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The Shape of a City

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Julien Gracq (1910-2007), selected bibliography:

1938 The Castle of Argol
1951 The Opposing Shore
1958 The Balcony in the Forest
1985 The Shape of a City

Julien Gracq is one of those utterly unclassifiable writers. His earliest work, especially The Castle of Argol, was influenced by the surrealists, but Gracq was never one to be contained by any single literary movement or manifesto. The Castle of Argol reads like a gothic romance, albeit one full of twentieth-century psychosexual dramas & tensions, and marks the beginning of a lifelong obsession with how we (writers & readers) weave fictions out of our real experience and /or weave real experience out of our fictions. (In Gracq's work there are no clear demarcations separating the real from the imaginary.)

Though there are consistent themes in his many works, each must be considered on its own terms. 1938's The Castle of Argol may have been heavily influenced by the surrealists, but by the time he wrote The Opposing Shore in 1951, he had completely absorbed surrealism and merged it with his other lifelong obsessions, history & geography. The Opposing Shore takes place in an imaginary time and place and thus has the feel of a novel-length parable and yet the real world is never completely eclipsed by the parable. Instead, the effect is that the real is not eclipsed but enhanced--or poeticized!-- by Gracq's imaginative rendering of it. Gracq works like an archeologist of the imagination, digging for and laying bare the deeper truths that reside within our individual & collective psyches. The world in the novel seems as real as anything encountered in Joseph Conrad (the world it describes, a highly distilled vision of contemporary European civilization, would be recognizable to Conrad or Mann or Proust or Musil), and yet the book also works like a poetic spell because the truth that Gracq is interested in is not just the material truth of histories and cultures and geographies but in the (creative/destructive) psychic urges & complulsions that lay within these histories and cultures and geographies, including the repulsion/attraction to that which lies just beyond one's own borders. The Opposing Shore is rightly famous for blending poetry & fiction in a richly ornate & evocative way. (In this book the reader never knows if what is sought is ultimate knowledge of self & civilization or escape from self & civilization).

The surprise of 1958's The Balcony in the Forest is that it takes place in a real place and time. It recounts one French soldier's day to day existence as he awaits the inevitable German invasion. But even here reality and unreality cannot be separated, each bleeds into the other though in a way that does not so much recall The Opposing Shore as elaborate & expand on that novels primary themes. In The Balcony in the Forest, we see firsthand the psychic effects of anticipation--the French soldier reacts to external events (or anticipated events) by retreating into a bucolic world of his own. But the book is never fantastic, rather it is a fascinating study of how our imaginations help us adjust to or cope with overwhelming circumstances & events.

Written in 1985, The Shape of a City is an intensely personal travel memoir, or, perhaps more accurately, a psychogeographic autobiography. The basic premise of the book is that our adult perceptions continue to be informed by the impressions of things & places we had in childhood. In this slim 200 page tome, Gracq tells the history of his own imaginative relation to his surroundings in several locales but primarily concentrating his attentions on Nantes. There are plenty of physical descriptions of each part of the city (some of these lengthy descriptive passages will best be appreciated by those who have some familiarity with the city), but these descriptions are always accompanied by a network of associations. For instance, the art museum, being located so near the school is forever associated with pedagogy and official culture and so failed to appeal to the young Julien and still fails to appeal to the older Julien; whereas the opera house and theatre being located in a much livelier part of town as well as a part of town that he knew very little about as a young man, exerted a strong and lasting mysterious appeal that continues to the present day. It is obvious that Gracq was independent as a young boy and this independence shaped his reaction to the city around him. What was official, sanctioned, and came pre-defined (like monuments, cathedrals, and anything found in a travel guide) had little or no appeal to the young Gracq while the unofficial, marginal, and forbidden areas of the city had, and still have, a strong allure. Gracq comes alive as a writer when he allows his imagination the freedom to roam & respond freely, but, at the same time, Gracq is forever making connections with other literary souls that have haunted the streets that he walks. Stendhal, Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Jules Verne, Valery Larbaud, Proust, Mauriac, Aragon, & Breton are all conjured and quoted. These like-spirited & like-minded travelers are the real shapers of Gracq's psychogeography; their writings, as much as the city itself, shape Gracq's perceptions of self & place. But his sympathetic imagination extends to more than just the literary-minded. To Gracq, the physical geography of one's surroundings effect one's mental geography, therefore in Gracq's imagination, those who live in cramped alleyways and tunnels and in crowded marketplaces relate to others differently--more intimately--than those who live in open spaces. Gracq is mesmerized time again by the alchemy of place and practice. He admits that he is forever undecided as to whether he is a city or a country dweller and he seems always to be equally seduced by a past for which he feels nostalgia and the as yet unwritten future. (Perhaps the imaginative are full of such indecision, such creative tension).

Psychic & geographic boundaries still obsess Gracq. Gracq sees real & imaginary boundaries everywhere and each boundary, he informs us, is only one step away from becoming a frontier.