L'Écriture de l'abandon: esthétique carmélitaine de l'œuvre romanesque de Georges Bernanos par Philippe Richard (review)

Like his intellectual precursor Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos is one of those major French authors now almost entirely unread by English-speaking academics. It is a tremendous shame, especially when there is so much still to be said about him, as Philippe Richard's recent book amply demonstrates. Richard's work deserves a place alongside that of Monique Gosselin, William Bush, and even Michel Estève for the magisterial and comprehensive way in which it synthesizes previous scholarship on Bernanos's fictional writing and elevates it with a new hypothesis repeatedly and thoroughly tested. Acknowledging previous studies of Bernanos's fascination with sanctity, anguish, and existential crisis, Richard plunges into the sources of Carmelite spirituality that offer again and again illumination about Bernanos's narrative structures and even his expressive armoury. Here, Bernanos's literary exploration of le vide and le néant, seemingly anticipated by Mallarmé and others, is shown to correlate strongly with, if not actually to be rooted in, what Carmelite spirituality describes as the dark nights of the senses and the soul. Throughout the book, Richard traces the intertextual pathways between biblical passages, commentaries thereon from John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and countless pages from Bernanos's fictional œuvre. Richard impresses with his total command of the primary sources, and his scholarly awareness of the markers others have put down in the critical sand. In several fulsome appendices, he provides us with some of his analytical findings in detail, pinpointing where Bernanos uses Carmelite concepts such as l'abandon and la douceur, and their various cognates. On a deeper level, Richard runs counter to some Bernanos critics who are simply determined to nail the latter's colours to the mast of modernity. According to the hypothesis of Bernanos the Carmelite, the experience of le vide or le néant is not an end in itself, a seedbed for mere literary creativity, nor even sincerely anguished expressivism, but part of a well-known Carmelite journey from the arid love of self to the fruitful love of God. From this starting point, Richard identifies in Bernanos's writing an aesthetic of prayer, leading to a range of theologically inspired stylistics, all finding their fulfilment in the narrative implications of the night of Holy Saturday. In this last perspective, the night in Bernanos is not only the dark night of the senses and the soul: it is primordially the dark night of the separation of the Father and the Son that precedes the Resurrection. Here readers will detect the influence of Hans Urs von Balthasar for whom Samedi saint was the temporal locus for a dramatique divine (Mysterium Paschale (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970)). In other words, Richard's interpretation shows Bernanos to be fully in line with so much of the Catholic literary revival of the BelleÉpoque, whose collective project was to render divine agency imaginable once more. In his conclusion Richard evokes the possibility of extending his analysis regarding the musical threads in Bernanos's imagination. It is to be hoped this next work will not be long in coming.