Positive Mimesis

Daniel McInerny 
2024; 422  pp.; $34.95 (hardcover)

Positive Mimesis: Review of Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts

“There’s so much more to imitation than bad ‘mimetic desire,’” writes philosopher Daniel McInerny in “The Comic Muse,” his Substack newsletter. Today, many associate the word “mimetic” (from the Greek word “mimesis,” meaning “imitation”) with French theorist René Girard, who coined the term “mimetic desire” to capture the way literary characters such as Don Quixote or Madame Bovary—and human beings in general—imitate the desires of their models. 

Girard critiqued ancient philosophy for imperfectly grasping the truth about desire present in the works of great modern writers. By his own admission, however, his theory emerges from a much older “mimetic” tradition stretching back to Plato and Aristotle. According to this tradition, mimesis is to be understood not as the driving force of human competition, as in Girard, but as the representation, or “picturing,” of an object. McInerny seeks to reclaim imitation as a “natural and good human activity” over and against the exclusive Girardian focus on rivalry and violence. 

The title of McInerny’s Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts refers to this positive, Aristotelian sense of imitation as a path to understanding the world, whether through the clarifying example of teachers or by depicting reality in an artistic medium. The book is an engaging, enlightening tour de force, which deserves a place on the bedside table of artists and art lovers alongside Jacques Maritain’s Art & Scholasticism (which it persuasively critiques), Fr. William Lynch’s Christ and Apollo, and Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners. 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, artists rebelled against the Aristotelian view that McInerny elucidates and defends. To the Romantic mindset, that view’s emphasis on portraying recognizable aspects of the external world was a curb on originality, reducing art to a kind of academic exercise, coldly technical rather than creative. But understanding art as “mimetic” or “imitative,” McInerny argues, does not entail that it must be a hyper-realistic copying. Rather, mimetic art “pictures” reality in such a way as to make that reality “delightfully intelligible.” A comedian re-presenting the voice of actor Christopher Walken, for instance, allows us to focus on the idiosyncratic syncopation of Walken’s voice in a way that is harder to do when we engage with Walken’s voice directly, without the benefit of imitation. Mimesis can often afford us a better insight into the formal quality of something than does the direct experience of the thing. 

In its core early chapters, Beauty & Imitation gradually builds a coherent, foundational account of what mimetic art does. Its object, McInerny writes, is “human beings in action.” And because Aristotelian ethics views every human action as “undertaken for the sake of eudaimonia, or ultimate fulfillment,” a novel or even a photograph (McInerny cites Alexander Gardner’s iconic 1865 portrait of Abraham Lincoln) depicts human beings as seekers after happiness. Furthermore, because the work shows us the protagonist’s choices and their consequences, it embodies a kind of “moral argument,” even a “proof” or “demonstration” of what conduces to success or failure in the quest for fulfillment. 

Ultimately, says McInerny, an artwork engages our bodily senses and activates our emotions in order to bring home some “mimetic universal” (“something true about human beings in their quest for happiness or wholeness…embodied in sensible particulars”). In Sam Mendes’s film 1917, the hero’s courageous attempt to rescue 1,600 comrades demonstrates something true about human excellence through its depiction of a particular sensible action, a universal that can be summed up in a syllogistic premise: “The sacrifice of great goods in the courageous service of others reveals all that is beautiful and noble in human beings.” 

Very often, of course, a work’s protagonist makes the wrong choices and consequently bungles his “essay in beatitude” (a phrase McInerny takes from Robert Sokolowski, whose happy influence looms large over Beauty & Imitation). The British novelist Piers Paul Read, for example, says that his works of fiction show “that invariably unhappiness results from the indulgence of disordered passions.” Although McInerny does not address Read’s novels, they are, as he puts it with a nod to storytelling guru Robert McKee, “creative demonstrations” of that probable truth. When a patrician lady in Read’s 2015 novel Scarpia embarks on an adulterous affair with a libertine French painter, she learns this truth the hard way, becoming estranged from her husband and experiencing painful remorse for her dalliance. We readers assent to the same truth through Read’s pleasing imitation of her wayward actions. 

This is a morally transformative experience. “When we enjoy beautiful works of art,” McInerny argues, “our soul’s powers enjoy a simulation of moral choice that can incline or attract us to future virtuous action.” The observation underwrites his contention that popular art, at which the literati may be tempted to sneer, is in the end the only kind of art that really matters for the political community, since it “appeals broadly to the hearts and minds of a wide audience” and can therefore best “help us to resist the cozy dream life of the expressive individual’s obsessive ego.” “High-brow” art in the mold of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake eschews plot and therefore cannot entertain, cannot “attract and help transform the many.” We forget too easily that masterpieces by Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens achieved canonical status in no small part because they were (and are) “rollicking good tales.” 

Given his emphasis on storytelling, it should not surprise us to learn that McInerny, a philosophy professor by trade, is also the author of a novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair (Chrism Press, 2023). Whatever his artistic predilections, no reader should pass up the opportunity to benefit from the abundant wisdom and insight on offer in Beauty & Imitation. But I suspect that Catholic fiction writers especially (even Girardian ones) will find themselves turning and returning to McInerny as they strive to achieve what he calls “the immediate and humble end of the work of mimetic art, which is to deliver cognitive delight in its picturing of humanity’s place in the theo-drama.”