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The Castle of Argol

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"From the top of this mute sentinel of the sylvan solitudes, the eye of a watcher following the traveller's steps could not for an instant lose sight of him throughout all the twisting arabesques of the path, and if hate should be waiting ambushed in this tower, a furtive visitor would run the most imminent danger!" A sentence plucked at random from the opening of Julien Gracq's gothic-inspired novel, as his protagonist, a wealthy young man known only as Albert, approaches for the first time a property he has purchased sight unseen, a castle on a rocky fastness, rising high above the forests in a deserted area of Brittany. I cannot say which is more extraordinary, the book itself or this translation by Louise Varèse, who sustains an archaic style of overladen richness with the confidence of a juggler, heedless of the fact that one slip would make the plates and parasols fall down in a gale of mocking laughter. Gracq, whose first novel this was, published in 1938, of course does the same in his original, but my French is not good enough to appreciate the linguistic legerdemain the way I can in English. I found myself reading avidly, not for the story or characters, but in utter amazement at the language, in willing surrender to wherever Gracq would take me next.

The story has both the simplicity and mystery of Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama PELLEAS AND MELISANDE (or the opera Debussy made of it). Three characters come to this isolated domain: the scholarly Albert, his bosom friend Herminien, and the beautiful Heide, who arrives as Herminien's companion but immediately falls in love with Albert. The palpable sexual tension is distilled to the point where it is almost indistinguishable from the equally strong overtones of homoeroticism. Again as in Maeterlinck, each successive setting seems like the stage of some drama, waiting only for the curtain to rise. There are the empty rooms of the castle, laced with light and strewn with furs, ready for the new actors to take up the long-abandoned play. There is the coast where rock, sand, and sun meet with the sea to dissolve the normal bonds of prudence. A deserted chapel in the woods, where an iron clock ticks out the unheeded minutes and a full organ stands in a crumbling clerestory for Herminien to thunder out a musical improvisation rivaling nature itself. A long avenue through the forest that takes an entire night to traverse, leading to a deserted circle on the heath where many such avenues meet. It is a world of dreams, where all is surreal, where even violation and death seem but stages in an existence beyond time.

I read the book because Philippe Claudel, the author of the magnificent BRODECK, cites Gracq as one of his favorite authors. To read him, though, is to plunge into a dense nexus of influences: Poe and the gothic writers before him; Proust, for the heady perfume of his style; even a touch of the surreal near-pornography of Georges Battaille's STORY OF THE EYE. I also thought of painting: Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and other symbolists; Paul Gauguin, especially in his Breton period; and of course Salvador Dali. In a postscript to the reader, Gracq describes the novella as a demoniac version of Wagner's PARSIFAL, with its myth of the wounded Fisher King and the redeemer who must himself be redeemed. I half suspect that Gracq's explanatory note was just intended to confuse the reader even further, but who cares? The book is a fascinating trip through an enchanted forest of words and images, and mystification is the destination, not a detour.