Lost among the supporting castFrench author Romain Rolland won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature shortly after publishing what is considered his magnum opus, a series of ten novels under the collective title of Jean-Christophe. This saga chronicles the life and career of fictional composer Jean-Christophe Krafft, who was born and raised in Germany but spends much of his life in France. When these ten novels were published in English translation, they were released in three volumes. The third of these volumes, sometimes appearing under the title of Jean-Christophe: Journey’s End, consists of novels eight, nine, and ten of Rolland’s series, respectively titled Love and Friendship, The Burning Bush, and The New Dawn.
The most surprising and disappointing aspect of this third volume of Jean-Christophe is just how small a part the title character actually plays in these last three volumes. Rolland seems to have become bored with his composer protagonist and feels the need to veer off into the life story of every supporting character in the series. Christophe barely appears in Love and Friendship. Instead, that novel focuses largely on his best friend and former roommate Olivier. The main plot concerns Olivier’s troubled marriage, but the reader is also treated to the back stories of Olivier’s friends and neighbors, his wife Jacqueline, and her family.
Olivier is still prominent in the first half of The Burning Bush, but the plot moves in a different direction when Christophe gets halfheartedly involved with the Socialist movement in Paris. In the second half of the ninth volume, a new woman enters Christophe’s life. One can clearly see the predictable direction where this is going and can only reluctantly ride out Christophe’s poor judgment and the impending certain disaster of that relationship. Much emotional angst ensues, and the reader’s eye rolls continue when the previously independent and freethinking Christophe finds God.
The final novel, The New Dawn, is a bit of an improvement over the previous two. At least it contains a trace of optimism in a new romance for Christophe, and he finally starts to show some maturity. Christophe moves around quite a bit over the course of these novels, from Germany to France to Switzerland and to Italy. This gives Rolland the opportunity to comment upon the national spirit of these different countries and cultures. In the early novels this felt more like stereotyping, but here at the end one can see Rolland sketching the mindset of Europe leading up to World War I. This historical commentary is probably the Jean-Christophe saga’s saving grace. Rolland also includes much commentary on the arts, but Christophe’s music career really gets lost in these last three novels. Christophe’s old age, however, allows Rolland to illustrate the cyclical process by which each generation of artists starts out as revolutionary youths and then matures and mellows with age.
Rolland was primarily known as a Romantic writer, but here in Jean-Christophe he ventures somewhat unsuccessfully into Naturalism, trying to illustrate how lives are molded by heredity and social forces. Unlike the naturalist masterworks of Emile Zola, however, there is no apparent master plan to Jean-Christophe. The narrative just seems to meander haphazardly, veering off into spontaneous digressions. The first few novels in Volume 1 of Jean-Christophe are quite captivating, but the series only loses steam as it moves forward and fails to live up to the promise of Christophe’s youth. This last and weakest of the three volumes is a struggle to get through.
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Heavy on cultural criticism, light on plotJean-Christophe is the title of a series of ten novels written by French author Romain Rolland, winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. Originally published from 1904 to 1912, the ten books chronicle the life of fictional musician and composer Jean-Christophe Krafft. Upon translation into English, these ten novels were consolidated into three volumes published from 1911 to 1913. The second volume includes the fifth, sixth, and seventh novels in the series, respectively titled The Marketplace, Antoinette, and The House. This second volume is also known by the title of Jean-Christophe in Paris because the German-born character has emigrated to France and spends most of these three novels in that nation’s capital city.
At the end of the fourth novel, Revolt, Christophe (as he is most frequently called) fled Germany to avoid legal troubles. At the beginning of The Marketplace, he finds himself in Paris with hardly a penny to his name and only a couple acquaintances in town that he can call on for assistance. He tries to pursue a career in music but is thwarted in his efforts by shallow, self-serving critics who fail to understand his art. Every hero must undergo arduous trials before achieving success, and The Marketplace is the novel in which Christophe undergoes maximum martyrdom. In the four novels of Volume 1, it was evident that Rolland chose a German protagonist as a means to criticize German arts, politics, and culture. When Christophe comes to Paris in Volume 2, however, Rolland points his finger inwards and criticizes France, scrutinizing and censuring every aspect of his homeland’s way of life. In The Marketplace, much of Rolland’s critical analysis is leveled at music, to the degree that anyone without a master’s degree in classical music is likely to understand the totality of his argument.
