No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is
the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.)
"So far as I’m concerned the earth has turned into a sort of
chaos… I’m afraid the hill may turn into a kind of volcano… Or that the
polar ice may melt, which would raise the level of the sea and swallow
me. I’m afraid of the people on the beach, BELOW. The sand is changing
into quicksands, the sun into a spider and the children into shrimps."
His searching gaze penetrated the smallest concavities, the folds
of skin or plumage, the scales, the fluffy hairs that sheltered the
visibly ignoble slumbers of balls of black hair, masses of flabby
cartilage, dusty membranes, red annulations, skin that was cracked and
split like a square of earth. He stripped the gardens of their grass,
dived head-first into mud, devoured humus voraciously, crawled along
burrows at a depth of twelve yards, pawed a new, kindred body borne
from the putrefied corpse of a field-mouse. With his mouth drawn down
between his shoulders he pushed forward his eyes, his two big, round
eyes, gently, with a thousand precautions, waiting for a kind of
electric shock that would contract his skin, activate the ganglions that
propelled him, and throw the rings of his body against one another
like copper bracelets, with a faint tinkle, when once he had become
subterranean, coiled, gelatinous -- yes, the one and only real,
tenebrous earthworm....suddenly melting, boiling, or flowing beneath his feet. The trees grew
excited and gave off poisonous vapours. The sea began to swell,
devoured the narrow grey strip of beach and then rose, rose to attack
the hill, to drown him, to numb him, to swallow him up in its dirty
waves. He could feel the fossilized monsters coming to birth somewhere,
prowling round the villa, the joints of their huge feet cracking. His
fear grew, invincible, imagination and frenzy could not be checked; even
human beings become hostile, barbarous, their limbs sprouted wool,
their heads shrank, and they advanced in serried ranks over the
countryside, cannibalistic, cowardly or ferocious. The moths flung
themselves on him, biting him with their mandibles, wrapping him in the
silky veil of their hairy wings. From the pools there rose an armoured
nation of parasites or shrimps, of abrupt, mysterious crustaceans,
hungering to tear off shreds of his flesh. The beaches were covered
with strange creatures who had come there, accompanied by their young,
to await no one knew what; animals prowled along the roads, growling and
squealing, curious parti-coloured animals whose shells glistened in
the sunshine. Everything was suddenly in motion, with an intense,
intestinal, concentrated life, heavy and incongruous as a kind of
submarine vegetation. While this was going on he drew back into his
corner, ready to spring out and defend himself pending the final
assault that would leave him the prey of these creatures…
Le Clézio, in his incredibly unnecessary foreword, attempts to sidestep criticism by considering The Interrogation
“too mannered and wordy; its style ranges from para-realistic dialogue
to pedantically aphoristic bombast.” This self-consciousness makes me
wonder if Le Clézio was simply using Adam as a mouthpiece when he had
him say:
I know we’re more or less literary, but it won’t do any longer.
I’m really tired of -- It’s bound to happen, because one reads too
much. One feels obliged to put everything forward in a perfect form.
One always feels called upon to illustrate the abstract idea by an
example of the latest craze, rather fashionable, indecent if possible,
and above all -- and above all, quite unconnected with the question.
Good Lord, how phoney it all is! It stinks of fake lyricism, memories,
childhood, psychoanalysis, the springtime of life and the history of
the Christian religion.
Le Clézio wishes for The Interrogation to be taken as a
“complete fiction, interesting only in so far as it produces a kind of
repercussion (however briefly) on the reader’s mind.” Does he succeed?
If by “complete fiction” he means a kind of metafictional narrative
that contradicts convention, confounds expectation, a fiction that
distances the reader from the text, a text that draws attention to
itself as a construction, then the answer is yes. But The Interrogation
is much more than that. The “repercussions” on the mind are much
stronger than that. Le Clézio’s juggling of the story’s action with
beautifully rendered prose, fantastic imagery, acerbic dialogue, and
especially its excavation of a deranged mind, distinguishes his novel
not only as an embryonic curiosity of an elder craftsman of literature,
but a fascinating work in itself.
The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio, translated by Daphne Woodward
Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-1439149188
256 pages
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