Michel Bernanos
Michel Bernanos was a French author born on January 20, 1923, and the son of renowned novelist Georges Bernanos. His early life was marked by significant upheaval, beginning with his family's relocation from Paris to Majorca after his father's accident in 1933. Later, during a period of self-imposed exile due to the impending European conflict, the Bernanos family moved to a farm in Brazil, where Michel developed a deep interest in the plight of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. His experiences in South America, alongside his service in the Free French Naval Forces during World War II, profoundly influenced his literary work.
Michel Bernanos is perhaps best known for his surreal novel "La Montagne morte de la vie," published posthumously in 1964, which explores themes of transformation and survival. The narrative follows an eighteen-year-old cabin boy aboard a seventeenth-century French ship, confronting challenges that culminate in a shipwreck on a mystical island. Critics have noted the rich imagery and complex symbolism in Bernanos's writing, drawing parallels to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, particularly in the depiction of anthropomorphized landscapes. The novel has garnered varied interpretations, further establishing Bernanos's place in the literary canon despite his tragic end.
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Michel Bernanos
Fiction Writer
- Born: January 20, 1923
- Birthplace: France
- Died: July 1, 1964
- Place of death: France
Biography
Born in France on January 20, 1923, Michel Bernanos was the fourth of six children. When his father, Georges Bernanos, the noted philosophical novelist and essayist, was disabled by a traffic accident in 1933, the family lost their home in Paris and moved to the Spanish island of Majorca, where they stayed until 1938. In that year, Georges Bernanos began a seven-year period of self-imposed exile; because of the imminent European conflict he correctly predicted, he relocated the family to a farm in Brazil. During these years in South America, Michel Bernanos became interested in the welfare of the Indian people of the Amazon basin. During the war years, while his father wrote essays in defense of French culture, gaining the title “bard of the French resistance,” Michael Bernanos served in the Free French Naval Forces. Both his time in South America and his naval experience in World War II inform his later work.
Michel Bernanos is best remembered for his surreal fantasy novel La Montagne morte de la vie, published after his death by suicide in July of 1964. The book, whose title appeared as The Other Side of the Mountain when it was published in English in 1968, is divided into two parts. The first half focuses on an eighteen-year-old cabin boy on a seventeenth century, French ship bound for Peru. He endures a number of hardships, including the crew’s insurrection and their cannibalization of the captain. The second half follows the fate of the protagonist and his one friend, the ship’s cook, on the extraordinary island upon which they have been shipwrecked. It eventually becomes clear to both men that the island is alive and that they are themselves undergoing a metamorphosis in which they will eventually be incorporated into the fabric of the landscape.
Critics have differed in their interpretations of the meaning of the novel, but all have agreed on the richness of its imagery and the complexity of its symbolism. A number of commentators have remarked on the author’s debt to the nineteenth century American author Edgar Allan Poe, particularly his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which includes a mutiny, shipwreck, and sensational adventures in the South Seas. In Bernanos’s book, the entire island has a heartbeat, and one mountain dominates its topography. This mountain contains a crater whose floor is covered in a lake of blood upon whose surface a giant eye floats. From details such as these, Bernanos appears to have been inspired by other Poe tales and poems that feature anthropomorphized landscapes.