Le Clézio’s book Diego and Frida reads as a truly beautiful tribute to Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), the Mexican painter, the soul mate of Diego Rivera; Frida Kahlo, the friend of the French Surrealists, the Marxists and the Communists who animated the socio-cultural landscape of Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1907 of a German father (Wilhelm Kahlo) and of an Indigenous Mexican mother (Mathilde Calderón), Frida enters a preparatory school in 1922 with the intent to studying medicine. From a very young age, she dreams of travelling and studying - a free and joyful life. But at the age 18, on September 17, 1925, while coming back from art school, she is hit by a tram. A metal bar breaks her body from the abdomen to the vagina. Her legs, and particularly, her vertebrae are very seriously injured. This accident marks a turning point in Frida’s life. She has to stay in bed for many months and wear a corset. Determined to offset her immobility and the tremendous pain, she starts painting. Her mother installs a mirror above her bed, and Frida begins making self-portraits, one of which is the Self-Portrait with Velvet Dress, in 1926.

In 1928, having recovered her mobility almost entirely, Frida Kahlo joins the Communist Party. It is during this same year that she meets the famous painter and muralist Diego Rivera and shows him some of her paintings. This marks the beginning of a tumultuous love story between the two. In 1929, Frida and Diego married. The following year, they move to San Francisco where Frida meets numerous artists. From then on, little by little, Frida identifies with the Yucatán tradition and with the Mexican Revolution that Le Clézio celebrates in the first pages of Diego and Frida. After much travelling between the United States and Mexico, the couple Kahlo-Rivera returns to Mexico settling into a new house in the outskirts of Mexico City, San Angel. Unfortunately, in 1930 and 1931, Frida has two miscarriages. During her recovery, she paints Henry Ford Hospital or the Flying Bed. After this period, beginning in 1934 – already exhausted from a third miscarriage – Frida finds out about the relationship between Diego and her adored sister, Cristina. Consequently, Frida decides to isolate herself. She moves into an apartment where she remains for a couple of months. She has an affair with Léon Trotsky, their guest at the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, whom Diego Rivera helped to obtain political asylum in 1937.

In September 1938, André Breton is on mission to Mexico with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He gives a series of conferences on European poetry and painting. The couple Kahlo-Rivera welcomes Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba. When meeting them, Frida claims she is not a Surrealist: “They used to take me for a Surrealist. It’s not fair. I have never painted dreams. I always represented my reality” (p. 220, my translation), she writes in her diary. In 1938 as well, Frida has a very successful exhibition at the Julien Levi Gallery in New York. In 1939, she has another exhibition at the Paris Renou & Colle Gallery. Upon her return to Mexico, Kahlo and Diego divorce. It’s during this time that she paints the famous painting The Two Fridas (1939) that symbolizes her heartbreak and the feeling of splitting in two. A year later, on December 8, 1940, Frida remarries Diego.

In 1953, Frida Kahlo’s first Mexican exhibition takes place. Yet, that same summer, she has her right leg amputated, and she dies a year later in 1954 at the age of 47. She leaves behind enormous suffering along with important paintings such as Some Small Injections (1935) or The Broken Column (1944) – a painting that displays her physical and moral suffering after Diego’s betrayal. In Diego and Frida, Le Clézio writes:

“Frida died on July 13, exactly seven days after having turned forty-seven. The day after, under pouring rain, Diego accompanied Frida in the open coffin, dressed in her beautiful white Yalalag shirt, to the Mexico Art Gallery where he wished her to be celebrated. Then, the coffin wrapped in the red frag with the Communist star and the symbol of the sickle and the hammer headed to the Dolores civic crematorium” (p. 198, my translation).

Frida Kahlo’s extraordinary life path – linked to Diego Rivera’s – testifies her infinite passion for painting. It is the painting that never stopped giving her vital energy:

“This feeble young girl, bearing the fantastic and fake appearance of a child that hasn’t grown up, is a true artist; she is inhabited like him [Diego], by a mysterious demon that animates her and pushes her to paint.” (p. 96, my translation)

​​ 

This breath of passion for life and art – perceptible in Le Clézio’s words, and in Diego’s as well – turns Frida into such a moving character: the phases of her creation process and the challenges of her illness are repeatedly overcome by her fervour and her vivid mindfulness amidst the dichotomies of the world and her own life story. Le Clézio states:

“With her reservation, with her third eye that suffering opened on her forehead, Frida knew it from the very beginning. For her, the world has always been divided in two: on the one hand, the night, on the other hand, the day, the moon and the sun, the water and the fire, the dream and the reality, the core-cell or the cave of the uterus, and the violence of the spermatozoid, the knife that kills.” (p. 209-10, my translation)

Thus, Frida Kahlo, a visionary and a warrior, stays loyal to the art that defends women and men who, at a certain moment, go through absolute suffering in solitude, in isolation. In Diego and Frida, Le Clézio presents Frida like a Madonna who incarnates feminine suffering. At the beginning of the 1940s, more and more weakened by illness, Frida leads a solitary life at the Casa Azul in Coyoacán. In fact, this retreat becomes an extension for her body, “where each stone, each piece of furniture is impregnated with melancholia and pain” (p. 233, my translation). Frida becomes the priestess of a cult “that links the whole universe” (p. 233, my translation), and at the same time, each small piece shows her endless love for Diego. Their home becomes an intimate universe where she can blend into the cosmos.

Let us remember that the 6th issue of the Cahiers Le Clézio, edited by Marina Salles and Eileen Lohka, explores the topic of the “women’s voices” in Le Clézio’s works. Among these voices, Frida Kahlo’s remains unique: the uncommon love story with Diego, her extreme suffering and isolation, her encounters with Trotsky and Breton, the American adventure and the unusual fascination for Henry Ford – all these aspects mark the uncontested role of Frida and Diego in the renewal of modern art world. In a way, we can say that Frida does not exist without Diego, just like Diego’s works and his life have no meaning without Frida. Art and revolution are their common points. “They form an indestructible and mythical couple, as perfect and contradictory as the original duality of Mexico: Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl. ” (Diego and Frida, 4th cover, my translation).

Adina Balint

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HERRERA, Hayden, Frida, biographie de Frida Kahlo, trad. Philippe Beaudoin, Paris, Librairie Générale française, coll. Le Livre de poche, 2003 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.M.G., Diego et Frida, Paris, Gallimard, 1993 ; KAHLO, Frida, Le Journal de Frida Kahlo, Paris, Éditions du Chêne, 1995 ; PRITNITZ-PODA, Helga, Frida Kahlo, trad. Josie Mély et Catherine Weinzorn, Paris, Gallimard, 2003 ; REY MIMOSO-RUIZ, Bernadette, « Diego et Frida de J.M.G. Le Clézio ou le paradoxe pour révélateur du mythe », J.M.G. Le Clézio. Dans la forêt des paradoxes, (dir. B. Thibault et K. Moser), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2012, p. 99-110 ; SALLES, Marina, « Figures et motifs du ‘musée imaginaire’ de J.M.G. Le Clézio », Le Clézio, passeur des arts et des cultures (dir. T. Léger, I. Roussel-Gillet et M. Salles), Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, p. 145-164 ; SALLES, Marina et LOHKA, Eileen, Voix de femmes, Les Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio n° 6, Paris, Éditions Complicités, 2013 ; THIBAULT, Bruno, « L’influence de quelques modèles artistiques sur l’œuvre romanesque de J.M.G. Le Clézio (Arman, Klein, Raysse, Tinguely) », Lecture d’une œuvre : Intertextualité et interculturalité chez J.M.G. Le Clézio (dir. B. Thibault et S. Bertocchi), Rennes, Éditions du Temps, 2004, p. 161-68.

