Historical Necessity & Conscience

...As soon as the order of private, peaceful living is shaken, the drama of the Ego, of its significance and basic obscurity, unfolds in the crudest of lights...

...he does not make either the official or the socialist point of view his own...

...History invades their lives and, with history, the nation, the state, and all mankind...

...Until the very last moment he clings to the hope that, after such senseless slaughter, governments will find the way back to reason and will succeed in establishing a truly effective League of Nations...

...At the approach of war this moral universe, which was already in question as far as the main characters were concerned, begins to shake, and eventually collapses...

...Concerning Roger Martin du Gard's Les Thibaulf One of the great novels of 20th-century Europe, Roger Martin du Gard's The Thibaults, has recently been reprinted in English translation by Bantam Books, with an introduction by Albert Camus...

...From a purely artistic point of view, Les Thibault could have ended with the part that deals with the death of Oscar Thibault, the father...

...Hence, in the last parts of the novel, Summer 1914 and Epilogue, the reader is transferred from the level of private life to that of public life and history...

...But for Martin du Gard, as distinguished from Tolstoy, nature is the dark side of things: all that, in life, escapes man's control, surging irrepressibly from the unconscious depths of his being...

...In telling us about Jacques' revolt against both his father's authority and his own class, or Antoine's healthy acceptance of both, or about the moral world of Monsieur Thibault, the father, Martin du Gard does not take a position...

...For Jacques, as a boy, the feverish impulse that draws him toward Daniel de Fontanin is as natural as, later on, his revolt against his father's authority...

...A moral debate is, however, appended to the sober account of characters and circumstances...

...Reason is no longer of any avail...

...If, however, I call Les Thibault the last great novel of the nineteenth century it is for reasons that are not primarily aesthetic...

...He cannot, that is, renounce the privilege of controlling (or repressing) nature by the sheer power of rational will...

...to him, they are rather a means for the realization of his ambitions...

...The gloomy strain that makes itself felt throughout the narration, and finally resounds in the lugubriously dissonant tunes that accompany the death of Antoine, comes from the stoic morality that inspires the whole work...

...A notebook in which the passionate friendship between him and his schoolmate, Daniel de Fontanin, is expressed in the ardent language of adolescence, having been discovered by his father, the stem Catholic and even sterner bourgeois Monsieur Oscar Thibault, the boy is sent to a "reformatory" —or, as it is called in the book, a "penitentiary...

...T T HE MORAL ORDER that obtains in The I Thibaults is an order based on the individual, on his reason and his responsibility, hence, in the last analysis, on his conscious will...

...It is, no doubt, a kind of sacred terror...

...While it is a liberating force, it is also dark and destructive...

...Why bother with a spy...

...IN MY OPINION, Les Thibault by Roger Martin du Gard is the last great novel in the classical nineteenth-century manner...

...Nature has swept away the dike...

...if there is conflict instead of accord, this means that there is error, fault, or ill will on the part of somebody...

...His attempt is different from Tolstoy's...

...It could not be reduced to capitalism or democracy, since it included such different ferments as socialism and antidemocratic ideologies...

...Jacques, mortally wounded, his plane having fallen even before he could drop his leaflets, is caught in the confusion of the French troops in retreat after the failure of their offensive in Alsatia...

...I take it for granted...

...The two brothers meet again in Paris at their father's death bed...

...On November 18, seven days after the end of the war, Antoine decides not to wait passively for death any longer and kills himself with an injection...

...A novel, of course, is above all a work of fiction...

...The chronicle deals with two different milieus: that of international socialism to which Jacques belongs, and that of the Parisian intellectual upper class where his brother Antoine pursues a brilliant medical career...

...as for his Catholicism, it is strongly egocentric, autocratic, as well as rationalistic...

...Society is a secondary fact in this universe, whose ideal is the individual entirely free from collective servitude, in a condition of permanent heresy, so to speak, with respect to society, insofar as he NICOLA CHIAROMONTE is capable of judging (that is of accepting or rejecting) established norms...

...It seems what he meant was that the relation between the modern novelist and his creations is necessarily ideological...

...This episode could well have concluded the story of the formation of Jacques' and Antoine's respective characters, of the different ways in which they react to the authority of the father and to the stem bourgeois Catholic morality represented by it...

...N THE LAST part of his novel Martin du Gard, like Tolstoy in War and Peace, clearly intended to probe into the why and how of the historical event, and he does so as an objective storyteller, portraying characters and events without intervening himself...

...And yet, in Antoine's attitude to death neither reason nor will, and not even hope, are given up...

...The two main characters, Jacques and Antoine, live by trusting the possibility, if not the certainty, of such an accord...

...The writer must have felt that the portraits of his characters would be left unfinished, as it were, if he had not shown them involved in the historical destiny that had struck their generation...

...As fiction, it does not lend itself to logical arguments or historical comments and criticism...

...In Tolstoy, death and destruction notwlthstanding, war is an ordeal out of which the individual as well as society, thanks to their natural vigor, can emerge victorious...

...The sense ofterror before the unleashing of the forces of nature becomes feverish when war breaks out...

