MIMESIS, n. This is just a fancy word for “imitation,” borrowed directly from Greek. You’ll recognize its cousin “mime.” In English, mimesis sounds like “my me sis,” which was a real surprise to me, a native English speaker who first learned this word in French (mimèsis, me may zees) because it comes up a lot in literary theory.
English and French borrowed this word from Greek because there are important instances in both Plato and Aristotle. They use it with different nuances, but all that matters for my purposes today is the general sense of imitation, because what I actually want to talk about is suppressed gay yearning in love triangles, and for that, I’m gonna need the term mimetic desire.
That term comes from René Girard’s 1961 work of literary theory Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (translated by Yvonne Freccero into English in 1966 as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel). The relevant idea in Girard is that desire is imitative—we want stuff because we see other people wanting it.
Now that I have a small child, I think about René Girard way more than I ever expected to after quitting academia, because two year olds are all about mimetic desire: even if there are two identical toy trucks available, the desirable one will always be the one that somebody else is playing with. Look how much fun he’s having! The truckless kid wants to be the truck-having kid. Therefore only the truck in the other kid’s possession will satisfy him. Naturally, two kids wanting the same truck causes conflict.
The untouched, identical toy truck is irrelevant, Mom.
This is a roundabout way of telling you all that I read Graham Greene’s 1955 spy novel The Quiet American, set in Vietnam in the 1950s, and I loved it.
It came to my attention via Benjamen Walker’s excellent podcast miniseries Not All Propaganda Is Art. Greene’s novel comes up in the podcast because the book itself is a critique of U.S. intervention in Vietnam—a sharp and prescient one—but the 1958 Hollywood film version excises this critique and replaces it with pro-U.S., anticommunist propaganda. I suffered through this film and can report that the podcast title applies. (I also watched the 2002 Hollywood film starring Michael Caine. It follows the book more closely, yet still can’t resist making the titular American, played by Brendan Fraser, less bumbling and pathetic. It’s weighed down with a couple of clunky monologues that are an embarrassment to Greene’s exquisite prose.)
Anyway, any version of this novel without its critique of the United States is baffling and hilarious, as is any version without all the suppressed gay yearning, the latter of which both movies try to erase. They fail. You might as well adapt a different book.
Even the title is an attack.
[… ‘]He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard,’ ‘a white elephant.’
A blue lizard, as far as I can tell, is simply a somewhat rare color of lizard. WHITE ELEPHANT, expr., is far more laden with meaning. It’s a rare color of elephant, and that made them precious. The monarchs of Southeast Asia kept white elephants. (Sometimes they even titled themselves as such.) The animals were sacred to them. They were symbols of power; to have an elephant not for its labor but simply for its beauty and sacred status was something only available to royals. To the British, who had no reverence of their own for these rare animals, white elephants became a metaphor for a costly burden, something that cannot be disposed of because it appears magnificent. It is so horribly apt that British East India Company traders could only conceive of value in money. We’ve inherited their nasty capitalist attitude. English speakers don’t call something a white elephant because we admire it, but because we want to get rid of it.
A quiet American, similarly, is rare and seemingly precious (“a good chap in his way”), but ultimately unwanted. Almost impossible to make go away. This push-pull of a thing that you want and don’t want is all over The Quiet American, which is a book about the Cold War, but also, as mentioned above, a book about a love triangle. Aging, cynical British war correspondent Thomas Fowler and young, idealistic U.S. “Economic Aid Mission worker” (CIA agent) Alden Pyle—the quiet American, the white elephant—vie for a beautiful young Vietnamese woman named Phuong. As with most love triangles in which two men are rivals for a woman, it is more about the relationship between the men than about the woman.
At the beginning of the story, Phuong is Fowler’s mistress. Pyle wants her precisely because she is Fowler’s mistress. He wants to have what Fowler has, to take Fowler’s place, to be Fowler. It’s mimetic desire! I’m delighted to inform you that it’s also very gay—and mutual, because Fowler wishes he was Pyle, too.
Fowler goes north to report on a battle in Phát Diệm. He’s not permitted to be there—the French forbid the press from publishing anything about their defeats—but has a friend in the French military who lets him pass. No one else is allowed, and yet Pyle sneaks in. Indeed, to say “sneaks in” vastly understates what Pyle does, which is to travel a thousand miles north from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and then secretly buy a boat and punt himself down a river—alone, in an active war zone, where he risked being killed by either side—all so he can slip into the room where Fowler is lying down, hoping to get some sleep between bombings, bed down next to him, and say
‘I really came to see you.’
‘You came here to see me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
He looked up from his bootlaces in an agony of embarrassment. ‘I had to tell you—I’ve fallen in love with Phuong.’
