Submission B: A Peripatetic Review of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaules

(This is an edited version of a previous post.)

A Peripatetic Review of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaules
Also translated as: My Quest for the Lost Domain of the Great Wanderer Meaulnes

My poetry group and podcast comrade Nick has a blog where he's mobilized a brilliant concept: he’s "working through [his] extensive backlog of video games and books.” Since I am shortly to be short of funds, I thought I would shamelessly imitate Nick by embarking on a readthrough of books already owned. Because I fetishize the process of obtaining, discovering, salvaging, or manifesting a book almost as much as the book itself, I'll also record how each book came to me and What Happened After.

I present to you: my backlog, and how it got to be there.

Beginning in the North (novels), and proceeding around to East (non-fiction), South (cookbooks, short stories, genre fiction, and children's lit), and West (poetry and erotica), I will read and report back on my large stock of untouched books, more or less alphabetically. Since North is Novels, this means that fairly soon I'm going to have to read Northanger Abbey, but I am ignoring that unpleasant fact.

1. Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Le Grand Meaulnes is a classic of French adolescent literature, first published in 1913. It went the rounds on the BBC not that long ago. They talked about it here, here, and here. Translators have struggled with this book, and especially its title, to a perplexing degree. Perplexing to me, anyway. There seems to be consensus that “Le Grand Meaulnes” cannot successfully be translated as “The Great Meaulnes” or “Meaulnes the Great.” (What about The Great Brain? What about Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great? Clearly I have much to learn about the art of translation.) In my copy (well, my first copy, but I’ll get to that), the title remains in French. The BBC podcasts also refer to a translation called The Lost Domain.

This is important. If you go looking for this book, you need to know that it has aliases and secret identities.

I bought Le Grand Meaulnes because it sounded like it might be a book that worked magic. Not a book about wizards, but one that both described and conjured in its reader a state of ecstatic perception, an experience of the world as charged with undiscovered energies and possibilities. That’s sort of my thing. Luckily, Le Grand Meaulnes is exactly that kind of book.

What is it about? If I tell you that Le Grand Meaulnes / The Lost Domain is a dreamy French novel about the transition from childhood to adulthood, you would be forgiven for thinking of Proust. Forgiven? I'd make out with you for thinking of Proust. So please, think of Proust, but not quite so wordy.

Let's see. It takes place in that year of so much historic activity, 189—. The book is narrated by Seurel, the son of a schoolteacher. I don't think we ever get Seurel's first name. He has either a knee problem or a hip problem, depending on the translation (I know how he feels). He is 15 when the story properly begins, the day that the older and wilder Augustin Meaulnes comes to stay.

Meaulnes is a rapscallion, y'see. He immediately steals a horse and cart, takes a wrong turn, falls asleep, and stumbles—not quite out of reality, but into one of those moments where reality seems to soften, to bend to your unarticulated desires, to become saturated with possibility. He finds himself at a party. This is the kind of party where children in antique costumes chase a Harlequin through a half-ruined manor. He stays the night in this enchanted place, which is the setting for a wedding that never happens—and Meaulnes is the only one who knows why. In the morning, he’s driven back to a road he recognizes, then left to walk home alone. He spends the rest of the book (and probably his life) trying to recover the feeling of that night. Spoiler for Familiar Literary Downers: he probably doesn’t recover it. Yet because of Alain-Fournier's gift for heightened prose, the reader is luckier. We get to go on experiencing the trance of his language.

“Meaulnes, his head half buried in the collar of his cloak which stood out like a ruff, was losing all sense of identity. Infected by the gaiety he too joined in the pursuit of the pierrot through corridors which were now like the wings of a theatre where the spectacle had spilled over from the stage.” See? Magic.

The second half of the novel feels compressed. Not just time, but space and possibility seem to shrink. This could simply be awkward writing. Alain-Fournier was only 27 when he wrote the book, and he died the next year in the First World War, so he didn't have a lot of time to evolve as a writer. The acceleration in the novel feels like something else to me, though. We often speak about how the world opens up to us as we reach adulthood. It's also true that it constricts. We discover that our acts and words do not go into a vast infinite space and vanish. What we do has consequences. We each exist within a community, a family, a network of relationships, and as we grow into adult roles, we have to confront our responsibility to these structures, even if we reject some of them.

2. I Struggle for the Book

Le Grand Meaulnes is more a 19th century book than a 20th century one, but my purchase and possession of this novel presented enough fragmentation, misdirection, and deferral to delight any modernist. Meaulnes is always trying to repeat his original journey, and I seemed to be doomed to imitate him.

I originally purchased a Penguin Modern Classics paperback circa 1976. Its pages seemed to have been toasted around the edges like a home-made treasure map. The book cost me $3.68, including tax. I know because the slip was still tucked into the book when I took it down from the shelf three months later. The pages immediately began to snow gently out of the binding.

On Day Two of my Reading Plan (time: lunch), I thought I'd read while I ate my almond energy bar and pretended it was either actual food or actual candy. I rummaged in my bag for the book. It was not there. I searched my few possessions. Nothing. Somehow, within days of finally deciding to read it, I had lost the book.

