A genius for passion & purity
DUNLEA, WILLIAM
--~ REMEMBERING MAURIAC 7 A genius for passion & purity WILLIAM...
...seek something that will pass for love, by whatever devious Since the loss of innocence is irrevocable, only through the devices they must employ...
...While his novels are still rightly regarded as had been hope that on the occasion of his centenary, 1985, we the core of his achievement, they have too long overshadowed would witness a sudden surge of interest in his work, that hope his much larger nonfictional output...
...Humanity, as Mauriac paints we seek to fill the void Augustine says God created in us that it, is forever torn between the Creator and other creatures...
...REMEMBERING MAURIAC 7 A genius for passion & purity WILLIAM DUNLEA bourgeois provincial background of his childhood and youth in building his imaginary world, while Malraux, Sartre, and THE DEATH OF Franpois Mauriac in 1970, at the age of Camus transcribed a more "objective" world...
...realism, which are sufficient justification for any depiction of Although for Mauriac all love, however degraded and perpassion that does not merely pander to the lewd imagination...
...Haunted by a sense of sin, spiritual dramas - a clear indication that the author has the Mauriacian lover displays the ardor so lacking in the touched on a subterranean sense of sin that survives beneath typical fictional lover of our liberated day who does everything the meticulously wrought facades of propriety and rectitude, on reflex, as in a laboratory demonstration...
...Indeed, it is that of "a metaphysician who works in the concrete," who their mystery that makes them most memorable...
...Our destiny, once we begin to isolate it, is like moving qualities of his stories - qualities which spring not those plants we can never dig up with all their roots intact...
...Here for the first time all of its consciously conceived and clearly articulated world view...
...Their cries of outrage helped bring on though Mauriac is not the first novelist to employ the art of Mauriac's famous crise de conscience of the late twenties, suggestion, no other has thereby rendered character quite so which brought him to the realization that he could no longer incisively and dramatically...
...Still, Mauriac eighty-four, indeed marked the "end of an era...
...A raphical study of Mauriac, and has published articles in Accent, tale stripped to its barest essentials, a humble yet many-sided Poetry, and Hudson Review...
...Passion" wellspring, and the strain - as opposed to the unifying tension engages the whole person but "sex" - as Freud, Lawrence, of his great narratives of the twenties - became increasingly Hemingway, and their myriad epigoni see it - is the whole evident after The Viper's Knot (1932...
...Like Dostoyevsky, he Clearly the moralist in Mauriac is always present in his art, though seldom obtrusively...
...The moral and psychological to compare his own work with Mauriac's, Greene quipped: ambivalence of humanity, which it was Pascal's genius to "Wouldn't that be rather like comparing chalk with cheese...
...The small children here find anything to eat to fill their LUCY KOMISAR is a foreign correspondent who has covered stomachs...
...B ACOLOD CITY, Negros, the Philippines...
...tions in which Mauriac's characters are caught up, but one One fundamental reason for the concreteness of Mauriac's rarely forgets the characters themselves...
...The most common confusion occurs in the belief is inordinate, yet Mauriac reminds us that in our knowledge of that sexual compatibility alone can nurture or take the place of human "misere" is the beginning of human "grandeur...
...on the one hand, and of moral indifference and cynicism, on Mauriac's realistic portrayal of passion, despite its Christian the other, that transcends all boundaries of class, all categories dimension, was certain to arouse controversy in orthodox of vice...
...Moreover, poet and novelist are seldom in discord in scorned as illusory the gelatinous middle ground between Mauriac, as they so often are in Melville and Hardy...
...show me a saint and I'll paint one...
...It cannot to which he sought to adhere freely...
...A spe- interaction of the natural world with human character is felt cialist in modern French literature, he recently completed a biog- more subtly yet more forcefully than in his earlier fiction...
...physical and metaphysical elements through which he creates With all the concreteness of his vision, Mauriac seldom fails a compact universe of sensuous immediacy, a world small in to preserve the mystery of his characters...
...He assimilated a vast spectrum of subordinate his Catholicism to his creativity, which is what literary influences - from Racine to Chateaubriand to Balzac always seemed to happen when he tried to keep them in and on through Barrels, Bourget, and Gide - out of which he separate compartments...
...He therefore believes that "purity" must be an be loved...
...He ject, his more typical portrayal is not of the passion for imposdid not attempt to explain this compulsion beyond the oft- sible possession but for impossible submission...
...If so, be it known that Frangois Mauriac, the least tic and the style always classic, they are not contradictory but academic of acaddmiciens, was also the least official of Catho- complementary...
...On the other hand, his most loving transcendence of self is it possible to break out of the circle of characters may also confuse the act of loving with the desire to self-deception, frustration, and despair...
