SOURCE: Motte, Warren. “Writing Away.” World Literature Today 71, no. 4 (fall 1997): 689–94.

For many critics, J. M. G. Le Clézio's principal virtue as a writer is his ability to construct a novelistic landscape that is dramatically different from the real world of his readers, a deeply evocative, seductive “elsewhere” to which we travel on the virtual journey of his fiction.¹ Such a technique is of course one of the privileged gestures of narrative, at least since Homer; yet in Le Clézio's texts it assumes a richly personal specificity which may be read, I think, as his authorial signature. I should like to examine that effect, focusing upon what I consider to be the most exemplary of Le Clézio's recent novels, Onitsha.

Like many of Le Clézio's writings, Onitsha is a novel of apprenticeship. It tells the story of a young boy named Fintan who leaves France for Africa with his mother in order to join a father whom he has not seen for many years. The very first words of the novel inscribe the theme of the journey and announce that it will occupy the foreground of the tale: “Le Surabaya, un navire de cinq mille trois cents tonneaux, deja vieux, de la Holland Africa Line, venait de quitter les eaux sales de l'estuaire de la Gironde et faisait route vets la cote ouest de l'Afrique, et Fintan regardait sa mere comme si c'etait pour la premiere fois” (13). Fintan's reluctance to embark upon that journey—“Je ne veux pas partir, je ne veux pas aller la-bas,” he protests (16)—may be interpreted as a move in the strategy Le Clézio deploys in order to enlist his reader in the imaginary voyage of the novel. For Fintan's remark is figural of the reader's own natural hesitation to leave the familiar behind and strike out for the unknown. It serves to situate the reader in solidarity with the principal character of the novel and to suggest that, just as Fintan's journey becomes inevitable once he embarks upon the Surabaya, so too our journey becomes inevitable once we begin to read.

During the ocean voyage, which occupies the first of the novel's four parts, Fintan will refer to his destination as “la-bas.” It is an apparently simple term, and yet the fact that it recurs in Fintan's discourse with such insistence leads one to believe that it is less innocent than it might seem.² It is useful to remember too that the term la-bas comes equipped with certain literary connotations in the modern French tradition, and a broad allusive field fashioned in the first instance by Baudelaire and Mallarme Baudelaire's “Invitation au voyage,” much like Onitsha, describes an initiatory ocean journey toward a radical “other,” a place that is utterly different from the word we know: “Mon enfant, ma sieur / Songe a la douceur / D'aller la-bas vivre ensemble!” And Mallarme's “Brise marine” likewise prescribes an ocean journey into the unknown as antidote to the mortal ennui which afflicts the poet: “La chair est triste, helas! et j'ai lu tousles livres. / Fuir! La-bas fuir?’

Clearly, Le Clézio appeals to that tradition in the first part of Onitsha. Under his pen, the term la-bas is powerfully intertextual, an overdetermined signifier that serves to designate a place defined, for the moment, only by its alterity. Throughout his novel, Le Clézio will play on the idea of alterity, shaping it and nuancing it within the structure of the text in order to propose it as his principal theme. Gradually elaborating his novelistic vision of Africa, Le Clézio relies on a discourse of opposition: seen through European eyes, Africa is a place where everything, from social conventions to the most trivial protocols of daily life, is different. In refining that difference, Le Clézio exploits the notion of the exotic massively,' invoking it as both a natural and a cultural term.³ On the one hand, Africa is vast, tropical, abundant, and opulent, a perfect example of Mallarme's “exotique nature.”⁴ As a landscape, it is everything that metropolitan France is not. On the other hand, its cultural conventions, as they are described in Onitsha, seem bizarre, “foreign,” and strangely encoded to Fintan—and, by extension once again, to Le Clézio's readers.

