Agreeing as I do with Calonlan's wise advice that kindred spirits to CAS, as well as fine writers in their own right, are to be found outside the weird fiction ghetto, below is an excerpt from an author whose work I have briefly mentioned here before, Julien Gracq (1910-2007). (One point in common between Gracq and CAS is that each had an early love of the writings of Poe).

Though not a weirdist, Gracq was a fellow-traveller of the Surrealists, an association that is evident, to me, in his oneiric and intricate prose. Most here will be uninterested or unmoved, I suspect, but I'd be surprised if at least a few did not appreciate what follows, and have their appetites whetted for more. I will add that, as a writer of poetic prose, Gracq is unexcelled even by CAS, in my opinion. Anyway, here goes (delete if deemed inappropriate, though I hope that that won't be the case).

Quote:

I react to capricious accidents of light and shadow with a feeling of joy and warmth, and, perhaps even more, with a vague sense of joy yet to come, a feeling inseparable from what I call, for want of a better expression, a belated beautifying. For example, the late afternoon of a long day of constant rain is beautified by a yellow ray of miraculous limpidity that emerges from behind a cover of breaking clouds (the damp, Nordic skies of Ruysdael); from time to time, I find this twilight beautification of the horizon (more luminous, warmer) at the Louvre in Virgin with Rabbit—a little Titian painting that captivates me. Such a distinctive feeling of warmth and comfort, perhaps more invigorating for me than for others, is like a charged religious image, imprinted in us ages ago, where a foreshadowed life can only reveal itself in all its glory on the other side of the “obscure corridor,” valley of darkness, or place of exile. The image of daytime turning to dusk, which often represents life’s flow, might also optimistically suggest a possible halting of decline and perhaps even an inversion of the flow of time, if it is presented to our innermost sense by this rejuvenation of afternoon sun. In any case, I’m almost certain that a heightened memory inside us, sensitized by nature to signals beyond the quotidian that regulates our lives, vouches for the reality of these vague, yet passionate, promises constantly made to us by time, weather, and season. The already setting sun, hidden while traversing these narrow waters, reappears now in full force; where it touches the liquid surface, this surface, only moments ago an unreassuring indicator of the river’s depth, appears almost opaque in the rays, as if covered again by a thin film of dust. Sunlight sprays in bursts across the branches and boughs of ash and willow trees; as if accompanied by the opening of parasols, one glides again across a tender and airy summer landscape flying the colors of “fine weather prevailing.”

from The Narrow Waters (1976), by Julien Gracq

This is exquisite - like a Monet in words --

This poet, either instinctively or through study seems to me to know The White Goddess, -- there is, within the context a clear recognition of the immense, nay
primeval joy of swimming in the mythic reservoir that feeds the streams.

And if our readers understand that sentence, as I know you do, they too will want more of this.

What are this writer's dates - this has the feel of youth, but that is no guarantee.

I like it very much, and thank you for posting it. The "little Titian" (how delicious) is truly exquisite and will halt the insightful from continuing the usual slow perambulation of the great gallery -- I recall it being in a smallish room but I could easily be wrong - it is now so long ago - what a delight to have it brought to mind with such grace. -

second note - a quick google informs me JG would have been 66 at the time of writing, and died just year before last --

Who did the translation? Can you post it in French - I should very much like to examine some of those phrases in the original - or did he master English sufficiently to pull it off - not unheard of -- I remember Vladimir Nabakov when he was teaching at Cornell while I was at Syracuse was asked about his successfully writing "Lolita" in English - his reply, "I just followed your own rules."

I am very glad that you enjoyed the excerpt. I'll post the French original later, as I have to type it, myself, but I'll go ahead and reply, otherwise.

Gracq, though brilliant, was no Conrad or Nabokov, in the sense of having mastered a foreign tongue sufficiently well to write original work in it. Everything he wrote is in his native language, French. Indeed, Gracq aspired to write untranslatable work. Fortunately for most, he failed, and more of his work is finally appearing in English, primarily, these days, via small presses (Pushkin, Turtle Point, Green Integer). That, alas, is another point in common Gracq shares with CAS, today.