This declaration couldn’t wait a week until they were both back in the relative safety of Saigon, where they and Phuong live, because, according to Pyle, Fowler “might have been killed.” But if Fowler had been killed, wouldn’t that free Pyle from the necessity of this confession? Instead, because Pyle feels such an urgent need to confess, they spend the night together.
‘Fowler,’ he said, ‘I don’t know your Christian name … ?’
‘Thomas. Why?’
‘I can call you Tom, can’t I? I feel in a way this has brought us together. Loving the same woman.’
Loving the same woman has, in this case, literally physically brought them together, into the same tiny room in a war zone. A thousand miles away from the woman in question.
Lest you worry that the mimetic desire only goes one way—Pyle wanting to be Fowler—let me offer you this: “He began to undress and I thought, ‘He has youth too.’ How sad it was to envy Pyle.”
Ah, yes, envy. Would simple envy explain why these two men keep ending up in intimate situations together? When the other, non-quiet Americans pressure poor, prudish Pyle into going to a brothel, it is Fowler who rescues him. When Pyle sneaks into Fowler’s room in the middle of the night, he wakes Fowler from a dream about Pyle. When the two of them once again spend the night together, stranded behind enemy lines in a different part of the country, they share stories of their “deepest sexual experience” and then huddle together waist-deep in a rice paddy, hiding from a patrol. Fowler’s leg is broken. Pyle saves his life.
Where is Phuong in all of this? Even when she is present and not a thousand miles away, “One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.” Fowler makes this observation as Pyle is apologizing for dancing with Phuong, a scene that recurs in Fowler’s dream, except in the dream Phuong actually is invisible; Fowler is watching Pyle dance by himself.
Pyle’s love of Phuong is based only on seeing her and dancing with her, as he cannot speak to her. He doesn’t speak French and she doesn’t speak English. They can only communicate through a third party. So Pyle addresses his “Will you marry me?” request to Fowler, who refuses to interpret it.
Let’s pause for a second to refer to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). When René Girard points out love triangles where the bond between the male rivals is of equal (or greater) importance to the love between men and women, for him this is largely not a question of gender or sexuality or social structures but the fundamental, mimetic nature of desire. Kosofsky Sedgwick takes his idea as a starting point and situates it within patriarchy. In male-dominated societies, relationships between men are always more important than relationships between men and women. Indeed, women are often relegated to “exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men.” And those bonds “may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two.”
It’s gonna be option three for us.
Speaking of homophobia, Fowler tells a priest that he could never be Catholic because
If I believed in any God at all, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. You must excuse me, Father, but to me it seems morbid—unmanly, even.
Meanwhile, Pyle is also a homophobe. On the same night that Fowler rescues (fearful, virginal) Pyle from the brothel, the three of them go out to a cabaret. Fowler watches Pyle and Phuong dance together, and then the men discuss Phuong as if she isn’t there. Soon after, “a troupe of female impersonators” comes to the cabaret:
A group of young Air Force officers whistled to them and they smiled glamorously back. I was astonished by the sudden violence of Pyle’s protest. ‘Fowler,’ he said, ‘let’s go. We’ve had enough, haven’t we? This isn’t a bit suitable for her.’
Visible queerness upsets Pyle to the point that he has to flee. He can’t admit this, though. He has to say he’s protecting Phuong, though Fowler’s description makes clear that the troupe are a fixture in their neighborhood, so Phuong has certainly already seen them, “during the day in the rue Catinat walking up and down.” The only one shocked and appalled is Pyle.
This moment resurfaces when Fowler is surveying the dead after the battle at Phát Diệm. On seeing a river full of corpses—the same river Pyle will punt down just to come see him—Fowler says
when I saw, my mind went back, I don’t know why, to the Chalet and the female impersonators and the young soldiers whistling and Pyle saying, ‘This isn’t a bit suitable.’
What is unsuitable is not sex—not even queer sex—but the carnage of war. How absurd to trivialize this obscene destruction by calling it “unsuitable,” but how trivial any objection to queerness seems, compared with this mass death. A group of young Air Force officers whistled to them and they smiled glamorously back. How harmless. How joyful. How alive.
Earlier, Fowler conflated sex and death in his homophobic statement to the priest that confession is “morbid—unmanly, even” and he conflates them again here, averting his eyes from the corpses: “Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act.”
Death, like sex, is both wanted and unwanted. Mysterious, important, inevitable, costly, and impossible to get rid of, they are white elephants. Sex and death are everywhere intertwined. Every time Pyle and Fowler’s lives are threatened, they take refuge in talking about sex. Later, trapped behind enemy lines, they discuss their “deepest sexual experience,” and Pyle reveals that he’s “never had a girl.”
‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, do you, Thomas?’
‘No, Pyle.’
‘It doesn’t mean I don’t need it, Thomas, like everybody else. I’m not—odd.’
