Jean Parvulesco (1928–2010) is the author of an œuvre without peer — mystical, geopolitical, visionary — far removed from the psychological novel or realist tale. For him, writing is not an art but an alchemical operation, a tool for transmuting the real and summoning Being. He writes in black, yet to raise a sun after the darkness. His novels, poems, and articles narrate nothing — they operate. Their aim? To reweave the torn threads between the visible and the invisible, in the mad hope of re-sacralizing the world. An ontological combat literature addressed to the watchers.
Are there writings more estranged from the contemporary mentality and the spirit of its literatures than those of Jean Parvulesco? Was it necessary for the French paradigm — that world of terminal certitudes mortared with materialist truth and progressive sap — to collide with such a stumbling stone, to let the Carpathian irrational seep into it, borne by the Parvulescian word and its unfathomable mystagogy? Phantasmagoria, eschatology, mariology, mysticism, occultism, tantrism, orphism, oneirism — irrepressible Parvulesco unleashing the offensive of the ban and arrière-ban of invisible powers, officially relegated to archaic beliefs, as though books still held the power to call down fire from heaven.
A single metaphysical obsession feeds Jean Parvulesco’s abundant œuvre: to achieve the reunion with being as primordial creative potency, to allow the new dawn of the world’s reintegration into the superior sphere of the sacred. Poems, novels, and articles bear countless witness to this inextinguishable élan, wholly turned toward the primordial philosophical question of ontology and the process of transformation it enfolds.
Written after a foundational period of poetic creation — yielding titles such as La Mystérieuse couronne du tantra (1978) or Traité de la chasse au faucon (1984) — Parvulesco’s novels, from La Servante portugaise (1987) to Bal masqué à Genève (1999), passing through Le Mystère de la villa Atlantis (1990), L’Étoile de l’Empire invisible (1994), or La Conspiration des noces polaires (1998) — to name only the principal — are characterized by their autobiographical dimension fused with a tenuous fictional intrigue, from which emerge long observations and analyses on subjects proper to the author’s vision, sometimes dominating the entire book, as in Le Gué des louves (1995), Le Sentier perdu (2007), or Le Retour en Colchide (2010), which moreover echo the thematic article collections punctuating this bibliography (La Spirale prophétique, 1986; Le Retour des grands temps, 1997; La Confirmation boréale, 2007).
Thus the Parvulescian script — difficult of access, yet recommended for first readings: La Servante portugaise, La Spirale prophétique, and the short-story collection Mission secrète à Bagdad (2003) — pertains neither to a literary model nor to an intellectual discourse producing fiction or theoretical constructs, but to an interior path bound to the dimension of the last things, to a displacement within the plane of Revelation defined as eschatology. This approach uncovers the creative word in its secret trajectory, hoping to attain its ultimate reality — that instant when being becomes reunion.
Hidden Doors Within the World
The path of the metaphysics of being — ontology — that Parvulesco follows rests upon a fundamental mechanism for seizing the real, a movement of the gaze upon existence, “a supreme attention” to the substance of life. At the margin of the quadrilled domains of theology and metaphysics, this praxis of perception opposes abstraction with the images of a dialectic of the concrete, confronting perceived signs with the author’s capacities for appropriation and metamorphosis of reality. Observations and personal memories drawn from notes gathered over the years form the raw material of this penetration into the depths of the tangible, this process of opening consciousness to the domain of meaning.
Presented in terms of a doubling of the gaze, this orientation designates a deepening equivalent to crossing the frontier that separates letter from spirit, appearances from the nature of things. The interior gaze reverses objectification; it opens to presence and unveils the spiral of being. Parvulesco establishes this fundamental link between being and gaze, illustrating it throughout his œuvre, which is nothing other than an attention paid to the condensation of being in existence, history, politics, the arts, and literature — domains from which he extracts data proper to an interior reading and the unveiling of a particular ontological weave. This mechanism of apprehension, whereby he transcends or elevates every object considered through a visionary capture of its profound nature, constitutes the most determining and characteristic element of his thought.
