Secularization, Profanation, and Knowledge of the Heart in Contemporary French Fiction

Abstract

Given the highly contested nature of the debate over secularization in modern literature, this paper examines the ways in which four contemporary French novelists address questions of human and divine absence in their fiction, focusing on Joël Egloff’s J’enquête, Gaspard-Marie Janvier’s Le dernier dimanche, Jérôme Ferrari’s Le sermon sur la chute de Rome, and Sylvie Germain’s Tobie des marais. It argues that some of the most pressing questions of our secular age—including questions of intersubjectivity and human and divine absence—are addressed in these competing narratives of secularization. It then examines Jean-Louis Chrétien’s notion of cardiognosie, or knowledge of the heart, and his argument that profanation, rather than secularization as such, is of central importance in the modern novel’s construction of meaning before concluding with a close reading of Jérôme Ferrari’s Le sermon sur la chute de Rome and a consideration of the heart in Sylvie Germain’s Tobie des marais as a first step toward establishing the means by which profanation has been faced and overcome in recent fictional texts.

1. Introduction: Human and Divine Absence

Writing in 2014, Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman claimed that “The secularization thesis is dead. There is no doubt whatever about that”. However, they also pointed out that “The things we kill off tend not to disappear. They have a mysterious tenacity, afterlives not easily reckoned with” (Coviello and Hickman 2014, p. 645). Rather than remain quietly in its grave, the secularization thesis has continued to haunt contemporary literary fiction, with literature remaining a site on which different theories of secularization are played out, where competing narratives of secularization are given the run of the literary field.

In Joël Egloff’s 2016 novel, J’enquête, for example, a private detective is hired to investigate a baffling crime: the theft of the baby Jesus from a crib outside a church in a provincial French town (Egloff 2016). However, it soon becomes clear that J’enquête is not a conventional crime novel but rather a novel about existential loneliness grounded in the erasure of the human subject, as its opening sentence suggests “À la gare, personne” (Egloff 2016, p. 7). Arriving at the station, the unnamed detective waits for his initially unnamed employers but, finding himself unable to make contact with them, is uncertain whether he has been forgotten or abandoned. Even when his new employers arrive, at the end of a first chapter which is characterized by inaction, they remain essentially absent: “J’aperçois des phares, au-dehors. Une voiture se gare. Les voilà enfin”1 (Egloff 2016, p. 9). First headlights, then a car, then an anonymous “les”. This erasure of the human subject at the start of the novel prepares us for the erasure of the divine, as symbolized by the missing baby Jesus, an erasure which is far from apparent in the novel’s opening pages, for it is only in the fifth chapter that the readers discover the nature of the crime the detective has been hired to solve. Up until that point—and, indeed, well beyond it—the novel is marked by vacillation, confusion, and detours from what we might expect to be a crime novel’s central concern: the crime itself.

In fact, we could go further. The Christmastide snow does not simply delay the arrival of the priest and sacristan at the station. It also necessitates a change of route and then “un détour au détour” (Egloff 2016, p. 21). As the narrative also takes a detour from its own detour, the priest, sacristan, and detective eventually begin to discuss the crime, though in an equally circumlocutory fashion. The detective assumes that he has been hired to investigate a theft—“un vol”—but the priest insists that there has been an abduction, “un enlèvement” (Egloff 2016, pp. 17–18). What is it then that has been taken? When the answer is given—“dans la mangeoire, sur la paille, là où on était en droit de s’attendre à voir l’enfant, il n’y avait plus rien”2—the mystery deepens for “en dépit de cette tragique absence, tout paraissait pourtant relativement paisible”3 (Egloff 2016, p. 30). Just as it is unclear whether the baby Jesus in the crib was simply a carved piece of wood or a quasi-sacramental sign of Christ himself (and so, whether the crime was a theft or an abduction), the “tragic absence” from the crib is undermined by the scene’s relative peace. Nothing has been disturbed: only the central figure is absent. The structure of the narrative both suggests and refuses to insist that the crime matters. In fact, there is some doubt whether the crime at the heart of the novel is a crime at all. It is not entirely surprising, therefore, that the detective, distracted from distraction by distraction, spends as much time trying to keep warm and track down his elusive paycheck as he does attempting to solve the mystery he has been hired to investigate. His investigation, which the narrative refuses to privilege, is pushed to the boundaries but is not replaced by any other overarching telos. What is at stake in J’enquête is ultimately a question that the novel cannot answer: does the absence of the baby Jesus actually matter?

The novel’s generic instability reinforces the central concerns of the novel—human and divine absence—which are themselves potent symbols of postmodern aporia. If J’enquête is a crime novel, it is one with possibly no crime and apparently no criminal. Just like the snow which drifts bathetically throughout the novel, the plot also drifts toward a deeply unsatisfactory conclusion—unsatisfactory for the priest, who has wasted his money, and for the private detective who is overwhelmed by existential weariness: “Une immense lassitude était montée en moi et m’avait envahi”4 (Egloff 2016, p. 285). However, it is worth examining the nature of this discontent further, for conclusions of a sort are reached, even if the crime which the detective was hired to solve remains unsolved. In a novel dominated by monetary concerns (at least on the part of the detective), it is perhaps not entirely surprising that a consumerist solution is found: “Nous avons d’ailleurs déjà commandé un nouveau petit Jésus pour l’année prochaine, a repris le sacristain. Et je trouve d’ailleurs qu’il est encore de plus belle facture que celui qui nous a été enlevé, a-t-il ajouté, a l’intention du père Steiger”5 (Egloff 2016, p. 285). The detective, by contrast, refuses to accept this solution. Finding his employers’ capitulation highly suspicious, he decides, after the initial shock and weariness, to continue his work. “Tout ne faisait que commencer”6 are the final words of the novel (Egloff 2016, p. 286).

