And, the Nobel Goes To ....

Writing for Le Clézio is an examination of his relationship to everyday things. Truly a global citizen, his work mirrors the contemporary world of movement across borders, with all its tensions and undercurrents.





Writing the transcultural experience: J.M.G. Le Clézio.

Border crossing is in his blood. In the 18th century, his ancestors had moved from Brittany to Mauritius. He studied in England and then taught in Bangkok, Boston and Mexico City. An Anglo-French parentage embroiled him yet again in the history of mi scegenation that would weave itself into the cosmopolitan texture of his fiction, covering diverse thematic concerns from alienation with crass consumerism to endeavouring to find a home in Mexico, Panama or Mauritius where his true roots lie. He has always aspired to find fulfilment in the rural landscape as opposed to the viciousness of the capitalised crudeness of the so-called notion of progress. Third world collides in his fiction with the Western culture, producing a narrative of migrancy, befitting a contemporary world of movement across borders from Central America to North Africa, from Mexico to Thailand, of “a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation” as described by the Swedish Academy when deciding to award the Nobel prize for literature to the 68-year-old French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

Across boundaries

Le Clézio’s theory of fiction cuts across class and national affiliations and moves towards a narrative that relates to humanity at large, unlike the contemporary fiction written in the U.S. that limits itself to the narrow space of its country of origin, an accusation made by Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, who shot off indiscreetly in support of the advanced literary traditions of Europe that have resulted in innumerable Nobel prizes going to Europeans. This parochial view has irked writers across the Atlantic who have argued in favour of the international complexion of the prize as well as individual merit as the criteria of winning the award without any racial prejudice. It must be kept in mind that creative output and theoretical and critical enthusiasm has always close links with the ongoing cultural growth, an innate critical self-awareness of history and local reality being the source of all efforts towards political, economic and cultural revolution where one country or race cannot claim any dominance.
The Prix Larbaud in 1972 and the Grand Prix Jean Giono in 1997, along with a number of other honours, have lent Le Clézio’s chequered career a distinguished place in the world of French letters for his “new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy”. He has written almost 30 novels, out of which 12 have been translated into English. His first published novel, Le Procès-verbal (1963), was remarkable for its stylistic and bold innovation . Le Déluge (1966), La Guerre (1970), and Les Géants (1973) and L’Extase matérielle (1967) took the world of material progress by the scruff of its neck and elaborated on the idea of confrontation between city and country. As he remarked in an interview, “When I write, I am primarily trying to translate my relationship to the everyday, to events. We live in a troubled era in which we are bombarded by a chaos of ideas and images. The role of literature today is perhaps to echo this chaos.”

Widely admired

Le Clézio is one of the most admired writers living in France today. Though not many have heard of him in the English-speaking world, it is about time that contemporary students of literature begin to get involved in other non-canonical authors like Orhan Pamuk or Naguib Mahfouz, who tend to involve the reader in politics and history outside Europe and who have rightly deserved the Nobel Prize. In recent times, there has been a shift to comparative world literature, but it would be a rewarding experience to introduce authors who remain on the periphery. It is therefore, likely that an international award can succeed in bringing unknown writers from around the world within the canon, thus helping in setting some seismic cross-currents in the area of literary taste. Continuity or obsession with tradition or nativism often borders on a neo-Nazi right-wing stance that often boils down to becoming a cult. Confidence and experimentalism are two qualities that Le Clézio possesses which have enabled him to almost take on the persona of a “loose canon” that refuses to rest with a single idea or one location. He thus moves across space in a multilayered landscape that allows him a three dimensional involvement in wide-ranging matters of human concern. Le Clézio broke new grounds with his Desert (1980), a novel the Swedish Academy emphasised had “magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants.” A woman abandons her desert land and moves into the decadent milieu of French urbanity. In his more recent work he has involved himself with the art of film as in Ballaciner (2007) or in children’s fiction as in Lullaby (1980) and Balaabilou (1985). His versatility is obvious in his enthusiasm for working his many novels around the theme of ecology as in Fever (1966), The Flood (1967) and Terra Amata (1969).

Necessary dialogues

Le Clézio’s transcultural experience is so necessary for a healthy dialogue between nations, bringing different cultures together, which make the rich human culture even richer and endorses integration. The bonds of ethnicity and “lost culture” which hold together the peoples of this world are more enduring than the barriers of political prejudice. To counter the self-insulation of cultures from the larger and more varied political realities of our time he sees the need to address issues in the real world. Cultures renew and renovate themselves only if they contain people for whom intellectual freedom matters.

Room for everyone

Continuity blends with change, tradition with modernity. There is room here for all faiths, all languages, all people. And dialogue across cultures becomes a civilising and a humanising agency of valuable social consciousness, thereby enhancing the idea of an international community with wider social concerns and effects. In a cosmopolitan, diasporic set-up, there is the urgency to leap the fences of a narrow nationalism, overcoming any racial antagonism. Today’s world of globalisation is symptomatic of shifting ethnic and cultural contours where expatriate aloofness has to give way to plural cultural affinities and a common vocabulary of a global literary community belonging to many nations. Within this context, Le Clézio’s project does not remain limited to the culture in which he is located, stepping as he does outside his culture to experience and understand other cultures, especially that of the native Americans. A free thinker is indeed an itinerant scholar, not a celebrant of any one cultural identity.
Le Clézio’s work envisages an environment of intellectual fellowship and cultural enrichment for a wider universal community. It is here that all narrow barriers are broken to pursue the vision of a single world. It is the celebration of diversity and transcultural activities such as these that sustain literary art and new spiritual realities. He would readily agree with Orhan Pamuk who says, “The history of the novel is the history of human liberation: by putting ourselves in others’ shoes, by using our imagination to free ourselves from our own identities, we are able to set ourselves free.”

Freedoms of movement

It is clear that Le Clézio works under structural and ideological regulations self imposed with a creativity that is based inherently on compassion, solidarity and the yearning for freedom of movement. He exists in a universal space bound neither by national boundaries nor by ethnic identity and is protean for he does not linger on any one theme or one single narrative technique. He experiences the wonderful lightness of being as well as the inherent tensions between the world that has gone by and the onslaught of the new scourge of global capitalism. Le Clézio will be admired by many in the years to come for his novels and essays and their thematic concerns of “memory, exile, the reorientations of youth, cultural conflict.” Undoubtedly, he has played a fundamental role in an attempt to fashion a contemporary French tradition and revitalise the French novel.