Applications of the Dream

 

This is a translation of Michel D’Urance’s preface to Jean Parvulesco’s posthumous work Return to Colchis (Un retour en Colchide 2010), which offers a pure and uncompromising distillation of Parvulesco’s vision. Here the novel is revealed not as fiction but as a clandestine operation, an alchemical weapon, and a vector of the dream into the real. Literature, revolution, tantric love, the hidden Imperium, the Heideggerian “ark of nothing,” and the final confrontation between Being and non-being are fused into a single, incandescent doctrine. What follows is less a critical introduction than a transmission from inside the invisible legion of the awakened — a manifesto whispered across the frontier where the novel ends and the apocalypse begins.

By Michel D’Urance

“There is in life the hysteria of a late spring,” wrote Emil Cioran in the 1930s. Life never stops oscillating. Whether we mean life in its vast sense — the sum of all lives, life as raw vitality, life against death — or in its personal sense — the unique existence of each one of us — it sparks a hysterical murmur. This murmur rises from the background of its own Being. The tension runs between two poles: the end of animal clarity (when we give way to human worries) and the beginning of a return to an original force. Destiny is a constant gamble, a relentless alarm ringing over the danger of feelings, goals, thoughts — all caught in the back-and-forth between “subjects” and “objects”. To live humanly — not in the “humanist” style of Hugo or Kant — means building, along the current, a construct that grows lighter and stronger day by day. Sometimes this construct collapses and dissolves beneath itself. Other times it rises above the fleeting man whose whole existence is to keep building it. When man and his construct finally fit together, they become one. At least that is true for those unreasonable, symbolic lives we call heroic. A superior personality, a “hero”, is rooted in a touch of madness, in a form of hysteria that grounds his historical life. Yet this madness is not a mistake, but what allows him to gather forms of hysteria and correct them. He draws in morbid essences to create anti-atomic shelters of the spirit. Think of lives like Camille Claudel, Yukio Mishima, Antonin Artaud, Émile Henry, Simone Weil, Évariste Galois — violent lives, stretched toward the absolute.

To explore how hysteria shapes the dream is to walk a path alongside someone very like us — almost too close to tell apart. Why, then, draw a line between hysteria and dream, between fabrication and transformation? In the eyes of psychiatry, the hysteric — like the dreamer — is unfit for reality. Both are accused of theatricality, of staging an imaginary world that lacks the solid coherence needed to live within reality. The dream, in this view, is a deficit — a damaged fragment of the tangible, a reef jutting from the sea of the real, easily mapped, measured, and dismissed as less than true. Reduced to a byproduct of expression, it is seen as a degradation of truth itself — a flawed production, judged and found wanting by the sovereign standard of objective reality.

But this book takes another path. Jean Parvulesco rejects the contradiction that says: the dream is inferior to reality yet somehow reveals the unconscious. His guiding idea is far bolder: the dream is a mode of creation by Being itself — a way for the deepest, most originary zones of the self to replicate themselves and bring forth the individual’s native mission into reality. This is not just the dream of sleep. It includes every experience — awake or aware — where lines of connection form between what reality allows and what the dream demands. In its essence, the dream extends from the original and functional figuration of the individual a thought that diverges from the common path — and in doing so, opens the way to one’s own path, to Being as such. As a key to the origin-matrix of every human being, the dream functions as a secret notebook — a private dialogue between self and self. The dream produced in the real is genuinely true. It is the “reality” extracted from the dream that is inaccurate in its power. The objectivity of the real depends on a dream of the real — the hidden prompter behind the stage of the physical world we call “authentic.”

The two following commentaries intend to indicate the stance of Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre. This requires a detour through those who animate it (and whom he animates): Parvulesco’s characters are living beings (I) within an aleatory yet foundational œuvre (II).

