Karen D. Levy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Since the publication of his first novel, Le procès verbal (The Interrogation, 1963), in which the protagonist Adam Pollo finds refuge from the aggressions of modern life in an asylum, J.-M. G. Le Clézio has been exploring the wounds of the human condition, caused, in his eyes, by expulsion from the liquid paradise of the womb and the fall into time. His characters are caught in various ways between the desire to lose themselves in the simultaneously comforting yet potentially fatal embrace of the maternal and the challenge of being able to mourn their loss and to acknowledge the void of the past in order to accept the risks of an imperfect future. None of Le Clézio’s texts inscribes this drama as intensely or as seductively as his recent diptych: Onitsha and Étoile errante (Wandering Star).[1] In this study I will analyze the various manifestations the fascination with the past assumes in these novels and address the question as to whether and how Le Clézio’s male and female protagonists learn to construct new configurations of relationships with individuals, with a wider ranging collectivity, and, equally importantly, with the geographic spaces that so fascinate them. By exploring these issues from a broadly psychoanalytic and feminist perspective, we will be able to understand more specifically the network of tensions dividing Le Clézio’s protagonists and to discern more clearly the relationships among the different kinds of discourses inscribed in his narratives.
In the 1980s, Le Clézio began to probe the conflicts of his own family’s past, lured by the possibility of a secret to be revealed. Le chercheur d’or (The Prospector, 1985) and Voyage à Rodrigues (Voyage to Rodrigues, 1986) chart his grandfather’s quest for an elusive treasure and his own efforts to establish contact with his phantom ancestor. The effort becomes much more intense and much more overtly erotic as we move forward in generations with Onitsha. As Nicole Casanova notes in a review of this novel, the link between Le Clézio as fiction writer and his family past becomes “as intensely embraced and as passionate as possible,” for the text is “the true story of Le Clézio in his distant childhood.”[2] The novel transposes a journey Le Clézio made with his mother to join his father in Africa: “The voyage lasted a month, but it was infinite … I never stopped thinking about it.”[3] In simplest terms the text recounts the voyage aboard the Surabaya which the twelve-year-old Fintan, Le Clézio’s literary counterpart, and his Italian-born mother, Maria Luisa, take to join the English father, Geoffroy Allen, whom Fintan has never known, in the Nigerian river town of Onitsha. It depicts the conflicts that occur when these three individuals come into contact with one another and with the British colonial administration. It traces the indelible marks which their sojourn in Africa engraves on their psyches and reveals the consequences of this experience when they are forced to return to Europe. The work has been greatly praised for its classically balanced construction, for the beauty of its language, and for its cathartic quality as “nostalgia writing.”[4] But the apparent transparency of its structure and the poignancy of its style as evocation must not blind us to the significance of the Oedipal drama depicted, nor lead us to dismiss the profound contradictions in the protagonists’ positions, which reveal the extent to which they appropriate a largely imagined past as alibi for inactivity in the present.
For the first twelve years of his life, Fintan enjoyed the exclusivity of his mother’s attention, unmarred by any paternal interference. Maria Luisa, whom Fintan at age ten chose to call Maou, the name he had used when first entering the symbolic, is at once the boy’s care-giver, sister, and would-be lover, whose sleeping body he gazes on with the classic Freudian blend of castration anxiety and fascination (O 13). The threat to this erotically charged intimacy which the voyage to Onitsha and the meeting with his unknown father poses is experienced simultaneously as separation, “the wrenching away, the hole left in memory” (O 16) and rebirth in “the belly of the Surabaya” (O 15). The problem with this departure is that it is precisely a re-birth which fatalistically re-produces the existing situation. It re-instates the original couple relationship and privileges the voyeurism of Fintan’s gaze with even greater intensity. Fintan will never forget the beautiful and tormenting vision of Maou bathing (O 34), and the blatantly sexual sight and taste of the forbidden fruit, seemingly an avocado, “pale green, cut in half around its swollen, obscene pit” (O 53), which Maou repeatedly encourages him to try. The juxtaposed images of the mother’s exposed body and the avocado set up the visual frame for the way in which Fintan will continue to respond to Maou as well as to other females he will encounter, staring rapturously and fetishizing the ovoid form of the womb itself in order to preserve his vision of maternal plenitude. He will remain locked in this stage of the Oedipal process, simultaneously possessing the female body through his gaze and suppressing his anxiety over the threat of castration by valorizing the figure represented, particularly the smooth rounded shape of the impregnated uterus.[5]
