The word surrealist is appropriate here, in one of its few current applications: a French schoolteacher, Julien Gracq (born Louis Poirier) was an admiring companion of the poet Andre Breton, the founder of literary Surrealism. Gracq wrote a book-length appreciation of that “saint of poetry,” its first edition, in 1948, illustrated with a frontispiece by Hans Bellmer. Julien Gracq’s writings may be, finally, the only truly successful works of serious fiction written under Breton’s direct influence. Of them, The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage des Syrtes) is the best known among French readers.
Gracq’s books are finely crafted intellectual puzzles, dense with perceptiveness, complex in fantasy and language, and stimulating even to a reader of cultivated taste. If only by virtue of its ability to command one’s full intellectual respect, The Opposing Shore—originally published in France in 1951 and now published in its first English edition by Columbia University Press—has almost nothing in common with the familiar “fantasy” genre, both in its highbrow (Umberto Eco) and lowbrow (science-fiction) forms. Indeed, “nothing in common” (“rien de commun”) is the motto that appears in the somewhat esoteric trademark of Gracq’s French publisher, José Corti. Gracq’s books, for the most part, are not truly novels: rather, they are extended Surrealist prose poems, mixing elements of dream, myth, and personal obsession, evoked with a special linguistic sonority that recalls Celtic and Norse literature.
The Opposing Shore is set in a landscape reminiscent of a de Chirico painting.
The Opposing Shore
