Review of Julien Gracq’s Abounding Freedom
Daniel Barbiero
May 2024
Julien Gracq, Abounding Freedom
tr. Alice Yang, World Poetry Books
“A Door Had Opened onto Unexplored Domains”
In the years immediately after its liberation, France underwent a major upheaval in its intellectual and cultural life. The overturning of the prewar order, following a humiliating defeat and occupation, affected French letters as well as French politics and social arrangements, as literary movements and figures that had come to prominence in the interwar period were eclipsed by new movements and figures emerging from the wreck of the war just ended. Among the movements pushed aside as no longer relevant was Surrealism, whose leadership and prominent members and allies were just returning to France from self-imposed exile in the Americas. Existentialism had usurped its place in avant-garde thought; worse yet, literary life was dominated by writers associated with the French Communist Party, many of whom were former Surrealists and hostile to Breton. Nevertheless the movement still managed to attract new adherents while also reaffirming old ties, even during these most difficult years. Among the movement’s older allies was poet, novelist, and critic Julien Gracq. In 1946, in an atmosphere not overly hospitable to Surrealism, he published the Surrealist-imprinted Liberté grande, his first and only collection of poems. We are now fortunate to have Abounding Freedom, a new translation of this lushly engaging volume.
Julien Gracq (1910-2007) was born Louis Poirier in St Florent-le-Vieil in western France; he adopted the pen name he would become known by with the publication in 1939 of the novel The Castle of Argol, his first book. Surrealist leader André Breton, who had in the past expressed antipathy to the novel as a form, nevertheless hailed The Castle of Argol as the first Surrealist novel. Gracq had been introduced to Surrealism several years before, when he read Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto and his autobiographical novel Nadja. As translator Alice Yang quotes him in her fine introduction to Abounding Freedom, with Surrealism Gracq “felt like a door had opened onto unexplored domains, or merely glimpsed domains, of poetry.” Gracq and Breton met for the first time in Nantes in August 1939, and although Gracq refused to become a formal member of the Surrealist group, he was sympathetic to Surrealism and maintained a lifelong friendship with Breton, particularly during the movement’s difficult years following Breton’s return to France from war-induced exile in America. Gracq, too, was displaced by the war, having been been called up for service in the French infantry and taken prisoner after his regiment was defeated by the German army near Dunkirk in May 1940. After he was released from internment in February 1941, he returned to his profession as a teacher of geography and history, and resumed writing. It was during the period immediately following his release that he began writing the prose poems that made up Liberté grande.
Following its initial appearance, Liberté grande was republished in expanded editions in 1958 and 1969. Abounding Freedom includes the forty original poems of Liberté grande, written between 1941 and 1943, as well as the six poems of “La Terre habitable” (1951) and the individual poems “La Sieste en Flandre hollandaise” (1951), “Gomorrhe” (1957) and “Aubrac” (1963). The new volume also includes a long prose passage taken from the unfinished novel La Route, a piece that did not appear in any edition of Liberté grande.
While Gracq’s poetry of 1941-1943 doesn’t represent an experimentation with Surrealist automatic writing, it was apparently written quickly, after which it was subjected to editing. The flavor of quick, spontaneous composition comes through, sometimes in contradictory ways. A number of the poems contain lengthy, convoluted sentences that give evidence of the unstoppable forward momentum of the imagination. “The Stowaway,” for example, an elaborately conjured fantasy of a seaside city, is made up of a procession of images carried along on a single very long sentence. By contrast there is “The Valley of Josaphat,” which presents its images in brusque yet vividly descriptive sentence fragments, as if they’d been transcribed from a stream of imagination intermittently breaking through to consciousness.
If not Surrealist proper, the poems of 1941-1943 frequently read like hallucinatory reports of things seen and felt while engaging in the quintessential Surrealist activity of urban wandering or its several transpositions. (At so many points the poems in Abounding Freedom recall Breton’s closing admonition in “Leave Everything”: “Take to the road.”) One of these transpositions provides the scenario for “Ambiguous Departure,” which exchanges the road for a waterway. Here, the speaker floats along a river or canal, where “[l]ong stretches of flat land and white, ghostly wood pigeons flying above the banks were the first awakenings of the magic seascape I improvised in the nocturnal scene.”