I
Jean Parvulesco’s characters are living beings. Born in 1928 in Romania, he fled the communist regime in July 1948 — swimming across the Danube to cross into Yugoslavia. He was sent as a political prisoner to the forced-labor camp of Litva-Banovici in Bosnia, a story he later recast in novelistic form in Secret Report to the Nunciature. A year later, he slipped into Austria under secrecy and was forced into ties with one of the American intelligence services from World War II and the early Cold War. He then entered the French occupation zone. This period appears — again in novelistic form — in The Ford of the She-wolves. He arrived in France in January 1950, after meeting Martin Heidegger in his mountain chalet south of the Black Forest. In Paris, he endured what he called the “atrocious tribulations of an inconceivable poverty” — briefly sketched in the short story “Incendium Amoris” (Secret Mission in Baghdad): “We were a fairly large tribe of students — or student-like specters — who more or less underground haunted the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, living in unbelievable conditions, in a state of collapse that didn’t even qualify as ordinary misery. We were social zombies, all of us living yet not living in a kind of transparent, fake, shameful underworld — and the worst part of it? It all happened in broad daylight. (‘We’ve got nothing to hide,’ people often said.)” Beneath the ashes of this suburban hell, some of them would find enough fire to become visible stars — shining far off in culture, in a certain culture, in cinema, in literature.

At this time, Jean Parvulesco joined an informal circle that included Éric Rohmer, Pierre Boutang, Roger Nimier, Paul Gegauff, and Jean Wahl. All the while, he kept close ties to a revolutionary faction of the Parisian right, led by Jean Dides, Charles Delarue, and a discreet industrialist, Jean Parcé. The scene of his youth was a field of embers — the initiatory ground, the raw energy, and solution to a path that would never stop diverging. The propeller’s wings began to stir. Parvulesco had tapped into the literary and cinematic world that gave him a chance to take root — to uncover his singular wandering, a pulsing path toward the future birth of his œuvre. This divergence was stretching a geometric figure across his life: the spiral — a subject for the “sciences of the occult”. The initiatory field of embers had gathered enough sparks to sustain itself through a whole destiny. Most of the fundamental connections — like the one with Éric Rohmer — led to other encounters. Let us mention Jean-Luc Godard, who cast Jean-Pierre Melville as the “Parvulesco” in Breathless (1960). The character’s main line would seep into the real man’s identity: “Become immortal… and then die.”

His first text in French appeared in 1967 in the second issue of “Cahiers de l’Herne” (dedicated to Georges Bernanos) and was titled “The Most Secret Paths.” The foundational book of his œuvre was published in 1978 by Éditions Ethos. Its title, The Merciful Crown of Tantra, could serve as a summary of all his published works. More than thirty works followed, including, among others, a poetic collection, Treatise on Falconry (its title inspired by the highly alchemical falconry treatise of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, De arte venandi cum avibus or The Art of Hunting with Birds), two collections of articles (The Prophetic Spiral, The Return of Great Times), the astonishing poem Diana Before the Gates of Memphis, four essays, two of which are geopolitical (The Ice Mantle, The Red Sun of Raymond Abellio; The Geopolitical Foundations of Great Gaullism, Vladimir Putin and Eurasia), a play (The Indigo Palisades), a collection of short stories (Secret Mission in Baghdad), articles (in Éléments, Nouvelle École, Combat, Le Pariscope, La Place Royale…), pamphlets published by Éditions DVX and, of course, numerous novels and intimate novel-journals, including a series of twelve books forming a novelistic cycle (from The Portuguese Servant to In the Forest of Fontainebleau). One of the novels in this cycle remains to be published after the present Return to Colchis. In Éléments, the author explained that the “publication of this final opus will close the cycle, insofar as it actually precedes In the Forest of Fontainebleau, the truly last book of the cycle, my final novel, “released ahead of its time,” released before the two other novels that will lead to it and its decisive end, whose novelistic future will materialize in reality itself.”

