Places often reflect the traveler's soul. They vary with those who travel them. Marquette's diary mixes religious sensibility, the taste of the marvelous, of rice and a certain science of the world, which lead him to write down relevant but fleeting details. In essence, more than a container for the representation of the religious, historical and geographical dimension of these unknown lands, the diary becomes above all an instrument to orient itself in the time of daily life.
The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of great cultural fervor that marked all the subsequent avant-garde trends. In this context of fervor and revolution fits Germain Nouveau not only because it is linked to friendship with Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Richepin and others but above all because with his works he contributed, with a vein of originality and spirit of rebellion, to birth of modern poetry.
After closing the cycle of novels, Gracq has opened a new chapter of literary production, based mainly on fragmentary notes or writings. From that moment on the new model of writing, that is the text or very short, was used almost exclusively to describe physical and literary places. Diaries and chronicles that today I can be side by side - each with its own perspective and narrative cut - to the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The argumentative structure of Autour des sept collines replaces the historiographical science with the values and illusions of surrealist poetry. In this work, it prevails, rather it literally "dominates" the description to the negative, the comparison that diminishes, which repeatedly denigrates. What Gracq says about the Romans is one of those points in the book that perplex. Not so much because of the negativity of judgment, which is debatable of which one can always discuss, but because of its trivial argumentative inconsistency, which seems more than anything else to appeal to a burden of commonplaces. This aspect of Autour des septs collines contrasts with the elegance of style.
'International Novatrice Infinitesimale, contrary to what happened to the movements after the great historical avant-garde, not only manages to gradually and brilliantly overcome its initial phases, but substantiates the movement as the fourth avant-garde after Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. The reason lies in the awareness that if you intend to overturn culture, the revolution must be innovative and permanent: not a revolution as a change in research, the art of non-sense or subversive ideological attitude, but a revolution as innovation of knowledge and abolition of the operating sectors.
