Gracq, le catholicisme et le sacré

Keeping with the surrealist tradition, Julien Gracq first of all gives the sacred a sacrilegious force opposed to Catholicism, a religion of sacristans. But he does not reject either the forms inherited from the Catholic tradition or Catholic writers’ contribution to the history of literature. Whether as an antithesis to the spirit of conversion or as a store of figures for a poetically redefined concept of the sacred, Catholicism was a constant reference point for Gracq’s imaginary.