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Men Becoming Gods in “Style”

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 30; Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/contagion.30.0149

1930-1200

Joshua Hren,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

In our secular age we hear seekers of the sacred and religious devotees alike decry the soul-deadening, spirit-dumbing consequences of materialism. René Girard contends that—on the contrary—in the “leveled,” horizontal world of a purportedly materialistic modernity this transcendent authority is deviated and distorted but it does not disappear. In his first major work, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, he argues that “the passion that drives men to seize or gain more possessions is not materialistic; it is the triumph of the mediator, the god with the human face.”1 In a materialistic age, the gods are “pulled down from the heaven, the sacred flows over the earth” and men become “gods for each other.”2Dana Gioia, former businessman and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is no stranger to the economy of divinized desire. The stakes of our passions—whether we are wrecked by dubious wants or able to shed our infernal imitations—pierce his poetry. Gioia cites Girard as a significant influence alongside St. Augustine and Kierkegaard, though he does not indicate whether his own poetic investigations of mimesis are a direct yield of his encounter with Girard or the independent discovery of attentive artistic intuition.3The refuge of lies so central to Girard is particularly palpable in Gioia's long narrative poem “Style.”4 Charlie, the self-deprecating narrator, divinizes his college friend Tom, a business mogul who “prospered like one chosen by the gods.”5 Tom uses his easy money to purchase gaudy metamorphoses, hosting magnificent events with his “flawless” wife Eden. An antihero of the unremarkable variety, Charlie attends all Tom's parties until he stops receiving invitations. When he discovers his deity's disappearance is tied to a terminal illness, he descends into the infernal “slums” of Tom's new hideout, and he finds his former hero hell-bent, ready to commit an arson that will erase his own existence in style. Charlie is confronted with a difficult decision that any coward would waver before. He has the chance to become an atheist—at least with respect to his dying god. After painting a portrait of man-made gods, the poem probes the question of whether and how we can cut short our penchant for great deceits.Charlie opens this narrative poem with an invective directed against himself.Just look at me. Isn't it obvious?I have no style. I'm just a human blur.On me expensive clothes look second-hand.They droop or sag. The color's never right.I wear the wrong apparel to the party.I pick the dullest item on the menu.Each haircut brings some new humiliation.6Crucially, we never receive an audit of this dour self-consciousness. By poem's end, no one has corrected or confirmed Charlie's condemnations. He may be right; his might be the antinomy of Midas's modus operandi. His hyperbolic portrait of Tom's greatness suggests that he is less than just to himself. His preoccupation with something as small as a menu item betrays a brutal obsessiveness. He employs the ascetical word “humiliation” in conjunction with a “haircut”—further revealing his unforgiving inner harshness. Charlie “always loved to visit Tom” precisely because he himself is Pathetic, Inc.7Were René Girard Charlie's older brother, he might sit the sad sap down on a comfortable couch and spell out the difficult truth as follows: The anti-hero “dreams of absorbing and assimilating his mediator's being.”8 This highfalutin description of “the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one's own substance.”9 We ought not to take seriously the excuses these types give for their failings and their fawning, for they “hate themselves on a more essential level than that of ‘qualities.’”10 When Charlie disparages his badly cut bangs or his mismatched outfits, he's really incriminating his very being.“The desire,” Girard argues, “is aimed at the mediator's being.”11 Charlie evinces this dynamic when he insists that Tom's “success was existential: / It wasn't what he did; he simply was / The way he was.”12 Stymying evidence to the contrary, Charlie buys into the obsession with style that will soon trigger Tom's demise: “Style isn't fashion,” he swears, dead sober: “It's knowing who you are / And how you hold yourself up to the world.”13 By this logic, lack of style is indistinguishable from living death. Self-depreciation, that twin brother of mad desire, delivers a despairing diagnosis: I wake up many mornings full of dread,Knowing my life is not what I intended.Just like my clothes, it doesn't really fit.