SOURCE: Oxenhandler, Neal. “Nihilism in Le Clézio's La Fièvre.” In Symbolism and Modern Literature: Studies in Honor of Wallace Fowlie, edited by Marcel Tetel, pp. 264–73. Durham: Duke University Press, 1978.

We know more about nihilism than we like to think.

—W. J. Dannhauser, from a lecture

Si vous voulez vraiment le savoir, j'aurais ne préféré ne jamais être né.

—J. M. G. Le Clézio, Preface to La Fièvre

I

The fictions of J. M. G. Le Clézio unfold on a devastated and devastating world. Few other writers in the tradition of Kafka and Sartre have celebrated as powerfully the emptiness of the contemporary cityscape. Numerous images of emptiness are brought into play to convey the reductive power of a nihilistic imagination.

The question I will put to Le Clézio's fiction has to do precisely with the meaning and extent of his nihilism. I wish to pursue this nihilism into various motifs of the stories, seeing what shapes it assumes and how it repeats itself. Once Le Clézio's nihilism has taken shape and substance we will be able to pose the question of its extent or limits. Obviously, if Le Clézio were a totally unrelenting nihilist he would not write stories. So the nihilism must be mitigated in some way. And perhaps it may even provide its own antidote. Is there escape from this nihilism—some possibility of redemption from (or perhaps through) it? I put this question to Le Clézio's book of stories La Fièvre because I think it his best work to date. Paradoxically, he poses the question of the meaning and limits of nihilism more effectively here than in his straight philosophical essays. One might ruefully apply to the Le Clézio of the later works, a novelist turned essayist, Rimbaud's devastating line on the misuse of talent: “Une belle gloire d'artiste et de conteur emportée!” (Une Saison en Enfer, “Adieu”).

II

Le Clézio's hero lives in a world of matter in motion:

Le mouvement renaîtrait dans le petit appartement, avec des à-coups, avec des ratés de moteur encrassé. Le mouvement viendrait. Il passerait sous la porte et se mettrait à ramper sournoisement, comme un reptile, vers le lit du malade.¹

[p. 48]

This molecular motion creeps in everywhere—nothing can resist it. Le Clézio calls it “l'extase matérielle,” and it encompasses all of creation. It includes human consciousness and the world of created objects. All-invading and all-encompassing, it reveals a monistic universe, one with only local differentiation. All things ebb and flow between nodal points of energy.

Language is the privileged matrix of extase matérielle, since it is here that the flux turns back upon itself in a loop or fold and so contains itself by a reflexive act.² Language as Le Clézio uses it is a material force: hence it is not primarily used to perform a cognitive act, i.e. to denote concepts or relationships. It is used as a magical power whose function is to change the material relations of the user. Language does not stand for an object; it is an object. It is not merely a symbol of the object but rather a material sign that contains it own referent. In what is the best article on Le Clézio to date, Gerda Zellner makes the point that Le Clézio uses language in a way diametrically opposed to the way it is used by the formalists of the Tel Quel group.³ He is fascinated with names because they somehow contain the essence of the thing named:

Qu'est-ce qui est marqué sur cette dalle? Les noms des morts, sans doute, et les empreintes spiralées des vivants. Les signatures aussi. Les dates des jours et les chiffres des heures, les numéros des années, les phases de la lune, les vents, marées, éruptions solaires. Le nombre des feuilles des arbres. Les écailles des serpents, les pattes des scolopendres. Arêtes, vieux vestiges, reliefs du festin, miettes, miettes! C'est cela mon domaine, ma prison. Je n'en sortirai pas; mais je veux compter les grains de sable et leur donner un nom à chacun, puisque c'est la seule raison de ma vie.⁴

The world is a trash heap littered with names, dates, graffiti. There are splendid remnants of the biological order—snake scales, spider legs. The writer's task is to rescue these remnants from the indeterminacy of the trash heap and to give them momentary prominence by the act of insertion in the mental order, an order which is directly cognate to their own, since it too is part of the extase matérielle.

