Montherlant's Aesthetics

MONTHERLANT'S AESTHETICS THE PLAYS OF HENRY DE MONTHERLANT stem from an aesthetic that can often seem a bit uncongenial to less hardy souls. He is ferocious, and his artistic principles often seem a little puzzling to people who are less austere. How then does Montherlant think of his artistic output? How does he deal with the raw materials-the characters, the themes, the style? The way he shapes these will suggest the effect he wants to make on his audience. His relation to his audience is a peculiar one, deriving, from the concepts of renoncement, alternance, and the neant sublime. In fact, his plays seem to be designed to enable his spectators to experience many of the feelings he himself moves through. He often retreats from other human beings and their feelings. Like a mystic, he is trying always to "withdraw." Renoncement, renunciation -this has always a ,certain tang for him. One way to withdraw is physical-one can go off to the deserts of North Africa, as Montherlant did in 1926. Another way to withdraw is personal-one can cut off relations with everyone one loves, as Montherlant constantly does. Another way, the way he enjoys most, is more spiritual. He enunciates this path in the essay that he himself calls the touchstone to all his work. "Syncretisme et Alternance"l outlines the idea that is most typically his, and most typically difficult. It is the idea of "alternance," alternation. Put in its simplest terms, his alternance demands that you pick up one thing, then put it down, and take up its opposite. You indulge yourself in anything and everything, and yet, because you are free, and floating, hovering and darting like a hummingbird, you are never bound down. You go to Norway one day, then fly to Alexandria the next. You write stark Corneillian characters, and then you indulge in soft, Racinian women for a while. You eat sweet cakes, and then drink lemon-bitter "citronade." You walk hot sands, then slide glaciers. "Let me live all the lives, the diversities, and the contradictions of the world intensely," and yet, he says, "and yet with detachment. So be it, since it is within my power."2 Good, bad, "Happiness, suf1 Awe Fontaines du desir, Paris, 1927. 2 Montherlant, Selected Essays, ed. Quennell, New York, 1961, p. 26. 324 1965 MONTHERLANT'S AESTHETICS 325 fering; innocence, impurity; wisdom, madness-they are all mine, and I want them all, since everything suits me, even if nothing suits me completely."3 By passing through an infinity of roles, by being all things, and all men, he may pass beyond them. Passing from one thing to its opposite , and then away again, Montherlant can produce plays which present fine dialectics. Entering into one attitude in one character's speech, and into its opposite in the next, Montherlant gradually separates himself from both. "I am each of my characters, and, in the end, none."4 In loving, in travelling, even in writing plays, he tries to pass everything , and yet, in doing it, his life becomes a series of withdrawals. ..It is more and more evident that the temptation of renouncing is one of the grand obsessions of Montherlant, that the double movement of taking up and putting down, rejecting (both) becomes each day a more imperious necessity for him."5 But how exactly does this form of retreat help him? The refusal of commitment, repeated over and over again, leaves him empty-handed. A saint, renouncing each bauble of the worldly existence, grows meanwhile into a spiritual eminence-Montherlant follows many of the mystic's habits, without his belief, and ends in a void. That void, though, is huge. The very largeness of it appals. And the awe he feels in front of it invigorates him. He is alone, and free, and detached. He partakes of the neant sublime. Like a man floating in the vast void of space, he holds his breath, and drifts in the enormous vacuum. This is what Montherlant seems to be aiming at, when he begins writing a play. Each time he sketches a new character, he is withdrawing from another, leaving another. As the movement...