The Castle of Argol

by Julien Gracq, Louise Varèse

THE GOTHIC SETTING of a lonely castle in the middle of thick, dense woods contrasts with the contemporaneity of the characters who inhabit it: a dissolute, rich and aimless young man who invites his best friend to stay in his newly-acquired chateau. The friend arrives not alone, but with a beautiful woman whose detached amorality disturbs both men.

Genres: Fiction, France, Gothic, Novels, French Literature, Horror, 20th Century

173 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

Julien Gracq (27 July 1910 – 22 December 2007), born Louis Poirier in St.-Florent-le-Vieil, in the French "département" of Maine-et-Loire, was a French writer. He wrote novels, criticism, a play, and poetry.

Gracq first studied in Paris at the Lycée Henri IV, where he earned his baccalauréat. He then entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1930, later studying at the École libre des sciences politiques.

In 1932, he read André Breton's Nadja, which deeply influenced him. His first novel, The Castle of Argol is dedicated to that surrealist writer, to whom he devoted a whole book in 1948.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Château d’Argol is a baroque filigree of words and it emanates a rich Gothic aura.
As the title of the novel suggests it’s a tale of a place… Château d’Argol is literally an opposite of the House of Usher… The protagonist arrives at his newly bought castle and finds it luxuriant and sunny…

In the lower portion of the hall, the tall pointed windows were hung with a light silk fabric intricately patterned in leaves and flowers; this filtered light, glaucous and softly yellow, seemed to be coming from some marine depth, and bathed the entire lower regions of the room in a uniformly warm glow like a luminous sediment, transparent and compact, while a few feet above, throughout the entire upper plane, the fierce rays of the sun ran riot. This stratification made each plane immediately apparent to the eye, and the contrast between the extravagant luxury displayed in the soft light of the ground level and the rough ceiling where the magic of sunlight in all its power alone held sway overwhelmed the soul with a sort of delirious bliss, warming Albert’s heart, as he started up the turret stairs of varnished wood that creaked with every step and were as sonorous as a ship’s hull.

Soon the old friend with his female companion comes with the prolonged visit and the strange triangle is drawn…

Then Heide with a shudder of her whole being (no doubt, as a woman, she was less invincibly timid, and no doubt Albert was not in love with her) laid on Albert’s hand her hand, as cold as marble and as hot as fire; with the slowness of torture, with force and frenzy, she twined each one of her fingers in his, and drawing his face to hers, she forced him to take her lips in a prolonged kiss that shook her entire body as though lightning had passed through it.

The host and his visitors abide in relentless melancholia… Gothic atmosphere persistently thickens… The friend suddenly disappears… And reality becomes more and more surreal…

Fallen in the grass, coiled in the grass, more motionless than a meteoric stone, with the strange floating uncertainty of his wide-open corpse’s eyes, as though revived in his face after death by the secret hand, and with the disquieting insinuations of an embalmer, the eyelids seemingly touched by the majestic makeup of death, Herminien lay nearby, and his uncovered face in the icy nakedness of the morning radiated a silent horror, as though, through the effect of a bloody irony, the blackness of a crime accomplished without a witness were painted on the face of the victim himself. Near him a block of sandstone half hidden in the grass was the very one on which his horse’s hoof must have stumbled.
Silently they lifted him, removed his clothes, and his torso appeared, white, vigorous and soft – and their eyes obstinately avoided each other – and in his side below his ribs, appeared the hideous wound where the horse’s shoe had struck, black and bloody, circled with clotted blood as though the haemorrhage had been stopped only by the effect of a charm or of a philtre. Little by little, they felt life returning under their fingers and it was not long before the doors of the castle closed behind the wounded man in a silence full of foreboding.

The magic of the place is strong… Or is it the magic of madness?

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

The castle is the man: austere, remote, full of a blinding light. The two visitors are the man: the first, a cynic and manipulator, a friend and a foe; the second, a seeker and a secret-keeper, a lover and a lure. The forest is the man: all paths lead back to him; all paths are the same. The murderer is the man: he takes the dagger and uses it. The murdered are the man: he yearns to dream and so slashes his own throat; he attempts to escape and so stabs his own back. This castle has been built for one; and so a man shall live alone.

In his afterward, Gracq makes clear his scorn for "symbolic explanation" and the excruciating finiteness of saying this equals that. Gracq is a surrealist; he eschews the finite. Gracq would no doubt scorn my first paragraph. Scorn me, Gracq! You make your mind all too clear, your characters like Jungian archetypes, the castle itself a metaphor, as with forest and path and grave, as with secret passageway from basement to bedroom. Sometimes the inside is easier to read from the outside. I am on the outside of the castle, evaluating it, contemplating its inhabitants. Gracq lives inside that castle. Which of us sees the forest for the trees?

In his afterward, Gracq makes clear his love for the classic gothic, for Mysteries of Udolpho and House of Usher and the like; he writes that The Castle of Argol is paean to such works. This fascinating book has little in common with such works. Those are works of darkness, fields of shade and shadow concealing murky human emotions, twisted narratives shaped by those twisted emotions, layers hiding layers. Quite unlike those gothics, this is a work of shining, scouring light. A clear path is cleared. A radiant clarity is achieved, for protagonist and for reader looking into the castle, from the forest and from the paths below.

