Le Grand Meaulnes

The Pilgrimage to Cythera by Antoine Watteau, c. 1718/19

While thinking about the ways in which romantic love and intimacy are understood and portrayed these days, I recalled, in contrast, the tone and ideas of CS Lewis’ classic The Allegory of Love, a book that was for a long time a staple of university English Literature courses. Among Lewis’ concerns were the tradition of ‘courtly love’ and its origins in late 11th century southern France, which engendered habits and attitudes that later came to be regarded as timeless or ‘natural’ in Western European culture. Denis de Rougemont, in another distinguished work on the subject, Love in the Western World, also proposed that romantic love ultimately derives from the poems and courtly romances of the troubadours, and particularly from the story of the Cornish knight Tristan and his illicit love for the Irish princess Iseult; it is selfish, he said, because there is more emphasis on the state of being in love than on the other person; it is also morbid, as it involves an unconscious belief that death or oblivion can purify the relationship. Besides, because this form of love thrives on difficulty, impediments and obstacles must constantly be found or created in order to renew the strength and ardor of passion itself, which is the true object of romantic desire.

Sal Paradise, hero of Jack Kerouac’s Beat novel ‘On the Road’, carries with him only one book during his three-year odyssey across America; on a Greyhound bus to St Louis he considers reading the second-hand copy of Le Grand Meaulnes that he has stolen from a bookstall in Hollywood bookstall, but decides not to. This, perhaps, is indicative of the fortune of Alain-Fournier’s book, one of France’s most popular novels, in the English-speaking world; highly regarded in the past, it now seems to be less frequently read. Henry Miller admired its hero; F. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed the book’s title for The Great Gatsby, and it has been suggested that its main protagonists influenced the creation of Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, as well as of Gatsby himself. John Fowles, author of the once fashionable The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus, said that it had affected everything he wrote: ‘I know it has many faults, yet it has haunted me all my life’. Describing the book as ‘the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature’, he made the interesting remark that its detractors dislike being reminded of ‘qualities and emotions they have tried to eradicate from their own lives’.

The story tells of the seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes, who is sent to board at a country school, where he befriends François Seurel, the narrator and son of the local schoolmaster, and becomes much admired by his schoolmates. Meaulnes discovers, by chance, a decaying château, where a strange wedding party, its guests wearing historical costumes, is taking place; he meets and falls for a beautiful young woman, but when he later tries to return, he finds it impossible to find the mysterious house and girl again. Dreamy and atmospheric, the novel combines fantasy and reality; Fournier’s childhood home was also among the sandy forests and marshes of north-central France, and Meaulne’s longing for his elusive love was inspired by a real encounter between the author and a young woman, Yvonne Marie Elise Toussaint de Quièvrecourt, who shared her first name with the heroine in the tale. Published in 1913, a year before Fournier’s early death, much of the book is an account of the protagonist’s obsessive search for Yvonne, and the author allows his characters a conclusion that was absent from his own life. In September 1914, during the early weeks of World War I, Lieutenant Fournier led his company into woods south of Verdun, where they came upon a German field hospital; he was killed in the skirmish that followed. From that perspective, Le Grand Meaulnes takes on a particularly melancholy and nostalgic light.

Nostalgia itself, like romantic love, has an intriguing history. The word was coined by the physician Johannes Hofer to describe the adverse symptoms displayed by Swiss mercenaries while they were away from home in the service of European monarchs, and his view of the condition as a neurological affliction lingered throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. By the early 19th, however, understanding of the term had begun to change. Nostalgia came to be regarded as a form of melancholia or depression, and this view of nostalgia was advocated throughout the 20th century in psychodynamic psychology, which variously defined nostalgia as an ‘immigrant psychosis’, a ‘mentally repressive compulsive disorder’, and ‘a regressive manifestation closely related to the issue of loss, grief, incomplete mourning, and, finally, depression’.

Only in the later years of the 20th century did the term develop its current meaning, and there is now a clear association between nostalgia and ideas of ‘childhood’, ‘old times’, and ‘yearning’. The concepts of homesickness and nostalgia are sharply differentiated: a contemporary definition of the former is the ‘experience of a longing for one’s home during a period of absence from it’, while the latter is described as ‘a sentimental longing for the past’. More unexpected, however, is the current psychological view that nostalgia is far from being a maudlin state of mind; it is said to generate positive affect, to maintain and enhance affirmative self-regard, and to strengthen social bonds. It also infuses life with meaning, which helps us to cope with existential threat and despair. Regarded for many years as an ailment or weakness, nostalgia, in a remarkable volte-face, has come to be accepted as a human strength and an intrinsic part of emotional life.

For further exploration:

On C.S. Lewis’ The Allegory of Love: https://www.lewisiana.nl/allegsum/

On Denis de Rougemont’s Love In The Western World : https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=denis+de+rougemont+love+in+the+western+world#vhid=zephyrhttps://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article%3D1166%26context%3Drmmra&vssid=collectionitem-web-desktophttps://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article%3D1166%26context%3Drmmra

The Paris Review on Le Grand Meaulnes: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/09/26/in-search-of-the-lost-trail/

Hermione Lee on Le Grand Meaulnes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLNZmbyoKZc

The British Psychological Society on nostalgia: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/nostalgia-cowbells-meaning-life

An alternative view from the same source: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/we-feel-more-nostalgic-we-get-older

Image on index page: still from the 1967 film, ‘The Wanderer’, based on Le Grand Meaulnes

Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nV5Sra0jVM

Alain-Fournier in 1905