Surrounded by high mountains (the Sierra de las Cruces, the Sierra de Ajusco Chichinauhtzi, the Sierra de Guadalupe), dominated to the south by the Iztaccihualt and Popactepelt Volcanoes, Mexico City was built on an island in Lake Texcoco. It was on this site that the nomadic Aztecs founded their capital Tenochtitlan in 1325, where they observed the symbol they had been searching for for a long time: an eagle, perched on a cactus, devouring a snake (image contained in the Mexican flag). In the 16th century, the Spanish took the city of Tenochtitlan, buried it and built a new city on the site: Mexico City. Mexico became independent in 1821, but the city was successively invaded by the United States army in 1847 and by French troops in 1863. In the 20th century, revolutions followed one another: the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) the war of the “Cristeros” (1926-1929), the repression of student demonstrations in Tlatelolco (1968), the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas in 1994.

 

Mexico City is the third largest city in the world (19 million inhabitants). It extends into the Valley of Mexico at an altitude of more than 2,300 meters. This vast metropolis of more than 2,000 square km includes the Mexican capital and its 16 districts, but also 40 other municipalities in the State of Mexico. The capital alone has 8.8 million inhabitants and has a very high birth rate and an influx of people from the countryside and other Mexican cities. But the size of the megalopolis also represents a weakness. Every day, 2 million vehicles invade the 10,000 kilometers of roads, causing huge traffic jams and chronic pollution problems.

The population doubled between 1970 and 2000 despite emigration to the United States which plays an important role in its evolution. From an ethnological point of view, it should be noted that 60% of Mexicans are mestizos, that is to say descendants of both Spanish colonizers and Indigenous peoples. In Mexico City, another percentage of Mexicans are descended from Europeans, mainly Spaniards, called in Mexico "criollos" (Creoles), but also French and Germans who emigrated to Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to whom various communities are added: Lebanese, Chinese, Japanese, among others. A “melting pot” that Le Clézio describes as follows: “[…] we were in the crater of the future, in a bubbling caldera where anything could happen, mixtures of races, myths, interests” (R, 438).

The 19th century city, between Alameda and Chapultepec, is in the process of being renovated: large glass and steel buildings, skyscrapers, are replacing neoclassical style buildings. The luxury neighborhoods – which try to keep their charm – contrast with the slums which shelter millions of inhabitants in shacks built along muddy paths, which gives the current city an image of poverty.

 

Mexico in Leclezian work: under the sign of antithesis

Mexico was my founding shock. This is the country of the real revolution. When I arrived there for the first time, in 1967, I had the feeling of having the revolution before my eyes at every moment. I will never forget these migrant families who, driven by poverty, went north and crossed the continent in the vain hope of passing through the fence to find work in the United States. (Garcin, 2003, 3)

 

Mexico City in the work of J.M.G. Le Clézio has a side of light and a side of shadow, it is a city of contrasts which become more accentuated with the passage of time. The Mexico which serves as the setting for the love story of Diego and Frida (1993) is not the same as that discovered by the author of this fictionalized biography during his stay in 1968:

 

At the end of the 1920s, Mexico City was not yet this monstrous metropolis of modernity, devastated by poverty, suffocated by factories and automobile traffic, a sort of hell of the future where destruction was inevitable… It is a tropical capital where we breathe the purest air in the world, “the most transparent zone of air” […] where, at the end of the main central streets, the snow-capped peaks of volcanoes stand out, where the interior patios of old Spanish hotels buzz with fountains, music, and the light rustle of hummingbirds. Where every evening, on the Alameda, couples of lovers walk, and groups of young girls in long dresses and ribboned hair. (D&F, 81)

 

This book devotes an important place to the Blue House of Cayocàn, now the Frida Kahlo Museum, and to various places: Ministry of Education, Chapingo Agricultural School, Preparatory School, also present in Revolutions, where Diego Rivera paints his frescoes murals.

 

 However, it was quite late, in the novel Revolutions (2003), with strong autobiographical inspiration, that Le Clézio – who lived in Mexico for a long time – took the city of Mexico as the setting for a fiction, of which he described in chiaroscuro… Revolutions, “[th]is big book of leaks” (Garcin, 2003, 4) narrates the wandering of Jean Marro, in search of his identity: from Nice to London, from London to Mexico, back in France and finally to Mauritius. The protagonist's journey presents itself as an autobiography, a coming-of-age novel, a travel diary, and a personal diary. In this hybrid story several stories intersect and overlap at the same time which have as a backdrop the revolutions throughout History... or the history of revolutions: French Revolution, experienced by the ancestor of Jean Marro, revolt of the Maroons in Mauritius, told by the slave Kiambé, revolt and killing of students in Tlatelolco in 1968, paralleled with the massacre of the Aztecs.

 

In Revolutions (2003), the chapter devoted to Mexico is brief, but of crucial importance in the economy of narration. The title of this part, “A border” (R, 433), a polysemous title, refers on the one hand to the geographical border where Mexican migrants try to cross to the United States, fleeing poverty, and on the other leaves for the border in the life of Jean Marro. Indeed, this stage presents itself symbolically as the opening to another reality, the test par excellence in one's initiatory journey.

 

The first part (435-448) describes the itinerary of Jean Marro to discover the city of Mexico. But behind this “he” is revealed the image of the author who relives and recreates his own experiences, his vision of the city and the most emblematic streets:

My books always feature moments from my story […] I invented Jean Marro so as not to have to write me. He looks a lot like me, but he's not me. Let’s say that Jean is a twin brother from whom I cannot detach myself but from whom I can move away at any time… (Garcin, 2003, 2)

The incipit of the chapter: “The Colonia Guerrero was the dream place to change your skin” (R, 435) introduces the description of a space a priori positively connoted. This popular part of the city is a “friendly neighborhood” (R, 435), and Jean “had learned to love the routine of life in the colonia Guerrero” (R, 437).

 

The frenetic movement of the crowd, the deafening noises of Mexico City return like a refrain: “Busy groups were coming out of the subway entrances […], people were running on the pavement […] Street children were running between the cars at crossroads", "the noise of traffic outside, the traffic jams on Isabel la Católica, the honking of taxi horns" (R, 438), "[...] dazed by the noise of the engines, by the movement of the crowd” (R, 439). The dynamism and noise contrast with moments of calm and serenity at the beginning and end of the day:

 

These were the two moments of the day that Jean preferred, when this city stopped beating with its frenzied impulse, and everything slowed down like a fever, subsided, and the air became more tender, sweeter. First there was the morning, around eight o'clock, when Jean left his house to go get bread on the corner of Guerrero […] The other moment was at nightfall, in a pearl gray twilight, when people lingered before returning home, strolling in Mosqueta […] (R, 493)

 

The silence, the shadow, “the past exhumed in all these books” (R, 438) that Jean reads at the library on rue Argentina, allow us to relive the moments of happiness with Aunt Catherine: “It was a bit like “the impression he once felt listening to Aunt Catherine talk about Rozilis” (R, 439).

 

The intrusion of Spanish words into the textual space helps to highlight the picturesqueness of daily life in Mexico and introduces a specific poetry. We will take as examples the vocabulary of food: the “comida corrrida” (R, 436), a meal composed of three dishes, which is inspired by the three stages of bullfights (generally a soup for the first part, rice or pasta or even a salad for the second and finally a main course – where three or four options are offered – for the third); or the “melancholy” of “this shrill, descending sound of the siren of the tamale seller” (Ibid.), name given to several dishes of Indigenous origin, steamed and surrounded in leaves from the cob of the same corn plant.

 

The somewhat idyllic vision of the colonia Guerrero echoes the "geographical metaphor" (Gabrielle Althen, 1989, 131), the "light" of the magnificent landscape which is offered to the protagonist's view and which contrasts strongly with the “shadow” of the “monstrous metropolis” (D&F, 81):

 

I think you would have liked that. All this grey, the never-ending twilights, the mist that erases everything. The mountains around […] The volcanoes all over the south, I wrote their names for you, following the chain they form around Mexico, like a necklace that I would like to offer you […]. (R, 485)

 

City of contrasts, Janus city... The narrator discovers the city of migrants when he sets out in search of traces of the Ruizs. He comes up against the terrible reality of the city of Naucalpan where migrants are forced to live in the miserable conditions of the slum:

 

Naucalpan is where economic migrants end up when they no longer know where to go. They have no choice. Either they return to the village they left, or they accept that they are sent to Naucalpan in the slum. (R, 463)

 

But he likes that Mexico is a cosmopolitan city, lively and noisy, where several races coexist:

 

And also, he had dreamed […] the mixtures of races, myths, interests. Similar to London, but as vast as an entire country, with streets a hundred kilometers long, towers, ruins, abandoned fields, pyramids […] and above all this moving crowd, never stopping […] this dark crowd, obstinate, stocky, deformed, at times so beautiful, faces of ancient statues […] sometimes ugly, beggars, dead-ends […]. (R, 470)

 

The figure of the antithesis also concerns the relationships between the various populations. On the one hand, the odious Rollès-Lalanne, installed in "his ivory tower" (R, 471) represents people of high status, the "afrancesada" society (R, 480) which despises the Indians in an atmosphere where carelessness and frivolity predominate:

as Jean spoke to him about the descendants of the Aztecs living miserably in Guerrero, Rollès-Lalanne gave a disdainful sneer: “Tramps, vagabonds,” he said. As long as this country does not get rid of the Indians, it will carry the weight of underdevelopment. (R, 473)

 

Marina Salles rightly points out the hypocrisy of this character, “a rich, unscrupulous businessman, a passionate collector of pre-Hispanic art and yet full of contempt for the descendants of the Aztecs” (Salles, 2006, 83). Le Clézio thus proceeds to “denounce the xenophobia exercised against the descendants of the Aztec people” (Cavallero, 2009, 305). This society of privileged people brutally clashes with the other social reality embodied by both Ruiz and his family who, fleeing misery and poverty, refugees in the slum of Naucalpan in the great suburbs of Mexico City personify the migratory movements – “he was from the state of Veracruz, he had left to look for work in the North […] they no longer had money to continue their journey” (R, 446) –, and by the Indians Pamela and Joaquín:

 

She [Pamela] had her roots in the mountains around Mexico City, she was linked to this place by centuries of endurance, of injustice. She was not just a pretty Indita (little Indian) […].

[Joaquín] looks very Indian, a bit callejero (from the street). (R, 442) 

 

They represent the insurgent students who survive the Tlatelolco massacre, and who finally succeed in crossing the border after a long journey: “they try to pass under the border wire, in Nogales, in Juarez” (R, 463). They set off on an adventure, fleeing injustice and intolerance, in a “car [which] took them into a landscape of phantasmagoria” (R, 493) towards a new life which will lead them to Denver, Colorado. And, just like the blue men of Desert (1980), “[t]hey disappear” (R, 498).

 

Maria Luisa Bernabé Gil

Translated by Adina Balint

(2024)

 

 

RÉFÉRENCES BIBLIOGRAPHIQUES :

ALTHEN, Gabrielle, « Narration et contemplation dans le roman de Le Clézio », Sud n°85-86, Marseille, 1989, p. 129-145 ; CAVALLERO, Claude, (2009), Le Clézio témoin du monde, Clamecy, Calliopées, 2009 ; Encyclopédie Larousse, Mexico (s.d.). http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/ville/Mexico/133004, consulté le 9 mai 2016 ; Encyclopédie Larousse, Mexico (s.d.). http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/Mexique_histoire/187027, consulté le 9 mai 2016 ; France Diplomatie, Mexique (2016), http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/dossiers-pays/mexique/presentation-du-mexique/article/geographie-et-histoire-108465, consulté le 9 mai 2016 ; GARCIN, Jérôme, (2003), « Les révolutions de Le Clézio », http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/romans/20081009.BIB2166/les-revolutions-de-le-clezio.html, consulté le 15 avril 2016 ; Gran Enciclopedia Larousse, Barcelona, Editorial Planeta, 1992 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.-M..G., Diego et Frida. Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Folio », Éd. Stock, 1993 ; Révolutions, Paris, Gallimard, 2003 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio. Notre contemporain, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1970, just as post-war Europe embraced a consumerist lifestyle, the Cold War and the nuclear threat took hold for good. Le Clézio wrote: "War has begun. No one knows where or how, but it is so" (p. 7). It is "on its way to last ten thousand years, longer than the history of mankind. There is no escape, no denial" (p. 7). These opening statements point to a demanding style of writing and a difficulty in generic categorization. For although there are characters in the text, they appear above all as paradigmatic figures. A young woman, a young man; it could be anyone. Masks rather than psychology. Above all a thematic, even theatrical, work that attempts to grasp, through literary writing, a form of latent warfare, War also presents an initiatory tale featuring a young girl, Bea B., grappling with her existential becoming and her complex and thwarted desire embodied by a shadowy young man, Mr. X. War is not exactly a novel, then, unless you cling to the notion despite the shattering of rules that were encouraged in those days.

 

The narrative, however thin, still allows us to understand this premise: Bea B. left her family home three or four years ago to come and live in Paris. There, she first experienced a heightened sociality, going out often and meeting many young people. She worked as a journalist for a publication presumed to be one of those popular women's magazines so popular in France at the time (see Sullerot 1966). Through her work, she met Henri, a photographer who illustrated several of her articles. He wanted to marry her and have children. But Bea B. gradually became detached from her professional environment, feeling less and less intellectually invested in it. Then, from one day to the next, she chose to "disappear" (p. 27) "to have time to look at what's really going on" (p. 26). So, living alone, she oscillates between the raw observation of the urban and technical world around her, the ineffable hope for a completely different life free from the constraints of work and the monotony of everyday life, and the taste for unbridled adventure, embodied here by the intriguing Monsieur X.

 

In a small notebook (which she carries everywhere), her "practical weekly planner," Bea B. writes: "I spend my time between classes, the library, cafés, and my room. [...] I go to the movies" (p. 28). She is a reflection of her generation: urban, educated, employed; she is exposed to the "sex stories" that obsess her contemporaries, even though she finds it "idiotic" (p. 29). She smokes American cigarettes and brushes her teeth. Le Clézio seems to have wanted to make his heroine the average prototype of the rising young generation of the time, the post-war generation to which the author belongs and which, caught up in the high-paced modernization that France has been experiencing since 1945, is calling into question the moral foundations and traditions on which society had hitherto rested. Le Clézio tries to represent this rampant modernity in a variety of ways (see Salles 2007). Disrupting customs, facilitating certain tasks, but also profoundly transforming time and space, it both frightens and fascinates.

