Tragic Novels, René Girard and the American Dream

Sacrifice in Suburbia

Carly Osborn

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350083509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This book draws on the philosopher René Girard to argue that three twentieth-century American novels (Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road ) are tragedies. Until now, Girardian literary analysis has generally focused on representations of human desire in texts, and neglected both other emotions and the place of tragedy. Carly Osborn addresses these omissions by using Girardian theory to present evidence that novels can indeed be tragedies. The book advances the scholarship of tragedy that has run from Aristotle to Nietzsche to Terry Eagleton, proposing a new way to read modern novels through ancient traditions. In addition, this is the first work to examine the place of women as victims, or in Girardian terms, 'scapegoats', in twentieth century fiction, specifically by considering the representation of women's bodies and ambivalence about their identities. In deploying a rich and vivid array of tragic tropes, The Virgin Suicides, The Ice Storm, and Revolutionary Road participate in a deep-rooted American tragic tradition. Tragic Novels, the American Dream and René Girard will be of interest to those working at the intersection of philosophy and literature, as well as Girard specialists.

1

Introduction: Tragedy, Girard and the American Dream

As I sit writing this introduction, the US government is in its eighteenth day of shutdown. The news is full of images of the years of internal tension that preceded this standoff. Talking heads on cable television; football players kneeling; white supremacists marching; women donning pink hats; minimum-wage workers striking; hand-lettered protest signs about walls and pussies and healthcare and immigrants and taxes, and again and again the phrase is invoked: the American Dream.

Has the American Dream failed to deliver its nebulous promises? Was there ever any hope? All around me, on Twitter, in cafés, in op-eds, people are asking: ‘Where to, O America?’ This book is a small and particular contribution to that conversation, in the form of a literary analysis.

In this book I meditate on a specific moment in the history of the American Dream. The images and stories herein are those of middle-class white suburbia in the post-war twentieth century. Tree-lined streets; shiny, candy-coloured cars; split-level lounge rooms; new appliances; Homecoming dances. Or as one of the protagonists puts it:

He had two kids, a house and a lawn mower, a Pontiac station wagon with simulated wood panelling on the side, a new Firebird, and a Labrador retriever named Daisy Chain.¹

These white suburban images are key to our understanding of the Dream, because they are, as Robert Beuka puts it, its longstanding symbol.² To have an elegant home and a nuclear family on one of those tree-lined streets is to have arrived at the Dream’s putative destination. The post-war period was lauded by many as the realization of decades, even centuries, of promise.³ That period is of real importance to an analysis of the USA now, because it bequeathed the nation two equally powerful, though contradictory, ideas: a fantasy to strive for and a lingering suspicion that the smiling suburbanites of the 1950s to 1970s were not, in fact, satisfied.

I am not the first to suggest that arriving at such a destination results not in deep spiritual satisfaction but ennui and self-destruction. But I hope to advance this narrative by illuminating how the Dream’s subjects deal with their existential crisis in violent and exclusionary ways that lead to the kind of phenomena in the 2017 news. The image of the 1964 Cadillac on the green lawn is directly connected to the image of the kneeling football player, and the #metoo women marching. Of course this connection is multifacted, and I don’t claim to be providing a comprehensive explanation here. But a Girardian reading of post-war suburbia offers insights that we can ill afford to ignore.

I have mentioned issues regarding race, economics and gender in the United States. No close study such as this could cover so broad a field, to the personal and institutional violence that is endemic therein. As a feminist scholar I am drawn to stories about sex and gender, and I have continued that focus here. I hope others more knowledgeable than myself about race and class will be prompted by this book to extend its insights into their own fields.

A few further disclaimers: I am not an American, and I have never lived there, though I have travelled across it. Many of the issues raised in the chapters to come are applicable to the white, middle-class capitalist West generally, but its touchstone is that unique US notion, the American Dream. I hope that as an inhabitant of the white Western middle class I have sufficient empathy with the protagonists herein; conversely, I hope that a little distance from my subject matter allows me to observe them without an excess of personal investment in my own American Dream.

As a scholar of literature and history, my method is to work, as one of my heroines, upon ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory … with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’.⁴ This is not a grand survey of the American novel or of American society. It is a close, sustained reading of seven texts. Two are scholarly non-fiction, one a quasi-fictional commentary, one a play and three novels. I am paying them such close attention because I believe that they form a useful extract of a larger story – the story of the American Dream.

