THE POETICS OF AFFLICTED BODY IN GEORGES BERNANOS’ NOVELS

Abstract

The article hermeneutically analyses the poetics of sick body in the three novels by the French modernist writer, representative of Catholic literary revival – Georges Bernanos. Whereas «The star of Satan» (1926), «The diary of a country priest» (1936) and «Monsieur Ouine» (1948) belong to different periods in the author’s oeuvre, the article highlights Bernanos’ established approach to the problem of afflicted body and ruined soul. The article reveals that multiple diseases from which most of Bernanos’ characters suffer reflect the damage done to their souls. The body is inseparably connected to the soul, thus unhealthy body means affected soul and vice versa. The disordered body is represented as individual or collective, subsequently embodied in the metaphors of tabernacle and mystical Christ’s body directly referred to in the texts under discussion. Symbolically, the individual sick body is inscribed in the mysticism of sainthood, specifically problematized in the two priest figures called to sanctitude: Donissant and the cure of Ambricourt – the one healthy and physically strong, who takes his salvation in his own hands fighting for it, and the second dying of the terminal cancer, only hoping and asking to be saved. The collective body is associated with afflicted and disrupted mystic Christ’s body incarnated in the image of parish dying of multiple physical and mental maladies represented by cancer tumor in «Monsieur Ouine». Thuswise, the analysis proves that Bernanos speaking from a Catholic perspective unites the disability of individual body with the revivification of soul, concurrently using the disordered collective body as the illustration of ill secular society.