The most powerful technique that Le Clézio uses to project his vision of the exotic upon the reader is involved with his naming practice. In the economy of fiction, as Roland Barthes has pointed out, the proper name is “the prince of signifiers.”⁵ Proper names, whether anthroponyms or toponyms, are always semiotically motivated in fiction, unlike in real life; they speak volumes about the people or places they designate. Le Clézio's novel is no exception to this rule, and in fact his onomastic strategy is announced in the very title of the book. For most of Le Clézio's readers, the word “Onitsha” is a floating signifier, waiting to be invested with meaning. As such, it is the first cipher in the hermeneutic code⁶ of the text, for it serves to pique the reader's curiosity. Clearly, the word is a “foreign” one whose resonances, to a French ear at least, are exotic. Even if the reader happens to know that “Onitsha” is the name of an actual city in Nigeria, the evocative force of the word is undiminished, within the same connotational field. In other words, the title of the book itself serves to announce the theme of the journey toward the unknown; and it will serve throughout the novel as the principal locus of “otherness.” To ensure that his reader will recognize this, Le Clézio stages the word “Onitsha” very deliberately: “C'etait un nom magique. Un nom aimante. On ne pouvait pas resister. … C'etait un nom tres beau et tres mysterieux, comme une foret, comme le meandre d'un fleuve” (46).

The word itself has an incantatory power, Le Clézio suggests; in Fintan's mind it conjures up a world of mystery and strangeness. For Fintan, it is the primary term in a catalogue of other “magical names” that he hears during his voyage.⁷ The reader is encouraged to interpret it in the same way. Moreover, granted the elaborate way Le Clézio weaves the word “Onitsha” into the associative texture of the novel, we recall each time we encounter it that it is also the title of the text. That is, it serves as a sort of shifter, urging us to read doubly, not only on the level of the novel's intrigue but also on the metaliterary level, reminding us incessantly that the novel is not only the story but also the writing of the story. And if Le Clézio intimates so often that the word “Onitsha” casts a sort of spell upon Fintan, he obviously hopes that the novel of the same name will have an analogous effect upon its reader.

On the ship carrying him to Africa, Fintan succumbs willingly to the power of the place-name: “Il y avait ces noms, qui circulaient de table en table dans la salle a manger: Saint-Louis, Dakar. Fintan aimait entendre ce nom aussi, Langue de Barbarie, et le nom de Gorre, si doux et si terrible a la fois” (31). Indeed, the mere enunciation of those exotic names sends him into a dreamlike state, a kind of trance. Uttered one after another, as in a litany or an incantation, they make Fintan dream of strange worlds: “On allait vets Takoradi, Lome, Cotonou, on allait vers Conakry, Sherbro, Lavannah, Edina, Manna, Sinou, Accra, Bonny, Calabar …” (36). In short, for Fintan at least, those names are the initiators of fiction, projecting his imagination into realms of rich—and hitherto unsuspected—narrative possibility. In similar fashion, Le Clézio intends that these names should open a narrative vista for his readers, a horizon upon which his novel will take shape.

Just as the toponyms in Onitsha evoke the unfamiliar, the “foreign,” so too do the anthroponyms. Fintan's own name, for instance, is a very strange one. Indisputably, it is not a French name; and indeed a French reader would find it difficult to identify its origin. Perhaps it sounds Celtic. But in any case, granted its opacity in the referential code of the text, it marks the character who bears it as a strange person. And indeed, all the other major figures in the novel bear the same stamp of alterity, imprinted upon them in the first instance by their names. Fintan's mother, for example, is named Maria Luisa, for she is Italian by birth; his father is an Englishman named Geoffroy Allen, who is marked by the archaic spelling of his first name; the ship's officer who takes Fintan and his mother under his protection during the ocean voyage is a Dutchman named Heylings. When Fintan and his mother arrive in Onitsha, the reader is bombarded with a variety of native names that seem equally strange to a French ear: Marima, who keeps house for Geoffroy Allen (and after whom Fintan's sister, conceived in Onitsha, will be named); Okawho, a servant in another European household; Bony, a fisherman's son who befriends Fintan; Oya, a young woman upon whom Fintan and Bony spy as she bathes in the river. Among the European community, there is Sabine Rodes, a shadowy acquaintance of Geoffroy's. Rodes is marked by the fact that his first name is that of a woman rather than a man. Yet Le Clézio suggests that his alterity is more profound still, and Fintan's father warns him away from Rodes, insisting precisely upon the strangeness of his name, appealing to a logic that the reader understands, even if Fintan himself does not: “Il a dit, Rodes, ca n'est pas un nom tres bien, ca n'est pas un nom comme le notre. Tu comprends? Fintan n'avait rien compris” (100).

