This is the first Gracq I've read, and the first book he wrote, based on which I've ordered his second. A new favourite author, I think.
In this vibrant translation, his language is poetically florid, but not overblown - violet prose, perhaps, rather than purple - moving from a densely described realism into a dreamlike, at times nightmarish, surreality. Despite, or perhaps because of, the somewhat ambiguous climax, a gothically baroque 5🌟 ( )

Au château d'Argol is the first book written by Louis Poirier, a Frenchman born in 1910 who wrote under the pseudonym Julien Gracq. Gracq's background was in philosophy and the social sciences, and he was also strongly influenced by the surrealists, having been introduced during his university days to André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto as well as his novel Nadja. Breton was an early champion of this book, which had very limited success from a sales standpoint (130 copies were sold in its first year of publication out of an initial pressing of 1,200). Gracq was famous for being the first writer to turn down the Prix Goncourt, in 1951, and I imagine that as he grew in stature and fame as a writer, more and more people discovered his first novel. I was also intrigued by Gracq's political activities around the time that he wrote Au château d'Argol: he had adhered to the French Communist party in 1936, but severed his ties with that party in 1939 after the Germano-Soviet pact. The second half of the 1930s was an extremely volatile period in European politics, and as I read this book I tried (and am still trying) to make connections between the three characters and the prevailing political ideologies of the time, wondering if perhaps Gracq had intended the book to be a heavily-veiled political allegory representing the interaction in Europe between democracy, communism and fascism, complete with his own prediction of an inevitably violent clash between the three. However, I do tend to believe that all Europeans at that time were completely obsessed with politics (with good reason) and maybe I'm reading too much into Gracq's own background in politics at a time when the Spanish Civil War, along with the rise of fascist Germany and Italy, would have given a French communist intellectual plenty of cause for concern.

The book begins with Albert purchasing the château d'Argol in Bretagne sight unseen, based on the recommendation of a friend. The castle is a strange amalgamation of different architectural styles, and it is described in meticulous detail as Albert arrives and settles in. Albert is a bit of an oddball, brilliant in his investigation of rather esoteric subjects but unable to sustain normal relationships with women. He's going to take advantage of his new rural home to do some studying, but he's also invited his old friend Herminien to come visit him at Argol, along with a mysterious person named Heide, who turns out to be a beautiful woman. There's a bit of a dark undercurrent to Albert's relationship with Herminien, and this dark side will certainly come into play during the guests' extended stay at the château. They do lots of stuff together, like take walks in the woods, swim in the sea, and explore a crumbling chapel in the forest. Each locale is described in rich detail, and I enjoyed the way the the characters' emotions were reflected in their natural surroundings. I especially liked Grecq's manipulation of light in his description of the castle and the forest: the light as it rises and falls illuminates the characters' actions and feelings in a way that emphasizes the sense of foreboding that looms over the Bretagne landscape, the castle and its trio of occupants. Tension builds as Albert and Heide start to get along rather well, and Herminien eventually, inevitably, lashes out. The relationship between Albert and Herminien becomes less and less sustainable, and the reader begins to understand that there will be an eventual showdown between the two old friends.

I went into this book knowing that it was connected to Breton and the surrealists, and I was surprised that it was not as experimental as I might have expected, or at least not in the way I had expected. I was expecting something like Nadja (which I admittedly don't remember very well), or even Huidobro's Altazor (not surrealist, but very keen on innovation); something exuberantly new and innovative. What I got was a very mature sort of surrealism, something that seemed almost like a throwback to the past, a book that could be seen as surrealist but in which traits of other, older literary -isms, such as gothicism or romanticism, were also present. A lot of the books that I've read from the first third of the 20th century seem so new, so fresh and original, with new voices seeking new modes of expression and new perspectives that break from traditional forms of art and literature. Here, I wanted to believe that the new surrealist tendencies were in dialogue with the greater literary tradition of Gracq's Europe. I was having trouble putting this feeling into words, and I was very glad to find that, in the very extensive and well-annotated article devoted to Gracq on Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Gracq), mention is made of a conference at Yale in 1942 where Breton describes the importance that he accords to this novel "where, without a doubt for the first time, surrealism freely looks inward on itself, analyzing its relationship with the great sensory experiences of the past and evaluating, as much from the angle of emotion as from that of clairvoyance, the extent of the ground that it has conquered." I like this idea, that in Au château d'Argol the surrealist movement, in the hands of a young and new writer, begins to find its place in the greater scheme of things, retaking old styles and passions and looking at them with new tools.