Egloff’s novel encapsulates many of the issues that are experienced in the twenty-first century in “a pluralist world, in which many forms of belief and unbelief jostle, and hence fragilize each other”, as Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age (Taylor 2007, p. 531). In J’enquête, both believers and unbelievers, religious and lay, are beset by aporia and baffled by human and divine absence. However, while a search for truth and meaning continues, there is little sense that what happens within the church (or inside the novel) really matters. In that sense, J’enquête is a typical example of what Vincent Pecora has identified as “the novel after Dostoevsky and Kafka [which] turned (at least in part) to the dark religious comedy of the almost unbearable disgrace that is human existence in a world where grace is no longer available” (Pecora 2015, p. 153). If novelists in the nineteenth century were often responding to Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith”, their responses came to seem curiously outdated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The novel was no longer “the epic of world abandoned by God” (Lukács 1971), a defiant gesture in the face of the God in whom one no longer believes, but a genre marked by absence: an absence of God certainly, but also an absence of certainty about the significance of that absence.

However, Egloff’s response to the afterlives of the secularization thesis is not the only response to be found in contemporary French fiction. As we shall see, Gaspard-Marie Janvier’s Le dernier dimanche (Janvier 2009) complicates the postmodern notions of divine and human absence found in Egloff’s novel, as does Jérôme Ferrari’s Le sermon sur la chute de Rome (Ferrari 2012), though in a quite different way. A close reading of Ferrari’s novel allows us to see the importance of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s notion of cardiognosie, or knowledge of the heart, in the modern novel’s construction of meaning. By attending to issues of narrative technique, figures of interiority, and biblically informed notions of subjectivity, Chrétien unveils precisely those areas of most concern to writers of faith in Taylor’s secular age. By working at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and literary narrative, he also identifies the means by which some of those writers have been able to resist the often unacknowledged narratives of secularization identified by Peter Harrison and others (Harrison 2017). Having examined Chrétien’s argument that profanation, rather than secularization as such, lies at the heart of the modern novel, this paper concludes with a consideration of the heart in Sylvie Germain’s Tobie des marais (Germain 1998) as a first step toward establishing the means by which such profanation has been faced and overcome in recent fictional texts. Like Marley’s ghost, the secularization thesis was dead to begin with. However, as Scrooge discovered before us, the re-enchantment of the (fictional) world can be very unsettling indeed.

2. Transcendental Intersubjectivity

The narrator of J’enquête lives in a determinedly secular age, in an environment pervaded by divine and human absence. However, his response to that absence is not the only one possible. In marked contrast to the detective in Egloff’s novel, the protagonist of Gaspard-Marie Janvier’s Le dernier dimanche refuses to remain outside the institutional church when confronted by issues of human and divine absence. Struggling in the aftermath of a divorce and appalled by what he sees as the horrors of a consumerist society, Janvier’s narrator decides to attend Mass every Sunday for a year as he searches for meaning in his life and relationships. What he seeks is a way out of debilitating subjectivity and a solution to the problem raised by Husserl in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations: “the problem of experiencing someone else, in rejoinder to the objection that phenomenology entails solipsism” (Husserl 1960). However, unlike Egloff’s detective, Janvier’s seeker finds what he is looking for precisely in the traditional rituals that are so strikingly absent from J’enquête. If what “Husserl requires is that these subjects should intercommunicate, that they should affect one another, so as to establish transcendental intersubjectivity” (Smith 2003, p. 215), it is in the Mass, Janvier’s narrator comes to think, that such transcendental intersubjectivity is enabled: “La messe du jour semble auréolée de ce mystère: comment le voisin devient le ‘prochain’; comment l’autre à qui je ne concède rien devient l’autre à qui je dois tout. La vie éternelle commence dans cette alchimie spirituelle, aussi prodigieuse que la transsubstantiation de la farine en chair et du vin en sang”7 (Janvier 2009, p. 81). Though Janvier’s novel, like Egloff’s, begins with both divine and human absence, it is precisely in the traditions and liturgy of the Church that human presence and, more tentatively, the presence of God are ultimately found. While it never seems to occur to Egloff’s narrator that the solution to his aporia could be found in the very church outside which the theft he is investigating took place, it is precisely inside the church (and the Church) that Janvier’s narrator begins his search. Here, then, is a quite different narrative of secularization from the one found in Egloff’s novel. Both novelists address questions of human and divine absence: the paths their protagonists follow could hardly be more different.

3. Knowledge of the Heart

One way of making sense of such divergent positions can be found in the work of Jean-Louis Chrétien, who, in a series of books beginning with Symbolique du corps, “shows how the ways of figuring personal identity that are rooted in [the biblical notion of] the heart differ from later, modern models of subjectivity” (Lewis 2023b, p. 83). Specifically, he argues in Conscience et roman I: La conscience au grand jour (Chrétien 2009) and Conscience et roman II: La conscience à mi-voix (Chrétien 2011), some of whose ideas are further developed in L’espace intérieur (Chrétien 2014), that the modern novel is essentially a theological project in which what was previously known only by God—the heart, in its biblical sense—becomes the novelist’s unique territory. Knowledge of the heart, which Chrétien dubs cardiognosie, is what defines the modern novel: “La cardiognosie que suppose la possibilité d’énoncer les pensées, les affects, et leur mouvement dans la conscience d’autrui, vus de l’intérieur, est coextensive au roman modern, et le définit comme tel”8 (Chrétien 2011, p. 18). It is important to emphasize that what Chrétien means by the “heart” has nothing to do with sentiment but is the most profound essence of our being, covering both our intelligence and our will:

le mot “coeur”, terme central de l’anthropologie biblique, où il désigne ce que l’être humain a de plus profond et de plus propre, et signifie, sans connotation sentimentale, l’organe de notre intelligence aussi bien que de notre volonté.

