Posts from the ‘Julien Gracq’ Category

“Floating high on the waters of catastrophe” – Julien Gracq’s Balcony in the Forest

Assigned to a blockhouse on a hilltop high above the Meuse River deep in the Ardennes Forest, Lt. Grange at first finds his new home “perfectly improbable.”  It’s nothing more than a concrete bunker comically topped by a little house where a handful of men live.  It feels as if they were perched in a children’s tree house, “as if they were on a roof and the ladder had been taken away.”  The time is autumn 1939.  The German invasions of Poland, Norway, and Denmark seem far away and France is preparing as if this is going to be a rematch of the trench warfare of the First World War.  “The war?  Who knows if there is a war?”

In surprisingly short order, however, Grange adapts to the hilltop hideaway where he and his men spend their days making half-hearted efforts to walk patrols and laying out the barbed wire with which they’ve been supplied, barbed wire, it seems, that is without many barbs. They have guns that don’t work and the parts they order never arrive.  But that doesn’t seem to matter.  What Grange responds to deeply is the forest.

The forest breathed, more ample now, awakened, alert, its remotest hiding places suddenly stirred by the enigmatic signs of time’s reversion – an age of great hunts, of proud cavalcades – as if the old Merovingian lair were quickened by a forgotten scent in the air that made it live again.

The forest is a living entity that continually breathes, and for many months to come its breathing will manage to absorb the existence of the distant war.  But for Grange, the forest is something more.  Whenever he listens to the forest he hears the ocean, even though the North Sea is more than a hundred miles away, beyond Belgium.

…both men held their breath for a moment, listening to the great respiration of the woods around them that made a kind of low and intermittent music, the long deep murmur of an undertow that came from the groves of firs near Les Fraitures…

We never learn much about Grange’s prior life, but in the forest, in spite of the crude conditions and the hint of war on the horizon, Grange begins to realize that he is a changed man.  “It seemed as if his life were no longer divided, partitioned…”   Nevertheless, it is not exactly clear to him why this should be so – “…a question it had become urgent to understand were being asked – but Grange did not understand.”  He becomes seduced by a local woman he meets in the forest one day – a woman variously described as a “rain sprite,” a “plant in the sun,” as “nature itself” or as a “witch” – and they embark on a romance that lasts until the imminent approach of the German army.  In his quarters, he surreptitiously begins to study the official brochure that reproduces the silhouettes of the German armored vehicles, afraid of being caught by his men “as if he were pouring over obscene photographs.”

Eventually, as “the phoney war” inexorably becomes real and threatens the French border, even the forest can no longer repel or absorb it; the earth becomes “like a corpse beginning to smell.”  Grange’s superior gives him the option of another post, far from the front, but Grange refuses. “‘I like it here.’  He felt as if he were hearing the words for the first time, astonished to have known the truth so long.”

What is it about this forest that compels him to stay here in his concrete tree house in the woods above the tiny village of Les Falizes?

What most reminded him of his exaltation at Les Falizes, where he seemed to breathe as never before, was the beginning of summer vacations in his childhood – the fever seizing him as soon as he could look out the train windows, still miles away from the coast, and see the trees gradually shrink, stunted by the salt wind – the anxiety suddenly filling his throat at the mere thought that his room in the hotel might not overlook the sea.  And the next day there would be the sand castles, too, when his heart beat stronger than anywhere else just standing next to them, because he knew, and at the same time could not believe, that the tide would soon cover them.

When the motorized German army finally does appear on the horizon across the Meuse in May, after swiftly slicing through Belgium, Grange feels something akin to relief.  “He felt his mind floating high on the waters of catastrophe.”

[It was] a marvelous, almost appealing terror that Grange felt rising from the depths of his childhood – from fairy tales: the terror of children lost in the woods at twilight, listening to the faraway branches crack beneath the dreadful heels of the seven-league boots.

The enemy doesn’t actually appear until eighteen pages from the end of the book, but the finale is swift.  The blockhouse is quickly assaulted by gunfire and Grange and his men are forced to flee into the open, where he manages to shoot and destroy a tank.  “It was intoxicating,” Grange thinks.  He realizes that he has reacted without panic during his first moments of combat.  “He felt somehow invulnerable.”  At the novel’s end, Grange is wounded and makes his way back into the blockhouse.

