Artful Dogma: The Immaculate Conception and Franz Werfel's Song of Bernadette

Man can only live in the name of the miracle. --Franz Werfel You know, Felice, Werfel is really miraculous. --Franz Kafka A Jew confirmed in his Jewish identity through Nazi persecution, (1) Expressionist poet, dramatist, and novelist Franz Werfel (1890-1945) nonetheless regarded his art as fundamentally Christian, expressing in symbols the truths of the faith. (2) In his so-called "Theologoumena," composed in his exile in the United States between 1942 and 1944 and first published during the year before his sudden death in 1945 at age 55, Werfel asserts, "In every great work of literature, a lofty, theological symbolism can be shown to exist" (BHE 220). He goes on to explain more clearly what he means by "theological symbolism": "The highest possible form of modern narrative writing consists of the mystic basic facts of the spiritual realm (creation of the world, fall of man, incarnation, resurrection, etc.) depicted by the most artful and economical means of realism in the least spectacular events and figures of the everyday present" (250-51). Of necessity, Werfel admits, "Only a very few of the higher intellects among the readers will recognize this symbolism, but they must never lose the blissful feeling that the author hasn't the slightest inkling of the secrets hidden in his simple tale" (251). Werfel's characterization of reader response would seem to apply in particular to the critical reception of his own historical novel The Song of Bernadette (Das Lied yon Bernadette), an international bestseller from its first appearance in 1941 and the inspiration in 1943 for an Academy Award-winning film by the same title. Writing fifty years later, in 1994, bibliographer Jennifer E. Michaels observes, "Despite the novel's enormous popular and commercial success and the almost uniformly superlative tone of the reviews, it has received surprisingly little critical attention until recently, except for brief mentions and summaries of the plot" (101). Lionel Steiman's 1985 book, Franz Werfel: The Faith of an Exile: From Prague to Beverly Hills, remains the most serious, sustained study of Werfel's religious thought, but Steiman finds "any attempt to trace the specific origins of [Werfel's] thought or its relation to the work of contemporary philosophers and theologians highly problematic" and, therefore, he pointedly makes "no attempt ... to do so" (7). Indeed, Steiman explicitly denies that Werfel's theological commitment had any depth, describing the Czech, Austrian, and finally "American" novelist's religious devotion (Frommigkeit) as "an aestheticism and a humanism dressed up in philosophical and theological garb" (192). With reference to The Song of Bernadette, Steiman writes: "As for the question of the novel's 'Catholicity' in general, its message was not one of dogma but of faith, a faith that was more Expressionist than Catholic: the simple inarticulate piety Werfel saw rooted in the sources of our being, the elementary and elemental forces of our immediate reactions and instinctive loves, prior to all reflection and culture" (151). Contra Steiman, I find no evidence to support this putative separation of "religious faith" from dogmatics in Werfel's novel. In this essay I follow Werfel's own lead, (3) spelled out in the quotation from the "Theologoumena" with which I began, in reassessing The Song of Bernadette precisely as a work of realistic fiction that depicts a dogma, one of the "mystic basic facts of the spiritual realm"--namely, the Immaculate Conception--albeit in a manner, proper to art, that carefully conceals that dogmatic depiction. (4) Disclosing this artfully hidden dimension requires me to take seriously Werfel's own invocation of allegoresis as necessary to the right reading of his Expressionist hagiography. "'None of my books, not even The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, is so full of meaning as The Song of Bernadette,' he wrote in the spring of 1942,'" adding, "'I am finally convinced that I have written a book appropriate to these times, although its action concludes in the year 1933'" (qtd. …