The syncretism of politics and literature — where the two merge into one — plays a central role in Jean Parvulesco’s life. Consider the unexpected alliance between pro-Gaullists and anti-Gaullists during the Algerian events, followed by Spanish exile. Or, later, the striking compromise between Gaullism’s heirs (now rooted in parliamentarism) and “revolutionary-conservative” cadres. All this reveals his drive to embody a marginal approach — one that places a unique vision of world and Being at the heart of a confident activism, an approach subordinated to literature as a fundamental postulate. No matter the cost confronting the deviation of real positions from his literary positions — at least the real as it is most often “believed”. The fictional deviation from reality (take politics, for example) is the exact counterpart, in life’s affairs and societal balances, of the “dogmatic irrationality” the author develops in the spiritual realm. The challenge: to prove this deviation can succeed. Politics must submit to literature — which, though potentially political, only becomes so through assimilation. A Politics seized by literature gambits pieces to occupy the most essential and vital positions, for literature is a risky world.

“…First question, where do you come from?” asks Théa von Canalis to the hero of A Masked Ball in Geneva, a certain Jean, the presumably autobiographical first name found in many of Jean Parvulesco’s novels. To come, to originate, to arrive: those who influenced him came from vastly different planes of thought and commitment (Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Gérard de Nerval, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph de Maistre, Karl Haushofer, René Guénon, André Dhôtel…). One must also consider the undoubtedly crucial encounters (Martin Heidegger, Mircea Eliade, Arno Breker, Jean Daniélou, Vintila Horia, Ezra Pound, Julius Evola, Raoul de Warren…), the singular friendships (Louis Pauwels, Raymond Abellio, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Vergès, Jean-Luc Godard, Dominique de Roux, Constantin Tacou…), and the influence of the great authors of American and English fantastic literature, especially Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Graham Masterton, Talbot Mundy, Algernon Blackwood, Gustav Meyrink, and John Buchan. This lends Jean Parvulesco a somewhat curious and highly eclectic, deeply paradoxical foundation, which underpins his originality both as a man and as a writer. His always discreet reputation will extend beyond the scope of the various dissident cultural circles. He inspires a renowned filmmaker (we have already seen the case of Godard), Éric Rohmer, who gives him a role in the cast of The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (1993), where he plays “Jean Walter,” musicians (Dimitri from Paris dedicates a musical epilogue to him in “Sacrebleu” (1996), and the duo Symphony from the Tricatel label composes “M. Parvulesco” in 2000), and even the observant parts of the press (such as producer Olivier Germain-Thomas, journalist Michel Marmin, the review 1895, Spectacle du Monde, Valeurs Actuelles, etc.), which devote radio and television programs, special issues, interviews, and articles to him. It seems like this influence exists beyond France, particularly in Russia, with the support of the geopolitician Alexander Dugin, an advisor to the Russian authorities, who has written that Jean Parvulesco is his “favorite author.”

An author who rarely doubted, or who only experienced that good doubt whispered to oneself in the evening, once the windows are closed, a doubt not displayed, not assailing, whose positive act is called “resolution.” This is how literary beings function: they do not doubt like others. Robots of their own destinies, even in chaos they persist deep within themselves. The literary beings of Jean Parvulesco, his characters, enjoy what could rightly be called a prefiguring status, the kind we sometimes glimpse in real life. Elitist conceptions have prefigured their souls; they are no longer entirely men and women. They belong to an elite of the “awakened.”

These beings are beings who believe. Called to join an informal order without a true name, “the Organization,” whose doctrinal principles are revolutionary and whose profound existential goals are far removed from the “normal” world, men and women develop “nests”, strategic action points that unite a diffuse set of groups from dissimilar social backgrounds. These nests are mobile residences on the social plane, immovable on the plane of destiny, designed to serve revolutionary designs and action. The typical action in Jean Parvulesco’s novels involves a couple or a group of couples acting, in a dreamlike manner, as intermediaries with “unknown superiors” within the operational framework of the nests, whose various concentric and hierarchical circles — some more inner than others — bring together politicians and figures from the worlds of entertainment or literature, working toward concrete goals whose true intrigue lies elsewhere — in the formation of a revolutionary pole, a herald of “Being”, against fundamental adversaries, representatives of “non-being”. Ardent love, tantric love, then initiates the process of the slow and arduous transformation of these characters, of “their own lives”, their pasts, and their social trajectories, to create the conditions for the existential reversal that signifies the authorization of their “passage”.