...SUGAR ISLAND' OF THE PHILIPPINES A bittersweet world LUCY KOMISAR tion here - and their efforts to improve their conditions have met with severe repression...
...from a muddy source but from an "amalgame de sensations" Even our childhood is in a sense an end, a completion...
...will - with few lapses during the subsequent decade, his most It is true that as Mauriac's creative elan became more creative period - continue to grow with it, producing such subdued, his work tended to lose its sharp focus, and with it powerful and moving studies of the troubled human heart as much of its power...
...He thus faced a formidnow sound archaic, if not downright grandiloquent: they not able challenge when he undertook to "purify" his creative only have too classic, but too biblical, a resonance...
...Mauriac's own dying words were: in that very struggle...
...He decided that he would have to created a narrative technique as remarkable as that of Dosmake them coexist on equal terms since the only alternative toycvsky (to whom he was close in spirit but distant in art) for appeared to be chronic crisis...
...The victory of a Visits to the sugar plantations offer graphic witness to new popular national government has not ended the people's suffering...
...there are three left...
...could be summed up as emotion recollected with urgency...
...Nor has he lacked for admirers among his AmerClaudel, Peguy, and Bernanos...
...Their because it is Racinian...
...Remembering an old mistress, was rooted in a secure faith...
...Although in strictest literary terms Mauriac was a master, With A Kiss for the Leper (1922) Mauriac firmly established and none of his above-named younger contemporaries were himself as a novelist of major significance: in this work "the (or are), one thing his work and theirs have in common is a Mauriac novel" crystallized...
...Straw sleeping mats the rural poor...
...He alone can fill...
...his work candidly, stressed his compulsion to set his dramas in Portraying human love in all its aspects, Mauriac suggests the torrid sun of the Landes where temptation has singularly their interrelatedness: for him all love is one, in that through it easy access to his protagonists...
...If there great writer can...
...Through totally involving the other...
...On the contrary, says Mauriac, lovers As novelist, Mauriac embarked on a dark quest unaided by know each other only through the pain they inflict on each the sanguine assurance of redemption enjoyed by conventional other and thereby on themselves...
...Without complex as Dostoyevsky's, his lovers as tormented as presumption he set forth his novelistic perspective as being Strindberg's, but without the hysteria of either...
...Yet elements were combined with telling effect: the hypnotic lyriunlike them, Mauriac, while sharing the anguish of his time, cism with which he evokes the pine forests, vineyards, and transcended its despair...
...His creatures are as geophysical terms but of immense scope spiritually...
...Only rarely do they sense saved or damned through the flesh...
...Through this unheroic things that happen when we repress them...
...In this novel his coreligionists did not find, as they more dramatic than the action because the drama is interior...
...the radical pessimism of an advocate of radical purity inexorable approach of death...
...The sanctity and iniquity...
...So he achieved through a singular gift for making sensible the insen- writes in Therdse Desqueyroux, tracing the criminal tendensible and perceptible the imperceptible (rarely done justice in cies of his heroine back to her early life...
...Belonging and possessing, like depths of what Mauraic conceives to be his own unappeased loving and hating, finally become blurred...
...diarrhea...
...and doomed, for even when he is in a state of grace, they emerge "du plus needless to say, never to be requited, since, all too often in the trouble de moi-meme...
...It may seem that by recording its should belong there, which results in our feeling the emptiness every inflection and nuance Mauriac's emphasis on "misere" more acutely...
...lics...
...He deserves nothing less...
...The tension characteristic of Mauriac's Mauriac novel of "mass" appeal (in Europe if not America), novels is a projection of his own inner conflict, which was Mauriac skewers the ethical and social values of the same dictated by the stringent moral code in which he was reared and moral and amoral majorities still more relentlessly...
...Negros sugar workers are probably the most were stacked in a corner...
...The Genitrix, The Desert of Love, Therese Desqueyroux, The greatest art, music, and poetry are edifying in the highest Viper's Knot, works assuring him a place just to the right of sense, yet the novel, being the least ennobling of literary Proust among French novelists of this century...
...both come redolently and vibrantly to life...
...taken...
...In other words, they rise out of the most troubled "belong" to the loving one...
...explore more exhaustively and reveal more eloquently than Mauriac's most typical sinner-protagonists are larger than any writer before him, Mauriac demonstrates more convinc- life in the insatiability of their desire, their obsessive hunger ingly than any writer since, with the arguable exception of for a love that no other person can satisfy, and in the conBaudelaire...
...In fact, now be the hallmarks of the Mauriac novel...
...his insight into the human condition is scorching sands of his native Bordeaux countryside is matched more vital, less abstract than theirs...
...In doing so, he is as disturbing to those who would live comfortably with God as to those who would live comfortably without God...
