“Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the factof the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet,whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has itsown flora and fauna. Thus, Faulkner’s technique is certainly thebest one with which to paint Faulkner’s world, and Kafka’s night-mare has produced its own myths that make it communicable.Benjamin Constant, Stendhal, Eugène Fromentin, Jacques Rivière,Radiguet, all used different techniques, took different liberties, andset themselves different tasks. The work of art itself, whether itstitle is Adolphe, Lucien Leuwen, Dominique, Le Diable au corpsor À la Recherche du temps perdu, is the solution to the problemof technique.”

With these words François Mauriac, discussing the novel inthe French literary magazine La Table ronde of August 1949,described his own position. In March 1953, he was interviewed onthe same subject for The Paris Review by Jean Le Marchand,Secrétaire Générale of La Table ronde. M. Le Marchand began byasking him about his earlier statement.

—Translated by Lydia Moffat & John Train, 1953

THE ART OF FICTION NO. 2FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

2 FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

My opinion hasn’t changed. I believe that my younger fellownovelists are greatly preoccupied with technique. They seem tothink a good novel ought to follow certain rules imposed from outside. In fact, however, this preoccupation hampers them andembarrasses them in their creation. The great novelist doesn’tdepend on anyone but himself. Proust resembled none of his pred-ecessors and he did not have, he could not have, any successors.The great novelist breaks his mold; he alone can use it. Balzac created the “Balzacian” novel; its style was suitable only for Balzac.

There is a close tie between a novelist’s originality in generaland the personal quality of his style. A borrowed style is a badstyle. American novelists from Faulkner to Hemingway invented astyle to express what they wanted to say—and it is a style thatcan’t be passed on to their followers.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that every novelist should invent his style forhimself—how would you describe your own?

MAURIAC

In all the time I have been writing novels I have very seldomasked myself about the technique I was using. When I begin towrite I don’t stop and wonder if I am interfering too directly in thestory, or if I know too much about my characters, or whether ornot I ought to judge them. I write with complete naïveté, sponta-neously. I’ve never had any preconceived notion of what I could orcould not do.

If today I sometimes ask myself these questions it’s becausethey are asked of me—because they are asked all around me.

Really there is no problem of this type whose solution is notfound in the completed work, whether good or bad. The preoccu-pation with these questions is a stumbling block for the Frenchnovel. The crisis in French novel-writing that people talk about somuch will be solved as soon as our young writers succeed in

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getting rid of the naïve idea that Joyce, Kafka, and Faulkner holdthe Tables of the Law of fictional technique. I’m convinced that aman with the real novelist’s temperament would transcend thesetaboos, these imaginary rules.

INTERVIEWER

All the same, haven’t you ever deliberately made use of definitetechniques in novel writing?

MAURIAC

A novelist spontaneously works out the techniques that fit hisown nature. Thus in Thérèse Desqueyroux I used some devicesthat came from the silent films: lack of preparation, the suddenopening, flashbacks. They were methods that were new and surprising at that time. I simply resorted to the techniques that myinstinct suggested to me. My novel Destins [Lines of Life] was likewise composed with an eye to film techniques.

INTERVIEWER

When you begin to write, are all the important points of theplot already established?

MAURIAC

That depends on the novel. In general they aren’t. There is apoint of departure, and there are some characters. It often happensthat the first characters don’t go any further and, on the otherhand, vaguer, more inconsistent characters show new possibilitiesas the story goes on, and assume a place we hadn’t foreseen. Totake an example from one of my plays, Asmodée, I had no idea at the outset how M. Coutûre was going to develop, and howimportant he was going to become in the play.

INTERVIEWER

In writing your novels, has any one problem given you particular trouble?

4 FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

MAURIAC

Not yet. Today, however, I cannot remain unaware of the com-ments made about my work from the standpoint of technique.That’s why the novel I just finished won’t be published this year. I want to look over it again in that light.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever described a situation of which you had no personal experience?

MAURIAC

That goes without saying—for example, I’ve never poisonedanyone! Certainly a novelist more or less comprehends all his characters; but I have also described situations of which I had nodirect experience.

INTERVIEWER

How distant in time do you have to be before you can describeyour own experiences, or things you have seen?

