Travelling Texts: ‘Georges Bernanos in the Footsteps of Columbus?’

Abstract

The work of French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) marked a distinctive contribution to the imaginative and polemical literature of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Part of that work was inspired by, and composed during, his voluntary ‘exile’ from France, first in Mallorca (1934–7) and thereafter in Brazil (1938–45). In embarking on these journeys, the writer was driven partly by poverty, and partly by disillusionment with 1930s French society. But an equally powerful if more subliminal motivation was his longstanding awareness of his remote ancestry, and in particular, his fascination with certain representations of the Columbus story. This essay examines their incidence in Bernanos's writing, relating them to his Hispano-American experience and to the works of a literary predecessor and arguing that these construct an image of the explorer which is both real and imaginary, textual and intertextual, familiar and profoundly ‘other’.