The lie of romanticism and the truth of the novel

In the name of this first book of the French -American philosopher Rene Girar, the whole pathos of his thoughts are already concluded: "romanticism" for him is not so much a direction in European art as an illusion that a person is free in his desires, but "Roman" is not a literary genre, A "Revelation", exposing our radical dependence on another. Having secured the support of the great writers - Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky, the author creates a conceptual story of desire from the new time to the present, from the playful imitation of the “Sun king” to the XX century that has gripped all the gloomy hatred of all to everyone. The European romance becomes a guide for him in the human soul, which runs the path from vanity, envy and imitation of his neighbor to the liberation that comes to the hero on his deathbed. If in subsequent books the Girard will talk about culture and the world as a whole, then the "lie of romanticism" is his only work where the place of life and death of an individual was found. Obviously or in a folded form, all the fundamental ideas of the philosopher are already present here: a mymetic principle, a sacrificial crisis, a mechanism of scapegoat - and its overcoming in Christianity