Haï was commissioned in 1971 by Gaétan Picon for his series “The Paths of Creation” published by Skira. Jean-Xavier Ridon recalls how a year earlier, in 1970, Roland Barthes published L’Empire des signes in the same series. Barthes’ text presents Japan as “a system of signs” based on his own experience of the country (Ridon, 2010, 80). Haï is not a non-fictional work: the text displays photos of various objects belonging to the author, such as statuettes, calabashes and baskets, as well as prints of Indian art in contrast with advertisements of a consumerist society.

Haï recounts Le Clézio’s experience at the beginning of the seventies among the Emberas and Waunanas Native Peoples of the Darién, a remote area in the tropical Amazon forest. For the Native Peoples the world is comprised of two forces : the first is the “Haï” as the title of the book - meaning “activity, energy”; and the second “Wandra”, which means ‘”submission, domination, possession” (H, 143). However, Le Clézio “does not seek to test his anthropological approach” (Cavallero, 2005, 19). The reader gets the impression of being in the presence of a semiological treatise on the Amerindians of Panama, one that is written, however, from the personal perspective of a sympathetic writer. Marina Salles notes that Native Peoples’ traditions are not directly the inspirational source for Le Clézio’s literary texts (Salles, 2006, 292), and that they allow the author to “depart from history” (Salles, 2006, 305). Indeed, the world of the Native Peoples is already so remote from our own reality that there would be no point in inventing a story, a fictional narrative. Thus, we find ourselves in a space that is not only beyond history, but also beyond time. The author makes it clear that, independently of his intention, the structure of the book mirrors that of the “ceremony of magic healing” (H, 7). The three stages of the festival that Le Clézio names in capital letters are: Initiation “Tahu sa, the eye which sees all” (H, 9), Song “Beka, the festival of song” (H, 47), and Exorcism “Kakwahaï, exorcized body” (H, 92). Consequently, it is a book about initiation.

The most disconcerting sentence of the book, which sets the tone of what is to follow is “One day, we’ll maybe discover that there was no such thing as art, only medicine” (H, 7). The italics suggest that the word in English denotes the shamanism just as, for the Native Peoples of America, the expression “medicine man” signifies “healer”, “shaman” or “sorcerer”. The practices described in Haï, that Le Clézio presents as both scientific and natural in contrast to those of consumerist societies, include mindfulness rituals, songs and art as a mode of treatment of the body and the mind. Le Clézio goes back to these rituals and to his own experience of initiation with the shamans in La Fête chantée.

Gérard de Cortanze, in his book/anthology, entitled J.-M.G. Le Clézio, quotes two pages of Haï (p. 29-31) that speak of silence and of the magic of silence (Cortanze, 2009, 91-92). De Cortanze underlines the heavy, “dense silence” (H, 31) of the forest and of the river which contrasts with the smog of cities and with vain human chatter. At her turn, Marina Salles draws attention to the respect for freedom and to the absence of censorship that characterizes the Amerindians. She shows how Le Clézio compares the freedom of the latter with the moral rules of Western societies, particularly in regard to women (Salles, 2006, 85). Indeed, Amerindian women “possess the freedom to leave the man they no longer love, to look for a man they like, to drink the decoctions of abortifacient plants or to poison an unwanted child at birth” (H, 25).

“I do not know how it is possible, but it’s true, I am an Indian” (H, 5), writes Le Clézio.

Could this statement, written in the enthusiasm of the encounter with the Amerindian civilization, be considered excessive? Let’s remember that the child who goes to Africa in Onitsha becomes an African and that Le Clézio calls his father “the African” in the eponymous book. For Le Clézio living in a particular place and culture must necessarily have an impact on a writer who is open-minded and empathetic. He immerses himself in the place and is present to the people. Thus, he becomes an African or an Amerindian. Le Clézio adapts remarkably well to a particular lifestyle, embracing all the customs, without falling for a facile exoticism. Practices, which generally fascinate readers in love with the exotic do not particularly interest the author: as he tells us, taking mescaline, peyotl or chicha have little effect on him (H, 5). You cannot expect to gain access to a magical world by taking hallucinatory plants. What he learns from the Amerindians goes much further than a physical vision of the world and is more in tune with nature. This clearly certifies that there are some other philosophies of life, other ways of perception and of feeling and other way of being in the world. Thus, he states that “when I met these Indian peoples, it was as if I, who did not think I really had any family, had suddenly acquired millions of fathers, brothers and wives”. By this, he means that he felt included, welcomed openly and with tolerance into the large family. This rarely happens in the Western world, a world that is individualized and discriminatory. The message that Le Clézio got from the Amerindians is a message of tolerance and respect for the alterity. Later, in La Fête chantée and L’Obs (Le Nouvel Observateur), the writer will reconsider his statement of the Amerindian identity, whose limits he recognizes: “naturally, after having achieved a certain level of understanding, it became clear to me that I could not go any further” (FC, 22). Nevertheless, he insists that his encounter with three sorcerers, shamans and soothsayers together with the ritual of the festival of song “has completely changed me, altered all my views on religion, on medicine, and on that other concept of time and reality that we call art” (F, 22).

In keeping with the spirit of ‘The Paths of Creation’, Haï addresses the question of the nature of art and shows that the Amerindian perception and understanding of the world of art differs from that of the West: “Clearly there is no need for books or picture: every person is a book, is a picture” (H, 50), or “Indian music does not seek to be beautiful. It is only a sound in the concert of other voices: the call of birds, the howling of monkeys, the barking of dogs” (H, 136). Amerindians believe that everyone can express themselves artistically and that there is no elitism in art, nor any requirement for technical skills. Indeed, the function of art in Indian society is quite different from the Western one. Amerindian art has a religious goal, that of transcending the individual and of the communion: “through song Indians are perhaps the only people to have achieved the zen ideal” (H, 79). The song can be linked to magic, it bewitches, it communicates with occult forces (H, 79). The song then dies away, just as Tibetan mandalas made of sand are created to be later effaced. Amerindians accept the ephemeral nature of art. The ego does not come into play, neither does the ambition, nor the desire to be remembered, which is in contrast with the Western conception of art where. Le Clézio writes that “obligatory competition turns artists into scoundrels and swindlers who only live for glory in the hope that their name will be remembered” (H, 105). The comparison between the Amerindian and modern worlds sheds light on our societies. For Le Clézio making this kind of comparisons becomes a true obligation: “The encounter with the Indian world is not a luxury today. It has become a necessity for all those who seek to understand the modern world” (H,11). Le Clézio contrasts the mysterious, the cosmogony, the living reality, nature and the universe with the so-called progress of modernity. Amerindians are part of the universe unlike the Westerners who are detached and separate because of their languages and different productions. Amerindians sometimes regard Western languages as suspect. Le Clézio describes the gestures, the act of looking and silence, three elements that have great quality for the Emberas. The same gestures are repeated unhurriedly, and they create beauty. People look without seeking to judge, to understand or to interpret; it is the silence of the jungle that prevails. Le Clézio dislikes the sound pollution of our cities, the aggressive advertising and the superfluous words: “Once you have learnt to speak, what else is there? Learning to be silent, that’s all” (H, 34). He suggests that Western cultures are awash with so many attractions, so many enticements, so many inducements that it is impossible to escape their power. Unlike the Amerindian who “cannot be coerced, who is not subservient” (H, 34).

