[It] has become abundantly clear that Le Clézio's writings to date function as a cohesive whole. There are constant reflections, echos, and even direct references from book to book as well as within each volume, and successive works take up themes that have already been treated in order to develop them further or offer an alternative statement. (p. 159)

[The] works tend to go in pairs. The Interrogation and The Flood offer the poles of heat and cold, light and darkness while telling the same story of bewilderment, refusal, and flight from society by symbolic annihilation of man's faculties of comprehension. The Ecstasy of Matter and Terra Amata are the theory and practice of human life in Western Europe and hence complement each other totally. The attitudes and preoccupations of the first three novels come together in The Book of Flights, with its tale of repeated turning away, whereas the contrast between village and city established in this book provides the division and parallel which have marked the pairs since 1969. War shows the struggle against modern city life; and its parallel was to have been found in In Iwa's Country—the story of life with the Panamanian Indians. Similarly, The Giants has its partner in Journeys to the Other Side in which the overwhelming accumulation of consumer goods is exchanged for the seething possibilities of the natural world. And in both the mind leaves the ordinary thinking plane. In the first case under the influence of the subliminal messages broadcast in Hyperpolis the movement is induced by others. In the second case NajaNaja teaches her friends to control their own minds in such a way that they can escape the restrictions of reality for a more universal plane whenever they wish. Simultaneously, Journeys to the Other Side provides the missing complement to The Book of Flights. The latter showed physical and geographical flight while the former explores mental and cosmic escape through the power of the imagination—a solution used tentatively at the beginning of Le Clézio's career in The Interrogation and The Ecstasy of Matter.

Throughout the work the protagonists are dominated by two major influences: the sun and the sea—or occasionally water in some other form. The sun brings understanding, an understanding of things which are sometimes too painful to withstand; thus man tries to escape what the light forces him to see. But everything is focused on the sun; for Le Clézio all man's thought and hence the structures he establishes are created around it, for it is the source of revelation. It is reality. (pp. 159-60)

The complementary influence is water, and it is not surprising to find that the women in Le Clézio's books are often found close to water. Chancelade and Adam both make advances to girls on the beach, and both fail to understand them. In The Book of Flights a woman is identified with a river; in The Giants Tranquilité and her friend drown; and finally NajaNaja walks on the water into the sunset, thus linking both images and providing an absolute contrast to François Besson crawling out to the end of the breakwater at the height of the storm. Besson seems to be trying to escape from his life and from the sort of relations with women where his security is constantly threatened; indeed, he is attempting to return to the womb. NajaNaja is the total opposite to the struggling image of rejection offered by Besson. She controls her environment; she has mystery, youth, beauty, flexibility, competence; she commands love and allegiance and seems to have power over all of life and death. Le Clézio gives her the attributes of the archetypal woman. (p. 161)

Solitude, alienation from society, its people and values, and travel in Asia and South and Central America where alternative philosophies can be found have brought Le Clézio along a path very similar to the one he traced in the work of Henri Michaux at the time when his own body of work was embryonic. The cohesion that exists between Le Clézio's critical work and his creative writing is striking. Everywhere we find the same choice, war or flight, imposed by a fundamental isolation rooted in fear; this is shared by Lautréamont, Artaud, and Michaux, to whom … Le Clézio is drawn. For all of them writing is a safety valve protecting them more or less effectively from madness. Drugs and travel are used as means of escape and revelation. Each writer is concerned with the expression of his own deep feelings and his need to communicate them to others. This need for communication creates a profound struggle in the writers, owing to each one's alienation from his fellows, and produces a language of unusual violence coupled with a certain hermeticism. (p. 162)

That Le Clézio's struggle is a personal one manifests itself, in the early novels at least, by the fact that his characters are very alike and that each of the young men is similar in a number of respects to Le Clézio himself. They are all alternative statements of the same thing. Indeed, the juxtaposition of alternatives is a technique the author uses at all levels and, in particular,… [there is] the instability of his subject pronouns at all times. Narration moves frequently from "I" to "you" to "he" without any apparent motivation—a technique which both alienates the reader and forces him to share the alienation of narrator and protagonist very intimately. The novels have little or no plot, and in many cases the sections within a book have no apparent order. Usually they are made up of a series of situations which illustrate a given theme from different angles. These can be complementary or contradictory, developing the theme further or offering another possibility, a different interpretation. The effect is that of a number of tableaux rather than of continuous narration. Each book is complete in itself and yet is linked to the other works by a system of recurrent detail, repetition of images, new or further treatment of themes and problems. Hence all Le Clézio's writings are woven together into a single growing structure in which each strand reinforces the others, and adds to their combined impact and power. (pp. 165-66)

Against society Le Clézio pits the forces of the natural world, and, above all, the elements. He is a relentless observer of the world around him, with the patience to record minute details, long sequences of phenomena, actions, and the gift to transpose what he has seen into words with extraordinary realism. It has been suggested that his evocations of heat are the most telling in the whole of French literature, and it is certainly true that he excels in the creation of "set-piece" descriptions: a storm at sea, a rainy night, and so on. His books are permeated by atmospheric conditions, overwhelmed by consumer goods and modern building. This is his universe. The only objection that can be made is that sometimes the author seems to be fascinated by the flow of his own sentences, and his effects then lack a conciseness which would increase their force.

In his personal explorations he has pushed beyond the usually accepted bounds of the novel into a realm of lyric reflection in which fiction, philosophy, and poetry are combined. It is no wonder that frequent references are found to pre-Socratic philosophers both in Le Clézio's writing and that of his critics. Like them Le Clézio is trying to describe the universe, and his cosmic prefaces and epilogues are but the more extreme of his attempts.

In many ways he reminds us of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both are intensely personal writers, consummate stylists, mystics making pertinent social criticisms, observers of nature in all its forms. Both reveal acute problems in their personal relations with other people and with women in particular. It is partly the result of each one's need to be accepted that they write copiously.

Given these resemblances, it would seem proper to end this study with two well-known quotations from Rousseau. Le Clézio's treatment of these statements is very different from that of his predecessor, but the criticisms contained in them sum up his attitude very well: "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." "Everything is good when it comes from the hands of the author of all things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Le Clézio indicts modern society, its growth and values, and shares with us his attempts to resist its pressures. He sees life as a period of uncertainty, movement, change between birth and death which both lead out into darkness. His is a totally relative universe where particles swirl, combining and dividing in a constant shift, and where matter may assemble in the shape of man for a short time—this is the result of modern science. Simultaneously, Le Clézio is a humanist of sorts. He believes that man, thus formed, should take responsibility for his context. He should remain as closely tied as possible to the other natural formations around him, for through them he can come to know himself perhaps. The man-made elements of the modern world prevent him from doing this—they alienate him from matter and therefore from himself, who is matter also. Le Clézio's work is one long attempt to deal with alienation and the accompanying diminution of the individual. By his way of writing he forces us to share and come to grips with his situation and therefore our own. He is a man of our time, and his writing is a valuable addition to the corpus of available experience. (pp. 166-67)