Jules Romains Long Fiction Analysis
With the appearance of Men of Good Will, Jules Romains became an overwhelmingly popular novelist, with each of the work’s twenty-seven volumes selling thousands of copies. A popular writer must first of all hold the interest of his readers. This Romains does, not only in his massive roman-fleuve but in his shorter novels as well. His plots are fast-moving, and even the longer works contain satisfying and immediate subplots. He generally begins in medias res, without a great deal of preparation, unlike Honoré de Balzac, whom he greatly admired. His ability to treat a number of subjects, both within his multivolume works and within the range of his shorter novels, provided an appeal to a broad public.
The shorter works, however, as well as the trilogy The Body’s Rapture, are relatively weak in plot. The Boys in the Back Room, although entertaining, is an adolescent canular, while The Body’s Rapture is a superficial idealization of sexual love. These works were intended to develop a unanimist vision: camaraderie, or the one soul of the couple. Thus, a single idea takes on a mystical dimension in a couple or a group. In his later works, Romains indulged himself in many digressions on the important questions of the day and on his personal preoccupations; this material wearies the reader and detracts from story development.
In his portrayal of characters, Romains likewise departed from the Balzacian tradition. Particularly notable is the paucity of physical description of the characters. Jallez, one of the principal characters in Men of Good Will, is never described physically throughout the entire work. Romains limits his character analysis to moral and psychological portrayal. Since interior monologue is his main tool, the reader knows only how his characters see themselves and is seldom aware of how they are perceived by others.
Even a sympathetic reader will concede that there is a certain lack of substance in Romains’s characters (especially the female characters, which are far less convincing than the males). To Romains, the collective mattered more than the individual. Thus, the effect of Godard’s death is more important than Godard himself, and Paris is more important than the men of goodwill—and not-so-goodwill—who live there.
Romains’snarrative technique consists in the use of interior monologue first, then dialogue, and last narration, much of which is hard to distinguish from interior monologue. Romains also uses a great deal of first-person narration. Lucienne’s Story and The Body’s Rapture are both told in this manner, by Lucienne and Pierre respectively. In the Balzacian tradition, Romains uses a pseudo-omniscient narrator, sometimes in combination with the first-person narrator. This technique results in an impression of great immediacy and dramatic intensity—without, however, fully concretizing the characters.
Like his hero Jallez, Romains became disillusioned with religion in his early teens yet sought a substitute in unanimism, which always contained mystical overtones. The subject of religion is prominent in his novels, from the parody of the priest’s sermon in The Boys in the Back Room to Abbé Jeanne’s genuine spirituality. Like his main characters in The Lonely (book 7 of Men of Good Will, Romains was always searching for a community, be it the Catholic Church, socialism, Freemasonry, or the communist revolution. In his own life and writings, he illustrated the fundamental solitude of the human condition and the search for identification with a group.
Both as a reflection of his own tensions and as a reaction to Victorian prudishness, Romains dwelt on sexuality. His themes run from eroticism to reverence to idealism, from friendship to love in marriage to sexual perversion. Naturalistic in style,...
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his works incorporate frank descriptions of these themes, often blending them with delicate poetry, as in the rapture of Lucienne and Pierre on their wedding night inThe Body’s Rapture. Romains’s style is varied, ranging from parody in the sermon delivered by Bénin in Les Copains to the purity of courtly love in Jallez’s admiration for Hélène Sigeau and Françoise, the perversions of Vorge Against Quinette and The Magic Carpet in Men of Good Will, the prostitution of Isabelle Maillecottin, and the various liaisons throughout the work. Romains also shows the link between violence and passion, as in Quinette and the poet Vorge. Romains’s treatment of sexual themes is didactic, directed against the stereotyped Catholic teachings on marriage and procreation. His naturalistic descriptions of Marie de Champcennais’s crude abortion, for example, point up his belief in the need for more tolerant legislation.
The burlesque style of Romains’s earlier works and the optimistic beginning of Men of Good Will ultimately gave way to pessimistic portrayals of war and confusion. Romains’s later works are less positive and less unanimist. In them, unanimism exists as a backdrop for painting individual characters. Romains poses problems with ever-increasing intensity: the war, technology, economic gains and rivalry, the difficulties of personal relationships. He sees no solutions to these problems other than to live as persons of goodwill.