 

Demonstrating some familiarity with the technocritical discourse of the Situationists or Socialisme ou Barbarie, and before them Georges Bernanos and Jacques Ellul, Le Clézio strives to represent, through striking imagery, the threat of the total encroachment of the Earth by synthetic materials and the replacement of natural elements with technical artifices. The following passage provides a good glimpse of this: "The Earth is a sheet of asphalt, the water is cellophane, and the air is nylon. The sun burns in the center of the hardboard ceiling, with its big 1,600-watt bulb. [...] The world is polished and new, smelling of chlorophyll and benzene. [...] Steel rivets gleam everywhere, and the sky turns on itself very slowly, pivoting on its immense hinges" (p. 31-32).

 

While Monsieur X is associated with speed, with the roaring engine of his powerful motorcycle, he also takes on a face of death, through which the writer identifies him with the threat that modern technology represents in his eyes. In an emblematic manhunt scene, the reader finds this character at the wheel of a large American automobile. Bea B. is also on board, although she has been drawn into the affair somewhat unwillingly. In the middle of the night, the car, headlights off, mows down a man walking along a country road. This absurd death scene illustrates the violence of modern machines and the destructive behavior they can provoke in their users, as if the energy they release and the power of movement they allow were inevitably turned against others. "Thought had been driven out of the world, just like that, easily, by the movement of cars rolling from one end of the boulevard to the other. Noise had annihilated truth and words" (p. 202), writes Le Clézio. War is written against the danger of the annihilation of thought by technology.

 

An important aspect of War is the representation of the female condition. Allied to the theme of total, civilizational war, the representation of women's social fate reveals its tragic dimension under the writer's pen. Thus, we read: "Since childhood, the girl had been fleeing, but she didn't know it. They were all chasing her. They had unleashed their packs of wild dogs on her, they had forced her to run, to run... But there is no escaping war [...] War closes its traps on the young girl" (p. 100). Le Clézio attaches great importance to portraying this feminine feeling of being hunted down, of being perceived as prey and, consequently, of feeling hunted down and threatened. Focusing on binary gender relations, the author keenly observes the symbolic violence that men exert over women, whether through their seduction techniques or, more indirectly, through the market, which reduces the young girl to wanting to conform to the images seen in shop windows or magazines. Thus, the female body becomes the site of a symbolic investment, a war of domination and control. "Perhaps the war has already got the better of her, petrified her. [...] Perhaps she lives automatically," writes Le Clézio, reducing the young girl at this moment to the reflections she sees in merchandise and liberal propaganda: "And her thoughts, her words: needle-heel marks on the asphalt, cigarette butts, reflections on car bodies, pages of magazines with nothing but photos of strangers" (p. 33).

 

Beyond the real social advances made around May '68 in favor of women's emancipation, Le Clézio seems to want to bear witness to a deeper reality by linking the condition and fate of his heroine to the specter of war. In a disturbing nightmare-like scene (pp. 257-264), Bea B. seeks to escape from an invisible, encircling threat. As voices from who knows where revile her, she cannot utter a word; she's trapped: "exhausted, she can no longer breathe." She tries to flee, but stumbles, and shreds of skin are torn off with each stride, until her legs are reduced to "hideous stumps." Suddenly, behind her, a man-car emerges: "It's a deep, menacing vibration, a thunderous sound at ground level. It's both a car with a roaring engine, and a man breathing." The man joins her; he "speaks to her with his engine." Then his "shadow stretches over her;" "the man's hands tear off her clothes;" "the man's mouth presses against hers and suffocates her." She senses that her "end is near." "The man's hands roam over her body, up and down, exploring the folds of her body," while around her, "bipeds rage against each other with club blows that shatter skulls." The scene takes an allegorical turn: both raw and hallucinatory, it seems to symbolize two simultaneous levels of war.

 

However, Le Clézio harbors doubt as to the nature of this scene. Is it rape? harbors doubt about the nature of this scene. Is it a rape? Is the young girl consenting? The Interrogation already depicted, insensitively from the male perspective, the rape of Michèle by Adam. Here, Le Clézio seems to take the opposite side, forcing us to experience with her the violent assault that Bea B. suffers at the hands of Monsieur X. "The young girl still struggles against the body that crushes and penetrates her. [...] There's nothing she can do about it;" "It's as if concrete had been poured into her uterus," writes the author. The scene takes on an initiatory hue, in which male domination and sexual assault appear as civilizational fatalism: "She knows that this is how it is, that at the end of all pursuits there must be this crushing, this pain." Yet the text speaks of a "pain that becomes increasingly burning, increasingly precise, until it reaches orgasm." The ambiguity of the physical relationship is coupled with an existential ambiguity, for at the end of the scene, "the young girl is dead on her mattress," even though she lives on in the next chapter.

 

Ook Chung has produced a very interesting analysis of the prophetic dimension of Leclerc's writing at this time. He notices In War the sustained presence of an apocalyptic discourse. The rape of the young girl could thus be seen as an allegorical illustration of the fate of humanity and the course of history, whose perpetuation and progress seem never to have been free of both symbolic and physical violence. In this respect, the fertile girl represents an important resource in this regard, whose mastery is crucial; her womb appears to be the site of all struggles for survival. Thus, "[t]he war is that itself: the act of being born" (p. 15). The work thus takes on the air of a fable about human existence and its possible end. Chung describes Bea B. and Monsieur X as an "ontological couple:" their relationship is one of "polarity made of attraction and opposition, desire, and terror. They cannot escape the fate that drives them to mate" (Chung 2001, p. 189), and are thus paradigmatic representatives of humankind. This confirms the idea that the writer wanted to present, in his own words, "a vision from beyond life, total, brutal, a vision from within life" (p. 202).

 

Ultimately, we'll remember "Monsieur X's curse," a true apocalyptic imprecation that overdetermines all the images presented in the text. Le Clézio’s discourse acknowledges the profound transformations brought about by technological modernity, but far from being reactionary, it is visionary to the extent of foreshadowing, through some striking images, the major disturbances of the current climate disruption: "Cities will soon explode. They will consume centuries of energy and thought in a flash. [...] We are inside blast furnaces, and the incandescent heat is slowly rising, degree by degree" (p. 240).

 

Excessive, dazzling, and pessimistic, the singular writing and thinking that characterize War are resolutely experimental and are bound to disconcert the uninitiated reader. Yet it is clear that Le Clézio found a new creative inspiration at the beginning of the 1970s, which will continue and intensify brilliantly in The Giants three years later.

 

 

Simon Levesque

Translated by Thierry Léger

(2024)

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

 

CHUNG, Ook, Le Clézio. Une écriture prophétique, Paris, Imago, 2001 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.M.G., Le Procès-verbal, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Le Chemin, 1963 ; La Guerre, Paris, Gallimard, coll. L’imaginaire, 1993 [1970] ; « Préface » (1967), in Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, éd. H. Juin, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Poésie/Gallimard, 1973, p. 714 ; MOSER, Keith, J.M.G. Le Clézio : A Concerned Citizen of the Global Village, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2013 ; MURAT, Michel, « Michel Murat relit La Guerre de J.M.G. Le Clézio », Fixxion, n° 2, 2011, p. 154-160 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio, « peintre de la vie moderne », Paris, L’Harmattan, coll. Critiques littéraires, 2007 ; La Tour, Les Choses, La Guerre : Hélène Bessette, Georges Perec, J.M.G. Le CLézio, Caen, Passage(s), 2018 ; SULLEROT, Évelyne, La presse féminine, 2e éd., Paris, Armand Colin, 1966 ; THIBAULT, Bruno, « Errance et initiation dans la ville postmoderne de La Guerre (1970) à Poisson d’or (1997) », Nottingham French Studies, vol. 39, n° 1, 2000, p. 76-109.

 

“The dream thus begins on February 8, 1517, when Bernal Díaz saw for the first time, from the deck of the ship, the great white Mayan city that the Spaniards would call ‘Great Cairo’” (9). It is with this sentence that “The Dream of the Conqueror” opens, the first of the essays that J.-M.G. Le Clézio brought together in The Mexican Dream or Interrupted Thought, and which he published in the Gallimard collection “NRF Essais” in 1989. This collection brings together previously published texts, such as “Nezahualcoyotl or the Speech Festival,” “Antonin Artaud or the Mexican dream,” and unpublished texts. Le Clézio’s interest in Mexico is not new. In 1976, he published The Prophesies of Chilam Balam, (already published by Gallimard, in the “Le Chemin” collection), and in 1984, The Relation of Michoacán, (also published by Gallimard, in the “Traditions” collection). ​​ In “The Dream of the Conqueror,” “The Dream of Origins” and “The Barbarian Dream,” Le Clézio retraces the tragic circumstances which led to the collapse of the Aztec civilization. A drama that played out thousands of years before the arrival of Cortés, with the announcement recorded in the sacred books of the return of the gods.

 

“The Conqueror’s Dream” chronicles the meeting between the soldier Bernal Díaz and the Mexican world, the mutual astonishment and a tragic mistake: the gastrimagia (greed) of gold and its disastrous consequences. Gold, the metal of the gods precisely; hence, it will come to pass that the Indians will bring so much to the conqueror that they will hasten their end with this same impulse. An encounter, defined as “the extermination of an ancient dream by the fury of a modern dream, the destruction of myths by the desire for power” (11) by J.-M.G. Le Clézio which retraces the stages of the war which pitted modern weapons and rationalism against magic and the worship of the gods. “The Conqueror's Dream” is also the story of the book written by Bernal Díaz: The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, a story of the conquest and memory of a dream before the destruction of the splendor of Mexican cities and the killing of the last kings of the New World: Cortés’s crazy dream of confronting Indian prisoners with their legends. When the Indians understand that the conquerors are not gods, it is too late. If Cortés was able to triumph, it is also thanks to his most effective weapon: speech, embodied by Malintzin, nicknamed by the Indians “our language.” “He owes his first setbacks to the fact that the Mayans did not give him time to speak” (28), explains Le Clézio, who recounts the spells by which a handful of adventurers were able to seize an empire, and reconstructs Moctezuma's unsuccessful attempts to stop destiny while awaiting a final victory, to the point of resignation inspired by the fatal meaning of dreams, prophecies and omens. When, after the massacre of Tlatelolco, the Indians revolted, Cortés's flight only offered them a respite: the Spanish captain and his men returned with 25,000 Indians from satellite states whom he was able to rally against the proud and dominating Mexico-Tenochtitlan. During the three months that the siege lasted, the sound of drums and horns accompanied the sacrifices of the prisoners. When the capital falls, this deafening noise gives way to a silence which is matched only by the oblivion in which the conqueror ensures that this civilization disappears.

 

“The Dream of Origins” is dedicated to the history of Bernardino de Sahagun and his masterpiece: The General History of Things in New Spain. The destruction of Mexico-Tenochtitlan is followed by a terrible silence. This story aims to rediscover “the memory of the vanished beauty and grandeur” (61) of the people of Mexico. This text describes the encounter of two dreams: that of the Franciscan and that of the survivors of the catastrophe. Le Clézio notes: “In the dream of origins, there is horror, admiration, and compassion all at the same time. By looking for roots, it is his own that Sahagun discovers, which connects him to this world of forgotten legend and splendor” (62). And he pays homage to this man without whom the texts written in Nahuatl which make up an “Indian book” against silence, against oblivion for the men of the future, would have remained unknown to us. Fascinated by the magic and wisdom of the Mexicans, Sahagun demonstrates an authentic quality in these times of intolerance: curiosity. Based on his copious documentation, Le Clézio describes and analyzes the legends, rites, magico-religious acts which link men and gods. It reconstitutes the major Indian cosmogonies, the pantheon of gods. A storyteller, he recounts some of the great founding myths, retraces the actions of Quetzalcoatl, meticulously describes the festivals where songs and dances are "magical scenes which materialize the mysterious forces of the beyond" (104), to render a vibrant tribute to the man thanks to whom a world has not sunk into oblivion.

 

In “The Barbarian Dream,” J.-M.G Le Clézio recalls that “the origin of civilization is in barbarism” in the sense that one takes shape in relation to the other – admiration, envy, fascination for freedom, absence of order. Drawing his sources mainly from The Relation of Michoacán, J.-M.G. Le Clézio praises these free, untamed, irreducible men. It traces the origins of Tenochtitlan and the Mexican cities, as well as the founding of the pure empire by the Uacusecha. An ethnographer, he describes their myths, customs, cults, festivities, and their relationship to ritual anthropophagy. His observations and analyses attest to an excellent knowledge of the Mayan, Seri, Yaqui, Otomi and Tarahumara ethnic groups.

 

In the article “Antonin Artaud or the Mexican Dream,” Le Clézio follows in the footsteps of the poet to try to understand what dreams, what truth and what reality inspired him during the journey among the Taharumaras that he made – or not – in 1936? What legend attracted him, after so many others? (D.H. Lawrence, Juan Rulfo or Jacques Soustelle…). The dream of a return to the origins of civilization and knowledge? Starting from the article published in The Nacional on July 5, 1936, “What I came to do in Mexico,” Le Clézio attempts to reconstruct the itinerary as well as the experience lived by Artaud. This journey and this attraction are not only born from the excluded Surrealist's fascination with primitive cultures. On site, disappointment quickly took precedence over fascination; Artaud only found the Mexico he came to seek in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts. That is to say... It is in the direction of myths and rites that he then turns and goes to the Tarahumaras, alone and not as a member of an official mission, and where under the influence of drugs, he engages in the rite of peyote – which Carlos Castañeda will describe in his writings – which encourages him to reconnect with “a theater in its original state,” to the “recognition of the absolute superiority of rite and magic over art and science” (226; 227). Artaud will never recover from this revelation.

“Nezahualcoyotl, or the Celebration of the Word,” originally a preface to an edition of the Songs of Nezahualcoyotl, offers itself as a reflection on the emotion and fascination that these sumptuous and incantatory songs continue to exert on the one who reads or listens to them, half a millennium away. A reflection on poetry, creation, starting from a portrait of Nezahualcoyotl, a complex personality with multiple contradictions, a legislator, poet and philosopher, prince and tyrant. Where does this come from? Because it is a simple and moving poetry, prey to doubt, sometimes worried, attached to the fragility of the things of daily life, giving voice to the echoes of a vanished civilization, reminding us that the Nezahualcoyotl’s songs were “covered by the anguished silence of the conquest” (136).

 

Le Clézio also explores some “Mexican myths” which powerfully fascinated Europeans. Not the myths produced by Mexicans but the myths anchored in Mexico and then throughout Latin America by the conquistadors: the land of the Amazons, El Dorado, the seven cities of Cibola. It analyzes the way in which Spanish chroniclers discovered, understood and attempted to describe, between horror and amazement, these complex constructions that are Amerindian myths. As an admirer but also as a connoisseur, J.-M.G. Le Clézio, who has read numerous volumes and collections of myths and legends, compares some of the creatures from the European bestiary with their Mexican counterparts, recalling how myths are “the most enduring monuments of men” (144).

