Abstract
Some 50 years ago, the Catholic Novel was a standard option within many degree courses in French organized either by genre or period. It was not by coincidence that this focus was grounded in Richard Griffiths’ now classic The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870−1914, published in 1966. For both scholars and undergraduates, it was an interest often culminating in the study of works by Julien Green and François Mauriac. That neither of these writers even get a mention in the index of Francesco Manzini’s wide-ranging book is not merely a consequence of his much earlier starting-point. For he adopts a different conceptual frame from Griffiths, and indeed from those working in the latter’s footsteps such as Joyce Lowrie and Malcolm Scott. Whereas Griffiths tends to judge works against Catholic orthodoxy and the perceived sincerity of religious conviction, neither Lowrie nor Scott, while sensitive, respectively, to the thematics of expiation and supernatural realism, is concerned with what Manzini calls ‘the aesthetic territory of freneticism’ (p. 21). Central to his argument are a properly medical set of assumptions, originating in the eighteenth century, associating fevers and sanctity. Physiologically inexplicable such symptoms are the markers of a collective crisis extended beyond religion to the literary and political discourses of the age. Manzini explores this in a series of chapters devoted to individual novelists. If Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët, with its admixture (or ‘eccentric fusion’, p. 86) of Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism and Catholicism serves to explain the heroine’s fevers, it is in Barbey’s d’Aurevilly’s Un prêtre marié that we can identify the motif as defining the parameters of the ‘Fevered Novel’ in its own right. It was in specific response to what he termed Barbey’s religious irrationalism, commonly imputed to women, that Zola embarked on La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, ridiculing fevered mysticism by relating it to sexual repression and hereditary mental illness. This is certainly a text that fits as uneasily into Les Rougon-Macquart as Le Rêve (another novel which deserves to be looked at in this light). And although Manzini’s study of La Faute barely gestures towards the substantial critical thinking it has provoked, specialists too will learn much from the perspective he adopts, situating in the polemical interchanges, both implicit and explicit, between ideological opponents the paradox that ‘Zola unwrites Un prêtre marié only to rewrite it’ (p. 148). What is equally illuminating is the subsequent reading of Huysmans’s En Rade and Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam between the opposing gravitational versions exemplified by a Zola and a Barbey. En Rade is more a parody of, rather than a homage to, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret. And if Lydwine’s physiological transformations remind us of Serge Mouret’s hallucinatory visions, the stigmata she bears testify to a miracle inseparable from the divine heat of her suffering, ‘the fevers of a saint’ (p. 171). It is then Léon Bloy’s turn, in Le Désespéré and La Femme pauvre, to rework a ‘masterplot’ revolving, in its most schematic formulation, around a pious young woman discovering her sexuality. More generally in this respect, what is particularly revealing about Manzini’s book is an intertextuality too often lost from sight. Gide’s unimpressed reaction to Bernanos’ Sous le soleil de Satan, back in 1926, is telling: ‘Tout cela … c’est la lignée de Léon Bloy et de Barbey d’Aurevilly’. If the detailed analyses end with Bernanos, his Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette plays with the structures and topoi found in the fiction of writers as apparently different as Balzac or Huysmans. They thus constitute the ‘Fevered Tradition’, with its survival as discernible in Surrealist experiments as its origins are to be found in the writings of Joseph de Maistre in the 1820s.