With the arrival of the Surabaya in Africa, the intimacy Fintan and Maou shared on the ship is transferred to the silent emptiness of Geoffroy Allen’s hilltop residence, Ibusun. During the year spent in Onitsha, mother and son are accepted by the Africans who live in and around the town. It is important to note that Maou’s closest relationships are with Marima, the young wife of the servant Elijah, and Oya, a wandering deaf adolescent. The text presents these young women as animal-like and childlike and thus emphasizes the traditional colonialist vision which sees Africa in sterotyped terms as the impenetrable and primitive other. Maou’s reaction reveals that she shares this vision. On the one hand, her relationships with Marima and Oya are established along the lines of mother-child bonds which reflect, but do not threaten, the intimacy Maou and Fintan share. On the other hand, the text also emphasizes the sensuality of these two young women, particularly Oya, whose caress makes Maou remember the pleasure experienced with her childhood girlfriend (O 152). The erotic overtones of these descriptions are heightened as Oya guides Maou’s hand down her opened dress to let her feel the fetus growing inside her (O 152). This scene recalls the image of the exposed fruit Maou offered Fintan aboard the Surabaya, revealing her own fascination and suggesting that, in order to be able to preserve her own privileged status, her body too will have to be filled. It further extends the net of erotic tensions centered around the phantasm of the mother’s plenitude and serves as a prelude for the seduction Fintan will experience during the months spent in Onitsha.
Fintan is initiated into African village life through his friend Bony, the son of a local fisherman who leads him to observe Oya, on whom his vision of maternal possession/plenitude converges. Fintan’s fascination with Oya’s naked body proceeds in four different stages, which develop the details of his obsession and reveal how the process of convergence operates. First Fintan is aroused by the sight of Oya bathing alone (O 94). The pleasure is heightened and complicated when he comes upon Bony, who is trying to rape her (O 94-95), and is then further reinforced when he watches Oya and a local domestic servant, Okawho, writhing together on a bathroom floor like two sacred warriors. Fintan associates Oya with the river and with “the princess from the ancient realm whose name Geoffroy Allen was seeking” (O 133). The scene dehumanizes and objectifies both her and Okawho, turns them into emblems of an imagined past, and emphasizes Fintan’s combined terror and fascination as he visually participates in the coupling. The final stage in the elaboration of Fintan’s phantasm occurs as he watches Oya give birth. He and Bony stand by speechlessly as Oya struggles in labor (O 199). And when Bony leaves, Fintan—a passive observer, transfixed by the spectacle he is witnessing—remains alone with Oya (O 200).
The description of the birth experience seeks to capture the effort and the physical anguish involved in the process. It does, however, immobilize the birth scene at the level of erotic spectacle for Fintan’s awestruck gaze (O 222), as much as it confines Oya, whose physical isolation is emphasized by her deafness, to the stereotyped role of river goddess, fatalistically linked to the sinking wreck of the George Shotton, the ship on which the entire scene takes place. The seductive quality of Oya’s pregnancy is further extended by the subsequent descriptions of Marima and Maou exchanging the secret of their own privileged status as newly expectant mothers, in scenes reminiscent of those between Oya and Maou earlier in the work (O 225-26). The three women in the novel who are of child-bearing age are thus valorized in as much as they cherish the function to which “nature” has assigned them and maintain the traditional, narrowly defined value system of a patriarchal society.
The blessing of Maou’s pregnancy offers the hope of a future and suggests the beginning of new relationships. But the exclusive maternal-filial bond that develops and which gains even greater prestige during the year-long stay in Onitsha will, in fact, never be opened to others. The next twenty years Fintan will spend in a state of psychological latency, waiting for the moment when he and Maou will be able to enjoy once again the exclusivity of their childhood relationship while, in the meantime, he records his passion for the dream of Onitsha in texts which are simultaneously letters, testament, and confession. The few pages of these documents—placed in a stylistically highlighted section of the novel—clearly reveal the dichotomy between Fintan’s filtered vision of the past and the destruction of the present, that is, the year 1968, when the Biafran civil war is raging (O 240-41). These pages communicate the melancholic pleasure Fintan feels as he insists on the irremediableness of the catastrophe and the forlornness of the situation. Most importantly, Fintan’s personal documents expose the gap between the strength of his fascination and the weakness of his resolve. He acknowledges that, at the outbreak of the Biafran war, he wanted to join Bony and the other Ibos in their struggle against the Federalist forces of General Adekunle (O 234), but he also admits his own passivity: “Perhaps I didn’t have the courage. Perhaps I didn’t know how to act, and anyway it was too late” (O 242-43). It is much more fascinating to dream in private of the past than to attempt to act in the present.[6]
In the final chapter Fintan’s dream comes full circle. In the spring of 1969, when Geoffroy Allen is at the point of death, Fintan leaves Jenny in Bristol and returns to the sepulchral tranquillity of Maou’s home in the hilltop village of Opio, near Grasse. In the calm of the bedroom where Allen lies lifeless, having disappeared into his own dream, Fintan and Maou reaffirm their fidelity: “Fintan sits down beside Maou.… Together they listen to the insects’ cries which resound joyously” (O 251). The fact that Allen dies in spring and that insects sing joyously would suggest the possibility of a new beginning in the cyclical framework Le Clézio values so highly,[7] if only the last two paragraphs did not return to the political situation in Biafra and point out that “everything is finished” (O 251). The end of the novel also stresses the definitiveness of Fintan’s departure from the boy’s school where he had been teaching, thus calling into question the possibility of any kind of legitimate renewal.
