WAR EXPERIENCE AND ITS REFLECTION IN GEORGES BERNANOS’ POLITICAL WRITING AND NOVELS

Abstract

The article analyzes the reflection of the 20th century’s war experiences both in fictional writing and political pamphlet of Georges Bernanos, a representative of the Catholic Literary Revival movement in French interwar literature. A chronological classification of the entire writer’s heritage connected with the subject of war is offered and divided into three periods. The most representative texts are proposed for each. Further research attention is devoted to the early period, namely the experience of the First World War, in which the author participated as combatant, and the problems of the first novel «Under the Sun of Satan» (1926). The novel, which does not directly talk about the war in its plot, is nevertheless classified as warlike. Metaphysical evil and the deterioration of the human soul are regarded as the main ideological constants through the images of the two protagonists of the novel. Emphasis is made on the animalistic image of evil rooted in the biblical tradition and the creation of the image of saint is, according to Bernanos, the only answer to the triumph of evil, which he saw with his own eyes during the war. The explicit manifestation of the Civil War in Spain 1936-1939, witnessed by the author, reinforced by the eschatology and prophetic nature of the narrative, as well as the use of biblical archetypes to denote the nature of violence, is analyzed on the base of the political pamphlet «The Great Cemeteries under the Moon» (1938). It is this war that becomes a turning point in the biography of Bernanos, who as a right-wing nationalist and Catholic discovers for himself the illogical impossibility of supporting the Franco regime, because of the terror. This very problem of mass violence and the propensity of human nature to evil were analyzed using the theory of mimetic violence by the French anthropologist R. Girard.