For these beings are beings who change. They wage their battle with a reserve of power from the amorous “deflagration” — from which they never return to who they were but makes them what they are from the depth of their origin, the core of their being. What grants them this power of modification and reversal? The “camp of Being.” A chain of “night watchmen,” “harvesters without harvests,” “nocturnal workers” for the high designs of the “Reign” — Jean Parvulesco’s characters treat “life” only through absolute affirmation. This affirmation has destroyed all negativity, all the weaknesses characterizing doubters: the organized society, the regime police, institutions, morality, the anxious and indecisive — unrepentant mythomaniacs — educational agents, repressive agents, the press, and journalists. The characters advance fanatically as guardians of archaic forces locked against other archaic forces. The overall positions of their strife metamorphose the world.

A set of manuals for inspired action — the Parvulescian novel offers no comfortable stories, no romanticized simulations of reality. Each novel serves as a myth for Western literature “at its end” — linked to Raymond Abellio’s “ultimate novel”: a “novel of the eighth day”, where novel, events, and history fade — in truth, a novel of passage from the seventh to the eighth day, a novel of an unmoved mover and the ascent of the mobile world into him (from Abellio’s correspondence with Dominique de Roux). Jean Parvulesco calls this final novel of the Western era the “Venus Junction”. It is no longer a matter of being born or giving birth, but of being reborn and bringing about rebirth. Leaning on structuring persuasion techniques aimed at forming a new reality in the world of experience, Jean Parvulesco’s heroes inscribe their statutory signs in fire and marble.

The Imperium, as the multiple powers constituting the Eurasian empire is, for those who serve its spirit, the primary revolutionary concept: Europe, India, Japan, Tibet, together constituting a geopolitical organism emerging historically and spiritually, will turn away from the declining politico-cultural hegemonies and form the Eurasian empire. But the empire does not visibly exist in reality; it is not there, not yet there, no longer there, or held in waiting, perhaps in proximity.

And, facing the possibility of the empire, Jean Parvulesco’s characters are beings who live. Their stories unfold as combative, vivifying manifestations of the migration toward reality undertaken by literary entities. When adventure befalls literature itself, its meaning can no longer be ontologically identified with the simple advent of literature as “adventure.” These characters, inside the novel, inhabit “their reality” and invoke the power of the novel — the novel as dream — which must penetrate reality. Yet, being characters of the novel, they already “dream.” They do not dream of a “novelistic” existence that should somehow find its place in their “life.” They dream of a novelistic existence that yields its own figuration through the “novel” — through the novel alone. Because they before anything else are inside the novel, our reality now becomes the “novel” of their own reality; and our novel, their reality that emerges. The novelistic thus inverts the notion of adventure, which no longer means a “situation where peril looms” or a “turning point in the quest”. It now means only the real element of the novel: for literature now arrives as real adventure, it is the advent of existence into literature that serves as the activator of Jean Parvulesco’s novels.

At a certain stage of interpretation — once its central objective has been relatively attained by the reader — this œuvre reveals its core achievement: its original (in)novation of the very category of the novel.

In this new category, it is a matter of the application of the dream to reality in the mathematical sense, where an application can be the exact inverse of another application if an element A is recovered from its image A’, in other words, if a “return” application undoes what the “original” application has done. In novelistic terms, which are thus not terms of adventure, a character is applied as a person, or a person is applied as a character, according to the criteria of a normative order that takes account of Being. In this sense, the application of the dream is neither the realization of an “adventure” by the subjects of the dream, nor the creation of the dream, nor the reading of the novel by those to whom it is addressed. The application of the dream is determined by the preexistence and post-existence of the dream that is applied, before the novel and after the “novel,” in reality itself: the application is constituted by the annexation of the novel’s characters, which are dreamed, by persons in reality, which is an application of the dream. The theory of the application of the dream in the Parvulescian novelistic system consecrates models of a superior human activity, a latent and gradual form of overhumanity.