For an amusing account of a didactic tete-a-tete between Gracq and his translator, look here. (A good list of Gracq's work in English translation follows this article, as well).

Ingeborg M. Kohn did the English translation that I posted here. I haven't done much comparing (I can read relatively brief passages of Gracq in French, but his work is too difficult for me to sustain a reading de longue haleine), but she seems to have done a fine job, notwithstanding her occasional sprinkling of the text with vulgar illiteracies, such as "dove" for "dived", that Gracq himself would never have used.

You quite rightly see the mythic element as a tie that binds both CAS and Gracq, as well as the superb writing. I doubt that Gracq knew of Graves's White Goddess, in particular, but one never knows. Gracq received a typically rigorous (and rigid) early 20th-Century French education for the elite, with form prizes and the like, so he was no doubt steeped in mythology from reading the Classical authors. It's interesting, too, that Gracq earned his living as a high school teacher of history and geography, subjects that, in the French curriculum of the day, at least, were rightly seen as inseparable. One of the many invigorating aspects of Gracq's writing is that the landscape is as alive as the humans that inhabit it, and sometimes more so.

Gracq was in his sixties when he wrote the piece, as you observed. It is, however, about revisiting a beloved spot remembered from his childhood growing up in the Loire Valley, hence, the mixture of maturity and youth that you sense in the excerpt.

It's interesting, the odd little discoveries one makes in a museum such as the Louvre. For me, there was a little Renaissance-era painting of a grandfather with a dreadful case of what appears to be rosacea looking tenderly at his grandson posed upon his lap.

Many of the English translations of Gracq's books are available for preview via Google Books. I recommend those who are interested to have a look.

By the way, what do you think that CAS would have thought of Gracq?



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 21 Feb 09 | 10:31AM by Kyberean.

Now, here's part of the original French text of the excerpt quoted, above. I am afraid it's too long for me to type the entire passage, but this should give you a good idea of the original.

I should add that I am making my best effort, but I cannot guarantee the accuracy of my typing! Also, I don't know how to reproduce French accent marks using my computer keyboard, so they'll be absent from this transcription.

"S'il y a une constante dans la maniere que j'ai de reagir aux accidents de l'ombre et de la lumiere qui se distribuent avec caprice tout au long de l'ecoulement d'une journee, c'est bien le sentiment de joie et de chaleur, et, davantage, encore peut-etre, de promesse confuse d'une autre joie encore a venir, qui ne se separe jamais pour moi de ce que j'appelle, ne trouvant pas d'expression meilleure, l'embellie tardive--l'embellie, par exemple, des longues journees de pluie qui laissent filtrer dans le soir avancee, sous le couvercle enfin souleve des nuages, un rayon jaune qui semble miraculeux de limpidite--l'embellie mouillee et nordique de certains ciels de Ruysdael--l'embellie crepusculaire au ras d'horizon, plus lumineuse, plus chaude, que je vais revoir quelquefois au Louvre dans un petit tableau de Titien qui me captive: La Vierge au lapin. Une impression si distincte de rechauffement et de reconfort, plus vigoreuse seulment peut-etre pour moi que pour d'autres en de telles occasions, n'est pas sans lien avec une image motrice tres anciennement empreinte en nous et sans doute de nature religieuse: l'image d'une autre vie pressentie qui ne peut se montrer dans tout son eclat qu'au-dela d'un certain 'passage obscur', lieu d'exil ou vallee de tenebres".

Thank you so much for the original -
In my view, Clark would have loved to have a crack at translating it - that could have really been something - I do not think JG was accessible in English or known in CAS time. - Philippe may have access to more info and a keyboard that types French.