To understand more fully the transcultural role played by the obsession with the past and the fetishization of the maternal body in Onitsha, we must turn our attention to the text’s other male protagonist, Geoffroy Allen, the British loner who leaves his bride behind to “go as far as Meroë, to follow this trace … of the last realm of the Nile, of the black queen who crossed the desert to the heart of Africa” (O 84). It is important to note that when he and Maou meet in Nice in 1935, Allen’s gaze is already turned to the distant past (O 84). During the twelve years Allen spends in Africa before his family join him, the traces of this vision, like the sacred itsi marks on the faces of the Umundri tribespeople, are etched deeper and deeper into his being, just as the voyage aboard the Surabaya reaffirms Maou and Fintan’s original intimacy. Throughout his years alone, Allen studies both the history and the legends associated with Egypt and Meroë and its queens. He appropriates this material and develops an elaborate personal system of transcultural encounters and intersections, which he then uses to confirm and sanctify his obsession. Like Fintan’s phantasms, they converge derisively on the fetishized image of Oya and, paradoxically, reveal the unacknowledged intensity of the bond uniting father and son.
The process of convergence, much more intricate with Allen than with Fintan because of the layering of discourses involved, begins with the sketchy history of Meroë and its queens, who, in addition to their sovereign title “qore” (ruler), bore the title “Kandake” (Candace, queen mother).[8] “Meroë” was the ancient state once centered around the city and the “island” of Meroë, today called the Butana. Meroë extended from slightly north of the point where the Atbara River and the Nile meet above modern-day Khartoum to one hundred twenty miles southward, and functioned as a politically independent entity from Egypt from around 900 B.C. to A.D. 350.[9]Two moments in Meroë’s history interest Allen, and both surround a military defeat, one of which involves a queen. The first event is the defeat which the Meroites suffered under the rule of Queen Amanirenas when they attacked the Egyptian towns of Philae, Aswan, and Elephantine in 24 B.C.[10] The second is the defeat they suffered around A.D. 350 at the hands of Aezanas, king of Axum in northern Abyssinia, an event generally taken to mark the end of the Meroitic kingdom,[11] although it was already in decline, greatly threatened by the influx of the Noba people living to the west of the Nile, by the time Aezanas invaded.[12] Allen condenses these two historical events by joining the image of Amanirenas attacking the Egyptians to both the destruction of Meroë as “the last realm of the Nile” (O 97) and the imagined founding of a new Meroitic kingdom on the Niger, “as if the river which flowed past Onitsha represented the path to the other side of the world” (O 118).