With Haï, Le Clézio hoped to bring to light a particular way of conceiving art that is foreign to Western civilization. Haï includes many different artistic expressions that Amerindians do not view as art but simply as life itself, and which they do not shut away in a museum. In the same way, in response to an invitation from the Louvre Museum in 2011-2012, Le Clézio assembled numerous works from all over the world for the exhibition The Museum World. His collection included ephemeral art, live art, artifacts and local crafts. Films, dance, music and shows were scheduled to take place over a period of three months. Artists coming from distant horizons and cultures, from Haïti, the Vanuatu, Mexico or Chicago were brought together as a symbol of border crossing, of transgressing hierarchies, of going beyond chronology so as to rethink the power of magic.

Isabelle Constant

Translation : Bronwen Martin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARMANET, François, ‘Entretien : Les Amérindiens et nous, par J.-M.G. Le Clézio,’ Bibliobs, 9-10-2008, https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/essais/20081009.BIB2169/les-amerindiens-et-nous-par-le-clezio.html

http://www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/medias/medias_fichiers/fichiers/pdf/louvre-dossier-presse-clezio.pdf, ​​ (accessed 25 March 2016); BARTHES, Roland, L’Empire des signes, Genève, Skira, coll. Les sentiers de la création, 1970; CAVALLERO, Claude, ‘J.-M.G. Le Clézio ou L’Écriture transitive’, Nouvelles Études francophones, vol.20, No 2, Automne 2005, 17-20; DE CORTANZE, Gérard, J.-M. G. Le Clézio, Paris, Gallimard/Cultures France Éditions, 2009; LE CLÉZIO, J. -M. G., Haï, Flammarion, coll. ‘Champs’, 1987; La Fête chantée et autres essais de thème amérindien, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Le Promeneur, 1997; PIEN, Nicolas, Le Clézio, La quête de l’accord originel, Paris, L’ Harmattan , 2004; RIDON, Jean-Xavier, ‘L’île perdue : entre invisibilité et nostalgie’ in Le Clézio, passeur des arts et des cultures, Léger, Roussel-Gillet, Salles, dirs, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, p. 75-91; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio notre contemporain, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006.

The Giants was published in 1973 by Gallimard. There was no mention of the genre on the cover. The expression “The Giants” is found in parentheses, below the real title: the electricity symbol. This work defies standard editorial practices from the very start. It breaks again and again with literary conventions. J.M.G. Le Clézio was considered to be the inheritor of the New Novel movement during this time period, a derider of the novelistic tradition, as evidenced by the list of authors created by Jean Ricardou (1973, 10). Besides, the work was dedicated to the first emperor of China who fought against literary traditionalism.

The characteristics of a novel: characters, plot, time, are subverted. Some characters make an intermittent appearance. They do not really have an identity, just a gender, a very vague age and they are designated by generic terms: ”the young girl Tranquility” (who had to lose a “l’” because she remains flat on the ground), her friend, Machines, who is a cart pusher at the supermarket and the “little boy nicknamed Bogo the Mute”. At the end of the work, the didactic fiction linking author and reader disappears: Tranquility, Machines, and Bogo lose what little identity they have (Ge, 307-309). Other characters appear throughout the work but in, at times, recurrent mini-stories.

Bogo’s observation of the young girls at the beginning (Ge, 41-42), is taken up again in an almost identical fashion at the end (Ge, 295-296). In the first version, “He sees the girls moving towards him on the beach, twisting their feet”. In the second version, “Screwing up his eyes, he sees the girls approaching on the beach, twisting their feet a little on the pebbles.” The boats on which they drift out to sea are almost identical. The end of the second version is even more surprising with the proliferation of these resemblances. After the first detonation, “We hear another detonation, but this one is stronger, which makes a funny double sound, when the young blond-headed girl squeezed the trigger of the LR 22 pistol against the heart of the young brown headed girl ​​ Who (which) kills her”(Ge 296). Their fate is deliberately ambiguous. Who kills who? The conclusion snubs the reader’s expectations, eschews the traditional structure of a story, and plays syntactical games based on the blurring of anaphoric mechanisms.

Other mini-stories throw the reader off balance as well. This is the case with the Brazil Nut Story that starts with “Once upon a time, in Puerto Maldonado […]” (Ge, 310). We are anticipating after the beginning a marvelous tale. There is nothing of the kind. Opening with the magic formula of a tale, the story degenerates into a critique of civilization, becomes a mise en abyme of the work itself and makes a mockery out of literary norms. ​​ 

As for the place from which Tranquility, Machines, and Bogo emanate, it is both the main theme and the main character : a gigantic supermarket. From the very first pages, Western, liberal, consumer society is designated through its logos, admitting in specialized texts its goal: that of erasing consciousness in order to sell as much as possible. Hyperpolis, a product of and a metaphor for the “Giants “ and the “Masters of Language” (Ge, 310), destroys individuality, transforms horizontality into verticality, the ceiling to an abyss, the light into night. (In the novel), time is cyclical.

There is no plot or conclusion to the story. The end of the text, comprised of pages of advertisements, returns to the beginning. ​​ All of the temporal metaphors that are developed borrow from the great myths. ​​ One thinks of Daedalus: “Those who conceived this trap did it well, so that we cannot escape” (Ge, 49). Sisyphus makes an appearance as well in the unremitting condemnation to perform the same activity for all of eternity: walk, put away carts. But, Hyperpolis most closely resembles time, Chronos, conjured as a “bloody mouth of a cannibal, who was devouring the crowd […]” (Ge, 53).

These are the “Masters of Language”, these ”Giants”, against which the narrative voice of the work protests. It’s about a furious presence that decries, denounces, and condemns. A fictitious author, whose distance from the real author is hazy, addresses a fictitious reader: “I am going to tell you: I see a lot of women and a lot of men, in the light of day all of the time, and they are deaf mutes. ​​ As for me, I still hear a few whisperings” (Ge, 19). He cannot rival the prophets to whom this absolute revelation has been accorded. However, like Jeremiah cited in War, he sees the earth from a sidereal distance and his speech is comprised of condemnations, reproaches supported by interrogations, exclamations, and anaphoras: “Free yourself. ​​ Free yourself. ​​ Kill with your simple glance the men who are the masters of the gaze […]” (Ge, 33). And coming back to the leitmotif: “We have to burn down Hyperpolis.”

Marina Salles discusses “the mise en abyme of the act of writing, which Gérard Genette calls ‘the metalepsis of the author’: ‘a transgression by which he inserts himself into the fiction as a figure of his creative ability’ […]” (2006, 285-286), to be more precise as a figure of his prophetic power that announces a new era. In order to thwart the “Masters of language”, the author must summon the reader to explore other modes of thought by means of a proliferation of references to other texts, transtextuality.

From the first pages, the vocabulary of The Giants is cynical and unforgiving, but the organization is such that its effects are cancelled out, its diversions are evident: superpositions, the accumulation of logos, sales theories, borrowing their “montage” from surrealist collages. ​​ Writing makes way for the plastic arts.