The book's incandescence dazzled me. Gracq's focus on the spatial is a hallmark of this story's brightness: the castle mapped out so deliberately, so clearly; the protagonist's body described so carefully, so lucidly; the forest and weather and other elemental things rendered with perfect understanding of how such things look and sound and feel. A painter's eye, and an architect's. The characters' mutual longing for something beyond themselves is illustrated over the course of disparate set pieces. My favorite: the three of them at sea, ecstatic and delirious, swimming ever outward, no matter if to their deaths: a brilliantly lit scene, illuminating their disengagement with mortal things, their inchoate, barely understood search for the unmapped territories, the ineffable, those ideas not to be described with mere verbiage, or made knowable through easy symbolism. These characters live in light; they yearn to be blinded by their own enlightenment.

Synopsis: a rich young man buys a castle in the country; all levels are explored.

[María Carpio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novela muy compleja. Muy. Novela de trama gótica y de estilo barroco (si se lo puede resumir así). Posiblemente se deba releer varias veces para llegar a comprender cada palabra, cada párrafo, cada sentido doble construido a través de esta arquitectura de palabras. Una arquitectura gótica en doble vía: los tres protagonistas se encuentran en un castillo -nuevamente- gótico, y la trama oscura y tenebrosa es gótica también. Pero no se vaya a a creer que es una novela de terror (aunque podría serlo), porque en realidad todo lo que da miedo en esta narración es un halo invisible de gélido temor a un mundo-espejo de aquello que va más allá de la razón y lo consciente. Un mundo de percepciones, intuiciones, sensaciones, conexiones invisibles, una especie de maldiciones automáticas provenientes de un lugar desconocido que habita en un intersticio de uno mismo y en el intersticio de la interacción con los otros, de lo no-evidente, lo no-dicho pero sobreentendido, pero todo esto, marcado por un aura oscura y tenebrosa. Quizás la oscuridad del inconsciente. Pero no es una novela psicológica ni nada de eso, sino de una retórica de pulido lenguaje barroco (infinitamente descriptivo, tanto de escenarios como de acciones) que basa su premisa en la noción de espíritu desarrollada por Hegel. Y esto es parte de la trama, al aludir a aquello como parte de las lecturas y discusiones que tienen los dos personajes masculinos: Albert y Herminien. Cabe aclarar que no hay diálogos sobre ello como tal, simplemente descripciones del narrador en tercera persona.

Sin embargo, nada de lo que he dicho describe fielmente lo que es esta novela, porque al leerla lo que prima es una atmósfera pesada de sensaciones densas y oscuras, como si se estuviera entrando a una catacumba o a un gélido y húmedo bosque tupido (y ambas cosas están en la novela), casi a tientas. La trama se basa en una rara relación entre tres personajes, marcada de pasiones extrañas, algo de sangre y muerte (la muerte siempre blandiendo su hacha a lo largo de toda la narración). El trío se compone de los dos amigos antes mencionados y una mujer, Heide, de belleza sublime y de tan etérea, casi espectral -como Albert y Herminien- que funge de catalizadora de la relación de ambos amigos. Lo que pasa entre ellos tres es una especie de encantamiento indescriptible, Heide por Albert, Albert por Herminien, y Herminien por Heide; y el avance ruinoso de sus relaciones. O es lo que logré vislumbrar.

Pese a toda esta narración bastante extraña y lúgubre, lo que prima es la fina filigrana del lenguaje con el que está construida. En verdad es un trabajo minucioso -y hasta por momentos excesivo- de la prosa, de alta joyería, lleno de detalles y descripciones abundantes y puntillosas de cada espacio, escena, acción y personaje. El castillo y el bosque que le rodea son el personaje más grande, es como si se tragaran a los personajes, como si los engulleran y los mantuvieran dando vueltas en sus fauces. Algo maligno en la naturaleza, algo maligno en los espacios, o quizás solo se trate de los recovecos de la conciencia humana. Todavía no he logrado entender del todo el sentido entero de esta novela, porque el narrador habla siempre de algo que marca a los personajes ocurrido por un motivo que se escapa a mi entender, pero ellos parecen comprenderlo bien. Y esto al final se sella con una especie de pacto... de sangre. Pero no es que asome un pacto como tal. Todo es tácito y a la vez, las escenas sangrientas están, pero muy arremolinadas en ese torrente de palabras.

Esta es una novela de 1939, de un autor francés no muy leído hoy en día (aunque ganó el premio Goncourt con su otra novela "El mar de las Sirtes"), al cual llego por referencias de Vila-Matas. En este caso, se aplica la máxima:"estilo vence trama". Por último, como dice el propio Gracq en el prefacio, esta novela podría ser una "versión demoníaca" del Persifal de Wagner y un homenaje a los Misterios de Udolfo, de Ann Radcliff; El castillo de Otranto, de Horace Walpole; y La caída de la casa Usher, de Edgar Allan Poe.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surreal, decadent novella written in a dense style with a morose Gothic atmosphere. It is full of very florid description of the landscape and the castle in which it takes place, but more importantly of the inner lives of the characters; half glimpsed impressions, sensations and dreamy meditations. It took some time for the prose to grow on me, it's both more dense and less vivid than the prose of Cormac McCarthy, just as an example. And yet when you get into the rhythm of it, this novel is quite enjoyable and unique.

