Finally, I have finished Georges Bernanos’s Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1936), a 285-page novel that has taken me four weeks to read. Reading in French, it is pour les oiseaux. The birds who already read French.
A bit more of the Wuthering Expectations Short History of French Literature I was writing last year:
The French twentieth century began with a crushing defeat of the Catholic Church, and the triumph of laicization, a struggle that had continued since the French Revolution. For more detail, see “The Law of the 9th of December 1905 Concerning the Separation of Church and State.” Meanwhile, French artists and writers were turning into godless Communists and lunatics. So there is a Catholic counter-reaction, eventually. Bernanos is the Catholic writer who has survived the best in French literature, I think, aside from Charles Péguy, who was killed in the war in 1914. Bernanos is probably a better novelist than his peers in the movement, but I have not read them – I would have to look up their names – so what do I know.
This novel is well-described by its title. A young priest in his first parish has a crisis of faith, and decides to write it down. He does not doubt his own faith, but rather that of everyone else, the superstitious no-longer-peasants who would make up his congregation if they ever came to Mass, and the neurotic wealthy family in the mansion on the hill. The latter provides most of the plot. This is very much not a novel about a priest dealing with ordinary people.
The book is a mix of the priest’s reflections, some of which are personal, some theological, some both – doubts about the intensity of his prayer, for example – which is what I would expect from a priest’s diary, and long Thomas Bernhardish monologues by other people, like an older priest who is something of a mentor, an atheist doctor who kills himself, and an old friend from the seminary who gives up the vocation, which are completely preposterous as diary entries, unless I am supposed to think the priest is inventing them. But I think I am not supposed to think about it. Just a convention. Occasionally, Bernanos and the priest do acknowledge the problem:
He must have pursued this for a long time, since I have the memory of a long monologue that I listened to without understanding it. (299 of this Librairie Plon edition, tr. mine)
The priest does not have a forceful personality, so he mostly just lets people talk. His own writing is clear, but the numerous long monologues are full of regional words, slang, and irony – oh so hard, so slow. The monologues are a clue to the tradition Bernanos is working. He is one of the French writers of the time who read Dostoevsky carefully, and he is bringing Dostoevsky’s many voices into French. It is as if Alyosha, from The Brothers Karamazov, became a priest and kept a diary. The narrator’s voice is orthodox, but many other voices have their say.
André Malraux, who writes the introduction to the edition I read, dated when I have no idea, is another of the French Dostoevskians of the time, but he is interested in the political Dostoevsky, of The Possessed, for example, while Bernanos works the religious side. It is all something new in French, and it is all about to turn into existentialism. The parallels between Country Priest and Sartre’s Nausea, published a year later, are curious, although Bernanos never achieves the hallucinatory lunacy of Sartre.
Maybe just once. The priest, poor fellow, has serious stomach problems, which may be psychological (a parallel with Sartre’s narrator’s nausea), but maybe not. In the last, and I thought best, section, the priest finally visits a doctor. After a professional examination, the young doctor begins to wander, perhaps just because his patient is a young priest. I am paraphrasing: “You are like my double. Do you think about suicide? Boy, I sure do! By the way, I have a terminal illness. Also by the way, so do you.” That is one bad doctor, and one weird monologue.
The essential existentialism of the novel is likely another reason it has survived so well, is what I am saying. As with Dostoevsky, it does not matter much if the reader agrees with the author, whatever that might mean. There are other things to do with the book.
Regardless, now I will refer to my list of French books appropriate for junior high students and find a French book that is much shorter and much easier.
