Elias or the battle with the nightingales has been compared by some to the prose of Rilke, by others with Le grand Meaulnes of Alain-Fournier or with the stories of the surrealists, but the novel evades these equations by the completely unique way in which Maurice Gilliams expresses the subconscious, childhood memory, dream and poetic vision.
Elias or the battle with the nightingale is not a novel in the ordinary sense of the word. The story not only brings a number of people to life, but also unfolds a vision of life. It is a search for self-knowledge, in the line of 'a la recherche du temps perdu' by Marcel Proust, but also by Rainer Maria Rilke and the prose of Charles of the Desert. The young Elias is dominated by a sickly fantasy that makes him unfit for the ‘ordinary’ life. He lives locked in the world of ‘the castle’ and wants to escape from it via ‘the stream’, but he does not succeed. This spatial contradiction symbolizes the dualism in which it is imprisoned. At the same time, the novel brings an environmental sketch of the old, French-speaking upper bourgeoisie at the turn of the century, a dying class living in a social and spiritual isolation.
With this novel Maurice Gilliams was ahead of his time, but he also joins a tradition. Elias or the battle with the night-gays is autobiographical commemorative prose which tells not so much a story as a representation of the inner world of experience of an introverted, hypersensitive young boy, who delivers a “fight” with the charming ‘night-galnals’ of his own imagination.
Gilliams rejects the traditional factual account of — he called it “sausage fill” – and replaces it with an exploration of the self. The central question is, “Who am I?”
In Gilliams’ diaries we can read: ‘I am Elias’.