By that evening I was wild to go on reading. Like Meaulnes, I hunted the land of dreams and abstractions. Or, you know, I searched the Internet. First, I tried several times to sign up for an ebook service that at no point reminded me it was not available in Canada. Next, I tried to get the ebook via a major online vendor, but could only find it in French. Then I downloaded the English ebook from the library, but I couldn't get it onto my unspecified MP3 device.

The next day I went back to the used bookstore, which like the Library of Congress has two copies of everything. I found Alain-Fourner, but "Rats," I said, "No Grand Meaulnes. Just three copies of The Wanderer, whatever that is." I picked it up and scanned the back. It seemed to cover similar territory. I flipped it open. "Meaulnes and I," I read. It turns out that Le Grand Meaulnes is not only The Lost Domain but also The Wanderer.

This copy had the Edward Gorey cover, affectionately lampooned by Hark a Vagrant here. There was also a third edition, also called The Wanderer, but with a different cover (swirly sexy 70s line art). I couldn't leave Edward Gorey behind, but I liked the other translation better. Clearly, I had to buy them both. Cost for each book: $3.68, including tax.

Then, of course, I found the first copy under the bed. In my defense, “under the bed” is a fairly complicated realm in my house. So now I have three copies of Le Grand Meaulnes, two under the title The Wanderer. Savings: Negative $7.36.

I do have the basis of a fascinating comparative translation paper. Here are the three books’ three takes on the main character's nickname: Le Grand Meaulnes, Admiral Meaulnes (!), and (victory!) The Great Meaulnes. I'll take it.

Next up: Hubert Aquin's Prochain Episode

Note: Wikipedia says Seurel's first name is "François."

Submission A: Our Reading Lives - Erotica and Therapy

I recently took an English course called “Sexting through the Ages.” I am not making that up. It was a survey of erotic writing from ancient Sumeria to the Internet age. As we worked through the readings in the course, from the Biblical “Song of Songs” to the searing modernist provocation Story of the Eye to the queer erotic standby Macho Sluts, it occurred to me that I’d never formally worked out my view of erotica.

What is erotica for? To turn you on, of course, which is a perfectly good reason all by itself for erotica to exist. Hopefully, it is also meant to give you aesthetic pleasure. Can it do more than that? I would argue yes, if it’s done right. That’s especially true if you’re queer, trans* or otherwise marginalized by the mainstream idea of what’s sexy. I think it can change not just your ideas but your consciousness. Erotic pleasure, aesthetic pleasure, and ecstatic states like trance are not separate conditions, but three means of reaching the same goal.

My first experience with erotica was based on reading (a little belatedly) the surge of sex-positive feminist writing from the 1990s. It was called “sex-positive” to distinguish it from anti-pornography theory like Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women. The movement included writers and editors like Carol Queen, Patrick Califia, Lawrence Schimel, Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, Wickie Stamps, Tristan Taormino, John Preston, and many other writers, often published by the ground-breaking Cleis Press. They were staking out a new territory: erotica as self-discovery and self-creation.

These writers showed me a therapeutic and ecstatic view of erotica. Some said it outright and some merely implied it, but most clearly imagined erotica as a vehicle for healing and empowerment – including stories or images that on the surface could be read as violent or degrading, because these reach deep unconscious forces in us. In this way of thinking, erotica is a tool (pun accepted) to support the identification of our desires (What do I like?), the exploration of those desires (How do I like it?), and, if we want to live them out, the integration of our desires into our lives (How can I find someone else who likes it too?). Goal: Ecstasy for Everyone. These writers remind us that a given text or image—even one that might bore, disturb, or amuse one of us—could be for another of us the exact thing that opens up self-discovery and pleasure. You know: “don’t yuck my yum.” Making fun of someone else’s turn-on is an attack on their well-being. The literal content of erotica is not as important as how it makes you feel – hot, hopefully, and in the best case, happier.

My bookshelf filled up with volumes like PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality, Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica, and The Leather Daddy and the Femme. These books don’t make utopias out of erotica. They don’t depict an idealized future when no one is confused or conflicted. Instead, they try to address the incredible range of real desires and practises in a joyful way. What they do idealize (in the good sense) are the real-world activities that enable us to get pleasure in ways that builds our sense of wholeness rather than undermining it. Clear consent, good negotiation, and safer sex are near absolutes. Those are still lessons we can all benefit from, always.

These books weren’t always perfect. For example, while many writers were insightful about the ways race can get stereotyped in erotica, others made well-meaning but awkward attempts at ethnic and cultural diversity. For another, as a trans person, I wasn’t always thrilled by the depiction of people like me, even in books I otherwise liked. Since then, a lot of erotica has been written. Many more people have had the chance to represent their desires directly, rather than relying on a few published authors (however talented) to filter it for them.

The sex-positive wave hit just before the Internet came of age as the repository and generator for a pretty much infinite set of erotic stories and images. Yet we each still have to go through that same process of exploration and discovery, and we do it in layers: What do I really like? What do I just think I’m supposed to like? What do I want to do and what do I only want to fantasize about? Does anyone else like what I like? These writers are still accomplished guides and mentors in that process of self-discovery. We all need teachers.