Will they succeed? The mystical fugue of Armande Béjart in The Strategy of Darkness, the foundational ambivalence of Karin, who founds a world for the narrator of A Masked Ball in Geneva, or the fallen-and-rising presence of the agents of the Manor of Roses in In the Forest of Fontainebleau, can no longer appear as literary descriptions according to the classical definitions of literature. They are, rather, furrows of archetypal identities “carved” into a book, as if by magical labor. Each character matrix-like possesses a series of roles that can be played either by his or her own personal realization or without that personal realization. For Jean Parvulesco this attribution of roles is a predestination — yet it may not stem from destiny as divine and “superior” subjection, but solely from Being, as outcome of this originary panoptic container of its own proper ends — from Being that regulates itself. Created within the order of the novel, Jean Parvulesco’s characters are vectors of the dream within reality. To dream of the novelistic reality, in real life, is to invoke support from the fundamental powers of production. It is to choose the field of a distinct becoming, that of life reclaimed in the territories of the dream, to affirm a world of subtle configurations that forms beings in order to form beings, to once again clear a path through the ontological chain of entities from remote oneiric and archaic fields to everyday reality.

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Will they succeed? In ordinary reality, persons give qualities to the characters of the novel; in the dream, characters apply persons from reality; and in the “novel” everything dialectically inverts. Through literature Jean Parvulesco has joined an invisible cohort of peers “in dream and in reality” who act for both empires. For although the empire is one, it is doubled in its functions depending on whether it is internal (the spiritual force within and by itself) or external (the spiritual force beyond itself, created by geopolitics). When the inaugural transformation occurs between lived reality and dream, between real dream and reality, nothing any longer separates the peers of reality from their peers in the dream. The realization of the dream, presupposing an essential distancing from the dream as such, allows reality to extend the dream into “life” and summon characters as persons, while the dream shapes persons as characters. All of them are players in a vast game of strategy. The alliance between the peers in the dream and the peers in reality is the philosophical locus of the conversion of the novel into reality — against everything in reality that must change. Immense tectonics of beings move the prefiguration of beings who prefigure themselves. Being regulates itself; beings prefigure themselves. The dispersion of peers in existence is ultimately that re-creation which is played out as the child described by Heraclitus plays, who plays because he plays: “Time is a child moving counters on a board.” Whatever internal instabilities there may be, Jean Parvulesco’s novelistic work shows us the path of this “child.” Time and being form a totality whose joint ordering suggests a general law of psychological gravitation that modulates the real as in a game — a law that always favors the strongest player: the one who wins because he believes the most.

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By Dragoš Kalajić
II
Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre is aleatory and foundational. When œuvres speak among themselves through the medium of criticism (the way one person converses with other persons), a rule of measure is needed to establish a hierarchy of œuvres.

This œuvre has often been (de)valued as “elitist” and over-elaborate, redundant, even incomprehensible. The loftiness of its influences cannot exempt it from the most frequent charge: “repetition”, tied to the accusation of hyper-prolixity, nor can influences serve as an automatic guarantee of quality. The author himself has justified some of the heavier characteristics of his writing: “My whole life is made only of repetitions; the present is called upon to repeat, always, what immediately preceded it. Thus, in my life there is never anything new, only ever a renewal … is this the ‘eternal return’?” (In the Forest of Fontainebleau) “What in the novel (in the romance) of my journey toward the final leap of the vision I received at the Belle Ferronnière may seem like (and indeed is) a kind of tiresome repetition of amorous questioning […] corresponds (it is necessary, I believe, that this be stated and doctrinally recorded here) to the terminal process of the ‘œuvre au rouge’ that the philosophers of living fire, of Incendium Amoris, call by the fierce and dolorist name reiteration. This repetition, then, so fatiguing, which never ceases to disorient and jeopardize any uninformed (I mean non-initiatic) reading of this novel, of this romance, is part of an obligatory passage and, as such, actively participates in the salvific process it is called to account for in the philosophically hermetic, inwardly visible progression: it is precisely this apparently endless repetition of an ever-identical amorous quest that bestows upon the writing conveying it a concealed yet haughty and permanent predisposition toward the invisible, thus making it an induced writing. I mean a writing induced in reiteration.” (The Mysteries of the Villa “Atlantis”).

