Once Perilous, now Safe? Landscapes of Exile in L'Œuvre au Noir of Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987)

Abstract

Set in the tumultuous period of the sixteenth century, in a Flanders racked by religious tensions, L'Œuvre au Noir traces the life of a physician and philosopher, Zénon, whose search for knowledge - his alchemical journey - leads him into dangerous territory. Based on seekers of truth such as the alchemist and physician, Paracelsus, the philosophers Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, the humanist and printer Etienne Dolet, and the physician and theologian Michael Servetus, Yourcenar's protagonist is repeatedly forced to flee from places which have temporarily become safe havens, but are no longer so. Like Bruno, Campanella, Dolet and Servetus, Zénon is considered a heretic because of his writings or his exercise of forbidden medical practices. In the end he undergoes a trial conducted by an ecclesiastical court and is imprisoned. The landscapes of exile - both real and imaginary - in which Zénon seeks refuge, and the transformative processes taking place as he undertakes his real and spiritual journey, form the focus of this paper. Written by an author who subsequently became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française - founded in 1637 - L'Œuvre au Noir was published in France in 1968, a time of turmoil which echoed that of this powerful novel. It instantly achieved fame and received the Femina Prize of that year, the first novel to be unanimously selected by the panel since the inception of the prize in 1904. This compelling work - translated into English as The Abyss - constitutes a rich matrix of material around the theme of exile as both traumatic and transformative experience, as a site of peril as well as of safety.