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Voyage and Immobility in J. M. G. Le Clézio's Désert and La Quarantaine

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In the following essay, Thompson studies the two diametric themes of voyage and immobility by comparing Désert and La Quarantaine.
SOURCE: Thompson, William. “Voyage and Immobility in J. M. G. Le Clézio's Désert and La Quarantaine.World Literature Today 71, no. 4 (fall 1997): 709–16.

I have often enjoyed embarking on a voyage with Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. In his fictional works, he has led his readers on an extensive and culturally rich voyage across the planet: to the islands in the Indian Ocean in Le Chercheur d'or and La Quarantaine, to West Africa in Onitsha, to North Africa, Europe, and even America in Désert and Poisson d'or, and to the Middle East in Étoile errante. I have spent many a quiet evening at home, in the comfort of my reclining chair, accompanying Le Clézio around the world, exploring places which I have never visited and perhaps never will. Yet at the same time I have been immobile with Le Clézio, never leaving my chair as I sit, transfixed, immersing myself in the exotic locales he depicts, and as I immobilize the text, lingering over and rereading the rich descriptive passages that so capture my imagination. But I have also literally traveled with Le Clézio, as copies of his works have accompanied me on my own voyages, less adventurous to be sure: home for the holidays and to the MLA convention in Washington, as I prepared to write this article.

I might well have chosen other substantives in the formation of the title of this study in an attempt to encapsulate the two features of Le Clézio's works which are the focus here. Instead of voyages I might have spoken of travel, movement, dislocation or relocation, wandering, flight or escape, yet without failing to convey the fundamental quality of these works that interests me. By the same token, instead of immobility I might have chosen stasis, inactivity, waiting, or confinement, all equally representative and appropriate terms. But I chose voyage and immobility for three specific yet simple reasons. First, these two words are frequently utilized by Le Clézio himself in the works to be considered here: Désert and La Quarantaine. Second, they both possess multiple and potentially contradictory definitions that I shall elucidate in my reading of the two novels. And third, since the following is an analysis in English of works composed in French, I have chosen two English terms with French cognates, thereby rendering the transition from Le Clézio's French texts to my English-language interpretation a less linguistically problematic task.

Le Clézio's works have, on several occasions, been analyzed with particular emphasis on the theme of voyage. (Although I shall not quote from these other studies directly, I would like to refer the reader to the studies listed in the bibliography for further analyses of the theme of voyage in Le Clézio's writings.) Yet what has come to fascinate me in my own reading of these texts is the complex interrelationship of the concept of voyage with that of immobility, the latter being, at first glance, less visible yet nonetheless a prevalent phenomenon. In order to establish a more precise context for understanding the dichotomy created by the presence of these concepts in Désert and La Quarantaine, I would like first to engage briefly in some definitions of the two key terms here.

On the basis of a variety of dictionary definitions, one may summarize that to be immobile can mean to be incapable of moving or being moved, both literally and figuratively. Such a definition may allude to resistance, weakness, resignation, or stubbornness. At the same time, immobility can suggest fixedness or stability, a total lack of movement that may be desired or required, that may in cases be permanent. It can more simply mean stationary, designating a person, object, or condition temporarily at rest yet capable of movement at any time.

While these meanings hold few surprises, I am certainly struck more by my findings as I went in search of the various connotations of voyage. In its most simple definition, a voyage is merely the act of traveling, a journey by which one goes from one place to another. Yet these two basic descriptions can suggest radically different endeavors. The act of traveling does not necessarily imply a fixed destination. And if fixedness was one of our definitions of immobility, the lack of a fixed destination suggests a destination that is itself moving, traveling, voyaging. In contrast, the journey that does have a precise destination is, obviously, more clearly delineated; there is a starting point and a point of arrival, and the act of the voyage is merely that which connects the two and thereby has less significance in and of itself.

Yet there exist other more restrictive definitions of voyage. A voyage may refer more specifically to a journey by sea or water or by air, or a journey undertaken with a military purpose. More interesting, however, for the discussion here, is the figurative definition of voyage as any enterprise or adventure of a private character, or of voyage as the course of human life in general. Finally, a voyage may be the written account of a journey. It is these latter definitions, without doubt, that hold particular and compelling significance in light of the discussion of Le Clézio's novels.