In one way or another, then, all the principal characters in Onitsha are designated as “other”—if to varying degree—by virtue of the fact that their names fall outside the referential field of French language and culture. And there is another curious phenomenon at work here, for in fact there is no character who bears an ordinary, easily identifiable French name. It is as if the referential field defined by the language of the novel had no sure guarantor, no center as it were. Personal identity (which the proper name normally serves to reify, after all) is consequently unstable and problematic in Onitsha. This is exacerbated by the fact that the central figures of the novel are plurinymous. Heylings calls Fintan “Junge,” for instance. Fintan himself refers to his mother not as “Maman” or even “Maria Luisa,” but rather as “Maou.” Fintan cannot bring himself to call Geoffroy Allen “Father,” and his mother refers to her husband sometimes by his first name, sometimes by his family name. Bony's name is likewise unstable: “Il s'appelait de son vrai nom Josip, ou Josef, mais comme il etait grand et maigre, on l'avait appele Bony, c'est-a-dire sac d'os” (69). One suspects early on that this plurinymity is a very deliberate effect, and that it is deeply intricated in the thematics of the novel, a suspicion that is amply confirmed by the final words of Onitsha, where Fintan learns of Sabine Rodes's real identity, some twenty years after he first encountered him: “La lettre precisait que, de son vrai nom, il s'appelait Roderick Matthews, et qu'il etait officier de l'Ordre de l'Empire Britannique” (251).

Le Clézio's use of onomastics to elaborate a discourse of alterity is part of a broader strategy through which he questions language itself. His novel constantly puts “foreign” languages into play against the backdrop of the referential language, French. When Fintan gets to Onitsha, he is fascinated by the languages he hears there. He listens with delight to the native voices, which suggest vast new linguistic possibilities to him: “Ils criaient le nom de la pluie: Ozoo! Ozoo! … Fintan ecoutait les voix, les cris des enfants, les appels: ‘Aoua! Aoua!’” (62–63). His mother shares his fascination, and in fact sets out to learn Marima's language: “Maou apprenait des mots dans sa langue. Ulo, la maison. Mmiri, de l'eau. Umu, les enfants. Aja, chien. Odeluede, c'est doux. Je nuo, boire. Ofee, j'aime ca. So! Parle! Tekateka, le temps passe. Elle ecrivait les mots dans son cahier de poesies, puis elle les lisait a voix haute, et Marima eclatait de rire” (149). But there are other new languages too, such as English, the language of the colonial rulers. That is Fintan's father's native tongue, of course; curiously, however, Fintan turns toward Bony rather than Geoffroy Allen for advanced instruction in English—and in another language as well: “Il savait toutes sortes de jurons et de gros mots en anglais, il avait appris a Fintan ce que c'etait que ‘cunt’ et d'autres choses qu'il ne connaissait pas. Il savait aussi parler par gestes. Fintan avait rapidement appris a parler le meme langage” (69).

Throughout Onitsha, Le Clézio interrogates the notion of the “mother tongue.” For the vast majority of his readers, that language is French; yet for Fintan, things are not quite as simple, because his mother's native language is Italian. Maou speaks French with an accent, with “foreign” inflections that appeal strongly to Fintan's ear: “Fintan ecoutait la voix chantante de Maou. Il aimait son accent italien, une musique” (21). Often, Fintan asks Maou to speak to him in Italian: “Parle-moi dans ta langue,” he says (119). And when she does, the music which Fintan hears in that language becomes literal, for Maou sings to him in Italian: “Maou se balancait dans le fauteuil de rotin, elle chantonnait des filastrocche, des ninnenanne, doucement d'abord, puis plus fort. C'etait etrange, ces chansons, et la langue italienne, si douce et qui se melait au bruit de l'eau, comme autrefois a Saint-Martin” (155). Whereas for most of us the idea of the “mother tongue” is essential and largely unproblematic, subtending much of the way we view the world of experience, Le Clézio carefully points out how slippery that notion may be. For Fintan, his mother's tongue is strange—that is, “strange” or “foreign”—and yet he takes great joy and comfort in it.