The epigraphs are often borrowed from ancient civilizations unless it is a question of the ultramodern language of the sciences. ​​ The scientific explanation of the illusion of the blue of the sky is placed next to the Sanskrit “Maya” meaning illusion (Ge, 122). Ideograms, comic books or sayings from Buddha (Ge, 99), this transtextuality fights against the language of the Masters by interrogating all times and places. This leads to an over examination of the text: the computer language Michigan Algorithm Decoder (Ge, 172) is designated by the acronym MAD, “crazy” in English; so the system finds itself stigmatized and the possible interpretations are multiplied. ​​ The work is teeming with utterances to be decoded that far exceed the reader’s capacities. For that matter, the number of hapaxes due to this transtextuality renders it impossible to do a lexicometric analysis, as Kastberg Sjöblom indicates, (we are) forced to give up on The Giants.

The work compels us to tear ourselves away from hypnotic meandering in favor of the unsteadiness of the difficult, unstable spiritual quest. ​​ It is words that make up reality but reality is never definite. Against the invasive language of slogans, from wherever they come, the injunction holds « We must write, think and act through riddles […] » (Ge, 320). An analogy is created between the influence of consumerism and that of the novelistic tradition. We must destroy and break these deceptive mirrors. ​​ Is this possible without feeling the anguish of being lost? “But if we break these windows, if I break my windows […] If I do that: what if it is me who ultimately collapses […]?” (Ge, 22). Les Géants portrays both a call to subversion and a longing for form.

 ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​​​ Michelle Labbé

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

LE CLĖZIO, J.-M.G., Les Géants, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Le Chemin », 1973 ; The Giants (Translation Simon TAYLOR), London, Vintage Books, 2008 ; GENETTE, Gérard, Métalepse, Paris, Seuil, coll. « Poétique », 2004, p. 27 (cité par Marina Salles, note 47) ; KASTBERG-SJÖBLOM, Margareta, L’Ėcriture de J.-M.G. Le Clézio, une approche lexicométrique, Université de Nice, Thèse 2002, p. 29. www.revuetexto.net>Kastberg_LeClézio.htlm, consulté le 6 octobre 2016 ; RICARDOU, Jean, Le Nouveau Roman, Paris, Le Seuil, coll. « Ėcrivains de toujours », 1973, p.10 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio dans le « champ littéraire » in Le Clézio, notre contemporain, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006, <http://www.books.openedition.org/pur/34796> consulté le 6 octobre 2016 ; WALKER, David, « Du détail au totalitarisme : variations sur le commerce conquérant chez Le Clézio » in THIBAULT, Bruno et MOSER, Keith (dirs), J.-M.G. Le Clézio, Dans la forêt des paradoxes, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2012, p. 111-123.

The third in the Mauritian cycle after Le Chercheur d’or* and La Quarantaine*, the novel Revolutions (2003) encapsulates many of the central features of Le Clézio’s writing. As a polyphonic text covering whole centuries and continents, it calls into play an immense variety of narrative voices, of interwoven stories and of modes of narration: ​​ letters, ships’ logs, personal stories, diaries and official reports. Le Clézio’s writing is characterized by the use of ordinary language, illuminated at intervals by passages of a more literary nature.

In a novel divided into seven parts, the quest of the principal protagonist, Jean Marro, an adolescent during the Algerian War, intersects with the epic account of his ancestor, Jean Eudes Marro, a soldier in the French Revolutionary Army. The two trajectories are structured around the motifs of a journey and of departure. Jean Marro, the fictional double of the author, is presented from the outset as a solitary being, suffocating within his family and within the claustrophobic atmosphere of Nice. As a child, he visits his Aunt Catherine whose oral accounts of her childhood at Rozilis nourish his dreams of travel and trigger a quest for his lost roots. At the age of sixteen, he is awakened to historic reality, to the violence of the Algerian War, to racism and to sexuality. It is during this period that he discovers pre-Socratic thought and this will mark an important stage in his quest for identity.

In this search for reality and for a promised land and in flight from an Algerian War in which he is not directly involved, Jean leaves France to study medicine in London. Here he encounters a xenophobic population engulfed in violent conflicts between the different communities. In the Elephant and Castle district, he comes up against the extreme poverty of the lives of the immigrants. Keen on widening this exploration of the real, he settles in Mexico in 1968, the year of the student revolution. Here he discovers Amerindian thought and is alerted to the cultural and economic oppression suffered by the indigenous population. After the brutal attack by the police on the students at Tatlelolco, he leaves Mexico. His final journey with his wife, Mariam, takes him to the island of Mauritius where he visits the sites of his ancestors and uncovers the secret of Rozilis and of his origins. The clausula suggests the departure of the couple for another territory and the promise of a child.

This journey of discovery by Jean Marro alternates with the embedded narrative of Jean Eudes Marro. At the age of eighteen, the narrator enlists as a volunteer in the Breton regiment and, after taking part in the Battle of Valmy, he returns to Brittany to find the region plunged in dire poverty and in the grip of terror. Disillusioned with the revolutionary cause, Jean Eudes embarks in 1798 for the Isle de France in the hope of beginning a new life. Confronted with a racist society where the slaves are reduced to the state of animals, he leaves the capital Port-Louis in 1824 to settle in the interior of the island where he establishes the plantation of Rozilis, a kind of solitary retreat governed by the ideals of the French Revolution. The second story entitled ​​ “Kilwa”, in which the slave Kiambé recounts her initial rape in Mozambique, her voyage to Mauritius, her bondage, her period as a fugitive, and finally her emancipation is a very concrete illustration of the horrors of the slave system against which Jean Eudes Marro is fighting and whose own account is inspired by the true story of Le Clézio’s ancestor, François-Alexis Le Clézio.

The vision of history: the echo structure

The interweaving of the two narrative threads calls for a paradigmatic reading whereby each fictional plane finds its echo at another level of discourse (Cavallero, Salles, 2006). The reader is struck by the ceaseless repetition of the same images, the same narrative configurations, and by a composition that recalls Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, a work to which the text refers (415). For instance, a parallel can be established between the Algerian War and the French Revolution, between the conflicts associated with decolonization in the twentieth century and the colonial conquests of the eighteenth century, between the student revolutions of May 1968 in France and of October 68 in Mexico, and between the latter and the massacre of the Indians by the conquistadors at Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. The notebook in which Jean Marro records the press reports on the Algerian War can also be compared with Jean Eudes’ nautical diary where he describes the movements of the ships in the Indian Ocean, witnesses to the turbulent history of the region. And it is poverty, cultural oppression and slavery that characterize both the colonized population of the past and the migrant populations of modern states. In the same way, similarities emerge at the level of the trajectories of the characters in their struggle against injustice and nationalism and in their quest for their multiple roots.

This echo effect, the persistence of violence and of racism across the centuries, suggest not only a denunciation of European colonialism but also a calling into question of the very concept of historical progress linked to a forgetting of the past. The historical anchorage of the two dominant narrative threads, the importance accorded the victims of history, can be regarded as a critique of European ideologies based on the notion of national identity or a single root and on the rejection of cultural difference. The narrator attacks the abstract language that underpins these ideologies favouring the non-dualistic approaches characteristic of pre-Socratic and Amerindian thought. Rejection of the Other is associated with the pursuit of purely conceptual values, with the separation of language and lived reality. For example, the text condemns the egocentricity and xenophobia of the students preparing the baccalauréat in philosophy (141-142), (151-52). For Jean Marro, on the other hand, language is a material force, a bond that links him to the world and to the cosmos (201-202).

Through the embodiment in concrete situations of the notion of “métissage” (mixing of cultures) and that of interculturality, the author draws attention to what brings together different individuals and different cultures. Several critics have examined the relationship between this novel and the thought of Édouard Glissant in a development of the concepts of rhizomatic identity, of Relation and of creolisation (Salles, Martin, Van Der Drift).