Two factors underlie my decision to concentrate on just two of Le Clézio's novels—Désert and La Quarantaine—in this study. First, these two works share structural similarities: each alternates between a primary narrative thread and a subnarrative which parallels the first. They are both rich in allusions to the implications of voyage, and at the same time they appose to the depictions of travel or voyage numerous situations in which immobility or stasis characterizes the protagonists. Also, another motif, that of the desert, dominates both texts, albeit in radically different manners. The Sahara Desert of Désert is vast, seemingly without limits, while the desert island of La Quarantaine is confining and claustrophobic. Although the themes at the center of this analysis are not unique to Désert and La Quarantaine, the fundamental similarities between these two works allow for a revealing investigation into Le Clézio's oeuvre as a whole.

There are two narrative threads in Désert; first, the story of Lalla, a young woman living in the slums of a North African city, between the desert and the sea. Lalla's adventure will take her from her cite, from the desert in which she was born and which she loves, as she flees to avoid an arranged marriage to an older man she barely knows. Her voyage will lead to France, where she will explore the Europe she has heard of only in mythical terms from an old sailor. She will live and wander through Marseille, experiencing an improbable rags-to-riches tale as she becomes a top model in Paris. Yet at the same time, Désert comprises the story of the nomads of the desert, from whom Lalla has descended, as they undertake an arduous journey in an attempt to escape and confront the invading French army, a narrative based on real events. In the end, both Lalla and the nomads return to the desert; Lalla returns to Africa to give birth to the child she conceived just before leaving for Marseille, and the nomads, defeated and massacred in great numbers by the French, will disappear back into the desert, their home.

The multiple definitions of desert, like those of voyage and immobility, are revealing to an understanding of Le Clézio's use of the word as the title of this work. The word's origins lie in the Latin desertus, meaning abandoned or deserted. It thus originally refers less to the geographic characteristics of a region than to the complex interrelationship of this region with its inhabitants: human, animal, or vegetal. Desert as a noun may be defined as an uninhabited and uncultivated tract of country, again according primacy to the human presence in nature, while the modern connotation is of a desolate, barren region, waterless and treeless. Although this latter definition certainly applies to Le Clézio's title and the region described throughout the text (particularly in the story of the nomads), what is more revealing is the definition of desert when it is an adjective. The fact that Le Clézio's title lacks any article certainly allows for the possibility that desert does not refer to a place but to a characteristic found within the text. The many possible definitions of the adjectival form—forsaken, abandoned, uninhabited, unpeopled, desolate, lonely, unproductive, barren, waste—assist us in our voyage through Le Clézio's text, as they explain the distress of the nomads and of Lalla. The physical desert, that barren, waterless, treeless region, is their home, and within the confines of this home they feel comfortable. It is only when they come into contact with French civilization, Lalla by traveling to and living in France, the nomads by engaging in battle with the French soldiers, that they encounter qualities such as abandonment, desolation, forsakenness, waste. And it is after such contact that they flee back to the desert, that seemingly immobile, unchanging, and unchangeable place.

Le Clézio himself includes in Désert a description that complements the preceding definitions:

There, in the country of the great desert, the sky is immense, the horizon is endless, for there is nothing that breaks the view. The desert is like the sea, with the waves of wind on the hard sand, with the foam of the rolling scrub. … There, in the desert, men can walk for days without coming across a single house, without seeing a well, for the desert is so great that no one can know it in its entirety. Men go into the desert and they are like boats on the sea, no one knows when they will come back. … Everything is so different in this country, the sun isn't the same here, it burns stronger, and there are men who return blinded, their faces burned.

(180–81; my translation)

For the nomads in Désert, the desert is both home and site of travel, of an endless voyage that is both physical and spiritual; their lives are comprised of constant voyage, their lives are nothing but voyage, with no apparent destination or aim: “The routes were circular, they inevitably led to the point of departure, tracing increasingly narrow circles around Saguiet el Hamra. But it was a path than had no end, for it was longer than human life” (24). The voyage that characterizes their life is perpetual, yet it will have a final destination, death: “The men and women lived thus, walking, without finding rest. They died one day, surprised by the light of the sun, struck by enemy fire, or ravaged by fever. … From the moment they were born, the men belonged to the endless stretches of land, to the sand, the thistles, the snakes, the rats, to the wind above all, for that was their true family” (25). The act of voyage becomes indistinguishable from life itself, so inherent is it in the existence of these people.

