Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 13
(1999)– [tijdschrift] Literatuur zonder leeftijd–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
[pagina 308]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Crossing the Borders
| ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 309]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Sept contes, in the Gallimard Folio Junior series (1990). Conversely, the tale, Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit, published for children in 1979, and awarded the prize for best foreign children's book at the Leipzig fair, was included, in 1989, in a collection of short stories for adults, Le Médianoche amoureux. | ||||||||||||||||||||
Not for childrenIt would perhaps be difficult to find another contemporary author more ideally suited to a study of crosswriting child and adult, or whose work transcends more easily the real or imaginary boundaries between adult and children's fiction. Is this merely the result of the careful husbandry and skillful marketing ploys of an author who unapologetically admits that he writes to be published, sold, and read as widely as possible? By publishing the same text in different contexts for a new readership, or by rewriting, apparently for a young audience, texts previously published for adults, is Tournier in fact padding his corpus? Is this refusal to divide his work into adult and juvenile fiction a sign of incertitude on the part of an author who cannot decide which audience he is in fact addressing? Can this ambiguity be interpreted as a deliberate attempt on Tournier's part to avoid being categorized as a ‘children's writer,’ because of the stigma which has so long dogged a genre considered by many to be minor and insignificant? A surprising silence surrounds Tournier's so-called children's texts in his intellectual autobiography, Le Vent Paraclet; Vendredi ou la vie sauvage is mentioned only in a footnote, and Jean Perrot wonders if this should be interpreted as another sign of ‘the modern child's absence of status as a real reader’ (145).Ga naar voetnoot3. In a 1971 interview titled ‘Les Enfants dans la bibliothèque’, Tournier states that ‘a book for children is not considered a literary work’ (56). Or is it possible that Tournier's dual readership suggests that the boundaries between children and adult fiction are crumbling, or in fact that they never really existed? This writer who enjoys a great deal of favour with young readers nonetheless denies ever having written deliberately for children. In an afterword included in the children's edition of Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit, titled ‘Écrire pour les enfants,’ Tournier categorically states: ‘I don't write children's books.’ The author went even further in a discussion with a group of French schoolchildren: I don't write for children. Never. I would be ashamed to do so. I don't like books written for children. It is pseudo-literature. (Tournier 1986, 21) Yet he pointedly entitled two articles, ‘Michel Tournier: comment écrire pour | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 310]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
les enfants’ and ‘Quand Michel Tournier récrit ses livres pour les enfants’. Speaking to me, in October 1993, about his works read by young people, Tournier insisted once again on the fact that ‘[his] books do not fall within the category of children's literature, even when they are read by children’. This author who writes for children, but claims not to write children's books, considers that he has attained the heights of his craft when he is read and appreciated by children: ‘Sometimes I apply myself so well and have so much talent that what I write can also be read by children. When my pen is less lucky, what it writes is only good enough for adults.’ The task of writing for children is a very difficult one, according to Tournier, who entitles one of his articles on the subject ‘Writing for Children is No Child's Play.’ It is only when the author is truly inspired that he writes texts accessible to a dual readership.Ga naar voetnoot4. Tournier privileges the child reader almost from the outset of his career as a novelist. ‘What is a book worth - and especially a novel - if its author cannot communicate the substance to an audience of ten-year-olds?’ he asked in a 1971 article. The author has no doubt about the answer, ever since he subjected two of his novels to what he calls the ‘crible enfantin,’ the ultimate test of a children's screening. Texts which ‘put off’ children - and he doesn't hesitate to give such illustrious examples as Racine's and Shakespeare's plays, and Balzac's Comédie humaine - are ‘second-rate’. In Tournier's eyes, ‘the highest summits of world literature’ are Perrault's Contes, La Fontaine's Fables, Andersen's The Snow Queen, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Kipling's Just So Stories, Saint Exupéry's Le Petit Prince: ‘They are generally said to be “for children”. That is to pay a very great tribute to children and to admit, with me, that a work can be addressed to a young public only if it is perfect.’ By Tournier's own account, his chance of being read by future generations rests with Vendredi ou la vie sauvage, Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit, or Barbedor, that is to say with the texts which most appeal to a young readership. ‘The writer who takes up his pen with that high aim in mind is obeying [...] an immeasurable ambition,’ writes Tournier. | ||||||||||||||||||||
