Julien Green's Troubled American: A Fictionalized Self-Portrait

Abstract

Julien Green's locating numerous fictional works (novels, stories, one play) in America has not been considered particularly significant, as these works share with those set in France common themes, moods, and character types which seem to transcend the specific national settings. In those works set in America there is, however, an unusually close relationship between the personal tragedies and the national milieu, certain problems of American life seeming to engender the dilemmas that lead the characters to tragic outcomes. Yet these circumstances are not so typically “American” as suggestive of problems the French novelist himself, born in France of American parents, encountered during the three crucial years he reluctantly spent in America following World War t. His lengthy Journal and some recent autobiographical works reveal that the principal dilemmas that torment his American characters relate to those which the unusual circumstances of his double nationality created for him: problems centering about the matters of national belonging and personal morality (relative to American puritanism). Green's American heroes are primarily transformations of himself, created partly to purge himself of his own tragic inclinations, partly to recapture a period of his life which, though fundamentally painful, had overtones of sweetness because of his first sexual awakening.