Le romancier, l’écrivain et Dieu

• Authors: Dominique Rougé
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

In his famous paper from 1939, entitled “M. François Mauriac et la liberté” [Eng. transl. “François Mauriac and freedom”], Jean-Paul Sartre argues polemically with F. Mauriac about his novel La fin de la nuit [Eng. transl. The End of the Night]. He accuses him of not allowing any latitude to his characters, of considering himself as their owner, of beeing God who knows everything about his creatures and disposes them his own fussy way. F. Mauriac has anticipated this criticism previously in 1933, in his text entitled “Le romancier et ses personnages” [‘The Novelist and his Characters’], in which he wards off considering himself a God and writes, that novelists are only the Almighty’s monkies. Mauriac says, that in his novels he combines elements cominf from reality and fruits of his imagination. Next Milan Kundera, particularly in his novel L’art du roman [Eng. transl. The Art of the Novel] criticizes sharply novelist, who, just like Sartre or Mauriac, make use of their characters to hand down their ideas. He says, that they should be demoted to writers. According to him, no one is the owner of novel’s characters, even their author. However, paradoxically, Kundera dedicates a lot of time to explain to his readers this what he wrote and to his feeling of betrayal and of incomprehension from his critics and translators. In reading of those three novelists, it seems that all of them more or less conciously aspire to the role of master of the way of thinking about the literary art.

Keywords

PL

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Jagielloński
• Journal: Romanica Cracoviensia
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 1

Dates

published

2009

online

2009-10-06

Contributors

author

Dominique Rougé