Another almost constant reproach is the incoherence of certain texts, or at least their apparent incoherence, caused especially by inversions in the narrative sequence. Of that, everyone may judge for himself. One might say that a writer resembles a woman whose beauty lies beyond beauty itself: she can live on the heights without having to sculpt or discipline that beauty, which therefore appears more formless and open to criticism. There is something of this in the partial refusal to adjust Parvulesco’s work to a wider public, an œuvre whose accents are so intensely personal that it cannot always be grasped by everyone. Yet in a great many of these texts there remains, from the very first line, what unmistakably belongs to a higher plane of literature, as well as there remains an intuitive kind of reading. Those who read him intuitively discovers outstanding literary capacities, and above all an originality of vision that is genuinely new where literature is concerned: new in its understanding of the relations between literature and life, between literature and reality, between literature and the imaginary; new in its approach to the problem of Being and to the problem of engagement.

The Parvulescian œuvre is aleatory because its irregularities forbid any system to be cleanly deduced from it. Yet the power of its rare intuitions and lightning flashes, combined with an elliptical novelistic form, ends up bypassing the ordinary question of textual coherence by the sheer strength of the foundations on which it is erected. In the end, it should be possible to recognize here a marginal writer who inserts himself into the lineage of “anti-naturalism” and who is intuitively superior to a great many others. His writing is genuinely unique, crafting a universe of intrigues emerging for the very first time, within a frame of reference that is almost impenetrable. The transfer of new feelings to the reader, which is what ultimately gives an œuvre its reach, and here is grounded in a rich literary corpus, operates with striking regularity once the totality of the novels is taken into account, and once one measures their place both in what has already been done and, even more decisively, in what has never been done in the domain of letters. It is the whole that founds the work, the whole as a closed totality, not the single, impoverished part viewed in isolation.

The writer — the craft, the function, the very status of writer — is never univocal. Through writing, the writer runs the imminent risks of the one aggregating worlds and men. The sole fulfillment of his sincerity will be to found a new Saying. Henry Miller, through countless books pursuing his own quest to define a literary meaning, said nothing different: create worlds, create beings, overturn the world by adding to it one emotion that has been truly discerned. Jean Parvulesco, for his part, has attempted to propose something beyond Saying itself.

Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre is foundational, because his emotion transmits definitions, appeals, orientations meant for a rare readership — a readership whose every true peer, if they exist, knows exactly what his world is and why he must advance under the aegis of the invisible empire of the dream. Under the protection of an intimate and secret seal, at once personal and constitutional, that belongs to his own decisive trajectory, each peer knows what he has to do as an element of an invisible legion marching with the “ark of nothing” of which Heidegger spoke. In The Prophetic Spiral, Jean Parvulesco writes: “The more the external part of darkness expands and thus seems to prevail over everything, the more the judgement of spiritual beings amorously closes in on the few who find themselves concerned by this amorous judgement, and by this judgement alone, and the more this very closing-in becomes, in itself, a superpower, the spiral of its own intimate self-intensification leading with perfect precision to the occult hearth of the conflagration which, at the appointed hour, will be aroused to become the original rupture, the first, lightning-like annunciation of the terrible spiritual deflagration that is to mark — on both sides of the dividing line between Being and non-being — the apocalyptic reversal of the present powers and of the state of irreducible antagonism they represent. […] For it can hardly be otherwise for us, we who stand motionless, without past or future, who in the darkness of perfect powerlessness and the infinite shame of our current state nevertheless continue the desperate combat for the sole honor of God.”