 

Indian thought carried within itself the components of its own end, planned, announced, expected, explains J.-M.G Le Clézio in his concluding essay: “The Interrupted Thought of Indian America.” Measured time, cyclical time, the present time of the Aztecs represents a reprieve before the next destruction to come. This belief is at the origin of the tragic disappearance of the peoples of Mexico and the New World. The conquerors understood this. And the Aztec priests had the misfortune to see in the arrival of these foreigners the revelation of the divine word. In a powerful plea, J.-M.G. Le Clézio denounces the silencing of the Indian world, the stifling of speech, the destruction of customs, of laws... by the methodical elimination of indigenous societies and the dispossession of the Indian of his thought, of his being, of his moral, social and religious order. By destroying Amerindian cultures, it was his own values, his own humanity that the conqueror destroyed, at the moment when these rites and these myths “could give substance to a true philosophy, whose influence on the world could have had the importance of Taoism or Buddhism” (261 and Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio, 2015). As an ethnographer and mythologist, J.-M.G. Le Clézio analyzes the nature of the links between the human world and the divine world in the light of relationships and chronicles. He explains how the opposing concepts governing these two worlds, these two thoughts, were interpreted. He describes ritual ceremonies and their purpose, their perception by conquerors, magical thinking, the various representations of natural forces, the intimate relationship of men with gods and myths. Thanks to the final testimonies of ancient Mexicans, J.M.G. Le Clézio allows us to imagine what these cultures would have created and how they could have “changed European concepts of spirituality, the idea of man, of morality, of politics” (243).

 

 

Dominique Lanni

Translated by Keith Moser

(2024)

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

 

Les Prophéties du Chilam Balam, Version et présentation de J.-M.G. Le Clézio, Paris, Gallimard, « Le Chemin », 1976 ; Relation de Michoacán, version et présentation de J.-M.G. Le Clézio. Paris, Gallimard, « Tradition », 1984 ; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, Histoire véridique de la conquête de la Nouvelle-Espagne, Paris, La Découverte, 1987 ; Eliade, Mircea, Le Mythe de l’éternel retour. Archétypes et répétition, Paris, Gallimard, 1969. Rééd. Paris, Gallimard, « Folio Essais », 1989 ; Garibay, Angel-Maria et Leon-Portilla, Miguel, Le Crépuscule des Aztèques. Récits indigènes de la conquête, Bruxelles, Casterman, 1965 ; Germoni, Karine et Jauer, Annick, dirs., La Pensée ininterrompue du Mexique dans l’œuvre de Le Clézio, Aix-en-Provence, Presses de l’Université de Provence, 2014 ; Jaulin, Robert, La Paix blanche. Introduction à l’ethnocide, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, « Combats », 1970 ; Las Casas, Bartolomeu (de), Très brève relation de la destruction des Indes, Paris, La Découverte, 1982 ; Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave, Le Rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue, Paris, Gallimard, 1988. Rééd., Paris, Gallimard, « Folio / Essais », 1992 ; Legros-Chapuis, Elisabeth, Le Mexique, un cas de fascination littéraire. Au pays des chiens morts, Paris, L’Harmattan, « Espaces littéraires », 2011 ; Leon-Portilla, Miguel, La Pensée aztèque, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, « Recherches anthropologiques », 1985 ; Sahagun, Bernardino de, Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle-Espagne, Paris, La Découverte, 1981 ; Salazar-Ferrer, Olivier, Le Clézio et la philosophie. Les Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio, no 8, Caen, Passage(s), 2015.

 

 

 

Alma, published by Gallimard in 2017, joins the Mauritian cycle where, inspired by the history of his family, J.M.G. Le Clézio evokes the Mascarenes, and particularly Mauritius. Although far from autobiography by the creation of characters, Alma is a novel of filiation, a quest for origins, without breaking with the rest of the work, started in 1963. Here, instead of a narrative structure, it is a question of “musicalization of the novel”, joining Huxley’s Counterpoint.

 

Alma is similar to a counterpoint, an organized superposition of distinct melodic lines, by the alternation of voices, which recalls Désert or Onitsha: those of Jérémie Felsen and Dominique Felsen known as Dodo, linked by kinship, that a generation separates, which perhaps cross furtively at the end of the work. Their paths are opposite: while Jérémie comes from France to Mauritius, Dodo, who left Mauritius, has been in France for a long time.

 

Uncertain rapporteur of a reality that he dreamed before having known it (14-15), Jérémie arrives on the island, equipped with a talisman which comes to him from his father: the gizzard stone of the raphus cucullatus or “dodo”, on which he intends to write a memoir. Its objective is multiple. He meets those who know the past of the island and his family, those who make the island present, Krystal who benefits and suffers from sex tourism, Aditi who, through an NGO, is concerned about wildlife and the flora… He has an inner curiosity: “I will go everywhere, I want to see everything” (147). Each chapter is an encounter and an approach to the island. In his careful description of what remains of a ruined sugar factory soon to be replaced by an amusement park, he places himself between a near past and an imminent future, but the sight of a dodo skeleton brings him back to the dawn of the world, “when the island was still new – new of humans” (81).

 

The other voice in the first person, differentiated by the italics, is that of Dodo, the last of the Felsen on the island, affected by syphilis, designated by the Greek sigma, which has eaten away his face and prohibited all descendants. For him, life is only a single day, which he evokes in the present, in simple words and propositions, accepting the tearing of sigma. Jérémie's tension responds to Dodo's resignation.

 

To these voices are added those of micro-narratives. Marie-Madeleine, natural daughter of the governor of the islands of France and Bourbon, complains in the style and spirit of the eighteenth century: “I have reason to believe” (168), “first cousin of my late father” (172). The story of Ashok who discovers the lake of fairies is close to a tale. The voice of Saklavou, spirit of slavery, vituperative, vengeful.

 

In addition to tones or timbres, there is a play on consonances and repetitions of themes. Jérémie, with the intention of recalling those who lived on the island, cites the Mauritius Almanac, suggesting the polycultural dimension of the place, imposing a rhythm to the proliferation, even because of the alphabetical order. Words from the Upanishads (192), an old Scottish song, “Auld Lang Syne,” also favor sounds. The song becomes a leitmotif for the two characters, signaling the end of a world: “[…] when you sing it, it means there is no goodbye” (180). The Creole melody is heard more in Dodo raised in Mauritius. It suits him all the more because, due to its syntactic and phonetic distortions, it takes on a childish naivety: “cassava biscuits” (63), “told zistoire Topsie” (64). Le Clézio says he does not need to speak or hear French to write it (October 5, 2017). He would be like a composer imagining a melody just by writing a score, a faculty he attributes to the musician Dodo (76).

 

The repetition of motifs punctuates the novel, variations which recur in the same character: the lyrical evocation of nature, the Fersen, the dodo, slavery or else pass from one character to another: a song, Topsie, Alma...

 

Multiple interferences exist. The disappearance of raphus cucullatus leads to that of the tambalacoque which it allowed to germinate. “Dodo” is the name of the bird and that of the last descendant of the Felsen, both moving and ridiculous. The man is used to making people laugh about his illness by managing, for lack of a nose, to lick his eyes. Echoing this, the bird is mocked on the deck of the boat by the crew.

 

“Alma” designates the Felsen property and its first hostess and, depending on the language: a foster mother, a young girl, by her paronyms: breath (atma), whiteness (alba). The Maya shopping center (from Sanskrit: illusion) has the alias Krystal, “the illusion of eternal youth” (74). Onomastics creates a nebula of values.

 

It is not a question of a metaphorical link but of a bundle of evocations which tend towards a spiritual unity. Dodo is human and monstrous, he has no face, but he has grace. He heals a dying child: “[…] I blow into the holes in his nose, and the child starts to cough […] he gains his life.” (260) “The Wonderful Tramp” is a kind of epic hero. The spiritualism session followed by Jérémie links the picturesqueness of the island to the descent into hell specific to the epic (226-233).

 

Themes and sounds alternate and reading plans overlap.

 

One of the plans is the prophecy that we already found in War and The Giants. Aditi calls Jeremiah “the vigilante” (142). He has “the name of a prophet” (143). Moreover, he denounces the dysfunctions of a society. One of the chapters in which Dodo is the speaker is called The Prophet. Ironically. Because it is in spite of himself that Dodo, followed by the crowd of excluded people, points out the misery of the world. (256).

Prophecy does not have the violence of previous works. Saklavou, alone, vituperates and curses. Jérémie humorously imitates the jokes of the island's good society: "Rob Rosko − even if he is Ukrainian Jewish through his parents, but thank God it's not too obvious, [...] not at all "marked" (217-218).

 

Le Clézio also lends some humor to Dodo, who, despite his innocence, is amused by the washing of his feet by the nuns. From the words of Simon Peter in the Gospel: “What! You Lord, you wash my feet! » he compares those of the tramps: “...mo lipié prop moi, not good washed mamzelle!” (155).

What is denounced is linked to devouring. Young black Topsie's fear of being eaten by the whites joins the disappearance of the dodos that the first settlers hoped to eat. Dodo says “[…] the disease that eats my face also eats my name” (50). Black people were prey for the planters, women remained prey for visitors to the island. The island is devoured by tourism. ​​ 

 

Writing is the cure for swallowing. Dodo chalks the names of his parents on the graves in the cemetery. Jérémie writes the names of the inhabitants, of evocative places: Petite Julie, Grande Rosalie. Aditi writes the names of the plants and animals of the island.

The time of the prophets is suspended. Jérémie evokes the moment when the dodos “begin their last dance” (87). The time “when everything is still possible, just a little before death” (141), recalls that evoked by The Mexican Dream.

The studious research of J.M.G. Le Clézio on the Aztecs or on Mauritius arrives at an ahistorical moment, a timeless one which reproduces whatever one does, where the awakening is contemporary with the fall.

 

We could say of Alma what Octavio Paz says of the works of Balzac or Proust: “It is a hybrid of inspiration and scientific investigation, of utopia and criticism. A mythical story, a myth which is incarnated in history and ends in judgment. A Last Judgment where society condemns itself with its principles.” (1956, 306). Alma's polyphony represents different facets of the identification of an island, of a quest for the missing part of oneself, of a timelessness. The reading is a spiral that goes from informative to epic poetry, to vision.

 

 

Michelle Labbé

Translated by Adina Balint

(2024)

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

 

CHAUDEY, Marie, « Le Clézio retourne à l’île Maurice », La Vie, 2§ octobre 2017, p. 76 ; DEVARRIEUX, Claire, « Le Clézio, Dodo le Héros », Libération, 6 octobre 2017,http://next.liberation.fr/livres/2017/10/06/le-clezio-dodo-le-heros_1601422 ; HUXLEY, Aldous, Contrepoint, 1928, traduit par Jules Caster, Plon, 1953 ; JANICOT, Alma mater, La Croix, 14-10-2017 https://www.la-croix.com/Culture/Livres-et-idees/Alma-mater-2017-10-12-1200883653 ; LECLAIR, Bertrand, « Ce que Le Clézio doit à l’île Maurice », Le Monde, 20 octobre 2017, p. 5 ; ​​ LE CLÉZIO, J.M.G., Alma, Paris Gallimard, 2017 ; LE MÉNAGER, Grégoire, « Le Clézio et ses démons », L’Obs n° 2763, 19-10-2017, p. 86-87 ; PAZ Octavio, L’arc et la lyre, 1956, 1965 pour la traduction française de Roger Munier, Gallimard. Entrevue avec Nicolas DEMORAND, https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/l invite de 8H20/l invite de 8h20, 5 octobre 2017. ​​ 

 

 

 

Le Clézio’s first novel, published in 1963, The Interrogation received the Renaudot Prize, which propelled the 23-year old author onto the literary scene with the help of the media and his young and attractive face. The success story of a manuscript sent by mail to the prestigious publisher Gallimard could almost overshadow the analysis of the story, but rightly places The Interrogation as a book marked by excess, which, while defying a pompous style, does not skimp on the overkill. The character Adam Pollo is by its very onomastic linked as much to the first man and the original myth as to the Greek god Apollo, god of the sun accompanied by a rat, an animal that occupies a chapter of the novel. The density of this novel is compensated by blanks, ellipses, and erasures. The writer thus controls excess as much as aporia in a fragile balance, conducive to disorienting the active reader confronted with a first enigma offered by the preface-letter: is Adam a deserter or an escapee from the asylum? Whatever the answer, the alternative immediately places him as an outcast.

 

Images of Excess, Smoke Screens?

 

The frequency of parodies (mise en abyme detective story, dialogue worthy of a theater of the absurd) and explicit (Bible, Gospel, Sartre, Parmenides, Defoe, Manilius, Éluard) or implicit references (Camus, Kafka, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Beckett) saturate the text. The demonstration of styles becomes accumulative, even borrowing from the 1960s fashion of collage by inserting a false press clipping, inserting a false literary readymade, or quoting pages from the notebook kept by Adam. The non-novel is in tune with the literary area of suspicion, and any excess, like a symptom, masks the slightest plot, the apprehension of a traditional character in favor of a chameleon-like man, hypersensitive and absorbing the sun. In this scorching August on the Mediterranean coast, between Nice and Carros, the all in all unrepresentable Adam is either a “disproportionate boy” (incipit), or “everywhere at once” (185), or “an agglomerate of cells” (230-231), or an addition of the three ages of childhood, young man and old man! Adam’s own behavior accentuates this effect of overflow, even though nothing but the most banal things happen – following a dog, going to the beach, the zoo, or the café – at first sight. This accentuation is presented in at least two ways: the first is linked to his imaginative faculty: “he was practicing imagining” (20); the second to his prophetic verve when he harangues the crowd before becoming aphasic. The first one favors the most surrealistic images, sometimes reviving childish terrors. The second seals Adam’s fate, arrested for disturbing the peace (is it the famous crime that the title could be announcing?) and sent to a psychiatric hospital.

 

A certain violence comes from this excess, despite the apparent non-event, or rather the uncertainty about the event, especially when it is recounted after the fact. Did he, for example, rape Michèle, or is it a fantasy? Other events do exist, but the narrative is not built in tension towards them. The focus is on the resulting effect: a drowned person, polluted water, waste. Even if the first sentence, “there was a little time”, is more than a simple pastiche, and it introduces from the outset a minor mode, there is indeed a progression in the passage to the act and the intensity of the aggressions: a supposed rape, a fight with an American, the murder of a rat. Everything seems to be under the rays of violence: excess of solicitations and advertising signs, of cathode tubes, of hypocrisy, of abstraction. The narrative generates abstraction by hyperreality or artificial derealization of the landscape thus described: “All had the conscientious aspect of a fabric in houndstooth, of an immense garden built according to the standards of the pleasure among beetles or snails.” (75) Oxymoron and change of scale all the more incongruous since the two preceding sentences speak of “the earth” and “the surface of the sea,” so infinite.

