[The Montana Professor 2.3, Fall 1992 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Michel Tournier
Christopher Anderson
Foreign Language
University of Montana
One of France's best known living writers, Michel Tournier has received some of the most prestigious French literary prizes, including the Grand Prix du Roman of the French Academy in 1967 for Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, and the Prix Goncourt in 1970 for Le Roi des aulnes. Despite the high literary quality of his fiction, Tournier is a popular writer. All of his novels have made the bestseller lists and one of his books, Vendredi on la vie sauvage, a revision of the novel that won the Grand Prix du Roman, is required reading in French schools. Since 1980, Tournier has concentrated his energies on making his fiction accessible to children, and has made strong claims for children as his ideal readers (Bouloumié 22; Le Monde, 8-9 Oct. 1978). Childhood reading, he asserts, forms the foundation of a reader's individual sensibility and personal mythology (VP 56). Of Tournier's 29 titles of fiction, essays and introductions to art, literature, and photography currently in print, fully a third (all fictional texts) is marketed in formats for children. Yet Tournier's fiction for children is hardly known outside of France (Petit 87).
Tournier views himself as a traditional conteur whose main role is to renew myths. He defines myth as simultaneously a story for children, a story that everyone already knows, as well as a theory of knowledge (VP 188-189). Tournier stresses the orality of his fiction and affective, as opposed to rational, response (Nouvel Obs.). A continuance of a story-telling tradition that relies on myths for the transmission of knowledge, the conte provides instruction at a number of differing levels of abstraction and contains messages for the audience that respond to the knowledge each listener or reader brings to the tale. Such a structure favors repeated consumption of the same tale, which will gain coherence as the reader gains experience. Ideally, one should have the sense of re-reading Tournier's stories at their first reading (VP 189). Thus, his work depends to a large extent on intertextuality. Furthermore, Tournier has consciously placed reference within his work to encourage young readers to associate intertextuality with an initiatic paradigm.
Tournier has repeatedly argued that the educational system does not serve the emotional needs of children because it overemphasizes the transmission of information to the detriment of initiatory ceremony (VP 61; Le Monde, 20 Dec. 1974). One cannot overestimate initiation as a structuring device of Tournier's narratives. All of Tournier's novels and novellas involve the initiatory quest of a marginal protagonist and are structured according to the three stages of initiation described by Simone Vièrnes: separation from society, a symbolic confrontation with death in which essential information is learned for future use, and rebirth as a transformed being (9-11). Tournier's heros, however, are reborn into a cosmic, as opposed to social, harmony.
Over the years, Tournier has given increasing credit to the sophistication of child readers. This is evident in the evolution in his children's works of adult themes such as sexuality and race identity. A progression from an absence of sexuality and an avoidance of any racial question despite protagonists of different races and cultures (Robinson Crusoe and Friday) in Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (1971), to a depiction of heterosexual desire and a placement of racism within a larger context of psychological inadequacies in Les Rois mages (1983), to descriptions of homosexual activity and the fake eroticism of the peep show and the representation of races as an essential, if often misinterpreted, element of identity in La Goutte d'or (1985) expands a child's awareness of adult themes, and indeed prepares the child for reception into the realm of the adult world. Moreover, stylistic changes reinforce the view of a sophisticated child reader. In the cycle of fiction for adults which ended in 1980 with the publication of Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, Tournier emphasized the relation between text and the subtexts informing it by using endnotes to point to the historical and literary works that have informed his fiction. All of his novels and novella for adults contain such historical and bibliographical notes. As might be expected, in Tournier's first work for children, the relationship between text and subtext is much less apparent. In keeping with the simplified vocabulary and syntax, and chapter length rarely exceeding five pages, there is only one note in Vendredi ou la vie sauvage; this is but an authorial aside. However, in Les Rois mages, written twelve years later, Tournier uses footnotes (rather than endnotes) in a rather striking way. Evenly spaced throughout the book which has only three chapter breaks, the footnotes, with one glaring exception, define terms or expand the information given in the fictional narrative. Some of the information is given in the fictional narrative. Some of the information in the footnotes is superflous, but these notes appear intended to function in other ways. First, the notes act as pauses from the action of the tale and give the reader a rest similar to that of a chapter break. Secondly, the language and content serve to contrast fictional and nonfictional discourse, and by implication the realities that each discourse represents. Tournier bases ideal reception of fiction on the reader's identification with the characters and the subsequent recognition that the various sentiments internalized during the reading process are fictional (VV 17). This contrast of affective discourse with informational discourse may indeed be intended to help young readers make conscious that recognition of the fictional.
One footnote in this novel refers to a tale, Barbedor, found in Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, which is not included in the children's version, Les Rois mages. This story was published separately for children in Sept Contes. The footnote is the first explicit suggestion in Tournier's works for children that reading might be completed in another work. Although it is common practice at Gallimard to use a footnote referring the reader to other in-house publications wherever the author makes allusion to previously published texts, it is clear by the placement of Barbador in Sept Contes that the reference is a willful reflection of Tournier's plan. Barbedor is the last of three tales clustered at the exact center of Sept Contes. All three tales combine intertext and initiation.
Barbedor, along with the two preceding tales, La Fugue du Petit Poucet and La fin de Robinson Crusoé, suggest by their titles alone a relationship with other texts that French children are sure to know. Charles Perrault's tales, La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard) and Le Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb) are as much a part of French culture as Winnie the Pooh is British and American. The Robinson myth is so pervasive in western society that children who have not read Defoe's tale will know of the myth through television or comic books. Moreover, the titles also show kinship--in an ethnographic sense--to other works and passages by Tournier that may be read at some later date. These three tales are meant, I believe, to plant the seeds of a mnemonic base that will lead those young readers who continue to read Tournier's works to a particular kind of intertextual reading that informs all of Tournier's fiction.