The perfect textTournier's ‘crosswriting’ is the result of an evolution in his writing, as a close study of his rewritings clearly reveals. One could say that Tournier the writer is a crosswriter because he is first and foremost a rewriter. A careful reading of Tournier's so-called ‘children's texts’ shows that the significance which the author | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 311]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
himself attaches to the rewriting of his works gradually evolves: what appeared in the beginning as a rewriting aimed at children proves subsequently to be a profound evolution of the author's writing towards the ‘perfect’ text which addresses a dual readership of adults and children. Tournier pursues the art of rewriting on two levels: the rewriting of his own works, apparently to adapt them to a young audience, and the rewriting of preexisting stories drawn from literature, legend, and myth. The author does not hesitate to call himself ‘a thieving magpie’. Tournier's texts, states one critic, are ‘rewritings of earlier stories, rewritings which suggest a new, provocative and even scandalous reading of texts or tales which have faded into the tapestry of our culture and whose ability to surprise needs to be rediscovered’, states Gascoigne. It is not insignificant that the story which Tournier retells in his first novel for adults, and then retells again in a version for children, that of Robinson Crusoe, is one which already had a long-established tradition of dual readership. An article which Tournier wrote at the time Vendredi ou la vie sauvage was published, merely by its title, ‘Quand Michel Tournier récrit ses livres pour enfants’, clearly reveals that the author viewed the text in the light of a rewriting for children: [...] translating les Limbes du Pacifique into Vie sauvage, I had the definite feeling I was taking a path already travelled in the opposite direction. [...] in a sense, I was only able to derive a novel for children from an adult novel because the latter had itself in a way been taken from the former in the first place. Aside from the fact, however, that the original novel for children had initially remained unformulated. (7) Tournier then asks the question which ensues naturally from these reflections: ‘That being the case, why not first write the novel for children?’ He admits that ‘the experiment would be worth trying,’ but that ‘it would not be without risk,’ because this form would no doubt prevent ‘the subsequent unfolding of the adult book’. Still, Tournier would, however, later take up the challenge in 1986 with La Goutte d'or. Rejecting his earlier notion that an adult version might be somehow richer, he now sets his sights on the ‘simpler’ text from the start. That simpler text he no longer considers a book ‘for children’, but merely a better work. During an interview granted in 1986, the year in which La Goutte d'or was published, the novelist explains his evolution in the following terms: | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 312]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
[...] I work toward purification, simplicity. My dream? That La goutte d'or may be read by twelve-year-old children! At the outset of my work, I had Thomas Mann for ideal, today it is Kipling and London. (Garcin) In October 1993, Tournier confirmed to me that there was no need to consider rewriting La Goutte d'or, as it can indeed be read by twelve-year-olds. | ||||||||||||||||||||
Dual readershipThe question of dual readership is raised by Gérard Genette, in the pages of Palimpsestes devoted to Tournier's Robinsonades.Ga naar voetnoot5. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe constitutes what Genette calls the ‘hypotext’ of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, but both of these texts have become the ‘hypotexts’ of Tournier's so-called children's version. As a rewriting of a rewriting, a ‘hyper-hypertext’ Vendredi ou la vie sauvage can become the object of what Genette calls a ‘double ‘reception’, that is to say a reception on two levels by the same reader, creating a sort of ‘reading palimpsest’ (425). For the young reader, unfamiliar with Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Tournier's second version is in fact only a rewriting of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engendering no more ‘awkwardness’ between the text and its reader than the countless other versions. However, when an adult reader comes to the second Vendredi with the first in his literary baggage, thus ‘superimposing’ himself on the implied child reader encoded within the text, an uncomfortable situation of ‘unforeseen readership, unprogrammed by the adaptor’ is created (424). Genette then proceeds to describe his own disconcerting experience as an adult reader of the second Vendredi: ‘I am alone before this text, however I feel like two: the child for whom it is intended and the adult it is reaching’ (425). Although Genette acknowledges that even the most ‘indiscreet’ reading of a text, especially one the author himself has published, is no doubt ‘legitimate,’ dual readership of Vendredi ou la vie sauvage remains, in his eyes, the result of the unintended reading of ‘a reserved version,’ which ‘addresses one type of reader [juvenile] and excludes another [adult].’ It is evident, however, that the adult reader of the second Vendredi cannot possibly be the ‘unexpected,’ ‘prying,’ and ‘intrusive’ reader Genette makes of him, if the later text is, as Tournier himself claims, an improved version rather than an adaptation of the story for children. It must nonetheless be pointed out that Tournier's two versions are still in print; in spite of the author's dissatisfaction with his first novel, the publication of | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 313]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Vendredi ou la vie sauvage did not induce him to prohibit distribution, sale, or reprintings of what he considers the ‘inferior’ version, nor, he told me, would he ever want to ‘commit this violence’ against its ‘defenders’ in his adult readership. The solitary billing of Friday in the titles of both versions of Tournier's rewritings of the Robinson Crusoe story immediately suggests a subversion of the original text. Tournier's retelling of Defoe's story, which transforms Friday into a ‘mythical hero’, was rendered possible, according to the author, by Claude Lévi-Strauss and ethnography. In Le Vent Paraclet, he explains: What was Friday to Daniel Defoe? Nothing: an animal, at best a creature waiting to receive his humanity from Robinson Crusoe, who as a European was in sole possession of all knowledge and wisdom. [...]. The idea that Crusoe might have been able to learn something from Friday would never have occurred to anyone before the age of anthropology. The story's properly mythical quality is most plainly evident here, for over the past few decades the encounter between Robinson and Friday has taken on a significance that Daniel Defoe was a thousand leagues from even suspecting’ (The Wind Spirit, 188-89). More recently, Tournier insisted on the topicality of this work, whose philosophical dimension does not escape young readers: ‘the confrontation of the Indian Vendredi and the Englishman Robinson is a major current events topic. [...] Vendredi's arrival [...] is the third world knocking at the door of the industrial world’. | ||||||||||||||||||||
Primal writingIt would be impossible to indicate here the exact nature of all the modifications which the first text underwent in order to provide a condensed version suitable for children. During a 1986 interview, Tournier himself is content to offer a single, illustrative example, which he feels requires no commentary: In Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, I wrote: | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 314]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
The author concludes categorically: The gibberish is finished. This is my true style aimed at twelve-year-old children. And so much the better if it appeals to adults. The first Vendredi was a rough draft, the second is the good copy. (Garcin) Aimed at the child reader, the new, ‘true’ style of Tournier is simpler, lighter, more direct, more concise, in short, it is what the author calls ‘primal’ writing. At the time of the publication of Vendredi ou la vie sauvage, Tournier is already certain that this should be his future manner of writing. The process of simplification which the first Vendredi underwent was not merely of a lexical nature. About a year before he published his rewritten version of Vendredi, Tournier contended in an interview that his only literary problem was ‘pedagogical’: ‘how to make clear and pleasant the subtle and difficult things I had to say’ (Rambures, 165). Dissatisfied with the overly explicit metaphysical reflections of the first version, Tournier tried to incorporate his philosophical speculations into the fabric of the narrative, in other words, to translate the abstract into concrete terms. To this end, authorial commentary and philosophical meditation, including Robinson's Logbook, were, for the most part, expunged. Vendredi ou la vie sauvage was Tournier's first attempt at a narrative accessible to all ages, but capable of conveying a philosophical message. Like the other texts which Tournier considers ‘books of philosophy for ten-year-old children,’ it contains ‘a hidden philosophy’ (Lapouge, 45). Tournier confirmed to me in 1993 that the ‘short’ Vendredi is, in his mind, better than the ‘long’ one, because it is ‘more finished, more condensed, much less philosophical, much less abstract, and just as rich’. However, although it is superior to the original novel, which he now considers merely a ‘rough draft,’ Vendredi ou la vie sauvage is not his ‘best book’, admits the author. Tournier's first text published for children marks the initial stage of a striking evolution of his writing toward the art of the tale.Ga naar voetnoot6. Tournier's fourth novel, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, published in 1980, and rewritten for children under the title Les Rois mages in 1983, is a retelling of the story of the Magi in Matthew's Gospel, to which the author brings a lesson learned from the vast iconography it has inspired over the centuries. Attributing the event's fascination to ‘the shock between the poverty and simplicity | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 315]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Michel Tournier
| ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 316]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
of the manger, and the sumptuousness of the Wise Men,’ the author describes it in the following manner: ‘The Thousand and One Nights turn up in the stable.’ (Lapouge, 31). At the time of the publication of Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, the author did not think the subject would interest a young audience: ‘I did not go far enough, I did not have enough talent or genius for the book to be accessible to ten-year-old children, but that is what one must strive toward’ (Lapouge, 45). The author does, nonetheless, later adapt the novel for young readers, and this rewriting requires far fewer modifications than that of his first novel. Whereas Tournier claims not to have left ‘a single line unchanged’ when he revised Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, ‘three-quarters of the text of Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar remains intact in Les Rois mages’ (Koster, 158). Apart from the exclusion of some philosophical or aesthetic meditations, and the reduction of the multiple narrative voices to a single, objective voice, the author was content, for the most part, to eliminate entire sections of the adult novel; the children's version contains only three of the original seven partially interwoven narratives, including that of the legendary fourth Wise Man, Taor, the Prince of Sugar, engaged in a long quest for the recipe for pistachio-flavoured Turkish Delight. Reluctant to see in Les Rois mages ‘an abbreviation more than a rewriting,’ one critic suggests that the revised version is ‘an example of minimal rewriting - which is also maximal rewriting,’ that is to say ‘what was (is) a highly sophisticated novel has been transformed into a parable’. Tournier's refinement of the art of rewriting is expressed, by the same critic, in terms of the reception of his two rewritten novels by the adult reader: ‘When reading the second Friday, one has an awkward sensation of being alternately adult and child; when reading the second Rois mages, one feels that one is simultaneously adult and child.’ As Tournier evolves towards a parabolic simplicity which is easily read by a child, but whose meaning is not easily interpreted by an adult, ‘every so-called adult novel he writes becomes an intermediary stage in his quest for the parabolic’ (Worton, 25). Rather than considering Vendredi ou la vie sauvage and Les Rois mages as vulgarisations or more artless, watered-down versions of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, these so-called ‘children's versions’ should be seen in the light of an evolution towards a more concise, more primitive, indeed a more ‘primal’ narrative, which gives concrete expression to abstract meaning. As Tournier sees the writer's craft essentially as a rewriting of myth, as an attempt ‘to add to or at any rate modify the “murmur” of myth that surrounds the child’ (The Wind Spirit, 159), Vendredi ou la vie sauvage and Les Rois | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 317]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
mages should be seen as variations on the same myth. Indeed, Tournier does not limit himself to two versions of these myths. In 1978, the author proposes an alternative ending to the story of Robinson Crusoe in one of the short stories of Le Coq de Bruyère, entitled ‘La Fin de Robinson’, modeled, not on Defoe's novel, but on Saint-John Perse's Images à Crusoé. Likewise, Le Médianoche amoureux, published in 1989, contains a tale entitled ‘Le Roi Faust’, in which two great myths are superimposed to suggest the existence of a fifth Wise Man. According to Arlette Bouloumié, Tournier's writing, which always involves ‘the rewriting of a previous text and the possibility of multiple variants,’ is a ‘mythical writing’ as in Claude Lévi-Strauss' description of myth. A striking mise en abyme of this mythical writing occurs in Les Rois mages. The artist Assour, who does the first drawing of the Wise Men, imagines the future ‘like an immense gallery of mirrors in which is reflected, each time according to the spirit of a different age, the same recognizable scene: the Adoration of the Wise Men’ (Les Rois mages 77), Tournier's various rewritings of the myth of the three Wise Men, specular writing par excellence, find their place in this galery of mirrors, and in so doing, make of the act of reading, in turn, a specular process. | ||||||||||||||||||||