Death of a Nobody
Death of a Nobody, Romains’s first critically acclaimed novel, was inspired by its author’s unanimist vision of life and death. In it, Jacques Godard, a humble but honest retired engineer and a childless widower, dies of a chill contracted while he was mounting the dome of the Panthéon. This death soon produces a positive reaction in many characters: the concierge, who carefully performs the necessary arrangements for the funeral; neighbors, who come to view the body and who collect money for a wreath; the villagers who live near Godard’s aged parents in the Velay. His father makes the long trip to Paris and fellowships with the travelers in the stagecoach and on the train—here Romains evokes a unanimist collective consciousness. The story ends with a eulogy of life by an anonymous young man.
Although definitely animated by Romains’s unanimist vision, Death of a Nobody is not contrived; rather, it is a picture of the various groups that form around the memory of Godard. It differs from ordinary portrayals of death in that the physical aspects of death are hardly noted; the emphasis is, rather, on its spiritual effects. Here, as in his short story Le Bourg régénéré, Romains used the technique of “simultaneity,” presenting the various reactions to Godard’s death that take place at the same time.
The Boys in the Back Room
The next of Romains’s short novels to attain popularity was The Boys in the Back Room, which was made into a film in 1964. Very different from the delicately simple Death of a Nobody, this book is a farcical and witty portrayal of seven young men who travel through France and impersonate a number of serious and important people on their way to “avenge” Ambert and Issoire, towns they have picked at random on a dusty map of France. At a railway station, Bénin, the principal member of the group—modeled on Romains himself—passes himself off as a Russian official; at Ambert, Broudier masquerades as a minister, and Bénin, as “the illustrious Père Lathuile,” delivers a magnificent sermon on sexuality. Finally, in Issoire, a statue, supposedly of Vercingetorix, is unveiled, proving to be the nude figure of Bénin.
Although totally different in tone from Death of a Nobody, The Boys in the Back Room is also a unanimist text, closely related to Le Bourg régénéré and Donogoo, showing the collectivity aroused to dynamic activity. In The Boys in the Back Room, before Gide, Romains makes use of the term acte gratuit, and shows it in operation in the pranks of the seven young men. The parody of the clergy, of the provincial bourgeoisie, and of the military, though traditional in the French comic genre, is incorporated into a highly entertaining comic piece, of which there are relatively few in French literature.
The Body’s Rapture
Romains’s last major work of sustained fiction before Men of Good Will was the trilogy The Body’s Rapture. The first volume, Lucienne’s Story, portrays the ideal courtship between the narrator and the main character, Lucienne, and Pierre Febvre, a cousin of the Barbelenet family, to whose two girls Lucienne gives music lessons. Lucienne is modeled on Romains’s first wife, Gabrielle, especially in her love of music and culture and in her sensitivity. This volume, though the best of the trilogy, is relatively weak in plot, and the character of Lucienne, while delicately analyzed from a psychological rather than physical point of view, is nevertheless unconvincing.
In the second volume, The Body’s Rapture (the English version bears the title of the trilogy as a whole), the couple prepares for marriage, and the story is told from Pierre’s viewpoint. Romains’s frank and detailed account of the couple’s wedding night shocked many readers when the book was published, although his point was simply to glorify the physical union of man and woman as a kind of religious rite with marriage as the initiation. He wished to show the attainment of a spiritual unanimism of the couple through their physical love, and to sing the glories of the flesh.
The final volume, Love’s Questing, is generally acknowledged to be the weakest. It lacks credibility in its supposition that material distance can be surmounted by a kind of self-projection. While Pierre is on duty on his ship, he feels Lucienne’s physical presence with him; Lucienne, likewise, “sees” Pierre’s ship from her apartment at Marseilles. For Romains, such a union was possible through the unanimist vision. The lengthy trilogy has an improbable and rather commonplace ending: The average couple “lives happily ever after,” probably because Romains’s own marital difficulties caused him to become weary of the project.