I don't know very much about 19th century literature, and most of my knowledge of romanticism comes from a high school class where our teacher had us read, among other books from the 18th and 19th century, The Sorrows of Young Werther. My class didn't like that book when we read it in high school. It was boring and way too emotional, and as a forced reading it was, well, difficult. But high school kids are (often) stubborn and stupid, and I would like to reintroduce myself to a romantic movement that I was turned off of a decade ago in my teenage years. I'd like to imagine that if I re-read it now, I'd find a lot more to like, and find ample ground for comparison between Young Werther and this book written a century and a half later. One of the things that I like about reading is that one book makes you think about so many others, makes you want to understand the different traditions that contributed to its genesis, and makes you want to look back on books that you didn't like a decade ago in a new light. ( )

Three pages or so into this book, I was so lit up by the prose that I sat down to write a poem to Julien Gracq about it. Upon finishing the book several days later, I came back to my tepid mess of chickenscratch, gave it a long look, and fired it into the bin. There were gonna be three verses, one on a beach and one in a wood and one looking up at the castle keep above; there was a simile I was proud of that compared reading Chateau d'Argol to slipping naked into a cold forest stream and finding it full of translucent eels. The last line was "Julien, you make me strange again." It didn't really work.


The point is that writing good poetry, finding a way to whip formal constraint not only into not constraining but into intensifying and expanding and achieving new little apotheoses, is freakin' hard. And Gracq is basically doing it in prose, and for 100+ pages. There's a million ways to write well, on a million shimmering axes, but let me venture this triangle as a scheme for capturing much of what humans do stylistically and symbologically with narrative. Let's define the centre (without implying that we it thereby privilege) as the traditional plot- and character-driven novel, played relatively straight, in all the many ways this can be done--realist, Romantic, sentimental, subgeneric; let's define it to include e.g. Balzac, Dickens, most of Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Stephen King, Philip Roth, Austen, Victor Hugo for sure No distinction between people whose books play explicitly by narratological rules and people who pretend to pure verisimilitude. Moving toward the edges, we pass by, i.a., perhaps, the "hysteric realism" of e.g. Zadie Smith; the incubating palimpsest of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the reaching and disquietude of Dostoevsky. We arrive at


Pole 1: Wild profusion. This is where we find our mad geniuses--Joyce, Sterne, David Foster Wallace, Pynchon, Günter Grass, Genet. Our keynote philosophers are Nietzsche and Heidegger and Deleuze, the ones who give it a twist and surprise you. The key technique here, or the key that unites the techniques, is that when you have a problem you throw words at it fast and furious until it's beaten or you are. I'm not sure you need to write long books--I'd put e.g. Salinger or Kerouac in this category. The key process for the reader here is reading a sentence and then reading it again.


We travel along the outside line, past some writers who know how to erupt but also how to withdraw--I'm thinking of Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, or of A Passage to India. A silence descends as we arrive at


Pole 2: Capacious restraint. There was a good discussion in Le Salon Littéraire recently about "spareness" in literature, and that's part of what I'm talking about, for sure: Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy. But there are a lot of ways of being artful by holding back (Kundera pops to mind; Orwell. Brecht), and I don't intend to put limits down here (or, for that matter, define these poles fully, in what's still supposed to be a review of Julien Gracq!) I think the key technique here is the mot juste (much as Hemingway would roar with rage, probably, at such an accusation of effeteness I think he spent a lot of time looking for the exactly right word, I do), and the telltale readerly behaviour is reading a sentence or a paragraph and then pausing for a long time before the next one.


Another type of restraint is dryness, and that's at least one path which we could take to the third pole: the dryness, say, of the early-mid 20th century English comic novelist, where the humour comes with the crisp exactness with which things are said. But we can follow them on a continuum from spare to lush--just e.g., Amis-->Waugh-->Wodehouse-->Wilde. Bringing us to


Pole 3: Stylized fecundity. I almost went with "intelligent design", even though it makes me think either of Oklahoma science textbooks or a smart-car ad. But this better captures the infinite care that I see writers at this pole taking with their work at the sentence level--not the firehose of words, not the single careful blow of the chisel over a whole anxious day, but the hanging of a mural, the choreography of a ballet. I am thinking of Proust, Nabokov, Flaubert. Our aesthetes. Also genre writers like Damon Runyon, trying to create a particular hyperstylized syntax. Lovecraft; everybody who ever tried to write Gothic (somebody said that Chateau d'Argol is what Dracula would've been if Stoker knew how to write). The key focus now becoming the grammar of the sentence, how it could be extended, and how much effect it can convey. The key move for the discerning reader being to read very, very slowwwwwwwwwly.