The quest for origins; a narrative of initiation

 As Bruno Thibault has pointed out, Jean Marro’s quest for identity can be regarded as a journey of initiation whose goal is to relive the experiences of his ancestor: at the end of the text, the protagonist returns to the land of his ancestors and merges with the figures of Jean Eudes and of Aunt Catherine. The island thus becomes the scene of the discovery of his plural roots. It is a cyclical structure that foregrounds the initiatory function of pre-Socratic thought evoked in the quote from Parmenides: «“and for me, it’s all the same, where I begin. Because there I will return” (100; 526).

 This identification with his ancestors is presented as a return to the space of origins, a regressus ad uterum, symbolized by the act of diving into the pond (544), followed by a symbolic birth. The same journey of return and of renewal characterizes the act of sexual union, presented as an experience of absolute freedom (5227). But, as Marina Salles and Claude Cavallero have pointed out, Revolutions, like many of Le Clézio’s novels, has an open ending: for Jean and Mariam, the journey deep into the past is not the expression of nostalgia, but a necessary detour providing a fresh impetus, the point of departure of a never-ending journey towards the real and towards oneself.

Memory

 The themes of intergenerational memory and of transmission of cultural heritage are embodied in the figure of Aunt Catherine, presented as “the last witness, the memory of Rozilis” (107). It is Jean whom she has chosen as the repository of her memory, his task is to reenact the story of his ancestors. Transmission is linked to the theme of metempsychosis, to that of the revolution or transmigration of the soul: “It is he who is in you, who has returned to live in you, in your life, in your thoughts. He speaks in you” (54-54). Paradoxically, it is the memory of the body that collapses the frontiers between past and present, between self and the material world and that, whilst associated with the space of origins, is also a creative, performative force, orientated towards the future.

 The struggle against forgetfulness becomes a central theme of the book : Aunt Catherine’s stories, linked together in a spiral structure, are repeated in cycles: when her memory fades, it is Jean who takes over the role of storyteller. One might also note the central role played by the transmission of intergenerational memory in the story of Kiambé.

 At the structural level, the interweaving of narratives, the network of multiple memories highlights the importance of the memory of the Other in the quest for identity and in resistance to injustice. The unfolding of the narrative trajectories of the protagonists illustrates the key role played by cultural heritage and the memory of text, oral or written, in this struggle against forgetfulness and in the quest for a better world.

        Michelle Labbé

 ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​​​ Translation: Bronwen Martin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANOUN, Abdelhaq, J.-M.G. Le Clézio, Révolutions ou l’appel intérieur des origines, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005; BALINT-BABOS, Adina, « Le rituel de La Kataviva dans Révolutions », Les Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio, no.1, Paris, Complicités, p.115-129; CAVALLERO, Claude, Le Clézio, témoin du monde, Paris, Calliopées, 2009 ; LE ​​ CLÉZIO, J.-M.G. Révolutions, Paris, Gallimard, 2003; MARTIN, Bronwen, The Fiction of J.- M. G. Le Clézio : A Postcolonial Reading, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2012; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio, Notre contemporain, PUR, 2006 ; Le Clézio, « Peintre de la vie moderne », Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007; « Formes de métissage et métissage des formes dans Révolutions de J.-M.G. Le Clézio », Littérature française contemporaine, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008, p.79-92 ; SOHY, Christelle, « La répresentation de l’esclavage dans Révolutions », Les Cahiers J.-M.G.Le Clézio, no.3-4, Paris, Complicités, p. 201-213 ; THIBAULT, Bruno, J.-M.G. Le Clézio et la métaphore exotique, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2009; VAN DER DRIFT, Martha, « Révolutions : La mémoire comme espace de ‘Relation’ », Le Clézio, Glissant, Segalen: la quête comme déconstruction de l’aventure, Université de Savoie, 2011, p.89-96.

Raga is a travel story, a collection of tales and legends, a synthesis of historical and anthropological studies, a book of testimonies and a political essay. It is part of the collection directed by Édouard Glissant devoited to “texts by writers who set out to meet people who were only accessible by water. “ The book begins with an invitation to consider the relationship between the explorers, the colonizers, and the people of the Pacific, in particular, those from the Pentecost Islands (now part of the Vanuatu Republic).  The narrator explains that the island is called Raga emphasizing from the outset the complexity and linguistic autonomy of the place he is writing about.

A book on Nearness

The narrator of Raga is a visitor who learns, or re-learns, how to discover a new place. Dominique Fisher points out the narrator’s awareness of his limits as a new kind of travel writer, as a “passeur of culture”. His way of approaching Raga, his stance as a visitor, comes up against the limitations of exteriority (Fisher, 2015, 208). It’s important to remember that prior visits weren’t so benign. With the exception of the arrival of the first inhabitants who respected and called upon the island’s spirits, those who followed came with other intentions: to exploit and to destroy. It was the explorers, pirates, slave traffickers, missionaries, colonizers, anthropologists, pedophiles and tourists: all who had shaped a violent and indefensible model that would provoke distrust and suspicion that would in turn confront the narrator and invite him to examine his conscience. What to do ?

Raga, the garden

As the narrative voice passes from the narrator to his interlocutors in the indigenous communities, their vision rises to the surface of the text through stories, tales, legends, and crafts whose meaning is three-fold: economic, cultural and spiritual. The narrator, himself, begins to interpret the pervading signs based on what he recognizes and what he is learning. For example, he notices the garden economy that has gone to waste, which only reaffirms the plantation economy formerly imposed by the colonizers: “Today, Raga is a garden. People who arrive here by sea or air could believe they have found a primitive island, a sort of lost paradise untouched by Man. They cannot see any fields, and the coconut plantations along the coast are but relics of colonization” (R, 68). However, this first impression lacks the enrichment that comes only through observation. Observing the Islanders' economic life that is run by entrepreneurial activist such as Charlotte Wèi Matansué, and other women, who revived the craft of mat making, a craft whose artistic value was publically recognized at the Louvre during Le Clézio's residency in 2011. Observing the systematic depopulation in the New Hebrides (the colonial name for Vanuatu) that went from one million in 1800 to forty-five thousand in 1935 (R, 47). Observing the devastating effect of the blackbirds, the pirates responsible for slave trafficking and supplying a source of manual labor from the islands for cotton plantations in Australia and mines in New Caledonia (R, 50). The image of a lost paradise loses its tourist-brochure shine while not dismissing the spiritual and political meaning of Raga as a garden, a significance that isn't necessarily hidden but merely unnoticed, cultivated between the cracks of genocidal, colonial history.

Resistance

 If Le Clézio choses to dedicate a chapter to “The art of resistance”, it is because he knows the extent to which “the recent history of Vanuatu had been caricatured” (R, 105). To oppose this caricature, he sketches a multi-faceted portrait of resistance to everything that would cause the islands to sink into death and oblivion. For the author, the volcanic origin of the islands suggests “something new, precarious, imaginative” (R, 95) that imbues the inhabitants’ minds. While the volcanos created the islands, they are also the force that can sometimes swallow up its people in the ocean. Thus, the inhabitants learned how to marry their creativity to the precariousness of living on the edge of an abyss. One can resist the potential of disappearing by setting up, for example, stone statues that unite the memory of those lost to a spiritual survival, a voice that resists the cracks of time and those of the earth itself. If we consider that most of these edifices were exiled to European museums (R, 97), then it becomes clear that their silence was not self-imposed. Such silence becomes the very fabric of their arts, crafts, and daily life. A case in point is the tragic death of a woman whose husband consequently becomes mad, a narrative that becomes the fabric of Raga’s women’s resistance against forgetfulness as they weave their mats and choose a design that would symbolize their mythical love (R, 103). According to Isabelle Roussel-Gillet, Raga’s mythical dimension “affirms a collective and spiritual dimension thus creating a communal bond”  (Roussel-Gillet, 2011, 120).