Aleatory and foundational, Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre is steeped in Christianity yet maintains no real theological ties to it. It is a post-Christian work that denies Christian values while still invoking God, a “God” who possesses the same consistency as Heidegger’s Being. Its conception of vital energy, of characters, of dream, of the real, springs from the discourse of the Tao, from the values of Greek polytheism, from the return of Rome, from the mythologies of a Europe beheld in the light of a primordial Tradition (which we permit ourselves to consider unfindable), from the mental departure toward Thule, from Tantra, and from the notion of mana. In this, the apparent binarity of Being/non-being and good/evil becomes highly artificial. For Jean Parvulesco, only the struggle of strength against weakness, the oneiric against the rational, vitality against negativity matters, and thus, perceived differently this time, the struggle of “Being against non-being” in the service of the political and spiritual causes that matter to him. A dynamo, slowly gathering speed… toward the service of this selfsame dynamic energy…

Some have understood Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre as a means of appeal in cassation against Christianity, a contradictory means in light of the text’s appearances, but a certain one all the same. The expansive energy of the œuvre serves to establish control over ourselves (among other sources of control), in order to think and act against the invading Eastern spirit that is submerging Europe, against existential negativity, and against the (parliamentary and “rational”) political regimes of the era. What must be done will be done, no matter how, even by detours and back-roads, provided those paths can be used for the cause that moves the revolutionary. And particularly through traversals, when circumstances demand it, in obedience to the supreme revolutionary principle: the realization of the ends. Diverting the adversary’s routes requires knowing their phraseologies and methods, to position oneself in action not at the level of “gossip” (that of jovial comrades swallowing coffee while talking about revolution, as bureaucrats do when discussing their upcoming vacations), but at the level of “intelligence.” What matters is to act collectively and personally through the broadest, most encompassing means of combat possible. Biologically viral, the strategy of revolutionary agents is operationally “Trotskyist” and fundamentally activist. It must adapt activism to transient opportunities while treating as permanently obligatory the effort of thought, doctrinal labor, and the unyielding firmness of a real (even if hidden) work of resistance. The sole terminus is the final elimination of the adversary and the fulfilment of the revolutionary demand. Every tool is provisional.

Like a red, serpentine wave, the line of dusk just before sleep, a disquieting strangeness that strikes the spheres of rationality with sudden incapacity, piercing them open to other forms and revealing the paths of a dream, the reading of Return to Colchis launches, aimed straight at the real, a harsh proposition of dawn. Jean Parvulesco once said to me in Paris: “We are no longer men”. What strange conversations he must have had with Raymond Abellio near La Muette, in the Jardins du Ranelagh… “But overmen,” he added, while I was thinking only about what in his life was true, and about nothing except what could possibly be true. In another of our discussions he spoke of the “Heideggerian science.” And of literature, which “can be very violent”: “Do not forget, and this is not for the sake of a formula — formulas no longer have any meaning now — that we are among the few who can both wait and remember. Do not forget that high above us, in the skies of France, a blood-debt hangs, because everything began in France and it is in France that everything will be settled.” Another time, walking back toward La Muette, I was listening to his appeals to literature, to the appeals of the novel inside life itself, yet I felt absent from myself, because one sentence, then another, had struck me with perfect sense. I had been transferred. I was thinking that our responsibility consists in fixing literature into reality, and that this responsibility neighbors the summoning of Being in philosophy.

I do not know why Martin Heidegger agreed to meet Jean Parvulesco, nor the degree of significance this meeting had. Yet the very possibility of such an encounter between peers, between two highly differentiated individuals, may have possessed the circumstantial force of an imperative for the future of the novel and the future of philosophy alike. The combination of the insights yielded by one œuvre with those of another can lead thought extraordinarily far, even when only reduction or transgression is expected. Perhaps the conjugation of Jean Parvulesco’s novel with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy is, in the end, more faithful to the singular aims of both œuvres than certain other attempted communions, for example the version of the “Heideggerian novel” offered by Ingeborg Bachmann.