MAURIAC

One cannot be a true novelist before one has attained a certainage, and that is why a young author has almost no chance of writingsuccessfully about any other period of his life than his childhoodor adolescence. A certain distance in time is absolutely necessaryfor a novelist, unless he is writing a journal.

All my novels take place in the period contemporary with myadolescence and my youth. They are all a “remembrance of thingspast.” But if Proust’s case helped me to understand my own, it waswithout any conscious imitation on my part.

INTERVIEWER

Do you make notes for future use? When you see something ofinterest in the course of life do you think, “That will be somethingI can use”?

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MAURIAC

Never; for the reason I have just given. I don’t observe and I don’t describe; I rediscover. I rediscover the narrow Jansenistworld of my devout, unhappy, and introverted childhood. It is asthough when I was twenty a door within me had closed forever onthat which was going to become the material of my work.

INTERVIEWER

To what extent is your writing dominated by sense-perceptions—hearing, sound, and sight?

MAURIAC

Very largely—the critics have all commented on the importanceof the sense of smell in my novels. Before beginning a novel I recreate inside myself its places, its milieu, its colors and smells. I revive within myself the atmosphere of my childhood and myyouth—I am my characters and their world.

INTERVIEWER

Do you write every day, or only when you feel inspired?

MAURIAC

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I writeevery day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to becarried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking downdictation, I stop.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever tried to write a novel entirely different fromthose you have written?

MAURIAC

Sometimes I’ve thought of writing a detective story, but I’venever done it.

6 FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

INTERVIEWER

How do you hit on the names of your characters?

MAURIAC

I have been unwise enough to use names that are very wellknown in my part of the country, around Bordeaux. So far, I havebeen able to avoid the great embarrassments that this system couldhave caused me.

INTERVIEWER

To what extent are your characters based on real people?

MAURIAC

There is almost always a real person in the beginning, but thenhe changes so that sometimes he no longer bears the slightestresemblance to the original. In general it is only the secondarycharacters that are taken directly from life.

INTERVIEWER

Have you a special system for changing a real person into animaginary one?

MAURIAC

There is no system . . . it is simply the art of the novel. Whattakes place is a sort of crystallization around the person. It is quiteindescribable. For a true novelist this transformation is a part ofone’s inner life. If I used some trick of prefabrication the resultwould not be a living character.

INTERVIEWER

Do you describe yourself in any of your characters?

MAURIAC

To some degree in all of them. I particularly described myselfin L’Enfant chargé de chaines and in La Robe prétexte. Yves

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Frontenac in Le Mystère Frontenac is both me and not me: Thereare strong resemblances, very strong, but at the same time a considerable deformation.

INTERVIEWER

From the standpoint of technique, what writers influenced you most?

MAURIAC

I can’t tell. As far as technique goes I have been influenced bynobody, or again by all the authors I have read. One is always theproduct of a culture. We are sometimes influenced by humble writerswhom we have forgotten—perhaps I was influenced only by thosebooks I was steeped in for so long, the books I read in childhood.I don’t think I have been influenced by any other novelist. I am anovelist of atmosphere, and poets have been very important forme: Racine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maurice de Guérin, and FrancisJammes, for example.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think a novelist should “renew” himself?

MAURIAC

I feel that a writer’s first duty is to be himself, to accept his limitations. The effort of self-expression should affect the mannerof expression.

I have never begun a novel without hoping that it would be theone that would make it unnecessary for me to write another. I havehad to start again from scratch with each one. What had gonebefore didn’t count . . . I was not adding to a fresco. Like a manwho has decided to start his life over again, I have told myself thatI had so far accomplished nothing: for I have always believed thatmy chef d’oeuvre would be the novel I was working on at the time.

8 FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

INTERVIEWER

Once a novel is finished, do you remain attached to your characters? Do you maintain contact with them?

MAURIAC

My characters exist for me only when someone talks to meabout them, or writes an article about them. I wrote a sequel toThérèse Desqueyroux because I was induced to do so from outside.Once a book is written and has left me it exists only through others. Night before last I listened on the radio to an adaptation ofDésert de l’Amour. Distorted as it was, I recognized Dr. Courrèges,his son Raymond, Maria Cross, the kept woman. This little worldwas speaking, suffering before me, this world that had left me thirty years before. I recognized it, slightly distorted by the mirrorthat reflected it.