Thus his geopolitical discourse, identifiable in numerous articles and often mingled with the romanesque and semi-fictional adventures of his personae. Whether his works on great history with geopolitical aim draw upon observation of civilizational and continental stakes — inspired in part by the German Haushofer or the American Mackinder, making him a figure of Eurasianism in the second half of the twentieth century — his analysis nonetheless seeks to raise these questions to the transhistorical plane. The political character of the Eurasian empire he constantly invokes is not absent from his views, but at the cutting edge of his discourse always impose themselves the prophetic and paracletic dimensions. The Imperium is for him, in the final resort, the incarnation of being, its spatio-temporal manifestation, its horizontality, at the hour of a new revelation of Life. What he terms, in this perspective, the Great Eurasian Empire of the End is nothing other than an eschatological projection of the Celestial City, whose mystical vocation the Parvulescian heroes — or the narrator himself — prefigure in their advent. His vision of Gaullism, emerging in the mid-1960s and designated by the expression Great Gaullism of the End — by analogy with that qualifying the Eurasian Empire — follows the same ascensional schema, this time evoking the hypostasis discernible in Gaullian geopolitics and its undertones concerning the metahistorical vocation of a France bearer of universal truth. The Gaullist adventure proceeds fundamentally from this vocation — that of the axial kingdom. Caught in the ontological movement of the Parvulescian spiral, until stripped of all link to any temporal episode, Gaullism becomes Great Gaullism, the receptacle of the sole primordial idea of this transhistorical universalism.
An Ontology Put to the Test of Art
Parvulesco thus weaves a mesh of being’s manifestations whereby he re-sacralizes the real. To the major axes of this hierophany — history and geopolitics — are added specific observations concerning artistic works whose integration into the Parvulescian sphere reveals the vital potency and, thereby, the ontological vocation that secretly defines them.
Interested in the works of filmmakers, painters, sculptors, even architects, Parvulesco devoted himself particularly to comprehending the interior lines of Éric Rohmer’s films, to piercing the metaphysical dimension born of the marriage between classicism and contemporary imagery that characterizes the production of this founder of the Nouvelle Vague, of whom he was a fellow traveler. From the sensitivity of the Rohmerian gaze, from its openness to the real, emerges the presence of being. Primordial ontology is brought back to life by the light projected on the screen. These reunions appear in their plenitude in Conte d’hiver (1992), a film whose heroine, Félicie, rejects, through the effect of a sudden revelation, the false amorous choices imposed by existence for the profound and irrational aspirations of her being — as Parvulesco explains in Retour en Colchide (2007), his final book. A consciousness of the same order forms the armature of L’Anglaise et le duc (2001), through which Rohmer shows the interior evolution of the English aristocrat Grace Eliott amid revolutionary events ever more degraded and menacing for herself and her friend the Duke of Orléans. This confrontation with the world’s acceleration opens a pathway between exteriority and interiority through which being emerges at the surface of the visible and intensifies therein. It exemplifies, within Parvulescian thought, the capacities of a remarkable metaphysical tool — a visionary art whose performative character transcends the boundaries of space and time, of the immanent and the transcendent, thereby bringing back to life what has vanished.
More than objects of analysis, the works in which Parvulesco discovers metaphysical potency resonate in him as so many revelations provoking an interior upheaval and each time extending further the field of his experience of being. Those of Constantin Brancusi particularly echo his thought. His commentaries on the sculptor’s quest — centered on the ultimate epuration of forms — translate this junction between their respective visions. By activating his own ontological keys, Parvulesco opens the interior doors of a trajectory corresponding to a process of personal stripping progressively accomplished through work upon matter. This stripping lived by Brancusi attached itself notably to the reunion with an archaic consciousness through the study of primitive or artisanal art objects. In search of the primordial source of creative being, this process establishes the relation between liberation and cosmic surreality, thus contributing to the overturning of the world into a new sacral time.
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Parvulesco’s frequentation of the painter Frédéric Pardo led to a similar degree his ascensional reading of the presence of being and the aspects of its manifestation. Seized by a quasi-ecstatic fascination for Pardo’s paintings, Parvulesco revealed himself before them more than ever as a visionary of being’s action and its special channels. Pardo’s portraits — of Daniel Pommereulle, Dominique Sanda, or Philippe Garrel, among others — constituted, beyond their oneiric and symbolic character, a metaphysical threshold translating, through several figures, the stages of being’s transformation confronted with non-being interfering in existence. Their nature thus revealed, these works transform the real and open the perspective of a new ontological cycle. “Narrative of a philosophical seizure of power,” they bear witness to the new power of being, Parvulesco tells us.