And you have guessed--certainly if you've read Gracq you've guessed--that for me he is the intensest example of Pole 3, more even than Proust. Every sentence seems gemlike. I could read his landscapes forever, and his description of the interpersonal dynamic between Albert and Herminien and Heide for almost as long. They are, as has been amply observed, endlessly interpretable, as Hegelian (anti-/syn-)thesis; as competing political philosophies; as a Freudian triad; as truth (Heide) emerging from, or being effaced by, the negotiation between ontology (Albert) and hermeneutics (Herminien). Read as a simple, twisted love story, they are compelling--they remind me of F. and "I" and Edith in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, except that the intellectual dynamic here is weighted toward Albert ("I") and not Herminien (F.), and the sexual dynamic, initially, the other way--Herminien notionally possesses Heide at the beginning. So it's an interesting inversion of Cohen's dialectic.


All this is true, and there's plenty more to say. You don't write a book around a holy trinity of characters alone in a castle far away from complicating factors and totally infatuated with each other's unique essences unless you want them to be endlessly interpretable and reinterpretable. But the book never feels cold or arid, never like an exercise. It feels like pure art, a joyous, controlled interaction with language using some steely implement that Julien Gracq clasps warily to his heart while he sleeps, and of which I, flailingly trying to ascend the wordmountains of Pole 1, shaking me fisties at William Vollmann as he lets loose another avalanche down at us--I say, of which I--supported only by my m-dashes--know nothing.


I'll leave you with one sumptuous, voluptuous passage--my favourite--which will clarify (and entrance) and put an end to my Rodney Dangerfield act. It could equally be the first approach to the castle, or the extended portrait of Herminien's brilliant mind, or the first sight of Heide's naked body (and if the Hegel and Freud stuff above makes you a bit suspicious about how and to what purposes she is rendered, you should be--if all Gracq's women are like this, I will frown, but taken on her own and in the context of Chateau d'Argol's magic kingdom, she gets by, or the pivotal and almost deadly swim, or Albert's horrid epiphany by the pool, or the descriptions of a royal road in the dark wood or a billowing in the heavy curtains or a wound made by a horse's hoof in the strong soft torso of a man, or, or or, but instead it's gonna be the first emergence onto the battlement to take in the prospect of the valley and the forest of Storrvan. Take it slow:

"To the south stretched the highlands of Storrvan. From the foot of the castle walls the forest spread out in a semicircle as far as the eye could see: a wild and gloomy forest, a sleeping forest whose absolute stillness seemed to clutch the soul. It encircled the castle like the coils of a heavily inert serpent whose mottled skin was almost imitated by the dark patches of cloudshadow as they ran over its rugose surface. The clouds in the heavens, flat and white, seemed to be floating at an enormous height over the green abyss. And the sight of this green ocean filled one with an obscure disquietude, giving Albert the curious feeling that this forest must be alive, and that, like a forest in a fairy tale or in a dream, it had not yet said its first word. Toward the west, high rocky barriers covered all over with trees, ran parallel; a brimming river flowed through these deep valleys, its surface roughened by a gust of wind, like skin by the cold, and suddenly thousands of bright facets reflected the blinding sunlight with a radiance that was curiously immobile. But the trees remained mute and menacing up to the blue heights of the horizon."

Scene set. Meticulous geographic poetry. ( )

A young man buys a castle, has company, and all of them suffer ergot poisoning. ( )

The more I read in this novella the more I didn't understand it.

Than I read a discussion of it on LT and I realized that I didn't have the literary or philosophical background to understand it: references to Hegel, allusions to the Parsifal legend, symbolism galore, etc. It all went right by me.

What I did get was beautiful but totally overwrought pictures of a mysterious old castle in a deep forest and haunting landscape: sentences overloaded with descriptive details, adjectives piled up on adjectives, phrases piled up on phrases. Quite remarkable writing. But with the characters who are clearly symbols more than they are characters and an episodic structure in which it was not always clear (to me, anyway) what was going on, I was way way way out of my depth.