Abstract: Born in 1910, Louis Poirier became Julien Gracq in 1938. From his arrival in Paris in 1929 through the “Phoney War,” a period of intense turmoil and unrest in Europe coincided with the writer’s intellectual formation, social emergence, and self-invention. Placing his literary debut in its historical context and considering the diversity of available sources allows us to question the label of Julien Gracq as a “timeless” and “unplaceable” classic. What emerges most clearly are three intertwined enigmas. A biographical one: Louis Poirier, a geomorphologist and Communist Party militant, became, at twenty-seven, an immediately paradoxical author with the publication of Au château d’Argol. An epistemological one: Writing, for him, is rooted in an almost libidinal affective economy. Finally, a poetic enigma, as focusing on the Poirier-Gracq figure leads us back to a fundamental question about the texts themselves: How can we understand the configuration of meaning in a fictional work that generates such complex affective responses?