Life fell back to this sweetish silence, the peace of a field of asphodels, only the faint rustle of blood within the ear, like the sound of the unattainable sea in a shell…Then he pulled the blanket up over his head and went to sleep.

Balcony in the Forest is a strange, elusive novel.  Is Grange an unrealistic dreamer who takes refuge from the realities of war in the dream forests of childhood fairy tales?   Or is he tapping into some primal force or existential plane that transcends the pettiness of human history?

Julien Gracq.  Balcony in the Forest.  NY: Columbia University Press, 1987.  Translated from the French by Richard Howard.

“The true novelist is the one who cheats”

After reading Julien Gracq’s The Narrow Waters, I moved on to his book of essays called, in English, Reading Writing  (originally published in France in 1980 as En Lisant En Écrivant).  The sixteen essays have titles like Literature and Painting, Landscape and the Novel, Literature and History, Literature and Cinema, and Surrealism – titles that in no way hint at the digressive, unpredictable nature of Gracq’s writing.  Like a hiker calmly ascending a craggy hill, Gracq surefootedly heads this way and that, following a path that often only he can spy.  Gracq, who lived from 1910 to 2007, writes with a mission, offering an alternative to the literary criticism of his day – and, indeed, of ours.

What I want from a literary critic – and what is rarely given – is for the critic to tell me, better than I could do myself, why reading a book gives me pleasure that cannot be replaced…what it has exclusively is all that matters to me.

Gracq, then, is an intense reader and tough to please.  He also openly admits that the nineteenth century – which he would say lasts from Stendhal to Proust – is his century  and that it is French literature which gives him the most pleasure, especially Stendhal.  For him, literature is most assuredly not a text, it is never something that can be disassembled, dissected, or understood mechanistically.

…the secret of a work resides much less in the ingenuity of its organization than in the quality of its material: if I enter a novel by Stendhal or a poem by Nerval without prejudice, I am first and foremost only the scent of a rose, like Condillac’s statue – without eyes, ears, or localized perceptions – and the artwork thereby offers me its distinctive operative character, which is to occupy my entire inner cavity immediately and without any differentiation, like a gas that is expanding.  Revealing its total elasticity and the undivided immanence of its true presence: it cannot be subdivided, because its virtue resides entirely in each particle.

Moreover:

The bad novelist – by which I mean the skilled and indifferent novelist – is the one who tries to bring to life, to animate from the outside and on the whole faithfully, the local color that strikes him as specific to a subject he has judged ingenious or picturesque – the true novelist is the one who cheats, who asks the subject, above all, through oblique and unexpected paths, to give him access once again to his personal palette, knowing full well that in terms of his local color, the only kind that can make an impression is his own.

The title itself – Reading Writing – implies several permutations of meaning.  The book contains essays on being a reader and on being a writer, and those that are more literally on the reading of writing – i.e. on the art of literature.  But of equal importance is Gracq’s insistence that literature is a kind of shared partnership between reader and writer.

The reading of a literary work is not only the decanting from one mind into another of an organized complex of ideas and images, or a subject’s active work on a collection of signs that must be resuscitated in a new way throughout, it is also the reader’s reception, in the course of a fully regulated visit, where not a comma can be changed in the itinerary, by someone: the conceiver and the constructor, now the naked proprietor, who gives you a tour of his domain from start to finish and from whose company you cannot be liberated.

In keeping with the major chord struck in The Narrow Waters, Gracq repeatedly returns to the unique role that memory plays for the reader.

In the novel reader’s mind, the whole stratification of memory is created while reading, a process perhaps like folding linear sequences of material in layers, like a piece of fabric. 

And elsewhere:

Nine-tenths of the pleasures we owe to art over a lifetime are conveyed not by direct contact with the work but by memory alone. 

Even when, on occasion, I failed to follow Gracq through this erudite, personal, and, at times, contradictory book, it was always an immense pleasure to read.  There was always a startling and illuminating insight or turn of phrase just around the corner.  I’ll leave you with one more example:

There has never existed a more terrifying waffle iron in literature than the classic tragedy in five acts.

[Julien Gracq, Reading Writing.  NY: Turtle Point Press, n.d. Translated from the French by Jeanine Herman.]