The story itself is uneventful. It has a Gothic setting, a castle with labyrinthine passages and strange lighting, a dark and oppressive forest, raging tempests, a ruined church and the roaring sea. But this is a quiet story of inner reflection primarily, even if there is a vague, indefinable dread throughout. There's also many unexplained phenomena; the servant who sleeps on the floor, an abandoned church with a functioning clock and why the characters wander the halls like wraiths. The whys are wherefores at the end are also pretty hazy, but while much of the plot is largely secondary, it does end with some excitement which was welcome.

Some of the sentences are, to say the least, LONG and full of qualifiers and little asides. This one is chosen almost randomly: It seemed to him that between the iron clock, the lamp, the tomb, the helmet and the lance there must be woven, perhaps through the effect of some ancient spell, but more likely because of their intimate and dangerous conjunction of an appalling antiquity, as the glistening saltpetre of the vault bore witness, a bond difficult in the circumstances to discover, but whose unquestionable existence imprisoned the imagination as in a perfect circle, and designated in an intentionally closed space the very geometric locus of the Enigma, whose inextricable knots had been stifling him since morning with an embrace at every instant more convincing—so that in the middle of his journey toward the altar he stopped abruptly, a prey to a sudden terror lest his enchanted footsteps, if they continued, should bring him face to face with its disconcerting and incontestable countenance.

So, this is certainly not light reading but at only 30,000~ words it's not especially long either.

I'll give some examples of the prose. You gotta be in the right mood for this. At times Gracq seeks to express the infinitesimal, at others, the colossal and cosmic. Some passages are more effective than others, but he's always reaching for the nebulous, some of which eludes his (or at least my) grasp.

A description of an a man playing an organ in an abandoned ruin of a church:

Clearly now—and with every moment it became more apparent to Albert—he was looking for the unique angle of incidence at which the eardrum, deprived of its power of interception and of diffusion, would become permeable like pure crystal, and would change this thing of flesh and blood into a sort of prism of total reflection, where sound would be accumulated instead of passing through, and would irrigate the heart with the same freedom as the sanguine medium, thus restoring to the desecrated word ecstasy its true significance.

Others...

As for Heide, she felt herself to be at one of those nodes of the planet's human vibrations where absolute calm, albeit engendered by the juggling interference of contrary motions, is all the more soothing in its perilous instability

...it seemed that each particle of skin simultaneously consumed all these profound delights, and if one closed one's eyes, the body suddenly to the senses had the form of a wine skin wholly closed around with warm darkness, whose marvelous living wall could be felt everywhere and at the same time by its contact with a coolness, no longer accidental but telluric, seeming to be radiated by all the pores of the planet, as its intolerable heat is radiated by the sun.

In the mass of his memories, slight and almost molecular detachments and displacements seemed to be taking place under the pressure of a prodigious weight, and, like iron filings moved by an invisible magnet on a piece of paper, seemed to shape themselves, did finally shape themselves, into what now appeared to be an interpretable figure, but which his feverish reason, struck with a furious impotence, circled without success, and as though under a spell, recognized the clearly oriented lines without yet, by intuition, penetrating their suddenly dazzling significance.

[Marko Vasić · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read such, nor similar illusive, grim, decadent and esoteric novel to this day, and I’m quite enthused with it. The utmost oddity of this novel is that the narrative is composed merely of description – mostly of nature, its sounds and onomatopoeias epitomised out of it. Not a single word uttered by a human voice is present – just a bundle of unspoken thoughts, pervaded with endless, yet quite keenly devised structural descriptions, formed from the essence of those thoughts and reveries. And the novel itself is a sheer cacophony of teeming sounds of variable trebles, which are, essentially, the foundations of the narrative and the atmospheric weft, giving the same impressions as classical compositions such are: Liszt’s “Dante Symphony” or “Night On Bald Mountain” by Mussorgsky, Pythagoras’ Music of the spheres or Tolkien’s Ainulindalë in The Silmarillion. Immense manor with a castle from the period of Norman invasions, which “rose at the extreme end of the rocky spur off from the road with a tortuous path led up to it—impracticable for any vehicle” is almost uninhabited, for, apart a few servants mentioned laconically and never described nor present within the story itself, and Albert – the young proprietor – no other persons are present thither. Albert is a decadent youngster, infatuated with Kant, Leibnitz, Plato, Descartes and particularly Hegel, who recently bought that manor and came to dwell there. The description of the surrounding is quite astonishing: “To his right stretched flat moorlands filling the eye with the dull besetting yellow of the gorse. Here and there stagnant water lay in grassy bogs where uneven stones offered the surest footing in the midst of a perfidious soil. Toward the horizon, the land seemed to be raised in a fold of ground forming a low chain which had been carved by erosion into three or four higher pyramids. The declining sun was now painting the short grass of the mountains a magnificent yellow: on their summits, jagged sandstone teeth and rude columns of crumbling stone blocks stood out sharply against the sky; a keen air, a luminous sky, silvered as though by the reflection of the ocean close at hand, gave a sort of majesty to the clean-cut profiles of the mountains. To the left rose dark and gloomy woods, dominated by oaks with, here and there, a few gaunt pines; invisible brooks could be heard, but Albert was struck by the rarity of bird songs and by their sad monotony.” The castle is, practically, settled in a snare – both physically and metaphorically. Miasmic mists, rising from the ocean and enfolding the forest, impetuous, furious storms, the old graveyard on the very shore, myriad archaic attributes employed by the author are of a few details which ornate this novel and the reasons of my prompt infatuation with it. The narrative is quite lacking in an action, yet bursts with the surreal and gothic elements, begirded with continually intensified uncertainty amongst the realistic and surreal. Thus – everything is quite static, but the thoughts. Albert invites his lifelong friend Herminien to his castle and the infinity of waiting for him to arrive is ceased with the third person that emerged with him on the doorstep – his girlfriend Heide. About these three characters the reader learns but a few: some features of their physique (yet quite enough to conceive their silhouettes), and somewhat of their mental states. Young Albert coexists, I daresay, in-between the homoerotic (which was twice referenced by the author as “his unalterable disdain for women”, which may not indicate Albert’s homosexuality but juvenility), and insatiable desire regarding Heide, whose character is quite vague and those two reminded me much of Poe’s Roderick and Madeline Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher, leaving the impression that Heide and Herminien are, perhaps, the same person, i.e. Jungian persona and shadow or anima and animus and that Albert is, in truth, in love with his friend Herminien, calling him “his long-ago lost soul”. Infinitely long days enshrouded with a dense atmosphere, these three spend in the forest. Crescendo and eucatastrophe are absent, yet a reader encounters abruptly with a sheer decrescendo, hence trepidation and apprehension are ceased with sudden Heide’s death and ensuing downfall of the soul twins. Or, maybe, not?