Within the voyage there is also emptiness, movement combined with a stagnant immutability: “No one had forgotten the suffering, the thirst, the terrible burning of the sun on the rocks and the endless sand, nor the horizon that always seemed to be drawing back. No one had forgotten the hunger that eats away, not only the hunger for food, but all hunger, hunger for hope and for liberation, hunger for everything that is lacking and carves dizziness in the ground, hunger that pushes forward in the cloud of dust in the midst of the startled flocks” (56). Less a positive movement forward, the voyage thus seems a source or cause of complete and total emaciation, the taking away of life.

Similarly, for the young Lalla, the roads she takes into the desert lead nowhere, have no destination, or simply return to the point of origin, making the prospect of any journey seem futile: “Lalla knows all the paths, those that lead beyond the long gray dunes, between the scrub, those that curve and come back, those that never lead anywhere” (76). Perhaps it is not surprising that the animals which particularly fascinate Lalla are the flies that are everywhere where she lives. She admires the manner in which they move through the air, at once moving quickly yet zigzagging, seemingly going nowhere in particular yet somehow arriving at a destination, surviving.

When Lalla makes the decision to leave her cite, terrified by the prospect of marrying a much older man whom she neither loves, respects, nor trusts, the only relevant matter is that she depart; her eventual destination is secondary in importance. Voyage becomes not a search for a new place but simply a need to abandon the old one, even at the risk of disappearing forever: “Where does the route go? Lalla does not know where she is going, she is adrift, carried by the wind of the desert which blows, sometimes burning her lips and eyelids, blinding and cruel, sometimes cold and slow, the wind that erases men and causes the rocks to fall to the bottom of the cliffs” (204).

Perhaps the ultimate voyage (perhaps the only one truly possible) is that which leads to oblivion, to the obliteration from this world of those who embark on this journey. This ultimate voyage need not necessarily result in death, but merely in the disappearance of the travelers from the face of the earth. The final passage of Désert suggests such a journey, as the defeated nomads return to a land where no one except they themselves would dare venture: “Each day, at the break of dawn, the free men returned toward their homes, toward the south, there where nobody else knew how to live. Every day, with the same gestures, they erased the traces of their fires, they buried their excrement. Turned toward the desert, they silently prayed. They departed, as in a dream, they disappeared” (439). In Lalla's case, and in spite of her earlier desire to flee her home, she will embark on a voyage that is precisely a return to her origins, as the baby that was conceived just before Lalla left Africa will be born shortly after her return. Her voyage to France becomes a temporary incongruity in her inextricable association with the desert of North Africa, and all reminders of this journey and of her presence in France are eradicated, as she leaves Europe forever.

For the most part, voyages are a direct reaction to the characters' desire to escape the immobility that dominates their lives, to avoid stagnation, or to arrive at a place where immobility will be tolerable. Just as voyages are described as both beneficial and detrimental to the lives of those who embark upon them, immobility too is depicted in both a positive and negative light. The word immobile itself is found frequently in Désert, indicative of a recurring state characterizing the population of the novel throughout their endeavors: in the stability and stagnation of their everyday lives, in their time spent observing what occurs around them, even, ironically, when they are in the process of traveling.

In the cite where Lalla lives, immobility is endemic: “The people wait. Here, in the city, they really do nothing else. They are stopped, not very far from the shore of the sea, in their shacks made of planks and zinc, immobile, couched in the thick shade. … They talk a bit, the girls go to the fountain, the boys go work on the other side of the river or idle in the streets of the real town, or they go sit down on the edge of the road and watch the trucks go by” (92). And later: “The men often remain sitting, on a rock, in the sun, their heads covered by their coats or a towel. They look before them. What do they look at? The dusty horizon, the roads where the trucks roll by. … That's what they look at. They don't want to do anything else” (184). The irony in these two passages is clear: when one is immobile out of a lack of anything else to do, the one activity in which one is in fact capable of engaging is watching other people as the latter undertake a voyage.