(Chrétien 2009, pp. 18–19)9

Whereas Lukács (Lukács 1971 and others saw interiority as a defining element of the modern novel, Chrétien argues that the modern novel develops and displaces Christian understandings of interiority, which means that “L’intériorité explorée par le roman moderne a donc une origine théologique et biblique. Le “coeur” biblique est sa condition de possibilité”10 (Chrétien 2009, p. 23). However, “en même temps, le roman mord la main qui l’a nourri, se rebelle contre sa source […] car le narrateur prend la place de Dieu”11 (Chrétien 2009, p. 23). In particular, it is in the modern novel’s use of interior monologue or free indirect discourse to explore the biblical heart, those hidden depths which were simply not addressed in premodernity because they were deemed to be inaccessible, that we see secularization at play. So overwhelming has been the success of the genre that most readers no longer notice the trick, even though what the novelist offers us is, in fact, utterly (and literally) fantastic:

Peculiar to the modern novel is its activity of uniting the depths of realism, in the multiform and always more acute description of every aspect of society and the actual material world, with the depths of the fantastic. For passing into the conscious-ness of another, to the point of perceiving in him more than he perceives in himself, is more fantastical than a magic carpet or an enchanted sword.

(Dika and Hackett 2016, pp. 234–35)

For Chrétien, imaginative literature takes a fundamentally new turn in the nineteenth century: “The chansons de geste did not attempt to renew our knowledge of man, no more than did the picaresque novels, but the modern novel has at its heart a project of exploration and unmasking, which determines its growing arrogance [qui fait sa fierté croissante]” (Dika and Hackett 2016, p. 236). More precisely, Chrétien argues that what lies at the heart of the modern novel is not so much secularization as profanation:

La thèse du present livre est que l’identité moderne résulte d’une profanation de l’espace intérieur, ce terme étant entendu au sens strict de “rendre profane”, de désaffecter ce lieu de ce qui fut longtemps sa destination et sa function les plus hautes, de déconsacrer, comme on le faisait rituellement pour un edifice cultuel qu’on abandonne.12

(Chrétien 2014, p. 252)

Or again:

The novel takes possession of this unlimited depth of interiority, obtained or constituted by centuries of [Christian] doctrines and practices, and, in the strict sense of the word, renders it profane by eliminating its center and source, God himself (there are exceptions, Dostoevsky or Bernanos, but this is precisely what makes them unique). This profanation becomes the site of a new sacrality, that of subjectivity.

(Dika and Hackett 2016, p. 236)

If Chrétien’s analysis is correct, what we have in the modern novel is the profanation of a particular aspect of God’s omniscience effected through a change of literary technique—the knowledge of the heart rendered possible in literature by the narrator’s use of internal monologue and free indirect discourse. The protagonists of Egloff’s and Janvier’s novels may tread very different paths and reach very different destinations, but they both inhabit a fictional world grounded in an essential profanation. As Pericles Lewis puts it in a different context, “For novelists, the question of how to account for experiences that have traditionally been considered religious gets displaced from a methodological problem to a formal one: they seek formal devices that describe the sorts of experiences generally associated with faith while avoiding a judgment as to the reality of those experiences” (Lewis 2010, pp. 50–51).

Chrétien’s focus is on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction (specifically, the work of Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Woolf, Faulkner, and Beckett), but it is also possible to apply his argument to contemporary fiction, as we shall see in the following discussion of Jérôme Ferrari’s Le sermon sur la chute de Rome, which, like J’enquête, is grounded in questions of human and divine absence and, like Le dernier dimanche, is concerned with a search for human (and, by extension, divine) communion.

4. The Sermon on the Fall of Rome

Ferrari’s novel is concerned with the rise and fall of a village bar in Corsica, though this local tragedy is set against a much larger set of geographical and temporal disturbances that include the First and Second World Wars, events in colonial and postcolonial Algeria, and the fall of the Roman Empire itself. In particular, the figure of St Augustine permeates the novel—its title, its chapter headings, and its content—in ways that unsettle the protagonists and shake readers’ temporal certainties.

However, the book begins not with St Augustine but with life after death in the form of Marcel Antonetti’s mother and five siblings who are preserved in a photograph taken in the summer of 1918 and who “seem to be floating like ghosts amid a stage mist that will soon swallow them up and make them disappear” (Ferrari 2014, p. 19). This photograph, which immediately points us beyond the linguistic present to a visual past, is both the site of memory and the site of a new sacrality, though one that is hard to decipher. The ghosts in the photograph do not disappear but remain stubbornly present to Marcel who has outlived them all: obsessed by their presence—which is also an absence—he “vainly persist[ed] in studying [the photograph] throughout his life” (Ferrari 2014, p. 19).

Writing about W.G. Sebald—another author who draws on the notion of photographs as sites of memory—and quoting Roland Barthes, Stefanie Harris has written that photographs are “the ‘certificate of presence’ for the thing that has been there” (Harris 2001, p. 379). They inscribe an absence that remains present, though the nature of that presence is both complex and unstable. However, what obsesses Marcel in The Sermon on the Fall of Rome is not so much the continued presence of his family in his photograph—or the reminder that they had been there—as the inescapable reminder of his own absence: “what Marcel contemplates, in this photograph taken in the course of a hot summer’s day in 1918 in the school yard where an itinerant photographer had hung a white sheet between two trestles, is first and foremost his own absence” (Ferrari 2014, p. 20). What he sees is not just Barthes’ “That-has-been” but also that which has not yet come to be.

In this secularized afterlife, the past is seen through the lens of the past—the lens of the unnamed photographer—but because the photograph is produced (or reproduced) in words, Marcel’s family only “exist[s] thanks to him and his stubbornly faithful gaze” in the present (Ferrari 2014, p. 21). He, or rather the author who gives him life, “is now their unique and fragile bulwark against nothingness” (Ferrari 2014, p. 21). Inevitably, therefore, it is present, even presentist, concerns which dominate the narrative even as the narrator interrogates the end of the world that 1918 represented. He (Marcel / the narrator) is in no doubt that “Marcel is not, and never has been, the one [his mother’s] eyes are desperately searching for” in the photograph: “the one she is searching for, far beyond the lens, is the one who ought to be standing there beside her and whose absence is so glaring that one might think this photograph had only been taken in the summer of 1918 to make it tangible and preserve this record of it” (Ferrari 2014, p. 21). She is searching for her husband, another absent presence, who “was captured in the Ardennes during the early fighting and from the start of the war has been working in a salt mine in Lower Silesia” (Ferrari 2014, p. 21).

