Burning Mont-Cinère

Abstract

Burning Mont-Cinere Robert Ziegler Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology IfJulien Green considers himself"l'unique sujet de ses livres" (Petit 13), how can that view be reconciled with authors' alienation from their works, with the failure of the effort to transpose the self in writing—in the book, which, Blanchot says, "est justement moi-même devenu autre" (305)? In remarks that Green recorded at the start of his career, he often deprecated the function ofhis reader. "On dit peu de chose de Mont-Cinere," he wrote in 1926. "Si j'écrivais pour les autres, non pour moi, je serais triste" (Les Années faciles 37). For an author who sees his writing as birthing what he calls "ma vérité," it is not surprising that he might have feared another's appropriation of his text and that this same concern should have informed him in the writing of his first novel. The prideful kind of diffidence that characterized Green in the 1920s, his doubt that he could write a book "which a great number of people might want to read" (Memories of Happy Days 220), betrays a recognition that he could be delivered of his truth only if that truth were shared in the action of revealing it. What counts in Green is not so much the substance of his confession, his admission ofhomosexuality or oftroubling religious scruples, but rather that the secret be successfully imparted, and that the written text be freed through its assimilation by a reader. "Ecrire un livre ne suffît pas à libérer l'écrivain. Il faut que le public le connaisse, il faut que le public sache" (Journal 570).1 In Mont-Cinere, Green articulates his evolving attitude toward his work, no longer suggesting it is in the text that the writer grasps himself, but conceding that the value of literature must finally reside in the dynamic interaction between an author and his public. The novel is not a story, then, of simple loneliness or greed, but tells of the attempt to preserve what can only slip away, to materialize and amass what intends its own self-liquidation, and to possess what ultimately eludes the one who would possess it. On three different levels, Green's first full novel describes the way this failure happens for those who try to appropriate what is a source ofnegative energy. Money, as Mrs. Fletcher knows, is a transformational medium, and, for the miser, 35 36Rocky Mountain Review supplants the marketable goods from which it is obtained. Yet in addition to its inherent uselessness,2 it is inaccessible to its owner: "je ne touche pas à mon compte en banque," the old woman is fond of saying (Mont-Cinère 167). Like money, fire is generated by destroying that which fuels it, and, similarly, its light and warmth cannot be held or touched. The title explains the derisory wish to hoard what creates nothingness, in the homonymie "mon-Mont," as in "my fire," "my pile ofashes."3 The fledgling writer Green must have surely understood himselfthat his own creative language obliterates the real which it illumines, and that the text which promises wealth or fame is not a vessel of one's thoughts, but a sign of the extinguishing" of that which made it live. As Blanchot says, the purpose ofwriting is the act and not the object, the experience rather than the production ofthe dead "chose littéraire" (300). Yet from the start ofthe novel, Green's characters see experience in terms of ownership, the conversion of a living world into an aesthetically arranged one. Emily dissociates herself from the view outside her window, interiorizes it as an art object, and turns it into "une nature morte." "La jeune fille considérait ce paysage avec l'attention que l'on prête à l'examen d'une peinture et ses regards se portaient sans cesse d'un point à l'autre" (Mont-Cinère 70). Throughout the novel, there are references to the house as a container, a strongbox-reliquary housing functionless collectibles. "Représentez-vous une maison . . . bâtie en forme de coffre," Green writes (Mont-Cinère 77). To Emily, who associates Mont-Cin...