The sections relating the imagined journey of the Meroites across the central African desert toward the west are set apart typographically and thus disrupt the linear narration of the novel in the same way as Fintan’s writings. This highlighting process encourages us to read the text in different ways. The structurally privileged chapters tell a story which does not coincide with the nobility of the vision to which Allen clings so desperately. The description of the Meroites’ flight is not only one of extreme physical hardship, but also, and even more importantly, one of decadence and sabotage from within. It reveals the ever widening gap between the queen whom Allen wishes to see and the one the text actually presents, namely a woman who, at the time of the exodus, was already “emaciated … in the midst of a famished horde” (O 125). The queen and her subjects pursue her vision of a new land (O 128) until her strength gives out, and she must entrust her dream to her young daughter Arsinoë. Soon after Arsinoë assumes her position as queen, the travelers arrive at the fertile shores of an inviting river, and it appears as if her mother’s dream might be realized. But satisfaction must be deferred because Gerberatu, Arsinoë’s advisor, “does not yet see the end of the journey” (166). It is important to note that Gerberatu is neither a true high priest, nor a Meroite by birth, but rather a “soothsayer” (O 167), and “a Nouba from Alwa” (O 164), in other words, a member of the group which, as historical sources suggest, infiltrated and undermined the Meroitic civilization from within. In Allen’s vision he does precisely this. Gerberatu cleverly takes advantage of the political void and the naïveté of the queen to usurp the position of spiritual advisor and consort: “the young queen is now in his power … he even reigns over her body” (O 166). Gerberatu marks the firstborn children’s faces with the sacred signs that would so captivate Geoffroy Allen, and he insists that they continue their journey. When the Meroites arrive at what Gerberatu considers to be the appropriate river island, “there is no more strength, no more hope, nothing but immense fatigue” (O 167). Significantly it is also Gerberatu’s daughter, a Nouba and hence not a “true” Meroite, who in Allen’s dream becomes the first queen of the new river” (O 168) and whose descendant he imagines to be Oya (O 168).[13]
Allen fixes his gaze on Oya as river goddess and incorporates her liquid essence: “It is the river which descends slowly in Geoffrey’s body while he sleeps” (O 166). However, by internalizing Oya’s body, which “shines in the night mingled with the river” (O 169), he sinks into the lethal embrace of the archaic mother, the sacred mbiam water (O 160). He descends physically as he searches with Okawho for the remains of the Aro Chuku oracle along the nearby Cross River on the outskirts of Iboland, which the British destroyed in a punitive expedition from November 1901 to March 1902.[14] The existence of the fetish “The Big Juju,” dedicated to the supreme Ibo deity Chuku,[15] is for Geoffroy Allen yet further evidence of Meroë’s continued presence in the region: “Aro Chuku is the truth and the heart which has not stopped beating” (O 178; 191-92), but ironically, Allen, as he struggles to keep up with Okawho, cannot even remember why he undertook this adventure (O 193). When they arrive at the sacred pool, “there is no sign of life, neither in the water, nor in the forest” (O 194). At this point the text distinguishes carefully between that which Okawho says and that which Geoffroy Allen perceives, for the text reveals the nature of his convictions and calls into question the holy properties believed to lie in the pool before them. The opaque water in which Allen bathes and of which he “drinks deeply” (O 194) brings not the expected purification and renewal, but illness and the threat of death: soon after, Allen begins to shiver with the chills of blackwater fever.
Geoffroy Allen’s immersion in the lifeless pond mirrors Fintan’s earlier initiatory experience with Bony, who guides Fintan through the vividly described genital organs of the forest to wash in another sacred pool (O 161). When Fintan enters the water, he experiences a serenity which affects his feelings for his father. For the first time he feels a closeness to Geoffroy Allen, thinking that this secluded maternal basin could perhaps accommodate them both. Fintan’s experience differs from his father’s in the level of intimacy attained. Whereas Fintan, following the traditional baptismal pattern, only bathes in the water, Allen both bathes and drinks, encountering in the process the full force of female ambivalence inscribed in the text.
The onset of Geoffroy Allen’s illness gives rise to the only other situation in which Fintan feels any affection for him. Weakened after many days of delirium, Allen no longer appears as a menacing rival to the boy. And Allen, for the first and only time, offers to share his quest with Fintan. While the surge of reciprocal affection is only momentary, they continue to share the same dream, the only remains of which are the sacred marks on the broken monoliths around Aro Chuku and on the black, statue-like faces of Okawho and Oya, in whose child they see “the last message of the oracle” (O 215).
Ironically, however, the birth of Oya’s baby is not the promise of a future race, but rather the confirmation of its demise. Since the child is a male, the matrilineal tie which Geoffroy Allen and Fintan imagine with the queens of Meroë is automatically broken. It is true that Oya’s departure with Okawho is a flight from the certitude of domestic exploitation in Onitsha, but they are merely exchanging one context of colonial abuse for another. The text leaves us with the fetishistic image of a naked Oya holding her son, as Okawho paddles in the rain toward the derisive beacons of the oil refineries on the island of Bonny in the Niger delta. The color of the water, which shines dully like “rusted metal” (O 211), further underscores the bleakness of the scene.
