Research Paper On Louis Mauriac

Vipers’ Tangle
By: Franҁois Mauriac A. Author’s Background

Franҁois Mauriac * born in Bordeaux, France on October 19, 1885 * his mother was a devout Catholic and was influenced of Jansenist thought * studied at the University of Bordeaux and received his M.A. on 1905 * stayed only for a few months in École des Chartes on 1908 and decided to devote himself entirely to Literature * Mauriac’s style is poetic * Forez was his pseudonym * In 1952, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life. * According to his speech in the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, in December 10, 1952,
Even the most miserly old sinner like Louis who strips himself of all his old illusions as he prepares for his inevitable end. Taking a cold, hard look at his life, and at the consequences of his meanness and solipsism, Louis begins to understand how a deliberate self-deception has shaped his life for ill, not for good. We are presented with a malevolent old man on his deathbed; the author’s case is simply this: no one is beyond the reach of God’s grace. Without romanticizing Louis, Mauriac expresses the tragedy of a wasted life, the tragedy of a man who has closed himself off from a community of love to wallow in his own despair. Louis is sinned against as well as sinning, but he reserves many of his harshest judgments for himself. He is honest, not hypocritical, and he often turns his cruelty inwards. But God’s grace reached him even though the members of his family are lukewarm Christians who spied upon his actions and whom he himself tormented. At fault, they have been driving him to despair and blinding his eyes to the light of
* The choice of words is evidence that his writing style is poetic: like when Louis said the following lines: * “You must see at least that there exists in me a secret chord; that which Marie set vibrating” * “Imagine waking up at sixty, born again at the point of dying.”

* With subtlety and wisdom, Mauriac traces the transformation of this tortured soul by the light of God's grace

h. Optimistic * When Louis goes through transformation that he should have achieved thirty or forty years earlier, he said that it’s never too late to begin their lives over again. * He knows that his children do not believe in his transformation and religiosity but does not feel bad about it since Janine, his granddaughter, believes in him and he is contented with that – that he is able to succeed in penetrating just one soul, before he