Michel Tournier, Christian Fiction, and Homosexuality: A Second Response to John M. Dunaway. (Dialogue)

This is the last of four essays that, beginning as a discussion of French novelist Michel Tournier, has evolved into a debate on the qualities that fiction must have to be considered Christian. In the first essay John M. Dunaway argued that Tournier claims to be a Christian writer but publishes novels contrary to Christianity, and he specifically criticized Tournier's novel about the Magi, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar. In replying, I offered evidence that Tournier does not claim to be a Christian writer but that nevertheless Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar is a Christian novel. Professor Dunaway has since answered, graciously accepting my definition of a Christian novel and clarifying some of his points. In this, my second reply, I will further explore our disagreements: whether Tournier claims to be a Christian writer (he does not), whether Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar is a Christian novel (it is), and why Tournier's other fiction cannot be classified as Christian (its ideas are too heretical). Beyond those questions, though, is a broader one--namely, how Christian fiction may treat "the ethics of `sexual orientation'" (Dunaway, "Tournier" 107). That is where we disagree the most strongly. In his second article Dunaway reiterates a point that, though prominent in his original essay, he has now relegated to an endnote: the claim that Tournier has called himself a Christian writer ("Tournier" 108n1). There is no point in repeating the evidence I have already presented showing that the statement by Tournier quoted by Dunaway is more accurately translated as "I have always considered myself a writer who is also a believer" (Petit, "Michel Tournier" 313-14). I must, however, contest Dunaway's assertion that "in a predominantly Christian culture" if one says one is a "believer, one will naturally be understood to mean a Christian" ("Tournier" 108n1). Surely when as precise a writer and speaker as Tournier says he is a "believer," that is what he means and not something else. (1) Of more moment, however, is whether Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar is a Christian novel. Dunaway has accepted my definition that a novel must be considered Christian if, "as a whole, it reflects Christian beliefs more or less explicitly and in a fashion that presents those beliefs as true. The beliefs need not be those of a particular church, but they must conform to the central doctrines of Christian churches generally or derive clearly from the Gospels and Christian tradition" ("Michel Tournier" 320). Although Dunaway says that Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar "fails to qualify" under this definition ("Tournier" 106), his reasoning is unpersuasive. One of Dunaway's objections has to do with passages from a different novel by Tournier, Le Roi des aulnes, and is therefore irrelevant. His only specific complaint concerning Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar itself is that the novel's "focus on the Incarnation strikes [him] as being too much" like the theology of Thomas J. J. Altizer and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ("Tournier" 106). This claim is unconvincing because he does not show what in the novel suggests those authors' ideas, does not explain why he cannot consider their theologies to be Christian, (2) and does not explain why focusing on the Incarnation would disqualify Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar as a Christian novel. The Incarnation is of supreme importance in the novel, but that is to be expected in a book about the Magi. One may certainly question the novel's theology. I have said elsewhere that because the fourth wise man, Taor, is carried bodily to heaven before the Crucifixion, "he is not saved by Christ's death [and] not justified by his Resurrection, because those events have not yet happened" (Michel Tournier's Metaphysical Fictions 146). The plot and themes of Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, however, center around the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus, which not only are presented as true but are expounded by the archangel Gabriel on Christmas Eve near the center of the novel (169-73). …