To begin, then, what kind of story is it? It is a tragedy

George Steiner pronounced the death of tragedy in 1961. In a modern world without gods and heroes, he declared, tragedy cannot survive.⁵ He defended this view in 2004, maintaining that modernity is hostile to every element that is necessary to tragedy.⁶ But despite such notices of its demise, tragedy refuses to depart the stage. So many self-declared ‘modern tragedies’ are being written that, in 2014, the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America dedicated a special issue to tragedy, with an editorial declaring that tragedy is not only alive but vibrantly present as ‘a resource with which to think, feel, and perform the urgencies of the times’.⁷ Yet nowhere in this special edition is tragedy considered, or even mentioned, in the novel form – a trend that has continued throughout current scholarship on the tragedy. If tragedy is a vital, energetic genre in dialogue with the urgencies of modern times, why do we not look for it in that essentially modern genre, the novel? Terry Eagleton, as often, proves the exception, dedicating a chapter of Sweet Violence to the tragic novel, with the acknowledgement that ‘we speak of the comic novel, but rarely of the tragic one’.⁸

In the coming chapters I, too, address this rarity by critically analysing the novels The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Ice Storm by Rick Moody and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates as modern tragedies. I use the mimetic theory of René Girard to argue that these three twentieth-century American novels are participating in a tradition, begun in sacrificial ritual and myth and continued in classical tragedy, in which a victim is blamed for a crisis and sacrificed for the benefit of a troubled community. The novels are connected to this tradition by the thematic emphases of the myth of the American Dream itself, as represented in the non-fictional, quasi-fictional and dramatic texts I analyse in Chapters 2 and 3: Jim Cullen’s The American Dream, Andrew Delbanco’s The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, John Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window and that touchstone of the American-Dream-as-tragedy, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. I then argue that the three novels build upon this textual legacy by ‘doing tragedy’ in new ways. The tragic sacrifice in the novels is subverted and complicated by various textual means, producing ‘anti-tragic’ texts that present the characteristic features of tragedy but problematize the cathartic effects ascribed to it by Girard.

Tragedy

What is tragedy, and what does it do? Aristotle provided an early answer in his Poetics, in which he lays out a neat and prescriptive schema for tragedy. A tragedy, he asserted, is a work of imitative art in the dramatic form, depicting serious matters, telling a complete story using rhythm and harmony, arousing feelings of pity and fear in order to effect their ‘proper purgation’ – catharsis. In addition to this crucial and highly contested term, Aristotle bequeathed to literary criticism a useful terminology of tragedy, of dramatic catastrophe brought about by a mistake caused by some inherent flaw or ignorant error of the hero (hamartia), leading to unfortunate reversals of intended effect (peripeteia) and thence to the climactic moment of too-late recognition (anagnorisis).⁹ But much has happened, on the tragic stage and in the world at large, since Aristotle, and his Poetics makes scant reference to what happened before tragedy – its origins in ritual and myth. This work aims to draw a thread from those ritual origins to some modern forms of tragedy, using the work of French-American theorist René Girard. In Girard’s model, Aristotle’s favoured Greek tragedies are part of a long tradition of spectacles of sacrifice, and the cathartic effect of tragedy is no mere artistic pleasure but a crucial mechanism of human culture – upon which I will later elaborate.

Girard is, of course, just one of many since Aristotle who have contributed definitions and ascribed purposes to tragedy. Terry Eagleton, in his meditation on tragedy, Sweet Violence, undertakes a survey of those voices, whose attitudes and understandings are highly varied. Some, such as Schopenhauer or Paul Allen, look for morality in tragedy: a hero’s renunciative sacrifice, an ‘uplifting’ denouement that acts upon the emotions and stimulates understanding and virtue.¹⁰ Others uphold the rules of Aristotle, stipulating high-status protagonists, deserved falls caused by hamartia, and the lightbulb moment of anagnorisis.¹¹ But where, Eagleton justly asks, do such classical limitations leave Willy Loman or Hedda Gabler? Perhaps, he speculates, we may decide that tragedy is not possible in the modern age, as does Walter Kerr, who cites ‘freedom’ as tragedy’s defining theme and argues that since Darwin and Enlightenment determinism, man is no longer free and thus no longer tragic.¹² In the coming chapters I will show that not only is tragedy possible in the modern age but that Willy Loman is a quintessentially tragic protagonist.

