The Vision of Joy: A Study of Georges Bernanos

Extract

If a man could take his shadow and accept it not merely as a sign of himself written by the sun but as an essential part of himself, he might begin to understand something of the mystery of prayer and poetry, suffering and surrender, religion and imagery. This is what Georges Bernanos, the recently dead French novelist, has tried to do. He is not a poet, except at those moments when his novels reach the limits of prose and cry for a barer and simpler statement; nor is he a mystic in the sense that he is trying to depict his own religious experiences directly. But that he has something of the mystic in him is evident both from the subjects he selects and the way in which he treats them. In his novel Joy, he is concerned with the terrifying experiences of a young visionary. Here, the visionary is seen as something very like a victim, a bearer-away of the sufferings which other men refuse. She confronts evil, even accepts it, yet she does not let it overwhelm her. In one of the later chapters of this novel, Bernanos describes Chantal’s surrender to God:

‘For at present, the idea, the certainty of her impotence had become the dazzling centre of her joy, the core of the flaming star. It was by that very impotence that she felt herself united to the still invisible Master, it was that humiliated portion of her soul that had plunged into the abyss of suavity.