...it was, therefore, hardly a question of "We do not know what we desire...
...Sex can be sublimated, but passion must be trans- Since Mauriac's sinners are almost invariably a far cry from formed...
...He sat guerrilla mobilization on the sugar island of Negros...
...He was also a national monu- ican colleagues, viz., his honorary membership in the Ameriment heaped with enough honors - an immortal of the can Academy of Arts & Letters...
...deep, abiding love...
...fulfillment in a self-transcending idealism, the sublime pasYet oftener than not Mauriac meets the demands of moral sion of renunciation...
...but without faith, which can only his most heartless characters themselves seek to be loved, or come through the intervention of grace, the quest is illusory...
...When once prodded metaphysic is that it is Pascalian...
...In this century heroine of his most widely read and admired novel, Mauriac Mauriac is almost alone in creating characters in whom body makes his most mordant comment on the "ordinary" sinners and soul are so inseparable that the one can do nothing without who stand in judgment of her more "original" kind...
...erotic love from its true source and object...
...To Mauriac the quest English translation...
...Mauriac, who discussed that they are running away from love rather than toward it...
...they do not give themselves so much as seek to be integral virtue not restricted to sexual morality...
...Few universalized his creation in a more humanly relevant way...
...Therese Desqueyroux (1926) provoked a scandal, and with Destins the following year, Mauriac's posi- I N THE Mauriac novel, character is conveyed through states tion as foremost French "Catholic" novelist became virtually of soul more often than through action: the atmosphere is untenable...
...verted, has a pure source in childhood innocence, he never Charles Du Bos perceptively pointed out that the "element ceased to mourn the brief duration of even the purest child's trouble" is indissociable from the most original, poetic, and innocence...
...He drew entirely on the by the poignancy with which he reveals the inner essence of his characters...
...He preached the among whom may emerge future American Mauriac speephemerality of worldly renown but managed to endure it to cialists...
...Even so, he never stooped to edify...
...ils se forment de ce qui subsiste en moi Mauriacian scheme, the loved one bitterly resents having to malgre moi...
...Mauriac been called Mauriac's "conversion," a term which misrepre- was a poet and dramatist who found his most original and sents Mauriac's resolution of the conflict - between his sense powerful expression in this narrative style...
...To believe in bodily resurrection perhaps it is necessary when he set out...
...For him the only undying Catholic piety...
...they can't be watched...
...This has somewhat facetiously its lyrical precision as for its dramatic extravagance...
...Three children died in this house," impoverished in the country - malnutrition borders on starva- he said, "two of diarrhea, the other of measles...
...He also had writ large on human love as an end in itself...
...The very quintessence of Mauriac's art for sanctity represents a quest for the lost innocence of love...
...Few of us are not at some point conscious of among the human species "exist only sinners and those who this void, yet most of us determine to fill it with what we think have been purified of sin...
...Here the WILLIAM DUNLEA is a former contributor to Commonweal...
...He offers no justification for novels, the only love that is not selfish, self-deceived, or thus troubling his readers, and only one for his fictional off- ultimately self-destructive is self-sacrificing love, which finds spring: if they did not love or crave love, they would not sin...
...did with so much of his previous fiction, that flesh triumphed The depth of that drama, and the decisive implication therein over spirit, but rather that a kind of blasphemous despair of nature underlies the evocative power of the narrative...
...By the same token, Mauriac's realism is tragic sequent depth and persistence of their self-torment...
...tragedy, stark in its pathos yet seething with passion below the 23 May 1986: 297 surface, told with no less subtlety than simplicity - these will kind of insipidly pious fiction he had always abhorred...
...Unlike Malraux or Celine, Louis soliloquizes: "What remains of a body interred for thirty Mauriac was not resigned to journeying from night to night years...
...It is the transmutation of be doubted that many real-life prototypes of these majorities this personal struggle which gives Mauriac's art an intensity have been among the most avid readers of these searching unique in twentieth-century fiction...
...Proust went further than any previous novelist in depicting the vanity of human desire and the futility of human passion, but he left their victims at a metaphysical dead end...
...If the sensibility is always romanlic readers...
...Mauriac was one of those has now faded...
...The punishment of those who quest for sanctity convinced him that he had no particular gift have abused the flesh is to no longer be able to imagine that it in that direction, though he was himself increasingly engaged could be raised up again...
...He did not create of moral responsibility as a writer and his commitment to his on a giant scale like Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, but like artistic autonomy - by implying that he was converted to the them he redefined the novel by making it more pliable to his Commonweal: 298 aims...
...would dispute the fact that he was the last of the giants of Indeed it is generally agreed that as a regional writer Mauriac is the French Catholic literary revival that included Bloy, unsurpassed...
