The Habit of Lying: Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory (review)

Smyth’s beautifully written, many stranded theoretical book explores the problem of the incorrigible lability (instability; inconstancy; vulnerability to error or to sin) of meaning that he first addressed at length in A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes. Years of reflection have enriched his philosophical background and deepened his pervasive sense of the problematic of human communities. Here his analyses of Defoe’s much studied Robinson Crusoe and of Beckett’s trilogy of novels—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (studied in Beckett’s English translations of himself—which contain a few Gallicisms) are [End Page 160] strikingly original in applying the concepts of lying and of sacrifice to these works. The chapter on Stendhal—Smyth’s apparent Girardian starting point (Girard’s own starting point was Dostoevsky)—is more predictable, but certainly well worth reading.