´ ´ ETAT PRESENT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CATHOLIC NOVEL?
TOBY GARFITT MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD

The idea of a specifically Catholic novel arose during the nineteeth century. The often anti-Catholic agenda of the philosophes and the libertine novel had been counterbalanced by writers such as Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who sought to reveal God through the wonders of the natural world. But it was Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) that inaugurated the new genre of the Catholic novel as a riposte to the dechristianization associated with the Revolution. Chateaubriand was more partial to the epic, however, and in this he was followed by Bonald, who appreciated the scope that the epic afforded for the depiction of ‘le merveilleux chretien’, including angels.1 An interesting ´ twentieth-century representative of this tradition is Patrice de La Tour du Pin, ´ whose three-volume Somme de poesie (1946 – 63) charts the progression from lyrical poetry in a neo-Romantic vein, through a process of kenosis or selfemptying (which involves a shift towards prose in the second volume), to the ´ ´ creation of a new theopoesie.2 Epic poetry continued to offer a means of exploring religious and scientific ideas throughout the nineteenth century (Quinet, Hugo, Bouilhet), but there was already a backlash by the 1820s, and, as the novel rapidly established itself as the major literary genre, a number of Catholic sub´ genres developed. The ‘Avant-propos’ to Balzac’s Comedie humaine expresses nostalgia for the alliance of throne and altar, but only a handful of the novels — Le ´ Cure de village (1839), for example — promote a Catholic sensibility. The new emphasis on the inner life encouraged by the violent upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and in literature by Chateaubriand, Constant, and the early Romantics, prepared the way for novelistic explorations ´ of struggles with faith and conscience in the manner of Sainte-Beuve’s Volupte (1834); but for much of the century the growing confidence of the Church and the spread of literacy were reflected in the huge production of anodyne ‘improving’ literature. The Catholic publishing house of Mame pioneered the ‘roman ` ` evangelique’ with such works as Les Deux Lignes paralleles, ou Frere et sœur, roman ´ ´ intime (1833) by Balzac’s friend and interpreter Felix Davin, and others by ´ women writers such as the comtesse de Bassanville (Anaıs Lebrun). Zenaıde ¨ ´ ¨ Fleuriot was to become particularly prolific, with eighty-three books to her name (Francois Mauriac was later to remember both her and ‘Raoul de Navary’ ¸
´ ´ ´ ` See Declin et confins de l’epopee au XIX e siecle, ed. by Saulo Neiva (Tubingen: Narr, 2008). ¨ ´ Patrice de La Tour du Pin, Une somme de poesie, 3 vols, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1981 –83). See ˆ ´ ´ Marie-Josette Le Han, Patrice de La Tour du Pin: la quete d’une theopoesie (Paris: Champion, 1996); and Patrice de La ˆ ´ ` Tour du Pin: ‘La Quete de joie’ au cœur d’‘Une somme de poesie’. Actes du colloque au College de France, 25 –26 septembre 2003, ed. by Isabelle Renaud-Chamska (Geneva: Droz, 2005).