The bleakness of the above passages stands in stark contrast to other depictions of immobility in Désert, which portray a state that is comforting, peaceful, and genuinely appealing. Lalla and Le Hartani (the mute shepherd who fathers Lalla's child) often engage in a similar activity—sitting immobile, simply looking around them—which appears to be a pleasurable experience: “Often, since they do not speak, they remain immobile, sitting on the rocks by the stony hills. It's difficult to understand what they are in fact doing at these times Maybe they are gazing ahead, as if they could see through the hills and behind the horizon. Lalla herself doesn't understand how it happens, for time no longer seems to exist when she is sitting beside Hartani” (112). When not opposed to the appealing connotations of voyage, immobility is a desirable state, providing an alternative form of escape to those unable physically to flee their grim surroundings.

Even in the midst of voyage, characters come to be immobile, as the two concepts are far from mutually exclusive in Le Clézio's works. When Lalla embarks on her journey away from the cite and the empty future it holds for her, her progress is soon interrupted: “Now she is immobile in the center of the great plateau of stones. Around her there is nothing, only masses of rocks, powdery light, cold hard wind, intense sky, without clouds, without moisture” (201). Yet this immobility marks neither the end of the voyage nor abandonment on the part of the traveler. Rather, it captures a moment of intense anticipation, as if the voyage, at the moment it becomes irreversible, must be contemplated in all its implications, temporarily incapacitating the traveler.

Similarly, the young nomad Nour and his fellow voyagers are immobilized when they come upon the city of Taroudant: “Immobile on the sand in the midst of the men of the desert, in the silence, Nour looked at the magic city that was awaking. The light trails of smoke rose in the air, and one could hear, almost unreal, the familiar sounds of life, the voices, the laughter of children, the singing of a young woman. … All the men were immobile, their eyes wide open, watching without blinking, until it hurt, the high red wall around the city” (254). The arrival at the apparent destination is virtually unbelievable, a seeming mirage in the desert landscape that is not to be trusted. The end of the journey is thus marked not by satisfaction, but by a transformation of the travelers from wandering nomads to static, indeed petrified, and overwhelmed spectators of a vision that was always their goal but which now seems incredible.

Perhaps the most intolerable form of immobility is that which seems inescapable, from which one believes, only in vain, that there is delivery, as in this description of Lalla and her surroundings in Marseille: “They are prisoners of the Panier. Maybe they don't really know it. Maybe they believe that they will be able to leave, one day, go elsewhere, return to their villages in the mountains and the muddy valleys, find once again the ones they left behind, family, children, friends. But it's impossible … [everything] holds them, surrounds them, makes them prisoners, and they will never be able to free themselves” (289). Here immobility stands diametrically opposed to voyage; it is precisely the inability to travel in its worst manifestation.

Voyage and immobility seem to be united in Désert most intricately and harmoniously when Lalla, still in Africa, asks the old fisherman Naman to tell her about his travels and about the cities of Europe. He does so only when he is immobile, sitting mending his nets: “Some days, he is sitting by the sea, in the shade of his fig tree, and he repairs his nets. It is at this moment that he tells the most beautiful stories, those that take place on the ocean, on boats, in storms, those in which there are shipwrecks and people arrive on unknown islands” (105). And when he is telling his stories, time appears to stand still; only in his narration is there movement, voyage, such that Lalla wishes it would go on forever (148).

When Lalla herself finally reaches Europe to live in Marseille, her life will be a constant alternation between movement and motionlessness. On the one hand she will devote much of her ample spare time to wandering through the streets of Marseille, seemingly impervious to the dangers awaiting a young girl alone in the unfamiliar climate of a large city. Yet at the same time she will spend many hours immobile, sitting watching the events that anonymously occur around her, or merely sitting doing nothing, or even dreaming of as yet unrealized and unrealizable travels: “She becomes like a piece of rock, covered with lichens and moss, immobile, unthinking, dilated by the heat of the sun. Sometimes she even falls asleep, leaning against the blue canvas, her knees under her chin, and she dreams that she is floating in a boat on the flat sea, as far as the other side of the world” (294–95).