Not everyone in Onitsha shares his linguistic relativism. When Fintan's family attends a party at the home of the British Resident, for instance, Maou happens to call out to Fintan in Italian, with socially catastrophic results:

Maou avait appele Fintan en italien. [M.sup.me] Rally etait venue, elle avait dit, de sa petite voix effarouchee: “Excusez-moi, quelle sorte de langue parlez-vous?” Plus tard Geoffroy avait gronde Maou. Il avait dit, en baissant la voix, pour montrer qu'il ne criait pas, peut-etre aussi parce qu'il sentait bien qu'il avait tort: “Je ne veux plus que tu parles a Fintan en italien, surtout chez le Resident.” Maou avait repondu: “Pourtant tu aimais ca autrefois.” C'etait peut-etre ce jour-la que tout avait change.

(156)

Within the narrative economy of the novel, that event is crucial, because it marks a point where Geoffroy Allen begins to distance himself from his wife and his son. Thematically, it is crucial too, for it is emblematic of the way in which, according to Le Clézio, we are determined by language. In the eyes of the British colonial community, Maou is marked as “other” by the fact that she speaks Italian, and the members of that community will shun her because of that. Though other reasons for excluding her are invoked (she is too “familiar” with the natives, she is unwilling to embrace the colonial ethic, she is “unconventional,” and so forth), her original sin is linguistic in character: her language is not the language of power. The “ceremony of punishment,” as Michel Foucault puts it (49), must be enacted upon Maou; she must be marginalized in order to preserve the disciplined society of Onitsha.

The novel which bears that name, however, takes a rather different stance on the issue of language and power. Just as Le Clézio problematizes the idea of the “mother tongue,” so too does he suggest that language's capacity to establish and preserve power is not absolute. Onitsha presents its reader with a linguistic polyphony in which a variety of languages—and theories of language—vex one another, question one another. The French of Le Clézio's novel is deliberately unstable, constantly interrupted by other languages: Italian, English, African languages, pidgin. In the place called “Onitsha,” Le Clézio asks us, what is a “native language” and what is a “foreign language”? Is autochthony a question of birth or of power? What makes for an exile? When Maou is banished from colonial society, it merely serves to confirm a marginality which marked her from the beginning of the story. Born into an Italian family, uneducated and dirt-poor, Maou was already a marginal figure, even in metropolitan France. The fact that she was an orphan was indeed one of the reasons Geoffroy Allen had been attracted to her: “Peut-etre etait-ce pour cela que Geoffroy l'avait choisie, parce qu'elle etait seule, qu'elle n'avait pas eu, comme lui, une famille a renier” (84). Yet she is not alone in the margins of Onitsha's society, whether “native” or “colonial.” Oya, the young woman whose sexuality fascinates Fintan and Bony, is an outcast among the natives: “On disait que c'etait une prostitute de Lagos, qu'elle avait ete en prison” (93). Sabine Rodes is feared and shunned by the other Europeans: “Il etait sans aucun doute l'homme le plus deteste de la petite communaute europeenne d'Onitsha” (99). More broadly still, Le Clézio describes the radical alienation of both the native community and the European community, pointing out an essential truth about colonial regimes: in such a society, nobody is truly “at home.” Through the evocation of issues such as this, as in his onomastic strategy, the lesson that Le Clézio wishes to convey is that there is no center here, no fixed, reliable point from which the question of marginality may be adjudicated.

In that sense, Onitsha is a book about exile, in which that condition is taken to be universal. The principal vehicle of that discourse is Fintan himself. Like his mother, he is described from the beginning as a marginal being. He is a male, yet he grew up in a feminine universe, ruled by his grandmother and his aunts as much as by his mother. He is a young boy, and thus he sees the adult world from outside. He is French, but his mother is Italian and his father is English. In Onitsha, he is not enfranchised in European circles; yet neither is he admitted into the society of Bony and the other African boys. When he returns to Europe near the end of the novel, he is sent to an English boarding school. There too he becomes a pariah, and it is interesting to note that his alienation is linguistic in origin. Quite simply, the English boys exclude Fintan because he doesn't speak their language:

Quand il etait arrive au college, Fintan parlait pidgin, par megarde. Il disait, He don go nawnaw, he tok say, il disait Di book bilong mi. Ca faisait fire et le surveillant general avait cru qu'il le faisait expres, pour semer le desordre. Il l'avait condamne a rester debout devant un mur pendant deux heures, les bras ecartes. Il fallait oublier cela aussi, ces mots qui sautaient, qui dansaient dans la bouche. … Il ne pouvait pas lire dans leur regard, il ne comprenait pas ce qu'ils voulaient. Il etait comme un sourd-muet qui guette, toujours sur ses gardes.