 

The “Novel” of Disappearance

 

Adam erases himself in a trashy way, “[...] exciting his mythological sense to a paroxysm, he surrounded himself with stones, with rubble; he would have liked to have all the detritus and garbage in the world to bury himself in [...]” (75). The ways to disappear are multiplied: the mystical way, the social disappearance in the stripping (to get rid of one’s belongings and to pass oneself off as dead), the regression to the mother’s womb or the reduction to the smallest entity, to be a grain of sand or in an oyster (314). Adam explores other possible disappearances: “he centered himself in the midst of matter, ashes, pebbles, and little by little became statuesque” (75). This image is followed by another, to live “like a block of ice from the North Pole” (94), then another still... A technique of centering is set up to live intensely in a material ecstasy, a confusion in the matter which neutralizes the intellectual mode to sharpen a state of “nervous knowledge of the matter.” (31) An entire mystical tradition can be mobilized here, as it is in the hippie context of the 1960s. But this dense vitality alternates with a morbid tendency. To empty oneself, then to fill oneself again with a reality that permeates him. Then to empty oneself again. Before speaking of an Icarian path, in its fatal linearity, it is necessary to admit that the patterns repeat themselves. And this cycle is marked by an “aggressive nihilism” (Onimus, 30).

 

The novel thus cultivates paradoxes; from overload to discharge and trash, and then to disappearance. Discharge could be understood as a search for decompensation, for it is also a question of an experience of madness in which a detail becomes paroxysmal: “Sometimes cars would pass in single file, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, the black metal would burst like a bomb, a spiral flash would shoot out of the hood and cause the whole hill to blaze and bend” (21). Human trash and detritus are sprinkled throughout the novel: various corpses, poem on dust and ashes, list of garbage (190), (one notes that Le Clézio knows the school of Nice, the New Realists, Arman, Ben, Spoerri), liquid secretions, urine, blood...

 

The excess is signaled as such by the necessity to include crossed out text, which nevertheless leaves what has been crossed out legible, like a palimpsest. The doubling of the narrative instance between a non-omniscient and omnipresent narrator (Salles, 1996) favors a variety of types of texts (mother’s letter, diary, dialogue, speech) where, in spite of everything, Adam’s gaze and imaginative power dominate. This delirious imagination is sometimes suddenly defused by Adam’s behaviorist-style disaffection when he describes objects or his own motion (walking as if in slow motion, the placement of two chairs). Everything converges little by little towards a shrinking of Adam’s own true life space to “contain” his hallucinations, so much the banal becomes animated in an unusual or fantastic way. Should we assume Adam’s madness when we read: “[...] by dint of seeing the world, the world had gone out of his eyes” (91)? Again, the overflow calls for the hollowing out, the “Ob-scenity of what, [is] placed, before me, ends up turning against me” (Fougère, 2017). He can also call upon his passion for geometry to “square the chaos” (Tritsmans, 1990).

The narrative “structure” can be compared to the journey of Icarus (Waelti-Walters, 1981), from sunburned Adam going down the hill to becoming “a lake bird, feathers plastered to his skin” (311). Being done with expanding or fleeing, Adam will be put in solitary confinement, in the shade, far from the burning sun. And the aporias, the breaks and the holes, will emerge even more. From the title, the language is faulty. Its most elementary tool, the alphabet, is also lacking. Each chapter begins with a letter A, B, C but stops at P, forgets the Q, starts again at R and then stops again. The language itself is broken since Adam becomes aphasic in the last pages of the book. In any case, the common language is impotent, indigent to give an account of reality. Only the poet can extricate himself from reality to find the strength of the common language. The hole in the alphabet, the ceiling of his cell that was pierced by dripping blood, but above all the amnesia un procès-verbal that Adam manifests are the clues that, in this puzzle-novel, there is a piece missing. And this piece slips away, so much a derision is at play, a way of not taking itself seriously. Moreover, the initial title was “Procès-verbal d’une catastrophe chez les fourmis,” (Minutes of an Ant Disaster), which is also the title that Adam notes on a page torn from his notebook.

 

Solipsism and Relationships with Otherness

 

Adam writes in a notebook to Michèle and the rest of the time he walks on the beach and in the city or squats in a house on the hill; micro-events, without causing a break, entertain from his idleness. His de-individualization is not so much due to a lack of thickness as to metamorphoses that prevent any grasp and make him sometimes floating, “soft” (311), sometimes “a prehistoric creature” (311), in any case in a state of regression. Although he is a strong communicator, Adam is also caught in a lack of relationship because of his disturbances, from monologue to silence: mythomaniac with Michèle, logorrheic with the crowd, or without answer for his mother. The preface-letter warned us against the rancid psychology. To interpret the letter from Adam’s mother, which present the clichés of an authoritarian and angry father, as a case of Oedipus complex would be misleading. Critical readings have not failed to question Adam’s behaviors (schizophrenic? paranoid?), taking over from the psychiatric experts (paranoid!) There is a Freudian reading (Poulet, 2008) analyzing “the cleavage of the ego, that is to say the coexistence within the ego of two contradictory and well separated attitudes towards external reality: one that recognizes it, the other that denies its existence in favor of the drive demands.” One can also look at a reading from Didier Anzieu’s concept of skin-self (Le Moi-Peau, Dunod, 1993 ; Roussel-Gillet, 2004) to understand Adam’s porous self, exploring the desire to understand the animality (Fougère, 2017) or even the becoming-animal of Adam (dog, lioness, rat). The graphic version of the novel by Edmond Baudoin accounts for this confusion of the human not only in the animal kingdom but also in the mineral and plant kingdoms. Analyses inspired by Bachelard, Durand, or Jung characterize then these reveries of intimacy, notably those of the burial, of the “desire to dig dens” (25). The hyper-coenesthetic develops a phenomenological relationship to the flesh of the world, which can be assimilated to an alchemical work, to “l’œuvre au noir” (trial by earth) to find a lost unity (Bachand, 2009).

 

Wounded Generation

 

The first name Adam directs us towards myth, away from historical readings. Yet, despite strategies to evacuate any blind spot, (“He had become a memory, and the angles of blindness, where the facets touch, were so rare that his consciousness was, as it were, spherical. It was the place, adjacent to total vision, where it happens that one can no longer live [...].” (91)), the blind spot of French society in those years was indeed the Algerian War that traumatized French youth (Roussel-Gillet, 2016). Le Clézio saw his friends leave and not return. He sows clues to this trauma when Adam speaks of a war that Michèle assures him does not exist in school textbooks. Amnesiac, Adam evokes for all that bombs, cannons, “that makes beautiful holes three hundred meters farther, holes not too dirty, which make puddles, after, when it rains.” (65) On the surface, it can be inferred from the reading of the book that to escape this war, young Frenchmen tried to pass themselves off as crazy.

 

The whole strategy consists in bringing to extremes the explosive and the withdrawal, the burning and the ice, which activates contradictory tensions: “Everything was so white under the light that it could have been black [...]” (238). Anything taken to its extreme can lead to its opposite. Reality thus seems unstable when reality remains a force of life. And to experience reality, a new writing must be presented in its raw state. This is what Le Clézio explained during his interviews: his first book, a revolt against writing and literature, answered a need for derision and sarcasm. He belonged to a generational state of mind marked by a “mixture of aggressiveness and derision” (Amette, 2006) in view of what one called then “the events”. In this context, literature cannot console but put the reader on alert.

As soon as the writer reflects on literature and language, he aims at destroying a form of literature, and at exhibiting new codes. The apparent affinities with the New Novel (the importance of objects, the simultaneity of emotions recorded by this seismograph, the real movement of thought, the absence of a linear or realistic narrative) function as decoys. If the New Novel is devoid of clues of engagement or interpellation of the reader, then the letter-preface departs from it. Just as the narrative warns us against “that bastard culture” (305) with which this first text is nevertheless saturated. Adam’s final incarceration may testify to the coercive system described by Foucault or incriminate hypocritical French society. The clues and lures maintain throughout the novel a sense of uncertainty. We see uncertainties of a wild but vulnerable youth caught between a society that it finds repugnant – absurd, at war, greedy for consumption – and a vitalism of matter, which makes it possible to live poetically within the world. The youth of the 60s revolted against systems, dreaming of a world of “peace and love.” This book prefigures the dynamite of 1968; it remains, however, of a crucial topicality, against the established systems, for an ecology of the living, which “never capitulates in front of the real” (EM, 140) and puts us in the unison with more archaic, more necessary vibrations.

 

Isabelle Roussel-Gillet

Translated by Thierry Léger

(2023)

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

AMETTE, Jean-Pierre, entretien avec JMG Le Clézio, Le Point, 26 janvier 2006, n°1741, p. 78 ; BACHAND, Denis, « La nostalgie des origines dans Le Procès-verbal de J.M.G. Le Clézio », revue en ligne www.revue-analyses.org, Vol. 4, nº 1 Hiver 2009, pp. 85-99, ​​ https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/revue-analyses/article/view/557/459 ; DIRKX, Paul, « La symbiose corporelle. Le corps de J.-M. G. Le Clézio et ses premières œuvres », Les Cahiers J.-M. G. Le Clézio, numéro 12 Corps, 2019, pp. 29-42 ; FOUGÈRE, Éric, « Hanter la terre ou l’habiter : l’homme et la bête dans Le Procès-verbal », Les Cahiers J.-M. G. Le Clézio, numéro 10, Habiter la terre, 2017, pp. 111 ; LÉGER, Thierry, « La Nausée en procès ou l’intertextualité sartrienne chez Le Clézio », Lecture d’une œuvre : J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nantes, éditions du Temps, 2004, pp. 95-103 ; MOOTOOSAMY, Vidoolah, « Le corps conflictuel ou la métamorphose dans Le Procès-verbal de Le Clézio », Les Cahiers J.-M. G. Le Clézio, numéro 12, Corps, 2019, pp. 115-126 ; ONIMUS Jean, Pour lire Le Clézio, Paris, PUF, 1994 ; POULET, Élisabeth, « La faille identitaire chez les personnages de Le Clézio », mise en ligne octobre 2008 (parution mai 2007) https://www.larevuedesressources.org/la-faille-identitaire-chez-les-personnages-de-le-clezio,801.html ; ROUSSEL-GILLET, Isabelle, « Troubles et trouées, le cas du Procès-verbal de Le Clézio », Roman 20-50, Echenoz, décembre 2004, pp. 113-123 ; « Pour une lecture psycho-historique du Procès-verbal », JMG Le Clézio. L’œuvre féconde, Certitudes, pays et musées imaginaires, Caen, Editions Passage(s), collection Essais, 2016, pp. 53-68 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Procès-verbal, Paris, Bertrand-Lacoste, collection Parcours de lecture, 1996 ; TRITSMANS, Bruno, « Rêves de cartes », Poétique n°82, avril 1990, pp. 165-177 ; WAELTI-WALTERS, Jennifer, Icare ou l'évasion impossible : étude psycho-mythique de l'œuvre de J.M.G. Le Clézio, Sherbrooke (Québec), Ed. Naaman, 1981.

 

 

 

Since his travels in the Americas in the 1970s, where he met Amerindian societies, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has been fascinated by a “golden age” where man lived “in harmony” with nature. This way of life respectful of the natural world, which he also discovered among the populations of black Africa, Mauritius, the Moroccan desert and Oceania, and which could be described as “primitive” in the sense that their existence and their cults rest on the internal organization and rhythm of the natural world, constitutes a striking contrast with the activities of the West determined by technical overabundance and consumerism:

 

At that time, I didn't care about ecology, and I knew almost nothing about America’s Native American past […]. It was the encounter with the Emberas, on the río Tuquesa, which gave me this liberation. […] Little by little [….] I arrived at the edge of a world completely opposite to everything I had known until then. […] I learned a new way of seeing, feeling, speaking. (FC, 10-11; my translation)

 

Following this overwhelming encounter and the discovery of “alternative” lifestyles, the author devotes numerous novels, stories and essays to the ecological attitude of Amerindian societies, for example in Haï (1971), whose title means “activity” or “energy”, and in La Fête chantée (1997). Interested in how the daily life and cults of these communities are based on a balanced and respectful management of the environment, Le Clézio is fascinated by their resolute rejection of any form of human superiority characteristic of Western religions and systems of thought, and their rejection of any distinction between men, animals, and even plants – an attitude that we today qualify as “anti-speciesist”.

 

At the same time, Le Clézio continues to explicitly criticize the urbanization and mechanization characteristic of the consumer society. If the condemnation of consumerism and urban development had already been expressed very early in Le Clézio's work, in Le Procès-verbal (1963), Le Déluge (1966), Terra amata (1967) and Le Livre des fuites (1969), where the author shows that he is sensitive to ecological issues through occasional references to the nuclear threat, it is in novels such as La Guerre (1970) and Les Géants (1973) that the concern for the future of humanity and the environment asserts itself in the most explicit way. The protagonists’ movements have as a backdrop an apocalyptic urban space, where men are parked in cells, between artificial brick and steel barriers, where the labyrinth of concrete streets, crossroads, housing estates, blockhouses and hypermarkets surrounds the inhabitants with a jungle of cables and pylons. In a conversation with Pierre Lhoste, Le Clézio affirms that the aggressive advance of cities “brings about a kind of permanent combat struggle between men themselves […] and nature” (Lhoste, Le Clézio, 1971, 63). Forests, beaches, rivers, lakes and plains have given way to constructions that are part of the ever-increasing technical mastery of the natural environment. The human being who walks in the city encounters only artificial landscapes, made up of non-natural materials: “forests of pylons”, “nickel beaches”, “plains of corrugated iron” (G, 166); the natural elements seem to have been produced in a factory: the earth is “a sheet of tar”, the water has become “cellophane”, the air “is made of nylon” and the sun has become a 1,600 watts lamp (G, 31). However, the author underlines that it is the very man who wanted this “mineral hardness” (Ge, 114), as if “one day someone had hated the world – everyone, the trees, the plants, grass, animals, air, sun, rain, sea, rivers, lakes, stones, clouds” (Ge, 279).