Unfortunately this image continues to haunt Geoffroy Allen until he is finally absorbed into the illusory brilliance of his vision. Meroë and Onitsha, Amanirenas, Arsinoë, and Oya all converge in a final paroxysm at the moment of his death. In a sense both male protagonists remain on the threshold of adolescence: “It is one of the most mysterious moments … because it is often the moment when everything is decided … a moment when everything is lived with intensity, which lasts only a few months.”[16] Le Clézio sees this fleeting time as a passage and fiction as the medium to record movement and change. Paradoxically, however, for Fintan and for Geoffroy Allen, who was firmly settled in his obsession when Maou met him as a young man, this passage is fixated. The sense of fatality both males feel, the fact that it is always “too late” (O 167, 179, 269), prevent them from ever doing anything except to evoke the past without acknowledging their complicity in the very destruction they lament. Although poignant, nostalgic melancholy alone is very limited. As Patrick Murphy emphasizes, “nostalgia is another dimension of the absolutist tendencies of dogmas, which reinforces static idealizations.”[17] Both Geoffroy Allen and his son believe that the idealized images of Meroë/Onitsha and its sovereigns contain the secret, the absolute Truth (O 27) that will justify and consecrate their existence. They are both incapable of recognizing their roles in constructing the myth that obsesses them and of moving beyond the stasis their positions exemplify.
Thus, while Onitsha may leave the reader seduced by the lyrical intensity of its images and dazzled by the complex intersections of its historical, cultural, and mythological references, it also leaves us frustrated by the phallocentric circularity of its vision, as closed as the “O” in the title and in the would-be river goddess’s name. The issues raised in the novel assume different configurations in the second part of the diptych, Étoile errante. Like Onitsha, Étoile errante is a tale of personal loss, Oedipal tension, racial prejudice, and political violence, set in the context of the Holocaust and the turmoil surrounding the creation of the state of Israel. On the one hand, the overall structure of the work is simpler because the frame of historical, cultural, and geographical references is more limited and the points of intersection between different kinds of past experience and the present are more direct. On the other hand, the novel is more complex because of the interplay between third-person narration and the sections in which the two principle characters, both of whom are female, become speaking subjects and, for the first time in Le Clézio novels, write their own stories. Similar to Onitsha, this text too focuses on youthful protagonists who are on the threshold of adolescence. But in contrast to Onitsha, Étoile errante depicts authentic passages, “something is happening and taking shape.”[18] Both Esther and the Palestinian refugee Nejma, whose vastly divergent paths cross only fleetingly, encounter exile, abandonment, death, and—albeit differently—the experience of maternity. The ways in which they react to the traumatic events that befall them reveal new dimensions in the dual process of remembering and forgetting that figures so significantly in Le Clézio’s fictional undertaking. The novel raises new questions concerning cultural identity and sociopolitical responsibility.
For the purposes of this study, I will concentrate on Esther’s story because she is more explicitly Fintan’s counterpoint and refer to Nejma’s experience only in so far as it relates to Esther’s situation. Her tale, which spans a forty-year time frame, opens in the summer of 1943, when Esther Grève and her Jewish parents are already exiles, having fled their native city of Nice at the beginning of World War II to the more secure village of Saint-Martin Vésubie in the Italian zone where her father is engaged in resistance and rescue efforts. The first section of the novel, narrated from a third-person position, describes the last weeks of relative security before Mussolini’s fall from power and total takeover of the region by the Germans, which triggers a frantic exodus across the mountains to Italy. Most importantly, it charts the young protagonist’s transformation from a naïve, sheltered child to a culturally committed adolescent, signaled by her name change from the secular Hélène to the Biblical queen Esther. It is important to note at the outset that neither of her parents observes Jewish ritual and that Esther has never visited a synagogue. Although Jewish and therefore threatened, she is not really part of her religious community. During the summer months she begins to understand the relation between the Nazi menace and the importance of fully assuming her Jewish heritage. Her growing awareness reveals itself through her reaction to the Shabbat service she attends on her own and through her decision to adopt her Hebrew name, which was the one her father, Michel, had always used when addressing her (cf. EE 16; 155–56).
