The Nobel Prize in Literature 1937
Roger Martin du Gard
Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1937
The recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Literature for 1937, Roger Martin du Gard, has dedicated most of
his activity to a single work, a long series of novels with the
collective title, Les Thibault (1922-40). It is a vast
work both in the number of its volumes and in its scope. It
represents modern French life by means of a whole gallery of
characters and an analysis of the intellectual currents and the
problems that occupied France during the ten years preceding the
First World War, a gallery as full and an analysis as complete as
the subject of the novel permitted. The work has therefore taken
a form especially characteristic of our era, called the
«roman fleuve» in the country of its origin.
The term designates a narrative method that is relatively little
concerned with composition and advances like a river across vast
countries, reflecting everything that is found on its way. The
essence of such a novel, in large as well as small matters,
consists in the exactitude of this reflection rather than in the
harmonious balance of its parts; it has no shape. The river
lingers at will and only rarely does the undercurrent disturb the
smooth flow of its surface.
Our age can hardly be called calm; on the contrary, the speed of
the machines accelerates the rhythm of life to the point of
agitation. It is strange, therefore, that in such an age the most
popular literary form, the novel, should have developed in a
totally opposite direction, and by so doing have become only the
more popular. Still, if the novel offered us the satisfying world
of fantasy, one could explain this phenomenon in psychological
terms as a sort of poetic compensation for the frustrations of
daily life. But it is precisely the heart-rending anguish of
reality that the novel takes such time to sound and to
emphasize.
Nevertheless, the novel is there, with its boundless substance,
and the reader finds a certain solace in the heightened awareness
which he acquires from the inevitable element of tragedy inherent
in all life. With a kind of heroism, it swallows reality in large
draughts and encourages us to bear even great sufferings with
joy. The reader's aesthetic demands will be satisfied in isolated
sections of the work which are more condensed and therefore
better suited to call forth his feelings. Les Thibault
does not lack such sections.
The essential characters of the novel are three members of the
same family: the father and two sons. The father remains in the
background; his passive role, one of weight and massiveness, is
presented by a special technique. The two sons and the countless
secondary characters of the work are presented in a dramatic
manner. Unprepared by anything in the story, we see them before
us, acting and speaking in the present; and we are given a
detailed and complete description of the setting. The reader must
be quick to grasp what he sees and hears, for the capricious and
irregular rhythm of life beats everywhere. He is helped in his
task by the writer's most perfected tool: the analysis of his
heroes' thoughts, expressed beyond words, an insight into the
darkness which engenders conscious actions. Martin du Gard goes
even further; he shows how thoughts, feelings, and the will can
be transformed before becoming words and acts. Sometimes exterior
considerations - habit, vanity, or even a simple gaucherie -
alter expressions and personality. This examination, at once
subtle and bold, of the dynamic processes of the soul obviously
constitutes Martin du Gard's most original and most remarkable
contribution to the art of characterizing human beings. From the
aesthetic point of view, this is not always an advantage, for the
analysis may appear cumbersome when its results do not seem
necessary to the story.
This introspective method is used even for the father's
character, but it is less complicated in his case. His
personality is already clear-cut and complete at the beginning of
the novel, for he belongs to the past. Events of the present no
longer affect him.
He is a member of the upper middle class, conscious of his status
and his duties, a faithful servant of the Church and a generous
benefactor of society, full of prudent advice. He really belongs
to a generation before his own, to the France of the July
Monarchy; that is why he is to come into more than one conflict
with the next generation, in particular with his sons. But this
conflict rarely reaches the verbal level, for the old man is too
convinced of his proper worth to engage in discussions. Hence the
perennial theme of the opposition of youth to age is not
specially treated here.
The representative of age appears above all in an attitude of
introspection and immutability; he relies heavily and
complacently on all that he thinks wise and just. No word can
influence him. In the isolation of his life, one might see the
whole tragedy of age if he were not himself so completely unaware
of the possibility of such a tragedy.
He is characterized rather by comic traits; profounder sentiments
are expressed only at the time of his death, in the face of his
human destiny. This expression is not direct but results from a
strictly objective, concrete description of the long martyrdom of
his agony. It is a moving description despite its minute detail.
Up to now he had been considered only from without, with the
exception of some rare instances when he had revealed what, even
in him, was hidden behind the façade he presented to the
world.
The difference between him and his oldest son receives little
emphasis. Antoine Thibault is a doctor. Entirely absorbed by his
profession, his father's moral and ethical points of view are
entirely alien to him. Morality is replaced in him by an intense
and conscientious devotion to research and to the exercise of his
profession. Master of himself, prudent, tactful, he has not the
least desire for opposition; he has not even time to think of it.
In the novel one witnesses his rapid evolution within prescribed
limits. He is a man ambitious for the future. At first he is
occasionally a little fatuous, but he soon commands respect by
his work.
Antoine becomes a sympathetic representative of the intellectuals
of his day, full of ideas, without prejudices in his conceptions,
but as a determinist convinced of the inability of the individual
to change whatever the general course of events may be. He is not
a revolutionary.
Quite different is his brother Jacques, who is several years
younger. The latter is too close to the writer's heart to suffer
any criticism. He is the hero of the work, and the exterior world
is examined and judged according to his ideals. His father's
responsibility for his evolution is considerable, but actually
Jacques, by his whole nature, is destined to be a revolutionary.
