Thomas Pavel "Temptations and Warnings - René Girard on Literary Fiction

Thomas Pavel taught French and Comparative literature at the Université du Québec à Montréal, at Princeton University, and at the University of Chicago. In 2005-2006, he was a visiting professor at the Collège de France, where he gave a course on "How to listen to literature". He is the author of several books, including Fictional Worlds (1986), L’Art de l’éloignement: Essai sur l’imagination classique (“Art as distance. The neo-classical imagination”, 1996); The Spell of Language: Post-structuralism and Speculation (1988, revised edition, 2001), and The Lives of the Novel (2013).

In his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, René Girard launches a new way of reading literature, based on a strong, surprising, moral reflection. To understand human feelings and action, he argues, literature focuses on the close links between noteworthy individuals and their models and rivals. Some characters can find the sources of their passions and convictions within themselves. Most often, however, especially since the nineteenth century, the protagonists of novels, lacking this power, imitate instead the desires exhibited by fashionable models and become the victims of vanity and snobbery, if not even, in some extreme cases, cynical carriers of satanic impulses. As Girard shows, these novels denounce the temptations of blind, egotistic imitation, thus warning their readers about one of the most serious dangers of modern societies. The truly best novels by Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Proust reconcile, however, human beings with the surrounding world, each revealing in its own way the salvific power of the sacred.

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