Writing and Transcendental Activism
The author of La Spirale prophétique thus upends the established order, turning facts and existences inside out and transposing them from the status of contingent data to that of projections emanating from a transcendent, Neoplatonically inspired universe. Carried to its furthest extreme, this perspective drives him to a metaphysical escalation that seeks to seize the plenitude of being in its generative dimension — the word that resonates within the interior spaces of the real functioning not merely as a revelatory presence but, beyond the speculative frameworks of categories (Aristotle), degrees (Saint Thomas Aquinas), or multiple states of being (René Guénon), as essentially an eruption: a vital, emergent, and radiant power born of an existential confrontation between the unstable and the permanent, the essential and the contingent. For Parvulesco, being is above all that which comes into presence, evolves, and transfigures itself within the substratum of an unbounded spatio-temporal process — indifferent to scales of magnitude, enacted in the reciprocal interplay of macrocosm and microcosm, in individual existence no less than in the collective and civilizational unfolding of destiny. Each of these stratifications within the density of the world mirrors the great cycle of being’s creative impulse: its ascent, its degradation, and its rebirth through a new advent.
Thus, the Parvulescian praxis — an exercise of consciousness directed toward a metaphysical decipherment of the real — is by no means confined to this precise framework. Through its revelatory function, the approach whose exemplars we have just examined bears witness to a directed operation, centered upon the axis of being’s advent and the mechanism of its reunion within the movement of an ascending spiral. It is precisely this activation of being’s procession that the Parvulescian vision has taken as its driving force: a “mysteriology in motion” of the consciousness of existence, whose scope it extends — through the mirror-effect between private revelations and historical Revelation — from the individual plane, where it is ordinarily situated, to the macrocosmic scale. The quest that leads to the reunion with being thereby reveals itself in the full amplitude of its action, converging upon a vision of active, cyclical ontology: an eschatological operation that renews the induction of the sacred into the terrestrial cosmos.
In the case of such a deposit, we may speak of a form of activism on the part of one who makes it his own — an ontological and transcendental activism set in opposition to any psychological intent, to any referential framework or idealism whatsoever. The dimension of being discloses itself solely in accordance with modalities of surrender to being itself and to its movement within the web of Revelation, through an effort of assimilation to being in keeping with the various degrees of its witness within the world.
For Parvulesco, the entire telos in this domain resides in writing — in a mode of writing that is above all poetic and novelistic, whose mysterious nature and mediatory function between immanence and transcendence he unveils more profoundly than any other. Parvulescian writing must therefore be understood as an activation of the metaphysical mechanism, capable of operating through the insertion of the real into the literary Word — an insertion whereby the distance between subject and phenomena is effaced. Thus translated into script, the real, liberated from matter, becomes nothing but interiority. The novelistic or poetic dimension it thereby acquires ushers it into the realm of ontological transmutation. In this “doubling” of reality, Parvulesco tells us, a circular movement takes shape: the real, elevated into a form of surreality, far from being confined to an abstraction born of the imaginary, instead imposes its newfound ontological weight upon the world of manifestation, to which it communicates its transformative potency.
Writing as Sacred Transmutation
Conscious of the nature of this ontogenetic mechanism, Parvulesco seizes its capacities within the sphere of Revelation. As an instrument of his own transformation, his interior perception can, through writing, become the instrument of macrocosmic mutations of an eschatological order — the weapon in the combat of being against non-being, at the crossroads where mundane realities intersect with divine action. This is why his œuvre in its entirety is so intensely consubstantial with his existence: it constitutes its double, the figuration of his sacrificial transmutation within the celestial horizon of an advent — a kind of nigredo akin to the mystical process of death and resurrection. “I write in black,” he sometimes says. Indeed, for the metaphysical operation latent in writing to be fulfilled, the latter must proceed from the vital experience of the author — from the gift of self in the aspiration to rejoin the primordial source of Life, from an amorous donation that bestows upon this itinerary a nuptial dimension. From this gift, Parvulesco absorbs the signs of being’s presence around him, and — across the multiple disciplines we have surveyed — elaborates his work around the central axis of the dialectic of amorous union: the union which, when truly lived, is able, through the transmutations of the Word, to enter into harmony with creative action and thus to bridge the abyss of the end-times.