La Fugue du petit PoucetFirst published in the magazine Elle in 1972, ‘La Fugue du petit Poucet’ has since appeared as a picture book for children, as well as in collections of short fiction for both adults and children. To rewrite one of Perrault's fairy tales is perhaps the sign of an immoderate ambition, but in Tournier's case, it is no doubt especially the desire to pay homage to the author who appears at the head of the novelist's list of the world's greatest writers. Tournier declares that he would give ‘all of Corneille's theatre for Perrault's Le Chat botté’ (Koster, 158). (As an author who does not appeal to a young audience, Corneille would appear in Tournier's second-rate list.) In recent years, the rewriting of traditional fairy tales has become a wide-spread phenomenon in children's literature, as Jack Zipes' study, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, clearly indicates. New adaptations of classical fairy tales have also been addressed to a specifically adult audience. ‘La Fugue du petit Poucet’ offers a modern, provocative, and, for some, scandalous reading of the well-known fairy tale. Tournier's version retains many of the traditional motifs of Perrault's fairy tale (woodcutter father, forest, boots, ogre), but they are inserted into the familiar context of modern daily life and they no longer convey the same message. Like other contemporary authors of fairy tales, Tournier uses the genre to present today's young readers with modern social problems, often of a technological, ecological, or gender nature, | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 318]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
in an attempt to transform society by encouraging tomorrow's citizens to challenge the status quo. It is Pierre Poucet who abandons his insensitive parents, and runs away to the forest, where he is taken in by Logre and his seven charming daughters. Tournier's ogre is a sort of androgynous hippy-vegetarian-ecologist-pacifist, who does not inspire fear in children, but rather in adults. The oversized boots that Tournier's genial ogre offers Pierre when Commander Poucet arrives with the police to recover the runaway and to arrest Logre for ‘corruption of a minor’ may no longer have the magical powers of the seven-league boots, but they nevertheless allow Pierre to escape his high-rise apartment by means of the more subtle magic of dream and imagination. | ||||||||||||||||||||
La plume de PierrotIt is no doubt the text Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit which offers the best example of ‘crosswriting,’ and most clearly illustrates the primal narrative suitable for a dual readership, towards which the author, in Tournier's eyes, must strive. In 1982, Tournier stated that he would gladly give up all his other works for Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit, a children's story published in 1979, considered by the author to be his best book. The tale revolves around three characters from the Italian commedia dell'-arte: Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine. In a provincial French village setting, Pierrot, with his baggy, white garments and powdered face becomes a baker; Harlequin, in his familiar multicoloured outfit becomes a housepainter; Columbine is a laundress. In this very simple love story, Tournier claims to offer ‘the philosophical structure’ of the love triangle, whose ‘countless variations’ include such ‘great classics’ as La Femme du boulanger by Giono. Repulsed by Pierrot's nocturnal vocation, Columbine lets herself be seduced by Harlequin's colours; the laundress becomes a dyer, exchanges her white dress for a dress of multi-coloured diamond-shapes, in short, becomes a ‘Harlequina’. After a brief elopement, the repentant Columbine returns, having discovered Pierrot's letter, which, according to Tournier, ‘contains all the philosophy of this tale’. The letter reveals to Columbine that Pierrot, too, has his colours, which, contrary to the chemical, toxic, superficial, malodorous colours of Harlequin, are substantial, nourishing, profound, sweet-smelling. Thus, Columbine is initiated to the ‘secrets of the night.’ In his article on how to write for children, Tournier explains that ‘through the two little dolls of the Italian theatre,’ two metaphysical ‘visions of the world’ clash: ‘Great echoes resound in these childish spokespersons. It's Goethe and Newton divided on the theory of colours, it's Parmenide versus Heraclite. [...] | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 319]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
The child, of course, doesn't know that. But he senses it, and he understands it in his own manner.’ (Tournier 1979, 19) Through a series of fundamental oppositions-black/white, day/night, sun/moon, speech/writing-, mere child's play accessible to very young readers, Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit presents the moral and philosophical reflexions of the author. The tale could have concluded with Columbine's return, but a good ending, according to Tournier, must be surprising, and the author does indeed reserve at least one delightful surprise for the reader of Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit. Very early in the tale, the reader learns that, contrary to the smooth-talker Harlequin, the taciturn Pierrot ‘preferred to write, which he did by candlelight, with an enormous pen’. This revelation takes on all its meaning toward the end of the tale, when Harlequin, chilled to the bone, knocks on the door of Pierrot's bakery, singing words which are very familiar to the young reader. Tournier embeds in his narrative the first verse of ‘Au clair de la lune’, probably the bestknown of all French children's songs:
Au clair de la lune,
Mon ami Pierrot!
