Paroxysmes historiques et savoirs fantômes. À propos des Terres du couchant de Julien Gracq

Abstract

The work of Julien Gracq, who has often referred to his studies of geography and his interest for cartography, has been haunted by the idea of instability or even monstrosity of modern history, particularly in the twentieth century. His work is indictitive of an intellectual movement that was prominent in France during the thirties, and that can easily been read in some journals (Le Voyage en Grèce, Minotaure, Acéphale), in the early work of Roger Caillois and in the Collège de sociologie. On the other hand, Gracq tries to suture this break by referring to the topos of the liber mundi, as it appears in German Romanticism (Novalis) and in On the Marble Cliffs (1939) by Ernst Jünger. This study focusses on this double poetic in Les Terres du couchant, a fascinating novel Gracq wrote between 1953 and 1956, but which remained unpublished until 2014. It shows the heavy violence of war, but retraces also complex paths of redemption, that reflect in a minor and blurred way the lost and almost phantomatic model of Ernst Jünger.