(What was it I intended anyway?)Most lives consist of choosing the wrong things.We try to compensate by choosing more,As if sheer mass bestowed integrity.14Charlie has seamlessly confused body and being—apparel and anima. He is not wrong to wager than many of us cover our poor decisions with decades of damning elected affinities. He is not wrong to frame free choice as totally consequential for the human species. But he reverses the relation of cause and effect, surface and depths. To him, Tom's suave handshakes are equal to moral goodness; his own sweaty palms are proof he's not chosen.Tom, of course, is sinless. Charlie's devotion increases his agonies instead of milking some sort of mercy from his sinless friend. To be sure, their friendship does not win him naturalization into the Mount Olympus that is Tom's office, “built on a cloud— / With miles of open sky and bright blue water / Shining through the glass walls above the bay.”15Marcel Proust suggests that “Every person who makes us suffer we can associate with a divinity, of which that person is only a fragmentary reflection.”16 On the other hand, “contemplation of this divinity as pure idea gives us instant joy in place of the sorrow we were suffering.”17 This is precisely the mechanism at play in Charlie. At first he speaks of Tom as a celebrity whose only peer is the “Cary Grant” stardom in “movies of a certain era,” wherein “the cameras caress him like a lover.”18 “Sitting in the dark” you watch first with awe, although “a single gesture” could cause “a dozen heartbreaks.”19 Soon, however, the cinematic aura that communicates celebrity is not enough to elevate the divinity.Tom dated a succession of tall beauties.And then came Eden. I can't be objectiveIn any way about her. She was perfect—Beautiful, elegant, intelligent.I want to say divine—probably becauseThe first time that I saw her she was bathedIn golden light against a colonnadeAt the Met's temple of the goddess Isis.The vision was purely theatrical—Tom's party planners doing their paid magic.But even tricks bestow a sense of wonder.20Touched by Tom, Eden too becomes paradisiacal. As René Girard notes of Proust's novels, “Even classical mythology has a part in the deification of the mediator.”21 That is, even in a rational age rid of mythology's mysterious dominance, the man of ressentiment turns to bygone gods in order to explain his dawning idols. Those untouchable Others, the “social elite,” are “transformed into nymphs, nereids, tritons.”22 In the beginning Eden becomes Isis.“The metaphor is no longer needed to give the flavor of the sacred; the effect is so well achieved that the perception itself sanctifies the metaphor. Thus, Proust rejuvenates worn-out metaphors, making them reflect the transcendency emanating from the mediator. . . . Everything, in fact, is false, theatrical, and artificial in desire except the immense hunger for the sacred.”23 Charlie embodies precisely this use of metaphors when he describes Eden as not merely “Beautiful, elegant, intelligent” but “divine,” this, he says, “probably because / The first time that I saw her she was bathed / In golden light against a colonnade / At the Met's temple of the goddess Isis.”24 Although Charlie tries to remind himself that “the vision was purely theatrical,” that it was merely contrived by “Tom's party planners doing their paid magic,” he nonetheless cannot escape the “wonder” these “tricks” produce. As Girard notes, “Proust's demands on the old mythological apparatus for services it is notoriously unable to render are somewhat ironic.”25 Likewise Gioia's: It is not merely the party planners’ mythic choreography, but Gioia himself doing his (poet's poorly paid) magic in a manner at once demystified and mesmerizing—ironic and utterly serious. For as they wax otherworldly, Charlie devolves into a “caveman staring at the stars” while I watched him climb the temple steps to join her.They were magnificent, and utterlyAsexual. They seemed like seraphimWho had transcended bodily desire.26Surely Charlie's self-delusion has several causes, but Girard helps us to home in on the golden goose of all this grandeur. Charlie tries to distance himself from these worn-out mythologies, which, couched in a museum's thoroughly “neutral” space, are the perfect emblem of secularity. He brushes up against the utter affectedness staged for show, but he reels back before fully admitting the implications. He is denied the epiphany that everything is “theatrical and artificial in desire except the immense hunger for the sacred” (Girard). The extent and intensity of his desire is especially evident when he disembodies the perfect couple. Charlie has an apparently incurable case of “angelic imagination.” In “The