Women writing in contemporary France

192 Transgressions and transformation
The most striking change, however, consists in the introduction of a
degree of self-consciousness or reflexivity into the novel. Prokop, now a
publisher, is given a story written by his neighbour M. Slavik. The untitled
autobiographical tale explains how M. Slavik came to realise that his dog
was an angel sent by God to watch over him. In a reflexive gesture, the
response to Prokop’s reading of this unlikely narrative raises the issue of
the relative conceptions of the nature of reality: ‘S’il n’avait pas connu monsieur
Slavik, il aurait lu cette histoire comme une fiction’ (If he hadn’t
known M. Slavik he would have read this story as a work of fiction), we are
told, but M. Slavik ‘n’avait écrit que pour relater des faits qu’il jugeait réels’
(p. 170) (had written only to relate facts which he judged to be true). The
ontological status of ‘reality’ is itself in question; one man’s ‘reality’ is
another’s fantastic. Furthermore, M. Slavik’s words to Prokop explicitly
raise the problematic issue of reception: ‘Vous comprenez qu’il y aurait une
grande impudeur à publier ces lignes qui ne pourraient que paraître ridicules
à la plupart des lecteurs’ (p. 169) (You understand that it would be
very unwise to publish these lines which could only appear ridiculous to
most readers).
As a Christian novelist, it may be that Germain faces an impossible
task. The Christian point of view should ideally be seen to prevail, yet it
must do so without alienating the non-believer, without the author’s presenting
us with an open and closed case. As she herself points out in Les
Echos du silence, stasis and closure are the marks of closed minds: ‘Tout
intégrisme hait le mouvement’ (p. 36) (All fundamentalism abhors movement).
The Christ of the resurrection, Germain states, could only be represented
by means of dynamic, open forms: ‘toute peinture où la force
prime la forme, où le mouvement brise les lignes, où vibre la lumière, où la
vitesse transfigure le visible’ (p. 45) (any painting in which force is more
important than form, in which movement shatters line, in which light
vibrates, in which speed transfigures the visible). By openly acknowledging
the twin issues of both reception and relative world-views by means of
reflexive gestures to the reader, Germain certainly does go some way
towards opening up her texts, but it may be that another, more intractable
problem remains: how can one describe the ineffable?
Statements which appear in her later novels acknowledge this
dilemma too. In Immensités, commenting on the state of mind of those who
succumb to despair, is a statement which ultimately seems to question the
capacity of any art form to represent Christianity: ‘Ils avaient cru, ces deux
êtres aux cœurs trop épris d’absolu, que la beauté, que le salut résidaient