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

 
Childe Albert to the Dark Tower Came

From the top of this mute sentinel of the sylvan solitudes, the eye of a watcher following the traveller's steps could not for an instant lose sight of him throughout all the twisting arabesques of the path, and if hate should be waiting ambushed in this tower, a furtive visitor would run the most imminent danger!

A sentence plucked at random from the opening of Julien Gracq's gothic-inspired novel, as his protagonist, a wealthy young man known only as Albert, approaches for the first time a property he has purchased sight unseen, a castle on a rocky fastness, rising high above the forests in a deserted area of Brittany. I cannot say which is more extraordinary, the book itself or this translation by Louise Varèse, who sustains an archaic style of overladen richness with the confidence of a juggler, heedless of the fact that one slip would make the plates and parasols fall down in a gale of mocking laughter. Gracq, whose first novel this was when published in 1938, of course does the same in his original (which I have also glanced at), but my French is not good enough to appreciate the linguistic legerdemain the way I can in English. I found myself reading avidly, not for the story or characters, but in utter amazement at the language, in willing surrender to wherever Gracq would take me next.

The story has both the simplicity and mystery of Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama Pelleas et Melisande (or the opera Debussy made of it). Three characters come to this isolated domain: the scholarly Albert, his bosom friend Herminien, and the beautiful Heide, who arrives as Herminien's companion but immediately falls in love with Albert. The palpable sexual tension is distilled to the point where it is almost indistinguishable from the equally strong overtones of homoeroticism. Again as in Maeterlinck, each successive setting seems like the stage of some intense drama, waiting only for the curtain to rise. There are the empty rooms of the castle, laced with light and strewn with furs, ready for the new actors to take up the long-abandoned play. There is the coast where rock, sand, and sun meet with the sea to dissolve the normal bonds of prudence. A deserted chapel in the woods, where an iron clock ticks out the unheeded minutes and a full organ stands in a crumbling clerestory for Herminien to thunder out a musical improvisation rivaling nature itself. A long avenue through the forest that takes an entire night to traverse, leading to a deserted circle on the heath where many such avenues meet. It is a world of dreams, where all is surreal, where even violation and death seem but stages in an existence beyond time.

I read the book because Philippe Claudel, the author of the magnificent Brodeck, cites Gracq as one of his favorite authors. To read him, though, is to plunge into a dense nexus of influences: Poe and the Gothic writers before him; Proust, for the heady perfume of his style; even a touch of the surreal near-pornography of Georges Battaille's Story of the Eye. I also thought of painting: Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and other Symbolists; Paul Gauguin, especially in his Breton period; and of course Salvador Dali. In a postscript to the reader, Gracq describes the novella as a demoniac version of Wagner's Parsifal, with its myth of the wounded Fisher King and the redeemer who must himself be redeemed. I half suspect that Gracq's explanatory note was intended to confuse the reader even further, but who cares? The book is a fascinating trip through an enchanted forest of words and images, and mystification is the destination, not a detour.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Julien Gracq's first novel is a paean to the early Gothic works of Poe, Walpole, and Radcliffe (freely admitted to by the author). Saturated in a heaviness that clings to the reader from the very first page, it tells the tale of a wealthy young man named Albert who purchases an ancient estate surrounded by a forest of supernatural proportions. Soon after he moves in, his old friend and soul mate Herminien arrives for a visit accompanied by the mysterious woman Heide. What follows is a feverish blur of dreams, hallucinations, perambulations through the labyrinthine castle of Argol, and treacherous forays into the menacing forest. The tripartite inhabitation of the castle by Albert, Herminien, and Heide is initially fraught with the somewhat predictable complications of what one might expect from such a situation, and yet it is also at times much more complex than a standard love triangle. It is in fact arguable whether it is the nature of the three themselves that is at the root of their difficulties, or if they are mere pawns in a perverse game played by unseen forces at a level beyond both their control and comprehension. Either way, each of these three characters meets with both pleasure and pain on the vast grounds of Argol. Throughout the book, Gracq's prose spills over with lush descriptions of the wildness surrounding the estate (in particular Gracq seems to have a fixation on hypnotic forests; see also A Balcony in the Forest), and it is this relentless lushness that most indelibly characterizes the novel. Take, for example, this excerpt from the chapter entitled 'The Avenue':