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(Eugenie-Caroline Saffray) as favourite authors of his childhood). Another was ´ the even more prolific Paul Feval, although his most famous novels, such as Le ´ Bossu, preceded his conversion in 1876. Alongside this bien-pensant current, the ˆ ´ ´ violent fantasies of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly — L’Ensorcelee (1854), Un pretre marie (1865) — provoked controversy and did not immediately attract imitators. A few writers eventually emerged in the last quarter of the century who grappled with the prima facie contradiction between the dominant doctrine of realism and the spiritual claims of Christianity. Notable among them were the former naturalist Joris-Karl Huysmans and Leon Bloy, both of whom emphasized the ´ redeeming power of suffering. The best study of the relationship between the Catholic novel and the realist tradition remains Malcolm Scott’s The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel (1989).3 Scott devotes five chapters (the bulk of his work) to the nineteenth century: scepticism about religion, Barbey, the later Zola, Huysmans, and Bloy, before moving into the twentieth century. He is particularly keen to scotch the myth of Barbey as a reactionary and moralizing writer: for Scott, Barbey’s bridging of the space between fantasy and religion, his creation of character (notably that of the country priest), his balanced articulation of moral conflicts, and his complex narrative technique, all make him a worthy precursor of the twentiethcentury Catholic novelist. His significance is only now beginning to be recognized, however, and for Mauriac he was more important as a correspondent of Maurice de Guerin than as a novelist. In any case, the SUDOC database con´ tains no item relating to Barbey with the word ‘catholique’ in the title. In the first years of the twentieth century the leading Catholic novelists were Paul Bourget, for whom psychological analysis was more important than faith; Maurice Barres, for whom faith was indistinguishable from nationalism; and ` Rene Bazin, who has been described as the novelist of the soil and the soul. ´ In 1922 Barres published Un jardin sur l’Oronte, with its evocations of passion` ate love. The literary critic of La Croix, Jose Vincent, took violent exception to ´ what he saw as a morally dangerous work, and opinion was polarized. One of those who supported Vincent was Henri Massis, pioneer of the ‘defense de ´ l’Occident’ against what he saw as foreign, ‘oriental’ influences. Albert Thibaudet of the NRF was later to say that, if ‘la question du roman catholique s’est trouvee a l’ordre du jour’, it was ‘a la suite d’un mouvement qui a com´ ` ` mence, je crois, avec la querelle du Jardin sur l’Oronte’.4 This was, of course, a ´ time of intense questioning as a result of the Great War, the growing popularity of Nietzsche and Freud, the beginnings of modernism, and other factors, including Gide’s lectures on Dostoevsky in 1921, in which he celebrated the ‘renversement des valeurs’ explored by the Russian novelist.
3 Malcolm Scott, The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850 –1970 (London: Macmillan, 1989). 4 ´ Albert Thibaudet, ‘Le Roman catholique’, in Reflexions sur le roman, 6th edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), pp. 221 –26 (p. 225).

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The first brief studies of the Catholic novel appeared in the 1920s and were, in the main, relatively hostile. Jose Vincent included a section on ‘le roman ´ catholique’ in his 1927 volume Propos un peu vifs, while abbe Louis Bethleem in ´ ´ ` ` the tenth and eleventh editions of his frequently revised Romans a lire et romans a proscrire (1928, 1932) pointed out various ways in which Mauriac failed to live up to the ideal of a Catholic novel.5 But in the NRF of June 1926 Albert Thibaudet devoted his regular ‘Reflexions sur la litterature’ to ‘le roman catholique’, focus´ ´ ing on the first novel by Georges Bernanos, Sous le soleil de Satan. He distinguished between ‘les ecrivains de sensibilite catholique’ (represented, for ´ ´ instance, by the early Mauriac), the ‘auteurs de roman a these’ such as Bourget, ` ` ˆ and those who sought to portray ‘la vie catholique elle-meme, vecue de l’inter´ ´ ieur, sentie dans ses exigences et ses profondeurs’, of whom Bernanos was a fine example. The productions of the last group were the only ones worthy of ´ the label ‘le roman