Book Review : Fairy Tale Fueled by Myth, Allegory and Imagination

The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq; translated by Richard Howard (Columbia University: $18.95)

French novelist Julien Gracq is a disciple of the surrealism of Andre Breton, but this novel, written in 1951, and awarded the French Goncourt Prize (which Gracq refused), resembles, in the baroque language of the accomplished translator, Richard Howard, fantasy/sci-fi. Gothic castles with secret passages and looming, malignant ramparts are set in a landscape out of a poet’s vision of the Fall of the Roman Empire: a place of pestilent swamps and sheep-strewn Piranesi-like ruins. It is hard to keep in your head that the alien creatures who inhabit this world are human beings. This is the old land of faeries, fueled by imagination, myth and allegory.

I should admit right away I’m not keen on this sort of thing.

Boredom and vague longings are the dominant emotions operating here, not only in the mind of Aldo, the narrator and protagonist, but also in the collective mind of Orsenna, Aldo’s “corrupt and exhausted” homeland, for which he is a minor official and spy. Aldo plays the Hegelian hero--he must embody the history of his country, taking on its Angst, and through his heroic yet ignorant acts, bring about the next stage of its history, in this case what appears to be its doom.

A Hegelian Foundation

In some sense, “The Opposing Shore” is Gracq’s working out in fiction of the philosophical and political ideas of Hegel, but the book is so steeped in gothic atmosphere--whole paragraphs are reserved for descriptions of atmosphere alone--so overly wrought with romantic yearnings for annihilation that it is hard to take seriously.

At moments in this story, when Aldo is overcome with self-doubt, and we are distanced from him, it is possible to imagine that this work might be about his mind and not the world it describes: how the young poetic male’s imagination, overheated by German romanticism, Hegel, the twin sirens of idealism and cynicism, and existential malaise, brings to life a world run by theory and myth, whose limits are expressed in the rhythmic repetition of such words as boring, longing, void, exhausted, corrupt, noble, fetid. His contempt for civilian commoners, for anyone trying to live an ordinary life; his horror of women and fascination for military intrigue could reveal how philosophy is too shot through with human desire, taste and distaste ever to get at the “truth.”

From this angle, the story is suddenly much more compelling and intelligent, but since Gracq always collapses this distance almost immediately, I think, finally, the book is not about philosophical and poetic sensibilities run amok. Rather, Gracq wants us mostly to take Aldo’s vision at face value, asking his readers to be swept along in suspended disbelief, as when one reads a romantic poem, where the emotions provide the roller coaster and the intellect is expected to go on vacation.

The Worth of War

Most interesting for me is the basic set-up between the Kingdom of Orsenna and the Kingdom of Farghestan on the opposing shore across the strait. The countries have been at war since their ancient beginnings, but for generations have been kept at bay by their refusal to communicate. Between them in the middle of the strait is an imagined line that neither country dares cross. Aldo’s obsession with the mysterious Farghestan and his longings to break through and to make contact represent Orsenna’s desire to embrace the void, to invite disaster, and with it, destiny and, possibly, a new life. In imagery and expectation, this contact is blatantly sexual--the only clear glimpse we get of Farghestan is of its spewing volcano. This might be the One’s fantasies, desires, and fears of the unknown and complementary Other. Yet the embrace proposed is an embracing not of life and fulfillment, but of death and annihilation.

Health through war is a proposition that should have long since had its day, if not since World War I, certainly since Hiroshima. If there is anything truly exhausted in Gracq’s visionary world, it is in that aspect of the vision itself. All in all, if I am going to take the carnival ride Romantic Fantasy, I prefer the kinder, more yea-saying kick of a “Cocoon” or a “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”