Edmund White
A Dark Stranger and three other books by Julien Gracq
A Dark Stranger by Julien Gracq, translated from the French by Christopher Moncrieff. Pushkin, 253 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Château d’Argol by Julien Gracq, translated from the French by Louise Varèse.
Pushkin, 141 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq, translated from the French by Richard Howard. Columbia University Press,
292 pp., $35.00 (paper)
Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq, translated from the French and with a foreword by Richard Howard.
New York Review Books,
213 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Proust remarked about Stendhal that he may have used rudimentary and banal descriptions but that he lights up when he pinpoints an elevated place, such as Fabrizio del Dongo’s and Julien Sorel’s prisons or the Abbé Blanès’s observatory, in which the characters cast aside their cares and take up a “disinterested voluptuous life.” Julien Gracq’s descriptions are wonderfully worked, but if he had a characteristic and favorite place in which to situate his action, a place that excited all his creative powers, it would be the seashore enveloped in fog. His world is one of decaying grandeur, palaces reverting to mold and swamp, mud-silted battleships, official inertia, the odor of stasis when “the familiar rotting smell passed over my face like the touch of a blind hand.” Fog and moonlight are what might be called the emblems of his fiction.
In a 1959 essay about the mysterious German writer Ernst Jünger, perhaps his major influence, Gracq said of Jünger’s 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs that it is “an emblematic book” rather than a livre à clef or an “explanation of our period.” Gracq prefers to invoke the lore of heraldry, images drawn from our life but resistant to interpretation, chess pieces that “burn the fingers” just to touch. Writing about On the Marble Cliffs, Gracq could be describing one of his own novels: “We could call it a symbolic work but only on condition of admitting that the symbols can only be read as enigmas seen in a mirror.” Nothing is autobiographical or political; everything is mythic. Julien Gracq was the pen name of Louis Poirier (1910–2007). He took the first name from Julien Sorel of The Red and the Black, his favorite Stendhal novel, and the last name from the Gracchi, the ancient Roman brothers who defended the rights of the poor. In a passage from 1980 imagining the complete surprise that the French Revolution represented for the people of the day, he quoted a line from the Roman satirist Juvenal: “Who could endure the Gracchi railing at sedition?”
Gracq grew up in Saint-Florent-leVieil, near the mouth of the Loire and twenty-two miles from Angers in western France. He studied in Paris and became a friend of “the pope of Surrealism,” André Breton, who hailed his 1938 novel Château d’Argol as the first Surrealist novel, though the Surrealists took a dim view of most novels. Gracq himself thought of Surrealism as less a movement than a way of practicing poetry, a “dynamic, active search for all the paths and all the methods leading to a poetic state.”
As a soldier during World War I Gracq was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia. After the war he taught history and geography in a lycée in Paris for twenty years; he studiously avoided publicity and thrice refused to dine with French president François Mitterrand, and he rejected the Goncourt Prize. He never married, though his writing makes it obvious that he was a lover of women; after his retirement he returned to Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, where he lived with his sister.
Gracq wrote only a handful of novels, each one dense and richly wrought. The first one, Château d’Argol, distinctly recalls Edgar Allan Poe, whom Gracq considered a writer that Americans from the land of “the cow catcher” and “the redskin” completely misunderstood and who was fully embraced only by Europeans, who knew how to appreciate “these immemorial colors” and “this delirious and funereal majesty.” The action in his novel, such as it is, comes out of the same universe as “The Fall of the House of Usher”; in Gracq’s hands it is set in a seaside castle next to a windy (and of course foggy) seaside forest. Two men, friends and rivals since childhood, and the mysterious, witchy woman one of them introduces, are virtually the only characters. Murder and suicide ensue, but the plot is insignificant next to the long, “decadent” sentences, the seemingly random but menacing words cast into italics, the remarkable unity of place, the use of all those adjectives creative writing classes forbid: implacable, unbelievable, incomparable—words that Joseph Conrad also relied on and that announce that the writer has been defeated in his attempts to describe the (what else?) ineffable.
Château d’Argol, like Poe’s stories, emphasizes the landscape as the dark sublime. The characters are static. Everything, from start to finish, is moving toward death, and the prevailing mood is one of terror or doom. Words repeat as in Poe: “In the very middle of the long December night, down the deserted stairs, through the deserted rooms where the candles were burnt out, where the candles were overturned, he left the castle in a traveller’s attire.” Compare Poe’s “Ulalume”: “The leaves they were crispéd and sere—/The leaves they were withering and sere” or “As the scoriac rivers that roll—/As the lavas that restlessly roll.” All the poetic props are in Poe: the “lonesome October,” the “most immemorial year,” “the ghoul-haunted woodland,” as well as demons and mist. In Gracq there are “meshes of mist” and “unavowable bonds.” Then there is this characteristic passage:
And nature, restored by the fog to its secret geometry, now became as unfamiliar as the furniture of a drawing-room under dust-covers to the eye of an intruder, substituting, all at once, the menacing affirmation of pure volume for the familiar hideousness of utility, and by an operation whose magical character must be evident to anyone, restoring to the instruments of humblest use, until then dishonoured by all that handling engenders of base degradation, the particular and striking splendour of the object.
This contempt for anything useful, this admiration of transforming difference, is not so far from Huysmans’s Against the Grain, nor is the comparison of nature to the furniture in a salon draped in Holland cloth.
Gracq’s second novel is difficult, starting with its title. In English it is called A Dark Stranger, but in French Un beau ténébreux has richer connotations—“a handsome man” who is “gloomy,” or “dark” or “mysterious” or “shadowy,” derived from tenebrae, in Latin a holy office preceding Easter during which the lights are turned off one by one to signify Christ’s death. In this case, the beau is Allan, a rich young man, half-French and half-English, who comes to an elegant seaside hotel in Brittany and has soon become the obsession of all the other guests, members of la jeunesse dorée. They are so obsessed that they are unable to leave the summer resort at the close of the season or well into the autumn. The mood of the book is sounded from the very beginning:
Sand drifted across the dunes, the air snapped like great banners, standing up against the cutting edge of the wind with a feline flick of the tail. And out on the horizon the hurried toing and froing of the waves, always this commotion of foam, this riotous churning, a confusion of clouds lined with squalls and sunshine, this fierce train of swells, the unfailing impatience of the sea in the background.
In his wonderfully inventive and totally original literary criticism, Gracq praises the “slowness pills” that the novel ideally administers. He admires “narrative pauses” that fulfill the function “of an organized delay, a braking in the action, whose goal is to let all the reserves capable of orchestrating and amplifying it flow towards the dramatic apex already in view.” A Dark Stranger is constructed out of such organized delays. We know that Allan is selfdestructive and half in love with death; we guess through heavy foreshadowing that the end of the book will be his suicide. But we take a long, foreboding path to get there.
For one thing, Allan is a compulsive gambler. He plays for ruinous stakes that would destroy any fortune, no matter how great. The other gamblers look on as he loses—“and, offensively, impertinently, mercilessly, he was taking his time over it, arranging it in clever stages, removing the veils of benign, bland, mollifying assumptions one by one and standing upright in the unbearable and now indisputable nakedness of scandal.” There is something theatrical, indeed tragic, in Allan’s headlong course toward death. (Gracq wrote plays and translated Kleist’s great play Penthesilea, about an Amazon queen in conflict with—and in love with—Achilles.) Another of the novel’s characters, a young man named Gérard Kersaint, challenges Nietzsche’s view of tragedy as founded on the passions; he argues, however, in an entry from his diary,
that somewhere in the plot there’s always an unjustifiable urge in one of the characters, a sudden inspira-