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Reviewed by:
  • De Louis Poirier à Julien Gracq
  • Carol J. Murphy
De Louis Poirier à Julien Gracq. By Dominique Perrin. Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2009. 766 pp. Pb €79.00.

Dominique Perrin examines Gracq's place in French and European intellectual and literary history in a magisterial study that combines three books in one: 'une biographie sensible et intellectuelle' (p. 39); an account of the turn to literature during the 1930s, with attendant emphasis on the socio-political climate in France and Europe; and an analysis of the libidinal economy of Gracq's fiction where history is figured not only as event but also as lived, affective experience. The objective is to trace the trajectory from the civilian Louis Poirier, professor agrégé of histoire-et-géographie and ancien of L'École normale supérieure, to the writer Julien Gracq, the pen name adopted in 1939 at the publication of his first novel Au château d'Argol. At the outset, Perrin situates Poirier-Gracq in the generation of 1910, born on the cusp of the First World War without foreseeing its dire consequences, and subsequently bearing witness to the following war, the predominance of fascism, colonialism, and communism on the historico-political front. Throughout the book, Gracq's own experience of the forces of political history and geography in shaping destiny is underscored as a major thematic core of the fiction and essays. Perrin chooses the fragment at the end of En lisant en écrivant (1982), a note on [End Page 105] the biography of Hitler by Joachim Fest, originally written by Gracq in 1973 and dated 11 November, the anniversary of the end of the First World War, as frame reference for the thesis that Gracq consciously imbricated political history and fictional writing (p. 57). The shift from academic scientific writing to literature that took place between the two wars is also seen, interestingly, as a sort of hasard objectif: Poirier was prevented from visiting the USSR to research his thesis on geomorphology because of a diplomatic crisis and spent the summer writing Argol instead (p. 162). In addition to sociopolitical factors that informed the fiction, Perrin develops in detail the numerous literary influences on Gracq's work, including those of Jules Verne, André Breton, Richard Wagner, Arthur Rimbaud, German Romanticism, Ernst Jünger, and, tantalizingly, that of Gracq's former teacher Alain, thereby raising the question of Gracq as an 'Alain surréaliste' (p. 273). The third volet of Perrin's study analyzes the rhetorical forces of Gracq's writings, especially as they translate personal, historical, and literary influences. Perrin captures convincingly the pluridimensionality of the Gracquian œuvre with brio and in detail. Passages from the works are quoted at length and repeatedly, allowing the reader to follow Perrin's line of reasoning at every stage. The bibliography is very complete and up-to-date. This is both a useful and first-rate book.

Carol J. Murphy
University of Florida
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