The photograph from which Marcel is absent points toward this earlier absence, which also raises troubling questions about the relationship between life and death. Although his family knows that the husband has been captured, “[l]etters take so long to reach them that they are always afraid what they are hearing may be no more than the echo of a dead man’s voice, transmitted in unfamiliar handwriting” (Ferrari 2014, p. 22). Just as the photograph is an enduring record of a presence and an absence, so too are letters from the Silesian salt mine, though they too are absent from the text of the novel: like Marcel and his mother, we search for them in vain in the midst and mist of the indirect discourse. However, while the family photograph, as described from the perspective of Marcel at some point in the atemporal present, inscribes the absence of death, the letters are heralds of life since Marcel’s father—as he is to become or has already become—“is not dead and he returns to the village in February 1919, so that Marcel may see the light of day. His eyelids and lashes are burned, his fingernails are as if eaten by acid and on his cracked lips can be seen the white traces of scarred layers of skin he will never be able to shed” (Ferrari 2014, pp. 21–22). He is the living embodiment of what the photograph has previously been and will continue to be for Marcel throughout his life: his bodily presence but emotional absence inscribed in Silesian salt that he is never able to shed, just as an absence was captured in a photograph, its “milky whiteness with its faded edges” (Ferrari 2014, p. 19) merging with Marcel’s father’s scarred white skin and his own faded life.

For Marcel, as for Barthes, his father surreptitiously induces the belief that he is alive while simultaneously suggesting that he is dead, a fact of some significance given Marcel’s own absence from the photograph, since in it he has not yet been conceived but lives in a theologically confused “limbo where unborn children are held captive” (Ferrari 2014, p. 21). The sight of his parents—as filtered through his siblings “who were pretending to be asleep” (Ferrari 2014, p. 22)—wearing “themselves ragged probing their own dry flesh, so as to bring back to life the ancient wellsprings made barren by sadness, mourning and salt” (Ferrari 2014, p. 23) is therefore of primordial importance to him, as is the inevitable drawing out “from the depths of their bellies what was left there of humours and mucus, albeit only a remnant of moisture, a little of the fluid that serves as the container for life, a single drop” since “their efforts were so great that this unique drop did finally well up and condense within them, making life possible, even though they themselves were barely alive” (Ferrari 2014, p. 23). What gave life to Marcel was the fruitful union of the parents he can scarcely bring himself to accept were even barely alive.

Marcel is indubitably present—in the world of the novel at least—because he is the one looking at the photograph, but he is also absent. He who remains stubbornly present as his family members slowly die before him remains emotionally absent to the younger generation that survives (Ferrari 2014, p. 44). His tragedy, arising from the trauma of absence described in the opening pages of the novel, is the first of the novel’s many tragedies, a tragedy and a trauma that establish the means by which we can read all the subsequent traumas and tragedies.

It may have been Marcel’s parents who gave him life, but he is also the product of the novelist whose narrative choices elaborate particular ways of reading the relationship between the past and the present, life and death, beginnings and ends. Readers are pulled between the authoritative telling of the unnamed and apparently omniscient narrator and the damaged perceptions of Marcel himself, with the consequent narrative uncertainty matching the mood of summer 1918, a time that was, the narrator insists, both an end and a beginning. Marcel’s absence from the photograph both masks and emblematizes the absence of the imagined author, his primal absence inaugurating a series of other absences—if such a feat is possible—around which the novel revolves. His own absence is soon displaced, and explained, by his father’s absence, which in turn is a marker of the absence of a world which “had vanished without anyone noticing and it was, above all, its absence, the most enigmatic and most daunting of all those absences captured that day on paper by the silver salts, that Marcel would spend his life contemplating” (Ferrari 2014, p. 28).

The absence of this world is not immediately apparent to those who live through the events described in the novel, the narrator insists, which necessarily shifts the focus of the novel from the initial, absent photograph to questions of sight and insight. What is it, the novelist asks, that enables us to see and to understand the passing of one world—one era—and the possible emergence of another? It is not academic study—which spectacularly fails the philosophy students, Matthieu and Libero, and eventually fails the archaeologist, Aurélie—but it may be the insight or practical wisdom that comes from lived bitter experience.

The novel becomes a search for signs, with the narrator suggesting that perhaps “we can even identify the almost perceptible signs that proclaim the recent disappearance of a world, not screaming shells above the gutted plains of the North, but the release of a shutter, scarcely disturbing the vibrant summer light, or the delicate, damaged hand of a young woman very gently closing a door in the middle of the night on what should not have been her life, or the square sail of a ship crossing the blue waters of the Mediterranean, in the open sea off Hippo, bringing the inconceivable news from Rome that men still exist but their world is no more” (Ferrari 2014, p. 29). However, even the narrator expresses hesitancy before identifying these “almost perceptible signs” which are the ostensible subject matter of the novel, leaving other sign reading to the readers since, underlying this semiotically driven narrative, there are other almost perceptible signs of absence that connote presence: the absence of St Augustine, whose sermons on the fall of Rome infiltrate and shape the narrative; the absence of the imagined author and of the intrusive yet elusive narrator who fades out of view through the use of free indirect discourse; and the absence of God to which these absences point.

Neither the absence of God in the novel nor the absence of St Augustine can be understood without first understanding the absent presence of the narrator, whose shaping presence creates the narrative while leaving few visible traces. When the third person narrator describes “the almost perceptible signs that proclaim the recent disappearance of a world” for instance, readers become aware of an immanent presence that is able to range across time and space in order to connect the apparently disparate worlds of France in the aftermath of the Great War, a Corsican bar in the late twentieth century, and the fall of Rome in the fourth century—a shaping intelligence that is able to reveal signs of the end of a world. With words that continually challenge the importance and significance of words, the narrator both suggests and undermines the suggestion that sight rather than words is the greatest conveyor of meaning, that it is not when latent memory traces are transcribed into meaningful narratives that traumatic memories are removed but when they are transformed into pictures whose meaning is revealed only by the viewer, whose own existence is essentially precarious, not least because it is brought into being by the imagined author and unseen narrator. Marcel’s absence from a photograph we never see but only read about second-hand therefore becomes the defining image of the novel. When death comes:

along with Marcel, it will carry away the world that now lives on only in him. All that will remain of this world will be a photograph, taken in the summer of 1918, but Marcel will no longer be there to look at it. No child in a sailor suit now, no little girl of four, no mysterious absence, only a pattern of lifeless marks, with no-one left to make sense of them.