The sixth novel, Antoinette, is a horse of a surprisingly different color and really a refreshing intermission in the series. Christophe is barely mentioned in this book. Instead, Rolland focuses on the saga of the Jeannins, a family that will play an important part in Christophe’s life. Rolland’s writing here is more naturalistic in tone, calling to mind the novels of Zola or Flaubert. Antoinette, the novel, is far more engaging and moving than the other two books included in Volume 2, perhaps because Antoinette Jeannin, the character, is a more sympathetic protagonist than Christophe himself.
With The House, Rolland returns to cultural criticism. Christophe moves into an apartment building where the tenants represent different classes and ideologies within French society. As he gets to know his neighbors, he learns more about the French mindset and values. Again, most of the criticism is negative, but here the subject matter is less about music and more about politics, war, and just the general French character. The most important development in Christophe’s life is that he now has a roommate and best friend, Olivier Jeannin. Rolland uses the pairing to contrast the two individuals as representations of the German and French national spirits. The two share a bond that for all intents and purposes appears to be a gay partnership, except Rolland shies away from that by occasionally having one of them pursue a woman. If the relationship is merely friendship, the intensity with which it is portrayed is unrealistic, at least for twentieth-century adults.
Having read seven-tenths of Jean-Christophe, I’m assuming the arc of the novel is about the title character’s maturation and self-discovery. The problem is, so far Christophe still comes across as kind of a childish jerk—a self-centered, arrogant man who blusteringly stumbles through social interactions like a bull in a china shop. I’m hoping in Volume 3 he finally grows up.
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The first four stages of a musician’s life
French novelist, playwright, and essayist Romain Rolland won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. This was due in no small part to his recently completed magnum opus Jean-Christophe, a series of ten novels published from 1904 to 1912. In the Jean-Christophe cycle, Rolland charts the cradle-to-grave trajectory of one character, a German-born musical prodigy named Jean-Christophe Krafft. When translated into English, these ten novels were published as a three-volume edition by Henry Holt and Company. The English-language Volume 1, published in 1911, contains the first four of Rolland’s Jean-Christophe novels: Dawn, Morning, Youth, and Revolt.
Christophe is born in a small unnamed German town on the Rhine. He comes from a long line of musicians. His grandfather and father are both professional players in the local symphony, though the elder is semi-retired and the father is an alcoholic has-been. When it is discovered at a young age that Christophe is a prodigy at the piano, he is groomed to follow the family profession, often through abusive methods. Despite his terrible childhood, Christophe does love music, and he achieves a level of virtuosity that exceeds his forbearers. As a child prodigy, Christophe enjoys the patronage of the Grand Duke and is often called to the castle to play his compositions.
Why would a French author choose to set his epic work in Germany? Rolland uses the setting to pontificate upon the “German soul,” to contrast the German and French natures, and to level a fair amount of criticism at Germany and its culture. Despite Rolland’s erudition, his broad generalizations on such topics often come across as nationalistic stereotypes, not only of Germany but also of France. In the process of Christophe’s musical development, Rolland manages to talk trash about the entire history of German classical music, accusing everyone from Beethoven to Brahms to Wagner of composing childish lies built upon false idealism.
