He might not be as well known as some of his contemporaries, but it is not surprising that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has been awarded the coveted prize, writes Stephen Gray.
The latest JM on the honours list to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature is one probably little known to South African readers: JMG Le Clézio. The initials stand for Jean-Marie Gustave, and the problem is that, being of a somewhat spiky taste, few of his more than 30 works have been translated into English.
Yet the range of his dashing oeuvre includes much material of interest to South Africans, at least insofar as his special patch is a country close by: Mauritius, which we hold in common nowadays.
His standard biography reads as follows: he was born in Nice on the French Riviera in 1940 and was educated there up to doctoral level. In 1963 with his first novel, released in English as The Interrogation, he won the first of his prestigious prizes, the Renaudot.
He explains: “Since the age of seven or eight I have never ceased to write: poems, sketches …” One might add the major novels, short stories, travel records and several works for children. With his high forehead and horse teeth, he is a cartoonist’s delight as well.
Although he made his debut as a younger member of the French anti-novel school, he has won the reputation of an independent. He has travelled for long spells, West Africa and Mexico being among his destinations. As the Parisian coterie of French letters seems ever more to retreat into itself, he has struck out for a larger world. He has become their oddball Jack London or their Robert Louis Stevenson of the islands.
Once, back in 1973, I used the opening of his magical novel Terra Amata, superbly rendered into English by Barbara Bray, in an anthology for use in local high schools. There was the construction, word by word, of a young personality within the pencil strokes of a volcanic landscape: Maa the sea, Nathan the crab, Prixt, Silicoe, Manuel, Kalar, Azor, in Chapter MDCCII of the assemblage of the earth, Chinese symbols on banners included. Yet our educators of the day were not to be inspired, preferring to stick to their Bapsfonteins and Bophuthatswanas.
Although basically metropolitan French, Le Clézio adds to his biography the tantalising detail that he was brought up in a Breton family “emigrated to Mauritius in the eighteenth century”. Indeed, in colonial days, the Le Clézios ranked with the Lagesses and the De Chazals as part of the island elite. In an interview given in 1991 their inheritor came out and classed himself of double nationality (British-French) and of a bilingual heritage (French-English).
Accordingly his work has always been noted in journals keeping tabs on Francophone literature overseas, such as Notre Librairie and Cultures Sud. His belief is that the multiculturalism they reflect is his only option for his future as a writer.
His greatest work so far in this vein, published as Le Chercheur d’Or in 1985, was not translated into English until 10 years later, rather limply rendered as The Prospector. There he sets up two violently contrasting panels: the Europe of World War I against its near antipodes in the Indian Ocean. Rich recreations of Mauritian life are recollected by his narrator, moving out on a treasure-hunt to one of its farflung dependencies, the even more remote Rodriques Island. “There one may no longer read the sky for bad signs, nor believe in a world at war,” he concludes.
But a decade later Le Clézio astounded his devotees in the follow-up, the travelogue called Voyage à Rodriques. Apparently its predecessor had been no novel at all, but a recreation of the true life of his actual grandfather. Nor was the retracing of his footsteps without sour swipes at South Africa’s meddling in their region: “frenzied dwarfs” he called the apartheid government, which with India opposed the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in their paradise archipelago.
Avoiding the razzmatazz of Parisian intellectual conformity, Le Clézio remains likeable for his records of poverty, his insistence on understanding migrants and his outreach to other and ancient cultures as a translator and cultural mediator. Let him remain such an outsider to the end, insisting that those on the periphery of power — so rarely included in international fiction — also achieve their place in the sun.
In the French establishment the extraordinary Michel Tournier first opened that vista, yet he has sadly been overlooked so far by the Nobel talent scouts. Perhaps the factor that swung them in Le Clézio’s favour, though, is his recent unrelenting attack on what he calls the supermarketisation of Western society. “Burn Hyperpolis” is his slogan, in ingenious texts of disrupted typography, cancelled directions, clashing logos and the advertised banality of universal products. While Tournier is the provocateur, Le Clézio has been the one to create panic outside the stately portals of the French Academy.