Joan of Arc, a constant figure in the author’s work, returns with the “Tomb” and her old hermit confessor.
After Johanna (Le Tripode, 2021), we left her childhood behind and became warriors, one night away from reaching Chinon and finding the Dauphin in “christmas light” one day in the year 1429. What will happen next? History knows this, but Marc Graciano does not write history or he does not write history as taught in textbooks; writes novels (about ten of Freedom in the mountains in Corti 2013), and sometimes songs in their own language, a language that most often consists of complicated sentences and old or unusual words, contrary, out of season and unparalleled. His returns as a goldsmith are always a joy, a meeting, because it seems that together with him we witness – which is ultimately a very rare feeling – the construction of a piece in real time (a term he himself does not really like). Tomb it forms his latest stone and makes Joan of Orleans a recurring figure without being a sequel, at least not as good logic would have it (the lifting of the siege of Orléans, the coronation of Charles VII at Reims, the trial, etc.). Instead of dutifully following the icon, Graciano returns the work to the loom, steps back, moves, turns and observes his object from afar, surreptitiously, to reveal new contours. This is evidenced by a narrative instance: where Johanna showed things through the young squire, tomb decide on a look a “the old hermit”, “the one who perhaps knew Johanne best”, his confessor.
Many birds circle (larks, blackbirds, thrushes, etc.)
Jeanne died at the stake many years ago and her memory haunts our reclusive man on the heights of Domrémy. As much as Johanna was a book for young people (one of the aspects that Graciana is most interested in, the Rimbaldian dimension of the character), how much tomb it is placed on the side of memory. “I remember the first time I saw her”… are his first words and each chapter has its own form in a long sentence full of interjections and adverbs. This time the novel deals less with progression than with end to end, even if it is ascending in its own way – from one martyr to another, hermit, “necessary for God”, will in turn carry his cross. Tomb it is not, however, a dark text: there are many birds (larks, blackbirds, thrushes, etc.) circling there, starting with the black-headed cricket on the cover, the work of Georges Peignard. With Gracian, we must return to the root of the word and its different meanings: in painting, the “tomb” represents Christ’s burial, but in poetry and music it can be a composition in honor of the artist. Perhaps we will rather understand the title, in homage and contemplation, as a work “inspired” in which we happen to also find a self-portrait, a few months after “Berrichons haiku” from Noirlac (named after the hamlet where the writer settled, opposite the Cistercian abbey). It said: “Soon I’ll be just an old man fishing on the banks of the Cher.” Who is the hermit of Grave ? This anonymous person who, some “autumn morning”, when the jays chirp, she thinks she hears a sign from Johanna, “which makes me cry softly every time”.