...In other words, even from a NICOLA CHIAROMONTE purely artistic point of view (if the enterprise of the novelist can ever be viewed as guided by purely artistic motives), Les Thibault would simply have been incomplete as the story of a bourgeois family from 1890 on, if it had not included the First World War...

...The frontier between the individual, nature and reason is erased...

...A novelist cannot really understand his characters and make them act without referring himself to a structure that goes beyond them insofar as it expresses the inner laws of the world in which they are supposed to exist...

...Like Tolstoy, he has seen in the paroxysm of war the very heart of the enigma of history...

...No matter how conscious of the "force" that lies at the core of his being, the individual cannot help feeling responsible...

...It is not my purpose here to analyze the artistic quality of the work...

...There seems to be nothing serene, nothing to be taken for granted, in nature as seen by Martin du Gard...

...It is "war" after "peace...

...The crisis of 1914 takes place, to begin with, in the conscience of individuals...

...Tolstoy's "peace" is simply based on "nature," social conventions and manners being themselves part of "natural" living...

...With a violent jolt, war wakes from slum ber the Self that was once curbed under the despotic rule of the father, only to give it its death sentence...

...His nature, however, remains that of a rebel...

...His reflection is echoed in his brother's exclamation: "Let us, once in life, have the courage to be ourselves...

...Summer 1914 is a chronicle that goes from June 28 to August 1, 1914, and includes the death of Jacques Thibault in a mad attempt to stop the war by getting into an airplane and dropping leaflets on both armies, calling for revolt and fraternization...

...HISTORICAL NECESSITY & CONSCIENCE L L IKE War and Peace, The Thibaults shows the effects of war on a peaceful society...

...In fact, bourgeois morality has already been questioned in the first part of the novel, The Grey Notebook, where the distance that separates Monsieur Thibault's rigidly set mind from the spontaneous outflow of an adolescent's feelings is shown with masterful restraint...

...This trust is, at bottom, shared even by their father...

...Such an end was in order, the reader feels, since the injustice done to Jacques when his friendship for Daniel de Fontanin was considered sinful, and punished as a crime, was too serious an offense against human spontaneity...

...Responsible for his actions, the individual owes an account of them first to his own conscience and then to others...

...The I and the Other confront each other unmercifully: "Under Doctor Thibault, I am well aware that there is somebody else: my own self...

...Confronted with history, the writer's tone remains objective and impassive...

...But, simply because he does not adopt any of the accepted positions and cares exclusively for a certain fidelity to factual truth, the final effect of Martin du Gard's pages on war is to show the weakness of the structure on which peace was based...

...below is a section of an extended study of Martin du Gard's work.—ED...

...In the very attitude of the novelist toward his subject, however, there is something of the attitude of the objective historian...

...Little known in the U.S., The Thibaults consists of a large sequence of novels covering the span of European life between 1890 and the First World War...

...In the nineteenth century it was the moral order shared by everybody, by the conformists as well as the rebels...

...He becomes a socialist and, as soon as he can, leaves Paris and his family to live in Switzerland, giving up a strong although, on both sides, utterly unexpressed passion that had been growing between him and Jenny, his friend Daniel's sister...

...The military policeman who has him in custody finishes him off with a shot...

...While Jacques lives the life of a revolutionary socialist in Geneva, his brother Antoine becomes a very successful doctor...

...Jacques' revolt makes no more sense than Antoine's conformity...

...Except that for Oscar Thibault reason is guaranteed by the authority of religion, while nature represents temptation and sin...

...The last volume of Roger Martin du Gard's great novel, Epilogue, was published in that very year...

...But, even when confronted with war, Martin du Gard's characters maintain the belief that between the man of good will and reason on one side, and nature and society on theother, there should be an accord of some kind...

...and this self is choking," Antoine tells himself at the approach of war...

...It is very different from that of Tolstoy...

...Epilogue takes place in 1918, from May 3 to November 18...

...In the end they are all equally dismayed and feel equally powerless...

...The writer does not indulge in the description of horrors abounding in literary testimonials on the First World War...

...In Martin du Gard, war is a dismal catastrophe in which not only the individual but society itself is helplessly shattered...

...In a certain sense, however, the underlying theme of the novel is indeed nature...

...These are the premises, fundamentally optimistic in spite of the somber overtones revealed by the absence of any true joy in the universe on which peace is founded and private life unfolds in The Thibaults...

...Jacques endures his punishment stoically and, when freed, continues his studies with great success, being admitted to that seventh heaven of the French school system, the Ecole Normale Superieure...

...Ideological problems take over...

...Yet at the bottom of these irresistible impulses of his soul there is something like a threatening ambiguity, a persistent feeling of guilt and doubt...

...Jean -Paul, the son born in 1915 of the first and last encounter between Jacques Thibault and Jenny de Fontanin, will be twenty-four in 1939...

...The individual no longer knows where he stands nor who he is...

...His impassive tone, however, has the effect of making the reader feel even more strongly that, for example, the death of Monsieur Thibault, the father, marked the end of a certain kind of authority and morality...

...Martin du Gard is too concerned with concrete details and the rendering of the psychology of his characters to deviate into ideological discussion...

