Spotlight on … Julien Gracq Chateau d’Argol (1938)

‘At the Lycée Claude Bernard in Paris during the 1950s a number of 16-year-olds were fascinated by their history and geography teacher, Monsieur Poirier. He was small, with short hair and dressed in a dark suit. Punctual and efficient, no one ever thought of playing tricks on him. When his teaching was over he gathered up his papers and went away. The reason for the particular interest in him was the discovery that Louis Poirier, who has died aged 97, was in fact Julien Gracq, the novelist, who had won (and refused) the Goncourt prize in 1951.

‘He had adopted this name from Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and from the Gracchi, the Roman heroes, Tiberius and Caius Sempronius. For his pupils he was the world of creative literature. But more than this, he was spoken of as one of the surrealists. Surrealism meant eccentricity and extravagance. How could the neat and precise Poirier fit into such a movement? They followed him to the Place Bianche to see him among the surrealists, as they followed him about Paris, eating his solitary meals. He remained a subject of mystery.

‘In his last years it was the population of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil who observed him with the same intentness. This village in Maine-et-Loire was his birthplace and, in his 80s, Gracq gave up his Paris flat to live there with his sister who, like him, had never married. The shopkeepers knew him well. One day he left his wallet at the florists, and she phoned Poirier before he had realised that he had lost it. When he came to fetch it he presented her with one of his books. Until then she had no idea that he was a writer.

‘As a novelist Gracq was a creator of mystery. He set his first one in Argol on the Isle de Crozon, western Brittany. To its dark forests and deserted moors, he added a labyrinthine chateau of the title Au Chateau d’Argol (1938). In the irregular architecture of this building, where the light appears as if through a curtain of silk, the main character, who has recently acquired the chateau, is unable to respond to the affection of a guest and to break out of his coldness. Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951, the winner of the spurned Goncourt), is a haunting novel with characters marked by the shadow of a past. Only at the end, as the principal character says, does the decor fall into place. Un Balcon en Foret (1958), the most accessible of the novels, tells the story of the war which has not yet become a war, that of 1939 to 1940, when ill-equipped French soldiers wait on events. Then the waiting ends; the Germans launch their devastating attack. The ending is Wagnerian. It is typical that although the author served in the French army during this period, this book is in no way autobiographical.

‘He believed in the importance not so much of style but of form. As his example, he gave the sayings of the countryside. Many of them are about the weather. These sayings are accepted. No one seeks to verify whether they are accurate. It is the form that makes them authentic.

‘Gracq was also a lucid critic. Perhaps the novelist and the critic came together best in the pieces that he wrote about London, after a visit in the summer of 1929. For Gracq, London was unknowable. He would ride in a bus until its finishing point, in some suburb. Then he would continue to walk in the same direction. Yet he saw the Thames as a river that seemed to control London, from the sordid pubs of the Isle of Dogs to the sleepy teashops of Richmond.

‘His refusal to accept the Goncourt prize was based on his dislike of the publicity that he saw surrounding literature in the 1950s. He has seen his fears confirmed by the role that television has played in making authors and their books the subject of commercialism. He refused invitations to appear on French radio and television and politely turned down three invitations from President Mitterrand to dine at the Élysée.’ — Douglas Johnson

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Extras

The heritage of Julien Gracq

Footage: Julien Gracq and Ernst Junger in 1988

Julien Gracq and Salvador Dali (in French)

‘Julien Gracq: Entetien’, a documentary in French

La mort de Julien Gracq

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Further

Julien Gracq Website (in French)
Julien Gracq Fansite (in French)
Video: Julien Gracq refuses the Prix Goncourt
‘Julien Gracq is smarter than all of us’
‘Anorexia of Literature: Julien Gracq’s Refusal of the 1951 prix Goncourt’
JG obituary @ The Independent
Julien Gracq’s King Cophetua @ The Quarterly Conversation
Julien Gracq’s A Dark Stranger @ 50 Watts
Julien Gracq’s Reading Writing @ Isola di Rifiuti
‘Rencontres avec Julien Gracq’
‘Le Rivage des Syrtes de Julien Gracq’
‘Manuscrits de guerre, de Julien Gracq’
‘Le balcon, une théorie du lyrisme dans Un balcon en forêt?’
Julien Gracq @ goodreads
JG’s books @ Amazon
Buy ‘Chateau d’Argol’ @ Pushkin Press