Prête-moi ta plume
Pour écrire un mot.
Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n'ai plus de feu.
Ouvre-moi ta porte,
Pour l'amour de Dieu!
Tournier explains, tongue in cheek, that Harlequin was singing ‘a song which has since become well-known, but whose words can only be understood by those who know the story we have just told’. The tale thus becomes a sort of etiological fable, relating the story of origins, as in Kipling's Just So Stories, which Tournier cites as one of the masterpieces of world literature, in an article which just happens to be devoted to Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit. But the ending of Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit reserves yet another surprise, one which shocked many adult readers. On Columbine's return to Pierrot's warm bakery, the latter shapes ‘a Columbine-Pierrette’ out of pastry dough. With an erotic suggestiveness rare in children's literature, Columbine invites the former rivals to join her in eating the pastry Columbine, in a sort of sensual Communion: ‘- How tasty I am! You too, my beloved, taste, eat the good Columbine! Eat me!’. Tournier insists that the sensuality present in his texts | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 320]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
published for children is a diffuse, pre-genital sexuality, which he considers appropriate for young readers. The author justifies such episodes by referring to Freud's definition of the child as ‘polymorphously perverse’, deducing from Freud's analyses that ‘children's works must be eroticized, perhaps even in a more intense manner than books for adults’. Tournier often laments the fact that his works accessible for children do not necessarily reach a wide juvenile audience because of adult censorship on the part of conservative children's editors, librarians, or parents. The author considers censorship one of the major problems confronting a text which is published for a dual readership of children and adults. Tournier may agree with the critic who tells him that he writes ‘children's books which should not be put into all hands,’ but the author himself adds: ‘Not to be put into the hands of all adults’ (Lapouge, 45). | ||||||||||||||||||||
Culmination of artThe reflections on his craft which Tournier confided to Arlette Bouloumié and the students of the Lycée Montaigne in 1986, clearly reveal that the rewriting of his own works is part of a general evolution of his writing: ‘When I write, one of three things occurs: in the exceptional case, I am brimming over with talent, with genius, [...] and I write straightaway a work so good that children can read it.’ The best example is Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit, which marks, according to Tournier himself, the culmination of his art. ‘Or, I don't carry it off and I write Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, but I have the strength to begin again, and that produces Vendredi ou la vie sauvage, which is not at all a version for children but simply a better version’ (Tournier 1986, 21). Tournier admits elsewhere that he did not have ‘enough talent, or genius’ when he wrote Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar for it to be ‘a book suitable for children’ (Lapouge, 45), but once again he has the courage to start over, and the result is Les Rois mages, which begins with the classical fairy tale opening: ‘Once upon a time’. It is worth noting that the tales, ‘La Fin de Robinson Crusoé’ and ‘Le Roi Faust’, the most recent variations on the two myths, appeared with no modifications whatsoever in Sept contes (1990) and Les Contes du médianoche (1989) respectively, both published in Gallimard's Folio Junior collection. Or, concludes the author in 1986, I don't pull it off, and the undertaking seems hopeless, beyond saving, and that results in Le Roi des Aulnes’ (translated as The Erl-King in Britain and as The Ogre in the United States). As early as 1971, Tournier had indicated his intention to rewrite for children Le Roi des Aulnes, a long, complex novel about Nazi Germany. Convinced that | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 321]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
an author should not hesitate to introduce extreme cruelty into a children's book when necessary (he reminds us that children's literature is full of it, citing in particular the ‘terrible sadism’ of Perrault's Contes), he promised that ‘Le Roi des Aulnes for children’ would not be lacking in ‘atrocities.’ However, Tournier seems to have mellowed over the years, as he admitted to me recently that, although he still believes that the novel could be rewritten for nine-year-olds, he hesitates to do so because of its ‘blackness,’ and no longer has the ‘heart’ or the ‘creative joy’ necessary to take on such a project. He had also envisaged writing a children's version of his most ambitious novel to date, Les Météores. As for a text like La Goutte d'or, there is no need to rewrite it: ‘fabricando, I learned to write. I believe it is so good that one could read it from ten years onward’ (Tournier 1986, 21). | ||||||||||||||||||||
