I’ve been reading Georges Bernanos’ Monsieur Ouine (1946) in William Bush’s English translation published in 2000 by the University of Nebraska Press. The novel has Bernanos’ trademarks: the world devastated by sin and yet shot through with grace; the Church apparently powerless and yet the only consistent speaker of truth about its own powerlessness; the obsession with France (understandable for a Frenchman, I suppose); and the consistently terrifying depictions of evil’s lack and what that lack means for us and the world we inhabit. Bernanos makes Graham Greene’s understanding of evil seem superficial: if Augustine had written novels, this is what they would be like. This novel has a murder, a lynching, a double suicide, the implied seduction of a teenage boy by a man — all depicted so delicately and so sidewise and so intensely that I found myself often looking away from the page in disbelief that what I’d just read was there. Monsieur Ouine (Mr. Yes/No) himself, for whom the novel is named, is the most convincing depiction in literature of a man who is almost not there — which is to say, almost completely evil.
There are some especially interesting things in this novel. Consider this, on priests and the decay of the present age:
With the decline or disappearance of other powers, the priest, even though appearing so intimately integrated into the life of society, has become a more singular and unclassifiable being than any of those old magicians the ancient world used to keep locked up like sacred animals in the depths of its temples, existing in the intimacy of the gods alone. Priests moreover are all the more singular and unclassifiable in that they do not recognize themselves as such and are nearly always dupes of the most gross outward appearance — whether of the irony of some or the servile deference of others. But that contradiction by nature more political than religious and used far too long to nurture clerical pride, does, through the growing feeling of their loneliness and to the extent that it is gradually transformed into hostile indifference, throw them unarmed into the heart of social conflicts they naively pride themselves on being able to resolve by using texts. But, then, what does it matter? The hour is coming when, on the ruins of the old Christian order, a new order will be born that will indeed be an order of the world, the order of the Prince of this World, of that prince whose kingdom is of this world. And the hard law of necessity, stronger than any illusions, will then remove the very object for clerical pride so long maintained simply by conventions outlasting any belief. And the footsteps of beggars shall cause the earth to tremble once again.
Well, yes. And perhaps we’re closer to that condition now than when Bernanos was writing these words, probably in exile in Brazil during the dark, late days of the Second World War.
