Gracq and Wagner: means and motives of semblances and dissimilations

The article deals in researching the early period of the works by the French author Julien Gracq (1910-2007), when he experienced a powerful influence of Richard Wagner (1813-1883)’s literary ideas and music, and arrived at new interpretations of the notion of “The Sensuous” in his novels “The Fisher King” and “The Argol Castle”. The influence of “Wagnerism” became an important segment of his artistic direction and was reflected in his essays and prose. The intermedial aspect of the interaction of literature and music is analyzed not from the viewpoint of verbal reproduction of the musical score, but in the perspective of its interpretation and modification, recreating a new semantic context. He was enthused by both music and scenic features of Wagner’s pieces of art, bordering on carnavalization, a very special poetics, mixing the fantastic with the idealistic and the funny. Moreover, it is stated that Gracq loans Wagner’s system of lead motives which is marked in the special text structure that maintains the dramatic composition in the prose texture. As it can be very clearly discerned from his essays, Gracq accepts Wagner in full, however he refrains from his previously shared with Wagner views of Parsifal, and revisits and reevaluates “The Sensuous” desecrating it, working at his own version of this hero and other characters’ biographies, thereby bringing together spiritual aspirations of the characters of R. Wagner’s opera with the surrealistic search for the absolute. Regrouping the elements of the original Graal myth compositionally and intonationally, the French writer via semantic transformations, gives the opposite meaning to Wagnerian motifs. The tragic conflict between the spiritual and the earthly, which is fundamental for R. Wagner, is being embodied within the surrealistic interpretation by J. Gracq into the idea of transcendental revelation, alien to the traditional binary opposition.