 

Among the ecological problems that hold the attention of the author, the huge piles of waste polluting the urban environment occupy a central place. It’s trash lying around the streets, mostly plastic wrappers of the disposable, consumer age, like “rectangles of black cast iron, where trash has clung for years” (G, 65), “cigarettes, [papers, and] Pepsi-Cola capsules” (G, 79). Le Clézio does not hesitate to express his deep aversion for cigarettes whose synthetic material filter takes forever to disappear from the landscape: “the butts have multiplied. For centuries we have been throwing this waste on the ground” (G, 68). For the author, the city dweller’s lack of respect for nature reaches its height when “[even] people sometimes stump their cigarettes into the ground” (Zhang, Le Clézio, 2017, 162). All this waste ends up being piled up in landfills often relegated to the edges of the city and therefore remains “invisible” for its inhabitants. The picture he draws includes all the typical elements of a pile of rubbish, with particular attention to the smell, the toxicity of the exhalations and the irreversible destructive force of such a pile of rubbish:

 

She travels to the other end of the city, to the big wasteland where a strange absence reigns, a strange black smoke. […] In the center of the vacant lot, there is a kind of cement factory, with two chimneys that throw up columns of smoke. The acrid odor falls back to earth, spreading its suffocating cloud. In front of the factory, there is a big pile of garbage, like a mountain, waiting to be burned. […] She feels the bland, dull odor that enters her, she also listens to the sounds of decomposition that ignites in the center of the mountain. (G, 271; my translation)

While the examples cited here are descriptive, evoking a state of affairs without adopting an explicitly threatening tone, the insertion in La Fête chantée of the discourse of the ​​ Indian Chief of Seattle to the Assembly of tribes in 1855, calling for the rejection of the he U.S. government’s offer to purchase Native American land, allows Le Clézio to warn the reader in a more prophetic style: “Keep soiling your bed, and one fine night you will suffocate in your own waste” (FC, 235). Le Clézio adopts the same catastrophic tone in an interview with Stéphanie Janicot, when he announces our debts to future generations, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of current human actions: “all children […] will have to face our mistakes, our horrors: just think of the waste - nuclear, chemical, bacteriological - that industrial countries have been burying or dumping for fifty years already, and some of which will continue to poison the air, the sea, the earth for tens of thousands of years” (Janicot, Le Clézio, 2006, 11).

 

Another ecological problem characteristic of the crowded urban space and its many technical inventions turn out to be exhaust gases. Despite their often colorless nature, Le Clézio visualizes their functioning by analyzing the interactions between the gases and the organs that make up the human body, explaining that “carbon monoxide spreads in the lungs and in the arteries” (G, 8) and that in particular the blood absorbs toxic substances (G, 145; EM, 63). Thus, Le Clézio’s narratives already testify at the beginning of the 1970s to a conviction that “posthuman ecocriticism” attributes to recent discoveries, that is to say the idea that synthetic material affects “bios-zoe -techno-eco-cultures”, hybrid worlds where the human body suffers more and more attacks caused by the substances generated by the postmodern society.

 

In a similar fashion, Le Clézio strives to show the invisible destructive forces of international trade by detailing the packaging, unnatural processing and global transport of food in supermarkets. Without ever letting a moral lesson shine through, Le Clézio affirms the need for sustainable development which requires a profound reorganization of production and consumption methods: “[on] the stalls, the fruits of the whole world were ripe. The cellophane-wrapped meats waited in the refrigerated bins” (G, 56) and “[in] the baskets, the fruit cannot rot” (G, 31). Note that Le Clézio included these findings in a novel published in 1970, while the first lines of “ecological” products packaged in recyclable packaging, offered by supermarkets such as Monoprix, were not launched until the end of the 1980s.

Writing in a period dominated by the nuclear deterrent of the Cold War, Le Clézio reveals in snippets the threat of an atomic catastrophe and the ecological crises that would result from it. While the narrator of Voyage à Rodrigues observes that “we are already preparing for nuclear war” (VAR, 128) and that Monsieur X prophesies in La Guerre an environmental deluge with, among other things, the appearance of “clouds in the shape of mushroom” (G, 233), Le Clézio shows in La Fête chantée that the concern is old, given that the ancient predictions of Amerindian civilizations, warning the people of a “scorched world” (FC, 39), turn out to be quite highly relevant in “our modern world, under threat of nuclear destruction and the devastation of natural resources” (FC, 39).

 

Finally, it is important to note that the author does not hesitate to address in the public space the ecological concerns expressed in his works of fiction. Thus, he mobilizes in a fight against the development of nuclear power: in the article entitled “To end with nuclear colonialism” (Le Monde, October 4, 1995), he denounced the resumption of nuclear tests by France in the Pacific, which “is both an ecological disaster and a moral indignity”. The question of the slaughter of whales in the lagoons of Baja California, Mexico, is successively addressed in Pawana (1992) and in the article “Saving the gray whales of California” (Le Monde, April 8, 1995). Another article, “A monstrous project” (Le Monde, May 12, 1987), denounces the “raid” of the Thierry Sabine Organization through the Guyanese forest, where the passage of fifty motorized and overpowered machines on the Maroni and Oyapock rivers would cause irreparable damage to the fauna and flora of the site. In “What future for the Romaine? (Le Monde, July 1, 2009), the author attacks the company Hydro-Québec: their plan to build four dams would endanger many animals and plants as well as the way of life of the Innu, residents of the Romaine river in Quebec, Canada. He also wrote about the Madeira River in Brazil, where the GDF-Suez group has installed a large hydroelectric complex: an ecological disaster for “several hundred species of fish and birds, as well as many species of mammals threatened” and for the Indian tribes living in the river basin (“A GDF-Suez project endangers the last isolated tribes of the Amazon”, Le Monde, April 7, 2010). An article denounces the activities of a Canadian mining company, which constitute a danger for the mountain of the Huichol Indians and for the survival of the surrounding ecosystems: “deep research, disembowelment with dynamite, use of pollutants (mercury and cyanide) , discharges of contaminated mud that endanger the aquifer” (“We must save the Huichol Indians”, Le Point, January 20, 2012). Le Clézio’s journalistic activity therefore not only constitutes the “praxis” of his literary ecological warning, as Claude Cavallero asserts, it “confers in a certain way to the duty implicitly imposed on him by his moral authority as a novelist” (Cavallero, 2009, 340).

 

Even if he renounces the title of “ecological activist” (Zhang, Le Clézio, 2017, 166), the author affirms to Lu Zhang his commitment within the group called “Survival”, which reports all attacks against minority populations by the great capitalist powers, and he has already joined the “Group of a Hundred”, which fights against the alteration of the environment. Le Clézio not only wrote tributes to defenders of the natural world, such as Petra Kelly (“In memory of Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian", Le Monde, November 3, 1992), he also gave himself the mission to familiarize the French reader with American Nature writing, among other things, through his laudatory prefaces to Almanach of a Sand County by Aldo Léopold (2000 [1949]) and to A Year in the Countryside by Sue Hubbell (1991 [1986]).

 

 

Sara Buekens (2022)

Translated by Adina Balint (2023)

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

CAVALLERO, Claude, Le Clézio, témoin du monde, Clamart, Éditions Callipoées, 2009 ; HUBBELL, Sue, Une année à la campagne, traduction par Janine Hérisson, préface de Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Paris, Gallimard, 1991 [1986] ; LE CLÉZIO, Jean-Marie Gustave, L’Extase matérielle, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Folio », 1992 [1967] ; La Guerre, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « L’imaginaire », 1992 [1970] ; Les Géants, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « L’imaginaire », 1997 [1973] ; Voyage à Rodrigues, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Le Chemin », 1986 ; « Un projet monstrueux », Le Monde, 12 mai 1987 ; « À la mémoire de Petra Kelly et Gert Bastian », Le Monde, 3 novembre 1992, p. 17 ; « Sauver les baleines grises de Californie », Le Monde, 8 avril 1995 ; « Pour en finir avec le colonialisme nucléaire », Le Monde, 4 octobre 1995 ; La Fête chantée, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Le Promeneur », 1997 ; « Quel avenir pour la Romaine ? », Le Monde, 1 juillet 2009 ; « Il faut sauver les Indiens Huichols », Le Point, 20 janvier 2012 ; LE CLÉZIO, Jean-Marie Gustave, RAZON, Jean-Patrick, « Un projet de GDF-Suez met en danger les dernières tribus isolées d’Amazonie », Le Monde, 7 avril 2010 ; LEOPOLD, Aldo, Almanach d’un comté des sables, suivi de Quelques croquis, traduction par Anna Gibson, préface de Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Paris, Flammarion, 2000 [1949] ; LHOSTE, Pierre, LE CLÉZIO, Jean-Marie Gustave, Conversations avec J.M.G. Le Clézio, Paris, Mercure de France, coll. « Littérature générale », 1971 ; JANICOT, Stéphanie, Le CLÉZIO, Jean-Marie Gustave, « L’entretien » Muze, 22, juin 2006, p. 8-12 ; ZHANG, Lu, LE CLÉZIO, Jean-Marie Gustave, « Je pense que la littérature doit beaucoup à la terre », Les Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio, 10, mai 2017, p. 159-176.

 

 

 

 

Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is the third most populous city in the world after Tokyo and Mexico City. In 2010, this megalopolis near the border between South and North Korea had a population of approximately 9.6 million, or 20% of Korean’s total population (Korean Statistical Information Service, 2010). Topographically, the Han [Hangang, 한강] River plays a crucial role: coming from a mountainous region in the east and flowing into the Yellow Sea, it cuts the city in two, the north bank and the south bank, connected by 28 bridges (The Seoul institute, 2018). Currently, the north bank [Gangbuk, 강북] is composed of 14 boroughs and the south bank [Gangnam 강남] of 11 boroughs. In addition, the city is spread out in a basin surrounded by a mountain range (The Seoul Research Data Service, 2013). Two years after the founding of the Chosŏn [조선] dynasty in September 1394, the city was chosen as the capital of this peninsula due to its military, political, and economic assets. The development of the country's ultra-fast economy during the second half of the 20th century is another important factor in comprehending a city like Seoul. After the Japanese imperialist colonization (1910-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953), South Korea devoted all its energy to economic growth. In the 1960s, this modern situation reinforced the centralization of Seoul. In a short period of time, the city became over-industrialized and overpopulated, requiring a considerable urbanization effort. The country set up a plan to decentralize the metropolis. Over the next three decades, office skyscrapers and large residential buildings sprouted up in the Korean capital and a subway system covering more than 605 square kilometers of land was implemented. This has resulted in a remarkable transformation of the cityscape and the lifestyle of its inhabitants (The City of Seoul).

 

The geographical and historical dimensions of Seoul have their own charm in the eyes of J.-M. G. Le Clézio. In a documentary film by François Caillat and Antoine de Gaudemar entitled Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio Between Worlds (2009), he refers to Seoul as “success city” where urban violence and nature coexist. The “cicadas” that “make more noise than the cars in summer” are comparable, according to him, to the human desire to “raise the tone” by means of “words of literature, of poetry” against the urban din (Gaillat and Gaudemar, 2009). The author discovered Korea late in his literary career. And although for a few years he taught literature and cinema at the University of Nanjing in China, it was first in Korea that he taught a course as an honorary visiting professor at the IHWA Women's University in Seoul until the year of the Nobel Prize, in addition to a few lectures at the Seoul International Forum for Literature (Bobae Oh, 2013). Without a doubt, J.-M. G. Le Clézio also encounters Asia through reading translations of Korean, Chinese and Japanese literature. In his speech in Stockholm, he cites Hwang Seok-Yong as one of the exiled writers in search of a “forest of paradoxes” that is “the domain of writing, the place from which the artist must not seek to escape” (Nobel Prize speech, 2008). Both from the same generation - J.-M. G. Le Clézio was born in 1940 and Seok-yong Hwang in 1943 - they met in 2018 during the interview on the theme, “Five stories about Seoul” (Kyobo Humanities Talks, 2018).

 

Korea is thus a relatively recent inspiration for Le Clézio’s work. The author stays in this “land of the morning calm” - named after the first and last dynasties, Chosŏn [조선 :朝鮮], before the constitution of the Republic of Korea in the 20th century - while writing History of the Foot and Other Stories (2011). The short story “Storm” (2014) is dedicated “[t]o the Haenyo, the women of the sea of Udo Island” (TDN, 2014, 9), which neighbors Jeju Island, located at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. J.-M. G. Le Clézio also presents the legend of the “sea fairies” who “brought to the seven stone men” of Jeju, “the art of weaving and basketry, singing and poetry, and the benefit of cooking food” in Museums are Worlds (MM, 2001, 21).

 

Published with the support of the city of Seoul (Hyoryeong Shin, 2017), first in Korean in December 2017,『빛나 서울 하늘 아래』, Bitna: Under the Sky of Seoul (2017) brings to the forefront one of the current sources of Leclezian writing. In this novel, which mentions the Korean capital in its title, the poetic aspect shimmers or signals as the meaning of the female first name “Bitna” in Korean: Bitna[빛나], derived from the verb bitnada [빛나다] means “to shine” or “to illuminate” or from the common noun bit [빛] which means “light”. A daughter of a fishing village in the South, Bitna is studying in Seoul, a city in which she feels oppressed by the violence of her aunt and cousin, a spoiled young girl. Her secret pleasure is to observe the passers-by and to take notes in her notebook. The large bookstore in Jongro is the best place for this intimate, literary activity where she soon discovers the pleasure of seeing and reading so many books. The bookseller, Frederick Pak, tells her about a young woman, Salome, who is looking for a storyteller. From then on, the novel takes the form of a polyphonic narrative at two levels: the story of the meeting between Bitna and Salomé, and the five embedded stories that Bitna invents for Salomé. Both female characters need freedom; Bitna is poor, while Salome is ill, suffering from the “complex regional pain syndrome” (BF, 98) that consumes her. Their meeting, reminiscent of Anton and Kekesfalva in Stefan Zweig's Dangerous Pity (1939), allows them to overcome the social and/or physical barriers that separate them from the world. Through Bitna's stories, Salome travels to places she could never go. She feels free like the birds of Mr. Cho, the main character of the first story. He raises and trains pigeons on the roof of the “Good luck!” where he works, hoping that these messenger birds will one day fly to North Korea, his mother's homeland. “Good luck!” is “a large building from the 1980s, part of the complex” - 20 stories high in this tale - in “Yongsan” (BF, 21). Spread out on a hill where the Namsan Tower stands, this Seoul district is known for housing a U.S. army garrison and as the neighborhood for North Korean refugees and South Korean returnees at the end of the Korean War. The Korean translator of Bitna: Under the Sky of Seoul confirms the existence of the places in Seoul visited by J.- M. G. Le Clézio, including “Yongsan” between “Seorae village, Gangnam”, “Hongdae, Dangsan-dong, Oryu-dong, Gwacheon zoo, Chungmu-ro, Jong-ro, Myeong-dong, Youngdeungpo, Yeouido, Insa-dong, Anguk-dong, Gyeongbokgug, Changdukgug, Cheongyecheon, Bukhan-san, Nam-san, Gamsil, Hangang”, etc. (BC, “epilogue”, 246-247). In order to understand toponymy in Korean, it is important to recall that the word san[산 (Korean) :山(Chinese)] means “mountain”, dong[동 :洞] “neighborhood” or “village”, gu[구 :區] “borough”, ro[로 : 路] “street”, po[포 :浦] “port”, do[도 :島] or [도 :都] “island” or “county”, cheon[천 :川] “river”, gang[강 :江] “river”, and gug[궁 :宮] “royal palace”, For example, Yongsan-gu translates to Yongsan district, a name composed of yong[용 :龍] “dragon” and san “mountain” i.e., “dragon mountain”; Hangang “Han river”, etc. When training his pigeons, Mr. Cho “squats in front of the cages”, “talks to the birds”, “slowly pronounces their names, one after another” (BF, 21):

