Julien Green and the murmur of the sea: literary histories of flotsam

Abstract

Julien Green and the murmur of the sea: literary histories of flotsam Literary history is a 'slaughterhouse', Franco Moretti claims. Contemplating the long lists of now forgotten books that were once held by Columbell's Circulating Library in Derby (a nineteenth-century library 'of the kind that wanted only successful books'), Moretti experiences a literary historian's version of memento mori: 'The majority of books disappear foreverand "majority" actually misses the point: if we set today's canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels.' 1 So far, so nihilistic. But perhaps it's Moretti's metaphor which 'misses the point'. After all it is possible to imagine literary history not in terms of the total obliteration of once popular books but in terms of the serendipitous finds that are made possible by this prior disappearancenot, that is, according to the logic of the slaughterhouse but according to patterns of loss, drift, and retrieval which recall the unexpected discovery of pieces of jetsam and flotsam. Julien Green's novel Varouna is a good candidate for an alternative, flotsamesque literary history, not because the book was never 'successful' by Moretti's (commercial) standards or because it awaits a rediscovery that may never come, but because the novel itself embodies what it means for a literary work to be governed by the disjunctive logic of flotsam. Completed on the eve of the German invasion of Paris in the summer of 1940, Varouna marked something of a new artistic start for the Franco-American writer Green. By the 1930s, Green had built a reputation as the author of sophisticated and reliably doom-laden naturalistic novels, some of which were set in the American South (the place where Green's American parents had been born) while others featured grimily urban settings in France (the country of Green's birth and his parents' chosen home). Departing from the naturalist formula that governed his earlier works, Varouna derives in part from Green's study of Eastern religions in the 1930s and from his budding interest in metempsychosis. 2 The novel's title invokes the Vedic god of the world-encircling ocean and the transmigration of souls, and Green's preface to the book makes