We put the most of ourselves into certain novels, which perhaps are not the best. For example, in Le Mystère FrontenacI sought to record my adolescence, to bring to life my mother andmy father’s brother, who was our tutor. Quite apart from any meritsor defects it might possess, this book has, for me, a heart-rendingtone. Actually, I don’t reread it any more than the others: I onlyreread my books when I have to in correcting proofs. The publi-cation of my complete works condemned me to this; it is as painfulas rereading old letters. It is thus that death emerges from abstraction,thus we touch it like a thing: a handful of ashes, of dust.

INTERVIEWER

Do you still read novels?

MAURIAC

I read very few. Every day I find that age asphyxiates the characters inside of me. I was once a passionate reader, I might sayinsatiable, but now . . . When I was young, my own future assuredto the Madame Bovarys, the Anna Kareninas, the characters fromBalzac, the atmosphere that made them, for me, living creatures.

An extract from “Bloc Notes,” a series of articles by François Mauriac on contemporarysubjects, in this case a discussion of Julien Green’s Sud.

10 FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

They spread out before me all that I dreamed of for myself. Mydestiny was prefigured by theirs. Then, as I lived longer, they closedaround me like rivals. A kind of competition obliged me to measure myself against them, above all against the characters of Balzac. Now, however, they have become part of that which hasbeen completed.

On the other hand, I can still reread a novel by Bernanos, oreven Huysmans, because it has a metaphysical extension. As formy younger contemporaries, it is their technique, more than any-thing else, that interests me.

It is because novels no longer have any hold on me that I amgiven over more to history, to history in the making.

INTERVIEWER

Do you believe this attitude is peculiar to yourself? Don’t youfind, rather, that at a time when the impact of events such as thosein Algeria is very heavy, the world has detached itself somewhatfrom fiction? Perhaps the distance is no longer there that is necessaryfor the reception of the novel.

MAURIAC

Every period in history has been more or less tragic. Theevents we are living through would not suffice to explain what isloosely called “the crisis of the novel,” which is not, I might add,a crisis of readership, inasmuch as the public does read novels today,and printings are much larger today than they were in my youth.

No, the crisis of the novel, in my opinion, is of a metaphysicalnature, and is connected with a certain conception of man. Theargument against the psychological novel derives essentially fromthe conception of man held by the present generation, a conceptionthat is totally negative. This altered view of the individual began along time ago. The works of Proust show it. Between Swann’s Way(the perfect novel) and The Past Recaptured we watch the characters dissolve. As the novel advances, the characters decay.

Today, along with nonrepresentational art, we have the

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nonrepresentational novel—the characters simply have no distinguishing features.

I believe that the crisis of the novel, if it exists, is right there,essentially, in the domain of technique. The novel has lost its purpose. That is the most serious difficulty, and it is from therethat we must begin. The younger generation believes, after Joyceand Proust, that it has discovered the “purpose” of the old novelto have been prefabricated and unrelated to reality.

INTERVIEWER

Doesn’t talking about the characters’ dissolving put too muchemphasis on the experimental novel? After all, there are still characters in the novels of Proust and Kafka. They have changed,of course, as compared to those of Balzac, but you rememberthem, you know them by name, they exist for the reader.

MAURIAC

I am going to shock you. I scarcely know the names of Kafka’scharacters, and yet at the same time I know him well, because hehimself fascinates me. I have read his diary, his letters, everythingabout him. But as for his novels, I cannot read them.

In Proust, I have mentioned that one is struck by the slowdecay of each character. After The Captive, the novel turns into along meditation on jealousy. Albertine no longer exists in the flesh;characters who seem to exist, at the beginning of the novel, suchas Charlus, become confused with the vice that devours them.

The crisis of the novel, then, is metaphysical. The generationthat preceded ours was no longer Christian, but it believed in theindividual, which comes to the same thing as believing in the soul.What each of us understands by the word soul is different; but in any case it is the fixed point around which the individual is constructed.