catholique’: a less ambitious work like Emile Baumann’s Job ´ ´ le predestine (1922) should more properly be called a ‘roman chretien’.6 Charles ´ Du Bos adopted a similarly nuanced approach in his groundbreaking Francois ¸ ` Mauriac et le probleme du romancier catholique.7 Andre Gide, in Les Faux-Monnayeurs ´ ´ (1925), had shown Edouard noting in his diary that, while ‘le tragique moral’, as made possible by Christianity, is the only subject that matters to him, ‘il n’y a pas, a proprement parler, de romans chretiens’.8 Mauriac’s early attempts to go ` ´ beyond a mere Catholic sensibility were famously derided by Roger Martin du Gard in a letter of 1928: ‘Je rigole, mon cher Mauriac, je rigole quand on fait de vous un ecrivain du catholicisme! [. . .] Ce sont des livres a damner des saints!’9 ´ ` It is true that in Le Fleuve de feu (1923) Mauriac had failed to integrate the sensual and the Catholic elements of the novel, but as early as 1924 he had announced to Frederic Lefevre that he was working on ways of using the novel ´ ´ ` as an ‘apologie indirecte du christianisme’,10 and by the time of Martin du Gard’s letter he was beginning to engage more authentically and productively with both his faith and his inner demons. The golden age of the Catholic novel had now begun. There were surprisingly few major critical accounts of the genre in the 1930s or 1940s, apart from that of Du Bos. Catholic critics continued to be wary: Jacques Vier published a pamphlet in 1934 waspishly entitled Francois Mauriac, ¸ romancier catholique?, and as late as 1957 Armand Muller wrote another called La ¨ Question du roman catholique.11 Despite its similar title, Peter Hebblethwaite’s 1967
5 ´ Jose Vincent, ‘Le Roman catholique’, in Propos un peu vifs: essais de critique ([Paris]: Editions du monde ´ ` ` moderne, 1927); Louis Bethleem, Romans a lire et romans a proscrire: essai de classification au point de vue moral des prin´ ´ ` cipaux romans et romanciers (1800 –1928), 10th edn (Paris: Editions de la Revue des lectures, 1928); Romans a lire [. . .] ´ (1800–1932), 11th edn (Paris: Editions de la Revue des lectures, 1932). 6 Albert Thibaudet, ‘Reflexions sur la litterature: le roman catholique — chronique dramatique’, Nouvelle Revue ´ ´ ´ francaise, 153 (June 1926), 727 –34; repr. in Thibaudet, Reflexions sur le roman, p. 222. ¸ 7 ` ˆ Charles Du Bos, Francois Mauriac et le probleme du romancier catholique (Paris: R.-A. Correa, 1933). ¸ 8 ´ Andre Gide, Romans; recits et soties; œuvres lyriques ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1958), p. 1030. ´ 9 Quoted in Jean Lacouture, Francois Mauriac (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 230. ¸ 10 ` ´ Frederic Lefevre, Une heure avec . . . (premiere serie) (Paris: Nouvelle Revue francaise, 1924), pp. 111 –19. ´ ´ ` ¸ 11 Jacques Vier, Francois Mauriac, romancier catholique? (Paris: Imprimerie de Tancrede, 1938); Armand Muller, ¸ ` ¨ La Question du roman catholique (Paris: Procure de l’Assomption, 1957).

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article ‘How Catholic is the Catholic Novel?’ adopted quite a different perspective, arguing that the modern Catholic novelist would have to abandon the ‘paradoxical and craggy’ orthodoxy of the older school and portray grace more as a ‘quality of human existence’ than as a dogmatic truth.12 Hebblethwaite was dealing largely with anglophone writers, and his views had already been anticipated to some extent by Mauriac. More positive accounts of Mauriac came from Pierre Letellier in 1944 and Georges Hourdin in 1945.13 A broader perspective was offered by Joseph Majault (1946) and Nelly Cormeau (1951),14 and, of course, Mauriac’s Nobel Prize in 1952 attracted new readers and critics. ´ In 1953 Charles Moeller published the first volume of his Litterature du XX e ` siecle et christianisme, which included Bernanos and Julien Green but not Mauriac, who had to wait for volume 6 (1993).15 The author was Belgian, and indeed Bernanos initially attracted more serious critical attention outside France than inside, with significant studies being published in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Britain, and the USA. Two volumes of the Lettres modernes Minard series ‘Themes et mythes’, by Guy Gaucher and Michel Esteve, were devoted to ` ` ´ Bernanos in the 1950s,16 and the important Etudes bernanosiennes series from the same stable (associated with the Societe des Amis de Georges Bernanos), in ´´ which much of the