Reading and Writing about Reading Writing

WevJT Reading and Writing about Reading Writing David Anshen Reading Writing Julien Gracq Translated by Jeanine Herman Turtle Point Press http://www.turtlepoint.com 448 pages; paper, $17.50 Julien Gracq is hardly a household name in America. This is true despite the vogue for French writers and critics that traces back, at least, to the seventies when poststructuralism and deconstruction became the rage, drawing attention to relatively obscure (in the United States) novelists and critics such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski. In the English-speaking world, such radical figures became the subject of fascination , sparking a renewed interest in more familiar radical French literary figures such as Andre Breton, Camus, Sartre, and Jean Genet, while writers such as Gracq remain virtually unknown. This is a shame, because as exciting, extreme, and important as the essays of Breton (great friends with Gracq) or Bataille may be (Visions ofExcess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 [1985] is the title of one of Bataille's essay collections), they give an incomplete picture of the traditions of French criticism and thought. It is worth knowing that not every French writer or thinker of importance is primarily interested in the poetics of the abject, alienation, and extreme states of consciousness. Gracq, although hardly conservative as a novelist or thinker (he mentions in passing fighting on the barricades in May 1968), writes a kind of criticism that is measured, restrained, contemplative , and thoughtful. Indeed, one of the gains of reading his recently translated Reading Writing, his first collection of essays translated into English, is the strange feeling that Gracq isn't a writer of the twentieth century at all. It is startling when, in a few places in the collection, Gracq mentions that he is writing the essays in 1978. Otherwise, the tone and approach would make 1778 seem just as plausible. His style, interest, approach, taste, and concerns all make this work ofcriticism a pleasant throwback to some earlier, more leisured, and disinterested time of the "free play of the faculties," to paraphrase Matthew Arnold. Indeed, Gracq's essays serve two major, distinct , and classical purposes: to please and instruct. Gracq does these in ways that reverse expectations. For example, Gracq writes polemically on the differences between painting and literature: To describe is to replace the instant comprehension of the retina with an associative sequence ofimages that unfolds overtime. Always hand in hand with the preliminaries ofdramatic art, description tends not toward a quietist unveiling of the object but toward the beating heart at the rising ofthe curtain.... For me, painting remains the world that calls attention to its closed heart, at times in the forms of ecstasies that may be repeated but may not resemble each other. Description is the world that opens its paths and becomes a path where someone is already walking or about to walk. The result is not that the reader is necessarily persuaded by the argument that literary narratives are more "open" than painting (Gracq seems unaware of abstract painting or the often passive nature of reading) but, rather, the effect, resulting from the style and power of Gracq's images and metaphors, makes the argument seem secondary. Although the book is translated from French (admirably, in my estimation, by Jeanine Herman), each sentence is creative and beautiful in its own right. As Gracq himself notes, "the richness of a book has less to do with the consciously registered multiplicity of these 'levels of meaning' than with the undivided fullness of the resonance that they organize around a text as the reading gradually progresses." Here we have Gracq, at his best, describing his own use of language and the effects produced by his essays. Gracq's is a sensibility lost in time. Gracq is an old-school critic trying, through an erudite immersion in literary masterpieces, to explore the essence of "Literature" in a time that no longer believes in "essences," let alone "Literature ." His criticism pares away the superfluous and searches for the hidden core of the artist or genre under discussion. He is an unabashed partisan of the novel over poetry, poetry over paintings, and all writing over cinema (which he likes and has goodjudgments...