problematic in its own way. Stage One, as we just saw, is that all desire is “mimetic”: we never want something because it is objectively valuable, or even because it meets our own subjective needs, but only because someone else wanted it before us.[7] If I decide to go swimming, for example, it is not because the human metabolism thrives on exercise, or because my physique in particular demands an upper-body workout, but only because I see the Joneses next door packing their towels. If I yearn for Zooey Deschanel rather than Ann Coulter, my preference has nothing to do with certain qualities that one has and the other lacks, or to the fact that my individual temperament gravitates towards a certain kind of partner, but only to do with what my peers have told me to value. I may believe that Zooey Deschanel and Ann Coulter are poles apart, but this is the famous mensonge romantique, that romantic delusion which Girard decries from one end of his career to the other.[8] In reality, the object is never special, never unique; no such differences exist, the kind of differences that would give us a reason to desire this rather than that. As Girard uncompromisingly puts it, “similarities alone are real.”[9] Stage Two of the theory piggybacks on Stage One. Since all desire is mimetic, that means that any given object in the world is either not desired by anyone or desired by more than one person. This inevitably leads to rivalry, and rivalry in turn leads to violence. (“As soon as we desire something that is desired by a model sufficiently close to us in space and time . . . we strive to snatch the object away from him, and rivalry between him and us is inevitable.”)[10] In fact, there is no other possible cause for violence: all violence, without exception, is a direct result of mimetic rivalry. “Mimeticism is the original source of all man’s troubles,” writes Girard, “the source of all disorder” (my emphasis); “violence is . . . a by-product of mimetic rivalry”; “the true secret of conflict and violence is . . . mimetic desire.”[11] For most of human history, continues Girard, the best that could be done about this was to channel the murderous rage onto a single victim, rather than have it tear society apart. This is Stage Three of the theory, the scapegoat mechanism. According to Girard, every single community in the world started exactly the same way: a loose assemblage of individuals, an escalation of mimetic rivalry, then an actual murder of an actual human being.[12] (“The escalations of mimetic rivalry to which archaic societies are prone stir up all kinds of disorders until their very intensity produces a unanimous polarization against a more or less random victim. Mimetically carried away, the entire community joins in, and as a result, mutual suspicions are extinguished; peace returns.”)[13] Without that actual murder of an actual human being, all those lovely laws and customs and traditions would never have been established. Of course, the scapegoat is only a temporary measure for the calming of rivalrous rage. We need something more reliable. Enter Stage Four, in the form of the Bible. The Bible—New Testament especially—makes it clear that the victim of collective violence is innocent; it thus reveals the founding mechanism of society, and, by so doing, puts it out of action. “There will be no more victims from now on who are persecuted unjustly,” proclaims Girard; “no more myths can be produced to cover up the fact of persecution. The Gospels make all forms of ‘mythologizing’ impossible since, by revealing the founding mechanism, they stop it from functioning.”[14] And while they thus place humankind even more at risk, depriving it of the outlet it once had, they also offer a solution, definitive this time: if all of us simply follow the example of Christ (imitatio Christi, a good form of imitation)[15] and direct our yearnings toward God (amor Dei, a good kind of desire), we will finally live in a world without violence.[16] Imitation-free violence Stages Three and Four are so fanciful that it’s hard to know what to say about them. (Wolfgang Pauli once said of a scientific theory that it was “not even false”; I think that’s an apt characterization of all primordial fantasies, whether Sigmund Freud’s “Original Father,” Denis Dutton’s “Pleistocene campfire,”[17] or René Girard’s founding scapegoat.) But let’s spend a moment on Stages One and Two. Since the theory as a whole builds on these claims, it seems to me that if we can show they are bankrupt, the remaining postulates will take care of themselves. Is it really true that all violence is a by-product of mimetic rivalry? Here’s the kind of situation Girard is asking us to imagine. Two men, Jimmy and Joey, stand beside a lake on a hot day. Jimmy decides to go for a swim. Joey, who would never have had this idea in his life, immediately decides to do likewise. Inevitably, this causes a death struggle between the two men as they fight over the lake. The above reading of Hamlet is essentially Girard’s own. Hamlet, writes Girard, has “faith in his model and rival as the embodiment of being” (which is to say, as the embodiment of spontaneous desire); he is, as a result, “aping the well-adjusted personality of Laertes.” “The madman,” continues Girard, “makes us feel uneasy not because his game is different from ours but because it is the same. It is the same old mimetic game in which we all engage but a little too emphatic for our taste. . . . We prefer to leave the matter alone and not to look at ourselves in the mirror offered to us” (“HDR,” 291) Discuss why Girard calls Hamlet a dull revenge ?