A more considered, though not necessarily convincing, argument against the possibility of modern tragedy is George Steiner’s seminal The Death of Tragedy, first published in 1961. Steiner marks the final death throes of tragedy in Shakespeare, arguing that the modern era is inhospitable to tragic art. He primarily blames the intersections of the ‘radical critique of the notion of guilt’¹³ of Romanticism, and the modern ‘triumph of rationalism and secular metaphysics’,¹⁴ as deadly to tragedy – guilt and gods both being necessary to the tragic hamartia, the result of cruel but inexorable Fate. Steiner finally declares that ‘tragedy is that form of art which requires the intolerable burden of God’s presence. It is now dead because His shadow no longer falls upon us as it fell on Agamemnon or Macbeth or Athalie.’¹⁵

As Eagleton notes, Nietzsche went further than Steiner, not simply noting but mourning the loss of the shadow of the pagan gods. For Nietzsche, myth and tragedy were desirable because they exalted and perpetuated violent sacrifice of deserving victims. He abhorred the rationalist ethics of modernity: faith in logical enquiry rather than mysterious instinct, coupled with the virtue-seeking ‘slave morality’ of Christianity – conditions fatal to tragic art. Tragedy, for Nietzsche, is ‘counter-Enlightenment’:¹⁶

Tragedy has died because fate, the gods, heroism, mythology and a proper appreciation of the darkness of human hearts have ruinously yielded in our own time to chance, contingency, democracy, rationality, religious disenchantment and a callow progressivism.¹⁷

Yet, against the Nietzsche-and-Steiner perspective, many critics have disputed this readiness to commit tragedy to the grave. Eagleton lists Raymond Williams and Krieger as among those for whom the modern worldview is tragic, perhaps even too tragic, and for whom the function of modern tragedy is to bring shape and order to the overwhelming tragic reality of the present.¹⁸

Girard, likewise, argues against the death-of-tragedy notion, but goes well beyond the broad statements of the critics exampled above. Girard’s theory of tragedy is formidably particular, as tragedy forms part of a complex schema that seeks to explain not only tragedy but human culture as a whole. Modern tragedies can thus be read as part of his schema, and the function or purpose of such tragedies considered as part of the culture in which they are produced and consumed. In the case of this work, I will argue that the culture of twentieth-century America is particularly fruitful of tragedy.

Girardian theory

For Girard, the fundamental crisis that threatens a community is the ‘mimetic crisis’. Mimesis (Gk. μίμησις ≈ imitation) is the basis of desire: subject A desires an object because he has observed B desire it, and he imitates that desire. Of course, this means that A and B ‘must reach together for one and the same object. They become rivals for that object.’¹⁹ The mimetic nature of desire causes violence or, rather, ‘violence is the process itself’ when people try to prevent one another from acquiring the object they all desire – which may be a material possession but includes metaphysical objects such as success.²⁰

Girard argues that ancient societies were constructed in order to minimize rivalry by formalizing each individual’s place in a highly stratified and immovable social structure. By contrast, modern societies have tended to remove social boundaries and attempt to place large masses of citizens in the same social space.²¹ However, admiration, imitation and envy are not reduced by this reduction in formal status. Once official distinctions of nobility are done away with, Girard argues, the upper class gain their prestige through the aspirations of the bourgeoisie to join them. The desire of the middle class for wealth and privilege ‘stimulates’ the desire of the upper class: ‘mediated by each other, henceforth the two classes will desire the same things in the same way’.²² The modern individual is surrounded by potential mediators and potential imitators:

The revolutionaries thought they would be destroying vanity when they destroyed [the nobility]. But vanity is like a virulent cancer that spreads … Who is there left to imitate? … Henceforth men shall copy each other; idolatry of one person is replaced by hatred of a hundred thousand rivals.²³

As for the French bourgeoisie, so for the twentieth-century American suburbanite. In such a case, the push-and-shove of mimetic competition escalates to ‘mimetic crisis’, and individuals frustrated in their acquisition of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Tragedy, Girard and the American Dream
• 2 The American Dream: A Mythical History
• 3 Textual Prologues
• 4 The Virgin Suicides: Unravelling Fantasies
• 5 The Ice Storm: Excess and Irony
• 6 Revolutionary Road: Plays and Failures
• Conclusion
• Appendix: René Girard at a Glance Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
• Glossary of Key Girardian Terms Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint