To Double Business Bound

The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq

While the narrator in every work of fiction is charged with the task of seeing, of serving—at least to some degree—as the reader’s own eyes, there are those narrators who seem to see more, to see differently, more complexly, their eyes not simply their own. Agents, emissaries, they are bound in what they experience by a sort of tortured double vision, their own often gravely human reckonings compounded at every turn by what they’ve been sent there to look for, to see.

Western literature is crowded with such figures, men mostly, often middling, reluctant witnesses, who’ve been shunted off to the margins of empire, men like Marlow from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Don Diego from Di Benedetto’s Zama, Geoffrey Firmin from Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Giovanni Drogo from Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (see my earlier post on The Tartar Steppe), Major Scobie from Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, and, more recently, the hapless Magistrate from Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

Then there is Aldo from, Julien Gracq’s lush, unsettling 1951 novel, The Opposing Shore, a protagonist and anti-hero very much in this line. Dispatched from the capitol to the rugged, once-hostile coast of Syrtes, Aldo soon finds himself lost in a menacing labyrinth of secrets, innuendo, and subterfuge, that he struggles alone and in vain to map. Centered upon the themes of boundaries and borders (both real an imaginary), and upon the stubbornly dichotomous, endlessly destructive mentalities of Us vs. Them/Good vs. Evil, Gracq’s The Opposing Shore remains a smart, telling study of our times.  

 

Yet what strikes me most about the novel (at least in translation) is his language itself—both its syntactical strangeness and its saturated, densely lyrical, nearly Conradian diction and phrasing. Much as when I first read Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu, I suffered the odd if liberating impression, in reading this novel, that I was not reading it in English after all, but in some other, more florid tongue. As with Moncrieff’s translation, I also felt that I was not just experiencing the original novel (at least an approximation of it), but seeing the English language itself, its scope and potential, refashioned before my eyes—just one more reason I am grateful to the many fine translators I’ve read.

Gracq himself is no less intriguing than his novel. Born Louis Poirier in 1910, he spent twenty-three all but invisible years teaching history and geography at the Lyce Claude Bernard in Paris. He, this modest, Walser-like man, this friend and admirer of Andre Breton, is known by many as writer whose fiction was often brilliantly tinged by Surrealism.  Deeply averse to celebrity, he refused to accept the Prix Goncourt, which he was awarded for this novel in 1951. He never married nor had children, and, in the later years of his life, lived quietly with his sister until she died in 1996. Alone (to quote from The Guardian’s fine obituary of him), “…he would spend the evenings watching television, particularly football. He continued to read.” He died in 2007.

* Special thanks to my friend, Eric Diler, for sending me this novel from France. Remarkably, for all my love of French literature, I had not read anything by Gracq. I am happy I have.

Peter Adam Nash