To understand the dynamics of Rene Girard’s memetics–and their implications for storytelling–consider three very different narratives.
Babbitt’s Closed Worlds
After a lifetime as Zenith’s most famous conformist, George Babbitt has taken up with a sexy bohemian named Tanis Judique. No longer a reflexive conservative, he has decided he likes short skirts and jazz and dancing cheek to cheek. For once, George is making decisions for himself.
Well, not exactly. In fact, Babbitt has exchanged one style of conformist behavior for another. The wild side he has embraced, on the sly, has just as many mirrors in it as the one he left.
Zenith never really lets Babbitt be himself. To be sure, Babbitt would not know how to be himself if he had the chance. Think of the groupings that constrain his behavior:
- His family, wife Myra and his grown children, ensconced in their Dutch Colonial house in Floral Heights.
- The Athletic Club and the Boosters, his conservative business peers, the men he lunches with and sells real estate alongside.
- Tanis and her Bunch, the late parties, and the giddy, deliberate, boozy looseness.
- The Good Citizens’ League, formed explicitly to bring men like Babbitt back into line.
When Babbitt tries to claim some room of his own — “that strikes me as my private business” — he pays a heavy price. He loses clients, the Zenith Street Traction Company among them. Gunch, once a friend, crosses the street when he sees him.
Moving into Tanis’s world also carries real costs. The deeper he gets, the less it feels like freedom and the more it feels another set of expectations. The giddiness of the affair and the wild nights need just as much mirroring as the straitlaced respectability of Babbitt’s old business pals.
Eventually, he returns to the fold. In the novel’s final chapter, Babbitt seeks reassurance from his pastor.
“I just wanted to ask — Tell you how it is, dominie: Here a while ago I guess I got kind of slack. Took a few drinks and so on. What I wanted to ask is: How is it if a fellow cuts that all out and comes back to his senses? Does it sort of, well, you might say, does it score against him in the long run?”
He’s not asking about his soul — he’s asking about acceptance. And Reverend Dr. Drew obliges him with exactly the wrong kind of attention: “Been going on joy-rides? Squeezing girls in cars?” His eyes glistened.
The story comes full circle. One memetic figure has confirmed another. The order of the world has been restored — not because Babbitt found his way back to anything true, but because he found, once again, an audience willing to tell him who he was.
Heroism in Memesis
Huck Finn looks, on the surface, like the easiest case in this series: a boy who simply doesn’t care what people think. He defies the Widow Douglas’s attempts to “sivilize” him almost on instinct, slips away from Pap with barely a backward glance, fakes his own death without much remorse.
None of that costs him anything, because he never accepts these boundaries. The Widow is an authority he can dodge. Pap is a model only in the sense of showing Huck exactly what he doesn’t want to become.
The real boundary doesn’t emerge until partway down the river, and it isn’t a person at all. It’s “the larger swirl”: the whole inherited weather of a slaveholding society, absorbed so early and so completely that Huck experiences it not as someone else’s opinion but as his own conscience.
The crisis arrives in Chapter 31. The duke and the king have sold Jim back into captivity, and Huck, alone on the raft, decides to do the “right” thing and write to Miss Watson, telling her where to find him. He writes the letter. He feels, he says, washed clean, light as a feather, ready to pray for the first time in his life.
But then he hesitates. He remembers his time with Jim on the river, in moonlight and in storms, talking and singing and laughing. “I see Jim before me all the time,” he says. Now Huck can’t go through with his plan. He picks up the letter, holds it, and tears it up. He has been taught to expectat damnation for such defiance. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he says.
How did Huck come so close to turning in Jim? Huck’s rationale for turning in Jim in was never really his; it’s the whole town’s opinion, internalized so thoroughly he mistook it for his own voice.
When he gets home, Jim has already been treed. But Tom Sawyer, ever the jester, plays a joke on Huck. He pretends that Jim is in captivity and stages a rescue plan. Tom’s fake adventure is just another form of memesis: Tom, having no other model, follows an absurd plan based on adventure tales. No matter that Jim is disrespected and Tom is hurt in the process.
In the end, Huck’s Aunt Sally is planning to adopt Huck to finish the civilizing the Widow started. The first round of memetics didn;t work; maybe this one will. Huck leaves: “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
No Exit
If Huck shows now to exit a bad memetic world, Jean-Paul Sartre shows what happens when there’s no way to escape.
Sartre’s No Exit shows three characters, recently dead and condemned to the surprising hell of a drawing room. Garcin is a journalist executed for desertion, Inez is a postal clerk who seduced her cousin’s wife, and Estelle is a socialite who drowned her own infant.
How can this room be hell? Where are the fiery wasteland or the burning lake of Milton? When the door shuts, it eventually dawns on the characters that “hell is other people”–confined together, condemned to play out memetic conflict forever.
Sartre builds a closed triangle out of exactly their mutual dependency: Estelle wants Garcin to want her, because a man’s desire is the only proof of her own beauty. Garcin wants Inez to believe he wasn’t a coward, because Estelle’s good opinion is worthless to him. And Inez wants Estelle, who can’t stand her.
Each needs the other, memetically. None of them can get what they need, making the third into a scapgoat.
The play’s most famous line–“Hell is other people”–isn;t the misanthropic claim that some readers hear. It refers, instead, to the discovery that when you identity depends on someone else, you have surrendered your selfhood.