Often dismissed as too idealistic, the trilogy pales in comparison with the great twenty-seven-volume work that Romains was already preparing. Lucienne’s Story, however, almost won for him the Prix Goncourt in 1922. That year’s winning book, Le Martyre de l’obèse (1922), by Henri Béraud, has failed to survive, while Lucienne’s Story is still read and appreciated. On the whole, The Body’s Rapture shows a shift in Romains’s technique, from unanimism to a more personal and traditional type of work with deeper psychological analysis than in Romains’s earlier works. It therefore sets the stage for Men of Good Will.
Men of Good Will
Men of Good Will is more than a novel; it is a roman-fleuve, a roman-somme. Imposing in its length—twenty-seven volumes of more than eight thousand pages—it is Romains’s greatest accomplishment, undoubtedly the primary reason for his reception into the French Academy in 1946. Romains had initiated the project in 1923 but did not begin publication until 1932, when the first two volumes appeared simultaneously, subsequent volumes appearing at the rate of two volumes a year. Books 19 through 24 were published in New York, because of the war, and in 1946, Flammarion published the remaining three. The work was extremely popular; at the time of Romains’s death, more than two million copies had been sold.
In a preface that ranks among the important literary prefaces in history, Romains compares his project with Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893) and Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (1829-1848; The Human Comedy, 1895-1896) but charges that the individual novels of their cycles do not make up a unified whole. He also rejects the single hero that characterizes the works of Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. His aim, he states, is to portray society and the modern world. He wishes to paint a number of people and scenes, allowing characters and ideas to appear and disappear spontaneously. As in life, some will have a future; others will be doomed to oblivion. Above all, Romains wished to write a book accessible to the greatest possible number of people. In the unanimist spirit, he wished to create “a vast human communion, an immense camaraderie.”
Despite his claims to have written “a new novel,” most critics find Romains’s work fairly traditional, much in the style of Guy de Maupassant and Anatole France. Not unlike Proust and Mann, he does have a central hero—rather, two who express different facets of Romains’s personality. The peasant-born Jean Jerphanion, like the Velay-born Romains, comes to Paris to study at the École Normale Supérieure. Practical and direct, he is attracted by politics and has a strong desire for social justice. After several trivial sexual encounters, he marries the sedate and intelligent Odette, serves in the army at Verdun, and embarks upon a political career. The introspective Pierre Jallez represents the more intimate side of Romains, with his religious, moral, and sentimental crises. Jallez is a Parisian, and in his love of the city he initiates Jerphanion into his favorite haunts. His search for an ideal leads him from a childhood love for Hélène Sigeau through many empty flirtations, including a disappointing liaison with Juliette Ezzelin, not unlike Romains’s first marriage. It culminates in his eventual marriage to Françoise Maïeul, modeled on Romains’s second, younger wife, Lise Dreyfus. Jallez, like Romains, becomes a journalist, a writer, and a seeker for the meaning of life.
True to his aim of portraying society, Romains does not let the two main characters of his work dominate it completely. He brings them into contact, often rather gratuitously, with various segments of society. As Cuisinier has noted, Romains’s characters fall into all the essential categories of the period, rendering the epoch itself the main character. At the bottom, there is the world of the poor, illustrated by Louis Bastide and his family. They, like Romains’s own family, live in Montmartre. The father loses his job, and little Louis—the single convincing portrait of a child in the entire work—takes on odd jobs to support the family. The milieu of the schoolteacher, so important in the early days of the Third Republic, is represented by the circle gathered around Sampeyre, the retired history professor. They include Legraverend, who toys with Marxism, Louis Argellati, Mathilde Cazalis, courted by both Clanricard and Jerphanion, Laulerque the rabid individualist, and Clanricard the Socialist and the Freemason, who befriends Louis Bastide and marries Mathilde but loses his happiness with her and his idealism.
Jallez and Jerphanion represent the world of “Normalien” students at the École Normale Supérieure, a world that Romains knew well. The middle class is present in the actor Germaine Baader, originally the mistress of the idealistic Gurau, who, like Jerphanion, aspires to a political career, and the untalented writer Georges Allory. Gurau and Germaine are drawn into the world of big business and concomitant dishonesty when Gurau tries to uncover the intrigues of a great oil cartel, led by Sammécaud and de Champcennais. The latter, in turn, furthers his business affairs by collaborating with the automobile manufacturer Bertrand.