The family situation seems emotionally stable, and the affection shared by all three is genuine. Nevertheless, through numerous descriptions of intimate father-daughter outings and other shared experiences, the text privileges Esther’s Oedipal attachment to her father’s influence—his encompassing shadow, which is at once protective and disquieting—and the authority of his name choice. At the same time, it charts the day-to-day tensions of Esther’s working relationship with Elizabeth, who is simultaneously mother, rival, sister, child. The text subtly plays on the sense of foreboding surrounding Michel Grève’s resistance activities in the mountains and on the ambiguity inscribed in the word “to disappear,” exploring the relationship between the void felt by those left behind and the double-sided experience of remembering and forgetting. The first section of Étoile errante describes Esther, who repeatedly imagines “her father who walked in the spacious fields of grass … who disappeared” (EE 41) and, at the same time, insists upon the erotically charged sensation associated with the experience: “Esther … believed herself lost as in dreams when her father disappeared.… It wasn’t really terrifying, the impression of being lost in the gorge” (EE 62). The pleasure of losing herself in the mountains her father traverses and the uncertainty of his fate after he disappears with the first group of refugees reinforce the erotic tension of Esther’s situation. During the trek she and her mother make across the Alps and the months spent in the village of Festiona, Esther relives the days of paternal intimacy in Saint-Martin and still hopes for her father’s return (EE 135). But she also senses the irreversibility of time and the finality of the loss that has fragmented her psyche: “What was on the other side of the mountain has become impossible … it created a huge hole in the center of her being” (EE 134). She is, in a sense, both suspended in and penetrated by the void whose psychological significance she cannot yet confront.
As the seventeen-year-old Esther takes up her own story, she returns again to the days in Saint-Martin and to her years of traumatic isolation afterward. Although Esther returns to the past, she does not remain fixated there as does her counterpart Fintan. The situations Esther describes reveal her efforts to acknowledge the finality of her father’s disappearance and to verbalize the psychological ambivalence implied in the event. This makes it possible for her to begin to mourn the specificity of his loss and to emerge, at least hesitantly, from the nostalgic melancholy that paralyzes Fintan and Geoffroy Allen in Onitsha. Esther recalls, for example, the outing with her father when she was ten years old to watch the harvesters at work, noting the sensuality of his exposed torso and their shared realization that “this was going to end … my father had to go away forever” (EE 146-47). She likewise reconstructs her expedition with Elizabeth to meet her father in one of his hiding places in a scene which captures the erotic tensions in the family relationship. Once Esther’s father greets her, he turns his attention to Elizabeth. As Esther plays nearby, she admits: “I understood that my father was going to die.… I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that he was going to die, that he had to die” (EE 148). These scenes underscore the nature and the intensity of Esther’s attachment to her father and her sense of rejection. The text offers here a variation of the classic Oedipal situation in that Esther’s negativity is directed more specifically toward her father, rather than to her female rival.[19]
Esther’s vision of her father’s death clearly combines her feeling of exclusion and the moment of epiphany when disappearing becomes dying. Esther returns to this scene later in the text, again emphasizing the image of her father and her position as outsider. Finally, she notes the urgency with which her mother, in a double-sided gesture of protection and flight, drags her down the mountain before nightfall, an escape which distances the women from Michel Grève’s presence and signals the ambivalence of the relationship the two will share over the next forty years.
This knot of tension and the hole it opens haunt Esther in Festiona and then in Paris, where she regresses to a state of pre-Oedipal dependency (EE 152) and where the memory of the mountain winds “further open the void” (EE 152). She must in some way unravel this tangle of conflict and, in a sense, leave it behind her. The mutual support Esther and Elizabeth offer one another during the desperate years in Festiona and Paris enable both women to confront the finality of Michel Grève’s disappearance and to verbalize the fact that he was murdered in circumstances which involved neither of them. Through dialogue, Esther begins to mourn the reality, not the phantasm of her loss. She is able to affirm that “I was cured of the void, I was no longer afraid of the truth” (EE 153) and to turn her gaze, albeit tentatively, to the future. Neither the memories nor the anguish of the past are in any way erased, but they are beginning to be reassembled in a process that will span four decades. The transfixing power of the void is hesitantly displaced onto the ship, “this void in the form of a ship” (EE 163), which transports Esther and Elizabeth to Israel, where they will have the opportunity to construct new relationships and to participate in the organization of a community.
In a number of ways, Esther’s psychological development continues to follow a classic Freudian path, in which her lover functions as a protective shepherd/father and her male child as the desired penis substitute. The text emphasizes the points of contact between Esther’s fiancé, Jacques Berger, and her father, superimposing Jacques’s shadow on that of Michel Grève on the morning when Esther realizes she is pregnant and roams the hills above the kibbutz of Ramat Yohanon with the same mixture of intoxication and foreboding that haunted the summer days in Saint-Martin. Father and fiancé coincide in the image of the fetus inside her, and both disappear in the same void: “It was as in the past … when she felt death poised over her father and the void opened before her” (EE 301). To finalize Jacques’s disappearance, Esther visits the border site where he was killed and recalls once again the times she stood guard in the alpine meadows near Festiona, vainly awaiting her father’s return. To reinforce the privileged character of the paternal-filial bond, Esther also jealously guards the knowledge of her pregnancy from Elizabeth. She will both fulfill her fiancé’s dream by emigrating to Canada and studying medicine and consecrate her father’s revered authority by naming her son after him.
