Roger Grenier Alice Kaplan and Alice Kaplan - Palace of Books

Palace of Books

Roger Grenier

Translated and with a Foreword by Alice Kaplan

Palace of Books

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

R OGER G RENIER , an editor at ditions Gallimard, has published over thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Difficulty of Being a Dog and A Box of Photographs, and is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Grand Prix de Littrature de lAcadmie Franaise.

A LICE K APLAN is the author of French Lessons, The Collaborator, The Interpreter, and Dreaming in French. She has translated a number of books, including Roger Greniers The Difficulty of Being a Dog and A Box of Photographs. She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30834-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23259-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226232591.001.0001

Originally published as Le palais des livres, ditions Gallimard, 2011.

http://www.centrenationaldulivre.fr

Cet ouvrage a bnfici du soutien des Programmes daide la publication de lInstitut Franais. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Franais.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grenier, Roger, 1919 author.

[Palais des livres. English]

Palace of books / Roger Grenier ; translated and with a foreword by Alice Kaplan.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-226-30834-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. EssaysAuthorship. 2. French literatureHistory and criticism. I. Kaplan, Alice Yaeger. II. Title.

PQ2613.R4323P3513 2014

844.914dc23

2014015683

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Alice Kaplan

Here is a palace of books where Proust, Flaubert, Nabokov, Flannery OConnor, Chekhov, Baudelaire, Kafka wander happily alongside the authors own friends and colleaguesRomain Gary, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Royand his mentor, Albert Camus. Roger Grenier, who as an editor and author has shaped the face of literature in France for nearly five decades, has a critical method that might best be described as phenomenology plus charm: he looks to literature, to writers, to elucidate lifes mysteries. Why do people feel the need to write? Why is the act of waiting so central a theme in literature? Can writers know when theyve written their last sentence, or is it always someone else who makes the call? What is the difference between putting your deepest self in a literary text and revealing your private life?

His book consists of nine essays: The Land of Poets; Waiting and Eternity; Leave-Taking; Private Life; Writing about Love, Again...; A Half Hour at the Dentists; Unfinished; Do I Have Anything Left to Say?; and To Be Loved. Each essay begins with a problem or theme and explores it through a form of argument disguised as literary free association. Grenier interrogates his favorite writers and wrests wisdom and humor from their novels and essays. On writing about love, for example, he reminds us that Chekhov worried that a story without women was like a steam engine without steam; that Alexandre Dumas and his collaborator were horrified when they realized they had gotten to the fortieth chapter of their sequel to The Three Musketeers without a single love story; that Camuss The Plague is the only major contemporary novel without major women characters, because Camus wanted to explore the horrors of separation in wartime. Grenier points out that Madame de Lafayette, in The Princess of Cleves (the first novel in the French canon), keeps saying how dangerous love is, and how it must be avoided. But she speaks of nothing else.

Readers of Greniers The Difficulty of Being a Dog and A Box of Photographs will recognize his appeal. Never didactic, never pedantic, Grenier takes us by the hand gently, and without really realizing what is happening, we come away enlightened. Palace of Books answers a real need and demand for nonacademic criticism, and for what Francine Prose has called, in the American context, the pleasures of reading like a writer.

Palace of Books

Committing a crime means taking action. But accounting for a crime in the newspaper or on radio and television means transforming that action into a story, into words.

This creates problems. The public that feasts on crime needs its stories to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needs a small novel, more exciting than fiction because its true. Reality rarely unfolds with such pleasing logic. Its usually impossible to know exactly when the slowly unfolding drama began, and just as impossible to make any sense of what the victims and protagonists had to say. The confusion isnt due to the facts but to something like a layer of concrete covering every motive, every attitude. Never has the Shakespearean-Faulknerian clich about the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury been more apropos. This doesnt prevent reporters from inventing fine, well-crafted accounts that respond to the five basic Ws: Who, What, When, Where, Why.

Which is exactly what Freud did with Oedipuss crime. He simplified an awfully confusing story, giving it his own structure. Actually, if you back up a little, his Laius had a pretty unsavory past. Hed been banished from Thebes and had to seek asylum in Pisa and in Ilia, with Pelops. And when he was allowed to return, he brought Pelopss bastard son Chrysippus with him. Laius, gay? According to some accounts, he was the original pederast.

The Thebans commemorated him with a military regiment composed of adolescent boys and their lovers and known as the Sacred Band of Thebes. Chrysippus supposedly tried to kill himself in shame. But Pelopss wife, Hippodameia, is also rumored to have gone to Thebes to kill him. Why? Something about an inheritance. She tried to get Atreus and Thyestes, the two legitimate sons shed had with Pelops, to murder both Laius and Chrysippus. Apparently they refused. One night she crept into the room where Laius lay in bed with a boy and plunged a sword into his heart. Laius was accused of the murder. Happily for him, Chrysippus was able to name the guilty party with his last breath. But not so fast. Its possible too that Atreus was involved in the crime, since he was in such a hurry to take asylum in Mycenae. As for Pelops, didnt people say he won his throne and Hippodameias hand by winning a chariot race against Oenomaus, the princesss father, thanks to a winged chariot thathold onto your seatwas apparently a present from his lover Poseidon? And Jocasta? Who knew that as priestess of Hera the Strangler she had a problem with Menoeceus, her father, one of the men sprung from the ground after Cadmus sowed the dragons teeth. Like seed. Old Menoeceus thought that he was the one who designated Tiresias the prophetnot Oedipus. And he sacrificed himself by jumping off the wall of Thebes. (Oedipus also sprang from one of these dragons teeth, in the third generation.) And why then did Odysseus call on Jocasta during his visit to the underworld? Homer gives Jocasta another name: Epicaste. This same Epicaste, Clymenuss wife, was also involved in an incest drama. Clymenus slept with their daughter Harpalyce, who then gave birth to a boy. Harpalyce killed her son, who was also her brother, and served him up to Clymenus on a platter.