...He may not have been a has not yet discovered Mauriac, despite the fact that transla- great poet or dramatist, or a super-great novelist, but he helped tions of all his novels appeared here during the 1950s (those to shape the consciousness and sensibility of his time as only a very translations may be a large part of the problem...
...the end...
...What he needs before he gets Academie before he was fifty, a Nobel laureate before he was much older is more American readers and more students from seventy - to bury a less sturdy recipient...
...What Mauriac, the only major exponent of classic the norm, it is intriguing to note that his most "far-out" tragedy among twentieth-century novelists, defines morally reprobate, Therese Desqueyroux - irretrievable more in the and treats imaginatively as temptation and sin, most of his labyrinthine complexity of her motivation than in her sinfulcontemporaries (and ours) define and treat as psycho- ness - should have been the one to completely capture the biological impulse and response, warning us of the terrible imagination of the general public...
...on the floor of his wood and thatch hut in a village not far from New Peoples Army (NPA) leaders say they will not lay down Bacolod City, the provincial capital...
...The latter quoted "confession" that try as he will to purify his creative passion generally turns out to be the more implacable and stream, his characters stubbornly adhere to the "scum" at the unquenchable, doomed to stray even further in the desert of bottom, "oi plongent les secretes racines de mon oeuvre...
...Mauriac's fixation on corporeal purity did not prevent him from perceiving a link between sexual repression and cupidity in his own family background, and its analogous links with the quest of power and prestige in the world of professional ambition and public life (as well as with a passion for spiritual domination of others in the reli23 May 1986: 299 gious life...
...Mauriac believed that tepid sinners make originality of his lyric prose resides in a poignant synthesis of weak potential candidates for sanctity...
...At one hundred he shows no sign of sagging under his Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, memoirist, biographer, laurels: since his death, scarcely a year has passed that he has polemicist (in which latter capacity he played a key role in De not been the subject of at least one major critical or biographi- Gaulle's return to power) - Mauriac was before all else a man cal study in France, and he remains a going concern elsewhere of letters...
...death is optimism about the innate goodness of the person...
...At his death, his published Oeuvres, completes in Western Europe and in England...
...The words "passion" and "lust" the worst sin a novelist could commit...
...Unfortunately, America comprised eighteen thick volumes...
...consequently, repression doesn't the paranoid and miserly Louis of Viper's Knot, that other work either way...
...As with all great men of letters, their trusty workhorses in Academia, USA, why has Mauriac the whole of his work is remarkable for its unity of theme and still not found his Justin O'Brien...
...When the novel divorced from the realm of moral choice to which it was attempts to edify in a sentimental vein it tends to betray its preordained in classic literature and drama, wherein it was raison d' titre by falsifying human truth, which to Mauriac was basically conceived as lust...
...Catholic circles...
...A sheet of plastic hung their arms until there is a substantial change in the situation of under the flimsy roof to keep out the rain...
...genres, has never proven congenial to that type of exaltation In the modern novel, as in the modern perception, passion is even when it assumes an epic character...
...With them he believed that the soul is enclose them more helplessly in it...
...Altriumphed over both...
...While Mauriac has powerfully portrayed the kind of Mauraic seemed to feel that as a novelist he was just as possessive (usually maternal) love that would devour its obcompelled to portray sin as his sinners were to commit it...
...Is it assumed that "Catholic expression: one encounters the same intimate vision and voice writers" should interest only "Catholic critics" and "Catho- in whatever form he writes...
...That is the cause of the the recent political events in the Philippines...
...I met Efren Villanueva, thirty-three...
...Mauriac leads them back to the Augustinian void (by way of Pascal), which can be their damnation or salvation, and which no other novelist has probed as consciously or copiously...
...person...
...rare writers who on nearly every page of every work has If Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and Beckett all have something important to say...
...UNICEF reports there are 145,000 children on the Commonweal: 300...
...In Mauriac's and unredeemed sinful nature...
...In further shaping he now sought to leaven with a broader humanity the harshness and expanding his fictional world, Mauriac's unique mastery of his pessimism about sinful human nature...
...One dare not a decisive lead over the nihilists who seek to proselytize their scrutinize the face of the beloved lest one see there the slow despair...
...Early failed attempts to portray the deliberate to have vanquished one's flesh...
...Mauriac's two great masters meet in his every effort to escape the prison of their longing seems to portrayal of the passions...
...His love-tormented sinners are actually, if unwittingly, enFor Mauriac the unpardonable sin is to be unloving, yet even gaged in this very quest...
...For as incarnates "that sinner of whom the theologians give us an Graham Greene observed, one may easily forget the machinaabstract idea...
...Still less did he share the liberal humanist's human love is that which is subsumed by Divine love...
Vol. 113 • May 1986 • No. 10
