The Allegorical Impulse in the Works of Julien Gracq: History as Rhetorical Enactment in "Le Rivage des Syrtes" and "Un Balcon en forêt" (review)

Book Reviews literary concerns, occult gestures, and mythological devices, the other—inhabitants of a "land without myth"—more pragmatic, interested in technique, and in theory insofar as it develops or sustains technique. This is true despite the early interest in myth displayed by Pollock, Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman and others, which served them as a way out of the regionalist manners and parochialism of U.S. art in the thirties. Yet, as their characteristic styles matured, they all dropped the literary baggage: in divesting themselves of mythology they were aided especially by automatism, the means whereby the Surrealists themselves tried to tap their unconscious. Evidently the struggles of late Surrealism to escape from its own "marvelous" stereotypes led the Europeans to similar concerns as their counterparts in New York, above all to discover a new role for line, no longer assigned to mythological distortion: in different ways Hayter's graphics, Matta's spatial tracery and Seligmann's ribbons attempted a redefinition of the nature of line and plane that Pollock, Gorky, Kline, and their fellows would realize with astonishing originality. Breton's group, fading like Nosferatu in the morning sun, welcomed the fresh blood, but could not match the enthusiasm and energy of the young artists. Sawin brings out the importance of somewhat neglected figures like Onslow-Ford, and she shows that Duchamp (especially his Big Glass) contributed to the New York School through Matta. That the monumental work of the Abstract Expressionists owed something to Duchamp is a curious and unexpected aspect of the history of the period, for the young generation that mocked and ridiculed them—Johns and Rauschenberg—also admired Duchamp, albeit his ironic and intellectual aspect (Greenberg, solemn advocate of that work, never mentions Duchamp except as a minor Cubist). One discovers in Sawin's book repeated allusions to issues of freedom addressed by all those living through the thirties and forties; but the concerns of the Europeans—inevitably, though often vaguely, political—differed from the motivations of the Americans, who aimed at freedom not only for their artistic practice, but from the European tradition out of which they had come and toward which they always felt the ambivalence of the son questing independence. Jack J. Spector Rutgers Universitv Carol J. Murphy. The Allegorical Impulse in the Works of Julien Gracq: History as Rhetorical Enactment in "Le Rivage des Syrtes" and "Un balcon en forêt." Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1995. Pp. 199. $30. In this recent addition to a growing number of book-length treatments of Julien Gracq, Carol Murphy applies "a broad theoretical study of History as allegorical narration" (15) to the two novels in which real and imagined historical events form the narrative base. Readers accustomed to Gracq's arabesque syntax and surrealist tendencies often forget the inevitable presence of his other self, Louis Poirier, agrégé in history and geography. Murphy provides a fresh perspective by deftly combining the author's real-life experiences of history (the First and Second World Wars), his literary and esthetic heritage (the Grail legend, German Romanticism, Surrealism), and her own extensive knowledge of North American and European theories of allegory and historical writing. The result is a highly readable, provocative study of an often overlooked aspect of Gracquian fiction. The first half of the book develops the theoretical framework. Centuries of both generalized and specialized use have made "allegory" a slippery term, and Murphy takes special care in presenting a broad range of critical perspectives. While heavy reliance on Vol. XXXVI, NO. 4 99 L'Esprit Créateur major players such as Benjamin, de Man, Freud, de Certeau, Ricœur, Kristeva, Quilligan, and a host of others makes her book read at times like a compendium of twentieth-century literary thought and threatens on occasion to overshadow her own insights, a number of stimulating connections are established. Murphy finds fertile analytic ground in the coincidence of Walter Benjamin's views on history and allegory with Gracq's own, as presented in his fiction and critical essays. Independent of each other, but witnessing the same historical events of the first half of the century, "each is caught in the dialectic between...