The struggle for the soul of the French novel : French Catholic and realist novelists, 1850-1970

Contents 2 The Limping Devil of Barbey d' Aurevilly 3 Zola'sNewTestament 4 Huysmans and the Art of Conversion 5 Leon Bloy' s Symbolist Imagination vi vi 1 11 52 90 6 Belief and Narrative Form in the Novels of Fran~ois Mauriac 7 Julien Green's Scale of Realities 8 The Bernanosian Synthesis Concluding Note Notes and References Select Bibliography Index The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel perceiving and interpreting the universe as an integrated whole, Lukacs comments that Christianity also offered such a 'totality', a structure within which all that exists can find a meaningful place. 'In Giotto and Dante, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Pisano, StThomas and St Francis, the world became round once more, a totality capable of being taken in at a glance ' (op. cit., 37). The idea that a literary genre can lay claim to the explanatory and expressive functions that have previously been the prerogative of world religions may seem a strange one, but something of this sort lies behind the novel's pre-eminence in modern times. It was when the novel emerged as a literary form capable of serving as the vehicle for just such a total world-view, a structure in which every element of the culture could be housed -when, in Balzac's words, it achieved 'la valeur philosophique de l'histoire', 8 when it became 'the entertainment, the history, the sociology and the psychology of the west', 9 and could 'control the field of present social and psychological reality' 10 -that its challenge to the former great totality, Christianity, became necessary, both for its internal process of self-identification and its external campaign of self-assertion. It was no longer a fiction grafted on to a historical setting, as in .the time of La Princesse de Cleves, but a genre purporting to reflect and explain history or even, in the Goncourts' phrase, become in itself 'L'Histoire morale contemporaine'Y The novel, to use Balzac's terminology again, 'competed' with reality (1, 52), while overlapping with it in order to achieve the illusion of authenticity. What the nineteenth-century novel shares with reality as a result of this overlap is a code of probabilities of what might happen or be expected to happen, based on the evidence of the senses, and especially of the eyes. Its totality is coextensive with the seen world. The tension between this reliance on the seen and the unseen dimension on which revealed religion depends is one of the principal themes of this book. It will argue that the very notion of an invisible, spiritual order was a threat to the novel's claim to represent totality, and that the novel adopted a defensive scepticism, a refutation of Christian supernaturalism necessary to its pursuit of a sense-based realism.This tension was certainly much more strongly felt in France than in Britain, and the reader who views literary history from the perspective of the English novel might well find the above analysis over-dramatic. Are not Richardson and Fielding, Jane Austen and Dickens the equals of their French counterparts in their evocation of the social scene and its concomitant psychological patterns, and do 1' enseignement traditionnel, avec la morale catholique' . 13 Such views, not so much prescriptive as proscriptive, arise from a fundamentally non-literary approach to literature which has bedevilled much Catholic criticism of both Catholic and non-Catholic authors. This approach announces its presence in the frowning question marks of such titles as Mauriac, romancier catholique? or 'Barbey, romancier catholique?d 4 and in numerous volumes by writers who make no secret of their distaste for the ambivalent world of fiction. No serious novelist could emerge unscathed from such scrutiny, and it is for reasons of self-protection that most of the major Catholic writers, despite the profundity of their faith, rebelled against the application of a label which smacked of conscription to a nonliterary cause. Their well-known preference for phrases like \* \* \*In the laying of the philosophical base of the Comedie Humaine, no source of intellectual energy was denied. Elements were fused together which in less universal minds would remain irreconcilable opposites: the enquiring and revolutionary outlook of the Enlightenment, the stability of traditional Catholicism, the novelty of the new sciences or crypto-sciences, the poetic dreams of the mystics and illuminists. There is no better model of Balzac's eclectic genius than the 'cenacle' of thinkers and writers in Illusion perdues, in which every shade of political and philosophical opinion coexists in mutual respect for its opposite. His refusal to contemplate closed frontiers was manifest, firstly, within his view of religion, in his denial of any essential difference between Christianity and Swedenborgian mysticism. In Swedenborg's angels, those creatures into whom all men are destined to be transformed when they outlive their earthly phase, Balzac saw the image of the Christian and Catholic truth thatThe Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel Mysteries of a supernatural sort are alien to the modern city, 'temps et lieu ou la magie devait etre impossible' (La Peau de chagrin; VII, 439). The