One day, through the trees, they followed a wide green avenue covered by a vaulting of branches a hundred feet overhead, whose singular character, immediately apparent to the soul always on the alert for the perpetual snares of the forest, was due to the fact that while it ran through particularly hilly country and continually embraced each slightest sinuosity, yet the rigidity of its direction imposed itself upon the eye in the midst of all the natural undulations of the ground, and, straight in front of the traveller through the dark barrier of trees at the horizon, carved a luminous and sharply defined notch—suggesting to the mind, obsessed by the impenetrable wall of trees, a door opening into an entirely unknown country which, because of the besetting straightness of the avenue traced over hill and dale as by some wild caprice, by a will royally disdainful of all difficulties, seemed to confer a gift of capital attraction.

This particular edition, a Lapis Press reprint of the original New Directions English translation, is an oversized version with cover and endpapers taken from the Swiss painter Robert Zünd's work Der Eichenwald (The Oak Forest), interior foldout landscapes from a photograph by Jean Pritchard, and a photographic portrait of a 'corpse'—a self-portrait by Pierre Molinier. The illustrations, large type, and heavy paper with hand-sewn binding combine to present a storybook look and feel while reading, thus enhancing the overall Gothic spell woven by Gracq's trance-inducing sentences. I can't claim ownership of this fine edition, as it is from the library, but copies in excellent condition are currently hovering only in the $20 range over at AbeBooks.

[Aletheia · Rating 2 out of 5]

EN EL CASTILLO DE ARGOL 10 mg comprimidos recubiertos con película EFG

"En el castillo de Argol" es un hipnótico que pertenece a un grupo de medicamentos conocidos como análogos a las benzodiazepinas.

Se usa para el tratamiento a corto plazo del insomnio en adultos, en situaciones en las que el insomnio está debilitando o causando ansiedad grave.

Los comprimidos de los que está compuesto "En el castillo de Argol" son pequeños pero algo difíciles de tragar. No tome más de la dosis recomendada. En casos graves de intoxicación pueden aparecer los siguientes síntomas: alteración de la percepción de la realidad, despersonalización, disminución de la tolerancia a sonidos habituales (hiperacusia), entumecimiento y hormigueo en las extremidades, hipersensibilidad a la luz, al ruido y al contacto físico, alucinaciones o convulsiones epilépticas.

Vaya ida de olla gótica, amigos. Seguramente en un momento más tranquilo de mi vida la hubiera disfrutado más, pero en este torbellino vital de ratos cortos de lectura robados a otras obligaciones el estilo recargado y barroco ha podido conmigo.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very mysterious and symbolic novel written by a master of the French language. A strange castle, two men and one woman, an intense atmosphere of intellectual stimulation and erotic attraction, and not one line of dialogue. It reminded me of some of the great European silent movies of the twenties, like L'Herbier's L'inhumaine (The Inhuman). The heroine could have been played by Garbo or Brigitte Helm. It may be a difficult and hermetic experience to some, but it is exceptionally intriguing, and the reader floats in a strange world he does not fully comprehend but cannot help be fascinated with.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first Gracq I've read, and the first book he wrote, based on which I've ordered his second. A new favourite author, I think.
In this vibrant translation, his language is poetically florid, but not overblown - violet prose, perhaps, rather than purple - moving from a densely described realism into a dreamlike, at times nightmarish, surreality. Despite, or perhaps because of, the somewhat ambiguous climax, a gothically baroque 5🌟

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not really the right audience for this, a gothic romance which has all the tropes - including organ music in a ruined church, secret passages in the titular chateau, pining heroes, no dialogue, blood (but is it real?), knives and moons - and arcane language. However I was struck at several points by the beauty and accuracy of its descriptions, eg when the three go swimming:

They undressed among the graves. The sun burst through the mist , lighting the scene with its rays just as Heide in her dazzling nudity walked toward the sea with a step more mettlesome and light than that of a mare of the desert sands. In that shimmering landscape formed by those long watery reflections, in the omnipotent horizontality of those banks of mist, of those smooth flat waves, of those gliding rays of the sun, she suddenly startled the eye by the miracle of her verticality. All along the sun-devoured shore from which all shadows had fled, she set sublime reflections flowing. It seemed as though she were walking on the waters.

So I did enjoy it really. It was one of those lovely Pushkin Press books that you can slip in your pocket, so clear in type and sturdy in design.

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And the sight of this green ocean filled one with an obscure disquietude, giving Albert the curious feeling that this forest of Storrvan must be alive, and that, like a forest in a fairy tale or in a dream, it had not yet said its first word."