Clearly this is French to be read aloud - there are phrases in there that are truly exquisite - ...tout au long de l'ecoulement de journee... --- and the charming ...petit tableau de Titien ... - the poet's ear is clear. I also doubt that he had read Graves, but the you rightly read the education background, and, frankly, the very soil of France exudes the "ancien poetique" -- as in Ireland and Wales, it is in the blood, air, the water -- the very crops absorb it from the soil, and the ancient Bardic force suffuses everything - and only a true bard can hear, feel, and touch it.
How much must our young peel away to actually activate the deepest senses? I need to send some of this to DSF, who is not a computer person, so I will try to find a copy of something and send on to him - Ron and Scott, if you are in a book sellers conference keep an eye out for this stuff -
Yes indeed, I think Clark and Julien knelt to drink from the same spring, or at least very near tributaries.

You are welcome. It's a pleasure for me to find others who appreciate Gracq (his legal name is Louis Poirier, by the way. He derived his pseudonym from Stendhal's protagonist Julien Sorel and from the Gracchi).

Gracq's motto seems to be very much that of Milton: "Fit readers find, tho' few". Even after he became (relatively) famous, Gracq continued to publish his works solely with the small publisher Jose' Corti, an early friend of the Surrealists (Corti editions are charmingly old-fashioned, by the way: One needs a paper knife to cut the pages in order to read them!). Gracq seems to be most famous in France for having been the first author ever to refuse the country's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, which he received, over his objections, for his 1951 novel Le Rivage des Syrtes (English title: the much less evocative The Opposing Shore).

During CAS's lifetime, three of Gracq's four novels were available in English: A Dark Stranger, The Castle of Argol, and Balcony in the Forest, published in translation in 1950, 1951, and 1959, respectively, by New Directions (the first two) and George Braziller. I imagine that each edition sank like a stone upon publication, so CAS would have to have had his ear very much to the ground to have heard of them. Gracq's association with the Surrealists would also not have enticed CAS to read him, I am sure (even though Gracq's writing could not be more opposed to automatic writing).

Still, as you say, the prospect of CAS's translating Gracq into English makes one salivate. I would especially love to have seen CAS tackle Gracq's sole volume of prose poems, Liberte' Grande (1947), which has still never been translated into English. DSF should perhaps give it a try!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 21 Feb 09 | 10:34AM by Kyberean.

Yes, Kyberean, the quotation of Gracq is quite impressive. It reminds me immediately of Proust, and I was wondering if that influence was conscious, or just a matter of being a French literary person--where it was perhaps absorbed willy-nilly?

Also, the part about a "vague sense of joy yet to come," "heightened memory," "signals beyond the quotidian", and "vague yet passionate promises constantly made to us by time, weather, and season", etc.--is remarkably like a certain motif one finds in Lovecraft's poetry and letters. In particular, HPL's long-cherished sense of an enchanted realm of beauty, lying just beyond the verge of our waking perception. (It also calls to mind his notion--closely related to this, and often referred to in the correspondence--of "adventurous expectancy")

By the way, how do you pronounce "Gracq"?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 23 Feb 09 | 04:51AM by Dexterward.

"Gracq" would be pronounced pretty much as its spelled, I think, with a slight "ah" sound to the "a", and a hard "k" sound at the end.

I think that the nature of the passage itself, with its exploration of memory and childhood places, lends itself to the Proustian style. Greater influences on Gracq's style, though, in my opinion, are the writings of Poe and Andre' Breton, with a bit of Lautreamont and Rimbaud added; perhaps even Novalis, in places, although I don't know at what point in his life Gracq first read the German Romantics. I admit, however, to a bias against Proust, for whom I don't care overmuch. Proust is the greater novelist, but Gracq is the greater poet, to my mind.

Your comparison of Lovecraft and Gracq is interesting and perceptive. Lovecraft, I think, had a more cosmic, or, despite himself, even spiritual, perspective with regard to this enchanted world just outside his reach, whereas Gracq, the history and geography professor, is moored a bit more to the Earth--which he nevertheless transforms in his own poetic fashion.

Oh, and further apropos of Proust, I almost forgot about the following passage in Gracq's book:

"Proust's name is linked to the resurrection of an abolished fragment by means of a reunion with an object. But memory's sudden release of the genie held captive inside matter, like a spirit bottled by an evil witch, is much more often for me both generator and principle of a happy, feverish fugue than the quietism of a Proustian illumination".