Writing in times of barbarism

For an essay I am writing, for some months now I have been immersed in the ascetic film work of Robert Bresson, one of the masters of transcendental cinema according to the theorist and filmmaker Paul Schrader. Two of Bresson's best films, Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette, are based on texts by the French novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos, who now returns to Catalan bookstores with what is probably his masterpiece: A Diary of My Times. La Nova Editorial Moll is publishing the completely revised translation by Antoni-Lluc Ferrer, which had to wait forty years to be released in its original edition, and it does so with notes by the historian Josep Massot i Muntaner, who went as far as to declare that this very harsh book represents, with absolute fidelity, the abominable disasters that took place in Mallorca during the Civil War.

In fact, Georges Bernanos, who had exiled himself to the island to flee from economic misery, was initially favorable to the Francoist side, as the good monarchist, conservative, and fervent Catholic that he was, but when he became aware of the atrocities committed, he wrote A Diary of My Times, a raw and exceptional novel, but also a political pamphlet, the most important according to Hannah Arendt, since it is built as a fierce denunciation of the barbarity and complicity of those who, in the name of order, the fatherland, or religion, blessed mass murders. The greatness of Bernanos lies in the fact that he dares to question his own coreligionists and to confront the hypocrisy of the Church and the right wing, turning his ideological disappointment into a moral demand. His prose—incandescent, furious, without concessions—transforms mere direct testimony into combat literature, and indignation into a form of rebellion of enlightened lucidity. Under the satellite that has so inspired poets and figures of world literature, the cemeteries become the symbolic image of a Europe that was brooding future hecatombs, and Bernanos, with tragic clairvoyance, reminds us that horror begins when the pits are filled and is perpetuated when everyone agrees to look the other way and remain silent.

We are facing a book of the highest literary quality and terribly uncomfortable that in this necessary reissue becomes a political gesture of the first order: in the face of this return of proudly neo-fascist forces, against the rise of right-wing and far-right parties that scourges Europe like a dreadful echo, it is convenient to reread or read for the first time A Diary of My Times, by Georges Bernanos, one of the major works regarding the representation of genocides to which ideologies that destroy human rights and mortally wound the democratic bastions that have cost so much to build can lead.