Word: sylva
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sylva slowly, painfully struggles away from the animal world. She escapes to the forest, only to discover that it rejects her new body. She escapes again to shack up with a feeble-minded woodcutter and returns to embarrass the prissy Richwick with her uninhibited advances (in a satirical switch, Vercors has Richwick study Freud in order to give Sylva some inhibitions). But the major gap that separates human from animal mentality is man's conscious awareness of his own existence. Eventually, Sylva makes the leap, and from the frightening moment when she discovers herself as an individual entity separate...
Sugar-Coated Pill. Vercors counterpoises Sylva's struggle upward with the sordid decline of Richwick's sometime girl friend into a drug-addicted, sexually perverted mindlessness. After a dash of degradation with her in London, Richwick escapes to come back home as a love-smitten Pygmalion to his Galatea-who turns out to be pregnant...
...unborn offspring his? Will it even be human? The answers supply some neat fillips at book's end, but they are only part of the literary sugar-coating on Vercors' pill. For pill it is, Vercors is not so much a novelist as a moralist, and Sylva is not so much a novel as a fable-an edifying tale designed to explore the question that has been bothering 59-year-old Jean Brüller ever since he took the pen name Vercors and wrote the book that made his reputation: The Silence...
Vercors' writing since the war has probed and worried that question-most notably in the bestselling You Shall Know Them (1953), which, like Sylva, examines man in terms of his relation to animals. The animals in the earlier novel were a species of hominid, subhuman, but capable of breeding with men-which Vercors used, as he uses his fox-lady, to exemplify his belief in the power of the aspiring will to change and transcend the natural, i.e., animal, condition...
...fruitful." Vercors insists. "The yogi working by himself for himself is a dead end. In my book, the forms and standards of society are represented by Richwick-that's why he may seem something of a prig. But it is these very forms, personified in Richwick, that give Sylva a direction and pattern for her development. And in dedicating himself to her, he too is elevated...