Symbolic Imagination,” Allen Tate defines the angelic imagination directly: I call that human imagination angelic which tries to disintegrate or to circumvent the image in the illusory pursuit of essence. When human beings undertake this ambitious program, divine love becomes so rarefied that it loses its human paradigm, and is dissolved in the worship of intellectual power, the surrogate of divinity that worships itself. It professes to know nature as essence at the same time that it has become alienated from nature in the rejection of its material forms.27Although less smitten admirers might fixate precisely upon fleshly consummation, Charlie's subjection to Tom is so severe that he promotes them up the Great Chain of Being: Here are not humans but “seraphim / Who had transcended bodily desire.”28 As Charlie himself is riddled with want, he longs to be someone who lacks it altogether.The smitten desirer comes into conflict with his mediator when his proximity to the man-made god increases. Girard makes an essential distinction between external and internal mediators: We shall speak of external mediation when the distance is sufficient to eliminate any contact between the two spheres of possibilities of which the mediator and the subject occupy the respective centers. We shall speak of internal mediation when this same distance is sufficiently reduced to allow these two spheres to penetrate each other more or less profoundly.29For many years Tom invited Charlie into his inner circle. It would seem then that the successful businessman and flawless socialite would be for the loser an internal mediator. However, as Girard clarifies, “It is not physical space that measures the gap between mediator and the desiring subject. Although geographical separation might be one factor, the distance between mediator and subject is primarily spiritual.”30 When Charlie attends Tom's parties, he experiences himself as so far removed, spiritually, from Tom that the latter is not rival but a secular saint whose being rubs off on him. Charlie cannot follow Tom to the klieg lights. He cannot flare into a star on “a sort of stage” that turns even the most “astonishing locations” (“The Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, / The Hall of the Great Whale, the Stock Exchange / And the Egyptian Temple at the Met”).31 In accordance with his crippled consciousness, Charlie becomes “the star” in “the secret movie in my mind . . . . and everything is bright, / Glamorous, and romantic, even me.”32 Though his glorious reel peters out with a glum “even me,” he screens the romantic lie for as long as he can.It goes without saying that Tom's lordship couldn't last. Suddenly “the invitations stopped,” a fate Charlie had anticipated for years: “I barely had a life. Tom had it all.” As Charlie learns, however, Tom has lost everything.Charlie hears the tale of Tom's unnerving downturn from Eden. They randomly run into one another at the St. Regis, “another unsuccessful pitch.” Although Charlie meets Eden in a bar just after his “shabby life” was “about to crash again,” and though seeing her at a table by herself gives him “a twinge of joy,” nonetheless he does not desire her, because he soon finds that “Tom and I are not together now.”33 She is without Tom—and thus less desirable. Her husband no longer mediates Charlie's enslaved wanting. No hieroglyphic Egyptian metaphors purple their beleaguered conversation. Charlie would never have approached an affair with Eden before now because she and Tom were gods, external—too far outside his orbit to be the object of practical action. Girard would argue that Charlie does not revere her because Tom does not desire her; the object of our pining does not really matter: The object of desire can shift—it is the mediator who remains the same, as long as he, in the eyes of the desirer, possesses a greater “metaphysicality.” But the saga Eden shares gives him a Tom without being.On a more literal level, the scene in a swanky, stylish bar shows just how distant Charlie has become from their lives—how lonely and isolated Eden is. Their chance meeting, which comes midway through the poem, marks a palpable shift in tone: The previously comic self-deprecation moves into a melancholy darkness that the reader is unprepared for. The complications of Charlie give way to a mesmerized focus on Tom's dramatic decline—culminating in his fiery rebellion.At first, when “Tom became ill,” he was confident that he could defeat the disease, even though “doctors couldn't pinpoint what was wrong.” He saw the sickness as “just another problem to be solved” and “We both knew he was good at solving problems.”34 But, as Flannery O'Connor would have it, “Evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.”35 In spite of his buoyant