The Impostor

...Daniel N. Murtaugh This is the first appearance in English of a novel that was originally published in French in 1927...

...They were as good as other less well-known ones written in the same spirit by conceited and disappointed men as a vehicle for the bitterness they exuded drop by drop...

...The pleasure one takes in Bernanos's skewering of Cenabre, Pernichon, and the others begins to feel like a guilty pleasure...

...He arises from a context Commonweal 25 June 4, 2999 of imposture in which the saintly characters stand out as anomalies...

...Cenabre's writings flirt with the official censure of the church, in a time when the condemnation of "Modernism" is a recent memory...

...Cenabre's rationalism does not set him apart...

...Instead of developing, characters are revealed at deeper levels and in significant recombinations...

...They applaud him as they would an aerialist performing without a net, anticipating with covert longing the always deferred moment of his fall...

...The Impostor does not progress through a plot...

...It is thus one of the earlier works of Georges Bernanos, the passionately Catholic novelist who died in 1948 and who is probably best known here for Diary of a Country Priest and the play (adapted as an opera by Francis Poulenc) Dialogues of the Carmelites...

...Opposed to Cenabre is a humble and painfully shy priest who once supervised him in the junior seminary and whom Cenabre now summons to counsel him in his crisis...

...In his charitable concern for Cenabre and, more strikingly, in his vigorous rejection of Cenabre's fraudulent confession, God speaks through Chevance...

...These responses do not arise out of his character, as this term is understood in ordinary discussions of fiction...

...Bernanos shares that contempt, but he speaks from an anti-Modernist position that sees Cenabre himself as a satanic condensation of tendencies represented laughably by Pernichon...

...And it is to these saintly characters, the dying Chevaunce and the radiant but still enigmatic Chantal, that the novel turns in its conclusion that does not conclude...

...Father Chevance is certainly a failure in the eyes of the world, behind in his rent, and barely holding onto a minor post secured for him by Cenabre...

...The characters seem, in fact, to be straw men in a debate proceeding outside the novel's boundaries...

...Its darkness is claustrophobic, suggesting the condition of human reason guardedly, secretly, asserting its claims against those of faith...

...The novel's four long chapters suggest the movement of a string quartet, each one having its own center of gravity and its own set of voices...

...He dominates the first and third chapters, but is for the most part an offstage presence in the second and fourth...

...Those who have sat through the Star Wars sequelae may be reminded of the salon of Jabba the Hut...

...One sees his point...

...Even worse is the cabal of third-rate crypto-Modernists who occupy the second chapter...

...That is why I think the translator would have done well to have brought the French title Imposture over into English...

...This condemnation was a victory for the Modernists and a cruel test of Bernanos's loyalty to the church...

...His career is followed with mingled awe and envy by an "intellectual demimonde" of closet Modernists, Commonweal 2 4 June 4,1999 theological dilettantes who troll the no-man's land between the left fringe of the "church party" and the Radical and Socialist parties...

...Commonweal 26 June 4, 2999...

...The saint, Bernanos argues, acts most effectively when he escapes or sets aside his character and becomes the instrument of God's love, even when that love expresses itself as condemnation...

...With our own hindsight that includes Nazism and Fascism, we are unlikely to mount the barricades for Action Franqaise or any other "organic" or "corporatist" political theory...

...Everything takes place in the Paris night...

...The "impostor" of the novel's English title is Father Cenabre, a historian of the saints whose coldly analytic rationalism is at once attracted to and affronted by his subjects, these "simple men whose simplicity had betrayed him," particularly by the transparency of their lives to divine grace...

...But even if we willingly suspend disbelief to accommodate this novel, it is hard not to conclude that Bernanos has stacked the deck in support of his cause...

...Cenabre despises Pernichon and his kind for their inauthenticy, their pusillanimity, and their inability to follow his heroic example of rational analysis...

...Bernanos punishes Cenabre's hubris with a loss of faith, the culmination of his prideful rationalism...

...But Chevance embodies an important idea of Bernanos's, namely, the saint who allows himself to be the instrument of God...

...For Bernanos was not just an anti-Modernist but a committed follower of Action Franchise, the Royalist, "corporatist" movement that found favor in conservative Catholic circles until it was condemned by Pius XI, at about the time Bernanos was writing this novel...

...Imposture (its French title, misrepresented somewhat by its English version) was followed by La ]oie in 1929 (an English version appeared in 1946), a sequel so closely tied to it that Bernanos expressed regret that he had not had the time to weld them into one larger novel...

...Readers accustomed to disinterested revelation of character will be startled by this introduction of Pernichon: "Pernichon wrote the religious column in a radical newspaper subsidized by a conservative financier for radical ends...

...We learn that "his Letters from Rome were not, however, entirely without merit...

...I mentioned the polemically involved voice of the narrator, that is, of Bernanos, and this is the source of the novel's energy and of its troubling quality...

...Cenabre knows this, and he holds them in contempt, illustrated most clearly in the novel's opening scene, when he excoriates one of them, a pathetic religious journalist named Pernichon...

...Voices are paramount here, those of the relatively small cast of characters and the polemically involved narrator...

...It appears watered down in Pernichon and in the repellent crew who surround him in the second chapter...

...What soul he had flourished in the threefold equivocation, feeding like a patient and industrious insect on the humiliation the position involved...

...The story of one in particular, the saintly ingenue Chantal La Clerg-erie, has barely begun, and a premonition of her death is simply unintelligible as we close the book...

...We leave principal characters in this novel with a sense that their stories are unfinished...

...Cenabre is not as central a figure here as the English title suggests...

...Daniel M. Murtaugh is associate professor of English and director of writing programs at Florida Atlantic Universtity...

...Indeed, on a second look (more analysis), Cenabre finds that he never had faith to begin with, that his entire life had been carefully constructed on the mere hypothesis of God's existence, one which he finds he can now let slip away, leaving him free to live his lie consciously rather than unconsciously...