Cathedral or Symphony: Essays on ‘Jean-Christophe’ by Dushan Bresky (review)

398 LEITERS IN CANADA AnaYs Nin is particularly interesting, since her numerous diaries have actually become her raison d'etre. 'Existing in an intermediate zone between living experience and the formal work of art, the diary threatens to encroach upon both, becoming a substitute for life and a deflection from art.' Tone - or attitude towards oneself and the world - counts for so much in a diary that the reader can indulge his personal feelings towards the subject. Sir Walter Scott elicits consistent admiration through the days of triumphant authorship to the dogged perseverance in the face of financial ruin. Byron, on the other hand, sounds petty and querulous. Some diaries are composed with a high degree of consciousness, but frequently the writer is unaware of the implications of what he is revealing about himself. So much has been written about Boswell that it would seem unlikely that anything fresh could be said, yet for me Professor Fothergill's analysis of Boswell as journal-writer is the most faScinating of an altogether absorbing book. Boswell's journals will be an eternal joy to all those who love a parade. The daily question posed by the role-player par excellence was, What kind of performance did I give? Boswell is the First Person as disproportionately Singular - 'I have one of the most singular minds ever was formed.' Fothergill sees him as endeavouring to create from his own raw material the character he wanted to attain. Professor Fothergill astutely analyses Boswell's fascination with his own uniqueness, a complacency subject to violent fluctuations which leave him bewildered by the impossibility of formulating a fixed and settled character. His obsession for Dr Johnson can be attributed to the older man's ability to give him the reassuring stability he craves - 'all the satisfactions of sonship with none of its discomforts,' as Fothergill shrewdly puts it. In Katherine Mansfield's diary he finds an intriguing and constant pressure between the roles of diarist and author. 'The self remembered and written about tends to become a fiction of the self remembering.' A reaction so profoundly sensitive as this is typical of his unerring instinct for the inscape of human beings ranging from the grandiose posturing of Benjamin Haydon to the sentimentalizing of Francis Kilvert. If Professor Fothergill finds diaries delightful, it is because he delights in people. (PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH) Dushan Bresky, Cathedral or Symphony: Essays on 'Jean-Christophe'. Herbert Lang Bern, Peter Lang: Frankfurt/M. 1.973, European University Papers, vol. XXIV,l.°9 On pouvait se demander si M. Dushan Bresky, dont Ie z'le s'.hait naguere employe it promouvoir ce que j'appellerais une rehabilitation d'Ana- HUMANITIES 399 tole France, menerait cette Eois son combat en faveu! d'un Romain Rolland injustement deerie OU, pire encore, arbitrairernent neglige dans les bilans litteraires de notre siecle. Or tel n'est pas du tout Ie cas du present petit livre. lean-Christophe, quali6e au depart plutot pejorativement de 'monumental melodramatic novel' (p II), n/est ici l'objet d'aucune complaisance . Bien au contraire. L/etude, qui se veut strictement esthetique, examine longuement et avec beaucoup de details la pretention exprimee par Romain Rolland d'avoir voulu rt~aliser avec son grand roman l'equivalent lithhaire ala fois d'une immense symphonie, regie par les principes de la composition musicale, et d/une cathedrale aux proportions aussi nettes et significatives que les hautes (Euvres de I'architecture gothique. Au terme des plus minutieuses considerations, au il aura ffieme reproduit des pages musicales de Smetana, Wagner et Beethoven aussi bien qu'un graphique des dix tomes de lean-Christophe disposes sur Ie plan de la cathedrale de Coventry, Ie critique conc1uera: 'The novel's inner structure is neither a symphony nor a cathedral, nor an epical cycle, but rather an artistically uneven sequence of melodramatic adventures and dialogues' (p 92). Je ne contesterai certes pas ce jugement, non plus, d'ailleurs, que la verite massive de la demonstration faite. II me semble neanmoins que toute cette preuve, savante et documentee mais un peu lourde dans sa rigueur, accorde somme toute une valeur litterale excessive aces termes de 'cathedrale' et de 'symphonie.' Ce faisant, l'auteur...