best research has appeared over the years, was launched in 1960 (the most recent volume, 23, in 2004). The Mauriac series, in contrast, did not begin until 1975 and has had only seven numbers; but it has been amply complemented by the two series of Cahiers Francois Mauriac (1974 –91 ¸ ´ and 1993– ), the Travaux du Centre d’etudes et de recherches sur Francois Mauriac ¸ (1977 – 94), and the Cahiers de Malagar (1987 – 2001), mostly associated with the Universite de Bordeaux-3 and the team that has included Jacques Monferier, ´ ´ Bernard Cocula, John Flower, and Paul Cooke. Julien Green’s novels did not become recognizably Catholic until Moıra (1950), and critics were slow to recog¨ nize the importance of that aspect of his wide-ranging output, especially since ´ Marc Eigeldinger’s Julien Green et la tentation de l’irreel, dealing with a different aspect, had come out as recently as 1947.17 Samuel Stokes’s Julian Green and the Thorn of Puritanism (1955) was an early example of anglophone and Protestant interest in the writer.18 Peter Hoy’s pioneering 1970 bibliography of Green was the complement to his Master’s thesis in the mid-1950s, another indication of early anglophone interest.19
Peter Hebblethwaite, ‘How Catholic Is the Catholic Novel?’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1967, p. 679. ˆ Pierre Letellier, Francois Mauriac, romancier de la grace (Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1944); Georges Hourdin, ¸ ´ ´ Mauriac, romancier chretien (Paris: Editions du temps present, 1945). ´ 14 Joseph Majault, Mauriac et l’art du roman (Paris: Laffont, 1946); Nelly Cormeau, L’Art de Francois Mauriac ¸ (Paris: Grasset, 1951). e 15 ´ ` Charles Moeller, Litterature du XX siecle et christianisme, 6 vols (Tournai and Paris: Casterman, 1953 –93). 16 ` Guy Gaucher, Le Theme de la mort dans les romans de Georges Bernanos (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1955); Michel Esteve, Le Sens de l’amour dans les romans de Bernanos (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1959). ` 17 ´ ´ Marc Eigeldinger, Julien Green et la tentation de l’irreel (Paris: Editions des Portes de France, 1947). 18 Samuel Stokes, Julian Green and the Thorn of Puritanism (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1955). 19 ´ ` Peter C. Hoy, Julien Green: essai de bibliographie des ´tudes en langue francaise consacrees a Julien Green (1923 –1967) e ¸ (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1970).
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ˆ ´ ´ ´ Pierre-Henri Simon’s La Litterature du peche et de la grace (1957) was instrumental in defining the canon and the scope of what came to be understood as the modern French Catholic novel.20 By then the twelve-volume Fayard edition of ` Mauriac’s Œuvres completes (1950 – 56) had consecrated his work. Bernanos was the first to have his novels collected in the Pleiade series, in a 1961 edition by ´ ˆ Albert Beguin, who had launched Bernanos studies with his Bernanos par lui-meme ´ (1954).21 Green came next (1972 – 74), followed by Mauriac (1978 –85). The Bernanos was a less good critical edition than the others: Michel Esteve pro` duced a revised and updated version in 1988, but a completely new edition is needed, taking into account, for instance, the work by William Bush and Daniel Pezeril on the genesis of Sous le soleil de Satan and Monsieur Ouine.22 ´ Sartre’s essay ‘M. Francois Mauriac et la liberte’ (1939) argued that there was ¸ ´ a fundamental incompatibility between the necessary freedom of character in the novel and the Catholic world view being put forward by the manipulative author.23 Sartre himself was to find it less than straightforward to respect the freedom of his own characters, and his polemical essay is not entirely disinterested, but the question of perceived incompatibility was to be central to the discussion of the Catholic novel over the next half century or so. Philip Stratford’s Faith and Fiction (1964) offers a helpful discussion of the dilemma of the Catholic novelist, while John Flower’s Intention and Achievement (1964) and Malcolm Scott’s Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel (1989) both examine the relationship between ideas and literary expression, finding varying degrees of successful integration.24 Albert Sonnenfeld and Ernest Beaumont disagreed in the late 1960s ´ over whether the silences and torn-out pages in Bernanos’s Journal d’un cure de campagne should be interpreted in religious or psychological terms.25 Although Bernanos studies continued to be dominated for a long time by the conservative ´ critic Michel Esteve (who published Bernanos, un triple itineraire in 1981,26 and ` oversaw the revised Pleiade edition of the novels in 1988), it is now more ´ common for critics to challenge the traditional Catholic interpretation of a novel like Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, as in Blandine Stefanson’s edition for Methuen Twentieth-Century Texts (1982).27 Marie Gil has recently emphasized literary