Although their resistance is diverse and involved, it is consequential. Throughout history, movements of revolt, brutally repressed, and creating creole languages like Bislama (the official language of Vanuatu), edifies “the ultimate, desperate, act of those who saw themselves condemned to servitude and extinction” (R, 107). After having outlined the history of political revolution and the process of ideas on sensationalism and consumption, the visitor comes back to a personal experience. During a visit to the village of Palimsi, he happened upon a young girl’s baptism (R, 114). Why include this event at the end of a chapter about resistance? In the eyes of the narrator, this ceremony signifies a free, collective act: “For a brief moment, the Palimsi River was the Jordan River - despite the distance in time, despite the weight of centuries, despite the wearing away of thought, and everything becomessimple and new.” (R, 116). The community affirms its right to choose their forms of resistance and their renewal.

The Travel Story as a Critique

       Robert Miller

Translation: Martha van der Drift

Translations of quotes in English from Raga are those of Martha van der Drift

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOUNOURE, Gilles, « Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Raga : approche du continent invisible », Le Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 125, 2007, p. 336-338 ; FISHER, Dominique, « Raga, (en)vers (d’)une politique de l’approche », Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 19.2, 2015, p. 205-214 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.M.G. Raga : approche du continent invisible, Paris, Seuil, 2006 ; RASSON, Luc et Bruno TRITSMANS, « Écritures du rivage : mythes, idéologies, jeux », L’Esprit Créateur, 51.2, 2011, p. 1-3 ; REY MIMOSO-RUIZ, Bernadette, « Les îles lecléziennes : mémoire et initiation »,  Carnets : Revue électronique des études françaises de l’APEF, 3, 2015 ; RIDON, Jean-Xavier, « L’île perdue : entre invisibilité et nostalgie » in Le Clézio : passeur des arts et des cultures, sous la direction de Thierry Léger, Isabelle Roussel-Gillet et Marina Salles, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010, p. 75-91; ROUSSEL-GILLET, Isabelle, J.M.G. Le Clézio : écrivain de l’incertitude, Paris, Ellipses, 2011.

It would be right to begin by paying homage to J.M.G. Le Clézio’s excellent knowledge of the many texts on the life and work of the famous couple of Mexican artists, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as displayed in his book Diego et Frida, published in 1993. However, equal importance should also be given to the poetic tone of Le Clézio’s style, which lends the text the dual quality of a biography of artists and of a portrait of Mexico. In the Preface, we read:

The story of Diego and Frida – this love story inseparable from faith in the revolution – is still alive today because it is imbued with the distinctive light of Mexico, with the hum of daily life, with the smell of streets and markets, with the beauty of ​​ children in the dusty houses, with that kind of nostalgic languor that lingers at twilight on the ancient monuments and on the oldest of trees. (D&F, 22)

Diego et Frida occupies a special place in Le Clézio’s creative output: it is the only story that the writer devotes completely to artists, placing at its core their life-love, the search for inspiration, encounters, suffering, and the revolutionary ideal inseparable from their fascination with the Amerindian world. “Diego and Frida will devote their whole life to the search for this ideal of the Amerindian world. It is this that gives them a revolutionary strength […]” (D&F, 20), writes Le Clézio. Moreover, Isabelle Constant, in her article “Portrait of Le Clézio in Diego and Frida”, stresses that Le Clézio is not immediately drawn to the commentaries on the frescoes of Diego or on the pictures of Frida, but rather to that which precedes the work, “the search for what motivates the artist” (2010, 129).

From the outset, Le Clézio presents us with a guide with which to follow the story of this bewildering couple: “Diego and Frida embodied, in some ways, the vices and virtues of that period when Mexican values, the art and thought of pre-historic civilisations, are being reinvented” (D&F, 19). If art as a desire for change is always a means of reinventing the world, then clearly the mythic couple is unfailingly bound up in the dream of redefining society, politics, and the foundations of modernism through painting. What is of relevance here is the knowledge that Diego brings back from his travels; first of all in Europe, France and Spain and later in the United States, in, for example, San Fransisco and Detroit, a knowledge that enables him to grasp the major movements in the history of art in the twentieth century : aesthetic anarchism, Dadaism, surrealism and the art of Pablo Picasso amongst others.

Le Clézio makes it clear that Diego and Frida are representatives of the “cosmic race of Vasconcelos” (D&F, 59). We should remember that José Vasconcelos (1887-1959) – a writer, philosopher and Mexican politician, the author of La race cosmique (1925), where he presents some of his thoughts on the mixing of cultures specific to Latin America – is considered to be the cultural el caudillo of the Mexican Revolution, a supporter of education for the masses and of the action of the Muralists. From another point of view, these two artists express in their work “the desires and anxieties of an oppressed people, exiled from their own culture” (D&F, 39). As for Frida, “all this disillusion, all these dramas, this immense suffering, which merges with that of her own life, all this is exhibited there, in her painting” (D&F, 60). It is now a case of considering the indivisible relationship between personal history and the wider historical canvas.

Le Clézio must have conducted a thorough investigation, drawing from the biographies of Diego Rivera and of Frida Kahlo in English and in Spanish, speaking to those close to the artists, and comparing accounts – as he notes in the acknowledgements. The first chapter of this project is devoted to the “Meeting with the ogre”: “Diego meets Frida for the first time in 1923” (D&F, 25). From then on, the story invites us to imagine the personality of the man and artist, Diego Rivera, a portrait that is completed in the second chapter, “A Savage in Paris”, whose comical title recalls the cliché of the noble savage of the Americas. In the same mischievous register, the following chapter, “Frida: a true demon”, paints the portrait of Frida that meets the expectations of the age – a period marked by a critique of capitalism and of colonialism. Nevertheless, Frida is not so much the embodiment of social struggle as that of the suffering inscribed within her extraordinary destiny: “Beneath her relaxed manner and appearance of a girl in love, Frida conceals an experience of pain beyond the common measure” (D&F, 60). Later, in the chapter “Love in the time of revolution”, another image of the couple emerges, that revealed by their political commitments, by Diego’s journey to Moscow, by his joining of the Mexican Communist Party as well as by their immense enthusiasm for art: for frescoes and for paintings. ​​ 

If already in 1967, in L’Extase matérielle, Le Clézio draws attention to what moves him the most in the human condition: the renouncing of “all that is false grandeur, of pride, of self-satisfaction and of all that one considers good about oneself and which is only meanness” (EM,67), this same preoccupation can be found in Diego and Frida. Marina Salles in Le Clézio, notre contemporain reminds us that Diego ​​ “asserts his political independence which will be the cause of his expulsion from the party, of the distrust of Trotsky, of the American denial of justice” whereas Frida ​​ “refuses the patronage of the surrealists” (ibidem). In this chapter, the moving “love story between an elephant and a dove” is omnipresent, as if it were a matter of smoothing over the social upheavals and the cruelty of her real-life experience: Frida’s terrifying accident and Diego’s financial and political worries.

