DOMINIQUE PERRIN, DE LOUIS POIRIER À JULIEN GRACQ

Review par Dominique Rabourdin

Readers of Julien Gracq know that in 1937 a young professor of history and geography (he was born in 1910), Louis Poirier, launched himself, "without great prior deliberation," into writing a first novel, Au château d'Argol, for which he would adopt upon its publication the pseudonym "Julien Gracq." The enigma of this book—whose least remarkable aspect is not that it remains "manifestly foreign to the author himself," writes Dominique Perrin—has not finished questioning. All the specialists of Gracq, beginning with the editor of his Complete Works, Bernhild Boie, have not failed to study very closely the biographical and historical circumstances that preceded his "entry into writing," everything that played a role not only in his literary formation—before becoming a writer, Gracq is a great reader—but in that of his personality. Dominique Perrin makes this the basis of her thesis—"Collective crisis and novelistic writing in Julien Gracq," defended in November 2006, then of her book, De Louis Poirier à Julien Gracq. She has read EVERYTHING by Gracq, including what has not been gathered in the Complete Works, which represents a non-negligible quantity of articles, interviews and declarations, often little known, but no less rich in instruction. She has also studied the considerable mass of studies devoted to him, which represents many more volumes than the work itself. She has neglected no information, no commentary by the author on his life and work. The result is a book of exceptional dimensions—a sum of nearly 800 pages—endowed with an equally exceptional critical apparatus, rich in innumerable references and long and sometimes even very long quotations, which instead of being a burden allows the reader to refer immediately to what she studies, and which does not cover only the period—the years 1930-1937—preceding Louis Poirier's "entry into writing." In his adolescence, Jules Verne, Stendhal, Edgar Poe. At the Lycée, in Paris, a professor like Alain. At twenty, the successive revelations of Wagner—since Gracq himself qualified the "thin narrative" that is Argol as a "demonic version of Parsifal"—of surrealism (according to Breton, Gracq assimilated "all its requirements") and of Rimbaud. In a second part, Dominique Perrin studies the three "founding" books that are for Gracq—who has not failed to return to them at length: Béatrix, Les Chants de Maldoror, Bajazet, and, determining among all, Sur les Falaises de marbre.

Parallel to literary formation, she insists on the place of history and its imprint by relating to his writings the main historical events that left their indelible mark on Louis Poirier: the First World War and its "immobile massacre" in his early childhood; at the beginning of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism and its "promise of cataclysms"; then the Second World War. She significantly places as a preamble to her book a brief fragment from the section of En lisant en écrivant entitled "Literature and history" on the biography of Adolf Hitler published in 1973 by German historian Jonathan Fest which suddenly, brutally resurrects the nightmare that was in 1930 the explosion of Nazism with the election of one hundred and ten deputies to the Reichstag: "The rise of the storm lasted nine years, a storm so intolerably slow to break, so heavy, so livid at once and so dark, that brains became animally stupefied and one sensed that such a cloud of apocalypses could no longer resolve itself in hail, but only in rain of blood and rain of toads. Since we speak (with reason) of influences that are exercised on writers—they have written about this on me as on others—I propose that one; it happens that in this matter the only thing one does not see is what strikes the eyes," comments Gracq still overwhelmed some forty years later by the return, brutally, of this vision of horror. Writing as a valve and as a "forceful exit," according to Breton's formula, who will gather in the mid-thirties, under the title Têtes d'orage the first writers who will appear in his Anthologie de l'humour noir, with a preface entitled Paratonnerre... The highlighting of the black light that this striking page among all projects not only on Argol, but on the work to come and the personality of a man "reputed in a posture of withdrawal" is exemplary of Dominique Perrin's approach in her intimate understanding of "Louis Poirier" as of "Julien Gracq."

P.S. The publication in April 2011, at José Corti, under the title Manuscrits de guerre, of the "War Memories" and the much more worked "narrative" he made of it in a second phase, presented by Bernhild Boie, is an event of importance on which we will not fail to return. Let it suffice today to say that what Dominique Perrin advances is confirmed as well as possible by this important unpublished work, by what Gracq writes—first day by day—of "his war" and its profound resonance in Un Balcon en forêt.