20 ˆ ´ ´ ´ ´ ´ Pierre-Henri Simon, La Litterature du peche et de la grace: essai sur la constitution d’une litterature chretienne depuis 1880 (Paris: Fayard, 1957). 21 ˆ Albert Beguin, Bernanos par lui-meme (Paris: Seuil, 1954). ´ 22 ` ` William Bush, Genese et structures de ‘Sous le soleil de Satan’ d’apres le manuscrit Bodmer: scrupules de Maritain et autocensure de Bernanos (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1988); Georges Bernanos, Cahiers de ‘Monsieur Ouine’, ed. by Daniel Pezeril (Paris: Seuil, 1991). 23 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘M. Francois Mauriac et la liberte’, Nouvelle Revue francaise, 305 (February 1939), 212 –32; ¸ ´ ¸ repr. in Situations, 1: essais critiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 36 –57. 24 Philip Stratford, Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Green and Mauriac (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964); J. E. Flower, Intention and Achievement: An Essay on the Novels of Francois Mauriac (Oxford: ¸ Clarendon Press, 1969); for Scott, see n. 3 above. 25 Albert Sonnenfeld, ‘The Catholic Novelist and the Supernatural’, French Studies, 22 (1968), 307 –19; Ernest Beaumont, ‘The Supernatural in Dostoyevsky and Bernanos: A Reply to Professor Sonnenfeld’, French Studies, 23 (1969), 264 –72. 26 ´ Michel Esteve, Bernanos, un triple itineraire (Paris: Hachette, 1981). ` 27 Georges Bernanos, Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, ed. by Blandine Stefanson (London: Methuen Educational, 1982).

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creation rather than interpretation in her study of Bernanos’s novels in terms of a palimpsest in which the ‘sous-texte biblique’ is constantly present.28 Susan Suleiman, in Authoritarian Fictions, placed the Catholic novel within a wider tradition of ideological writing that used a range of techniques including exemplary characters, while David Karnath was less accommodating, arguing in 1978 that the Catholic novel was ‘a formal contradiction’, and in 2002 Margaret-Anne Hutton took a similar hard line in relation to the work of Sylvie Germain.29 The obsession with whether or not a character achieves salvation, thematized so painfully by Mauriac in Destins (1928), was already fading in the post-war period as literary and sociopolitical questions came to dominate the critical agenda. Bernanos and Mauriac were respected for their independent-minded commentaries on contemporary issues, enabling them to be appreciated more widely than simply as Catholic novelists. Bernanos died in 1948, and the posthu´ mous publications edited by Beguin in the 1950s were essays (such as La Liberte, ´ pour quoi faire?, 1953). Mauriac seemed to have abandoned the novel, returning to it only with L’Agneau in 1954. A new generation of Catholic novelists shifted their attention to different issues, such as the worker-priest movement.30 Although the explosion of theses and monographs on Bernanos, Mauriac, and Green was still to come, the creative climate had changed, and in hindsight the heyday of the Catholic Novel was already over, with Green proving to be the last major exponent of the genre (Chaque homme dans sa nuit, 1960; L’Autre, 1971). In fact the critical studies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s were often concerned either with a single theme (death, the priest-figure, sexuality, landscape, and so on) or with a wider appreciation of the particular author’s literary qualities, in which specifically Catholic elements were only one component; although a title ´ such as Monique Gosselin’s L’Ecriture du surnaturel dans l’œuvre romanesque de ` G. Bernanos was not untypical.31 Jean Touzot’s La Planete Mauriac, while certainly seeking to ‘percer le secret de l’obsession planetaire’, has the broader aim of ´ ˆ ‘faire mieux connaıtre un idiolecte’ through a systematic study of Mauriac’s imagery.32 As late as 1995, though, John Flower could lament that the ‘industry’ of Mauriac criticism still ‘tended to follow fairly orthodox, even conservative lines, not infrequently coloured by the shared Catholicism of the individual critics’, a tendency that he sought to combat through bringing together a