One of Lalla's favorite activities in Marseille is to sit in front of the train station, contemplating the travelers who enter and exit, on their way to and from journeys which are the cause of both fascination and envy on Lalla's part. Yet Lalla observes something more subtle in the coming and going of the voyagers: “It's as if the great city was not yet completely finished, as if there was still a great hole through which people continued to arrive and leave. Often she thinks that she too would like to leave, to climb into a train going north, with all these place-names that both fascinate and frighten, Irun, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Leon, Dijon, Paris, Calais” (272). The voyages are thus not only the endeavors of individual travelers engaged in their own personal activities; they are a constant, ongoing effort on the part of humanity to contribute to a society, a civilization in the process of being created. Yet Lalla excludes herself from this particular activity when at one point she climbs into a train herself but quickly jumps back onto the platform just as the train is about to depart. She immobilizes herself in this rejection of voyage, never actually intending to make the journey (she has not, after all, bought a ticket), perhaps knowing from experience the futility of such travel, a fact proven by the unhappiness she feels as a consequence of her journey from Africa to France in the first place.

When Lalla embarks on her return voyage home, the union of voyage and immobility is strikingly portrayed in the description of the passengers in the bus that carries Lalla on the final stage of her journey in Désert. While the bus makes its way along the dusty road into the hills, inside the vehicle “the passengers are immobile, passive. The men are wrapped in their wool coats, the women are crouched on the floor, between the seats, covered by their blue and black veils. Only the driver moves, grimaces, glancing in the rearview mirror” (412). Those riding in the bus are trapped, immobilized as if reluctant companions on a voyage which they cannot control. Even the driver is focused less on the road ahead than on what lies behind him. Lalla's return completes a cycle that negates the voyage. Born in the desert, she returns there to give birth; she has physically returned and spiritually always remained where she began.

In La Quarantaine Le Clézio engages his personal interest in the tiny French colonies of the Indian Ocean, as he describes in great detail the fate of three travelers who are forced into quarantine, in the latter stages of the nineteenth century, on a small, uninviting island not far from their destination of l'Ile Maurice (Mauritius). The first-person narrative of this adventure, related by one Léon Archambau, is framed by the efforts of another narrator. The latter, living at the end of the twentieth century, is the great-nephew of Léon and the grandson of Jacques and Suzanne Archambau, Léon's brother and sister-in-law, who together with Léon are abandoned in quarantine on l'Ile Plate. The brief framing narrative attempts to recuperate and understand the story of Léon, Jacques, Suzanne, and their frightening adventure.

The agony and incertitude of the forced confinement on l'Ile Plate dominate the text, and the considerable attention paid to sensual detail intoxicates the reader, who cannot help but empathize with the protagonists in their struggle against illness, excruciating heat, hostile plantation workers, and isolation as they attempt to survive on this island. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the narrative is the manner in which the at-first chaotic situation is adapted by the creation of a microsociety by the few inhabitants on the island. The initial feeling of disorientation is replaced by the needs of the isolated and immobilized travelers to feed themselves and to keep themselves free of the smallpox that is rapidly afflicting the island's population. As some fall victim and die, others must resort to desperate measures to protect their health and their sanity in this forced confinement.

Léon will seek refuge in his fascination with and love for Suryavati, a young Indian woman who has lived her life on this island and for whom he will abandon everything in the end. Through Surya we will also meet her mother, Ananta, whose own intriguing story will be told in apposition to the main narrative. Leon's imagination is also fueled by his and his sister-in-law Suzanne's love of literature, and the text abounds with literary references relevant to the tropical location of the characters' story: Baudelaire, Longfellow, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Defoe. By far the most striking reference is to Rimbaud, who is not only quoted but also figures as a character at two points in the text. Jacques Archambau as a young boy sees a drunken Rimbaud in a Parisian cafe, and the famous poet appears later when Léon and Jacques, now a doctor, stop in Aden during their voyage to Mauritius. These encounters will fascinate the author of the framing narrative, who sees in the fate of the unfortunate Rimbaud many similarities to that of his forebears, especially Léon: “I believed that he had been hidden, chased away, just because he was a thug, that he has left, abandoning everyone, like Léon” (463). For the narrator, the story of Léon, who seems to disappear from the face of the earth with Suryavati, cannot be told with any certainty, just as the details of Rimbaud's later life long remained mysterious. In the end, they are not immobilized; rather, they embark upon an infinite journey whose outcome is not known. Yet the very fact that the truth cannot be known is motivation enough to tell the story: “So everything is invented, illusory, just as life continues differently when one pursues a dream, night after night” (457).