The world of growing technology and the economic development in modern society is reflected in the complex intrigues of the oil cartel and the automobile industry, as well as in the enormous real estate transactions of Haverkamp, symbolized in his voracious devouring of a huge, rare steak. All of these industrialists profit from the war, which increases the stock of the oil cartel and eventually brings about the ruin of Haverkamp. The war takes on various meanings for different individuals and groups: It is a source of income for Haverkamp and de Champcennais, as well as an economic advantage for the small workers; a political rallying point for Gurau and Jerphanion; and a symbol of power to the Marxists and the striking union members.
Among the many subcultures depicted in the novel, one of the most striking is that of the criminal world, represented by Quinette, who is modeled on Henri Landru, the notorious modern-day bluebeard who was a neighbor of Romains. By contrast, there is the spiritual world of the humble parish priest, Abbé Jeanne, who regulates his actions by the single law of love. There is the world of ecclesiastical ambition in the former graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, Abbé Mionnet, who meets the illustrious Cardinal Merry Del Val and diplomatically handles many scandals, to become at the end Archbishop of Tours. There is the real world of actual historical figures, Aristide Briand, Jean Léon Jaurès, and the circle of poets, among them Romains himself, whom Jallez meets at the Closerie des Lilas. There is even the animal world, represented by the dog Macaire, whose amorous expeditions through Paris recall those of his human counterparts.
The female world pales in comparison to this vast masculine panorama. In Romains’s fiction, women seem to exist only as stimulants to men’s sexual desires or as ideals of purity, not unlike the traditional Eve/Virgin Mary dichotomy. The idealistic women—Hélène Sigeau, Françoise Maïeul, and Odette Jerphanion—are shadowy figures in their transparent purity. The more seductive female characters—Juliette Ezzelin, Germaine Baader, and even the unwilling Marie de Champcennais—are more credible and human. With the strong emphasis on erotic and sentimental scenes in the novel, it is somewhat surprising that a strong female character does not emerge.
By consensus, the best books in the series are the first four, in which Romains draws rapid flashes of characters and scenes, especially of Paris and the meeting of Jallez and Jerphanion. The sixth book, The Meek, the story of Louis Bastide and his family, and the seventh book, The Lonely, the search for human community and an ideal among the various principal characters, are also excellent. Books 15 and 16, The Prelude and The Battle, which deal with World War I as seen through the battle at Verdun, are also acknowledged as superior. In them, Romains’s antiwar attitude is very strong, yet his admiration for Pétain and his appreciation of the camaraderie produced by the war are equally powerful. The fact that these two volumes were published in 1938, on the eve of a second worldwide clash, made them even more highly appreciated.
Like Balzac, Zola, and Leo Tolstoy, and his contemporaries Proust and Romain Rolland, Romains created a vast panorama of an age, yet Jerphanion on the roofs of the École Normale Supérieure does not climb to the height of Balzac’s Rastignac at Père Lachaise in his wager with Paris; nor, fighting at Verdun, does Jerphanion equal Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei Bolkónsky at Borodino. There is no female character that approaches Tolstoy’s Natasha. Although Romains states his preference for nonviolence and his hatred of war in The Battle, he reaches neither Tolstoy’s exuberance of national pride in the portrayal of the invasion of Moscow nor his discovery of the role of chance in Napoleon’s downfall.
Romains poses many questions—too many, perhaps—but does not explore them with the intensity of a Balzac or a Tolstoy. He portrays crime but not vice; he depicts society but not the enigmatic forces that control an individual through power and desire. He explores the inner depths of Jallez, examines the forces of eros and ambition, but lacks the intuitive perceptions of Proust and Balzac. Length and order seem to replace depth and spontaneity; unanimism masks individual freedom. What will remain of Romains and his vast novel is perhaps what he worked on least: the portraits of Paris, the humiliated, and the poor, and the two friends who, like the pilgrims of Emmaus, trudge along the paths of life to bear witness to an event, a vision, which only they have seen.