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.
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