Concluding Note

Abstract

The ‘Bemanosian synthesis’ brings this study to an appropriate close, for it is in Bemanos’ novels that the notions explored in it reach their clearest illustration. Like all the six major Catholic novelists discussed in this book, Bemanos builds his work, quite consciously, on a critique of Realism, which he then readapts for the purpose of expressing his individual Christian’s view of the world. This process of readaptation leads him to the creation, in Journal d’un cure de campagne, of the Catholic Realism first dreamed of by Huysmans, and in other novels, notably Monsieur Ouine, to the exploitation, essayed before him by Barbey and Bloy, of themes and techniques drawn from the fantastic tradition. In the intervening decades, Mauriac and Green had given the Catholic novel the psychological depths it may have lacked in the work of its earlier exponents, but it is Bemanos who completes the link between the twentieth-century Catholic novel and its nineteenth-century beginnings.