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Misc

Julien Gracq’s house

Manuscript page from ‘Chateau d’Argol’

Julien Gracq as a child (w/ friend)

Han Bellmer’s portrait of Julien Gracq

Julien Gracq refusing the Prix Goncourt

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Back to Breton
by Julien Gracq

Julien Gracq and André Breton, 1939. Photo: GBertrand

I do not believe that Breton would have truly welcomed the celebration of the centennial of his birth. Even though he may, in his own manner, have had something to do with the sacred, he had little interest in official, commemorative rites. Forever at odds with History, Surrealism, from the beginning, was never friendly with Memory, that impediment to a total receptivity of what could be, the blank page where revelation alone can be inscribed with all its power of renewal. Breton was utterly prospective, tracking what was emerging, rarely inclined to recapitulate; he was not a back-seat rider. Come to think of it, was he actually born in 1896? What he had in common with Malraux (and this was about all) was that he appeared relatively untouched by his childhood, which he more or less rejected as shabby, failed, too immature. He was really born around 1916: that is when things began to happen for him, towards the end of his adolescence, and the years immediately following.

Breton died in September 1966: a Fall burial that left me with an almost spring-like memory. Considerably more people attended than were ex- pected, many lovers bringing a flower and holding hands. And, shortly thereafter, the dislocation, then, dissolution of the group marked the official end of the movement. And yet …

… The black humor that sometimes nests within the dates of a biography alone prevented, less than some two years from then, an encounter which still leaves one imagining, that of Breton with May 1968. It is more difficult than one thinks to predict the opinion Breton would have had of the student uprising. Basically, Breton did not like success; he mistrusted it, he was born contrary (“All ideas that triumph rush to their demise”). He might have been violently shaken by the inimitable trivialization, indeed, caricature, of those ideas. From the start, moreover, he had structured his group, not in a way to enlarge more fully its communication, but as an order of chosen depositors, having taken an oath to “absolute Surrealism,” in a word, rather than as propagandists, an elite phalanx garrisoning around him the “château étoilé.” I do not believe he ever seriously took into account the possibility of an actual surrealistic wildfire, really putting the masses into motion. But it is certain that, without always knowing it, the unforeseen libertarian explosion of May ’68, which, more than a political revolution, sought to change life according to the law of desire, here and now—”immediately and without delay”—and which so strongly disconcerted the entire institutionalized Left, even so far as within the fabric of its language and formulae, had to do much more with Breton than with Sartre, or especially Aragon, both of whom attempted to have themselves anointed by the resurrected Sorbonne. One day, sometime after the “events,” Georges Pompidou told me, “Actually, what happened there was all about Breton.”

Has [Surrealism] finished its journey? The world which is now being made—or unmade—in front of our eyes, after having explored in vain the classic paths of political revolution, is no doubt one of those which Breton would have cursed with the least amount of reservation, and also with the most justification. The instantaneous monetary standardization of all human activity—the promotion of art on the market level—the advent of a society exclusively obsessed with “uses” of money and mer- chandise production, in which, according to Thomas Pollack Nageire in the Exchange (Claudel), “everything is worth so much,” headed, moreover, towards cretinization by the media and political economy, where both the unemployed worker’s daily news and the intelligentsia’s magazine, by the game of “supplements” which swell up and are transformed before the naked eye into a Small Echo of TV and Stock Market news, make it no longer unreasonable to imagine, in the face of such a situation destined to trivialization or rejection, that one day Surrealism will have an heir, a movement whose form we cannot predict, one undoubtedly rid of its small sins, which it had overly caressed, trinkets of a time that greatly contributed to its aging: Czarist proclamations (“oukazes”), puerile provocations, exquisite cadavers, metaphysical spoonerisms, letters to “voyantes” and other “gadgets” from the Irrational. How can we know? The lack of a response from religions has nearly become as obvious as the caricature of “cults.” Surrealism, which played a little hide-and-seek with history, and which history did not really serve well, has not “gone by” the cafe, as one used to think; rather, it has demonstrated an unexpected tenacity to survive while in hibernation. For Breton’s Manes, a century after his birth, a quarter-century after his group became officially deceased, the perspectives are wide-open.

