The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard

217 Pages·2013·5.258 MB·English

by  Trevor Cribben Merrill

The Book of Imitation and Desire

The Book of

Imitation and Desire
Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard
Trevor Cribben Merrill

NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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NY 10010 WC1B 3DP
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www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2013
© Trevor Cribben Merrill, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on
or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Merrill, Trevor Cribben.
The book of imitation and desire : reading Milan Kundera with René Girard /
Trevor Cribben Merrill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-1865-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kundera, Milan–Criticism
and interpretation. 2. Imitation in literature. 3. Desire in literature. I. Title.
PG5039.21.U6Z7786 2013
891.8’635–dc23
2012036722
EISBN: 978-1-4411-9546-3

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
It could be said that I am playing at something that Martin lives. Sometimes
I have the feeling that the whole of my polygamous life is a consequence of
my imitation of other men; although I am not denying that I have taken a
liking for this imitation.
Milan Kundera, “The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire”

Contents

Foreword ix
Author’s Preface xii
1 “Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women” 1
2 Into the Labyrinth of Values 9
The transfiguration of the object 9
Metamorphoses of Kristyna 21
“An imitation of feeling” 26
3 From Imitation to Rivalry 33
The shift from admiration to envy 33
Deceit, desire, and the plight of the aging Don Juan 37
Rivalry and the transfiguration of the object 43
“The younger sister imitated the elder” 48
Publish or perish 56
4 The Model as Obstacle 63
Strategies of revelation 63
The art of polyphonic comparison 68
A little theory of resentment 74
Litost in the underground 77
5 Jealousy and its Metaphors 83
The game gone awry 83
The metaphors of jealousy 89
“A test that gauged her susceptibility to seduction” 94
6 The Quadrille of Desire 105
Sex as theater 105
Acute rivalry and homosexual attraction 116
The geometry of sadomasochism 118
viii Contents
7 At the Heart of the Labyrinth 123
“The thousand-headed dragon” 123
“The cement of their brotherhood” 126
The two temptations 131
“The absolute denial of shit” 134
First time as tragedy, second time as farce 139
8 Repudiating the Model 143
Eduard’s smile 143
From hatred to compassion 148
Karenin’s smile 152
The birth of a novelist 157
Liberating exiles 163
9 Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel 169
Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman 175
Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works 183
Notes 189
Bibliography 195
Index 199
Foreword by Andrew McKenna

In a letter from prison Dietrich Bonhoffer complains about books “whose
productions seem to me to be lacking the hilaritas—cheerfulness—which is
to be found in any really great and free intellectual achievement.” This is a
startling comment from a man sentenced to death for conspiring against a
murderous regime. The conjoining of laughter and moral freedom is worth
sounding out, and Trevor Merrill’s deft reading of the novels of Milan
Kundera has a lot to teach us about it.
The Joke, Laughable Loves, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Surely
Kundera means us to understand something about humor, which we find is
both a theme and a structuring principle of his fictions, its exercise being a
way of knowing. To give but a single example: in one of his novels someone
tells a joke about a man throwing up on the street in Prague; another man
passing by stops to remark, “I know just what you mean.” As if a visceral
disgust is pandemic, the all-pervasive response to the grim realities of
totalitarian rule; and as if the author’s joke served as a necessary purgative for
his indignation. Among the many rewarding concepts that Merrill imparts
to us is a definition of the novel as “satire gone wrong,” by which we are
meant to understand our best fiction as issuing from a defining correction,
something like a conversion, by which an author abandons all pretense to
moral privilege. His characters elude the writer’s censure; they are allowed
a freedom to emerge in a more fully rounded way than in satire, and are
effectively left to their own devices in fashioning the misery they concoct
for themselves. The work of desengaño or disillusionment is something the
readers have to do on their own.
René Girard has written that “all great novels tend to the comic,” and this
is the case that Merrill makes for Kundera, who came to admire Girard’s
ideas during his exile in Paris. A footnote in his Testaments Betrayed praises
Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel as the best book to read on narrative
fiction. This does not mean that Kundera plots his stories according to a grid
provided by Girard’s mimetic theory, but that he shares with the French
critic the same insights into human interaction. Cervantes is the mentor
they have in common as the originator of the modern novel, which is borne
aloft by the fundamental intuition that our desires require models, that we
desire according to others, and that it is precisely when we ignore or deny
this basic reality that we get into the most trouble, with ourselves and with
one another.