If I may indulge in a final definition, I would like to consider briefly the connotations of quarantine. The French quarantaine, of course, is ambiguous, its translation depending on the context. In its original meaning quarantaine indicates a number around forty. It is the second use, however, that which has been borrowed into English, that retains our attention. A quarantine is a period (originally of forty days) during which persons thought capable of spreading contagious diseases are kept isolated from the rest of the population. In particular, this applies to travelers or voyagers before they are allowed to enter a country or town and mix with the inhabitants, and it applies to the period during which a ship capable of carrying contagion is kept isolated upon its arrival in port. The English word also has the added meaning of that place where quarantine is enforced, as a quarantine thus thwarts and immobilizes voyage. Ironically, the numerical origin of the word in French loses all value for those in quarantine on l'Ile Plate, as their confinement and immobility make days indistinguishable from weeks, make time lose all significance.

As in Désert, voyage may have multiple effects on the characters. Early in La Quarantaine, the young Jacques is described after he leaves Mauritius for Paris: “In France everything appeared magnificent and terrifying to him” (16). The destination has become the great unknown, a formidable challenge to be confronted and conquered. The liberating and exhilarating effect of the voyage is tempered by the confined, claustrophobic spaces of the European city, full of narrow streets, ominous, crowded buildings, and unfriendly passers-by.

The contrast between Paris and l'Ile Plate on which the characters will be confined is exemplified most acutely in the text by the numerous references to French poetry, especially Baudelaire, whose “Invitation au voyage” and “Parfum exotique” are mentioned, and the latter quoted, in the text (251): “Quand, les deux yeux fermes, en un soir chaud d'automne, / Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux, / Je vois se derouler des rivages heureux / Qu'eblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone.”

The feeling of immobility and confinement that will reach its apex in the time spent in quarantine on l'Ile Plate is announced early on even in the description of the passengers on the boat sailing for Mauritius. The people on this vessel are described as “prisoners on board” (33), overcome with boredom and impatience. Their intense desire to reach Mauritius will make the time subsequently spent in quarantine unbearable, will make the hours seem long and tense. Exacerbating their situation even further is the fact that they are confined to an island within sight of Mauritius, their final destination after a journey of thousands of miles, so close yet frustratingly unattainable, like a mirage in which they will cease to believe after time, so remote seem the chances of ever reaching it.

The despair created by their confinement on l'Ile Plate renders any mention of departure suspect to ridicule, as Léon states: “I heard the words that Jacques said to Suzanne, just as one speaks to make a child sleep, absurd words: ‘Tomorrow, you'll see, they'll come to get us, the boat will take us to Mauritius’” (59). Yet the possibility of departure, of the completion of their voyage to Mauritius, is the only thought that is capable of reassuring those trapped in quarantine, even if any vestige of hope seems futile, as this description of Suzanne displays: “She is no different than Jacques, Bartoli, or Veran, the only thing she is waiting for is the return of the ship, she can't stop thinking about it, it's the only thing that counts for her, to get away, to save herself. That's what is glimmering in her eyes, a fever, a madness” (215). The illness ravaging the island's reluctant population engenders another illness, this one mental, caused by the overwhelming desire to avoid disease and to escape from the island.

Yet even in isolation and confinement a greater isolation is possible. Those who contract smallpox and risk infecting the others are sent to the ironically named l'Ile Gabriel, an even smaller and more desolate island just off the coast of l'Ile Plate, from which the chances of returning alive are remote. In addition, contact with the other island inhabitants, from whom the Europeans have been sequestered, could lead either to the spread of the illness or to violence. Consequently, the primitive barracks in which the travelers spend their quarantine is not only a source of revulsion but, ironically, of comfort, described by Léon at one point as black and hostile (126), yet soon after as soothing in spite of their wretchedness, for it is the only location remotely resembling the Western society with which they are familiar, and the only place where survival seems possible.