sanguinity, soon “he no longer looked at all like Tom.”36 His “face puffed up / His features thickened, his hair thinned out,” a metamorphosis especially awful for a man with such a winsome countenance.37 Ashamed of his out-of-control disfigurement, he stopped going to the office, thereby sinking the business. Finally, after he “took the mirrors down in the apartment,” Tom fled, disappeared, and she found him only with the help of detectives.38When she taxies to his tenement Eden worries for her safety, because “The place was sordid.”39 She knocks and knocks but receives no answer at all.I pounded wildly, screaming at the door.Finally, a voice spoke. His voice. It said,‘The person that you're looking for is gone.Tom isn't here. Tom isn't anywhere.’I begged and wept. He wouldn't let me in.A neighbor came out in his underwearAnd stared at me. I felt ashamed and left.40Eden, here, is all too human. The vanity she cultivated as a secular goddess still exists, but it bids her bow low and leave instead of beaming in the spotlight. As their pained exchange ends, Eden's eyes are “blackened, / Smeared from her streaked eyeliner, but they shined / With the intensity of the damned,” and she pleads with Charlie to reason with Tom, who always said “you were his closest friend.”41 We can't help feeling the unbearable distance of this proximity. Tom has lived a life beyond intimacy. Flattery has played the part written for fraternal correction.Charlie discovers that the “‘sordid’ tenement turned out to be / An ordinary place, down on its luck,” a filthy place, yes, but “it wasn't / Much worse than the apartment where I lived.”42 When his deity answers Charlie does not recognize him, for “His body was a leopard skin of bruises.”“Welcome,” he said, “to the Kingdom of the Dead.I wish that I could offer you a chair,But don't expect good manners from the damned.I should apologize about the smell,But once apologies begin, where would I stop?”43Tom splits into two: He enters into rivalry with himself, with his “former self.” “The man I was is dead,” Tom says, “I'm just the fellow waiting for the hearse.”44 Insofar as this is the case, he is engaged in what Girard calls “internal mediation, where the model's and subject's objects of desire overlap and become a matter of rivalry.” He is raging against and competing with the man—or the mannequin—he was. At this point Tom openly identifies himself as a vaniteux: “Even a monster has his vanity” he declares, insisting that he “left the other man his life intact / I didn't steal a thing, not even her.”45 Stendhal cautions us against “what he calls modern emotions, the fruits of universal vanity: ‘envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred.”46 In Tom's case, the universality is internalized: His hatred is directed toward his current self. He is pleading the case on behalf of his former client and successful businessman Tom.“The romantic vaniteux does not want to be anyone's disciple,” Girard explains. Convinced that he is “thoroughly original,” his heart is haunted by “Romantic revulsion, hatred of society, nostalgia for the desert, just as gregariousness, usually conceal a morbid concern for the Other.”47 When Tom abdicates his hyperpublic posturing to inhabit the hidden, “sordid” slums, he takes with him no admirers. He loses his signature singularity. In a terrible twist (“Pity the monsters!” wrote Robert Lowell48), Tom the former socialite assumes the consciousness of an antisocial revolutionary.When Charlie enters, he finds “a dark and empty room.”49 Notice the lack of light, the absence. What does exist here either is wretched (the stench of grease) or has barely any being at all. It is not that the place is literally ghostly; no ghouls or dread spirits inhabit this dead kingdom. Rather, the mediator can no longer conjure his powers. Bereft of the style that promised him being, Tom cannot lend divine sheen to the ash heap. As Girard says, “The mediator's prestige is imparted to the object of desire and confers upon it an illusory value.”50 The desiring disciple, devoted to the mediator, “transfigures” the objects his master touches.51 The contents of the room are indistinguishable from “the sort of junk you see left on the street.”52 Explicitly divided from his former self, furious over his fate as “An object of intolerable pity,” Tom is for Charlie totally unrecognizable: “I did not recognize the man who sat there,” Charlie declares.53If he's shed his former luster in the poem's last pages, Tom grows “eloquent,” for “Being well-spoken is all I have left.”54 Through a cataract of melodramatic appeals, he tries to make meaning out of what has become “a very shabby story.”55 He accuses “reality” of having “made a botch of it,” and refuses to go gently into a finale that has “no nuance, no