Études bernanosiennes, 23: 'Monsieur Ouine' 3, l'écriture romanesque et l'univers du Mal (review)

This volume of the Études bernanosiennes is the third to be devoted to Bernanos's enigmatic masterpiece Monsieur Ouine. The two earlier volumes appeared in 1964 and 1969. The first three essays concentrate on certain features of the novel's structure and style — Bernanos's choice of metaphors and the dynamics of his dialogues, the absence of linear time, the use of implicit and direct invitations to the reader to speculate and to try to make sense of a world in which ambiguity and uncertainty are ever present. The fourth essay is an analysis of Jambe de Laine and her apparent insanity, and shows how the châtelaine is trying to free herself from the material world in which she is trapped. Thereafter we are taken in a fresh direction as, in the fifth essay, the composition of Monsieur Ouine is related to Bernanos's polemical writing in the context of the 1930s and early 1940s as he increasingly despaired of the modern world. The four remaining essays are comparative studies embracing the works and ideas of Kierkegaard, Conrad, Jean Sullivan and Mohammed Dib. That Monsieur Ouine continues to attract critical attention is a clear indication of its complexity, but it is dangerous to imagine that any single or coherent reading can be made of it as a whole or indeed of any of its individual features. If it issues us with a challenge it also constantly defies us; there are no answers. When he first abandoned the book in 1934 and went on to write his other, 'counterbalancing' masterpiece, Journal d'un curé de campagne, did not Bernanos himself remark: 'le roman m'échappe'? Nor perhaps is it insignificant that when Brasillach met Bernanos in the same year he considered him to be mad. The Catholic novel and Bernanos in particular may not be as fashionable as they once were, but there is no doubt that Monsieur Ouine remains one of France's most challenging novels of the recent past. Much of what is in this present volume is valuable, but the authors show scant acquaintance with previous critical work on the novel other than that contained in the earlier volumes of the Études, and none of any language not written in French, much of which is valuable.