For the narrator Léon, his own confinement allows for the possibility of liberation from normal social dictates. He succeeds in no longer feeling restricted by the quarantine and, subsequently, by his own identity within society. Rather, in his immobilization he feels merely isolated and anonymous, a condition he relishes, especially in the company of Suryavati: “She seems to dance on the reef, she is intoxicated by the sea which rises and by the wind, by all this golden light which envelops us. The lagoon is smooth and impenetrable like a mirror. I have never felt more free. I no longer have a memory, I no longer have a name” (398). Like Lalla in Désert, Léon finds repose in the stories he hears, in his case from Suryavati, and the stories he tells her of Europe, for these stories erase the preoccupation with time; they provide invaluable moments of pleasure in the midst of discomfort and death. Her stories speak of exotic places; they take him on voyages that make him forget his own immobility, and at the same time allow him to understand the woman he loves. His time with Suryavati has effaced all that is occurring around them and indeed everything that he has previously experienced.

I know that I cannot expect anything beyond this island. Everything I have is here, in the curved line of the reef, the magic silhouette of Suryavati who walks on the water, the light of her eyes, the freshness of her voice when she asks me about London and Paris, her laugh when what I say surprises her. I need her more than anyone in the world. … She belongs to the quarantine, the black rock of the volcano and the lagoon in the quiet sea. And now I too have entered into her domain. (124)

For some time it appears that Léon will decide not to leave the island when the opportunity finally presents itself, that he will choose to perpetuate his immobility rather than complete the voyage which has led him here. When Jacques and Suzanne climb into the boat that will allow them to reach Mauritius, Léon remains on the beach, watching them for the last time. He will disappear forever from their lives, immobilized as a component of their past. On the eve prior to their departure together from the island, Léon and Surya lie together on the beach, and he envisages the journey, both physical and spiritual, on which they are about to embark: “Together we flow on the sea, toward the other end of time. I have never lived any other night than this night, it has lasted longer than my entire life, and everything before this night has been only a dream” (407). Although Léon will eventually leave the island, taking Surya with him, the destination will not be Mauritius but one that will permanently eradicate his contacts with his past life and will capture the joy he finds in his static confinement with Surya.

I shall leave the final word on this topic to Le Clézio himself, quoting not from one of his fictional works but from a brief commentary in L'Express about the beauty of the French language. In this text Le Clézio attempts to explain his personal relationship with his mother tongue, and he describes himself in a striking passage that reveals much about his own individual connection with the concepts of voyage and immobility: “For me, an islander, a descendant of a Breton who emigrated to l'Ile Maurice, someone who is from the edge of the sea, who watches the cargo ships pass by, who wanders through ports, someone who has no land, who does not take root anywhere, like a man who walks along a boulevard and who cannot be from any single neighborhood or city but from all neighborhoods and all cities, the French language is my only country, the only place where I live” (40). Le Clézio the great traveler and narrator of travel, the insightful observer of the complexities of the world in which he lives, immobilizes himself in his language, eternalizes in his writing worlds which we the readers may also explore and in which we too may immerse ourselves.

Bibliography

Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave. Désert. Paris. Gallimard. 1980.

———. “Eloge de la langue franacise.” L'Express, 2205 (14 October 1993), pp. 40–41.

———. La Quarantaine Paris. Gallimard. 1995.

Li Sou-Yeul. “Le voyage dans l'oeuvre de Le Clézio.” In J. M. G. Le Clézio: Actes du colloque international. Elena Real, Dolores Jimenez, eds. Valencia. Universitat de Valencia. 1992. Pp. 245–53.

Mezade, Jean-Paul. “Le voyage's rebours.” In Jean-Marie Le Clézio. Gabrielle Althen, ed. Marseille. Sud. 1990. Pp. 149–54.

Onimus, Jean. Pour lire Le Clézio. Paris. PUF. 1994.

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 (September 1991), pp. 76–80.

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