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´ Marie Gil, Les Deux Ecritures: ´tude sur Bernanos (Paris: Cerf, 2008). e Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); David Karnath, ‘Bernanos, Green, and the Novel Convention’, Contemporary Literature, 19 (1978), 409 –28; Margaret-Anne Hutton, ‘Il n’y a pas de troisieme voie: Sylvie Germain and the Generic ` Problems of the Christian Novel’, in Women’s Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s, ed. by Gill Rye and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 182 –94. 30 Gilbert Cesbron, Les Saints vont en enfer (Paris: Laffont, 1952). 31 ´ Monique Gosselin, L’Ecriture du surnaturel dans l’œuvre romanesque de G. Bernanos, 2 vols (doctoral thesis, Universite Paris-III, 1977; Lille: Atelier de reproduction des theses, Universite de Lille 3, 1979). ´ ` ´ 32 ` Jean Touzot, La Planete Mauriac: figure d’analogie et roman (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985).
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number of articles of a different persuasion, inspired by Charles Mauron and others, in the volume Psycholectures/Psychoreadings.33 At about the same time, attention began to shift away from the novels towards other types of writing, particularly autobiographical in the case of Mauriac and Green. After four volumes of novels and plays, the fifth volume in the Pleiade Mauriac series in 1990 was ´ Francois Durand’s edition of the Œuvres autobiographiques, while Touzot’s new ¸ five-volume edition of the Bloc-notes gave fresh prominence to his journalism.34 Edward Welch’s Francois Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual (2006) was later to ¸ use Bourdieu’s ideas of cultural production to explore topics such as Mauriac’s commodification and packaging in Servan-Schreiber’s L’Express.35 Green’s reputation has never rested primarily on his novels, although they have been well ´ served by critics, notably the members of the Societe Internationale d’Etudes ´´ Greeniennes, including Michele Raclot, Marie-Francoise Canerot (also a major ` ¸ ´ Mauriac critic), and Michael O’Dwyer, whose Julien Green: A Critical Study provides a helpful introductory survey.36 Green’s important and lengthy Journal was what attracted attention, and it followed hard on the heels of the novels into the Pleiade series (1976 – 77, with the later parts included in a miscellaneous volume ´ in 1990). Questions of the self have been an important strand in critical studies of Green, from John Dunaway’s The Metamorphoses of the Self to Helene Dottin’s ´` ´ L’Ecriture du moi dans l’œuvre romanesque de Julien Green and Carol Auroy’s Julien Green: le miroir en ´clats, and the Journal was the subject of a volume of conference e papers in 2005.37 The conflict between religious faith and (homo)sexuality has been a particular focus for study in the case of Green, and more recently of Mauriac.38 The most significant date in the later history of the Catholic novel, both as an evolving genre and as an object of criticism, is no doubt 1962, when the Second Vatican Council began its deliberations. By 1980 Bernard Bergonzi could write that, since the old Catholic world view had collapsed and was now replaced by a new ‘humanistic Catholicism’ that was less clearly at odds with the surrounding culture, there was no room for the old-style Catholic novel, and the best that could be hoped for was the ‘Catholic anti-novel’ of such as David Lodge.39 Patrick Sherry agreed that views of sin and society had changed irrevocably, but
33 J. E. Flower, ‘Introduction’, in Francois Mauriac: Psycholectures/Psychoreadings, ed. by J. E. Flower (Exeter: ¸ University of Exeter Press; Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1995), pp. 5 –7 (p. 5). 34 Francois Mauriac, Bloc-notes, ed. by Jean Touzot, 5 vols (Paris, Seuil, 1993). See Bernard Cocula, Mauriac, le ¸ bloc-notes (Bordeaux: L’Esprit du temps, 1995). 35 Edward Welch, Francois Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). ¸ 36 Michael O’Dwyer, Julien Green: A Critical Study (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997). 