A humanist at the heart of the 16th-century hurricane
Marguerite Yourcenar manages to make shine, in 'Black Work', the Europe of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, of the curiosity and intellectual daring of the humanists and of the authoritarian obscurantism of political and ecclesiastical powers
'Black Work'
- Marguerite YourcenarEdicions ProaTranslation by Felícia Fuster384 pages / 21.90 euros
The cascade of transformative events, technical progress, ideological and religious upheavals (everything went together), and intellectual and cultural developments that occurred between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in what is commonly considered the full bloom of the humanist Renaissance and the official birth of the modern world, was unprecedented and prodigious. The aesthetic and intellectual recovery of the updated Greco-Roman classical world, the expansion of knowledge in medicine and astronomy, the broadening of scope in geographical and commercial terms (with the European discovery of the New World), the crucial pictorial invention of perspective, the shattering of Christianity caused by the reformer Martin Luther: all of this, while in many cases not representing a break with the Middle Ages but rather a continuation and culmination of medieval dynamics, ways of doing things, and ideas, makes that era a singularly radiant moment in human history.
It is not surprising that the Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), who in the excellent Memoirs of Hadrian
had already fictionalized a historical period in transition and richly tumultuous (that of the Roman Empire straddling the 1st and 2nd centuries AD), also became interested in that era. Black Work, originally published in French in 1968 and now reissued in Catalan by Proa in the exuberant translation of Felícia Fuster, is, in fact, above all a fresco of an era and the people who lived and suffered it. To call it a historical novel would be accurate, if we accept that the best historical novels are not limited to being a rhetorical cardboard recreation of a past time that has nothing to do with us, but are a form of total novel – a novel of adventures and ideas, intrigues and passions, customs and conflicts – set in a time that is not ours but that, nevertheless, calls to us and says things about the present and about who we are.
The narrative strategy Yourcenar invents to achieve her purpose is simple and efficient. She creates a paradigmatic protagonist of the ambitions, anxieties, dilemmas, and innovations of the era and places him at the heart of a wandering plot, which takes him up and down the continent, from Languedoc to Sweden, with Bruges as a vital and dramatic center. All this allows the author to make her protagonist, Zénon, an active witness to all sorts of events representative of the world and the time he has to live in, that of Europe of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, of the curiosity and intellectual boldness of humanists and the authoritarian obscurantism of political and ecclesiastical powers, of the wars of religion and the advances (in thought, medicine, engineering, science) that made established truths tremble or even annul them while expanding and deepening the perception and knowledge of reality.
A champion of freedom of thought
Both the character and the biographical adventure of Yourcenar's protagonist function as a compendium and distillate of the classic humanist typology. A doctor with scholastic knowledge, a rational alchemist aware of how magical everything is, a man of science who observes reality and hears it, a philosopher who doubts and tries to be aware of everything and constantly examines himself and his surroundings, Zénon is a champion of freedom of thought, and that is why he is persecuted, and must hide, and must flee, and that is why in the end, like so many brilliant contemporaries of his, he ends up paying the highest price.
Beyond the thematic and contextual substance, what makes The Dark Work a first-class novel is the literary treatment that Marguerite Yourcenar gives to the fascinating raw materials with which she works. Yourcenar's prose, rhythmic and wise, has the dazzling and striking detail of Flemish painting, and makes ideas and sensations, historical information and emotions, dramatic action and introspection coexist, in every paragraph, often in every sentence. It is a prose that encapsulates and expresses the spirit, the revolts and the fatality of a magnificent and terrible century.