You may know how they go. A family travelling in a remote area and getting hungry, to their delight, they comes across an unexpected restaurant. Not only that: the food turns out to be wonderful.
But when they look for it on a journey back or try to take friends to enjoy it, it proves impossible to find. If they ask the locals, they deny any knowledge of such a place.
Commenting on such a tale, the co-presenter Simon Young says:
It reminds me somewhat of these great British fairy experiences involving glamour, where people, perhaps, are out and about at night and they come across a fair, or they come across a glorious feast or they come across a building they don't normally see. They enjoy the experience of being there and then when they come back the next day there's nothing there, it was all moonlight, it's all disappeared.
Hearing that, I thought at once of Alain-Fournier's 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes, which is also known in English as The Lost Domain and by various other titles.
Meaulnes, an older boy who joins the narrator's school at the start of the novel, is the novel's hero. And soon Meaulnes reports to him just such a 'glamorous' experience - I'll let Julian Barnes take this post forwards:
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. ...
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.
Le Grand Meaulnes is one of those books where it is the atmosphere you remember most of all, and I share Barnes's view of its conclusion:
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.
This ability to conjure up a compelling situation or atmosphere, without being quite clear how to resolve things by the end of the book or film, often seems to me characteristic of the decades after the second world war.
If it can be said of Alain-Fournier, who died in the opening weeks of the first world war, then he was something of a pioneer.
No comments:
Post a Comment