panache.”56 We see his soul, as it were, spoken at last—and what he says is enough to spook anyone: So let me start my new and last career,The editor who will revise this story.If I'm compelled to play the monster's role,Then let the monster have his grand finale.Give me a death scene and a juicy speech,Not a morphine drip in a hospice bed,Nor a last whimper to a paid attendant.57The vain person, the vaniteux, “cannot draw his desires from his own resources,” Girard argues; “he must borrow them from others.”58 A vaniteux will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person whom he admires. Tom desires the objects of his former self, a man so familiar and yet so wholly external—a man who has died without a glorious funeral. Tom Past hasn't even had a halfway decent burial, a fact that stokes fury from his admirer—an ire that will flower in fury and fire.The mediator here is himself-as-a-rival, brought into existence by a bad case of vanity, and that same vanity demands his self-defeat. Present Tom's mediator is Tom Past. Even though Tom Past is dead, Tom Present vies for him in a contest of style, in a competition that demands the highest performance review ever: He must outdistance Tom Past with a new and thoroughly original style. Remember that the romantic vaniteux “convinces himself that he is thoroughly original.” For Tom Present, his manner of death carries his ultimate, parting, purportedly inimitable style. He summons an “inferno” that's been “carefully devised,” whose “blaze reached out in lines across the room,” whose flames, as they spread, “were beautiful.”59 Charlie, still blinded, cannot see that the light is Luciferian. Charlie, desperate to have his model regain glory, eager to see even death's sting overcome with style, is the perfect audience.“No one knows how the accident occurred,” Charlie says in his choreographed confession, relating the “accident” to the widowed Eden: “Tom and I talked about his situation.He said that he was sorry you had suffered.He had almost decided to come home.As I walked out, he stopped me for a moment.He made me promise I would visit you.”60The consolation prize of lies is all he can offer, and his bad acting leaves us comfortless. Earlier, at Tom's, Charlie had confronted his holier than thou. “How can you talk that way about your wife? / This is no time for striking clever poses.”61 For a moment he seems moved by something more genuine—a concern for Eden, a love for her maybe. This is the closest the antihero comes to courage but he never slays his self-hating consciousness. He remains, like Tom, split in two, his conversion from hero worship stymied. “The ending is what gives a story meaning,” Tom declares at his most theatrical.62 If Charlie gets the girl, this is not the last word. His final lines are falsification. His bad faith gives us pause, as does his newfound boldness.In this understated, disconcerting coda, Charlie has cooked up a self-serving fib. He's here by decree: Tom made him promise. Tom's death does not spell resurrection from the underground. The underground consciousness ascends the elevator and sets itself at its former master's service. Unable to choose an object of desire, Charlie is like a Flaubert protagonist, “marked by an essential ‘lack of a fixed character and originality of their own . . . so that being nothing by themselves they become something, one thing or another, through the suggestion which they obey.’”63It is because the vain man “feels the emptiness mentioned in Ecclesiastes growing inside of him that he takes refuge in shallow behavior and imitation. Because he cannot face his nothingness he throws himself on Another who seems to be spared by the curse.”64 Eden, vexed by the bonfire of her vain husband, is still here. Her presence convinces Charlie she's been spared Tom's contagion. But an angel guards that Edenic paradise. The wages of sin forbid our entry without true death to self. The happy fault becomes unfunny when the fissures threaten to fissure the soul—and all the while the host is unconscious of it.We readers, on the other hand, are wholly alert to the characters’ living hell of contagious desire. We almost take literally Tom's kinship over the damned. As Girard says, modern literature contains conversions analogous to Dante's but now defined “in nonreligious terms—in terms of what happens to us when our relations with others are dominated exclusively by our desires and theirs, and their relationships dominated by their desires and ours.”65 A character who is “badly caught up in circularity” must “undergo an experience of radical change which religious people call a conversion.”66 But he must “want . . . to get out of it.”67 That was one desire that did not trouble Charlie. We, my friend, must want to get out of it.