The first is Jacques’ stubborn silence when, for the first time, Antoine comes to see him at the reform school in Crouy. How could there be a better way to convey humiliation than this silence. The rapidly muttered words, the onsets of reticence in which this silence is clothed, and which serve to underline it even further, are so accurately calculated and proportioned that mystery and pity suddenly erupt into what was until then a straightforward story, opening much wider vistas than those of the middle class Parisian milieu in which it had begun.
Humiliation has never been depicted more objectively or more successfully, except by Dostoevski, whose technique is either frenzied or grating (I am not counting Lawrence, who describes a personal humiliation) and by Malraux, in the epic mode (especially in La Vote royale, which I persist in liking whatever its author may say). No one, however, has ever tried to paint it in subdued and even colors, and Martin du Gard has perhaps achieved what is most difficult in art.
If there are artistic miracles, they must resemble those that come from grace. I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant. Thus, in art, the more prosaic the reality chosen as one’s subject matter, the more difficult it is to transfigure. Even here, however, there is a point beyond which we cannot go, that makes any claim to absolute realism quite untenable.
But it is here nonetheless, half way between reality and its stylization, that art from time to time achieves the perfect triumph. The portrait of Jacques in his humiliation remains, in my view, one of these triumphs. To give one last example of Martin du Gard’s technique, I shall quote the father’s simulated death in Les Thibault. A brilliant idea, indeed, on the novelist’s part, to make the playacting that had, in a sense, formed this character’s whole life, extend even into death.
The man who could not prevent himself from constantly playing the part of a Christian is also incapable, in the idleness and depression of an illness that he does not know is ratal, of resisting the temptation to dramatize the last moments of his life. So he organizes, from his bed, a dress rehearsal, which is half sincere, involving assemblies of servants, exemplary acts of repentance, the praising of virtues, and flights of holiness. The father expects his reward in the form of protests that will dissipate the vague anxiety he sometimes harbors, as does every invalid.
But his family’s genuine grief, their tacit acceptance of his speeches on his approaching end, suddenly bring him face to face with his true condition. His playacting, instead of producing the good results he had hoped for, brings the cruel reflection of a merciless reality. Having thought himself an actor, he finds himself a victim. From this moment, he begins to die, and fear sterilizes his faith. His great cry “Ah, how can God do this to me!” crowns this dramatic discovery with the emptiness and duplicity of his religious beliefs and also his need of them. He dies reconciled, nonetheless, but in gasps of pain and childish songs that reveal a man broken to the very core, stripped of his pretense and ostentation, delivered naked to death and simple faith.
Such a canvas bears the signature of a master. The novelist able to depict the successive impulses of a soul that transforms being itself into a device for pretense has nothing to learn from anyone. He has only lessons, and durable ones, to offer us.
But even more than his art it is Martin du Gard’s themes that coincide with our own preoccupations. The path he has followed with so fortunate and deliberate a pace is one the rest of us have had to race along, with history at our heels. I mean, generally, the personal evolution that leads one to a recognition of the history of all men and to an acceptance of their struggles. Even in this, of course, Martin du Gard has his own particular stamp.
He stands midway between his predecessors and his peers (who talked of nothing but the individual and never let history play more than a circumstantial role) and his successors (who make only embarrassed allusions to the individual). In Les Thibault, and in Jean Barois, individuals are intact and the pain of history still quite fresh.
They have not yet worn each other out. Martin du Gard has not experienced our situation, in which we inherit at the same time shop-worn people and a history tensed and paralyzed by several wars and the fear of final destruction. We can say without paradox that what is alive in our present-day experience lies behind us, in a work like Roger Martin du Gard’s.
As early as 1913, in any case, Jean Barois outlines the movement that concerns us. The subject of this curious novel is familiar, although its construction is quite unusual. Technically, in fact, there is nothing of the novel about it. It breaks with all the genre’s traditions, and there is nothing comparable to it in literature since. Its author seems to have looked, systematically, for the least fictional of mediums. The book is made up of dialogues (accompanied by brief stage directions) and documents, some of them incorporated in their original form.
Consequently, the interest of the book never weakens, and it can be read in one sitting. This may be because the subject was perfectly suited to such a technique. Actually, Martin du Gard intended to adopt this form for all his future work. As it turned out, only Jean Barois was to profit from it. One might say that in a way this book (more than Zola’s novels, which were intended as scientific although their author could not keep them from becoming epic) is the only great novel of the age of scientism, whose hopes and disappointments it expresses so well. This documentary novel is also a monograph, all the more surprising in that it concerns the case history of a religious crisis.
It happens that to make a card index of the aspirations and doubts of a soul was, in the long run, an enterprise particularly fitting in a period inspired, with a few exceptions, by the religion of science. In the course of the book, Barois abandons the old faith for the new. If, face to face with death, he betrays this new belief at the very last moment, he still remains the man of that brief new age which was to collapse in 1914.
His story is therefore all the more striking, related to us in the style of the new gospels. The case history reads like an adventure tale because its unusual form is deeply wedded to the story it unfolds. The evolution of a man who comes to doubt traditional faith, who thinks he finds a more certain faith in science,3 could not be reported better than by this technique of quasi-scientific description, which Martin du Gard intended to perfect.
In the end, science satisfied neither Barois nor his creator, but its method, or at least its ideal, was fleetingly raised, in this novel, to the dignity of perfectly effective art. The exploit has not been repeated in our literature or even in Martin du Gard’s later work. But didn’t the faith that inspired it, already threatened in the book itself, also die, prematurely, as a result of the excesses of mechanized savagery? Jean Barois remains at least a testamentary work in which we can find moving evidence of a vanished belief and prophecies that affected our lives.
The conflict between faith and science, which so excited the early years of this century, arouses less interest today. We are living out its consequences, nonetheless, which were foreshadowed in Jean Barois. To take only one example: irreligion is portrayed as closely linked to the rise of the socialist movement, and the book consequently lays bare one of the most powerful driving forces in our history. Fleeing from the encounter with God, Jean Barois discovers men. His liberation coincides with the great movement that grew up around Dreyfus.
The “Sower’s” group links Barois to the rest of mankind; it is there that he reaches full maturity, and that what can be called the cycle of history (struggle and victory) exhausts his manhood. Historical disappointments bring him gradually back to solitude, to anguish, and, faced with death, to the denial of his new faith. Can the community of men, which sometimes helps us to live, also help us die? This is the question underlying all Martin du Gard’s work, which creates its tragic quality.
For if the reply is
negative, the situation of the modern unbeliever is temporarily madness, even if a tranquil madness. This is doubtless why so many men today proclaim with a kind of fury that the human community keeps us from dying. Martin du Gard has never said this, because in truth he does not believe it. But he gives us in his novel, along with Barois, the portrait of a rationalist who does not deny his own beliefs, and who dies without abjuring reason. The Stoic Luce probably represents Martin du Gard’s ideal in 1913. A particularly severe and sombre ideal, if Luce himself is to be believed. “I do not acknowledge two moral standards.
One must attain happiness, without being the dupe of any mirage, through truth and truth alone” One could hardly give a better definition of the enlightened renunciation of happiness. But let us simply remember that the first portrait of men who
