The Landscape of Madness

by William Jay Smith

In his first novel, The Interrogation, which won its author the Prix Renaudot, J. M. G. Le Clézio admits in a preface to two secret ambitions. “One of them is to write one day,” he says, “a novel of such a kind that if the hero dies in the last chapter—or, at a pinch, develops Parkinson’s disease—I shall be swamped beneath a flood of scurrilous anonymous letters.” The second is to write

by J. M. G. Le Clézio translated from the French by Barbara Bray (Atheneum, $5.95) a really effective novel later on, “something in the spirit of Conan Doyle, appealing not to the readers’ taste for realism—along the broad lines of psychological analysis and illustration—but to their sentimentality.” In Terra Amata, which now appears in a fine English translation, he may have realized both ambitions, although perhaps not quite in the way he had anticipated. The hero of this new novel dies, causes unspecified, and is buried in the last chapter; but I doubt that M. Le Clézio will be Swamped by anonymous letters of any sort. And while it may not appear so on first reading, Terra Amata is, in a sense, very much in the spirit of Conan Doyle: while presented in the guise of psychological analysis and illustration, its basic appeal is sentimental. It is really a little fold-out puzzle, or, as M. Le Clézio himself says of The Interrogation, a “kind of game or jigsaw puzzle in the form of a novel.”

What we have now is simply a do-it-yourself piece, a happening in which the author does everything possible to make the reader feel not only that what is happening is happening to him but also that he is making it happen, that he is the writer as well as the reader. “Come up on stage,” the author seems to say, “let’s see what we can make of all this. Your guess is as good as mine.” M. Le Clézio’s interest is simply in spreading the scrambled jigsaw before us and letting us focus on the pieces. He has a predilection for prologues, and he indulges himself, and his reader, again here. This novel begins: “You’ve opened the book at this page. You’ve turned over two or three pages, glancing idly at the title, the name of the author . . .”and ends: “What does it matter that there was one to write and another to read? In the last resort, in the very last resort, they are one and the same, and they’ve always known it. There is not just one word, one sun, one civilization. There are millions of things everywhere. Isn’t the poem there, or there, or in your eye, the eye of the beholder? I didn’t really write what you’ve just read. . . . But I’ve said enough. Now it’s your turn.”

And so, if it is not too old-fashioned a question to ask, what is it all about? It is about nothing less than the entire universe, about one person who is born on this insignificant earth, born by chance, that is, and whose name happens to be Chancelade (de la Chance, you see), who kills potato bugs, grows up, has a girlfriend who by chance is called “Mina,” makes love, peoples the earth (“Another thing you could do was have a son”) , tries to communicate (and, of course, tell the whole truth along the way), dies, and is buried. Chancelade, the hero of this miniature saga, is a kind of Lucky Jim, who projects his anguish and frustration into timeless space. And there is—as in every French film—a girl beside him watching and admiring him while he does. Chancelade is Everyman everywhere and at every time. The book is all paradox from beginning to end—the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss linked to the existentialism of Sartre and the absurdity so dear to the authors of the nouveau roman. It seems a terribly youthful work, that of a philosophy student in a cold room who has stayed up too late, read too much in too many dusty tomes, and is trying to put it all down—utterly without humorbefore turning on the gas. But in the paradox, in the shifting of the jigsaw pieces, there is, all the same, a certain poetry.

M. Le Clézio is frequently very good at communicating sensations. In one section entitled “In a region that resembled Hell,”he describes in detail the sights, sounds, and smells of driving along the Côte d’Azur in a traffic jam, and he does give his reader the definite sensa-

tion of being in hell. “He felt that he was gliding into the landscape of madness, in time with the electric music. Soon he would be one of them, an insect among insects; the crowd would close around him like a mouth and digest him greedily.” The novel begins by detailing the landscape, “a stretch of earth and dry rubble, with a few mountains, a few hills, and, on the other side, the great plateau of the sea.” And it ends with the landscape still the same under “the inescapable sun”: “There is nothing figurative anywhere, because everything is self-sufficient. There is no imagination. Nothing is isolated, and nothing communicates.”

For a novel concerned with nothingness, in which there is no communication, a great many pages are devoted to attempts at it. There are Chinese characters sprinkled throughout. One section is composed of invented, incomprehensible words; the hero and heroine communicate for pages at another point in sign language. I was going to try to decipher that, but I looked first at another section in which Chancelade addresses his mistress by blinking a flashlight in Morse code. The message, printed in code (and, of course, translated from French to English in code), begins: “Dear Mina are you there I want to say what I’ve never been able to say before. . . .”

When I got that far, I gave up. It may well be that, as Lévi-Strauss maintains, society’s myths and beliefs are as fundamental to its form as language. But still one wishes that M. Le Clézio would give greater vent to his poetic self, and realize that language, like life, may be a prison, but it may also be a privilege and a promise.

I read Terra Amata in Paris at Christmas while the astronauts were circling the moon. The novel seemed representative of Paris at the moment, with all its buildings washed clean and already beginning to get dirty again, Paris obsessed by its man-made beauty and its logical heritage, trying to break free in so many ways into the greater modern world, but still held back, in its attempt, by its sentimental self-concern. I went at the same time to see Jean-Louis Barrault’s wonderful spectacle, a re-creation of Rabelais, which is held on the planks of a former wrestling arena. Rabelais, with his grotesque, but always human, characters, his long lists of invented, earthy words, seemed infinitely more modern, yet more in touch with all that is primitive and eternal on this blue, beloved earth than this at times brilliant, but fundamentally pretentious, little puzzle.