(Ferrari 2014, p. 228)

This, then, is Ferrari’s image of secularization: the end of a process which results in the absence even of absence and a pattern of largely forgotten fragments and lifeless marks which no one can any longer make sense of. Seen from this perspective, the novel’s central character is neither Matthieu nor Libero but Aurélie, the archaeologist, who alone recognizes the importance of sight and the finality of death. She is the quickest to realize the implications of secularization and the breaking of the chains of memory:

Her grandfather viewed her as an enchantress, single-handedly capable of hoisting up vanished worlds from the abysses of dust and oblivion that had engulfed them and, in her moments of enthusiasm, when she had just embarked on her studies, that had been how she had dreamed of herself. She had since become humbler and more serious. She knew that life cannot exist far from human eyes and strove to be one of those pairs of eyes that save life from extinction. But her churlish heart sometimes whispered to her that this was not true, all she brought into the light was dead things, she breathed no life into them, on the contrary, it was her own life that was slowly allowing itself to be invaded through and through by death.

(Ferrari 2014, p. 107)

With such a secularization narrative embedded in the narrative of the novel, it is hardly surprising that God should also be absent. However, God is not simply absent: he has disappeared. Just as in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (Coetzee 2013), what remains of the divine presence are verbal traces that are in the process of losing their former meaning. When Marcel entered the imperial civil service, he “did not rest his hopes in God but in the statutes of the public service, the good news of which had just been promulgated to all the children of the French Republic, which would enable him, without having to pass through colonial service training school, to rise as high as he could in the hierarchy, to extricate himself at last from the limbo he had never entirely succeeded in leaving when he was born” (Ferrari 2014, p. 156). The imperial state may have replaced God in Marcel’s eyes, but the language of God lived on, albeit in debased form, with the theologically unorthodox notion of “the limbo where unborn children are held captive” having been introduced as early as the first chapter of the novel (Ferrari 2014, p. 21).

The secularized theology of the novel is significant from the very start of the novel. In the aftermath of the Great War, we discover that “the Archangel” who vanquished “that poisonous fly of ancient legend” is not only an angelic being cut off from its moorings in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures but also that it has departed from the world: “the Archangel had long ago returned to his celestial dwelling place and remained deaf to prayers and processions, turning aside from those who were dying” (Ferrari 2014, pp. 23–24). This secularized Archangel is subsequently profaned in the novel when “a pitiless loner, like the [now explicitly] legendary Archangel of the Lord of hosts” (Ferrari 2014, p. 92), begins murdering lone Italian soldiers in Corsica during the Second World War and, even more explicitly, in the life of Jean-Baptiste, who becomes a substitute in Marcel’s eyes for the heavenly presence. In Marcel’s imagination, Jean-Baptiste is not the herald of the Messiah but of the end of the world and the death of God, appearing in his colonial fantasies as a figure treated with respect and fear by the natives “as if he were the invincible Archangel, the destroyer of scourges, once again devoted to men’s salvation” (Ferrari 2014, pp. 27–28). This downward movement, from the archangels of Scripture to the Archangel of legend, to an absent being who has no interest in the fate of men, to an imperialist who is regarded as a tutelary spirit, is the sign and cause of Marcel’s own loss of belief: “during the catechism he would listen with sealed lips to the lies told by the evangelist, for he knew what an apocalypse was, he knew that at the end of the world the heavens did not open and there were neither horsemen nor trumpets nor number of the beast, no monster, but only silence, so much so that you might think nothing had happened”(Ferrari 2014, p. 28).

Displaced by the Archangel and what the Archangel represents, the God of the novel is a demiurge rather than a creator. This at least is how he appears in a significant passage that comes at the time of Matthieu and Libero’s greatest success, with the former students of philosophy recalling notions and studies long since abandoned:

For the first time in a long while [Matthieu] thought about Leibniz and took delight in the place he himself now occupied in the best of all possible worlds and he almost felt inclined to bow down before the goodness of God, the Lord of all the worlds, who sets every creature in its appointed place.

(Ferrari 2014, p. 117)

“But”, the narrator continues, “God deserved no praise here, for in this little world there was no demiurge other than Matthieu and Libero” (Ferrari 2014, p. 117). This uncompromising statement could be an indication, through the use of free indirect discourse, of a slowly dawning realization on Matthieu’s part that the seeds of his unhappiness and the bar’s destruction had already been sown, or it could be a narratorial intrusion, omniscience transferred from God to the demiurgical narrator, since what the narrator goes on to say about the demiurge could equally apply to the third person narrator himself:

The demiurge is not God the creator. He does not even know he is fabricating a world, what he makes, placing stone upon stone, is a man-made work, and soon his creation eludes his grasp and runs away with him and if he does not destroy it, it will destroy him.

(Ferrari 2014, p. 117)13

If the narrator is demiurge to the author’s creator God, then we might be justified in asking where omniscience and omnipotence lie. The answer, Matthieu and Libero gradually come to realizes, is not with themselves. They may be demiurges of their own local world, but that, in the world of the novel, is tantamount to admitting that they are only characters in a great tragedy they cannot control. Both the events they have set in motion and, on a higher existential plane, the author who creates and the narrator who exercises borrowed power on the author’s behalf control them utterly, with God’s voice being reduced bathetically to that of a disembodied announcement when they fail to leave Corsica:

They were not gods, but merely demiurges, and it was the world they had created that now held them under the yoke of its tyrannical rule, an insistent voice announced that passengers Libero Pintus and Matthieu Antonetti were urgently awaited before the gates closed, and they knew that the world they had created would not let them depart, they sat there and the final call came, and when the plane had taken off they stood up in silence, picked up their bags, and went back to the world they belonged to.

