The Unfathomable Human Spirit

Mouchette, by Georges Bernanos. Holt, $3.95

Reading the novels of Bernanos, I am always struck by his great attention to descriptions of physical suffering. His characters suffer from disease and intolerable pain. At times the disease is specific and it permeates its victim like a hot iron rod turning in his body (the tuberculosis of Mouchette’s mother, the cancer of the curé d’Ambricourt). But even when organic disease is not present, the mystery of suffering is there in its acutest, physical forms. These descriptions of bodily ills take the place of passages where ordinarily we would expect some “psychological” analysis. Of the latter, strictly speaking, there is very little; the two worlds of Bernanos’ fiction are the physical and the spiritual, in striking correlation.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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Mouchette, by Georges Bernanos. Holt, $3.95

Reading the novels of Bernanos, I am always struck by his great attention to descriptions of physical suffering. His characters suffer from disease and intolerable pain. At times the disease is specific and it permeates its victim like a hot iron rod turning in his body (the tuberculosis of Mouchette’s mother, the cancer of the curé d’Ambricourt). But even when organic disease is not present, the mystery of suffering is there in its acutest, physical forms. These descriptions of bodily ills take the place of passages where ordinarily we would expect some “psychological” analysis. Of the latter, strictly speaking, there is very little; the two worlds of Bernanos’ fiction are the physical and the spiritual, in striking correlation.