Julien Green’s Scale of Realities

Abstract

Although Julien Green is still writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century, his encounter with the nineteenth-century Realists was an important factor in his career. Green recalls his reaction, as a recently converted Catholic, to the novels which he read at the rate of one a day in the closing months of the First World War, and which contributed to the awakening of a sexual awareness that was to interfere increasingly with the practice of his religion. In them, he says, he unconsciously sought reasons for no longer believing in the sinfulness of sexuality. Against the teachings of his puritanical mother, Zola, Maupassant and the Goncourts freed sex from moral stricture and proclaimed it ‘la grande chose de la vie’.1 He read their books as a source of information about sex, of which he was by today’s standards almost unbelievably ignorant, and, more subversively as far as his religious faith was concerned, accepted them as an accurate reflection of the views and values of the modern world (V, 914). More broadly still, for a young man who had not yet begun to write, the notion that there was a yawning gap between religion and literature was an important preconditioning factor. Green was always to believe that literature, being about sex, was the province of the devil.