Work with the black is a Romance of Marguerite Yourcenar, published in 1968. As of the year of its publication he is success near the public and the Prix Femina is decreed to him by a unanimous vote of the jury.

The title of the novel

The term work with the black indicates in Alchimie the first of the three phases whose achievement is necessary to complete the Magnum opus. Indeed, according to the tradition, the alchemist must successively conclude work to the black, the white, and finally with the red in order to be able to achieve the Transmutation lead into gold, to obtain the Philosopher's stone or to produce the Panacée.

Yourcenar comments on thus on this subject: the formula Work with the black , given as titrates with the present book, indicates in the alchemical treaties the phase of separation and of dissolution of the substance which was, says one, the most difficult share of the Philosopher's stone. One still discusses if this expression applied to daring experiments to the matter itself or symbolically meant tests of the spirit being released from the routines and the prejudices. Undoubtedly it meant in turn or at the same time one and the other.

History

Imaginary character of humanistic, Zénon Ligre, man of the Rebirth, is at the same time a philosopher, a doctor and a alchemist which learned much during a wandering life. Its scientific activities, its publications as its critical spirit upset the Church. Taken refuge with Bruges under a false name, it will be locked up in a prison of the Inquisition where it will commit suicide. The account is composed of three parts: Wandering life - motionless life - the prison. Zénon symbolizes the man who seeks - but also cannot conceal - the truth, in the middle of his contemporaries of which some include/understand it and others not. It will lose its freedom there, then its life.

The end of the character (refusal of retractation) is not without relationship with that of Giordano Bruno.

Range of work

Work with the Black can be seen like during medieval of the Mémoires of Hadrian , the most famous novel of Marguerite Yourcenar. These two novels have indeed like common point to present the reflections of two men, although enough different, over their time, the world such as they knew it.

With the difference of Hadrian, Zénon is not a man of being able and evolves/moves within a company where the risks are permanent for those which preach freedom of expression or of thought. The experiments of Zénon (the novel describes us its life since its birth - bastard of the sister of a rich person negotiating of Ghent - until its death in prison), pushed by a not very common wisdom and an open-minded for the time, will carry out it to be interested on subjects as various as medicine (looking further into the anatomy, practitioner of the dissections), alchemy, the voyages, etc However, it runs up against a world where the obscurantism reigns and where the capital punishment is applied for one yes or for not. The danger is permanent in this novel.

Of its voyages, we retain the reflections that it draws some on the company, the political organization, the religions and their reforms, etc Of its scientific experiments, we retain the fabulous world of knowledge to come which it is updating. Of its discussions with the few people able to include/understand it (the prior, its cousin), we retain his tolerance and his capacity to be grown rich by the other. Alas, all this was too modern for its time and such a character could only irritate and wake up the suspicions of the capacity in place.

One of the forces of the novel is not to have forced the feature on the capacity while making pass the high ranking authorities of the time for the cynical ones and corrupted. The passage of the prison and the lawsuit of Zénon are, for this reason, very interesting because it constitutes an exchange between two irreconcilable worlds.

Certain tables of the novel are chiefs of work: adventures preceding the birth by Zénon, the seat of the town of Münster with the anabaptists, the episode with the North Sea, the prison.

Extract

Zénon diagnosed under the obscure symptoms of the disease of the prior the harmful action of a piece of flesh devouring the close structures little by little. It had been said that the ambition and violence, if foreign with the nature of the monk, had been stationed in this recess of its body, from where they would destroy finally this man of kindness. (...) Except the possibility, never negligible, of an accidental death gaining so to speak speed on the disease itself, the destiny of the saint man was as sealed as if he had already lived. (...) When time has just deadened excessive sufferings, opiates would be effective, and it would be wise to continue to amuse it by then drugs pain-killers, which would avoid the anguish feeling to him abandoned with its evil.

Quotations

• Fille which shows her forms made assavoir with each one that it has hunger of another thing that of brioche. is
• Which the prisoner who would agree to die without to have made the turn of his prison?
• Science and contemplation are not enough if they are not transmuted into power.
• Plus I thought of it, more our ideas, more our idols, our habits known as holy, and those of our visions which pass for unutterable me appear generated by the human machine.

Adaptation

The novel was the subject of a cinematographic adaptation Belgian, carried out by André Delvaux in 1988: to see Work with the black .

Note

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