In a sense, Esther also assumes Elizabeth’s position as she narrates her mother’s tale in the final section of the text. She continues the love story the dying Elizabeth no longer has the energy to tell. Esther listens to the memories Elizabeth recalls from her hospital bed in Nice and appropriates them. Esther’s situation changes from that of casual observer to that of intimate witness to their lovemaking. In the context of the Oedipal struggle the text inscribes, Esther assumes her mother’s place as her father’s lover. As Jacques’s shadow was superimposed on that of Michel Grève, so too does Esther’s coincide fleetingly, but definitively, with that of Elizabeth in a movement which suggests reconciliation, separation, and also victory. As she sits steadfastly by her mother’s side, capturing the sound of Elizabeth’s last breaths, Esther notes “I was waiting, I was breathing, I was alive” (EE 324; my emphasis).
With “Elizabeth’s disappearance in the crematorium” (EE 326), Esther embarks on what could be termed the final stage in the forty-year-long mourning process referred to earlier, her effort to understand the relationship between her father’s shadow and the shadows of those whom the Nazis deported to the crematoria of the extermination camps. She must locate the site of the horror, of the wound—both personal and communal—in order to, as she insists, “understand what has escaped me … to begin my life anew with Michel and Philip, the two men whom I love … to live in the present” (EE 326). What is important here is Esther’s eagerness to confront the truth. She refuses to sink into the nostalgia that paralyzed Fintan, for whom it was always too late to act. When Esther discovers the Ermitage palace where the Gestapo officers tortured their captives and visits the plateau where her father and the refugees were killed, she retraces in a simultaneous movement her journey to the Israeli border where Jacques was killed, her mother’s return to France, and the desperate wanderings of all the refugees with whom she traveled in the past. Esther walks determinedly in the fields above Saint-Martin Vésubie, as she had in Israel, and disperses Elizabeth’s ashes over the sea on Nice’s shore as a way of mediating between the past and the future and of affirming the strength of her own ego. She is able to turn away from the sinister attraction of the Ermitage and to descend from the mountain field into the valley where now “the shadows are warm” (EE 335). Like Le Clézio himself, who began to explore the tangled knot of his ancestral past out of what he terms “the desire to attain an equilibrium,”[20] Esther has sought to “understand better her feeling of being rooted in the world,”[21] in order to be able to live with greater lucidity and perhaps greater generosity. As she indicates in the final paragraphs of her narration, Esther recognizes her privileged status as one who has a family, a profession, and a country (EE 335). She likewise acknowledges her responsibility to the Palestinians like Nejma, the text’s other “wandering star,” for whom “the road has no end” (EE 284, 335), repeating a phrase which echoes in an all too painful contemporary context Geoffroy Allen’s romanticized vision of Meroë’s rulers.
The fleeting encounter between Nejma and Esther on the road outside Jerusalem in the summer of 1948 reveals the intensity of the Jews’ hostility toward the Palestinians and the kind of effort that must be made for any dialogue to be able to occur between immigrants and exiles. The description of their meeting pinpoints the dichotomies between their respective sociopolitical positions and the gulf of silence, linguistic and cultural, separating them. On the one hand, the text underlines the Jewish settlers’ exhilaration, albeit guarded, over the creation of the state of Israel. On the other, it emphasizes the extreme physical poverty and the psychological disorientation of the Arab women and children plodding in the dust. More importantly, it contrasts Esther’s efforts to understand with the close-mindedness of those with her who are unwilling to acknowledge the humanity of the refugees and to recognize what had until recently been their own plight.
Although the movement of the two adolescents toward one another is mutual and, for all practical purposes, simultaneous, it is Nejma, in this instance the displaced person, who initiates an exchange, an act which performs what the other Jewish immigrants refuse to accept. It is important to note that Nejma’s action is neither a request nor a plea, but rather an affirmation of her own dignity and identity and an offer that Esther share her own. Nejma writes her name on the cover of the notebook in which she will later record the tale of her exile in the Palestinian camp of Nour Chams. She gives it to Esther so that she might do the same. Nejma writes her name not only in Latin letters so Esther, who does not understand Arabic, can read the word, but also “in capital letters” (EE 212), thereby intensifying the authority of her signature and the solemnity of the event.