37 John M. Dunaway, The Metamorphoses of the Self: The Mystic, the Sensualist, and the Artist in the Works of Julien ´ Green (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978); Helene Dottin, L’Ecriture du moi dans l’œuvre romanesque de ´` ` Julien Green de 1947 a 1977 (doctoral thesis, Universite de Paris X-Nanterre, 1997; Presses universitaires du ´ ´ Septentrion, 1999); Carol Auroy, Julien Green: le miroir en ´clats. Etude sur l’autobiographie (Paris: Cerf, 2000); Le e ˆ ` Journal de Julien Green: miroir d’une ame, miroir d’un siecle, ed. by Michael O’Dwyer, Michele Raclot, and Peter ` Collier (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005). 38 See Jean-Luc Barre, Francois Mauriac: biographie intime, I : 1885 –1940 (Paris: Fayard, 2009). ´ ¸ 39 Bernard Bergonzi, ‘A Conspicuous Absentee: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel’, Encounter, 55 (1980), 44 –56; repr. in B. Bergonzi, The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 172 –85.

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contended that ‘there still are distinctively Catholic novels, some of which reflect the preoccupations of their predecessors, some do not’.40 While Mauriac is a reference point for both critics, they are mainly concerned with nonfrancophone traditions (Sherry concentrates on Heinrich Boll and Flannery ¨ O’Connor), but their analysis could equally well be applied to modern French writers. In a paper read to the Belgian Royal Academy in 1992 Lucien Guissard echoed Hebblethwaite in speaking of the necessary ‘apprentissage de la modestie intellectuelle’ which recognizes that ‘Dieu retourne a l’indicible’.41 He instanced ` Jean Sulivan, ‘qui se solidarisait avec les chretiens de l’incertitude’, or the much ´ more affirmative Roger Bichelberger, whose faith is nevertheless neither triumphalist nor doctrinaire and who (though Guissard does not say so) is thoroughly post-Conciliar in his celebration of human love as a pointer to the divine. Other writers Guissard mentions are Luc Estang, who turned away from the Church; Jean Cayrol, who reacted against over-pious interpretations of his earlier work and retained only ‘un implicite tres lointain’; and those like Pierre ` Moinot, Francoise Mallet-Joris, Francois Taillandier, or Joseph Majault, who ¸ ¸ portray the search for meaning and a ‘vide qui n’est pas neant’. The novels of ´ Sylvie Germain, who was only just beginning to publish at the time of Guissard’s paper, have displayed similar characteristics, but also a return to the theme of evil (associated with Mauriac and Bernanos), combined with a notably poetic style. Other writers who can be considered as in some sense the heirs of the Catholic novel tradition include Michel del Castillo and Didier Decoin. In the same year as Guissard’s paper, an article by Bernard Swift took a similar line, but pointing out that Mauriac and Graham Greene had in fact taken seriously Newman’s argument that there can be no such thing as a distinctively Christian literature, since all literature by definition expresses the human condition in its sinfulness and need of grace.42 While deeply marked by the Catholic Revival, they were in some ways precursors of the liberalizing spirit of the Second Vatican Council, contributing to the development of what Richard Griffiths called ‘un roman catholique plus vrai, ou l’ambiguıte moderne ¨´ ` se substitue aux certitudes traditionnelles’.43 More recent authors referred to by Swift in this connection are William Golding and David Lodge, and, in France, Jean Sulivan, Roger Bichelberger, and Jacques de Bourbon-Busset (whose novels celebrate his ‘amour fou durable’, and whose winning of the Grand Prix du Roman of the Academie Francaise in 1957 for Le Silence et la joie started an asso´ ¸ ciation of that particular literary prize with novelists of a Catholic persuasion). Olivier de Boisboissel and Remi Soulie have suggested that the heirs of the ´ ´
Patrick Sherry, ‘The End of the Catholic Novel?’, Literature & Theology, 9 (1995), pp. 165 –78 (p. 166). ´ ´ Lucien Guissard, ‘Ou en est le roman “catholique”?’, Bulletin de l’Academie royale de langue et de litterature fran` ¸aises, 70 (1992), 42 –54 ,http://www.arllfb.be/ebibliotheque/communications/guissard110192.pdf. [accessed c 31 October 2011]. 42 Bernard C. Swift, ‘“The Dangerous Edge of Things”: Mauriac, Greene and the Idea of the Catholic Novel’, Journal of European Studies, 22 (1992), 111 –26. 43 Richard Griffiths, ‘Du “roman catholique” traditionnel au roman mauriacien’, Cahiers Francois Mauriac, 11 ¸ (1984), 23 –39 (pp. 38 –39).
