The Social Relationships In Les Thibault By Roger Martin Du Gard

Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) was one of the most famous French writers in the first half of the20th century. With his novel-cycle Les Thibault (1922-1940), he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in1937"for the artistic power and truth with which he has depicted human conflict as well as some fundamental aspects of contemporary life". The reward of Les Thibault had a profound social significance. Therefore, an exploration of the social relationships in Les Thibault and analysis of the prototype of the fictional universe become the keys of understanding Les Thibault and the literary creation of Roger Martin du Gard.The foreign studies on the works of Roger Martin du Gard are mainly focused on his non-involvement in politics, his narrative techniques, his dramatic art, the evolution of his opinion on war and religion, and his humanism. However, the study of the characters of Les Thibault, the exploration of his diary and correspondence, and the study of the reception and the translation of Les Thibault in China have merely begun. By choosing the social relationships in Les Thibault as a focal point, this thesis considers respectively the fictional French society in Les Thibault and the human conditions, the French society before the birth of Les Thibault and the author’s social environment, and the reception of Les Thibault in the Chinese society. Through the application of some literary and critical theories such as literary sociology, text analysis and comparative literature, our aim is to demonstrate the creation of the characters of Les Thibault, the relationships between the novel and the society, and to explain the personal experience of the author, his world outlook, his conception of the literary, his philosophy, the main factors of the creation of Les Thibault. This thesis will be the first monograph on Roger Martin du Gard in China.The first part of this thesis attempts to consider the characters of Les Thibault by situating them in their family and social relationships, and also to expound the novel’s comprehension of humanity and the world. Father’s authority, fraternity, love and gender relationships, religion, social hierarchy, these are the basical situations in which the major characters struggle to find and to understand themselves. First of all, the family relationships in Les Thibault can be divided into two general sections: father and son, brothers, represented by Mr Thibault and Jacques, Antoine and Jacques. Both of these two relationships are complicated:the three members of the Thibaults are tortured between affection and hate, intimacy and estrangement. In these relationships, the ideology has played a certain effect; the society and the social hierarchy act on the identity of the men in the family. Secondly, in the gender relationships, the male characters of Les Thibault often wave between sex and Platonic love, while the female characters struggle between dependence and independence. In the novel, before1914, women have less place than men. But since the outbreak of the First World War, the gender relationships change its regular state and massively women try to gain their own initiative either for family or social affairs. As a result of the social ideology and the economics, the war influences in his turn the social relationships and the evolution of the society. Thirdly, the story of Les Thibault starts after the separation of politics and religion, when the religion was receiving strong assaults from the science. But the hostility between catholics and protestants and the barrier between believers and nonbelievers are still very pronounced. Besides, the opposition between workers and bourgeois represents the major social conflict of the French society in the beginning of the20th century. Finally, although the numerous characters in Les Thibault are placed into different positions in family and social relationships, and sometimes even in totally opposite situations, the novel makes it clear that they share the same destiny:resistance to solitude, fear of death, incommunicability, confrontation between body and soul, the inexorability of history and social reality, etc. Lector’s point of view is thus directed to the existing conditions of the entire humanity, and the novel transcends individuality, time and space.The second part analyses the influence that the external world had played in the training of Roger Martin du Gard’s world outlook and literary concepts. After the study of the writer’s diary and correspondence and the summary of his thoughts on family relationships, gender relationships, social relationships and human destiny, we discover that the author’s own world is full of contradictions:optimism and pessimism, rebellion and conservatism, love and friendship, acquaintance of the human defects and compassion of the human destiny, appreciation of religious values and abomination of the Church’s abuses. Les Thibault can be considered as an autobiographical writing. This is not to say that the writer talked about his own life, but the fact that he extracted and purified the essence of his reflections on humanity and poured them into different but representative characters. Roger Martin du Gard’s whole outlook on life is carried by the daily life, the dialogues and the monologues of the characters which arouse resonances in the lectors. To achieve this purpose, Roger Martin du Gard developed his own methods of creation:emphasis on the reality and the vividness of the characters, profound exploration of their psychology, calm and objectivity of the writer, accumulation of materials and authenticity of historic documents, understanding of the dialectical relationships between form and content and between ensemble and section, use of the affirmative, the negative and the appearance... Roger Martin du Gard regarded these methods as completely different from those of the New French Review (Nouvelle Revue Francaise)’s writers:not only they carried on the realist tradition and the rigorous creation attitude of the predecessors, but also abandoned some weak points such as the prolix descriptions and discontinuity of the different texts. Nevertheless, Roger Martin du Gard’s success was inseparable from the New French Review. His writers had also acted on the creation of Les Thibault. Andre Gide, Gaston Gallimard, Jean Schlumberger, Georges Duhamel and Jacques Copeau contributed to the improvement and the publication of Les Thibault in different ways. A century after the foundation of the New French Review, a retrospective summary of the literary friendship between Roger Martin du Gard and these writers may help us comprehend the French society at that time and the social place of the literature.The final part of this thesis evaluates in the first place the reception of Roger Martin du Gard’s work among the Chinese public. Although most of his writings have been translated in Chinese, too little research works on them have been done in China and their lectors are becoming rare. The Chinese versions of Les Thibault haven’t been published since1992. To understand this phenomenon, the second chapter of this part explores the relationships between literature translation and the social reality by studying the changes of the Chinese’s modes of life and of their reading habit, the different ways of looking at the war by the Chinese and Europeans, the expectation horizon of the Chinese readers, the role of critics and ideology in the novel’s reception. The last chapter compares Les Thibault with a Chinese trilogy, Torrent(Family-Spring-Autumn,1932-1940) by BA Jin, although very different but which also considers family and social relationships:through the life experience of three brothers, Torrent depicts also how the youth faced the authority of the father and the family conflicts, how they struggled to create a new life against a social background of constant changes. The brothers Thibault and the brothers Gao are shackled by the father’s authority and the estrangement of their brothers, but at the same time, they nourish tender feelings for each other and are thirsty for their comprehension. At the beginning of the novel, the female characters had an inferior social status than men. With the development of the plot, women achieve more emancipation physically and spiritually. The two novels have also demonstrated the rising of the proletariat, the decline of the ruling class (bourgeoisie in Les Thibault and feudalism in Torrent), the petrifaction of religions (catholicism and Confucianism), and the confrontation between main ideologies and new ideas. Although the two novels are apparently against these main ideologies, they substantially denounce how men distort et take advantage of religions, and inspire the readers to recall the essence of religions and to ponder upon the relationships between men, between man and himself.Les Thibault has depicted a grand spectacle of the French society in the beginning of the20th century. Under the influence of social environment and personal experience, seeking unremittingly truth and literature, Roger Martin du Gard described how social relationships condition men and how men struggle like Sisyphus despite their perplexity and their anacatesthesia in the society. These themes run through Les Thibault; they demonstrate the pulse of the French society, and still have profound social significance nowadays.