2023-08-10 18:24:23
Good Christian or syncretist without taboo? Henri Bosco sometimes blurs the tracks, between atavistic superstition, insatiable intellectual curiosity about everything to do with esotericism, and deep beliefs…, but the dominant feature of his work is undoubtedly a strong religious feeling. He poetically combines there at the same time a sincere Catholicism, paganism – the pagan and polytheistic world always surfacing “in this other Greece” what is Provence – and an oriental philosophical thought. The subtle alliance of these three spiritual visions gives his luminous work all its particularity..
The Bosquian poetics of the sacred is indeed inhabited by a constant feeling of presence, the thambos Greek, sudden and extraordinary apperception of the divine in things, a sort of grasping of being in contact with mystery. It is ” gifted “il “test God”et ” that (his) is enough”explains the writer. Hence a sympathy for familiar objects, which serve him in a certain way to “magic tables to detect the Presence” (1). He says his parents evolved naturally “under the gaze of dark signs”. A painting that fell off, for example, was interpreted as a misfortune to come, that ” with ease ” : “They lived familiarly in the midst of omens. » (2) No doubt this strongly influenced him.
A work tinged with mysticism
His characters are indeed drawn to mystery. Thus the narrator ofA branch of the night does he admit a taste “innate, obsessive, of the secret life of men and things”. Ambivalent, they are always sensitive to the existence of a double which presents itself as “a me deeper than me (…) as if I lived with a hidden companion who is silent most of the time and who sometimes talks to me” (Le Récif). Or in Malicroix : “Intrusion of another into my being, of another who, not being me, came from me, and on whom, not being me, at times, it seemed as if the fluid edifice of my life was resting secret. »
The Saint-Barthélémy de Vaugines church, near Lourmarin in the Var, whose esplanade and pediment Bosco appreciated. / Jean-Francois Jung
In his “initiation”, the hero is often accompanied by sorts of shadows, almost mute characters “to taciturn friendship” – like Gatzo, described by Pascalet in The Child and the River –, essential smugglers for access to a poetic vision of things in a relationship freed from “old” representations. Here is what Martial says, in Malicroix, about Balandran: “Everything I had looked at until then, but without seeing it, became visible to me, and even what I had seen. I had the impression of discovering a new world, a colourful, solid world, full of its weight, whole. »
The taste of nature
The writer himself recognizes that this constant feeling of sacredness is quite close to magic. In this case, he says, this is a means of using the visible, tangible object, to put oneself in a state of perceiving what is neither visible nor tangible, and “however we obsess”. In other words, he “transcribed” : “By moving from one world to another, I can order a lot of visions and make them plausible. » (1)
The writer himself recognizes that this constant feeling of sacredness is quite close to magic. / Jean-Francois Jung
For those who have a religious experience, all of nature is indeed capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacredness. An archaic memory can thus manifest itself, linked to a collective unconscious. Because if man feels isolated in the cosmos, it is because he is no longer involved in nature, observes the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung in his Exploration of the unconscious : the world “dehumanizing little by little” due, in particular, to the progress of the sciences, the feeling of the sacred is diminished and leads to the loss of the symbolic implications of the natural elements: “Thunder is no longer the irritated voice of a god, nor lightning his vengeful projectile, the river no longer harbors spirits. (…) Stones, plants, animals no longer speak to man and man no longer speaks to them believing that they can hear him. » The influence of Christianity aiming to “save” pagan souls from these superstitions is not foreign to it either.
By restoring to beings and things their soul and their secret radiance, the work of Henri Bosco reconstitutes this heritage resulting from riches that modern man seems to have abandoned but of which he retains nostalgia or vague memories. In this, Christian humanism joins Greek wisdom. Doesn’t Bosco himself say clearly, through the mouth of Manoulakis in The Reefthat his natural sympathies lead him to reconcile paganism and Christianity? “This story,” he said, “wonderfully answers a question that you Provençal, me Greek, the people of the North ask you. She’s naive… Are you a Christian? Are you pagan? Now, both our sun and our sea dispense us from enlightening these reasonable heads other than by stories. » And the author explains that he experiences nature more religiously than philosophically: “You know, the Southerners are all more or less pagans: even if they are converted, even if they are practicing Catholics like me, they still have a taste for nature, a taste for form. » (4)
Reconnect with a lost contact
Henri Bosco also shows throughout his life a great interest in Orphism, theastrology, magic, epigraphy… and more generally for all types of spirituality. During his stay in the East (1931-1955), he was passionate about the Arab religious tradition, Islam, Sufism, as well as the esoteric works of René Guénon. His propensity to become attached to mysteries and to try to reveal their secrets is only reinforced. The Morocco, “land of prayers and praises” for him, comments Sophie Pacifico Le Guyader – his great-niece – allows him to live “several kinds of experiences, and, despite the influence of Muslim mysticism, he will remain deeply Christian”.
The syncretism, undeniable in his work, allows his novels to deploy a magnificent poetry. The writing is freed from contingencies that could limit its fullness. From an aesthetic point of view, Henri Bosco, a great lover of painting, could take up the words of Vassily Kandinsky in his famous essay Spiritual in artconsidering that a work should always be “able to cause vibrations of the soul”, the painter then emphasizing the primordial role of spirituality in artistic creation. Likewise, Bosco sees poetry as a “spiritual exercise”. More than delivering a message, the work as a whole reconnects with a lost contact, it also becomes initiatory for the reader curious about these questions. Catholic, his work is “in any case in the etymological sense of the word”, underlines a critic. You said universal ?
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Excerpt: “I could not yet discern the face of this god”
Le Mas Theotimeby Henri Bosco (Gallimard Editions)
“There were moving tiles in the roof, under the slow movement of a main beam which gave way, in the wall, to the heat of the calcined stones. Although these signs were moving in the darkness, I had heard them so often on my head that they troubled me little more than usual. But sometimes the noises were silent, and then straining my ears intensely, I perceived a very low vibration, and so serious that it must have remained imperceptible to my usual auditory sense, for sounds do not descend to such depths; and I picked it up beyond human hearing, on chords sensitive to the slowest messages. I could not give a name to these indefinable waves whose nocturnal radiation reached me for the first time, doubtless by the privilege of a precarious agreement due to the competition of this ardent night, the abnormal torments of my soul, and perhaps to be a powerful expression of the hidden genius of Theotime. I was upset about it. For that was my blood rising slowly, rolling away my anguish and my terror, the violence of which did not succeed in breaking the wide rhythm, the interior field of this common life, where Theotime and I, by melting the flesh at the stone, we were no longer a single soul, anxious for its salvation, and perhaps already in search of its secret god. But of this god I could not yet discern the face, which I nevertheless sensed as rustic and hard.
For a long time I was absorbed in this strange communion. »
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