Rolland could be considered the last of the great romanticists. Though he wrote at a time when European literature was well on its way into modernism, Rolland was still a holdout for the literary ideals of 19th century romanticism. That is evident in the plot of Jean-Christophe, which features an individualist protagonist who suffers repeated persecution and intense emotional angst in his struggle for self-fulfillment. Like his good friend Hermann Hesse, however, Rolland’s depictions of human nature are informed by modern psychological science, which results in characters more grounded in realism than those of traditional romanticists like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Victor Hugo. The vivid precision with which Rolland describes the natural environment, social conditions, and human psychology in Jean-Christophe often borders on naturalism.
Nevertheless, Rolland does occasionally lapse into maudlin territory. In Morning, for example, Christophe forms his first male friendship. The day after meeting this new pal, Christophe is writing letters to the guy saying “My soul . . . I love you.” Such effusive expressions of bromance are an unrealistic throwback to the 18th century days of Goethe. Christophe’s relationships with women, however, are much more grounded in 20th century realism. At times, Rolland concentrates so much on his hero’s love life that Christophe’s musical career is almost entirely forgotten. There are also large portions of the book in which Christophe comes across as a conceited jerk, making him difficult to root for, but he does grow as a human being and shows promise of redemption. Despite a few imperfections, Jean-Christophe is a monumental work of literature, and Rolland’s writing is exceptional. He crafts Christophe’s life with such fullness and intricacy that the reader can’t help but follow this narrative through to its end.
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Love in the face of war
Pierre and Luce is the story of two young lovers in Paris during World War I. Published in 1920, it was written by French author Romain Rolland, who won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel begins in January of 1918. Pierre, an 18-year-old Parisian, is scheduled to enter military service in six months, but despite the atmosphere of fervent patriotism that runs rampant during wartime, he is by no means enthusiastic about his impending entry into the French Army. He spots pretty young Luce on a train, and the two are brought together at the next station when they hold hands during a German bombing raid. Over the course of the book, the two get to know each other and fall in love, while ever the threat of war and Pierre’s future departure looms over them.
There is no combat depicted in novel, and only the briefest mention of air raids. Rather than focus on physical destruction or wartime hardships, Rolland concentrates primarily on the psychological effects of the war. Pierre and Luce are depicted as members of a lost generation who are disillusioned with the governing powers of the world and the false promises of nationalism. Their lives are out of their control, they no longer feel the freedom to dream, and they don’t plan for the future because they (at least Pierre) feel that they will have none. Nevertheless, Pierre and Luce manage to build a strong love in the face of this adversity. Throughout the book, Rolland expertly crafts a narrative that walks a delicate line between hope and hopelessness.
Further stacking the cards against them, Pierre and Luce are of two different social classes. The son of a judge, Pierre is firmly situated within the bourgeoisie while Luce is a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks. She makes her living by painting decorative copies of masterpieces, while her widowed mother labors in a munitions factory. Pierre has lived a sheltered life in which he has had no experience with the lower classes, and through getting to know Luce his eyes are opened to a whole new awareness of the lives of others. Though neither puts any stock in the restrictive system of social stratification, they both realize that Pierre’s family and social station would prohibit their marriage. What difference does it make, however, when Pierre will likely be marching off to his death in a few months? In that sense, war is the great leveler of class and serves as a unifying force between the two. Rolland does a great job of examining all the subtle implications of this class disparity, as well as supplying supporting characters who briefly demonstrate a shallowness and conformity in French society that contrasts with the genuineness of the lovers’ bond.
While Rolland’s depictions of war, class, and their effects on society and the human psyche are admirably realistic, the two young lovers are a bit too innocent to be believed. Pierre and Luce share a very idealized and idyllic love in the midst of the woes of the modern world. It’s almost as if Rolland is making a leap from romanticism to modernism while skipping over realism entirely. The over-romantic passages might prove annoying if it weren’t for the book’s brevity. To its credit, Pierre and Luce does not overstay its welcome. Compared to depictions of the World War I experience in other classic novels, Pierre and Luce is neither as bogged down in navel-gazing sensitivity as John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, nor as stoically deadpan as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The tone of Rolland’s novel falls somewhere squarely between the two, and ends up being a more satisfying read than both.
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