Consider “Hanging Gardens,” about a walk along the outskirts of a provincial town where
one can saunter alone down the slope toward the sorrowful rivers, a cemetery of pleasure boats in winter, squares invaded silently by grass and the hushed games of poor children, and sometimes a sleeping freight car or a kite’s frivolous vocal exercise…Solitude comes from the inhabited fringes from which one turns toward the windows—like one’s gaze, dizzy to the point of nausea, that takes off from the heights of an overcrowded velodrome and floats over deserted land where laundry hangs to dry from nomads’ caravans, or perhaps like the mystifying, drowsy languor of a suburban marshaling yard.
We can feel Gracq’s solitude, which he makes palpable through a heightened attention to the sights and sounds around him, which his imagination transforms through outlandish analogies or the attribution to things of incongruous properties. Central to the piece is the affective coloration he projects onto the scene: rivers are “sorrowful,” a collection of pleasure boats on the river is a “cemetery,” a quiet node of railroad tracks is “mystifying, drowsy” and “langour[ous].” His sense of being alone is itself shot through with vertigo as he compares it to the view from the upper tiers of a bicycle racing arena, which in a sudden, dreamlike transformation, becomes an aerial view of an empty landscape.
The Surrealists’ wanderings were undertaken in a spirit of disponibilité – of an availability or openness to whatever might happen. They were particularly keen on making themselves available to the possibility that they would experience a serendipitous meeting up with the object or person holding the key to the solution to some personal dilemma. We can see this in “The Great Game,” a prose poem consisting of a single very long sentence of stunning imagery. Gracq again writes of the mysterious appeal of neighborhoods around train stations, with their “delirious Euclidean geometries of marshaling yards.” Now he does so with an eye toward what they might augur for him:
sometimes a single water tower keeps watch over expansive solitudes—at times I’ve thought of turning over those haunting vignettes, those tarot cards of a duplicitous game—to seek for whom those face cards, forever unique to me, might have the same reverse side.
Gracq reads this landscape, whose solitude is reminiscent of one of de Chirico’s enigmatic paintings of train stations, as if it were a deck of tarot cards, the interpretation of which would reveal the other person – a counterpart unique to him — for whom this particular spread of cards was destined. Ironically, though, it seems a fact of biography that Gracq never did turn over those cards: prizing his solitude, he never married, and his writings are generally empty of any indications of erotic motivation.
The poetic voice legible throughout these poems of the early forties finds itself by finding itself outside of itself, through a projection of imagination onto the brute facts of its surroundings. It is a transformative imagination, one that can tie together disparate objects or events in novel ways, or cover plain reality with a colorful curtain of metaphor. Gracq’s scenes of wandering aren’t described so much as they are constituted by the arcane parallels and substitutions through which he expresses them. In good Surrealist fashion language doesn’t indicate so much as it conjures, through its capacity to generate meaning with startling images arranged in catalytic combinations. And yet it can descend to plain reference as well, as evidenced by the many allusions to real and sometimes very distant places that turn up in the titles or bodies of the poems: the Ross Ice Shelf; the Cornish cathedral city of Truro; the Susquehanna River; Petrograd; South Carolina; the eastern Siberian region of Transbaikalia. A reminder, perhaps, that Gracq the quasi-Surrealist was also Gracq the geography professor.
In the later “Habitable Earth” series of poems as well as in “La Sieste en Flandre hollandaise,” “Gomorrah,” and “Aubrac,” Gracq continues to write with a logic that is analogical, associative, and decisively colored by affect. But now the imagery is more explicitly constrained by the literal facts on the ground. In addition his lines, although still elaborately structured, unfold with a more measured momentum. With its urban setting, “Habitable Earth”’s opening poem, “Paris at Dawn,” provides a good transition from the poems of the early forties to the later poems. “Paris at Dawn” is a tour-de-force telling of what it is like to experience a city “trembling at the extreme edge of a night’s rest”:
Daybreak in Paris has nothing to do with the planet’s jubilation, with the symphonic sunrise in Beauce or Champagne: it’s the blind ebb of an inner tide of blood—it’s the outcrop on a vigorous face, on the surface of a sheltered life, of a secret, gnawing fatigue—the hour when life recedes to its lowest foreshore, when the dying fade away—it’s that poignant moment, that shadowy hour when the face takes flight from the beloved head on the pillow, and an unknown mask, like a man trudging through snow, gets its bearings in death’s incomparable light.
