Une politique intérieure: la question de l'engagement chez Roger Martin du Gard (review)

This mammoth study of the work of Roger Martin du Gard, following the publication in 2009 of Roger Martin du Gard et le biographique, a collection of essays jointly edited by Hélène Baty-Delalande and Jean-François Massol (Grenoble: ELLUG), treats Martin du Gard's literary output with reference to critical material published throughout the twentieth century, both of general and specific nature, the latter reflecting the increased interest in his work in the last decade. Following an introductory discussion of engagement as posed by Sartre and debated thereafter in French intellectual circles, Baty-Delalande begins with a consideration of Martin du Gard's personal ethics as a pessimistic and passionate observer, devoted to the cult of freedom and of the individual, who, in an age where the literary figure is expected to adopt a political stance, like Montherlant, refutes the notion of engagement. Through the journal, memoirs, and correspondence (with Gide, Mauriac, Giono, Rolland, Romains), Baty-Delalande establishes that, for Martin du Gard, writing is a vocation, whereby the author is essentially absent in order best to renounce all didactic intention and open the phenomenological project to the reader's interpretation. Martin du Gard believes in the power of fiction that gives voice to the other's discourse and effaces that of the writer. In relating personal writings and fiction, Baty-Delalande argues that the anti-religious argument of Jean Barois, the tempered immorality of Confidence africaine and Taciturne, the pacificism of Les Thibault, the socialist dream that is the antithesis of the society described in Vieille France, and the ideological and moral ambition of Maumort are produced by private motivation rather than any sense of public responsibility. She then examines the contemporary reception of the fiction (Chapter 3), including comments by Malraux, Duhamel, and Aragon. In Part II, Chapter 4, the discursive nature of the texts is analysed, with the identification of temporal and discursive ambiguity. The novels' discourses, recognized as dialogues of a system within a system or between characters or as monologues, are defined as the space where the true politics of the novels is played out. As Camus noted in his 1955 preface to Martin du Gard's OEuvres complètes, the writer's duty is understood as a personal form of asceticism; this forms the basis for a rereading of the fiction as engagé. Chapter 5 treats the polemic of the novels, including the debate between religion and reason, the individual and the collective, ideological inscriptions such as socialism and pacifism related to the causes of the First World War, concluding with the great schisms of modernity, the Second World War, Nazism, and the colonial wars. Baty-Delalande's scrupulous analysis shows how the essential political nature of the novels, despite the author's stance, is conveyed through the rhetoric of reason and emotion. Chapter 6 maintains that the novels' scenes, combined with Martin du Gard's discursive strategies, open up the possibility of a sceptical reading. In Part III, Baty-Delalande demonstrates how the 'politique intérieure' (the phrase is from Thomas Mann) is present in the encounter between a poetics of knowledge and an aesthetics of showing. Martin du Gard's tragic vision of history is further explored in Chapter 8, where the characters' engagement is assessed in their gradual discovery of learning how to be: these ambivalent, unheroic figures pursue individual liberty in a tragic universe, without any metaphysical dimension. Finally, Martin du Gard is situated between realist fiction, late naturalism, and the melancholia of modernity: his work portrays the individual bound by his psychology and social milieu and also celebrates the total and authentic engagement of man in himself and in History. Overall, Baty-Delalande's book is an eloquent, coherent, and comprehensive assessment of Martin du Gard's work.