(234)

Fintan's keenest insight—and the crux of this novel of apprenticeship—comes as he gradually recognizes his existential status as an “outsider” and learns to deal with it productively. It has been pointed out, by critics such as Sander Gilman, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, that the outsider, while painfully excluded from society, nonetheless occupies a position which offers certain real advantages in terms of perspective.⁸ Speaking of the alienation of the intellectual in society, Said argues that point eloquently: “So while it is true to say that exile is the condition that characterizes the intellectual as someone who stands as a marginal figure outside the comforts of privilege, power, being-at-homeness (so to speak), it is also very important to stress that that condition carries with it certain rewards and, yes, even privileges” (1994, 53). Fintan's situation in Onitsha is a similar one: though he cannot speak the language of power to power, his very exclusion from power, coupled with his sharp recognition that his marginalization emanates from a highly dubious “center,” enables him to survive. He will engage in what Ross Chambers has called “oppositional behavior”—that is, he will exploit small faults, or flaws, in the system of power, in order to disturb that system (Chambers, xi).

According to Le Clézio, one of the areas in which power's hegemony may be seen to be less than total is in its cultural practices, and most conspicuously in literature. When all else fails and his marginality threatens to submerge him, Fintan takes refuge in stories. He inherits his taste for literature from his mother. Maou is a reader, Le Clézio tells us; she turns constantly toward literature in order to palliate her solitude and her sadness. Alone with her infant son in France during the war, with Geoffroy in Africa and unable to join them, Maou reads Gone with the Wind (82); depressed and ill with fever in Onitsha, she reads Joyce Cary's novel The Witch (108). Geoffroy too is a reader, and he sees in literature a radiant image of everything his life might have been, had things turned out differently. His library in Onitsha contains various kinds of books: anthropological studies by Margaret Mead, Sigfried Nadel, and E. A. Wallis Budge; novels by Cary and Rudyard Kipling; travel narratives by Percy Amaury Talbot, C. K. Meek, and Sinclair Gordon (110). As different as they may seem, however, Geoffroy's books share a common theme: like Onitsha itself, they are all devoted, in one way or another, to the evocation of an exotic “other.” And Geoffroy is powerfully seduced by that “other.” He spends days poring over the Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, losing himself in it, until the world it offers him comes to seem more real than the far less attractive world surrounding him in Onitsha. In a sense, then, Maou and Geoffroy are ideal readers: they enter into the textual contract wholly and unreservedly, fulfilling the role assigned to them as readers to the very letter. Clearly, Le Clézio hopes that we will approach his novel in much the same manner.

Fintan's devotion to literature is still more profound. Like many children, he is introduced to literature by his mother: as far back as he can remember, Maou had told him stories, recited nursery rhymes and poetry to him. During moments of particular stress, he continues to ask her to do that, even now that he knows how to read on his own. During the ocean journey, for instance, he asks Maou to recite some “verses” to him, and she responds with a poem in Italian, which soothes him (29); once they get to Onitsha, he continues to ask her for the same sort of consolation, and she recites Italian nursery rhymes to him (113, 208). In each case, Le Clézio produces these texts in Italian in the pages of his novel, perhaps to suggest that, for Fintan, the “mother tongue” is literature itself. For it is through his mother's voice that Fintan accedes to the world of fiction and dream. Indeed, the text itself is less important to Fintan than the voice that reads it, for the voice has a power to shape the text—any text—to its own ends. As Maou reads aloud to him from a book called The Child's Guide to Knowledge, for instance, Fintan perceives a strange and wonderful world through the simple, prosaic words of the text: “Fintan aimait rever a toutes ces choses extraordinaires, ces merveilles, ces peuples fabuleux” (204). Once again, Fintan's experience is staged as emblematic, for Le Clézio intends that we should approach literature in the same way, and that through our reading of Onitsha we should be offered a vision of the marvelous “other” similar to Fintan's own.

