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Le Grand Meaulnes

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Le Grand Meaulnes Empty Le Grand Meaulnes

Post  eddie Sun Apr 15, 2012 5:57 pm

Le Grand Meaulnes revisited

Julian Barnes feared that in rereading Alain-Fournier's great novel, in his 60s, its youthful enchantment might be lost. Instead, he was captivated once more

Julian Barnes

guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 April 2012 22.50 BST

Le Grand Meaulnes LE-GRAND-MEAULNESTHE-WAND-008
Youth recaptured: Alain Libolt as François Seurel in The Wanderer, 1967. Photograph: Allstar Collection/AWA Films

There is no doubting the classic status of Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. A poll of French readers a dozen years ago placed it sixth of all 20th-century books, just behind Proust and Camus. Most French people read it at school; yet very few of them (according to my own private poll) ever reread it. This may stem from an understandable reluctance to revisit set texts; but more, perhaps, from a fear that the novel's magic might not work a second time around – as if, in adulthood, we know too much to fall under the its spell again. Yet this would be a mistake. What John Fowles called "the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature" can only ever be partly grasped by adolescents, because they don't yet know exactly what it is they are going to lose by growing up.

The British generally come to the book later than the French. I first read it even later than most – towards the end of my 30s. For a long time I'd been put off by the title (as I had with The Catcher in the Rye), by a paperback cover featuring a cute chunk of French chateau peeping out from idyllic woodland, and by the blurb, which would announce the story of a boy finding a mysteriously beautiful house then losing it, and finding a mysteriously beautiful girl then losing her. I imagined a sentimental tale of rural life, and wrongly assumed I was too old for all that stuff. More likely, I was still too young for it.

The title is, admittedly, a problem; it's been said that there are more English titles for the book than there have been translations. Meaulnes is the surname of the chief character, but in English an unfortunate homonym of "moan"; so to call the novel The Big Meaulnes or The Great Meaulnes or (even, recently) The Magnificent Meaulnes is asking for trouble. Some translators simply leave it in French. A sideways approach works better, as with The Wanderer, which identifies the hero's restless nature. Or The Lost Domain, which held sway until the recent Penguin edition (translated by the late Robin Buss) improved it into The Lost Estate. This contains the undermeaning of "estate" in the sense of "passage of life". In adolescence we all normally dream of "coming to man's [or woman's] estate". Fournier was a rare exception to this psychosocial rule. When still only 18, he was already expressing "nostalgia for the past"; five years later, he described himself as "haunted by the fear of seeing youth end".

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults. Fournier's piece of magic in Le Grand Meaulnes is to create a dreamland where these double negatives become a positive. When Meaulnes – the wanderer, the adventurer, the pathfinder – first stumbles upon the lost chateau, there is some kind of fête champêtre going on, with the partygoers dressed in costume from the 1830s. He overhears children explaining how, just for the time of the festivities, they are "allowed to do as we like". So the impossible dream is of a life in which we may stay children and yet run things – to play at being grown-up: this is, indeed, the novel's definition of freedom. The son of the chateau, Franz de Galais, a wilder, more self-indulgent and destructive version of the peasant Meaulnes, has already been permitted to do just this: in the grounds is a small square house to which he could to go as a child in order to impersonate adulthood.

And no, it is not a good, or even a feasible, idea – at least, if taken seriously. At the fête, Meaulnes falls instantly in love with Franz's sister, Yvonne de Galais, who eventually rebuffs him with the words: "We are two children; we've been foolish." But this is, of course, the logical extension of the dream: to be foolish without being punished for it, to enjoy adult love while remaining at heart a child.

Love in this novel is idealistic and high-minded; it is also, by implication, rather afraid of sex. The critic Jacques Rivière, Fournier's lifelong friend, wrote that for Fournier, "perfect purity and innocence" were necessary for him to fall in love, and that he believed in "the union of souls before that of bodies". The same aspirations apply in the world of the lost estate: three years after discovering it, Meaulnes looks back and reflects that there he reached "a height of perfection and purity".