The author of Return to Colchis noted in The Conspiracy of the Polar Weddings that it is “the very near future that will show us the march of things, and it is the evolution of the situation on the ground through an existential ordeal that will reveal to us the final secret unfolding in the underground of the greatest history […] In a certain sense, everything is also accomplished through our waiting.” A waiting that is hearkening the moment it is accepted as the chronological axis of a philosophical tradition: “We thereby wish to mark, abruptly, the return of the new European consciousness of Being to the Heraclitean and pre-Socratic thought of the very first origins of our race; the negation, and the resolute abandonment of two millennia of Western rationalist blindness, an abandonment and negation pre-announced by the inner movement of Martin Heidegger’s final philosophical inquiries. We must therefore start everything anew from Martin Heidegger, in the most radical way.”


By Dragoš Kalajić
In Return to Colchis, it is specified that “it is not enough simply to reach Colchis: Once in Colchis itself, one must still know how to reach the Polar Tree and the Golden Fleece. One must succeed in seizing the latter. And then clandestinely depart from Colchis with the Golden Fleece, to bring it into the historical space and time of this world, where it must be able to act according to the preconceived plan and for the purposes envisioned and determined before the journey to Colchis. For the sole reason one goes there is to be able to act upon this world.” From the perspective of the applications of the dream, the novel is a timeless weapon. Return to Colchis, as Jean Parvulesco writes, has as its “inner time” its own unfolding outside of linear time — “everything becomes novel and novel of this novel, whose history would then be nothing other than the day-to-day history of its own becoming.” For the dream is the instrument of a will that is highly defined by Being itself, and the present book (sequel to The Ford of the She-Wolves) illustrates some of the criteria and powers of that will. The study of revolution and of revolutionary thought is, fundamentally, a study of clandestine life, a form of life that is nothing less than the practical enactment of the conditions under which Being calls.

The author of this novel (who is at the same time its dreamer, its diarist, and one of its readers) holds this edifying and heuristic conception of the dream: the dream can pass into reality through action or through writing. Yet it is still only a partial passage, a passage of wakefulness, for “capturing in writing the sharp, living, and overpowering inner impression of certain dreams, those which are truly decisive instances of our existence understood in its entirety, of our diurnal and nocturnal existence, is indeed almost never possible. Something always escapes, precisely that which should have constituted the undeniable participation in another order of reality, in a space of superior (and very likely even supernatural) consciousness and experience. No, the mysterious intimate reality of the dream allows itself to be grasped only in its immediate lived moment. It tolerates absolutely no repetition, no deferred approach, no later resumption, not even a memory.” A passage of wakefulness, therefore: a passage that is forever and a passage forgotten the instant it has been crossed. For, as Ernst Jünger writes in The Adventurous Heart, “the most powerful dreams are dreams in deep and lost places, from which the œuvre emerges only as an accident, and in which scarcely more than a feeble part of necessity is enclosed.”

“They failed because they did not start with the dream”: this all-too-famous quote from Shakespeare now transforms into a directive for combat. To fight, by applying the dream to create an œuvre charged with the future, thus has as its constant meaning: “begin”. There exist cold divinities in certain dreams, doubtless the prototypes of whatever, in waking life, is truly seized. Without them nothing moves, for they are the mobilisers of the seized object. In unreal Asgards, they close the lifelines of the men they impel, the men who tread the paths of Bifröst: the mythological rainbow of three colors, one of which burns, also called the “bridge of the Aesir”. “Paths of thinking for which what is past is indeed past, yet what is gathered remains on its way toward us: such paths wait for the day when men who think will venture onto them,” declared the master of the Black Forest.

There is an elite of the “awakened.” They are the clearing of a definition of Being and the solution of a secret mission. For Being feeds on Being.

This preface by Michel D’Urance is translated to English from Un retour en Colchide, Guy Trédanial Éditeur, 2010.

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