The Joy of Being Wrong Essays, Part 4--"Make Yourself Responsible for All Men's Sins"
In retrospect, I was primed to go Full Girardian long before I actually encountered Girard's work. Back during my time with the Dominicans, I read the book that I believe is the greatest novel ever written-- The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is one of the handful of authors (alongside Shakespeare, Cervantes, Proust, and Steindahl) that Girard used as the basis for developing his initial theories on memetic desire, back when it was basically a literary construct. Loving Dostoevsky put me halfway home to appreciating Girard. Reading Dostoevsky is always, for me, an interesting experience--it's not enjoyable in the normal sense (though, it's not un-enjoyable, either) so much as it is revealing. The sense I get when reading Dostoevsky is that he is telling you the truth about the way things are, even when you can't exactly isolate the precise content of the truth he is communicating. The first time I read the novel, my basic reacti...