Gracq, Julien (pseud. of Louis Poirier) (b. 1910). French novelist and essayist, in ordinary life a teacher of history and geography in a Paris lycée. After meeting André Breton in 1939, Gracq discreetly situated his own ideas and work within the orbit of Surrealism, though abstaining from direct involvement in the Paris group. His work comprises novels, récits, and prose poetry, two plays (of which one is an adaptation of Kleist's Penthesilea), literary essays, and leisurely books devoted to elective places such as the Nantes he knew as a schoolboy in the 1920s (La Forme d'une ville, 1985) or the Rome he first visited at the age of 66 (Autour des sept collines, 1989). An adept of a prose of great acuity and gracefulness which advances with an almost somnambulistic equipoise, Gracq constantly slows down the action in his fictions with poetic descriptions of a world steeped in psychic resonances and hermetic symbolism. The hypnotic atmosphere of the novels sustains a curious tension amid torpor, the sensation of being on the brink of either catastrophe or sublime fulfilment: the protagonists spend long hours confined alone or in small groups, as in Un beau ténébreux (1945), where people linger out of season in a seaside hotel in Brittany, in the grip of foreboding and expectancy. Psychologically implausible, Gracq's characters are invariably exceptional beings, brooding loners and devotees of impassioned gestures, like the hero of Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951), who launches a naval attack on an unseen enemy and sparks off a war. Themes of exile, fatality, transgression, and sombre yearning are indebted to Romantic antecedents, as well as to the Grail cycle, the Parsifal legend, and the Gothic tradition (see Au château d'Argol, 1938).
An impressive occasional writer, Gracq draws up notes on his readings as well as sketches of personal and historical reminiscence, publishing them from time to time in collections such as Lettrines (2 vols., 1967 and 1974), En lisant, en écrivant (1980), or Carnets du grand chemin (1992). His essay André Breton (1948) foregrounds Breton's prose style and comes across as a literary portrait of singular empathy, perhaps even an oblique self-portrait. Gracq once dubbed his criticism ‘une critique de l'émoi’, and it is true that he is content with a small shelf of favourites like Poe, Novalis, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, and Ernst Jünger, on whom he can make comments, now playful, now solemn and penetrating. A resolute dissenter from the rituals of Parisian literary life, which he pilloried in the pamphlet La Littérature à l'estomac (1950), Gracq adamantly refused the Prix Goncourt for which he was nominated in 1951.
[Roger Cardinal]
Bibliography
- Julien Gracq. Actes du colloque international d'Angers (1982)
- M. Murat, Julien Gracq (1991)