If Le Clézio proposes reading as a means of ingress into that “other,” he also intimates that writing may lead one there. In Fintan's case, just as his mother's example had guided him in his apprenticeship as a reader, so too does her writerly activity inspire him. For Maou writes incessantly, and writing, like reading, offers her a way of coming to terms with her alienation. Her writing is not sophisticated or polished, but, on the contrary, naive (in the mathematical sense of that word) and happily unaware of literary convention; it is process rather than product. Moreover, Le Clézio carefully describes Maou as being free of specific linguistic constraints when she writes, as if writing itself, ecriture, were somehow beyond the various languages that she is obliged to juggle, with more or less success, in her daily life: “C'etait des histoires, ou des lettres, elle ne savait pas tres bien. Des mots. Elle commencait, elle ne savait pas ou ca irait, en francais, en italien, parfois meme en anglais, ca n'avait pas d'importance” (26). Writing represents for Maou everything that her daily experience refuses her: integration, serenity, expression, and the access, through dream, to a virtual, and better, world: “Ecrire, en ecoutant le froissement de l'eau sur la coque, comme si on remontait un fleuve sans fin. … Ecrire, c'etait rever. La-bas, quand on arriverait a Onitsha, tout serait different, tout serait facile” (26–27).

Her example is a determinative one for Fintan. Watching her write, he is awakened to the possibilities that writing offers a person, even one as besieged as his mother. After returning to Europe, Maou gradually ceases to write. When she moves to the South of France, leaving Fintan in boarding school in England, she gives him her old notebooks. Two decades after the events in Onitsha, Fintan looks back upon Maou's writings from that period, seeing in them a powerful, enduring legacy:

Elle n'ecrit plus l'apres-midi dans ses cahiers d'ecoliere les longs poemes qui ressemblent a des lettres. Quand Geoffroy et elle sont partis pour le sud de la France avec Marima, il y a plus de quinze ans, Maou a donne tous ses cahiers a Fintan, dans une grande enveloppe. Sur l'enveloppe elle avait ecrit les ninnenanne que Fintan aimait bien, celle de la Befana et de l'Uomo nero, celle du pont de la Stura. Fintan avait lu tousles cahiers l'un apres l'autre, pendant une annee. Apres tant de temps, il sait encore des pages par coeur.

(246–47)

Maou no longer writes now; but Fintan does. Following his mother's example, Fintan had begun to write long ago, during the ocean voyage from France to Africa. Even at that initiatory moment, Fintan senses that writing may provide him with the same kind of solace that Maou finds in it. Troubled by the attentions that an Englishman named Gerald Simpson is paying to Maou on the Surabaya, and dreading the encounter with his father which awaits him at the end of his journey, Fintan sits down to write a story: “C'etait bien, d'ecrire cette histoire, enferme dans la cabine, sans un bruit, avec la lumiere de la veilleuse et la chaleur du soleil qui montait au-dessus de la coque du navire immobile” (49). His story is the tale of a young woman who goes to Africa for the first time and discovers a strange new world. Clearly, he is writing his own story, scripting it as he wishes it to unfold, using fiction—much like the marvelous new African words he hears during the voyage—as incantation. And he will continue to work on his story throughout his time in Onitsha,⁹ embroidering upon his fictional world in an effort to come to terms with the experiential world he encounters there.

Fintan entitles his story “Un long voyage.” The fact that this is also the title of the first part of Le Clézio's novel, during which we see Fintan begin to write, suggests in a very compelling manner the theory of literature that Onitsha proposes to its reader. For literature is essentially reciprocal, Le Clézio argues: its reciprocities are played out creatively and infinitely in any literary exchange—between writer and writer, for example, or between writer and reader. Fintan's “long voyage” is emblazoned in specular fashion within Le Clézio's “long voyage.” Yet from our perspective as readers, the relations of container and contained are not quite that clear, for in fact we read the one as we read the other. Thus do stories speak to each other, Le Clézio implies, easily traversing boundaries that in real life may appear to be hermetic. The uses of literature too are distributed reciprocally among the partners in literary exchange, and they also may be turned toward a questioning of the boundaries that surround us. A character in a novel may choose to write a story in which he invokes an exotic, foreign world as a means of coming to terms with his own sense of being an “outsider.” A novelist may offer an imaginary journey to his reader in order to encourage him or her to consider what alterity means and how it works in our lives. A reader may see the literary construction of the “other” for what it is and begin to consider otherness as, precisely, a construct.

