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PARTISAN REVIEW
The devices to which the cunning and selfish savage resorts
for the sake of easing himself at the expense of his neighbour
are manifold.
It is uncertain to what extent Frazer ever realised that 'the cunning
and selfish savage' is ubiquitous and eternal. He never let on. He was
a wise man and quietly finished his work. The dig at religious myth–
ology was comparatively safe.
The accumulated misfortune and sins of the whole people
are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to bear
them away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy.
But I must not go on quoting from
The Golden Bough.
It
is probably
accessible to every reader of these pages. Before I move to literary ter–
ritory, I would like simply to point out that a journalistic misuse of
the word 'scapegoat' is widely current to-day and that it is no part
of the word's original sense to imply blame. To-day we have lost the
sense of our own guilt. It is always 'they' and never 'we' who have
sinned. In this respect we have fallen below the moral and indeed
the psychological level of 'the cunning and selfish savage'
!
Anti–
Semitism and Vansittartism do not properly employ Jews or Germans
as scapegoats. They impute sin to the victim and name it as the cause
of the people's misfortunes. The function of a true scapegoat is bene–
ficial, and scapegoats are to be loved.
The night a new priest arrives in the village, a man is murdered
The new priest, sensitive, pale and mysteriously ill, turns out in the
end to be a girl. The murdered man was the expected priest. The girl
commits suicide after a confession. Lesbian practices lay at the root
of her disorder. In other words, she had broken a very serious
tabu.
The priest paid the price of her guilt and unhappiness. After
masquerading as a priest and thus taking his function to herself, she
also must die. That is the plot of
Un Crime,
the earliest, le.ast sophis–
ticated and perhaps even least mythological of Bernanos' novels and
the only one in which the subject-matter is explicitly that of a thriller.
However, no' novel by Bernanos is without a body.
Les Grands Cimetieres sous la Lune
is not a work of fiction and
does not concern us here. The work of Georges Bernanos divides
cleanly into two parts, the fiction (whose theme is constant and ob–
sessive) and the polemics.
Les Grands Cimetieres sous la Lune
is a
protest against the massacres perpetrated by Franco's men in Majorca.