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Catholic novel are not all novelists and might include Bataille, whose ‘a-theologie’ is preoccupied with sin and guilt, Lacan, who acknowledged his ´ debt to St Thomas Aquinas, and Philippe Sollers, ‘dont le papisme allusivement maistrien n’etonnera que ceux qui ne l’ont pas lu’.44 ´ The distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic writers is not the only one to have been eroded. Anglophone (including American) and francophone novelists with a Christian dimension are increasingly being seen once more as belonging to the same broad tradition. Swift emphasized the mutual admiration and debt between Mauriac and Graham Greene, and Eamon Maher has drawn attention to the links between the Irish writer John Broderick and the French Catholic novel.45 If Theodore Fraser offered a European conspectus in 1994 with The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe, he was only returning to the breadth of vision of Donat O’Donnell (the pseudonym of Conor Cruise O’Brien) in his Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers.46 Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence was published in Japanese in 1966 and has been hailed as a modern classic in the Catholic tradition; and among those normally categorized as francophone writers, the philosopher-novelist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (who has published mostly in English since leaving Africa) has a strong claim to being included in any study of the modern Catholic novel, for his Shaba deux.47 In The Pen and the Cross (2010) Richard Griffiths correctly emphasizes the importance of the French experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the writing of Graham Greene and many others on this side of the Channel, but he does not see more recent French writers and thinkers as offering any pointers to a possible reinvention of the Catholic novel.48 One of his central questions is whether Catholic literature can survive as theology moves on, and it will be interesting to see whether the theologically informed reflections of an influential philosopher like Jean-Luc Marion on love, idolatry, and transcendence provide something for the next generation of novelists (in whatever language) to get their teeth into.49

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44 Olivier de Boisboissel and Remi Soulie, ‘Les Romanciers et le catholicisme: une filiation litteraire’, in Les ´ ´ ´ ´ Romanciers et le catholicisme, ed. by Claude Barthe (Versailles: Editions de Paris, 2004), pp. 9 –26. 45 Eamon Maher, ‘John Broderick (1924 –89) and the French “roman catholique”’, in Reinventing Ireland through a French Prism, ed. by E. Maher, Grace Neville, and Eugene O’Brien (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 245 –61. 46 Theodore P. Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe (New York: Twayne, 1994); Donat O’Donnell, Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952). 47 ` Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Shaba deux: les carnets de mere Marie-Gertrude (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1989). ´ 48 Richard Griffiths, The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850 –2000 (London: Continuum, 2010). 49 ´ ´ Jean-Luc Marion: L’Idole et la distance: cinq ´tudes (Paris: Grasset, 1977), La Croisee du visible (Paris: Editions de e ´ ` e ´ la Difference, 1991), Le Phenomene ´rotique: six meditations (Paris: Grasset, 2003). ´