That is the range of reflection which Onitsha presents most eloquently, I think. At the end of the novel we once again see Fintan writing, this time as an adult. He is composing a letter to his younger sister Marima, trying to tell her about Onitsha. It is a world that she has never seen, starkly different from her own. Yet Fintan feels that it is crucial that Marima should imagine that world—if only through his description of it, and thus tentatively. For he is deeply persuaded that, however distant and foreign it may be in Marima's eyes, Onitsha is somehow hers too. We leave him there, struggling to build another world from words, much like Le Clézio himself, writing away.

Notes

1. See, for example, Didier Pobel, pp. 79–80: “La force de J. M. G. Le Clézio semble, certes, resider pour bonne part dans son aptitude a faire de nous, sans exotisme, d'indissociables compagnons d' Un long voyage. … Lire Le Clézio, c'est etre protege et etrangle a la fois, au cours d'Un long voyage dans l'immobilite du regard, en quoi nous ne cessons de nous reduire, en quoi nous ne cessons de nous depasser, en quoi nous ne cessons de nous renouveler.”

2. See also pp. 17, 18, 27.

3. Here I demur at Didier Pobel's assertion that Le Clézio's manner of enlisting his readers in a “voyage” excludes exoticism. Quite to the contrary, Le Clézio positions his text explicitly in a literary tradition which uses the “exotic” as one of its central terms. That practice distinguishes him, moreover, from many of his contemporaries (Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and Emmanuele Bernheim come to mind) whose writings evoke ordinary, quotidian, “endotic” worlds.

4. See “Brise marine”: “Steamer balancant ta mature, / Leve l'ancre pour une exotique nature.”

5. See Barthes, “Analyse,” p. 34: “Un nom propre doit etre toujours interroge soigneusement, car le nom propre est, si l'on peut dire, le prince des signifiants; ses connotations sont riches, sociales et symboliques.”

6. In S/Z Barthes defines that term in the following manner: “L'inventaire du code hermeneutique consistera a distinguer les differents termes (formels), au gre desquels une enigme se centre, se pose, se formule, puis se retarde et enfin se devoile” (26).

7. See, for example, p. 20: “Un chapelet d'iles noires etait accroche a l'horizon. ‘Regarde: Madeira, Funchal.’ C'etait des noms magiques”; and p. 24: “Il avait dit des noms magiques: ‘Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote.’”

8. See Gilman, p. 17: “I am not neutral, I am not distanced, for being an outsider does not mean to be cool and clinical; it must mean to burn with those fires which define you as the outsider”; Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxvii: “Yet when I say ‘exile’ I do not mean something sad or deprived. On the contrary belonging, as it were, to both sides of the imperial divide enables you to understand them more easily”; and Spivak's response to the assertion that her critical attitudes reflect the fact that she is an “outsider”: “I have thought about that question. Even after nineteen years in this country, fifteen of them spent in full-time teaching, I believe the answer is yes. But then, where is the inside? To define an inside is a decision, I believe I said that night, and the critical method I am describing would question the ethico-political strategic exclusions that would define a certain set of characteristics as an ‘inside’ at a certain time. ‘The text itself, “the poem as such,” intrinsic criticism,’ are such strategic definitions. I have spoken in support of such a way of reading that would continue to break down these distinctions, never once and for all, and actively interpret ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as texts for involvement as well as change” (102).

9. See, for instance, pp. 56, 95, 106.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Analyse textuelle d'un conte d'Edgar Poe.” In Semiotique narrative et textuelle. Claude Chabrol, ed. Paris. Larousse. 1973. Pp. 29–54.

———. S/Z. Paris. Seuil. 1970.

Chambers, Ross. Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1991.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Alan Sheridan, tr. New York. Pantheon. 1977.

Gilman, Sander. Inscribing the Other. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 1991.

Le Clézio, J. M. G. Onitsha. Paris. Gallimard. 1991.

Pobel, Didier. “‘Un long voyage’ dans l'immobilite du regard: Variations autour d'Onitsha et de quelques autres livres de J. M. G. Le Clézio.” Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 464 (1991), pp. 76–80.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York. Knopf. 1993.

———. Representations of the Intellectual. New York. Pantheon. 1994.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York/London. Methuen. 1987.