This was such a strange read - it is deeply Gothic, the Hermetic writing is quite lush and lyrical, the plot is engulfed in a decadent esoteric state but much too heavily lost in symbolism that I cannot necessarily understand and honestly, it's all because of Hegel.

Hegel takes the best seat in the house, obscuring the good view and as I am failing to stretch my neck left and right to get a proper glimpse of the activity, I cannot help but wonder whether Julien Gracq is simply poking fun at Hegel whilst pulling the reader's leg by mixing Hegel and Gothic, which would make this book a bloody masterpiece.

"The principle of restoration is found in thought and thought alone. The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it. 'You shall be like Gods, having knowledge of good and evil.' That was the cause of the Fall, but also, it was the only possible redemption."

To read this is to read more Hegel than Gracq.
So is it a masterpiece? I'm not sure.
Hegel would be pleased.

[Robert Adam Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pair of tag-team bastard intellectuals share a castle with a perhaps equally brilliant lady. The men are proud of their skills at rejecting women but they cant deal with her quite so easily (not that she fares better than them).

This book is completely filled with descriptions (only one line of dialogue), probably the best purple prose I've read so far, other writers often end up repetitive in their striving to stay so ornate but this flows wonderfully, even if the sentences are quite complicated at times (I would have liked more paragraph breaks). I guess this is what those other writers are striving towards but unable to execute.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of the constant extreme descriptions of feelings that seem like they should be more subtle. It can be a bit irritating, calling to mind books where people of leisure say things like "oh I do so hate bramble picking, it really is the most intolerably beastly thing!"
Are the writers just like these characters or are they criticizing the behavior of these silly people? Do we all become so sensitive if we live in such leisure? In an ideal world, would a slightly uncomfortable chair seem like a torture instrument from hell?
Gradually I accepted the extremity and imagined their world to be one with far more extreme feelings than ours, feelings that don't always seem to make sense, like they are floating around with their own agency greater than that of the characters.
Sometimes I thought Gracq just likes writing so much that he'll throw out coherency in favor of an impressive flourish and it sort of fits here.

The descriptions of the setting are very generous, especially the enormous forest. Impressive lighting, rich darkness and winds. This takes up the majority of the book and could maybe be called the soul of it.

There is a potential stumbling block I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned: the brutal act upon the woman is treated in a very detached, abstract way and the main character applies a magical logic to the situation even though he is horrified. Press on and you'll see that Gracq isn't so callous; although the gorgeousness of the brutality will still leave some readers unhappy.

For a long time I was less pleased with the portrayal of the relationships but by the end it all made much more sense, even if I didn't get all the symbolism and reference points to the religious figures.

Maybe it needed a bit of something else in there but I liked it very much.

I think my next Gracq will be The Opposing Shore, as the idea sounds interesting.

[Yves S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our lives are one of those linear intrigues surrounded by grandiose Surreality; a Surreality that we generally miss, as mediocre banality, hidden behind Reality.

A very basic linear plot proceeding in the middle of a simple setting which is made absolutely majestic by the imagination of the characters alone. But can we call imagination what could very well be a more piercing gaze through Reality. Beyond a Gothic aspect that seems to be directly extracted from a Wagnerian opera (Parsifal), this way of making grandiose everything that we usually consider as banal, is where lies the Surreality of Au Château d'Argol, Gracq’s first novel and the most Surrealist of all his subsequent novels.

To take an example, the improvisation of Herminien in the chapel which appears to Albert (page 119) as "a protection against an inescapable temptation [...] a surprising air of warning, which could refer only to some undecided struggle in which the very forces of life and death were at play" as well as the "energetic feeling" deep in Albert's heart "that the days of the end were now at hand" only confirm that these two characters possess a keener and deeper perception than most of us.

Exposed to our eyes in this way, through the story of the Albert-Heide-Herminien triangle, the Surreality suddenly appears glaringly obvious. Certainly here, without the help of the author, we would have seen absolutely nothing of what now appears as evident, elementary. But the dismantling of our daily Reality cannot save us from despairing and gripping terrors. Broken are the last forces which were holding back its Surreality.

Interestingly, what Gracq shows us, once Reality is surpassed, is that the human bestial instincts take on more force, as if Reality were only the representation of, or held by, a vulgar heap of rules, which here have just been broken and dismantled. One of these rules, or perhaps several, was barring the way of our animal instincts and now the body, the senses and the “Beast” are unleashed.

In this first, early novel, we already find all the ingredients of what was to make one of the greatest stylist, possibly the greatest (that would be my opinion), in the French language in the 20th century.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atmosphere as action, thought as landscape, archetypes as insight, romance as death. "The Castle of Argol" transplants high gothic tropes to the stormy Breton seashore. Purple in places and nowhere as accomplished as "The Distant Shore" or "The Balcony in the Forest," Gracq's prose still sounds an inimitable note.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This early (1938) novel by Julien Gracq is more a child of literary theory than of storytelling. There are three characters -- Albert, Herminien, and Heide -- holed up in an atmospheric castle near the Breton shore, surrounded by water, a dark forest, an eerie cemetery, and scads of atmosphere.

Lacking, however, is character. The death of Heide and Herminien (at least, I think it is Herminien) does not arouse any feeling because both they and Albert are more literary constructs than characters. There is only a single line of dialog -- the two words "Never again!" -- uttered either by Albert or Herminien, I'm not sure which.