 

He blows on [the] beak softly, he whispers the words that encourage, not sentences, just words he chooses carefully, soft words, round words, light words. "Wind" "spirit" "light" "wing" "love" "return" "grass" "snow"... (BF, 21)

​​ 

Through this image, both Adamic and divine, Mr. Cho gives life to words in a concrete world: the material and the spiritual, merging, create an ironic beauty. In Bitna's third story, Hanna, an orphanage worker, finds an abandoned child on a small street near the busy Hongdae district, where students and young people go out at night. Naomi, as Hanna calls her, has “a gift that other children don't have”: “She could see things that no one else could” (BF, 147). While Hanna unsuccessfully takes Naomi to religious places such as the "Bongwonsa Temple" (BF, 176), the “Myeong-dong Cathedral” (BF, 177), and a place where a shamanic rite takes place (BF, 177-178) in the belief that “she must have known God” (BF, 176), Naomi's imagination is more like that of a poet who draws inspiration from the natural world-“the sky”-and from literary reading. During a walk to Namsan, Hanna recites a poem by “Yun Dongju” (BF, 181), a poet who became a symbol of resistance against Japanese imperialism in Korea in the early 20th century. Here, J.-M. G. Le Clézio refers to the poem “La nuit où je compte les étoiles” (The night when I count the stars) from his collection Ciel, vent, étoiles et poèmes [Sky, Wind, Stars and Poems] (1948). This collection of poems, completed in 1941, would not see the light of day until 1948, after its author's death in prison in 1945. For two years, he was detained for ideological crime in Fukuoka Penitentiary: he wrote only in Korean during the period of Japanese occupation in Korea (Yun Dongju Museum 윤동주문학관). Naomi believes that this poet would have seen the world she sees: the dragons in the sky, “[t]he one who wrote the poems saw them, I'm sure” (BF, 183), she says. Seoul is a city where the sensitivity of Bitna's character is revealed. Whether it is Mr. Cho on the roof of a popular building, or Naomi, not far from Mr. Cho, in Namsan, with Hanna, these people shine in the Leclézian world: they are Bitna-under the sky of Seoul.

​​ 

Hyeli Kim

Translated by Mary Vogl

(2023)

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

« Section 01. Population », Seoul Statistical Series, The Seoul Institute : http://global.si.re.kr/seoul_statistical_series ; « Seoul Infographics », n° 251, The Seoul Institute, le 15 janvier 2018 : https://www.si.re.kr/node/58681 ; « Topography », The Seoul Research Data Service, 2013 : http://data.si.re.kr/node/49 ; « Urbanisation et transformation », Portail de l’urbanisme de Séoul, Ville de Séoul : http://urban.seoul.go.kr/4DUPIS/sub2/sub2_1.jsp ;CAILLAT François, DE GAUDEMAR Antoine, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio entre les mondes, Paris, Édition vidéo France Télévisions Distribution, France 5, « Empreintes », 2009 ; OH Bobae, « Présentation d’une conférence de J.-M. G. Le Clézio à Séoul », in SALLES Marina, LOHKA Eileen (dir.), Voix de femmes, Les Cahiers J.-M. G. Le Clézio¸ n° 6, Paris, Complicités, 2013, p. 127-128 ; LE CLÉZIO Jean-Marie Gustave, « J.M. G. Le Clézio : Dans la forêt des paradoxes », La Fondation Nobel, le 07 décembre 2008 : https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/clezio-lecture_fr-3.pdf ; Lecture des Sciences humaines de Kyobo et entretien avec J.-M. G. Le Clézio et Hwang Suk-Young sur « Cinq histoires sur Séoul », organisés par La Fondation Daesan et KyoboMoongo, le 12 mars 2018, Séoul (« 2018년 교보인문한석강 특별 초청 대담회 : 르 클레지오·황석영 특별대담», 대산문화재단, 교보문고, 교보생명 주최, 2018년 3월 12일 월요일 저녁 7시 30분, 광화문 교보빌딩 23층 교보컨벤션홀) : http://www.kyobobook.co.kr/culture/cultureClassicDetail.laf?serviceGb=KHU&serviceCd=44&orderClick=zbu ; SHIN Hyoryeong, « Le Clézio “c’est un évènement important que j’ai écrit un roman sur ‘Séoul’” », Newsis, le 14 décembre 2017, (신효령, « 르 클레지오 “’서울’을 소설로 쓴건 내 인생 중요한 사건” », 뉴시스, 2017년 12월 14일) : https://newsis.com/view/?id=NISX20171214_0000176629&cID=10701&pID=10700 ; ZWEIG Stefan, La Pitié dangereuse, Paris, Grasset & Fasquelle, « Les Cahiers Rouges », 2002 ; YUN Dongju, Ciel, vent, étoiles et poèmes, trad. par KIM Hyeon-ju, MESINI Pierre, Marseille, Autres temps, « Temps poétique », 1997 (version originale, YUN Dongju, Ciel, vent, étoiles et poèmes, Séoul, Sowadari, 2016 (윤동주,『하늘과 바람과 별과 시』, 서울, 소와다리, 2016 (1948))) ; Musée de Yun Dongju, 윤동주문학관, Jongro-gu, Séoul : https://www.jfac.or.kr/site/main/content/yoondj01.

Les références en ligne ont été consultées le 11 avril 2020.

 

Works by J.-M. G. Le Clézio cited in this article

 

MM : Les Musées sont des mondes, Paris, Gallimard/Musée du Louvre Éditions, 2011.

HP : Histoire du pied et autres histoires, Paris, Gallimard, « Blanche », 2011

TDN : Tempête. Deux novellas, Paris, Gallimard, « Blanche », 2014.

BC : Bitna-sous le ciel de Séoul, Séoul, Séoul Collection, 2017 (J. M. G. 르 클레지오, 『빛나 서울 하늘 아래 』, 송기정 옮김, 서울, 서울컬렉션, 2017))

BF : Bitna-sous le ciel de Séoul, Paris, Stock, « La Bleue », 2018.

 

Chiapas State lies in the South-East of Mexico on the high central plateau of Sierra Madre del Sur, north of the river Usumacinta, east of Oaxaca State, south of Tabasco State and of the Yucatan peninsular and west of Guatemala. At the south it is bordered by the Pacific Ocean. Enjoying a tropical climate and sharing ​​ a coastline, valleys, mountains and tropical forest, this region displays an extraordinary biodiversity (Rosier, 2008, 224). The capital of Chiapas is Tuxtla Gutierrez.

 

  According to the most recent census conducted by the National Mexican Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) in 2010, the State has 4 796 580 inhabitants per 73 289 kilometers. As an area of high ethnic diversity, it comprises twelve groups of Amerindians: the Tzeltal 37.9 %, the Tzotzil 34%, the Chol 16%, the Zoque 4.5 % ​​ and the Tojolabal 4.5%. The rest of the native population (2.6 %) is composed of the groups, Lacandon, Kanjobel, Mame, Chuj, Jacalteco, Katchikel and Mocho. The State has numerous natural resources at its disposal: it provides 35% of the national production, 50% of natural gas, 55% of the hydroelectric energy of the country and almost 30% of Mexican oil, yet it is the poorest State of Mexico. Its economy also relies on agricultural products-coffee, cocoa, maize, bananas, mangoes, sugar and spices – whose profits all go to the large property owners who exploit the indigenous workforce.

 

As a center of resistance, the region has witnessed numerous rebellions, including that in 1712 of the Tzendales from the village of Cancuc. In Le Rêve mexicain ,Le Clézio refers to this particular event when he describes resistance movements whose principal aim is ‘the rejection of the Spanish ​​ clergy’ (RM, 184).

 

However, the most memorable uprising was that of the Zapista Army of National Liberation (E.Z.L.N.) led by Rafael Sebastian Guillen known as ‘deputy Marcos’. The rebellion broke out symbolically on January 1st 1994, the date when the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States ​​ and Mexico (ALENA)came into force. It was signed in the village of San Andres Larrainzar. This agreement created amongst the Chiapanec peasants an unprecedented crisis(Collier, 2005, 207-208):the Zapatistas ​​ demanded the  ​​​​ cultivable land, the recognition of indigenous cultures, the right to democracy and justice and they let their cry of ‘Ya Bista’ ​​ (that’s enough’) resound throughout the entire world (Mentius, 2006, 108), The uprising was brutally crushed by the military onslaught of the Mexican government.

 

It is impossible to speak about the history of the Chiapas resistance without mentioning Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) who was appointed first bishop of the State in 1545. His struggle against “l’encomienda”, a system reducing Amerindians to slaves (Higgins, 2004, 36) as well his writings and debates notably his “Contreverse de Valladolid” (1550-1551), question the legitimacy of colonialism. In La Fête chantée, J.M.G. Le Clézio mentions ​​ this ​​ ‘famous argument between Bartolomé de Las Casas et Juan Ginés de Sepulvarda about the ‘slave-like nature’ of ​​ Amérindians’ ​​ (FC, 165). Le Clézio views this Spanish bishop as one of the ‘founding fathers of the new Mexican civilisation’ (FC, 158) and reminds us on several occasions of the part he played in the condemnation of the cruelty of the Spanish conquerors. He also stresses the importance of the Bishop’s text Brévissime. Relacion de la descruction de las Indias, published in 1522 and translated into several languages. The book had a key role in denouncing throughout Europe the legend of the Spanish conquest, -‘a legend of rape, murder and despoliation’ (FC, 159).In honour of his memory, the city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, the cultural capital of the country, is named after him.

 

The other well-known personality in the struggle against colonialism was Belisario Dominguez, a doctor and senator from Chiapas . In Le Livre des fuites  ​​​​ Le Clézio introduces this militant in the following manner: ‘Belisano Dominguez was a deputy. To wreck vengeance on him, Victoriano Huerta made him a prisoner. Then he tore out his tongue ( L F, 279). Indeed, in 1913 ​​ the politician, Belisario Dominguez, had condemned Huerta’s crimes in his speeches which, judged ​​ politically subversive, ​​ were turned down by the president. He therefore decided to print and distribute them widely, an act which led to his assassination.

 

The references to Chiapas in Le Clézio’s work are all associated with a ​​ condemnation of the ​​ intrusion ​​ of foreigners into the lives of the Amerindians. The writer’s own aquaintance with this region goes back as far as 1968, the year of his discovery of Mexico. This encounter is so memorable (Mayer, 1998, 36) that the name, Chiapas, figures in most of Le Clézio’s texts belonging to the Mexican cycle. These include Le Livre des fuites (1969),L’inconnu sur la terre (1978), Le Rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue((1988), La Fête chantée et autres essais du (de)thème amérindien (1997) ​​ and Ourania(2006). Amongst these works, Le Livre des fuites published shortly after Le Clézio’s discovery of Chiapas, is the text most heavily influenced by Amerindian culture. The final chapter of the novel describes the arrival of Hogan at the little village of Belisaro Dominguez in Chiapas. Initially, the peaceful atmosphere of the village creates an impression of euphoria, one however that is later dispelled when Hogan realises that this ‘abominable peace’is the outcome of a disease that renders people blind. He discovers later that, in spite of this disease being transmitted by mosquitoes on the coffee plantations, the owners refrain from spraying the plantations with DDT, as that would ‘ make the crop more expensive for them’ (LF, 281) In the moving description of the state in which the population found itself, ​​ Le Clézio denounces their cruel exploitation as one of the outcomes of the intrusion of the conquerors. The invasion of the mosquitoes, rendering the Amerindians in a similar state of dead and alive, can be compared to that of the colonialists who have deprived them of their freedom: ‘Their opaque eyes are closed on the war, leaving room for a peace which is insane, a peace that is worse than war. A calm suffering bears down with all its weight on the village. It is a strangled cry suppressed within the body and all the more devastating’ (LF, 24).

 

The silence reigning over the village recalls Le Clézio’s lament in ​​ Le Rêve mexicain ​​ (RM, 212-213) : ‘ it is without doubt one of the greatest dramas of humanity’ (RM, 212-218) ​​ as it ​​ the deprives ​​ the Amerindian of the ​​ ‘right to think’ (RM, 212-218). It is for this reason and also to illustrate ​​ that it is a question of a ‘clash of ideas and cultures’ rather than ​​ just of ‘peoples and races’ (RM, 190) that Le Clézio chose the State of Chiapas ‘(RM, 190) .Indeed, one of the causes for ​​ this deep division between ​​ the materialistic culture of the colonialists and the ‘primitive culture’ of the Amerindians ​​ lies in ​​ their ​​ very different approaches to the religious question: ​​ for the Tzendales of Chiapas, religion ‘is never divorced from the real world as it gives expression to the identity of a clan, of a tribe’ (RM,181). Similarly, ‘the priest is more than an intermediary, he is himself a god’ (RM,183). This explains why ‘most of the rebellions, especially in Chiapas, are led by spiritual leaders who are opposed to the Christianity of the Spanish and preach the return of ancestral traditions’ (RM, 182). The violent rebellion of Lacondas provides an example (RM, 182).

 

Reading the descriptions of Palenque, the impressive Mayan city, would ​​ make it difficult not to dream. Its construction may go back to the year 100 before J.-C., but most of the monuments, the most famous being ​​ the Palais royal and the ​​ Temple des Inscriptions, were constructed between ​​ 600 and 700 AD., that is, during ​​ the reign of the famous king K’inich Janaab’ Pakal (Kops, 2008, 8). The word Palenque is the Spanish equivalent of Otolum (‘Land of sturdy houses’), the name given by the Chol Mayas to the city. Lying at the heart of the tropical forest and enjoying a special atmosphere, the site attracts many travellers to Chiapas. ​​ Le Clézio views it as ‘one of the most prestigious sites in the world’ (OU, 280). In L’inconnu sur la terre, he sings the beauty of temple ruins by offering us a beautiful description of the site. However, the passage reminds us of an absence, that of one of the most prodigious civilizations of humanity: ‘The temples deserted by men and the gods are now the home of insects.’ (IT,177).