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Book

Julien Gracq Chateau d’Argol
Pushkin Press

‘Julien Gracq’s Chateau d’Argol, the author’s first published work, appeared in 1939. In a lecture to Yale University students a few years later, Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, cited the work as an example that summarized “the extent of Surrealism’s conquest”. By this, Breton was no doubt referring to two of Surrealism’s great pre-modern sources of inspiration, the Gothic novel and Romanticism. From Breton, this was no scant praise. No doubt, however, that those who, like one reviewer below, have “studied Surrealism for six months” know better than Breton himself!

‘Chateau d’Argol is a tale of three friends, and of a disturbing menage-a-trois turned violent. In good Romantic/Gothic fashion, the changes in the richly described landscapes mirror the turbulent alterations in the characters’ inner states. The setting is a lonely castle in an area of Brittany that is simultaneously real and imaginary, in that Gracq unites disparate elements of the Breton landscape and situates them in a locale of his memory-based imaginings.

‘The philosophy of Hegel also figures prominently in this story of doubles and opposites, of dialectical antitheses and syntheses. In addition, the author creates a strange mood of detachment through his use of third-person narrative throughout (there is not a word of dialogue in the book) that contrasts with the rich and opulent descriptive writing. Indeed, for me, the most striking and rewarding aspect of this work is its gorgeous, richly hued language, its superbly evocative and poetic narrative. Of course, there are false notes on occasion, some of which may be the fault of the translator, but, on the whole, Gracq succeeds in sustaining a hypnotically beautiful tapestry of language.’ — Pushkin Press

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Excerpt
from 50 Watts

And perhaps it was not perceptible to him in the midst of his tumultuous agitation, how much higher than all the voices of nature resounded here with a dissonant clamour the glaring disappropriation of all things—of the altar all the more majestic for being abandoned, of the useless lance, of the tomb as perturbing as a cenotaph, of the clock ticking for nothing outside time, on which its gears had no more grip than a mill-wheel in a dried-up stream, of the lamp burning in full daylight, of the windows palpably made to be looked into from outside, and against which were glued all the green tentacles of the forest.

Then out of the depth of his disquietude there rose a sound that seemed instantly to fill the whole chapel and stream down the glistening walls, and without daring to turn around, so stunned was he by its inconceivable amplitude, he now realized that during his own silent exploration of the chapel, Herminien had mounted the stone steps of the organ loft which rose in the darkness to the left of the door, occupying a considerable portion of the chapel, but which, his own attention having been at once captured by the alluring light effect, had escaped his notice until now. Herminien’s playing was stamped with a singular force, and such was his expressive power that Albert, as though he could read in the depths of his soul, divined each succeeding theme of this wild improvisation. At first it seemed that Herminien, with dissonant and tentative gropings, interrupted by reiterations and regressions in which the principal motif was repeatedly taken up in a more timid and, as it were, interrogative mode, was only trying out the volume and acoustical capacity of this perturbing edifice. And now burst forth waves of sound, as violent as the forest and free as the winds of the heights, and the storm which Albert had contemplated with such horror from the high terraces of the castle thundered out of those mystic depths, while above them sounds of a crystalline purity fell, one by one, in a surprising and hesitating decrescendo, and floated like a sonorous vapour shot with flashes of yellow sunlight, curiously following the rhythm of the drops of water that were dripping from the vault.