On the plus side, Château d'Argol is written with a great deal of energy. The scenes are constantly shifting. Although I never saw any such Breton landscapes during my visit there, I was impressed by the constant atmospherics.

A typical scene is the following:

A heavy idleness took possession of the inmates of the castle, and with rare and insignificant words they appeared persistently to avoid each other, to such an extent that even their chance meetings in the mazes of the winding corridors, filled with a faltering white light which seeped through the curtains of the rain as though diffused by the moisture ceaselessly streaming down the walls, engendered a visible malaise.

... as one would think it would!

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

They entered the sanctuary through a low door. A heavy, dense air, a fragrant and almost total obscurity filled this refuge of prayer, in the middle of which, hanging from the vaulted ceiling, shone a lamp in a red globe whose marvellously fragile flame was constantly flaring up, bent over and lifted as by the beating of invisible wings. There were large breaches in the roof through which glided pell-mell, as into a deep abyss (and without the soul that was pierced to its very depths like the sharp point of a spear, being able to distinguish the sound of the light the yellow and vibrant cry of the sun) the dazzling darts of the flaming breast of a bird. And the whole chapel, submerged in the green dusk diffused by its stained glass windows against which the leaves, indistinct through the dirt and thickness of the panes, floated with a movement more indolent and softer than seaweed, seemed to have descended into the gulfs of the forest as into some submarine grotto that pressed with all the force of its cool palms against these walls of glass and of stone, and to be held over these vertiginous depths only by the marvellous cable of the sun. [84–5]

Long lingered the hours of the profound night. And now a vague feeling they were powerless to resist invaded the souls of Heide and of Albert. It seemed to them that the planet, swept along by the heart of the night which it belaboured with the crests of all its trees, overturned and spun backward following the obstinate direction of the avenue, more unreal than the axis of the poles, more abundant than the sun's rays drawn in chalk on a blackboard. And as though lifted by a prodigious effort onto the roof of the smooth planet, onto the nocturnal ridge of the world, they felt, with a divine shudder of cold, the sun sinking under them to an immense depth, and the unballasted avenue as it climbed right through the thickness of the true night revealing to them, minute by minute, all its secret and untrodden paths. In the silence of the woods, hardly distinguishable from that of the stars, they lived through a night of the world in all its sidereal intimacy, and the revolution of the planet, its thrilling orb, seemed to govern the harmony of their most ordinary gestures. [116–7]

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Within the eerie confines of a secluded castle in Brittany, the brooding Albert, the brand new owner of the property, has invited his old friend Herminien and Herminien's beguiling companion, Heide. The trio's arrival initiates a surreal and gothic tale, replete with symbolic undertones and philosophical musings. The castle itself, shrouded in mystery and surrounded by dense, foreboding woods, windswept beaches, and the obligatory gothic graveyard, becomes a character in its own right, echoing the psychological turmoil of its inhabitants.

As the days pass, the atmosphere thickens with an almost palpable tension, driven by the burgeoning, illicit attraction between Albert and Heide. Their clandestine affair, against the backdrop of the castle's shadowy corridors and hidden passageways, ignites a tempest of jealousy in Herminien. Consumed by a mix of rage and despair, Herminien's actions spiral into a tragic crescendo, culminating in a violent confrontation that also involves a spectral presence haunting the castle.

Alluding to Hegel, Rembrandt Parsifal and others, the novel's denouement is as haunting as it is inevitable, with the ghostly presence overshadowing the living characters. Gracq's poetic prose, lush and sensuous, illustrates the power of desire and the destructive potential of emotions, all wrapped in a sophisticated, almost playful exploration of the darker corners of the psyche.

You were probably wondering what makes this novel French. Well, rest assured that you will be challenged for no apparent reason by the choice to omit all dialogue and employ descriptions only, that despite their dexterity, make you reach for the closest clove non-filtered cigarette and your trusty bottle of cognac to get through the book.

Oh France...

[Nathan Jerpe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A small, curious book about a man who goes to live in a castle in the forest. Ten chapters, only three characters; as far as novels go there's not much happening here.

I discovered, however, that if I approached this work as I would a set of paintings, I began to appreciate it more. Nature abounds - scenes of forests and thunder and the sea, and the internal, dreamlike deliberations of Albert and his guests are breathtaking. The design of the physical book is also remarkable, even minimalist, with a centerfold of a corpse in the back that I almost missed.

File this under prose poetry, fantasy in form if not in content. A bit of Hegelian philosophy, too, although that pretty much blew past me as I went.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is like one of those electronic albums without any lyrics where you can't tell if it's good or not

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sumptuous prose... comparisons to Proust are entirely justified.

[Chlöe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Je pourrais crever pour avoir le talent de Julien Gracq ok?
+ sérieusement, c'est une histoire qui prend aux tripes dès les premières pages avec des descriptions à couper le souffle, une immersion totale dans ce fabuleux et merveilleux château d'Argol.
Une plongée dans un univers onirique mais qui cache une face plus sombre, plus mystérieuse et dont l'obscurité en révèle les dangers tout en jetant un éclairage nouveau sur la psychologie des personnages que l'on découvre pas à pas. Des bouleversements inattendus qui demandent alors au lecteur de se positionner, voire de se faire avocat du diable... C'est également une forêt envoûtante, ensorcelante, presque vivante qui complète alors ce quatuor. De nouveau, à l'instar du Rivage des Syrtes, c'est un univers à la fois réel et imaginaire qui se dessine : on évoque la Bretagne mais y sommes-nous vraiment ? La féerie du lieu (entendre son côté complètement hors du temps et qui dépasse toute espérance, tout en faisant appel à un imaginaire collectif fort et ancré avec une architecture de d'autres temps qui renforce un ancrage dans le réel tout en laissant place à une certaine créativité de la part du lecteur) contraste légèrement avec son essence de songe.

