References To History, Geography and Current Science
Apparently, Werfel obtained accounts of Bernadette from Lourdes families whose older members had known her. It is possible that a great deal of folklore and legend had been added to the plain facts by the time Werfel heard the tale.
Lourdes pilgrims often want to know more about Bernadette and do not realize that far from being a simple-minded shepherdess, she was a strong-willed young woman who stood by her story in the face of tough church and government inquiry. Werfel was able to work this aspect of her personality into his narration.
However, Werfel was not above fictionalization to fill in details or romanticize her story. He included a number of characters who did not exist, embellished others, and concocted a potential romance for Bernadette as well as a highly dramatic and fictionalized death scene. However, in the preface, Werfel states that readers will justifiably ask "What is true and what is invented?" Werfel answers that the most important events of the story are all true, and that it was easy to verify them because roughly only eighty years had passed between the events and the writing of the book. He declares: " The Song of Bernadette is a novel but not a fictive work".
The book should not be regarded as a factual account but as an historical novel. It seems to have been inspired in part by Emile Zola's Lourdes, a blistering denunciation of the industry that sprang up in Lourdes around the allegedly miraculous spring. Apparently Werfel believed the book might serve as a counterpoint to Zola's best-selling vitriol. One of his characters, Hyacinthe de Lafite, a member of the freethinkers' club that hangs around the town cafe, is a thinly disguised portrayal of Zola himself, re-imagined as a failed journalist/author who smugly casts Bernadette's experience in terms of the pagan history of the area.By the end of the book Lafite, the lady's "proudest foe", believing himself to be dying of cancer, is "lying on his knees" before the image of Bernadette's lady in the grotto.
Werfel goes into great detail about the cures at the Lourdes Spring, and has Dr. Dozous, the town physician, show Hyacinthe through the wards of the hospital, particularly a dormitory of women with a particularly virulent form of Lupus vulgaris in which the face rots and falls off. Werfel provides medical details and claims that some such women have been completely cured after washing in water from the spring, and reports that many more healings take place during the Blessing of the Eucharist ceremony which is held daily at the grotto. Most of these details seem to have been paraphrased from Zola's novel or from the research he did to write it.
Read more about this topic: The Song Of Bernadette (novel)
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