When the story begins, he is a schoolboy of fourteen in a college
run by priests. Although he dislikes and neglects his studies, he
commands respect by his intelligence. The catastrophe occurs when
he discovers a friend among his schoolmates, and their affection,
at this dangerous period of adolescence, takes an exalted and
seemingly erotic form. Their feelings are betrayed by their
letters, misinterpreted (as, indeed, they are bound to be) by the
priests who intervene with disciplinary measures. The strict
surveillance and the very intrusion into his emotional private
life are an unbearable offense to Jacques. Furthermore, he has to
await his father's rage, stirred up by this scandal. His revolt
is expressed in action. He carries along his friend in his escape
far from all yokes, those he endured and those he feared in a
hostile and harsh world. He feels that his whole being, in the
grip of romantic poetry and of more dangerous tendencies, is
irreconcilable with the real world. Seeking happiness and
freedom, the two boys leave for Africa, but their visionary
project is destroyed in Marseilles by the efforts of the police
who had been alerted.
On his return, his father, in an excess of pedagogic zeal, makes
a psychological mistake; he condemns his son to solitary
confinement in a reformatory founded by himself. The oppression
of this confinement causes Jacques' indomitable personality to
emerge even stronger and fiercer. The account of this development
is the most moving episode in the work.
After he has been released owing to his brother's influence,
Jacques is permitted to pursue his studies, his only consolation.
He does brilliantly and is easily accepted by the École
Normale, the supreme goal of all ambitious and talented students
and the open door to all top literary or scientific careers. But
Jacques cannot be attracted by an official career that for him is
only a void and an illusion; he soon sets out for adventure and
reality. Once more the boy escapes to Africa, but this time he
succeeds and he remains absent from the narrative for a long
time.
He is seen again when Antoine discovers his residence - in
Switzerland among the revolutionaries - and brings him back to
their father's deathbed. He arrives too late for a
reconciliation, even if one considered a reconciliation between
these two diametrically opposed concepts of life possible. The
old man does not recognize him, but Jacques feels a deep sorrow,
for he is not one of those people who, obsessed with mankind's
future happiness, begin by stifling every trace of humanity in
themselves.
Such is the outline of Jacques' inner life as far as it is known.
For the rest he remains rather elusive, as before, but we notice
the author's great appreciation of his faculties and of his
character.
We get to know him fully when the novel approaches its conclusion
and at the same time its height of epic grandeur - in the summer
of 1914 just before the world catastrophe. Jacques is in Geneva,
having left Paris soon after his father's death in order to
escape the necessity of inheriting a fortune in a society which
he scorns. He belongs to a group of socialist and communist
reformers whose immediate mission is to halt the threat of war by
the revolt of the masses. The description of these agitators is
one of the least successful passages in the book; the overall
impression, whether intended or not, is that these men are not
worthy of their mission.
But Jacques' stature increases in everyone's eyes when he leaves
Geneva and returns to Paris to accomplish his mission. His
development is moral rather than intellectual; his actions have
no great results, but he saves his soul. The description of the
last days of July in Paris, with Jacques wavering between hope
and despair in this surcharged atmosphere, is a veritable tour
de force in Martin du Gard's novelistic achievement. The
history of this period revives, reawakens, as far as the masses'
role is concerned. But, as almost always, the role is not
decisive. The masses are impotent, blind, and in this case even
less familiar than usual with the game of politics that causes
such tragedies. The author himself seems not to be particularly
initiated, but he is tolerant and human, and his description, as
far as it goes, is truthful.
Against the background of this bewildering anxiety there occurs a
brief but highly illuminating episode of a completely different
character. Jacques meets again a young girl with whom he had
almost fallen in love several years before, but from whom he had
run away as he had run away from everything else. This time the
true spark is kindled between them. This fatal love story is one
of the most significant episodes in the novel; it is profoundly
felt and rendered in all its pure beauty precisely because it is
restricted to the dimensions that the breathless flight of days
imposes on the story. It lasts only a short time, but that is
enough to give it a tragic and simple beauty.
When all the political illusions vanish for Jacques at the
declaration of war, he recreates for himself a new illusion, born
of his despair and of is will to sacrifice. Right at the front
lines he tries to ward off the catastrophe by appealing from an
airplane to the two opposing armies, seeking to inspire in them a
common revolt and a desire to overthrow the powers which hold
them captive. Without hesitating he leaves Paris and the woman he
loves.
The adventure is stamped with the same schoolboy romanticism and
lack of reality as was his first flight out of the world, but
Jacques nonetheless carries out his plan with his customary
energy. His call for revolution is printed in Switzerland, the
airplane and pilot are ready, the expedition begins. It will not
last long, for he has hardly flown over the battlefield when the
plane crashes and catches fire with its whole load, men and
bundles of paper. Jacques himself falls, a heap of bruised and
burned flesh, among the retreating French troops. All his
perception is restricted to a vague sensation of the bitterness
of defeat and to unbearable and infinite physical torments, which
are finally relieved by the bullet of a compatriot tired of
dragging along this ill-fated person whom he holds to be a spy
anyhow.
It is difficult to imagine a bitterer dénouement to a
tragedy or a crueller irony in a defeat. But Martin du Gard did
not direct his irony toward his hero. Perhaps he wanted to show
the brutality and the cruelty of world events as opposed to
idealistic tendencies. His bitterness is certainly justified
here, but the long detailed description of the whole episode
becomes almost intolerable in its scrupulous exactitude.
Jacques Thibault, as we finally get to know him, lives in our
memory as a heroic figure. Without the least grandiloquent
attitude or word, this upright, silent, and reserved man receives
at last the seal of grandeur: grandeur of will and courage.
Whenever the novel centres on him, the writer's untiring work
achieves persuasive eloquence. After his pointed and sceptical
analysis of the human soul, which almost consumes its object with
its often extreme exactness in detail, through the most minute
realism possible, Martin du Gard finally pays homage to the
idealism of the human spirit.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1937
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