Rereading Le Grand Meaulnes in my 60s, I was afraid I might find it soppy. Rivière, who could not enjoy a book that was lacking in irony, accused his friend of being "over-sensitive" and "sentimental". Fournier, whose work contains hardly a smidge of irony, found the perfect response to the charge: "Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off – when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows."

The novel is many things – magical, high-hearted, improbable, coincidence-ridden, operatic – yet never sentimental, because it is true to what we remember about adolescence, with all its hopes and fears and impossible dreams. What surprised me about the novel this time round was how intensely literary it is. Fournier, while still discovering how to write, said determinedly that: "I shan't be truly myself as long as I have a single bookish phrase in my head." This certainly holds at the level of style – he writes in an easy, intimate, rather hesitant speaking voice – but a wider bookishness is omnipresent.

Fournier, an Anglophile who spent three months in 1905 working as the "French clerk" in the Sanderson's wallpaper factory in west London, was a great admirer of Dickens, Kipling and Stevenson – he called the last "ce delicieux Anglais". The "great adventure" of Le Grand Meaulnes recalls the "great game" of Kim; and the novel is full of Stevensonian gestures (the incomplete map, the quest for lost treasure, the skeleton key, the locked chest containing the vital clue). Defoe is name-checked in the novel's opening pages. And there are French influences too. Though Fournier was obtuse about Flaubert, his novel opens (like Madame Bovary) with a new boy arriving into a schoolroom, plus an early description of a fanciful hat. The dreamworld of Laforgue is also strongly present, and is Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, filtered through the Debussy opera, which Fournier and Rivière adored. The "We are two children" line is a direct homage to Golaud's rebuke to the opera's enamoured eponyms: "Vous êtes des enfants."

There is a self-awareness, too, of fiction being fiction: thus Meaulnes is like "the hero of a novel" to the narrator François Seurel; while both search for "the [secret] passage that they write about in books". And the novel is not just fiction-soaked but fiction-predicting: at least, it seemed quite evident to me that Seurel must have been the precursor for Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby. Both are shadowy, rather passive figures in thrall to an enchanted world, stay-at-homes who admire the otherness and daring of the adventurer; both press their noses to the shop-window (as we, the readers, do), while aware that the glass is unbreakable. Surely Fitzgerald, in Paris in the 1920s, would have read Le Grand Meaulnes (and even borrowed the template of its title)? But I haven't been able to substantiate this connection: the nearest proof-by-association being the fact that the first translator of Fournier's novel was Harry Crosby, the millionaire expatriate who moved in the same Parisian circles as Fitzgerald.

Of course, rereading shows up the novel's weaknesses. Its first third, with the world of enchantment inserted frictionlessly into the world of realistic rural childhood, remains perfect. In the mid-third, the intensity drops; you wonder why these boy-gangs are skirmishing, why the Gypsies and the circus have come to town – or come to town for quite so long. But in the final third, the tempo is restored, the extreme complexities of plot (five main characters containing two emotional triangles) are worked out in a highly professional way, amounting indeed to "a true expression of life's sorrows".

Yet I was also left with a slight regret – that Meaulnes and Seurel ever solved the mystery, ever tracked down the lost estate in the first place. The sense of that magical lost house, which may or may not actually exist (Meaulnes has taken a blow to the head before discovering it), is so compelling that part of you doesn't really want to be handed its cartographic coordinates. But then, the novel is obliged to go somewhere after it has done its initial work of enchanting you.

In those seductive opening pages, Meaulnes discovers in the attic of the narrator's house some spent fireworks from a previous 14 July celebration (why anyone would put used-up fireworks back in their attic is a pedantic question the novel doesn't deign to answer). Two of the rockets, however, are still fireable. Meaulnes takes Seurel out into the yard and sets them off; the two boys, hand-in-hand, look up at the shooting sparks "without flinching". This scene prefigures Meaulnes's unflinching response to the great sparkburst of love; but it also embodies the reader's reaction to the novel itself. Romanticism was a glorious firework show, and for decades after the main display was over artists were still letting off rockets. Le Grand Meaulnes is one of the last explosions of late Romanticism. The year of its publication was 1913; the following year the first world war broke out (killing Fournier in its first weeks), and Romanticism was no longer possible. But we can still stare up into the night sky and be dazzled.
eddie
eddie
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