After these effects of nature came an access of violent, sensual passion, and with perfect fidelity the organist painted his savage frenzy: like a luminous mist Heide floated on high, vanished, returned, and finally established her empire over melodic swells, of an extraordinary amplitude that seemed to transport the senses into an unknown region, and, by means of an incredible perversion, to endow the ear with all the graces of touch and sight. Meanwhile, although the artist had already given full rein to a tremulous and incoercible passion, it seemed to Albert apparent from now on, that even in the full plenitude of his improvisation, whose curious arabesques still kept something of the tentative character of an experiment, Herminien was searching for the key to an even loftier soaring, the necessary support for a final leap whose completely decisive consequences were at once both forecast and unpredictable, and that he was hesitating on the very brink of that abyss whose glorious approaches he described with such wild enveloping grace.

Clearly now—and with every moment it became more apparent to Albert—he was looking for the unique angle of incidence at which the eardrum, deprived of its power of interception and of diffusion, would become permeable like pure crystal, and would change this thing of flesh and blood into a sort of prism of total reflection, where sound would be accumulated instead of passing through, and would irrigate the heart with the same freedom as the sanguine medium, thus restoring to the desecrated word ecstasy its true significance. A sonorous vibration, growing ever more concentrated, seemed the exterior sign of the sombre fever of his quest, and settled everywhere swarmingly like bees out of a suddenly shattered hive. Finally a note, held with marvellous steadiness, shrilled in incredible splendour, and taking off as from a beach of sound, rose a phrase of ineffable beauty. And still higher, in a mellow golden light which seemed to accompany the descent into the chapel of a sublime grace as an answer to a prayer, Herminien’s fingers resounded, as if a light and consuming warmth ran through them, the song of virile fraternity. And the final breath that gradually left the lungs as it soared to unbelievable heights, let the salutary tide of a sea, as light and free as the night, rise into the completely vacant body.

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, cool that the post occasioned a nice missive from Delany. I love Benjamin too, so I’ll read that, thanks! ** Bill, Hey. Gotcha, ugh, you deserve bird-style freedom. I think I could live quite happily and fruitfully without ever looking at another Warhol painting for the rest of my life, but his films? That’s something else. The Ex! Wow, I’m going to go listen to them. They were a local lifesaver back when I lived in sleepy Amsterdam in the 80s. Cool. Novel proceeds, TV show will will begin re-proceeding (too) soon enough. ** Steve Erickson, Ah, I see, about using a real anchor. Yes, that would have been very interesting. Too bad. I’ve heard one track, I think, by White Ward that was very intriguing, so good news about September. Glad the editor things sounds so on-track, and lucky you re: the NYFF, although not about all the related writing, although looking forward to those rewards. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. Oh, no solution. It was just the non-conclusive possible eye + brain fun of finding all 164 of the shadows, some of which were subtle. ** Armando, Hi. ‘Crowd’ is a dance piece, no text at all. No, the score is all 90s techno and trance and ambient tracks curated by Peter Rehberg with one KTL track mixed in. It’s about … a bunch (around 16) young people enter an after hours dance club, dance, go through a bunch of weird physical and emotional/ psychological stuff, the club closes, and they leave. The piece was started maybe 4 years ago. I wrote the narrative subtext that created characters for the dancers and the underlying story and the structure of the piece, all of which is there and discernible under the surface if you pay attention. Look, anything is possible, but the problem is, in that case, you would need a French producer or co-producer, and it would need to be real, official, registered producer or production company, not just someone saying they’re a producer. They would, with you, apply for government grants, so they would need to know that system. So you would need to get a French producer/production company to agree to produce or co-produce your film. You being not in France, and this being your first project, would make that a bit difficult. You would need to research French producers and submit your script and other evidence to them and just see what happens. I think there are probably easier ways to try to make the film, but it’s not impossible. Take care. ** Okay. Today the blog spotlights a fantastic book by a fantastic writer you may not may not have read, the one and only Julien Gracq. See you tomorrow.