The author has been a mystery of French literature since the Goncourt prize, which he refused in 1951. Julien Gracq, who died in 2007 at the age of 97, bequeathed his manuscripts to the National Library of France and left instructions about their publication.
An unpublished work by Julien Gracq, The House, released Thursday, March 30. A story of “urbex” before time, pending the subsequent revelation of the contents of notebooks whose publication the writer has blocked until 2027. Urbex (urban exploration) consists of visiting abandoned places or industrial wastelands without authorization. Julien Gracq probably did not have the opportunity to hear the term before his death in 2007, at the age of 97, but it is indeed what he describes having practiced, and from which he draws a sensory account.
“A long poem in prose”
The House, published by the publishing house to which he has always remained faithful, Jose Corti, comes from a vast treasure: the manuscripts bequeathed by the author to the National Library of France (BNF). In these some 15,000 pages, the writer’s heir and friend, Bernhild Boie, brought to light a long story or a short novel, which Gracq had not wanted to publish. “It is a compendium of Gracquian fiction, almost a long prose poem.estimates the professor emeritus of literature of the Sorbonne Michel Murat, questioned by AFP. “The known landscape, in a trivial autobiographical context, suddenly, after crossing a certain threshold, becomes unusual”. “This unpublished short story by Julien
Gracq unfolds, like an intrigue, the birth of a desire”, emphasize Corti Editions.
In the work, finally published, are reproduced, in facsimile, two states of the manuscript, one preparatory, annotated and crossed out on all sides; the other put in the net. Gracq’s writing, applied and loose, is pleasant to read. The action of The Housewritten “probably between 1946 and 1950”, is easy to locate. After fighting the German invasion of May 1940, being captured near Dunkirk, sent to a camp for soldiers and released in February 1941 for health reasons, Gracq became a teacher at the Lycée d’Angers.
He describes the journey he made during the 1941-1942 school year, twice a week, in a “tired coach” between the capital of Anjou and the town of Varades, to find the weekend his stronghold of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, on the other side of the Loire. The house is located halfway to “G.”probably Saint-Georges-sur-Loire, “one of those villas of pretentious and mediocre appearance which the beginning century has multiplied”. It seems uninhabited. The narrator will one day venture into his park.
Mysterious and prolific beyond the grave
The author has been a mystery of French literature since the Goncourt prize which he refused in 1951 for Le Rivage des Syrtes. “Gracq has not been forgotten, he has a loyal following”underlines Isabelle Daunais, professor of literature at McGill University in Montreal.
Several unpublished have emerged since his death. Like “War Scrolls”, in 2011, which consisted of a diary kept in May–June 1940 and a fiction sketched from that diary. In 2014, Sunset Lands showed an abandoned novel that Gracq had worked on between 1953 and 1955. And life knots, in 2021, was a collection of various fragments.
The publication of his work is far from over. A story titled Partnership, in all likelihood the first by Gracq in 1931, is still waiting to arrive in bookstores. The writer, by his will, also prohibited the publication, for the 20 years following his death, of 29 notebooks which he called Minutes.
What is in these 3,500 pages? One of the few people who leafed through them, a curator at the BnF, Marie-Odile Germain, explained to Isabelle Daunais that they were “the framework of day-to-day, fragmentary writing, freed from fiction and the subject”. “We will perhaps, not certainly, have elements of an autobiographical nature. Things maybe freer, more eccentric, we don’t know”believes for his part Michel Murat.