Du Gracq on en lit une fois, on en veut pour la vie. Lisez ce génie de la plume, je vous en conjure ! Vous pouvez lire une page 1 000 fois que vous auriez 1 000 détails à (re)découvrir et savourer. Une lecture est insuffisante, ses ouvrages doivent être vécus du plus profond de l'âme. Les lectures seront multiples et chacune s'orienter vers une appréciation différente : l'histoire, le lyrisme, les descriptions, les personnages et leur psychologie, la construction du récit.. Tant d'élément à s'approprier.
Gracq se confirme comme mon auteur de chevet disons :) il n'y a plus de doute

[Emil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jean-Paul Goux (La Leçon d'Argol, 1982) : « La phrase chez Gracq prend à sa charge les fonctions habituellement assignées à la narration. Le suspense des romans ne naît pas de telle ou telle action prêtée à des personnages, mais de l'espoir nourri par l'auteur d'atteindre par les mots, avant que ne s'achève le paragraphe, à une manière d'éclair extatique, porteur, non de connaissance rationnelle, mais d'adhésion magique, et n'ayant d'autre effet que de relancer l'attente du prochain état de grâce.»

[naturaespecies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abrumador. A Dios gracias sólo tiene 150 páginas.

[Sinem Akyıldız · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kötü çok kötü

[WillemC · Rating 2 out of 5]

In het voorwoord kondigt Gracq aan dat hij met dit debuut een gothic novel heeft willen schrijven in de stijl van Walpole en Poe, al valt "Het kasteel Argol" volgens mij beter te omschrijven als een "esoterische kasteelnovelle vol half uitgewerkte griezelclichés die door zijn barokke schrijfstijl bijna volledig kapotgeschreven is." Het bombastische proza schommelt tussen sterk en irritant. Hier en daar wat interessante momenten maar te zweverig en te leeg om mij te boeien. Het had misschien nog een goed kortverhaal geweest.

[Milan Prtvar · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5⭐
Često predugačke rečenice. Previše opisa, toliko da prozor ima "simetričnu dostojanstvenost svoja dva krila".

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dense and descriptive prose, quite enjoyable.

"Albert now perceived that the abnormal disposition of the interior, which the appearance of the façade had suggested to his imagination, was not belied. The visitor first entered a lofty vaulted hall with Romanesque arches, and divided by three rows of pillars. The slanting rays of the sun coming through the low horizontal loopholes seen in the façade, and that the setting sun now lighted with long streaks of dancing golden dust, formed with the white pillars a luminous pattern separating the entire upper part of the vaulted ceiling, and their ever-changing and fantastic fluctuations prevented the eye from measuring its true height. No furniture was to be seen in this hall, but here and there piles of deep furred skins; and cushions, covered with Asiatic silken fabrics of an extravagant luxury, were piled against the naked walls and pillars with an air of negligent profusion, making one think of a night encampment of the Golden Horde in a white Byzantine cathedral. Out of this great entrance hall opened low and endlessly winding corridors interrupted by stairways and steep descents full of recesses and corners, which seemed to run like veins through the vast structure of the castle, presenting the appearance of a three-dimensional labyrinth."

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

He loves her,
But she loves him.
He loves somebody else,
You just can't win...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0LAs...


Albert, a young French intellectual, buys an old Gothic chateau near the coast of Brittany. He invites his close friend Herminien for a visit. Herminien writes to say that he is bringing along a friend, Heide. Albert, being the spoiled jealous type, is annoyed that his private time with Herminien will be intruded upon by an outsider. When they arrive, Heide turns out to be a beautiful young woman who almost immediately falls for Albert. And so, we have the makings of a doomed love triangle in a windswept chateau, or so it would seem.

Julien Gracq was enamored of Breton's novel, Nadja, and dedicated Chateau d'Argol to him. At first, we're able to easily follow events between our doomed lovers, but around the mid-point of the book, the surreal world of dreams takes over and what exactly is happening in the forest of Argol is obscured. Gracq's writing, however, seduces us into this dreamworld, to our aesthetic benefit.

Recommended to those who like to lose themselves in lush and seductive writing.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the awesome Opposing Shore and the very good Balcony in the Forrest, I had the highest expectations about this one and I was somewhat disappointed; superb passages and a clear precursor to Opposing Shores, but the book lacks something - purpose, vitality, coherence?? - hard to say, Chateau d'Argol has a clear ending and things happen, but it's all very dreamy, lacking reality and ultimately makes one wonder why bother reading. The scattered great descriptive scenes and the wonderful passages mentioned make it worth but the book could have been so much better... Maybe Opposing Shores narrator is what's lacking - a voice to make the whole at least the sum of the parts...