As suggested by the emphasis on conversion narrative, mimetic desire is a fundamentally Christian theory. Just as “the false prophets proclaim that in tomorrow’s world men will be gods for each other,” so does mimetic desire entail worshiping another human being as a god, with inevitably disastrous results. There is one and only one human who actually is a god, and that’s Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it is only by taking Christ as a model for our actions that we can redeem mimetic desire as a positive force.
Although I am unconvinced that mimetic desire is the fundamental content of the novelistic form, or that humans’ mimetic desires can be channeled productively only by imitating Christ, Girard’s theory unquestionably explains a great deal in the work of certain novelists, particularly those such as Stendhal and Dostoevsky, who were deeply engaged with Christian thought and the practice of a Christian life.* The solution is particularly convincing in the case of Demons. Girard characterizes Stavrogin—whose name combines the Greek stavros (cross) and the Russian rog (horn), suggesting the Antichrist—as a test case of the ultimate mediator of desire: one who has no desires himself. “It is not clear whether he no longer desires because Others desire him or whether Others desire him because he no longer desires”; in any case, Stavrogin is trapped in a deadly cycle:
No longer having a mediator himself, he becomes a magnetic pole of desire and hatred . . . all the characters in The Possessed become his slaves . . . Kirillov, Shatov, Pyotr, and all the women in The Possessed succumb to Stavrogin’s strange power and reveal to him in almost identical terms the part he plays in their existence. Stavrogin is their “light,” they wait for him as for the “sun”; before him they feel they are “before the Almighty”; they speak to him as “to God himself.”
Stavrogin, Girard continues, is “young, good-looking, rich, strong, intelligent, and noble,” not because Dostoevsky “feels a secret sympathy for him,” but because the test subject must “unite in his own person all the conditions for metaphysical success”—it has to be without any effort on his part that men and women alike “fall at his feet and surrender to him.” Stavrogin is “rapidly reduced to the most horrible caprices,” ending with suicide; this is how Dostoevsky illustrates the price of “the ‘success’ of the metaphysical undertaking.” Because the purest culmination of mimetic desire is self-annihilation, Stavrogin’s demise is accompanied by “a quasi-suicide of the collectivity”: Kirillov shoots himself; Shatov, Liza, and Marya indirectly bring about their own murders; and Stepan Trofimovich self-destructs in a fit of madness.
Girard’s interpretation accounts for Stavrogin’s psychic emptiness, for the desperate mania of others to be near him and to co-opt him into their philosophies. It answers Stavrogin’s question “What the devil do you need me for?” It explains the metaphor of demonic possession and, through the idea of mimetic contagion, the mass effect on the whole town. It also accounts finally for the role of Stepan Trofimovich in the noveclass="underline" it is Stepan Trofimovich’s “Russian liberalism,” the valorization of self-fulfillment, the deism, freethinking, and Francophilia, that create the vacuum embodied by Stavrogin. “Stepan Trofimovich is the father of all the possessed. He is Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father; he is the spiritual father of Shatov, of [Darya], of [Liza], and especially of Stavrogin, since he taught them all,” Girard writes. “Everything in The Possessed starts with Stepan Trofimovich and ends with Stavrogin.”
The strange thing is that, during the “demonic” years of my graduate-student career, Girard himself played the role of Stepan Trofimovich: the pedagogue-father who gave birth to monsters. It wasn’t just mimetic sickness that we had, my classmates and I, but the idea of mimetic sickness, and we had learned it from him.
When I returned to Stanford after fifteen months of trying to write a novel, the department dynamics had changed completely. There were two years’ worth of new admits. Unlike the other students in Luba’s and my class—an extremely efficient young man who completed a PhD on the Chinese reception of Shakespeare in just four years; a Romanian girl who briefly studied unreliable narrators before dropping out of the program and moving to Canada—they had coalesced into a community, taking classes together, reading one another’s papers, going to lectures, discussing their work long into the night.
“They’re so . . . enthusiastic,” Luba said, not altogether approvingly, with reference to these students. She had just gotten back together with a college boyfriend and had moved off campus. My relationship with my college boyfriend was, by contrast, increasingly strained. I found myself spending less time at home or with Luba, and more time on campus with my new classmates.
The circle was polarized around Matej, a fast-talking philosophy major from Croatia, who combined Stavrogin’s “masklike” beauty—narrow glinting eyes, high cheekbones, too-black hair—with a long-limbed, perfectly proportioned physical elegance, such that his body always looked at once extravagantly casual and flawlessly composed. The first time I saw him—as it happens, in an introductory meeting of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky seminar, which neither of us ended up taking—the overall effect struck me as excessive, almost parodic. But the more time I spent around Matej, the more vividly I realized that I was for the first time in the presence of pure charisma, the real thing. It was an elemental power, like weather or electricity. Recognizing it had no effect on your physical response.
Like the related phenomenon of charm, charisma resides largely in speech. Matej, who had spent the last three years working for a radio station in Zagreb, had a deep, mesmerizing, immediately recognizable voice, as well as a rhetorical talent for provoking conflicts with one hand while smoothing them over with the other, making concessions and winning them at the same time, producing the impression on everyone involved that great, collegial, and somehow intimate progress was being made in the working out of ideas.
I knew of at least two extremely smart and attractive women who were in love with Matej. Both were dating other men, whom Matej befriended. He then behaved very flirtatiously with the women. The flirtation was cloaked in a kind of gallantry that everyone found exciting, until one day they suddenly didn’t. One of the couples broke up; the boy transferred to Harvard and the girl, a formerly lively and charming person, wandered around campus like a ghost, her eyes red, talking about her cats.
Then there was my comp lit classmate Keren. She and her boyfriend, Ilan, a linguist, were inseparable from Matej. The three of them shared a car, and one summer they all lived together in Berlin. Keren and Matej were office-mates and spent a lot of time alone in each other’s company, but Ilan and Matej would also sometimes go watch basketball together, without Keren. Matej, like Stavrogin, had a magnetic effect on both sexes.
It was a great mystery how Keren and Ilan managed to stay together despite Matej. I asked her about it once, in a roundabout way; she told me that she and Ilan were committed to each other for the foreseeable future, but that they both understood and accepted that each might not be the most intensely thought-about person in the other’s psyche 100 percent of the time. “You know how intense things can get with the people you work with,” she said.