The following chapters, “Life as a couple: to be the wife of a genius” and “The World City” (San Francisco) open up new ways of interpreting the history of the couple, revisiting their collusion, the forces of life that drive them on and that lead them to break the boundaries of life and of creation. “No painter has expressed with so much conviction the complementarity of masculine and feminine, of war and of love, of solar and lunar forces” (D&F, 197), writes Le Clézio, evoking Diego. Later, one discovers “the two Fridas, their heart laid bare, and the extraordinary portrait, dazzling with that macabre humour which for her is a substitute for a breast-plate” (D&F, 25-226). The writer does not hesitate to lay out with sensitivity the strengths of man and woman in their bond with creation. He brings to light the consonance between the absolute love that unites Diego and Frida and the desire to draw on this for their work.

The final chapter, « The eternal child », returns to the resilience of the couple’s affection and of their bond with Mexico:

The vagaries of existence, the meanness, the disillusionment could not break off this relationship, a relationship not of dependence but of perpetual exchange, like the blood that flows and the air they breathe. The relationship of Diego and Frida is similar to that of Mexico to the earth, to the rhythm of the seasons, to the contrast of climate and culture. (D&F, 268)

After all, the couple around which Le Clézio’s story is constructed forms a microcosm for measuring the evolution and the transformation of Mexican society in the first half of the 20th century. The permanent metamorphoses, the successive redefinitions of their complicity make it possible to locate the lines of continuity and of rupture from the Mexico of the twenties up to the end of the fifties.

Diego et Frida throws a fresh poetic light on our knowledge of this couple of Mexican artists. Distancing himself from the biographical discourse of journalism, Le Clézio offers us a hermeneutic based less on historical facts than on the elaboration of an aesthetics of creation. The reader is moved not only by the succession of revelations but also by the poetic and at times personal tone adopted by the writer:

It is difficult today in a world eroded by disillusion, by the bloodiest wars ever and by a growing cultural poverty to imagine the maelstrom of ideas that set Mexico ablaze during the decade running from 1923 to 1933. Mexico is then in the process of inventing everything, of changing everything, of bringing everything to light in the most chaotic period of its history[…]. Everything is to be invented and everything comes to light in this feverish epoch: the art of the muralists in the service of the people […]. (D&F, 10)

Le Clézio commits himself to his writing with a passion that can only be equalled ​​ by his admiration for the life and work of these prodigious artists.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

LE CLÉZIO, J.-M.G., Diego et Frida, Paris, Gallimard, 1993 ; L’Extase ​​ matérielle, Paris, Gallimard, 1967 ; CONSTANT, Isabelle, «  Portrait de Le Clézio en Diego et Frida  », in Thierry Léger, Isabelle Roussel-Gillet et Marina Salles (dir.), Le Clézio, passeur des arts et des cultures, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, p. 129-144 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio, notre contemporain, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006 ; THIBAULT, Bruno, « L’Influence de quelques modèles artistiques sur l’œuvre romanesque de J.M.G. Le Clézio (Arman, Klein, Raysse, Tinguely, Kahlo et O’Keefe) » in BERTOCCHI-JOLLIN, Sophie, THIBAULT, Bruno (coords), Lectures d’une œuvre, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nantes, Éditions du temps, 2004, p. 161-178.

The short story “Secret Love” (published in Histoire du pied et autres fantaisies, 2011) takes place on the island of Mauritius, not far from Vacoas. The story is narrated from the point of view of a teacher, Andréa, an elderly lady who teaches the girls at the Bonne Terre convent where she lives. She also makes up stories, first oral and then written, for the young female inmates of the Beau Bassin prison. Furthermore, there are two interwoven stories: on the one hand, there is that of Andréa who succeeds in gaining the confidence of the prisoners of Beau Bassin and in particular  ​​​​ that of Crystal de Bambous, a dangerous yet lovable girl whom Andréa succeeds in persuading not to commit suicide by setting fire to herself within the prison. On the other hand, there is ‘Starless’, a story written by Andréa describing the miserable existence of the Indian Maya who dies after a life of endless toil, the victim of a violent attack by her son. However, just before dying, and for the first time in her life, she is able to gaze at the shining splendour of a star and undergo an experience of ​​ spiritual transcendence.

 The story is structured around two alternating narratives: the principal narrative, that of Andréa and the inserted narrative, that of the ‘Starless”, signaled by a change in typography. However, the structure of the story is more complex than that of simple linear alternating voices: ​​ both narratives contain flashbacks and anticipated events. There are also resonances between the two: the life of Maya is largely superimposed on that of the prisoners of Beau Bassin.

 The story explores a common theme in Le Clézio’s writing, that of the struggle of the poor to survive against of all odds within a hostile universe. The social aspect is highlighted ​​ in the text: the prisoners of Beau Bassin are from the fringes of society and ​​ have been placed under the tyrannical authority ​​ of the notables of the ​​ island of Mauritius.

 At the same time, an engagement with the theme of writing and with the stance of the writer is equally in evidence. Indeed, the story communicates a positive vision of literature, one that is capable of saving a life: Andrea’s stories deter Crystal from committing suicide. ​​ Besides, in the very choice of the short story, literature offers us the possibility of sharing, both in terms of the audience for whom Andrea is writing and in those of the prisoners who make their own contribution ​​ through suggesting to their teacher possible ways of continuing the stories. ​​ Andrea can be viewed as the prototype of the postcolonial writer who succeeds in going further than disillusionment with the African historical situation, further than the dreams that this could harbour: the writers’ goal is ​​ now ​​ to transform their ​​ writing by remaining clear-sighted as to the evils ​​ and difficulties of contemporary society without however renouncing a ​​ specific form of magic realism.

 In addition, the very choice of the island of Mauritius suggests the presence of a multi-cultural community, the space par excellence of cultural cross-fertilization: there are references to cooking (the rice, dal and faratas that the prisoners eat) and to Indian dance (conveyed by the word “payal” which designates the foot bangles decorated with bells worn by women in India). There is also the presence of the “Chinese boutique” where Andrea buys her exercise books as well as a mention of creole, …all of which points to a intermingling of peoples and cultures. ​​ Finally, Andrea may live in a convent but she is happy to listen to the call to prayer by the muezzin.

Claire Colin

Translated by Bronwen Martin

(2022)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BEDRANE, Sabrinelle, « Histoire du pied et autres fantaisies. Déplacements génériques » in Roman 20-50, numéro consacré à J.-M.G. Le Clézio, La Fièvre, Printemps et autres saisons, Histoire du pied et autres fantaisies, ‘La Prom’, n° 55, juin 2013, p. 25-33 ; CAVALLERO, Claude, « L’espoir en filigrane », in Roman 20-50, op. cit., p. 65-76 ; COLIN, Claire, « Écrire, un jeu joyeux et nécessaire », in Roman 20-50, op. cit., p. 77-87 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.-M.G, Histoire du pied et autres fantaisies, Paris, Gallimard, 2011 (p. 217-233) ; THIBAULT, Bruno, « Trois femmes puissantes. La vision de l’Afrique contemporaine dans Histoire du pied et autres fantaisies », in Roman 20-50, op. cit., p. 37-47.

Desert was published with Gallimard in 1980. On the occasion of the release of the novel, the author was awarded, by the French Academy, the Paul Morand Grand Prize for Literature, for his work as a whole. Jean-Louis Ezine notes in Le Nouvel Observateur in May 1992: “He had kind of disappeared between Fever and Desert.” The Clézio regains the fame earned by The Interrogation.