This conception of the function of language no doubt has its roots in Symbolism with its view of the magical power of name-giving.⁵ Yet perhaps the clearest link is with the alchemical view of poetic language held by Rimbaud. Like Rimbaud, Le Clézio uses language to change the world. He possesses Rimbaud's acute awareness that this banal, daily world is somehow not the real one; and like Rimbaud, he uses language to void the world and penetrate through it to something else. That “something else” is Nothingness. No matter where one begins in a Le Clézio story one is always carried back to that emptiness at the center of his vision. Yet how one sees or interprets the void is the central issue for arriving at an understanding of Le Clézio's poetic ontology.

The flux of the literary text reveals itself in a constant process of making and unmaking. It is characterized by continual change and openness which is opposed to the deathlike sterility of the cityscape. And yet the flux of the text seems to be a directed process, a dialectic propelled by some inner urgency toward a meaningful opening-out.

Certain motifs return over and over again in these stories. A classification of these motifs would run as follows:

1. The walk through the city. This is the motif that occurs the most frequently in La Fièvre. The characters wander aimlessly through the teeming streets of a Mediterranean city (based on Le Clézio's own Nice), where they have a number of random encounters:

Il traversa à nouveau toute la ville, tout ce dédale sonore plein de coups de douleur et de frissons, cette espèce de blockhaus asphyxiant et sale où les couloirs partaient dans toutes les directions, pour mieux vous tromper, où les chambres se ressemblaient toutes, avec leurs meurtrières minces et leurs coins noirâtres, où se croisaient près du béton armé de lourdes odeurs de croupissures et d'excréments.

[p. 34]

2. Encounters in the city. The most powerful presence in the city is the crowd, which seems to live its trance-producing existence like an affliction or plague. The solitary walker is constantly on the verge of succumbing to the crowd's power, but the presence of human flesh awakens nausea in the hero and deep feelings of paranoid fear:

Au centre de cette viande suante, criarde, bariolée, des yeux vivaient, d'une vie presque indépendante, petites bêtes glauques et voraces. … Il était cerné par ces murailles de vivants, tenu fixement au milieu du trottoir, attaqué de tous côtés, en proie à toutes les sortes d'hommes, ceux qui marchent, ceux qui sont assis, ceux qui rient, ceux qui parlent, ceux qui sont derrière, ceux qui regardent, ceux qui dorment.

[p. 121]

Other encounters, however, are less menacing. There is, for instance, in Le Procès verbal (published in 1963, two years before La Fièvre) the extraordinary sequence during which the hero follows a dog for hours on end, abandoning his own autonomy to that of the animal. More frequent than encounters with animals, however, are those with children. There are a number of these in La Fièvre; all communicate a Rimbaud-like fascination with the nondiscursive intelligence exhibited by children. Perhaps most poignant is the child's ability to remove himself from the inhumanity of the city and to immerse himself in an imaginary world. Yet childlikeness does not provide an effective antidote to the constant aggression that the hero meets as he wanders through the city. Much of Le Clézio's paranoia seems to focus on the automobiles encountered during the city walk:

… il se dégageait de toutes ces machines à l'arrêt une sorte de rumeur confuse, qui n'était plus du bruit et pas encore le silence. … J'étais en quelque sorte nourri de cette rumeur. Elle entrait par mes oreilles et par toute ma peau et s'installait à l'intérieur de mon corps, déclenchant des mécanismes inconnus, des rouages. Au bout de quelque temps, j'étais devenu une sorte de voiture, moi aussi, une machine d'occasion sans doute.

[p. 93]

The automobile is the prime example that indicates the adversary relationship between the Le Clézian hero and all material objects. No doubt this follows from the dehumanization and pollution of the city by the automobile. Yet, at the same time, there remains a deep fascination with the car as a primary locus of fantasy life.