uncertainty suggested by this 'devait' is due to the context: Balzac is about to unfold the story of Raphael's fatal encounter with the magical wild ass's skin. La Peau de chagrin, that bridge between the two Etudes, admits the fantastic, and belongs to a different ontological universe from that of the other novels of the city. The conflict, in its final part, between the scientists who try to comprehend the phenomenon of the skin and the opacity of its talismanic power raises questions of the nature of reality which are remote from the concerns of LePere Goriot or Illusions perdues. What is true of illuminist fantasy is also true of orthodox religion, given Balzac's identification of the two. Divine assistance for Lucien de Rubempre in his struggle against the journalists would be as aesthetically destructive to Lucien's fictional credibility as if he were to borrow Raphael's magic skin for the afternoon. The idea of God is a comfort to Lucien's mistress Coralie on her death-bed, but her prayers cannot be answered by unambiguous divine intervention, unless our perception of the novel's anatomy is to be radically changed. It may be true that Balzac's moral assumptions are based on the Ten Commandments, 17 and that 'he raises at least two of the great New Testament questions: What must I do to gain the world? and, by implication, its opposite: What must I do to save my soul? 118 These questions, however, are raised and answered on a terrestrial plane. Balzac's tempters are human demons, not Satan incarnate. Vautrin, seducing Rastignac in the garden or Lucien by the road-side, is a devil of a man rather than theDevil in Man. Balzac may borrow the character of Melmoth from Mathurin's gothic rewriting of the Faust legend, but he treats his material in a comic and ultimately dismissive way, the satanic pact in Melmoth Reconcilie reducing itself in the end to the question of passing on syphilis. His Parisian women too, although he argues in the avant-propos that the Catholic writer has more sublime archetypes at his disposal than his Protestant counterpart, are creatures of flesh. The polarity of Virgin and Magdalene leaves them stranded in the domestic or erotic middle ground, existing only for their men-folk. 'Lucien!' mingles with 'Dieu!' in Coralie's death-cry. Esther Gobseck is 'saved': saved for Lucien.Balzac's most edifying novel, L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine, written at the end of his life under the influence of the devout Madame Hanska, is set in the corrupt city, and relates the efforts of a charitable Christian group to undo its evil. But what might be calledThe Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel achievement. Balzac was acutely aware of the discontinuity between the empirical and mystical faces of his work. He expressed in the preface to his Livre mystique his unease at having 'mis Ies pieds de Seraphita dans Ia boue du globe', and he adds: 'Si Ies savants admettent un univers spirituel et divin, ils reconnaitront que Ies sciences de I'univers materiel n'y sont d'aucune utilite' (VII, 608). Balzac's two universes are the principal sources of the two currents that this book will chart. The connections were quite direct, but there has been little discussion of them since Verhaeren's remark that the Alexandrian provinces of the Comedie Humaine were divided after his death into two territories, one occupied by the Realists, the other by Barbey d' Aurevilly. 19 Balzac wrote in Illusions perdues that glory and fortune awaited a new Catholic writer. He himelf cannot, unambiguously, be said to be that writer, but the religious elements in his work were substantial enough for Barbey to confer the title upon him. 'Le Catholicisme,' said Barbey, 'n' a besoin de personne, mais Ie catholicisme, nous osons Ie prevoir, reclamera un jour Balzac comme un de ses ecrivains Ies plus devoues car, en toute these, il conclut comme Ie catholicisme conclurait.' 20 None of which prevented Emile Zola from embracing Balzac as the immediate precursor of experimental Naturalism. These divergent views of Balzac were only possible because the Comedie Humaine is not a monolith. Its creator had not given the genre a definitive form, but only alternative forms, each of which would be championed by others as the potentially definitive direction which the novel should take. Balzac had established its importance as a total model of the real, which is why, to Realist and Catholic alike, it was vital, in the post-Balzac era, to command the philosophical heights of the great modern genre. \* \* \* \* \* \* Lii-Bas begins with a justly famous discussion on Naturalism between \* \* \* A leap of some sort was being contemplated by Huysmans in the \* \* \* Before Therese, Mauriac's early characters embody the patterns of Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introduction....Pages 1-10 The Sceptical Mode....Pages 11-51 The Limping Devil of Barbey d’Aurevilly....Pages 52-89 Zola’s New Testament....Pages 90-120 Huysmans and the Art of Conversion....Pages 121-151 Léon Bloy’s Symbolist Imagination....Pages 152-178 Belief and Narrative Form in the Novels of Franҫois Mauriac....Pages 179-207 Julien Green’s Scale of Realities....Pages 208-236 The Bernanosian Synthesis....Pages 237-266 Concluding Note....Pages 267-269 Back Matter....Pages 267-294