That “odd,” marked off with an em-dash, encompasses a whole world of other sexuality. Pyle can’t bring himself to say “homosexual,” a word he certainly knows, as he mentions the Kinsey Report only a few sentences later. The way he is—having no interest in promiscuity, wanting to be faithful to just one woman, a woman he can’t have a conversation with who just so happens to be Fowler’s mistress—is “not in the Kinsey Report.” One could interpret Pyle as falling somewhere on the asexual spectrum, but that definitely isn’t in the Kinsey Report. There is such desperation in this brief exchange, not merely to be “like everybody else,” but to win Fowler’s approval.
The Kinsey Report isn’t the only text on sex that Pyle has been reading. When Fowler sees his bookshelves, he notes:
Tucked away behind the anthology there was a paper-backed book called The Physiology of Marriage. Perhaps he was studying sex, as he had studied the East, on paper. And the keyword was marriage. Pyle believed in being involved.
Excuse me. I need a meme that says BALZAC MENTIONED.
La Physiologie du mariage is an eclectic, tongue-in-cheek 1829 essay by Honoré de Balzac that purports to be about marriage but is primarily about adultery. Granted, you can’t have the latter without the former. The text is addressed to husbands. Balzac proposes, near the end, that if your wife takes a lover, maybe the best solution is not to kill that guy in a duel, but to chill out and be friends. Maybe your new friend will defend your honor or get you a promotion. (Look at that, a woman as exchangeable, symbolic property cementing the bonds between men.) Plus, if your wife is happy enough, she might start sleeping with you again, too. Everybody wins.
Was Balzac sleeping with a married woman when he wrote this? Absolutely yes.
Anyway, nobody in The Quiet American ever considers chilling out. Romantic and sexual accord feel as distant as peace.
Pyle is a virgin who reads about sex and a spy working in a foreign country he hardly knows. And yet he believes “in being involved.” This is his downfall.
Pyle gains Fowler’s approval easily on the question of his sexuality. There isn’t anything wrong with him (“No, Pyle”). Not sexually, anyway. Unfortunately for everybody in this book, Pyle dedicates way more time and energy to gaining Fowler’s approval for the doomed, useless U.S. plan he’s trying to accomplish, which is to cultivate a “Third Force,” neither colonial nor Communist, in Vietnam. This jargon covers what Pyle is actually doing: arming mercenaries. His plan has predictable, devastating results. Fowler, entirely correctly, disapproves.
The violence Pyle is committing in Vietnam—trying to create a triangular conflict—is what ultimately destroys the love triangle. The love story is inextricable from the politics. It is, after all, a man from an old colonial power and a man from the new postwar capitalist superpower fighting over a woman from a colonized people at war for their independence. There is metonymy happening here, each person standing in for their people. When Fowler loses Phuong to Pyle, he develops a hatred of all things American: “It was as if she were being taken from me by a nation rather than by a man.”
Notice that “taken from me,” as if Phuong herself has no choice. Both men treat her like this. Perhaps Pyle more than Fowler, but that’s a low standard. Neither Fowler nor Pyle speak Vietnamese. When Phuong isn’t there, they both make disparaging remarks about Vietnamese people in general and Phuong in specific. Even Fowler, who has come to feel that Vietnam is home, and who I often found more sympathetic than Pyle, says some truly appalling shit. Their praise is just as damning, concerned largely with Phuong’s beauty, her grace. Neither of them thinks much about what she wants. They’re too obsessed with each other, locked in the logic of mimetic desire, the young capitalist wanting to be the old colonialist and vice versa. Phuong deserves better than either of these guys, both white elephants in the English sense, costly burdens that are hard to get rid of.
Not, however, impossible.
The Quiet American is the story of ceasing to be “afraid like a virgin of the act.” Which act? Well, death, of course. The whole narration is a confession. Morbid—unmanly, even.
This newsletter is so long that I’m gonna have to wait to tell you all about “Third Force” coming up in an entirely different book I’ve been reading, even though it would have gone so well in this one. I’m also going to save my romance reviews for next time. Just two last comments:
If you vote in the US, please vote. Fight the book-banning fascists who would take over our local schools and city councils. Regarding the presidency, I will never like any US president. But some of them can be bullied by the public into maybe doing fewer atrocities, and some of them wake up in the morning just raring to add to the world’s evils. I believe in harm reduction. More personally, I’ve had two ectopic pregnancies and would be so fucking super dead without abortion. I voted for Harris.
Wherever you are in the world, if you are sick and/or terrified of the US and you need a romance novel to sweep you off your feet, go get Zen Cho’s The Friend Zone Experiment. Malaysian main characters, set in London, luxurious, heartfelt, swoon-worthy.
I’ll be back in your inbox on November 17.