3. Encounters between man and insect. The insect presents to man a minuscule version of his own vulnerability. Often the text focuses down like a high-power microscope:

Martin pencha la tête vers la bête immobile au creux de sa main et la contempla longuement. Il vit le corps rond, noirâtre, la rainure des élytres, la tête et les antennes rentrées … il comprit tout de suite que le charançon était vivant, et qu'il faisait le mort pour qu'on le laisse tranquille. Il vit ça tout de suite, au premier coup d'œil, à cause de l'application que mettait le petit animal à rester levé sur lui-même, et peut-être aussi à cause d'un imperceptible mouvement de vibration dans les antennes pliées. C'était cela, la peur, ce petit grain de poussière, ce pauvre pépin de fruit, tout noir, tué sur lui-même, le temps arrêté, le corps à l'envers, les pattes serrées sur son abdomen où la vie palpitante se cachait.

[pp. 156–57]

Later in the story Martin himself will become an insect, when he is attacked by a ruthless band of children. Le Clézio is fascinated by the way in which the insect presents to man a reduced and elemental version of his own place in the cosmos.

4. The enabling emotion. Le Clézio's text is a crossroads of all the intellectual and aesthetic currents that precede him. As a continuator of the existentials, notably Sartre, he makes it clear that any important insight must be grounded in the body and must be accompanied by a powerful emotion. Le Clézio's heroes, updated versions of Sartre's Roquentin, are frequently subject to nausea. The prime example of an enabling emotion is the fever which gives the whole collection its name. The overwhelming vertigo and panic which crash down upon the character Roch are described at length as they overwhelm his mind and body. The fever mounts in him like a wave; he shivers and feels that his body is on fire; objects melt under his gaze or become part of a nebula. In this truly Rimbaldian story the hero reaches apocalyptic heights as he destroys the world with his glance. The world becomes an enormous cancer; and one thinks of Roquentin's intuition that being is “de trop” as he stares at the roots of the chestnut tree in the park of Boueville.

Like Roquentin, Le Clézio's hero, Roch, perceives objects as secretions:

Les choses sécrétaient, sans arrêt, laissaient couler des liquides brûlants. Il y avait des glandes partout, des cloques invisibles qui bouillonnaient au plus profond de la matière.

[p. 31]

It is, of course, the insertion of man into the world that makes reality viscous, since he must dye it with the stuff of consciousness before he can apprehend it. Emotion, which occurs at the endothymic juncture between body and soul, is for Le Clézio a guarantee (albeit a weak and fallible one) that man, anchored to the world through his tormented and fever-ridden body, is still viable, even if threatened.

If we ask what it is that threatens the Le Clézian hero, we return to the theme of nothingness which was our original starting point. For the intuition of the void seems to underlie every perception, every act. Finally, we realize, the Le Clézian hero must go through the void if he is ever to attain appeasement.

Nothingness functions not as a “motif,” but rather a permanent basso continuo always present at any point in the work's unfolding. The hero aspires to dissolve himself and vanish into the emptiness of space:

Ce qui était bizarre, offusquant, c'était que je me sentais vivre, dans la plus profonde évidence, et qu'en même temps, il me semblait être devenu transparent sous la lumière. Les vibrations de l'éclairage passaient à travers moi comme à travers un bloc d'air, et me faisaient onduler doucement du haut en bas. Tout mon corps, tout mon corps vivant était attiré invinciblement par la source lumineuse, et j'entrais longuement dans le ciel ouvert; j'étais bu par l'espace, en plein mouvement, et rien ne pouvait arrêter cette ascension.

[p. 91]

This is certainly one of the most positive of the Le Clézian hero's many transformations. It is important because it expresses the underlying monism of Le Clézio's work, his view that all reality is finally one. If we went further and added that the One or Underlying Principle is nothingness, nirvana, then we would not be far from the view of Buddhism. It is clear that Le Clézio is close to Buddhism in other respects: his view that all human existence is suffering is profoundly Buddhist. And from Buddhism we can borrow insights that will help us to understand the role of nothingness in Le Clézio.

Le Clézio's work must be approached with the understanding that it is deeply paradoxical, as is any text that attempts to express the meaning of life. Man is diminished yet retains, through his power to name, an awesome ability to create existence where before there was nothing. His heroes deny any meaning to existence while at the same time they endlessly record that meaning (or absence of meaning). All things, Le Clézio maintains, are one, yet he draws up endless lists of material objects. Perhaps the greatest paradox lies in the appeasement that comes, for apparently no reason, after the frantic wanderings (through material and imaginary space) of heroes such as Roch or Paoli or Beaumont or Martin. We see that the text is dialectically organized in such a way as to make this outcome necessary. The appeasement seems logical and inevitable; yet how explain it, how justify it in such an apparently comfortless cosmos?