But the Parisian location of “Habitable Earth” is an outlier. With the series’ other poems Gracq takes us to “The Uplands of Sertalejo,” Dutch Flanders, and Aubrac. Physical details of the landscapes come more clearly into focus even as they are wrapped in a tissue of reminiscence, reflection, and emotional response. The exterior world is still colored by Gracq’s interior world, but it takes on a certain semi-independence as Gracq’s prose ventures away from Surrealist extravagance and approaches closer to description. Here, for example, is a passage from “The Uplands of Sertalejo”:
Once more I see the skies swept with the lustral clarity of a cleansed pebble shore, where the clouds sketched pearly shell-like spirals on the pure canvas—the green hills above the chasms, where the wind’s fingers plunged into the tall grass—the mountain lakes, nestled in the heart of the starshaped land serrated with peaks, like drops of night dew in the palm of a leaf. But above all, with the allure of a sustained chord that drowns out a melody’s arabesques like still water, silence comes back to haunt me: a highland silence, of a devastated and smooth planet where nothing frays the clouds’ shadows on the ground, and where sunlight bursts through the silent thunder of blooming life.
We get a strong visual sense of the setting as the metaphors and similes, while reflecting the sensibility of the poem’s voice, point us more directly to their objects. That the transformation of fact is less radical than it was in earlier poems doesn’t take away from these later poems’ ability to open up unique vistas. The curtain of imagery is still there, but now made of a less dense material.
The final piece in the volume is a set of two fragments taken from an unfinished novel of 1953. Gracq chose to publish the two fragments in 1963 under the title “La Route,” translated here as “The Road.” Gracq once again writes of taking to the road, but now the prose is more befitting a novel than a poem: it is descriptively detailed and more-or-less straightforward as a narrative. The second paragraph sets both the scene and the tone. We find the narrator recalling
The strange, unsettling road! The only open road I’ve ever taken, whose meandering would—even if everything around it were to fade away, from its perils and junctions to its fear and twilight thickets—still engrave its imprint in my memory, like the scratch of a diamond on a windowpane. Entering that path was like setting out to sea. Across 300 leagues of haphazard land, extending on its own, a thin thread disentangled and untied, drawn-out, bleached by the sun, and rotten with dead leaves, it unfurls, in my memory, the phosphorescent trail where feet feel their way through grass on a moonlit night, as though I had followed it along its nocturnal riverbanks, from one end to the other, across an endless black wood.
Gracq is no longer writing a prose poem, but the prose nevertheless carries the scent of the poetic. His sentences here, as in the earlier prose poems, take on length as they accumulate sequences of metaphorically enhanced images. But here the images are the products of reconstructed observations rather than of imaginative extravagance; the voice that earlier had found its inner life outside, where the pressures of an active imagination had shaped its surroundings, now reaches back into the outer world through the impressions served up by memory, which it records in vividly descriptive language. Gracq’s description is far from neutral, though; his words have been chosen as much for their emotional shadings as for their capacity to make present the physical details of the road and its environment.
Yang’s translation is sensitively done and takes great pains to preserve the cumulative momentum of Gracq’s writing. As she notes in her introduction, the long sentence was central to Gracq’s style. She respects this by preserving the length and complexity of Gracq’s lines, but adds commas in places in order to clarify the relationships between words and the flow of images. It doesn’t hurt that the French originals appear on facing pages. In addition, her introduction provides essential context and a solid critical perspective on Gracq’s work. Gracq is not very well-known to American readers, but this well-chosen selection of material and fine translation should go far toward bringing him within reach.
Julien Gracq, Abounding Freedom
World Poetry Books →
Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
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