Such is the dread secret of Parvulesco — one to which he ceaselessly draws the reader’s attention without ever naming it outright, as though an incandescent nugget lay buried within his books, when in truth it is the œuvre itself: this repetitive unfolding that proclaims the mad hope of renewing, through its very motion, the salvific miracle of Life’s advent and its terrestrial en-sunment. Parvulesco’s thought resides in a system constituted by the primordial articulation between the universe of a nuptial mysticism — “a certain activism of the depths” — and the manifestation of God’s Word in history, an operation whose archetypes are contained within Holy Scripture and activated in the Incarnation. It underscores the bond between the experience of presence and the function of writing in the relation between immanence and transcendence, as though scriptural Revelation were not confined to the canonical texts but dwelt, in varying degrees, within a multitude of writings throughout history — even unto our own day.
The Final Cycle of the Grail
“Such is the true novel,” Parvulesco tells us — a term to be understood in its broadest sense as the writing of being, as the instrument of the interior unfolding of the spirit of the sacred, a mode of writing of which the Arthurian romance is the very archetype: the primordial expression of the spiral of being and of the immemorial eschatological combat whereby the Word inseminates history. The Arthurian romance thus stands at the source of an ontological and civilizational cycle, while at its term there resounds the ultimate testimony of Parvulescian activism and of his polymorphous novels.
Beyond their manifold variety, these works all obey the same visionary axis, the same structural determinism embodied in the image of the passage to the beyond — “the ford of the she-wolves”. Around this nodal point there gathers a half-shadowed universe of ambivalent personae whose profound identity is unveiled through the return to the world of a common supernatural and archetypal alterity, destined for reincarnation as the sign of a new revelation. Semi-real worldly figures, erotic ritual ceremonies and high magic staged in the secrecy of Parisian villas or hôtels particuliers, nocturnal wanderings thronged with supernatural encounters, deaths and resurrections — all serve as the instruments of an ever-renewed orchestration of superior conspiracies on the threshold of a doubled reality. From one book to the next, this thematic unfolds: ferrymen of the otherworld, sometimes modeled on living persons or even on the author himself — Franz des Vallées, Jean Raimondi, or Raoul de Waldeck — or emissaries of shadow with dark designs — Robert Solutré or Walter Neroman — all in interplay with semi-divine feminine figures of multiple identities that merge into one another: Violette, “a super-activated energy nexus”; Laurence de Saint-Romain, risen from a dream; the initiatrix Wanda; or Jeanne Darlington, “the supreme mistress of a strange operative concept.”
Cartography of the Sacred
Whether it traverses fantastic literature, the cosmos of a renowned artist, oneiric memories, the global geostrategic theater, or the destinies of the Roman Church, this perspective is concerned solely with the enactment of interactions between the real and the surreal, between memory and sacred-bearing images whence the elements of fiction are quarried. Hence, no classical, psychological, linear narrative project inhabits the Parvulescian universe, but rather an articulation of data whose conjunction with fictional fragments serves only to elevate this existential substratum to the plane of transcendental experience. Freely conflating religious terminologies drawn from disparate wellsprings — Tantrism, Immaculate Conception, Great Times, or Old Country — Parvulesco transgresses ontological and semantic barriers at will, attending only to the expression of the sacred and the primordial concepts it enfolds.
These multiple crossings lend a disorienting, even opaque character to the whole — a corpus comprehensible only as veiled or ciphered literature, akin to an alchemical opus that describes the motions of the spiral of being not through correspondence with states of matter, but through their inscription within the spatio-temporal field. Iterative and imaginal, bearer of the Word, Parvulesco’s literature itself constitutes the line of passage.
This article is translated from Jean Parvulesco devant l’Éternel
By Hugues Moreau
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