Looooong Day's Journey.... -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 14:21:12 03/25/08 Tue
Author: CS Holden
Subject: Looooong Day's Journey....

A friend and I were talking about plays that we found to be very Girardian, or at least similar to Long Day's Journey into Night. The mimetic cycles are agonizing and there is no relief, no expiation, no sense of relief (however temporary). It makes you wonder just how much we need to "get it all out" from time to time.

Some plays that came to mind were Sartre's No Exit, from which we get the famous phrase, "Hell is other people." It takes place in a hell that is an awful lot like earth, and the love triangle is the eternal torture. In this hell, there is no way out--no doors, mirrors, crying--and the characters never experience a catharsis. The idea is also that the audience should feel claustrophobic and tortured by the end of the play. (Incidentally, the Theatre Dept. is producing this play in mid April. Good stuff, folks.)

We also thought of Beckett's plays. Waiting for Godot, with its two vaudevillian characters in constant crisis and competition, not to mention the vagabonds Lucky and Pozzo and their master-slave relationship, is full of mimetic angst. There's a great moment in act two where, in trying to pick up Pozzo from the ground, Vlad and Didi end up pinned down, too, unable to rise again except with extreme effort. And every attempt at suicide, reconciliation, or catharsis is either meaningless or quickly forgotten.

There's something existential, clearly, about any theory of human behavior that suggests we are unconscious of ourselves, or that our behavior is cyclical, formulaic, unoriginal, pointless, and violent. I suppose that's why Girard is sure to show a way out.

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