...At the same time, however, the writer shows us the limit beyond which that faith breaks down...

...Thus ends the Thibault family...

...Nature has reverted to chaos...

...The glance he fixes on total darkness is firm, the last word he writes in his notebook is the name of a child...

...on the other, the serious and orderly people, among whom is Rumelles, a high official of the Quai d'Orsay, one of the history-makers...

...He limits himself to describing each character with a Spinozian concern to understand without judging...

...The first reason is the scope of the narration, which covers the story of a French bourgeois family from about 1890 to the end of the First World War...

...on November 18, 1918, seven days after the conclusion of the armistice, Antoine, the younger of the Thibault brothers, knowing that he is going to die from having been gassed in the war, deliberately puts an end to his life...

...Society has taken possession of him and carries him away toward an unknown consummation...

...It recounts the slow death of the army doctor Antoine Thibault in a sanatorium, his lungs corroded by poison gas...

...Individuals are no longer alone...

...On one side are the ideologists and the rebels...

...Then they separate and do not meet until the days of July 1914 HISTORICAL NECESSITY & CONSCIENCE when, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, the fate of Europe hangs in the balance and private life is pushed into the background by historical drama...

...There is no modern novel of any scope that does not imply a certain view of society, of history, and of the world...

...He neither takes sides nor indicts...

...The novel begins with an episode in the childhood of Jacques, the elder Thibault brother...

...But in the soberness of its style as well as in the apparent discontinuity of its composition (consisting of a series of separate episodes rather than an uninterrupted flow of narration), it shows more than atrace of twentieth-century sensibility...

...while Tolstoy from the very beginning conceived of his work as a novel about history, Martin du Gard was led to give his novel a historical epilogue by a kind of chronological necessity...

...Yet he is too objective and too respectful of historical truth to shrink from ideas when the events themselves require their presence...

...The novelist shows us how both the rebels and the orderly people, anguished by the onrush of events, try to understand what is taking place, make it fit into the frame of reference of their established convictions, try to guess what is going to happen and influence it...

...It is the same morality that has been the pride of modern humanism since Spinoza...

...But what, one might ask, is the specific structure of the state of peace as seen by Martin du Gard...

...The pathos of the last parts of the novel comes from the strength of a moral faith that is able to withstand the weight of the world...

...Stoic morality is upheld to the very end...

...Yet, in every important work of fiction we find, implicit or explicit, well amalgamated with the narration or clumsily appended to it, a definite structure of ideas...

...At that moment it is made clear that, if this is what individual life was meant for, if this is the end of its story, there is no difference whatsoever between one life and another...

...While Jacques is a rebel, Antoine, who conforms to accepted norms of conduct, is very far from doing so out of conviction...

...Society is a congregation of individuals, each of them contributing freely to the life of the community, each one responsible according to his own condition for the present state of the community as well as for its future...

...Even if he has not yet succeeded in controlling nature, man is the conscious cause of what happens around him, hence he must accept responsibility for it, under penalty of renouncing his dignity...

...Jacques and Antoine Thibault would indeed have remained incomplete as characters if the writer had not confronted them with the ordeal of war...

...The theme of the novel, which until then had been exclusively that of the private relations between the characters—Oscar Thibault and his sons, the Thibault family as against the Fontanin family, the delicate relations between Jacques and Jenny, Antoine's straightforward ambition and lust for life—is transformed into that of the relationship between the individual and society...

...Nature is shown in the novel as the force which drives the individual to look for happiness and self-fulfillment as well as for what Jacques calls "the hold on reality," meaning the complete conviction that one's actions are in accord with the order of things—a conviction that, incidentally, Jacques will never be able to gain...

...While consciously waiting for death, Antoine ponders upon his own destiny, on his brother's, and on the absurdity of war...

...This structure was not simply the political system that had been established in Europe after the second half of the nineteenth century...

...The only outlet left for reason is soliloquy...

...The writer's attitude to history is no different...

...One of its most perceptive critics is the Italian writer Nicola Chiaromonte...

...A mediocre book could hardly provoke sustained intellectual interest or supply substantial matter for reflection...

...In The Thibaults, however, "peace" is definitely based on the individual's taking for granted not a natural state, but the accord between three fundamental elements: the individual himself, reason, and nature...

...The moral question that finally flares up during the critical days of July 1914 was already smouldering in the souls of the characters, as is suggested by their natural gravity and their earnest commitment to the business of living...

...Happiness appears to him at that moment as "a surrender to obscure forces...

...Nor was it based on bourgeois morality, for that had already been seriously undermined...

...Nothing characterizes more clearly both Jacques' character and the sense of nature in Martin du Gard than Jacques' feeling at the very moment when he abandons himself to his love for Jenny...

...The individual finds himself alone in a dark universe...

...It is not sufficient to be a man, one must be a system," said Balzac, speaking of the novelist...

...It is the same feeling that is masterfully expressed by the author in the relationship between Jacques and Jenny, in which attraction and repulsion are inextricably intertwined, and which remains troubled even when the two, carried away by the emotion of the impending collective disaster, finally yield to their mutual attraction...