 

 

Maryam Sheibanian

Translated by Bronwen Martin

(2023)

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

COLLIER, George et al., Land and the zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Oakland, Food First Books, 2005 ; CORTANZE, Gérard (de), Le Clézio Vérité et Légendes, Paris, Éditions du Chêne, 1999 ; HIGGINS, Nicholas, Understanding the Chiapas rebellion, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004 ; Institut National de la Statistique et de la Géographie (INEGI), « Perspectiva Estadistica Chiapas », 2011, URL : http://www.inegi.org.mx/est/contenidos/espanol/sistemas/perspectivas/perspectiva-chs.pdf, consulté le 15 décembre 2015 ; KOPS, Deborah, Palenque, Minneapolis, Twenty-First Century Books, 2008 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.-M.G., Le Livre des fuites, Paris, Gallimard, 1969 ; L’Inconnu sur la terre, Paris, Gallimard, 1978 ; Le Rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue, Paris, Gallimard, 1988 ; La Fête chantée et autres essais du thème amérindien, Paris, Gallimard, 1997 ; Ourania, Paris, Gallimard, 2006 ; MAYER, Jean, « L’initiation mexicaine », Le Magazine littéraire, numéro 362, février 1998, pp. 36-39 ; Le Service international pour la paix (SIPAZ), « Chiapas en données », URL : http://www.sipaz.org/populations-autochtones/?lang=fr, consulté le 15 décembre 2015 ; MENTINIS, Mihalis, Zapatista the Chiapas Revolt and what it means for radical politics, London, Pluto Press, 2006 ; ROSIER, Karine,« Exploitation et conservation des milieux forestiers du Chiapas (Mexique) », Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer [En ligne], 218, Avril-Juin 2002, p. 223-248, mis en ligne le 13 février 2008, URL : http://com.revues.org/1113, consulté le 3 janvier 2016.

 

Adam Pollo is the protagonist of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio’s first published work entitled Le Procès-verbal (1963). After receiving the Prix Renaudot, this novel attracted the attention of critics, especially because of the particularities of its protagonist who differs in many respects from a traditional character in a novel, in addition to other reasons. ​​ Indeed, the richness of multiple sources of inspiration with which this character is impregnated in its construction, places this novel at the crossroads of genres such as the detective novel, the New Novel, the postmodern novel, the existential novel, the surrealist novel, etc. ​​ Adam Pollo is at the center of various readings that stem from the novel. ​​ He also weaves rich intertextual relationships through biblical references such as Adam, the first man, and by echoing romantic characters such as Meursault (Salles, 2006, 258), Roquentin (Léger, 2004, 977-103) or Robinson Crusoe, or even through references to myths like the Greek god Apollo. ​​ He is the sole axis of the unfolding of the story, which is in reality a sequence of scenes from his life, both inside and outside. ​​ The novel recounts his thoughts, his dreams, his gestures, and his relationships with others, in short, his way of being. ​​ He invites the reader to accompany the protagonist in his “process of ‘overconsciousness’” which may also be at the origin of his alienation (EM, 95). ​​ Fleeing all responsibility, Adam revolts against civilization and its plagues. ​​ He embodies a marginal being, “a-social, unpredictable, contingent, without status and without a future” (Onimus, 1994, 131). ​​ After throwing his motorcycle into the sea to pretend he is dead, he leaves the family home and isolates himself in an abandoned house on a hill, far from the urban space of a coastal town in the south of France. ​​ The Interrogation reflects, like a “puzzle novel,” this slice of Adam’s life: between his escape and his transfer to the psychiatric hospital.

 

The first distinction of this character comes down to the disproportionate nature of his constituent components. ​​ In this sense, the indications concerning his physical representation are very limited. ​​ In this respect, the reader is only entitled to a brief description of Adam’s appearance at the beginning of the novel: “he was a huge boy, a little hunched over […] He looked like a beggar […] He was dressed only in worn-out beige canvas trousers, soiled with sweat, the legs of which he had folded up to the height of his knees” (PV, 15). ​​ It is only in the next-to-last chapter of the work that the author devotes another paragraph to corporeal details, namely the face, hair, shoulders, chest and hands (PV, 230). ​​ The reader is also deprived of any identity markers related to the past, professional, or family situation of the character. ​​ He cannot even know if Adam “came out of an asylum or the army” (PV, 57). ​​ This restricted information is indicative of a lack of realism often expected by readers and thus evokes characters from the New Novel. ​​ The realistic aspect is in fact already disturbed in the beginning through the usage of the initial (narrative) strategy specific to fairy tales: “Once upon a time, during the heat wave, a guy was sitting in front of an open window” (PV, 15). ​​ 

 

On the other hand, an important place is reserved throughout the story for the representation of Adam’s subjectivity. ​​ The latter’s permanent nonchalance and inaction foster a deliberate concentration on his interiority. ​​ Adam is used to spending time in silence and indifference, watching people or contemplating nature: “Adam Pollo’s life was that. ​​ At night, light the candles at the back of the room, and stand in front of the open windows […] Wait a long time, without moving […] for the first flights of moths to arrive […]; then, lie down on the ground, covered in blankets, and watch, with fixed eyes, the hasty swarming of the insects” (PV, 22). ​​ Adam’s passivity robs him of all the allure of a hero. ​​ Other characteristics are also added, including violence, making him more like an anti-hero. ​​ Mistreating animals in the zoo (PV, 87), recklessly uprooting a rosebush (PV, 115), attempting to rape Michèle (PV, 42), cruelly slaughtering a rat with a billiard ball (PV, 124) and damaging the stalk of a bamboo tree are just a few of his violent acts. ​​ Having placed himself on the margins of society, Adam survives by stealing from supermarkets or by getting help from Michèle with whom he has ambiguous relations.  ​​​​ 

 

Another specificity of the protagonist from The Interrogation, which recalls postmodern literary characters, is his enigmatic and paradoxical nature. ​​ This aspect always creates “a double track” for the reader (Roussel-Gillet, 2011, 108). ​​ Thus, Adam has no desire to communicate with others. ​​ He even imagines the various methods he could have used to avoid having to speak, instead of retreating to the abandoned house: buying a parrot to let it speak for him, disguising himself as a blind mind, in this way “others would not dare approach him” (PV, 110); or selling lottery tickets to prevent “anyone from talking to him while shouting regularly…Come try your luck!” (PV, 110). Instead, he surprises the reader by harassing strangers and inviting them to talk: “Learn to talk. ​​ Try it too. ​​ Even if you have nothing to say. […] Come on, talk right and left. ​​ Spread the good word” (PV, 247). ​​ He also writes letters to Michèle which he never sends to her, or he dreams of traveling and making “a friend in every city” to return to those cities on days when it is impossible to meet those friends (PV, 134). ​​ In another chapter, Adam sadistically kills a rat, but cries when he throws it out the window at the bottom of a thorn bush (PV, 125). ​​ Later, in a letter addressed to Michèle, he describes the corpse of a rat torn to pieces without having the slightest memory of the torments he had subjected it to (PV, 126). ​​ Similarly, after having attempted to rape Michèle, he “gives her [his] raincoat” (PV, 43), while on several occasions he asks her to reimburse the value of the latter (PV, 221, 222). ​​ As the diary entry announces, Adam is recognized as a mentally ill schizophrenic “maniac” (PV, 256). ​​ The doctor’s diagnosis confirms this: “systematized paranoid delirium, predilection for hypochondria, megalomania (sometimes reversing into micromania), persecution mania” (PV, 287). Yet during his conversations with Michèle, but also when he tries to answer questions from interns at the psychiatric hospital, he often makes philosophical remarks that intrigue others. ​​ These comments even seem to fascinate Julienne, one of the interns, who takes him seriously unlike her colleagues. ​​ In the scene of the massacre of the rat, establishing “an air of kinship” with it, Adam finally “transforms into a white rat” (PV, 118), and yet at the same time he is its murderer. ​​ The “phenomenon of human-animal reversal” (Amar, 2004, 124) happens frequently to Adam. ​​ This duality within him is especially noteworthy in his way of living between man and animal: ​​ “He, Adam, was well and truly lost; not being a dog (not yet, perhaps) he could not find himself through all these annotations placed flat on the road, these smells […] And being no longer human, in any case, never again, he passed without seeing anything in the very center of the city, and nothing no longer said anything anymore” (PV, 102).

 

Animality is one of the properties of Adam Pollo. ​​ It is a way for him to experience otherness and to experience another way of being. ​​ Adam thus follows for hours “a dog alone” in its wanderings, while imitating its behavior. ​​ The imitation of the barking of the dog, that of the moans of the rat or the movements of the animals in the zoological garden point in the same direction. ​​ The desire to identify with animals indeed stems from a contempt of the absurd life of men trapped in the everydayness of modern life, “a life of slaves in a world of slaves” (Lhoste, 1971, 30). ​​ To escape this life, Adam opens up to other forms of existence. ​​ His means of achieving these (states) are hyperesthetic presence in nature and material ecstasy (Salles, 2007, 233-234), because “the path of certainties is that of material ecstasy” (PV, 204). ​​ His experiences of ecstasy are numerous and significant. ​​ This is evidenced by Adam’s union with the “rock world,” the “lion,” “the mosses and lichens,” the “mineral gel,” etc. ​​ It is no longer reason that guides Adam, but his senses, for “sensory knowledge alone is the measure of life” (PV, 36). ​​ “Proud of not having much human anymore” (PV, 22), Adam is aware of his existential status and wishes to reach the pure state of life, “being of being.” ​​ This singular experience is realized beyond spatio-temporal limits, in an absolute “simultaneity” resulting from the “total annihilation of time” (PV, 203). ​​ Adam becomes what he perceives through his senses: “Through the force of seeing the world, the world was completely taken out of his eyes; things were so seen, felt, smelled […] that he had become like a faceted mirror (PV, 91). ​​ This game of “multiplication” and “identification” helps him to “annihilate himself” to become another (PV, 205). ​​ To place oneself in an “antehumanist” (Chung, 2001, 246) and “sympoetic” spirit within the universe, to discover its ontological truth is indeed the project that Adam proposes to modern man through the reading experience.  ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​​​ ​​ 

Maryam Sheibanian

Translated by Keith Moser

(2023)

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

AMAR, Ruth, Les Structures de la solitude dans l’œuvre de J.M.G. Le Clézio, Paris, Publisud, 2004; CHUNG, Ook, Le Clézio, Une écriture prophétique, Paris, Imago, 2001; LE CLÉZIO, Jean-Marie Gustave, Le Procès-verbal, Paris, Gallimard, 1963; L’Extase matérielle, Paris, Gallimard, 1967; LHOSTE, Pierre, Conversations avec J.M.G. Le Clézio, Paris, Mercure de France, 1971; LÉGER, Thierry, « La Nausée en procès ou l’intertextualité sartrienne chez Le Clézio », in Sophie JOLLIN-BERTOCCHI et Bruno THIBAULT (dir.), Lectures d’une œuvre: J.-.M.G. Le Clézio, Nantes, Éditions du temps, 2004, p. 95-103; ONIMUS, Jean, Pour lire Le Clézio, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1994; ROUSSEL-GILLET, Isabelle, J.M.G. Le Clézio écrivain de l’incertitude, Paris, Ellipses, 2011; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio notre contemporain, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006; Le Clézio Peintre de la vie moderne, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007.

 

Geography of the Archipelago

 

 The Chagos archipelago, the main island being Diego Garcia, is located at the heart of the Indian Ocean, half-way between Africa and Indonesia, 7° south of the equator and 500 km south of the Maldives. The archipelago, covering approximately 15,000 km2, of which only 56 km2 are firm land, consists of more than 50 islands, shoals, coral reefs and banks, grouped into 7 atolls, the most of important of which are Peros Banhos, the Salomon islands, the Great Chagos Bank – ​​ the largest on the planet – as well as the Eagle Islands, the Three Brothers, Danger Island, Nelson’s Island, the Edgmont Islands and Diego Garcia to the southeast. It is regarded as one of the richest marine ecosystems of the world with outstanding ecological values. In particular, the Chagos Conservation Trust (n.d.) describes the archipelago as “the most pristine tropical marine environment surviving on the planet”.

 

 

 

 

History of the archipelago

 

The archipelago was discovered by the Portuguese navigator, Pedro Mascarenhas, in 1512, but the islands remained unpopulated until late in the 18th century when the first plantations were established on Diego Garcia by a few French Île-de-France (now Mauritius) land owners with slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar, as well as a few free Blacks. ​​ In 1810, the British seized Mauritius, and obtained its ‘minor dependencies’ (Seychelles, Rodrigues and Chagos) by the Treaty of Paris of 1814. In 1835, Great Britain abolished slavery and the Chagossian slaves became “contract workers”. A number of Malay, Chinese and Indian indentured workers were also imported. During the 19th century a plantation society developed on Chagos, much as elsewhere in the Mascarenes, the Antilles, etc. The basic economic source was the coconut tree, either to extract coconut oil on site or to make copra. In 1880, the population of the archipelago was approximately 760 souls, the great majority being Creole. In the ensuing years, employees from Mauritius or Seychelles settled on the islands, thus increasing the local population to which they quickly assimilated. The Chagossians continued to work for the oil extraction company, many also doing some fishing, gardening or raising small livestock, but never becoming owners of their plots or their meager homes. Over two centuries, the Chagossians developed into a distinct people with its own Creole dialect (related to both Mauritian and Seychellois Creole), its own music, culinary specialties and other aspects of culture.

 

Deportation of the Chagossians

 

In 1962, the Chagos Agalega Company of Seychelles bought all of the coconut plantations of the archipelago from the Mauritian Société huilière de Diego et Peros. Three years later, after years of secret negotiations with its Mauritian colony and in contravention of the United Nations decolonization rules, the United Kingdom promised Mauritius its independence but by an ‘Order in Council’, created the British Indian Ocean Territory, which included not only the Chagos archipelago but also the Aldabra, Farquhar and Des Roches islands, then under Seychelles control. In compensation, the UK offered the sum of £3 million to the colonial government of Mauritius and a new airport for Seychelles. In 1966, again by a secret accord, the UK signed a 50-year (20-year renewable) free ‘lease’ on Diego Garcia to the United States, where they intended to build an important naval support facility. Before agreeing to the lease, the Americans insisted that the population of the whole archipelago be ‘removed’, to which the British readily agreed. As a counterpart, the Americans reduced a British contract on the purchase of Polaris missiles by £11 million. It is to be noted that between 1965 and 1968, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted three resolutions calling upon the UK government to take no actions which would dismember the Territory of Mauritius and violate its integrity.

 In 1967, the British government bought all the Chagossian plantations for the sum of £600,000. The following year, Mauritius became independent. Beginning in1968, by British decision, any Chagossian leaving the islands for medical reasons or for visiting relatives in Mauritius was refused a return passage, which de facto condemned more than 400 Îlois to exile. At the same time, the British authorities willingly restricted importation of medical and food supplies to the islands and attempted to have everyone believe that there never had been any permanent population on the islands and that the Chagossians were merely temporary contract workers.