(Ferrari 2014, p. 147)

Though God may be absent, there are moments in the novel when the narrator seems to inherit his foreknowledge, with the tragic novel’s sense of fate thereby gaining a post-Christian (and apparently post-Calvinist) tinge: “at the very moment when Sebastien Colonna learned the name of his infantry regiment, he was already embarking on his ineluctable trajectory towards the machine-gun bullets that had always been waiting for him at Monte Cassino” (Ferrari 2014, p. 95). On one level, God’s place is taken in the novel by the narrator but, in another sense, he is replaced by St Augustine, a man whose absent presence and present absence simultaneously mirrors and undermines the omnipresence of God. Augustine is (or was) the only real presence in the otherwise fictional world of the novel, with Barthes’ punctum transferred from the world of the photograph to a place in history. If photography, as Walter Benjamin argued, is the paradigmatic medium of modernity, then St Augustine’s absence is an inescapable consequence of his premodernity. However, just as the photograph constantly transcribes the absences of modernity’s past, so too does the act of writing transcribe the absences of premodernity. Augustine is, therefore, both elusive and omnipresent. When studying in Paris, “Libero read the four sermons on the fall of Rome, feeling as if he were performing an act of supreme resistance and also read The City of God, but as the nights drew in the last of his optimism became dissolved in the mist and rain that bore down on the damp pavements” (Ferrari 2014, p. 74). As Libero’s act of resistance dissolves, so too does his image of Augustine whose vision of the world he eventually rejects, coming to see him “as nothing more than an uncivilised barbarian who rejoiced in the fall of the Empire because it marked the arrival of the world of mediocrities and triumphant slaves, of which he was a part” (Ferrari 2014, p. 74). Augustine is displaced by Libero, whose own “moral exhaustion” displaces any appreciation that he may originally have had of the saint (Ferrari 2014, p. 75).

Similarly, Marcel’s journey from idealism to disillusionment during the Second World War is given symbolic form by the absence of St Augustine. Passing through Bône on his vain search for active military duty, he discovers that “all that remained of the cathedral beneath whose vault Augustine had preached and where his last breath was drowned by the clamour of the Vandals, was a waste land, covered in yellow plants and battered by the wind” (Ferrari 2014, p. 96). He is not the only one to be disappointed by the absence he discovers: Aurélie began her work in Algeria, excavating the remains of St Augustine’s cathedral, with great expectations, only to be cast down in personal and professional disappointment: “The dig was finished, they had not found Augustine’s cathedral but there was so much still to do, one day they would find it and once again the marble of the apse where the bishop of Hippo had lain dying, surrounded by praying clerics, would gleam in the sunlight” (Ferrari 2014, p. 192). This prophecy is fulfilled, though, only when the narrator steps away from the events of the modern world, the sunlit apse and the dying bishop being resurrected, or recreated, by the novelist at the end of his novel.

For Aurélie, however, “there was only one place where she could live out her relationship with Massinissa in freedom and that place was neither France nor Algeria, it was located in time, not space, and did not lie within the limits of the world. It was a part of the fifth century that lived on in the collapsed stones of Hippo, where Augustine’s shade still celebrated the secret weddings of those who were dear to him and could not achieve union anywhere else” (Ferrari 2014, p. 208). Only in this secularized afterlife was there hope of a fulfilled relationship, something that neither Aurélie nor most of the other characters in the novel are able to achieve in their local worlds: “the elusive remains of an old bishop, dead many centuries before” (Ferrari 2014, p. 210), bespeaking another series of absences in the modern world of the novel.

The absent bishop only becomes present in the act of telling. His words, like the archaeological remains that Aurélie seeks, are fragmentary and elusive. When Marcel traveled through North Africa in search of the Second World War, he discovered that “no trace remained of the marvellous tales that peopled the history books, neither the fire of Baal, nor Scipio’s African legions, there was not one Numidian knight besieging the walls of Cirta to restore Sophonisba’s kiss to Massinissa after she had been stolen from him, both the walls and the men who had laid siege to them had returned to dust and nothingness together, for marble and flesh are equally subject to decay” (Ferrari 2014, pp. 95–96). Even Aurélie, whose own Massinissa is stolen from her by the implacable forces of postcolonialism and who is more committed to work and the work of St Augustine than the rest of the family, is only able to report the resuscitation of the saint through the words of her Algerian colleagues, with those words being distanced still further through the narrator’s free indirect discourse:

She spoke about the kindness of her Algerian colleagues … about the skill and faith with which, for children from primary schools, they conjured up a city filled with life, and, as the children gazed at this mass of mute stones, the yellow grass became covered in paving and mosaics, the old Numidian king rode by on his great melancholy horse, dreaming of Sophonisba’s lost kiss, and centuries later, at the end of the long, pagan night, the faithful, resuscitated, pressed close together against the chancels, as they waited to hear the voice of the bishop who loved them arising within the nave filled with light,

“Hear me, you who are dear to me”,

but Matthieu heard no such voice.

(Ferrari 2014, p. 129)

St Augustine’s own words do not even survive to the end of the novel, with each of the chapter headings apart from the last being taken from his sermons on the fall of Rome. By the end of the novel, his sermons on the fall of Rome are reduced to a single sermon, which is itself the creation of the author.14 Augustine’s absent presence mirrors that of the author and narrator, their shaping presence creating the narrative, while leaving few visible traces. It is only in the last chapter of the novel that the narrator’s absent presence becomes more of a present absence. What the narrator gives us in these final pages is what Jean-Louis Chrétien identifies as paradigmatic of the modern novel, the secrets of the heart as revealed at the moment of death: “savoir ce que quelqu’un a fait ou dit juste avant de mourir ne nous suffit plus, nous voulons savoir ce qu’on ressent quand on meurt”15 (Chrétien 2009, p. 15).