Mythic dimensionThe key to Tournier's ability to appeal to a dual readership lies in the mythical pretext/pre-text which underlies all of his works. A chapter of Tournier's autobiography, entitled ‘The Mythic Dimension’, stresses the fundamental importance of this aspect of his writing. When Tournier was forced to renounce what he considered his true vocation as a philosopher to become a novelist, it was myth which provided him with a ‘bridge from metaphysics to the novel’. Defining myth as ‘a story that everybody already knows,’ Tournier regards it as ‘a multistoried structure,’ which on one level is ‘a mere child's story,’ yet on a higher level embodies ‘a theory of morality, metaphysics, and ontology’. ‘The child's tale that is the myth's ground floor, as it were, is just as essential as its metaphysical summit,’ he writes. To illustrate this, Tournier describes the joy and pride he felt when a technical afterword by Gilles Deleuze was being included in the paperback edition of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, ‘while the very same novel was simultaneously being brought out in a children's version and staged as a children's play by Antoine Vitez’. Tournier's conclusion is fundamental to our discussion: ‘For me, the proof of the novel's success is the response that it was able to elicit from two readers at opposite poles of sophistication: a child at one end of the scale, a metaphysician at the other.’ As Tournier's art evolves, the author no longer finds it necessary to tell the myth in two separate stories, each ‘being built according to an identical plan but at a different level of abstraction’. The metaphysician will have to content himself with the ‘child's tale,’ which Tournier no longer considers merely ‘just as essential’ as the ‘metaphysical summit,’ but indeed superior, and capable of conveying more effectively the same message. Thus, in 1984, Tournier describes Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit as ‘an ontological treatise which has all the | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 322]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
appearance of a children's tale’ (Koster, 150). Claude Lévi-Strauss compares the functioning of myth to ‘bricolage’; similarly, Claude Brémond likens the tale to the ‘bricolage’ of a child playing with meccano. By engaging in this ‘bricolage’ of myths and tales, Tournier has discovered a form of playful writing which naturally finds favour with young readers. In striving toward the ‘ideal of brevity’ he finds in such masters as Perrault, Grimm, and Andersen, Tournier's writing and rewriting has undergone, not an impoverishment, but a distillation, resulting in a more concentrated mythic quality, and the ‘glaucous depth’ which characterizes the best fairy tales. In an essay entitled ‘Barbe-Bleue ou le secret du conte’,Ga naar voetnoot7. Tournier uses the example of Perrault's ‘Bluebeard’ to attempt to pinpoint the secret of the tale, which he defines as a short story ‘haunted by a spectral meaning which touches and enriches us but does not enlighten us’. The veiled, ambiguous simplicity of the tale resists a complete and definitive decoding of the multiple layers of meaning, inviting readings on different levels by all ages. It is the ‘mythic dimension’ which draws Tournier's art ever nearer to those great works of Perrault, Grimm, and Andersen, works ‘that were not written for children, but that are so good that they too can read them’. In response to an interviewer who asked him if the fact that he had written a children's version of his first novel was an indication that Vendredi was already ‘a tale for grownups’, Tournier replied that ‘everything, or almost everything’ he writes is ‘childish’, due to his ‘mythical inspiration’ (Brochier, 11).Ga naar voetnoot8. The author considers this ‘mythic dimension’ a fundamental attribute of the tale: ‘the tale is haunted by a myth, distorted, disguised, destroyed, or, on the contrary, in the process of developing: that is to say that the tale would be a nebula of myth’ (Bevan, 69). One of Tournier's concluding reflections in ‘Barbe-Bleue ou le secret du conte’ sheds a great deal of light on his own writing, and in particular his art of rewriting: ‘Archetypes drowned in the depth of a childish plot, great myths disguised and exploded, which nonetheless lend their powerful magic to a popular little story: such is no doubt the secret of the tale.’ Such is also the secret of Tournier's own works that are ‘generally said to be “for children”’, but which are in fact tales for children and grown-ups alike. | ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 323]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Literature
| ||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 324]
| ||||||||||||||||||||
|
|