The appeasement that is attained by Le Clézio's hero may come after a period of frantic efforts as it does to Roch, after his long bout of fever (p. 59). When finally the narrator is able to control movement (synonymous with change and hence life itself), then he will be wholly appeased. Appeasement thus seems linked with some kind of negative or downward closure on existence. Tranquillity comes as he vanishes, as he dissolves the apparent solidity of the self and evaporates into the night air. This attainment of nothingness, of nirvana as the goal toward which the self moves, is presented even more strikingly in a passage that appears earlier in the same story:

Il semble même que les pensées se répandent au-dehors, qu'elles sortent par mon nez et mes oreilles et vaquent dans l'espace, me font un lit. Les désirs forment des boules non loin de moi. Dans le fond d'une caverne noire, une impulsion palpite, isolée, enfin de moi visible. Je peux toucher mes mots, mes visions. Et moi, ce qui s'appelle moi, n'est plus rien. Vidé, soulagé, ma tête immense m'abandonne. Je suis enfin libre. Je suis enfin libre. Je n'ai plus de nom, je ne parle plus de language, je ne suis qu'un néant. J'appartiens à la vie, morte, anéantie, transfigurée par la splendeur de l'évacuation. Un souffle. Je n'ai plus de pensée, mon âme est un objet. Je gis.

[pp. 198–99]

The central paradox here amounts to a reversal of the Cartesian cogito: I think and perceive, therefore I am not. This is only an apparent paradox to one who has some understanding of the Buddhist goal of nirvana.

The affirmation of the nothingness of the self lies beyond the principle of contradiction and, at the very least, must be viewed as an unresolvable paradox. Yet there are a variety of meanings that can be attributed to the affirmation that the self is empty and strives to unite its emptiness with the absolute emptiness of nirvana.

There is, first, an effort to define the self as a protean and immaterial principle, a principle that has all forms and no forms, that dies and yet survives death. The very paradox quoted earlier, “Je n'ai plus de pensée, mon âme est un objet,” is dense with meanings. If I have this thought, how can I have no thought? Because, no doubt, I am an immaterial substance, that is, one occupying neither time nor space. Yet, he claims, the soul is an object. There is a Sartrean echo here, for the soul seems to lack any particular ontological privilege. Yet the surging, spontaneous, protean quality of the very passage quoted seems to place the “soul” in a category above and beyond all objects.

For Le Clézio, the soul is a pilgrim in quest of some dimension, some realm where it can subsist without the constant threat of annihilation. This realm, if it could be attained, would be nirvana. Yet here we return to paradox, for the only way the soul could exist would be to cease to exist. A further extension of the paradox of the soul's emptiness would be to read it as a vector pointing toward a profound or deep self, as opposed to the superficial self that functions in most of our daily transactions. This would be a view consonant with the depth psychologies or the psychology of Marcel Proust, whose entire fictional work is a descent into the depths of lost or vanished selves.

Still another possible interpretation would be to insist that the second term of the assertion (nirvana) is not merely a “vide” but a “vide-plein,” to borrow the terms of the scholar of Buddhism, Joseph Masson. Masson sees in the asceticism of Buddhism the traditional steps: negation of the world and of attachment to the world; negation of the self, in preparation for the attainment of nirvana. He writes: “C'est en supprimant, théoriquement et pratiquement, le Soi, la personne, que l'on peut dépasser toutes les douloureuses limitations et parvenir à l'expérience béatifiante et illimitée de la mystique; c'est alors qu'il peut y avoir nirvana.”⁶

So much is clear in regard to the first stages of the mystical ascent. But beyond this point lies the vexed question whether nirvana is pure negativity or might not be rather a via negationis for arriving at the absolute, in other words, a “vide-plein.” This question must no doubt be answered differently for each of the different Buddhisms, not to speak of the different Buddhists. The Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki comes out strongly in favor of nirvana as a transcendence toward an absolute ground of being. Masson echoes this position:

Bien conduite, l'opération de dépouillement “doit déboucher,” semble-t-il, sur tout autre chose que le rien pur et simple; sur une “négation,” “un vide,” un “anéantissement” qui ne sont nullement le néant. … Nous serions ici en face … d'une via negationis vécue, anéidétique, et para—ou supra—conceptuelle … qui use du vide et de l'abolition pour connaître comme inconnue l'existence substantielle de l'âme.⁷

The Oriental scroll-painting, known as the mandala, presents a pictogram of spiritual states through which an individual must pass on his journey to enlightenment. In the center is the abode of the deity. This is contained within the palace of inner being, surrounded in turn by the different gates through which the pilgrim must enter. All these stages or way-stations, simultaneously present on the illuminated surface, impel the pilgrim to advance along his meditative way. Carl G. Jung took the mandala, essentially a meditative ritualistic device, and adapted it to therapeutic use, as a means for the neurotic to achieve self-centering.

One might see Le Clézio's stories as representing the different aspects of a quest from neurosis and toward enlightenment or at least appeasement. The Le Clézian persona moves through different spiritual and psychological states, all equally synchronous as he runs his predetermined course. He too follows a spiritual path, usually unrelentingly downward, into the throbbing city streets that lead him inwards, on his spiritual journey. Each hero seems to be drawn irresistibly toward the void, only to regain consciousness at the last moment, just before he succumbs to its hypnotic power and plunges into oblivion. Each story is a litany of negations and denials, a stripping of all camouflage and all defense from these characters until they are revealed totally naked.

Perhaps the immediate literary ancestor of Le Clézio's persona is the officer in Kafka's tale “The Penal Colony.” When the execution machine starts to run amok, the officer strips and lies down on the bed, allowing his body to be riddled and mutilated by the deadly needles of the harrow. One might add that there is a strong Oriental strain of impassivity and submission to suffering in Kafka, just as there is in Le Clézio.

But, after all, although he has a strong streak of the exotic, Le Clézio is not a Buddhist. And yet the Buddhist multivalent use of nonbeing helps to circumscribe Le Clézio's struggle with nothingness, helps to situate and schematize it. Le Clézio's personae move through nothingness and assimilate it or are assimilated by it as they progress along a spiritual path. The nature of their spiritual experience can never be stated once and for all. So it is that the writer uses metaphor and negation as he attempts to deal with this experience. And he begins the story over and over again. In a very profound sense each of these stories is the same story repeatedly told. Perhaps this explains Le Clézio's doubting and abandonment of the traditional narrative form. He seems to be making no progress, seems to be repeating himself. Again and again, the same motifs occur. Again and again, the story makes closure on an incommunicable experience, till finally he makes the decision to abandon the fictional form altogether and to seize the core experience directly, by a different kind of discourse. Like Rimbaud and like that contemporary Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, Le Clézio may eventually abandon the struggle with the narrative form altogether. Yet this will not bring him any closer to nirvana.

Le Clézio is like the man in the parable that ends Kafka's Trial. He waits patiently, year after year, for a gate to open—not knowing that it was open all the time. In the mysticism of the void, to search is to have found; to desire is to be appeased; and yet there is no finding and no appeasement.

Notes

1. All references are to La Fièvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) unless otherwise indicated.

2. Le Clézio's fascination with matter and his exaltation of matter as an ecstatic force that implicitly contains consciousness as its inner dimension is reminiscent of the view of Teilhard de Chardin.

3. “Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio: le roman antiformaliste,” in Positions et oppositions sur le roman contemporain (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).

4. J. M. G. Le Clézio, “Comment j'écris,” in Les Cahiers du chemin (Paris: Gallimard, 15 Oct. 1967).

5. One is also reminded of the Sartrean view of poetry's ability to “unveil” or “disclose” a reality sunk in shadows until it is named.

6. Le Bouddhisme (Paris, 1975), p. 173.

7. Ibid., p. 182. The quotations are from an article by Jacques Maritain.