However, before we reach the moment of death, we have the fall of Rome. The narrator becomes more intrusive than ever before, telling us that Augustine “barely pays attention” to the news of the Visigoths trailing “their long blue cloaks in the blood of virgins”, that he “is not interested in the collapse of masonry”, and, more tentatively, that “he may yet have retained from the teachings of Manichaeus the profound inner conviction that this world is bad and does not merit the shedding of tears over its ending” (Ferrari 2012, p. 229). A theological interpretation of the bishop’s belief system is smuggled into the narrative through the use of free indirect discourse. The sermon that follows—the sermon on the fall of Rome—corresponds to Augustine’s Sermon 81 but is significantly different from it. Narrative merges with direct discourse in the presentation of what turn out to be Ferrari’s, rather than Augustine’s, words, the absence of quotation marks suggesting a line of development from the previous third-person narrative, though the paragraphing sets it apart from the preceding commentary. What we have in the novel’s sermon is fiction, a secularized version of Augustine’s sermon that omits both the biblical passages on which St Augustine preached and also the application of the biblical message to the lives of Augustine’s congregation. Ferrari gives us not simply a pastiche but a secularized pastiche, which serves to displace the Augustine of history one step further.

This displacement of St Augustine, which is also a displacement of God, is, in effect, a replacement, with the narrator taking the role of scrutineer of the human heart. Chrétien’s cardiognosie becomes particularly apparent after the sermon is finished, and the smile of a young woman takes us from the fall of Rome to the death of St Augustine himself, with Aurélie’s prediction fulfilled at last “as he lies there on the floor of the apse while kneeling clerics pray for the salvation of his soul, of which no-one is in any doubt” (Ferrari 2014, p. 233). However, no one is really immune from doubt in the modern novel, and so the narrator promptly challenges the clerics’ confidence by lifting the roof on Augustine’s soul and showing us his heart. The narrator tells us what no one could possibly have known that Augustine “can no longer hear either the clamour of the Vandal army or the frightened voices of the faithful seeking refuge in the nave”, that “[t]o his exhausted mind the cathedral now seems once more to have become a haven of light and silence protected by the hand of God”, and that “he has preached about the end of the world so often that he must not now be concerned by it” (Ferrari 2014, p. 234). The novel finishes, however, with a passage of free indirect discourse which could be read in a less positive manner. “God’s promise is constantly being fulfilled”, we are told, “and the soul of a dying man is weak, vulnerable to temptation” (Ferrari 2014, p. 234). This comment could be an insight into Augustine’s mind as he nears death, or it could be a narratorial intervention, expressing a presentist interpretation of past events. Ferrari keeps his and our options open so that the existential questions that follow can be read either as further proof of the absence of God or as an expression of modernist realism, with the thoughts of the dying man vocalized by the omniscient narrator and human vulnerability expressed by the most fallibly human of the Church Fathers:

What promise can God make to men, He who knows them so little that He remained deaf to the despair of his own son and did not understand them, even when He made Himself one of them? And how may men have faith in His promises when Christ himself despaired of his own divinity.

(Ferrari 2014, p. 234)

Whichever interpretation we choose, the following lines pull us back to cardiognosie: “Augustine shivers on the cold marble and just before his eyes are opened to the eternal light that shines on the city no army will ever capture, he wonders in anguish whether all those in tears among the faithful whom the sermon on the fall of Rome failed to comfort had not understood his words better than he understood them himself” (Ferrari 2014, pp. 234–35). This sentence issues a particularly acute challenge to the reader. The assumed reader may question the narrator’s apparent knowledge of Augustine’s eternal destination, but such is the power of free indirect discourse and the now familiar conventions of the novel genre—that he or she may be less sceptical of the narrator’s ability to know what was in the bishop’s mind. What the fictional Augustine wonders about his fictive congregation is what the modern novel claims for itself: the ability to understand another’s words better than he understands them himself.16 It is the narrator, through the use of free indirect discourse, who is able to impress upon the assumed narratee a nihilistic understanding of the world that underlies the tragedy of the novel—“Worlds perish, in truth, passing one after the other, from darkness into darkness, and perhaps the succession of them signifies nothing” (Ferrari 2014, p. 235)—though he then imposes more directly on the narrative, ascribing this interpretation to the dying Augustine himself: “This unbearable thought burns Augustine’s soul, as he lies there amid his brothers, and tries to turn towards the Lord” (Ferrari 2014, p. 235). Profanation, in its strict sense, rather than secularization, is what marks the end of the novel.

5. The Re-Enchantment of the World

Where then can the modern novelist of faith turn in order to escape the dominance of such profanation and its ubiquitous presence in the modern novel? One answer, Chrétien suggests, is that the novelist need not turn away at all, because “la cardiognosie se guérit et se rachète elle-même de sa propre démesure”17 (Chrétien 2011, p. 290). As Stephen E. Lewis, summarizing Chrétien’s argument about one particular novelist, explains: Henry James uses cardiognosie “especially in his late novels, against itself, so as to encourage in the reader an attention to moral ambiguity, and an accompanying feeling of clear-eyed, unsentimental pity towards his characters. This pity grows out of the awareness that one of the worst faults one could commit would be to interfere in the life of another, speaking and acting in his or her place without his or her permission” (Lewis 2023a, p. 131). Another, quite different, response to profanation in, and the profanation of, the modern novel can be found in the work of Sylvie Germain, whose work “ses romans en particulier, ne cessent d’ouvrir au mystère et à l’infini sous toutes ses formes, d’explorer notre monde—que les esprits rationnels tendent à limiter, répertorier et expliquer –, de façon à nous faire parcourir toutes sortes de chemins extraordinaires et à mettre en évidence d’étranges manifestations”18 (Goulet 2015, p. 71). One example of these strange manifestations (out of many in her work) can be found in Tobie des marais (Germain 1998), which transposes The Book of Tobit to twentieth century France and in which, to adopt Taylor’s terminology, Germain writes about a porous rather than a buffered self (Taylor 2007, pp. 37–42). Breaking through the immanent frame at the very start of the book, she writes about a disconcertingly active angel who, appearing as a hitch-hiker, leads an unsuspecting driver to Tobias before accompanying Tobias on his journey through the novel.