 From 1971 to 1973, the remaining 2,000 Chagossians were forcefully loaded onto boats headed either for Mauritius or Seychelles, where they were left to fend for themselves and were obliged to live under inhuman conditions. Incapable of finding work suitable to their training, many fell prey to alcoholism, prostitution and petty crime. The British government offered the paltry sum of £650,000 to the Mauritian government to help relocate the Chagossians, but it took more than five years for them to receive the money, without the accumulated interest. In 1982, following a hunger strike and a lawsuit led by a group of Chagossians, the British government granted them the sum of £4 million in compensation for their hardship and the Mauritian government offered them land worth £1 million, but in order to obtain their share, they were forced to sign a document, written exclusively in English, which forever extinguished any possibility of their returning to the islands. Most Chagossians, being illiterate and speaking only Creole, were therefore unable to understand what they were signing. In the meantime, the Americans were developing their air-naval base on Diego Garcia. Originally dubbed ‘Footprint of freedom’ (currently named Camp Thunder Cove), where some 2,500 military personnel and contract workers (mostly from Mauritius or the Philippines, none from the Chagos) were deployed. Due to its location, the Diego Garcia base was instrumental in both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and presently represents America’s vital defense outpost for the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.

 

Chagossian and Mauritian Legal Battles

 

 Since their deportation, the Chagossians have unceasingly fought on a number of fronts to allow their return to their homeland, bringing lawsuits to British and American courts. In turn, Mauritius has lobbied and fought on several international fronts for recognition of its sovereignty over the archipelago.

​​ In 2000, the English and Welsh High Court of Justice declared that the deportation of the Chagossians during the 1970s had been illegal and that they had the right to return to their islands, with the exception of Diego Garcia. However, three years later, the same High Court reversed its decision, estimating that the Chagossians had been amply compensated for their expulsion. The same year, a lawsuit brought to the US District Court for the District of Washington by the Chagos Refugees Group (CRG) ended in favour of the United States.

 In 2002, all Chagossians born on Chagos, as well as their children, obtained British citizenship and many of them, then living in Mauritius, Réunion or Seychelles, immigrated to England, most settling in and around the town of Crawley, near Chadwick airport, south of London. It is estimated that some 5,000 Chagossians currently live in the UK.

In 2004, a new Order in Council abolished their right of return to the islands. Following an appeal by the GRC, the order was overturned by the Division Court, and later by the High Court of Justice.

In 2008, the highest judiciary instance of the country, the judicial committee of the House of Lords, overturned the High Court decision, thus theoretically ending any possible UK legal recourse for the Chagossians. That same year, the British government earmarked the sum of £40M for Chagossians in the UK, Seychelles and Mauritius. The funds were to cover support for improved access to health, education, employment and cultural conservation. The British support package also included visits to the various islands of the archipelago, however it seems very little of the promised money has actually been spent.

 In October, 2009, J.-M.G. Le Clézio wrote a public letter in Le Monde, addressed to President Obama, who had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he asked that the Chagossians be allowed “to return to their native land, to work (and why not on the military base?), and to honor their dead. It would not be an act of charity, but of justice.” (Le Clézio, 2009) (Our translation). The letter was never answered.

In 2010, the UK established a Marine Protected Area (MPA) of some 64,000km2 covering the Chagos archipelago, but excluding Diego Garcia. All fishing or exploitation of any kind within the MPA was henceforth illegal. According to a number of documents revealed by the now famous Wikileaks, the Foreign Office in London was said to have suggested to the American government that the establishment of the MPA would make the return of the Chagossians quite impossible. The Mauritian government rapidly brought a suit against the UK at the UN’s Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), contesting the legality of the MPA, based on the UN’s Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The same year, the European parliament adopted a resolution recognizing the illegality of the Chagossian deportation and proposed that the European Court of Human Rights determine the merits of the suit brought by the GRC in 2007.

In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights refused to hear the suit brought by the GRC five years earlier, invoking a number of technical legal arguments, while indicating that the Chagossians had already been amply compensated for their troubles. During the same year, an international petition launched by the GRC on the American White House We the People website, pleading the Chagossians’ cause, gathered more than 28,000 signatures. Nevertheless, the White House replied that it was powerless to act and that the UK had sole authority on the Archipelago, including Diego Garcia.

In 2013, the British High Court ruled favorably on the legality of the MPA. That same year, Le Clézio wrote a second article, published in Libération, deploring the Court of Human Rights’ ruling: “In truth, however iniquitous it may be, the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling was predictable. It demonstrates the fragility of international forums in matters of justice. When it has to pronounce itself on litigious questions, the European Court behaves much like an ordinary tribunal, taking refuge behind a procedural code and arguing about inadmissible judicial elements, as it would in a simple litigation between individuals. In so doing, it is not in contradiction with the spirit of the law, but it is totally so with the spirit of human rights […] The European Court of Human Rights has rendered its decision, in the indifference on the part of the world’s powers. What matters a handful of Ilois, small farmers, fishermen casting their lines in the lagoon, when strategic and military interests are at stake, and that these faraway islands, lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean, can be transformed at low cost into one of the most operational bases in the world…” (Le Clézio, 2013) (Our translation)

In 2015, the PCA unanimously ruled that the MPA over the Chagos Archipelago had been created in violation of international law under the UNCLOS. However, the PCA ruling did not address the question of sovereignty over the archipelago.

Also in 2015, Olivier Bancoult, leader of the GRC, launched an appeal to the Supreme Court contesting the House of Lords’ 2008 decision, which the Court accepted to hear. The following year, the Court rejected Bancoult’s appeal.

In November 2016, the British government extended the ‘lease’ of the US military base on Diego Garcia for a further twenty years. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office declared that Chagossians would not be allowed to return “on the grounds of feasibility, defence and security interests, and costs to the British taxpayer.” However, the government renewed its promise of £40 million to the Chagossians over a ten-year period.

 In June 2017, a majority of countries at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) voted to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to give an advisory opinion on the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius before its independence in the 1960s.

In February 2019, the ICJ at The Hague issued a non-binding advisory opinion rejecting the UK’s claim of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and ruling that the islands rightfully belonged to Mauritius. The ICJ further advised that all members of the UN were obligated to work toward the decolonization of Chagos. The UK took no notice. Three months later, 116 states voted at the UNGA to endorse the ICJ’s decision and called upon the UK government to transfer the archipelago to Mauritius within six months. Again, the UK insisted that both the ICJ ruling and the UNGA vote were merely advisory and non-binding. The government declared that it was still the lawful authority and that if and when it no longer needed the archipelago for its defence purposes, it would ‘cede’ the territory to Mauritius. The American reaction was that it “unequivocally supports UK sovereignty. The specific arrangement involving the facilities of Diego Garcia is grounded in the uniquely close and active defense and security partnership between the United States and the UK. It cannot be replicated. » As of November 2019, since the UK has not complied with the UNGA decision, it has been branded as an ‘illegal colonial occupier’ by Mauritius.

In May 2020, the Court of Appeals in London refused the GRC’s appeal concerning the right to return and the matter of the £40M promised to the Chagossians, arguing once again the economic non-feasibility of an eventual return to the islands and that as far as the problems concerning the distribution of the financial package, they were due to the lack of cooperation on the part of the Mauritian government as long as the matter of sovereignty over the Chagos was not resolved. Olivier Bancoult, leader of the GRC, proceeded to appeal the decision to the British Supreme Court.

In June 2020, Mauritius initiated arbitral proceedings against the Maldives at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), in order to delimit the maritime boundary between the Maldives and the Chagos archipelago.

In January 2021, ITLOS confirmed the legitimacy of Mauritius’ claim to the archipelago, calling Britain’s continuing administration of the islands unlawful and criticized its failure to hand the islands back to their rightful owner, Mauritius. The binding ITLOS decision puts both the UK and the USA in a difficult position. For the US, the decision implies that it is running a military base on territory that is illegally occupied by a state with no claims to it under international law. Furthermore, both countries, have repeatedly invoked the principle of “rule-based order” and both have severely chastised China for ignoring a recent ITLOS ruling in favor of the Philippines concerning the South China Sea, all the while ignoring the ITLOS ruling on Chagos. On the other hand, leasing Diego Garcia to the Americans also poses a problem for Mauritius, since it is signatory to the Pelindaba Treaty (African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty). If Mauritius were to become sovereign over the archipelago, including Diego Garcia, it could no longer station nuclear weapons on its territory, including those carried by foreign ships or aircraft. As well, the Mauritian ambassador to the UN has stated that when Mauritius regains sovereignty, the Chagossians would be rehabilitated to three outlying islands, at least 100 miles away from Diego Garcia, which would be contrary to most Chagossians’s wishes of returning to Diego Garcia itself.

Since October, 2020, the UN official world map indicates the Chagos Archipelao to be Mauritian territory. Also, the Universal Postal Union (UPU), a UN specialized agency for postal matters, formally recognized the Chagos Archipelago as an integral part of the territory of Mauritius. As a result, the UPU will no longer register, distribute or forward postage stamps issued by the so-called ‘British Ocean Territory.

 

The Present Situation

 

The next step in the fight over the archipelago will occur at the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the intergovernmental authority established by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in 1966 to regulate fishing in the region. Mauritius is lobbying to expel the UK from the IOTC, claiming that the BIOT does not legally exist and therefore that the UK is not Indian Ocean coastal state. The UK is undoubtedly in a difficult situation since the IOTC will be hard put to ignore the ITLOS ruling, since both are UN legal authorities.

On February 14, 2022, a small delegation of Chagossians, led by Olivier Bancoult of the GRC and by the Mauritian ambassador to the UN, landed on Peros Banhos, where it raised the Mauritian flag, thereby declaring Mauritian sovereignty over the archipelago, in defiance of UK’s territorial claims. Britain’s Foreign Office replied by stating that the UK “has no doubt as to our sovereignty over the BIOT, which we have held continuously since 1814.”

 The battle for the return of the Chagos islands to Mauritius and that of the Chagossians’ right to British citizenship as well as their right to return to their islands must not be confused. The most recent development on this front is the Nationality and Borders Bill, recently presented to the British parliament. If passed, it would allow the grand-children and great-grand-children of those Chagossians born on the islands to obtain British citizenship. Currently they are considered as clandestine.

 The stakes over the sovereignty of the Archipelago are not solely a question of justice and rights for Mauritius; they are also financial. Needless to say, when Mauritius recovers the islands, and notably Diego Garcia, the 99-year lease which it promises to sign with the Americans will provide millions of dollars annually. Furthermore, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the organism which attributes internet domain names, assigned the domain .io to a rich British businessman, involving millions of dollars, and it now belongs to Ethos Capital, an American investment firm. If Mauritius regains sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago, it would then inherit legal rights to the .io domain, as well as the huge annual profits that this address brings.

 

 

Robert Papen

Translated by the author

(2022)

Further Readings

 

Alexandre, C. et K. Koutouki. 2014. “Les déplacés du Chagos, retour sur la lutte de ces habitants pour récupérer leur terre ancestrale”, Revue québécoise de droit international, vol. 27,2 :1-26. https://doi.org/10.7021/1068021ar.

Allen, S. and C. Monaghan. 2018. Fifty years of the British Indian Ocean Territory: Legal perspectives. Cham, Switzerland, Springer International Publishing.

Benson, P. 2012. A lesser dependency. London, Alma Books.

Bruno, J.-F. 2017. “Géographies insulaires, frontiers territoriales et écologies politiques : Rodrigues et les Chagos, ces ‘étrangères’ de la nation mauricienne ”.  Nouvelles Études Francophones, vol. 32,2 : 124-139.

Bashfield, S. 2020. “Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago? Strategic implications for Diego Garcia from a UK-US perspective”. Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, vol. 16,2: 166-181.

(The) Chagos Archipelago. n.d. https://sites.google.com/site/thechagosarchipelagofacts/home.

Chagos Conservation Trust. n.d. https://chagos-trust.org/chagos/overview

Chagos Support Group. s.d. https://www.chagossupport.org.uk/chagossian-struggle-in-the-media.

Chagossian Voices. n.d. https://www.facebook.com/chagossianvoices.

Evers, S. & M. Kooy (eds.). 2011. Eviction from the Chagos Islands. Displacement and Struggle for Identity Against Two World Powers. Leiden, Brill.

(The) Guardian. 2021. UN court rejects UK claim to Chagos Islands in favour of Mauritius. January, 28, 2021.

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/28/un-court-rejects-uk-claim-to-chagos-islands-in-favour-of-mauritius

Güzul, Mehmet. 2018. “The Chagos Archipelago Case in the International Court of Justice”, Ankasam/Bölgesel Araşlirmalar Dergesi: 119-151.

 http://www.academia.edu/36823287/THE_CHAGOS_ARCHIPELAGO_CASE_IN_THE_COURT_OF_JUSTICE

Harris,P. 2021. “The case for decolonizing the Chagos Islands: A response to Bashfield”. Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, vol. 17,2: 224-229.

Jeffrey, L. 2013. Chagos Islanders in Mauritius and UK. Forced displacement and onward migration. Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Laurent, C. 2020. Rivage de la colère. Paris : Pocket.

Le Clezio, J.-M.G. « Lavez l’injustice faite aux Chagossiens », Le Monde, 17 octobre, 2009. http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2009/10/17/lavez-l-injustice-faite-aux-chagossiens-par-jean-marie-g-le-clezio_1255254_3232.html.

Le Clezio, J.-M.G. « Les Îlois contre le Royaume –Uni, suite et fin? », Libération, 14 mai, 2013. http://liberation.fr/monde/2013/05/14/les-ilois-des-chagos-contre-le-royaume-uni-et-fin_902862.

Mandrilly, A. 2006. Les Exilés de l’océan Indien (Îles Chagos). Licence en anthropologie. Université Bordeaux II. https://memoireonline.com/06/09/2155/Les-exiles-de-lOcean-Indien-Iles-Chagos.html

Patel, S. 2005. Le silence des Chagos, Paris, Éditions de l’Olivier.

Pierre S. J.-N. 2021. Absolutely Must Go. ​​ (Film documentaire sur la lute des Chagossiens). https://onetwothree.media/content/absolutely-must-go/

Thakkar, C. 2021. Overcoming the Diego Garcia stalemate. War on the Rocks, July, 2021. https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/overcoming-the-diego-garcia-stalemate/

Vine, D. 2009. Island of shame : The secret history of the US military base on Diego Garcia, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Wenban-Smith, N. and M. Carter. 2016. Chagos: A history. Exploration, exploitation, expulsion. Chagos Conservation Trust, York, UK, YPD Books.