Desert occupies a particular place in Le Clézio’s work. It inaugurates a new style. The categories of the novel – characters, space, time – the functions: author, narrator, somewhat abused in previous works, become identifiable. The novel reconnects, to a certain extent, with the novelistic tradition – condemned by the Nouveau Roman, with which J.M.G. Le Clézio is associated in 1973 by nouveau roman theorist Jean Ricardou.

But Desert is unique in its very structure. It is composed of two alternating narratives, clearly distinct from each other by their arrangement on the page: a narrow narrative with a large margin, a second narrative with the conventional layout.

The main character of the narrow story, Nour, belongs to the nomadic civilization of the Blue Men who flee from the French troops from 1910 to 1912 across Western Sahara to southern Morocco. This flight, which continues with Nour as guide, establishes, with the victory of the French, the process of colonization that will mark the lives of those to come, including Lalla.

Lalla, in second narrative of the same novel, no longer lives as a nomad. First she lives in a shanty town that we suppose is in Morocco, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Then she lives in exile in Marseille, in the contemporary era, as evidenced by cars and supermarkets. The second story represents a temporal and spatial break from the first. Lalla could not have known the flight of the Blue Men, since she was separated from them shortly after her birth.

Above all, there is an axiological break between the two stories. The story of Lalla can be considered in the novelistic tradition, since it traces the struggle of the “problematic individual”, according to a formula of Lukács, against engulfment by society. She fled Morocco and her chleuh (Berber) shepherd, Le Hartani, to escape forced marriage to a rich man. She leaves Marseille to avoid being swallowed up by consumerism and exploitation as a vulnerable young woman. The recurrence of images of anthropophagy and suction into an abyss hypostasize the city, which becomes an ogre. As she strolls through Marseille, ”Lalla feels the constant vertigo of emptiness that enters her as if the wind that was passing through the alley was that of a long gyratory movement” (D, 295). The guilty ones are "the immobile giants, with bloody eyes, cruel eyes, the devouring giants of men and women”. (D, 296) The little emigrant, poorly dressed, badly fed, exploited to perform repugnant tasks, becomes supermodel. She experiences the best of what this society has to offer: celebrity and fortune.

But Lalla returns to the desert and the slum to bring into the world the child she made with Le Hartani and to rediscover the ineffable brilliance of a certain way of looking.

Although related to the « History » segment, the part called “The Time of Nour” has an epic quality to it in the way it breaks with an objective description of time. Not only is time assimilated to space, being invariable and fixed, but it represents an acme: “It was a country out of time, far from the history of men perhaps, a country where nothing else could appear or die, as if it were already separated from other countries, at the peak of earthly existence” (D, 11). Beings are not distinct from each other. In his role as guide, Nour follows in the footsteps of his father, the man with the rifle. They are not separated from the animals, because they have the same needs - rest, hunger, thirst – nor are they separated from the elements, reduced to a minimum: sand, wind, sky. God and the saints are consulted and answer. Ma el Aïnine is endowed with an undeniable moral authority because he is believed to be of a divine origin. As archetypes, they belong to a ‘geste,’ an epic poem written in an incantatory style. This narrative contrasts with the novelistic part of the work in which the individual characters stand out and do not fit in with the rest of society.

 ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​​​ Still, it is not all black and white. The epic of the Blue Men that frames the story of Lalla is not neatly resolved: neither peace nor revelation, much less the end of the quest, but defeat and doubt, the search for a way out, as if the epic, which closes the “novel”, opens onto the novel’s territory, that of the struggle of “the problematic individual”. “Even the warriors of the desert, the invincible blue men of Ma el Aïnine were tired, and their eyes were filled with shame, like men who no longer believe.” (D, 222)

Conversely, the novel is penetrated by the epic, if only by the appearance to Lalla of Es Ser which seems the reincarnation of the spiritual master Al Azraq, and more strongly by the tale that Amma tells of her origins. She is thought to be from the lineage of Al Azraq. On the other hand, the Hartani, the initiator, through the accumulation of his gifts and his extraordinary powers, also seems to come from the epic, to be fleeing the real. With him, the world becomes flesh, begins to throb. This intensity of being, this renewal of life that is accorded things through sight, hearing, smell and touch, give the hero an increased, even paroxysmal awareness of his existence and the universe. Lalla looks at the gnats Le Hartani shows her: “These things were more beautiful when he looked at them, newer, as if no one had looked at them before him, as at the beginning of the world” (D, 121). The description is not there for its picturesque value nor for placing the circumstances of the action. The earth is scrutinized, questioned, summoned to answer. “Lalla continues to walk, very slowly, looking at the gray sand with so much attention that her eyes hurt a little. She is watching what lies on the ground [...]” (D, 72). We witness the disappearance of the separation between nature and culture peculiar to the West which, according to Le Clézio, makes humans eternal exiles from themselves.

Le Clézio has been reproached for his taste for archaic or developing societies. For him, overproduction is at the root of all exploitation, all abuse. The episode in Marseille is titled “Life among the Slaves” - while the march of the Blue Men is along the fields cultivated by harratin slaves (D, 15). The Berber shepherd Le Hartani probably comes from a people of slaves (D, 104). Slavery comes up well before the Marseille episode in Desert. This makes Le Clézio seem biased. However, what is highlighted in particular through the opposition of desert and city is the self-exile imposed on the city dweller and the role of the gaze which scrutinizes and reveals, as does writing. Le Clézio’s “Interrogation is a vigil”, according to Foucault. Desert, like the majority of Le Clézio’s works, meets this definition. The fact that the work is of particular interest to ecocritics, who study the relationship between literature and the natural environment, is not surprising: “Leclézian descriptions of Nature range from absolute magnitude (the infinite view of the dunes in the desert) to an attention to the most infintesimal (drops of water). “ (Sueza, 2009) But it is risky to think of literature as a simple defense of nature and to forget the constant quest for Being in the novel. The desert can serve as a “parable”, as Jean Michel Maulpoix points out.

Michelle Labbé

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BORGOMANO, Madeleine, Désert J.M.G. Le Clézio, Paris, Éditions Bertrand Lacoste, Parcours de lecture,1992 ; BOUVET, Rachel, Essai sur l’imaginaire du désert, Montréal, XYZ Éditeurs, coll. Documents, 2006 ; DOMANGE, Simone, Le Clézio ou la quête du désert, Paris, Imago, 1993 ; LE CLÉZIO, Jean-Marie Gustave, Désert, Gallimard, Le Chemin, 1980 ; FOUCAULT, Michel, « Le Langage de l’espace », Critique n° 203, avril 1964, p. 379 ; LABBÉ, Michelle, Le Clézio, l’écart romanesque, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999 ; LUKÁCS, Georg, Théorie du roman, Gallimard, Tel, 1968, p. 73 ; MAULPOIX, Jean-Michel, « Désert de J.M.G. Le Clézio », La Quinzaine Littéraire n° 326, 1980 ; RICARDOU, Jean, Le Nouveau Roman, Le Seuil, Écrivains de toujours, 1978, p. 10 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio, Désert, Paris, Ellipses, col. Résonances, 1999 ; SUEZA ESPEJO, Maria José, « Désert de Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, analyse d’éléments descriptifs et interprétation écocritique », April 2009. http://webpages.ull.es/users/cedille/cinco/sueza.pdf, consulted December 8, 2015.