Migrations of J.M.G. Le Clézio

Abstract

INTRODUCTION TO MIGRATIONS OF J.M.G. LE CLÉZIOJean Paul Deléage The science is far from containing all the questionings on the problems of the humanity and the world.The artistic and singularly literary questionings have often a deeper impact as is shown in the masterflywork of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio who has just distinguished by the Nobel Prize in Literature.Far away worlds and mysteries of human identity and intimacy, brilliant criticisms of the ecologicaland social faults of unforgivable times are invariants of the writings of Le Clézio. As for the weak andthe imbecile people who give up, they deserve nothing but the extreme severity of the author and theircontemporaries. “Write to the world”, this is the first intention of Le Clézio. “Following this idea, I shall say first thatthere is not a Le Clézio without us. “To be born to the world and write to the world are linked in ourreading of the world.”, writes Véronique Giorgiutti in the beautiful text she offers us to read. To writeto the world to show our concern for the people rather than the Earth on which they live, because it willfinally resist whereas there will be many human beings crushed by the inhumanity of the actions of thewestern societies, indifferent to their poverty and to the destruction of nature. Because, as he writes itin Raga: “today, the slightest acre of earth up to the heart of the Amazonian forests, up to the ice-coldcanyons of Antarctica, was examined […] by the cold eye of satellites. If a secret remains, it is insideour soul, in the long continuation of desires, legends, masks and songs which is mixed to the time andreappears and runs on the skin of the people …” A rise in ritournelle of a panic outburst ends the last work of the author, Ritournelle of the hunger. Aren’twe today in a situation similar to that of the first listeners at the première of the Bolero of Ravel attendedby the mother of the narrator in 1928 as well as by Claude Lévi-Strauss who expressed himself on thatmatter. Jean Marie G. Clézio writes in the last page of its last novel that the Bolero is a prediction: “hetells the story of an anger, a hunger. When it ends in the violence, the silence which follows is terriblefor the stunned survivors”.