Faith in God was lost for many, but not the values this faithpostulates. The good was not bad, and the bad was not good. Thecollapse of the novel is due to the destruction of this fundamental

12 FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

concept: the awareness of good and evil. The language itself has been devalued and emptied of its meaning by this attack on conscience.

Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, likemyself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. Heis not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mold once and for all.This is what makes the traditional psychological novel so differentfrom what I did or thought I was doing. The human being as I conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama ofsalvation, even if he doesn’t know it.

And yet, I admire in the young novelists their “search for theabsolute,” their hatred of false appearances and illusions. Theymade me think of what Alain and Simone Weil said of a “purifyingatheism.” But let’s not go into that—I’m no philosopher.

INTERVIEWER

That’s what everyone says you are. Besides, why deny it?

MAURIAC

Each time literary talent decreases, the philosophers gain. I amnot saying that’s against them, but little by little they have takenover. The present generation is terribly intelligent. In the old daysone could have talent and still be a little stupid; today, no. Insofaras the young are philosophers, they probably have much less needof fiction than we did.

It is very important, all the same, that the master who hasmost influenced our period in literature should be a philosopher.Jean-Paul Sartre has, moreover, great talent, without which hewould not have taken the position he now occupies. Compare hisinfluence to that of Bergson, who stayed in the domain of ideasand only affected literature indirectly, through his influence on theliterary men themselves.

INTERVIEWER

Do you believe that literature has been turned over to thephilosophers by accident?

MAURIAC

There is a historical reason for it: the tragedy of France. Sartreexpressed the despair of this generation. He did not create it, buthe gave it a justification and a style.

INTERVIEWER

You said that you were more interested in the man Kafka thanin his work. In the Figaro Littéraire, you wrote that throughoutWuthering Heights it is the figure of Emily Brontë that attractedyou. In a word, when the characters disappear, the author stepsinto the foreground and little by little takes over the scene.

MAURIAC

Almost all the works die while the men remain. We seldomread any more of Rousseau than his Confessions, or ofChateaubriand than his Mémoires d’outre-tombe. They aloneinterest us. I have always been and still remain a great admirer ofGide. It already appears, however, that only his journal and Si legrain ne meurt, the story of his childhood, have any chance of last-ing. The rarest thing in literature, and the only success, is when theauthor disappears and his work remains. We don’t know whoShakespeare was, or Homer. People have worn themselves outwriting about the life of Racine without being able to establishanything. He is lost in the radiance of his creation. That is quite rare.

There are almost no writers who disappear into their work.The opposite almost always comes about. Even the great charactersthat have survived in novels are found now more in handbooksand histories, as though in a museum. As living creatures they getworn out, and they grow feeble. Sometimes we even see them die.Madame Bovary seems to me to be in poorer health than she usedto be. . .

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INTERVIEWER

You think so?

MAURIAC

Yes, and even Anna Karenina, even the Karamazovs. First,because they need readers in order to live, and the new generationsare less and less capable of providing them with the air they needto breathe.

INTERVIEWER

In one place you speak of the greatness of the novel as the perfect literary form, the king of the arts.

MAURIAC

I was praising my merchandise, but no art is more royal thananother. It is the artist who counts. Tolstoy and Dickens andBalzac are great, not the literary form they demonstrated.

INTERVIEWER

Has Christianity lived so intensely as yours created problemsfor you as a novelist?

MAURIAC

All the time. It seems comical today, but I was regarded inCatholic circles almost as a pornographic writer. That held medown somewhat.

If I were asked, “Do you believe your faith has hampered orenriched your literary life?” I would answer yes to both parts ofthe question. My Christian faith has enriched me. It has also ham-pered me, in that my books are not what they might have been hadI let myself go. Today I know that God pays no attention to whatwe write; He uses it.

I am a Christian, though, and I would like to end my life notin violence and anger, but in peace. For the greatest temptation atthe close of a Christian’s life is retreat, silence. Even to the music

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I love most I now prefer silence, because there is no silence withGod.

My enemies believe I want to remain on stage at any price—that I make use of politics in order to survive. They would beastounded indeed if they knew that my greatest happiness is to bealone on my terrace, trying to guess the direction of the wind fromthe odors it carries. What I fear is not being forgotten after mydeath, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying,it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

§

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