10 December 2008 - 31 January 2009 - Carolina Rediviva
J.M.G. Le Clézio, the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature 2008, was celebrated by an exhibition in the foyer of Carolina Rediviva. The exhibition, illustrating Le Clézio's works in words and pictures right from his first novel in 1963, was opened on "Nobel's Day" and it focused on four main themes.
“How can a book describe what’s going on in a city? It would take millions of pictures, millions of sounds, to invent millions of new words …” (Conversation with Pierre Lhoste, 1970)
Le Clézio's very first novels express an uncontrolled anxiety for modernity and our mechanised Western civilisation, whose foremost symbol is the city. With its skyscrapers of cement and iron, its noisy trafficked streets and its neon-lit supermarkets - the temples of the consumer society - it feels like an inferno. Books like The Interrogation, The Flood and War with their expressive titles, can be seen as rebellious screams against the aggression and violence that people in urban environments are subjected to. It is however possible, if you open your eyes in all this pervasive chaos, to find small miracles: the light bulb with its perfect, softly rounded and fragile contours of glass is an example that crops up in many of the Nobel laureate's works.
"I don't really know why, that's just the way it is: I am an Indian." (Haï, 1971)
A turning point came in the author's writing in the 1970s after a lengthy sojourn with Indians in the rain forests of Panama. On the run from modern civilisation, hunting for inner peace, Le Clézio confronts the Indian's culture and becomes a convert. It was, he writes in The Singing Feast, "an experience that changed my whole live, my ideas about the world and art, my attitude to my fellow human beings, my way of moving, eating, loving, sleeping, even my dreams". A book by Antonin Artaud about the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico aroused Le Clézio's interest - in a positive way - in these "primitive" and "instinctive" people. He perceives them as bearers of wisdom living in harmony with the cosmos, beyond science and rationalism. Even if he eventually "after maturing somewhat" was forced to renounce the claim "I am an Indian", he has never ceased, in essays and translations of the ancient myths, to stress that the Indians "have something to offer" materialistic Westerners.
"Beauty shines in life, pure and immediate. Beauty is a gift. It is not for sale." (L’Inconnu sur la terre, 1978)
This is followed by years of calm, harmonious texts where observations of nature afford freedom and safety. As no-one else, Le Clézio can portray the sun and light which now infuse his books. "Why speak of anxiety, fear, ugliness? There is so much beauty in every moment here, in the sky, the cliffs, the grass and the surface of the ocean", he writes in L’Inconnu sur la terre ("The Unknown on Earth"). In an interview for Le Magazine littéraire in May 1985 he explains that although he doesn't do it consciously, he cannot write a novel without thinking about the four elements: earth, fire, air and water. "For me they are" he says, "just as important as human society". And the characters, who meet the reader in his books, live as one with nature. They can still be enchanted by small gems - a beautifully formed shell, an inconspicuous plant with a stunning scent or the colourful markings on a beetle. Often they are children, very young women or old people. Often they exist on the periphery of society. Often they are going somewhere. They are always figures of light. Lalla in Désert ("Desert"), Daniel in the short story "The boy who had never seen the sea", Mondo in the short story with the same name or Esther and Najma in Wandering Star are all significant for this period where the desert plays an important role. The desert is the home of the nomads and it represents the search for truth, for a lost innocence and a forgotten beginning.
"Actually I write to try and find out who I am. Seeking adventure..." (Conversation with Carole Vantroys, 1994)
Searching for his own identity is the starting point of most of Le Clézio's later works: he is hunting for his origins, his own history and that of his forebears. He recalls that he became aware of this when he wrote La Quarantaine ("The Quarantine"). He has roots both in Brittany and on the island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Autobiographically inspired novels such as Révolutions ("Revolutions") and the recently published Ritournelle de la faim ("The Song of Hunger") and memoirs like L'Africain ("The African"), which describes his meeting with his father in Nigeria at the age of eight, are searches into his own past. But Le Clézio always links his own history inseparably with that of the poor, the vulnerable and the forgotten. He travels, for example, to the small island of Raga in Melanesia and finds "an atmosphere of abandonment and misery". It is the memory of the most cruel slave trading in the world, which despite slavery long since being outlawed in "civilised countries" was carried on by those people far away in the Pacific right into the 20th century. Far from fleeing his responsibility as a fellow human being, Le Clézio tells the story of those who are never heard. It may well be this which is the common thread running through the whole of his work.