Barbedor, along with Charles Perrault's La Barbe bleue and Tournier's tale Barberousse, inserted into La Goutte d'or, form an initial triad of stories linked by beards of primary colors. Facial hair acts as a leitmotif in Tournier's fiction to announce changes in identity (Merllié 29). In the story Tupik (in Le Coq du bruy ère) a young boy's rejection of his father is manifest in the boy's refusal of everything associated with facial hair. In La Mère Noël a school mistress and unwed mother dons a false beard to assume a paternal identity. However, the triad of colored bears, including Perrault's tale, reveal a progression of adaptability that repeats the three stages of initiation. The blue beard in Perrault's tale is a physical indication of his main character's moral corruption. His refusal to accept his wife's natural curiosity by submitting her to an unfair test reveals that the character is without redemption, and he is killed at the end of the tale by his brothers-in-law. Barbedor, on the other hand, is a curious tale of renewal through separation and stasis. As Barbedor--a king without progeny--ages, a magical bird plucks out the white hairs in his beard during his daily naps. When his beard is gone he transforms into the child that is his own successor. This story is a tribute to regeneration through passivity and to a perfect, that is, not requiring any effort, adaptation. In its original context in Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, the tale is offered as a successful solution to a life and death gamble.
My ordering of the three works into a schema of progressive adaptability admittedly is a convenient way to link the texts meaningfully, and there can be no guarantee that if children read all three works they will be perceived in that order or will read them for any progressive message. However, the way in which color orients depth perception helps the reader to mentally reorder the works in precisely the one described: in painting, darker tones such as blue form the background for light hues, and red, especially, leaps to the foreground.
Both La fin de Robinson Crusoé and La Fugue du Petit Poucet involve a more elaborate scheme that combines intertextual kinship with initiation. La fin de Robinson Crusoé, although just six pages long, shares a number of details with Daniel Defoe's The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe that are in opposition to either of Tournier's two novels in which Robinson Crusoe is the protagonist. First the island is in the Caribbean, whereas in Tournier's novels the island is in the Pacific. Both Robinson and Vendredi have returned to England (in Tournier's novels they never leave the island). Robinson, as in Defoe's novel, makes a second trip to his island. However, in Tournier's story there is a difference: Robinson never finds his island, and as a result, returns once again to England obsessed by the knowledge of its location on his map and that he wasn't able to find it. His obsession leads to drink. At the end of the story, the patrons of a bar where Robinson has a reputation as a fool ridicule him for not having realized that the island's vegetation had changed during his absence of twenty-five years and therefore could not conform to his mental image of it. The sadness that the realization of aging brings to an already broken man stops all the patrons' laughter. By itself there is little in this story that's appealing; its a cliff-hanger and it is negative. However, the story becomes meaningful, indeed necessary, in terms of sensitizing readers to associate intertextual reacting with an initiatic paradigm. La fin de Robinson Crusoé functions as the stage of ritual death, in which Robinson learns essential information (don't leave the island if you wish to remain young) that permits the transformed Robinson in Tournier's novels to adapt to the island's environment and defeat the aging process.
La Fugue du Petit Poucet, occupies not the transitional stage of initiation, but is the transformed story. This story is, just as Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique is to Defoe's novel, a mirror image of Perrault's Le Petit Poucet. Nearly every detail is the opposite or a transformation of the details of Perrault's tale. The names of the characters indicating a type in Perrault's tale--"Poucet," "l'Ogre," etc.--become patronymics in Tournier's story. Poucet's father is an urban lumberjack charged with the chopping down of trees in Paris; l'Ogre is a vegetarian, marijuana-smoking, tree-loving, house husband opposed to violence of any kind. And unlike Perrault's tale, an initiatory quest par excellence, in which Poucet's adventures initiate him into the adult world and turn him into the family bread winner, Tournier's tale is a quest in which the child learns ways to use his imagination in order to remain child-like and resist his father's imposition of a modern life style.
The initiatory stage of ritual death in this transformation is found in Gilles et Jeanne (1983). Because of its simplified style and language, this novella is certainly accessible to adolescents; however, its subject matter makes it unlikely childhood reading, and therefore, if read at all, it would be consumed perhaps years after Le Petit Poucet and La Fugue du Petit Poucet. A long passage in Gilles et Jeanne (53-55) repeats the events of Perrault's tale up to the point Poucet and his brothers find the ogre's house. in this case Gilles de Rais's castle in the Vendée. Although the details of the description of Poucet's family are realistic rather than the idealized descriptions of fairy tale, there is a suggestion of magic at the end of the passage. This is the end of the chapter, and in the following, the children's deaths are suggested by smoke rising from the castle chimney. Oddly, there is no lesson learned in Poucet's confrontation with death. The shock of killing off a classic character of French children's literature may be just the mnemonic jolt necessary for conjuring up Tournier's other Poucet tale and for ordering it along with Perrault's tale according to an initiatory paradigm. That's the effect the scene had on me.
The stories in Sept Contes and Las Rois mages may appear simple, yet they are a rich interface of themes and structures common to Tournier's most complex works. Clustered together, La fin de Robinson Crusoé, La Fugue du Petit Poucet, and Barbedor initiate young readers into complex forms of reading that gain in resonance through experience with Tournier's other fiction. Importantly, the intertextual allusions in Tournier's work are never only self-referential, but instead encourage the reader to situate Tournier's fiction within the larger context of an established literary continuum.
[The Montana Professor 2.3, Fall 1992 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]