When Nejma and Esther assume their own positions as speaking subjects, each insists on the kind of bond acknowledged during their encounter and its significance for the future. For Esther, it is the memory of Nejma, of her insistent gaze and deliberate signing, that inspire her to become the writer of her own story, which is at once exorcism and affirmation. Nejma likewise influences Esther’s decision to return to Israel. The image of a solitary and still wandering Nejma haunts Esther during her student years in Montreal but helps her recognize her responsibility to alleviate some of the suffering in Israel, the country which welcomes her, while it continues to treat Nejma and her people as outcasts. Esther’s project to help those suffering from disease and discrimination is described in general terms only. Nevertheless, although it is true that this effort, like the road back to a mythical Meroë, has no end, it is at least attempting to go somewhere.
In conclusion, Le Clézio’s haunting diptych exposes the impasse posed by evocation of the past as nostalgic lamentation alone. His counterpointed novels reveal the urgent need to reconcile the past with the present in order to provide for the possibility of a future. They likewise begin to emphasize the dramatic differences between the positions taken and the texts written by male versus female protagonists. These phenomena pose new challenges for us as readers and encourage us to hope that Le Clézio will continue to open his works to new speaking subjects who will acknowledge alterity as they continue to strive for greater understanding.
NOTES
[1] J.-M. G. Le Clézio, Onitsha
(Paris: Gallimard, 1991) and Étoile
errante (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). All subsequent references are to these
editions and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviations O and EE. All translations are mine. Cf. Nadine Dormoy, “Entretien avec
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio,” À Chacun
sa France, ed. Nadine Dormoy and Lilian Lazar (Bern: Lang, 1991) 129.
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[2] Nicole Casanova, “Le Clézio en rendez-vous avec lui-même,” Quinzaine littéraire 16 April 1991: 14.
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[3] J.-M. G. Le Clzio, Ailleurs
(Paris: Arléa, 1995) 122.
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[4] Madeleine Borgomano, “Onitsha
de J.-M. G. Le Clézio, ou l’Afrique perdue,” Carrefour de culture: Mélanges offerts à Jacqueline Leiner, ed.
Régis Antoine (Tübigen: Narr, 1993)
243.
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[5] The nausea Fintan felt at the sight of the bisected fruit
corresponds to the classic Freudian description of aversion to the female
genitals, which arises when the male child realizes that his mother does not
have a penis. The child substitutes another object for the missing phallus,
transforming the maternal figure into a fetish so that it no longer appears
incomplete. This transformation calms the child’s fear of loss while preserving
his erotic fascination. See Sigmund Freud, Sexuality
and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963)
215-16.
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[6] The text reveals that Fintan is ignorant of the political situation
in the country that so fascinates him: he places Bony among the soldiers of
Adekunle, against whom one would expect him, a local resident, to be fighting (O 235).
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[7] See, for example, Les
prophéties du Chilam Balam (1976) 7-31; Relation
de Michoacan (1984) 11-43; Le Rêve
mexicain or la pensée interrompue (1988) 228–48; and Ailleurs (1995) 83-103.
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[8] Karl-Heinz Priese, “The Napatan Period,” Africa in Antiquity: The Arts of Ancient Nubia and the Sudan, 2
vols., ed. Sylvia Hochfield and Elizabeth Riefstahl (Brooklyn: Publications and
Marketing Services, The Brooklyn Museum, 1978) 98.
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[9] Peter L. Shinnie, Meroe, A Civilization of the Sudan (New York:
Praeger, 1967) 29-61; see also Priese, in Hochfield 75.
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[10] William Y. Adams, Nubia:
Corridor to Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 340-41;
see also Shinnie 42-50.
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[11] Bruce G. Trigger, “The Ballana Culture and the Coming of
Christianity,” in Hochfield 107.
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[12] Adams 387; see also Trigger 107.
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[13] See also J. O. Lucas, Religions
in West Africa and Ancient Egypt (Lagos: Nigerian National Press, 1970)
145.
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[14] Elizabeth Isichei, The Ibo
People and the Europeans: The Genesis of a Relationshipto 1906 (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1973) 34-36, 124-35.
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[15] Lucas 70-72.
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[16] Dormoy 125.
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[17] Patrick Murphy, Literature,
Nature and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995) 16.
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[18] Dormoy 125.
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[19] Freud 176-211.
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[20] Cavallero 174.
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[21] Cavallero 174.
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