Time and François Mauriac

Extract

Probably no major Catholic writer has been the subject of more controversy among his co-religionists than Francis Mauriac. The generally acrid atmosphere of the novels, the darkly pessimistic view of human nature (‘Why must he write about such unpleasant people?’), the spiritual perturbation of the so-called ‘pre-conversion’ period—singly and conjointly these have inspired an abundance of searching debate concerning the validity of his Catholic position. Yet, it is almost certainly true that Mauriac is the most widely accepted among that gifted group of Catholic men of letters of this century who have gained for Catholicism in France a hearing and a respect unknown since the century of Bossuet. Consequently, it may be relevant to point out one aspect of Mauriac’s work in which his unquestionable Catholic orientation sets him sharply apart from the leading writers of fiction of his day.

If there is a single theme more than any other which has attracted the major novelists of the past third of a century it is that of man’s relation to time. Proust in France, Joyce in Ireland, Virginia Woolf in England, Thomas Mann in Germany, Faulkner in the United States, to name only the most eminent, have all been centrally concerned with the time problem. A contemporary critic has even suggested that Herman Melville anticipated these writers by half a century in the development of a metaphysic of time. But leaving Melville aside as representing the possible premonitory intuition of genius, the virtual simultaneity of impact of the time thesis in the works of the foremost practitioners of the contemporary novel in the western world is a striking phenomenon.