Novels and Anti-Novels

...he is as impossible to render effectively as Peguy or Proudhon, with both of whom he shares a great deal...

...The reason becomes palpable as soon as one begins to read Bernanos...

...But Stendhal is still concerned with the creation of character, he is still a master of psychological analysis, he still presents a world that we pic­ture in our minds with all its quick­ly changing action even as we ap­preciate his ironical commentary upon it, and these characteristics place him firmly in the tradition of the great 19th-century novelists...

...Beckett seems to attract the kind of borderline critics, half-literary, half-theological, who now teem in American and Canadian universities...

...he is, as Pierre Emmanuel once said, "one of the greatest prose poets of our language," and prose poets, like verse poets, are hard to translate...

...their destinies, though tragic, are not to be regretted Peter Hebblethwaite, in discussing Bernanos, has the advantage that very little has yet been written on this novelist in English...

...Yet he is still concerned with the creation of characters, and it is through their complicated relation­ships and their varying reactions to the human condition that he raises the questions of a militant Chris­tian, and suggests the answers of a power which moves beyond the scope of human reason...

...It is, to say the least, curious to see Gina Sanseverina as "a motherly figure,' but this may well be the rationalization by which Atherton justifies his consistent underplaying of the magnificent Duchess, who quite obviously grew in Stendhal's estimation during those classic 52 days when the Charterhouse of Parma was in the process of creation until she even­tually demanded as much of his attention as Fabrice, the nominal hero...

...Les Grands Cimetieres sous la Lune surely ranks with Homage to Catalonia among the few great works resulting from the Spanish Civil War...

...One may also dispute the em­phasis which Atherton has placed on the pessimism with which Sten­dhal regards his heroes...

...The result is that the comments on him are even more tortuous and arid than his own writing, and much more pretentious...

...In Stendhal meaning is created by the hero who places himself above the indifferent flow of history, and in Bernanos by the saint who practices Christian love in a world dominated by the spirit of negation, personified by Satan...

...Stendhal's view is pessimistic only if one im­agines him accepting a convention­al view of success, but in the terms of the Beylist or Espagnolist phi­losophy, heroes like Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo are most free in the high towers of their prisons and most triumphant when they stand under the shadow of death...

...He convincingly presents the central phenomenon of Stendhal's art, "the combination of disparate and un­connected perceptions into a whole that gives the sense of movement and life.' There are particular points which are eminently de­batable...

...In Beckett there is no meaning beyond the negation and its recognition, for, after all the efforts of the metaphysical inter­preters to find a positive spiritual meaning in his writing, Godot and God alike retain their original elu­siveness...

...He is more than a novelist...

...Like many excellent local French wines, his particular kind of prose does not travel...

...There is a discontinuity in his writing, a dis­regard for conventional devices of transition which gives his pattern of sentences a mosaic quality and which suggests a contempt for orthodox ideas of structure...

...As John Atherton suggests in the first of the monographs listed above, "Stendhal has a fear of rhetoric that amounts to a mistrust of lan­guage, and this alone suffices to dis­tinguish him from romantic writers...

...The point which a writer like Robbe-Grillet is making is that significance cannot be imposed on experience at all...

...Stendhal, Bernanos and Beckett are the subjects of the most recent volumes in the Studies of Modern European Literature series, edited by Erich Heller and Anthony Thorlby...

...John Atherton's study of Stendhal carries a similar bonus...

...It is true that all in various ways depart from the conventions of realism, and that all see man­kind faced by a world which at times-with Beckett at all times­appears devoid of meaning...

...The great weakness of Nathan A. Scott's Samuel Beckett is that the author, although admitting this much about his subject, is still straining after meanings which there is no reason to believe the author intends...

...With this important distinction Father Hebblethwaite carries us over to the world of the anti-novelists which Samuel Beckett, like Robbe-Grillet, inhabits...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Writer and Politics" AT first sight it would seem difficult to find much in common between Stendhal, Bernanos and Beckett...

...Bernanos' novels are irradiated with the joy of love as the two great completed works of Stendhal, The Red and the Black and The Charter­house of Parma, are irradiated with the joy of pride...

...Bernanos is saying that it cannot be found in the world of evil...

...Some past volumes have been a great deal more than this, particularly on the rare occasions when the editors have been courageous enough to commis­sion writers who were either out­side the universities or more than academics...

...He examines and elucidates the novels effectively, relating them to the revolutionary traditionalism which made Bernanos a patriot who parted from Maurras in the name of decency, and denounced those fellow Catholics who supported Franco after he had seen the Republican prisoners, bearing themselves with noble dignity, taken away to face the firing squads in Majorca...

...It is also a clearly and brilliantly written essay in criticism, in which Atherton carefully weighs the am­biguities and contradictions which are so essential to Stendhal...

...Joy, love and pride are as foreign to the dim fuscous world of Beckett's imagina­tion, in contrast, as the characters of Stendhal and Bernanos are to the dehumanized wraiths who whine and fart and slobber through his dreary parade of sub-novels and anti-plays, from Watt to Happy Day...

...Much more might have been gained from a literary consideration of Beckett which would have taken into account not merely his relation to the anti-literary schools of contemporary France but also, more closely than Scott has done, to the Irish writers of the early 20th century...

...It is true that in Stendhal one can find certain stylistic features which in some ways anticipate Beckett and the other alitterateurs who have come into prominence in France during the past decade...

...Bernanos in his turn often seems to be writing in parable, and equal­ly often departs so far from the ordinary business of fiction that his novels take on intermittently the tone of an essay on spiritual values...

...Done into English, Bernanos shows his worst features, his bombast and his prolixity, while the passion he conjures out of the French language is never effectively carried over...

...In the end he uses Heidegger to argue an inverted religious significance in Beckett: Beckett, he says, resolutely plunges us into the Dark, takes us to the end of the road where we fail to find God, but, paradoxically, this may lead us to the point when we begin "distantly to descry his presence...

...in particular one might instance Barea on Unamuno, Roy Campbell on Lorca and Iris Mur­doch on Sartre...

...Scott's study is a positive dust-trap of this kind of writing, loaded with dry discussions of obscure articles in learned journals, discussions which at times become so laden with academic jargon that one suspects the author of approaching the anti-literature of his subject through an anti-scholarship expressed in self-parody...

...For there is much in Beckett that can best be understood as an extension of trends already existing not merely in Joyce, but also in Synge and in the later Yeats...

...Given these difficulties, Father Hebblethwaite makes as good a job as might be expected of his exposition of Bernanos...

...It not only tells the reader what to look for when he begins to read Stendhal...

...These small volumes, which vary in length from 120 to 140 pages, are written mainly by academic critics with the primary intention of providing an introduc­tion for students, and they are pre­sented with the customary scholarly apparatus of footnotes, biographical notes and bibliography...

...In Stendhal, as in Proust, the great victories go to those who can put themselves outside history and outside time...

...Scott, unfortunately, is more of a theologian than a literary critic, and instead of considering Beckett effectively as a writer he is constantly trying to find points of contact with philosophers and theologians as varied as Wittgenstein, Tillich, Kelvin, Pascal, Barth, Bonhoeffer and, above all, Heidegger...