JMG Le Clezio

Reading JMG Le Clezio has been a revelation.It has been therapeutic too. It has helped me get over my Conrad fixation. Le Clezio takes further the journey that Conrad began. Somewhere on the way, Camus joins him and the reader is taken on an intense interrogation of the human mind. Dealing with anxiety of exploration and thrills of voyage. The tussle between nature and culture.

Empty spaces fascinate both, Conrad and Le Clezio. 

"There was nothing else on earth, nothing, no one.They were born of the desert, they could follow no other path. They said nothing. Wanted nothing. The wind swept over them, through them, as if there were no one on the dunes. They had been walking since the very crack of dawn without stopping, thirst and weariness hung over them like a lead weight. Their cracked lips and tongues hard and leathery. Hunger gnawed their insides. They couldn't have spoken. They had been as mute as the desert for so long, filled with the light of the sun burning down in the middle of the empty sky, and frozen with all the night and its stars."

- pg 2, Desert, JMG Le Clezio. 

"Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence,an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick,heavy and sluggish. There was no joy in brilliance of sunshine.The long stretches of the waterway ran on,deserted into the gloom of overshadowed distances."

pg 57, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.

Le Clezio shares a love for the sea. Alexis L'Etang has a Marlowesque fascination for sea:

"I thought of the sea as human, and in the dark all senses were alert, the better to hear her arrival, the better to receive her. The giant waves kept over the reefs and then tumbled into the lagoon; the noise made the air and earth vibrate like a boiler. I heard her, she moved, she breathed." 

 -pg 2,The Prospector Le Clezio.

"It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map,resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a fast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land."

pg 28, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.

Conrad might support and subvert the colonial enterprise.But, Le Clezio has witnessed its futility. Le Clezio makes a  strong case for the Self as well as the Other. Alexis falls hopelessly in love with the exotic, young  Ouma, at the same time he is acutely aware of the lure of the sea and passion for travel. Ouma is an enigma throughout the novel. Silent and firm, full of feminine beauty, Ouma knows the hollow dream that Alexis pursues. She knows there is no treasure to be found. She asks him whether he believes that there is really gold to be found.

"She has a child's face but she is tall and slim;she is wearing a short skirt, as the Manaf women usually do, and a tattered shirt. Her hair is long and curly like an Indian's. She walks along the valley with a bent head because of the rain. She is coming toward my tree.I know she has not seen me yet and I dread the moment when she does.Will she cry out in fear and run away? She walks soundlessly, with the supple movements of an animal. She stops to look toward the tamarind tree and then she sees me. Immediately her beautiful smooth face becomes anxious. She stands where she is,balancing on one leg and leaning on her long harpoon."

pg 187,The Prospector Le Clezio.

Le Clezio remains dubious throughout the novel. In his essay L'African he shares that he never shared the white man's burden. He approaches the life on colonies,wars, identity crisis with an unflinching honesty. 

Well, enough on Le Clezio for one post. 

Next post would take me on an interrogation of The Interrogation by Le Clezio and glimpses of Camus' The Fall" found in Le Clezio's writing.