Nonetheless, the focus of the novel is not on Raphael or even exclusively on Tobias but also encompasses Deborah, his grandmother, who warrants only a single line in the original biblical account. In Germain’s novel, Deborah is a guardian of memory. Exiled from her native Poland and with most of her family dead, Deborah, aged twenty, “bore the weight of a past going back several thousand years. She was a descendant of Abraham and Moses, a distant grain of sand from the desert of Judea, carried by the winds of exodus to Galicia, and now stranded on a tiny island in the ocean before cliffs as dazzling as they were inaccessible” (Germain 2000, p. 43). In Tobie des marais, Sylvie Germain “propose une lecture destinée non seulement à mettre en évidence la grande richesse du texte biblique mais aussi ses prolongements dans le monde actuel”,19 as Alain Schaffner points out (Schaffner 2004, p. 539). The deep trauma that Deborah carries throughout the twentieth century as her Jewish family encounters one horror after another is placed directly into the biblical text and becomes the means by which it is interpreted. The absence, or erasure, of her family and the apparent silence of God in the face of Jewish suffering throughout history become the focal points of Germain’s novel (and, indeed, of many of her other novels). If, following Schaffner, we are given a sense that the contemporary novel must settle its accounts with the sacred, it is precisely here, Germain suggests, in the face of human and divine absence, and in the deafening silence of God and man, that it needs to begin.

And this is precisely what happens. Where Egloff’s detective struggles to make any sense of the divine absence as he investigates (or, evading the enormity of the existential crises that such an abduction suggests, fails to investigate) the theft of the baby Jesus from the crib, Deborah discovers within the depths of her being, in the biblical heart, the means by which she can loosen the grasp of modern aporia: “she carried within her a vanished world, a world whose silenced voices and songs had continued to resonate in her heart in tune with the most arid, strident silence of that God she had never denied or forsworn, but endlessly appealed to and questioned” (Germain 2000, p. 145). The sea which exiles her “inscribed its lack of history, and time recounted over and over again its blank tale of forgetting and recommencement”, but Deborah carries in her own body the memory of her people, the Jewish people, and the voice of her Cantor father (Germain 2000, p. 44). Even after her marriage to a Christian, even after settling in France, even after relative after relative ends up dead and graveless, Deborah fulfils the role “of an invisible community, of a conduit of memory” as she builds “in the night, in the marshland mists, an immanent synagogue” (Germain 2000, p. 49). Religion, for Deborah, as for Danièle Hervieu-Léger, is a chain of memory (Hervieu-Léger 2000). Breaking free from what Hartog describes as the omnipresent presentism of our regime of historicity (Hartog 2015), she brings her people’s past into the church because she already carries it in her body and, specifically, in her heart: “Deborah did not convert. Though she went to church on Sundays, it was to be near her husband in what she called ‘his house of prayer’. […] And the murmur of her people’s chanting, of the voices of her youth and childhood, ancestral magnificent voices, resounded secretly within her body; a combined murmur of ocean, night and tears that drifted in her heart” (Germain 2000, p. 48).

What we find in Tobie des marais, then, is yet another response to secularization. If Egloff and Ferrari give us an absence of certainty about the significance of divine and human absence and Janvier presents us with a tentative exploration of traditional Catholic practice as a means by which transcendental intersubjectivity might be established, Sylvie Germain allows silence to echo through time and in the heart (Germain 1996) so that the re-enchantment of the world may be effected, the reason for Raphael’s baffling presence being finally revealed when he tells a hesitant Tobias to “enjoin silence and light” on Sara (Germain 2000, p. 168) so that her heart might be opened: he commands Tobias to throw the deeply symbolic “tongue and heart of the fish we caught” on the ground before Sara “so that the silence instilled in them wells up and spreads out. Wait a few minutes before crossing the threshold; you must let the place fill with silence, let it penetrate everything deeply. Then, it’s up to you to find the right words to secure the reconquered light” (Germain 2000, p. 168). It is in this intricate dance of words and silence that Sara’s hidden curse is removed and Tobias is finally able to overcome the traumas his family has carried through many generations, but it is only when Raphael breaks through the immanent frame of the modern novel that Tobias is able to fulfil his destiny, for “human beings have such great need of messengers, without whom they do not succeed in receiving news from their own hearts” (Germain 2000, p. 178). Heart speaks to heart in many ways in Germain’s work. Raphael’s heart speaks to Tobias’s, which enables him to speak to (and heal) Sara’s. The narrator may still retain the privileged ability to reach into these hidden places, but she is also able to lead us beyond the confines of the buffered self, and of the novel itself, as when she remarks that humans “are like the moon, which appears beneath a veil of grey clouds; the light they manage to cast does not come from them alone, it originates from a much more distant source, and everyone reflects it with greater or lesser intensity and bountifulness, depending on each one’s purity and patience of heart” (Germain 2000, p. 178). No longer emptied of the divine, the heart is recognized as a place of human and divine encounter, a place beyond words where the absent God can once more be heard: “So pure was the emptiness within her that only the ineffable name of God could ring there in silence” (Germain 2000, p. 43).

6. Conclusions

What we find, then, in these four novels—Joël Egloff’s J’enquête, Gaspard-Marie Janvier’s Le dernier dimanche, Jérôme Ferrari’s Le sermon sur la chute de Rome, and Sylvie Germain’s Tobie des marais—are what Charles Taylor (Taylor 2007), Peter Harrison (Harrison 2017), and others have identified as competing narratives of secularization. In very different ways, each novel addresses pressing questions of our secular age, foregrounding issues of human and divine absence, communion and intersubjectivity, and time and temporality. However, the ways in which they do so reveal that neither the secularization thesis nor the profanation of which Jean-Louis Chrétien writes has a completely free rein in modern fiction. Returning to the words of Coviello and Hickman, we can say that it is not just the secularization thesis that has a mysterious tenacity, afterlives not easily reckoned with: human and divine presence, as well as signs of human and divine absence, live on in the contested field of contemporary French literature.