SOURCE: "Michel Tournier's Texts for Children," in Children's Literature, Vol. 13, 1985, pp. 154-68.

[In the following essay, McMahon examines the themes of Tournier's novels for children and discusses their differences from his adult works.]

I think that a child's readings constitute for him an intangible mine, an unattackable base on which are built, more than his literary culture and judgments, his personal sensitivity and mythology.

                                  —Le Vent Paraclet

The texts Michel Tournier—who is thought by some to be France's outstanding living novelist—has written for children are for the most part strikingly different from those he has written for adults. In the latter, he has purposefully played with his readers in an effort to force them to ask themselves questions about the attitudes they bring to reading. He has found other ways of being provocative by enunciating in Le Vent Paraclet, where he writes mainly about his own works, elaborate defenses of forms of human behavior which many believe to be aberrant. It is as though he wants, through strident notes, to force his readers to hear a subtler tone.

The same is not true of the works he has written for children, where his purposes are, on the whole, clear; there he often defends the kinds of values he ridicules in the works he has addressed to an adult audience, in which, as he himself has said, "I find myself pawing the ground of taboos" [See Escoffier-Lambiotte, "L'Ecrivain et la société," Le Monde, October 8-9, 1978]. The different narrative stances produce a situation in which the texts for children can be used to illuminate those written for grownups. The stances may also be related to some sharp distinctions he draws in Le Vent Paraclet about the intentions which lurk behind particular literary forms. Literature has power to influence the ways in which individuals see the world about them. They never shake off the influence of those works which have shaped their views at an early age. That assertion is of great pertinence to his interest in writing for children; it sheds light on the way in which he writes for adults. Implicit in his discussion of reading is a contradiction. On the one hand, he seems to be saying that there comes a moment when one no longer reads as a child does, for various kinds of distances are eventually created between texts and readers, who become wary. On the other hand, much of what Tournier writes seems to suggest his belief that today's readers are willing to look at and even believe almost anything; and, in that sense, they have never ceased being children.

That apparent contradiction may help to explain Tournier's two manners of writing and suggests that, whatever it is he is trying to do in writing for children, what he is doing when he writes for adults is trying to make them read as grownups. He would not put it that way, for he claims, "I never deliberately write children's books but sometimes I write so well that what I've written can also be read by children. When I'm less lucky, what I come up with is only good enough for adults" [Mary Blume, "A Laughing Provocateur Is Launched in Britain," Herald-Tribune (Paris), December 30, 1983]. Earlier, in 1979, he had told an interviewer from Le Monde that "a work can be addressed to a young public only when it is perfect. Every weakness reduces it to the level of adults alone. The writer who takes up his pen with that high aim in mind is obeying an immeasurable ambition" ["Comment écrire pour les enfants," Le Monde, December 21, 1979].

Those sentiments, as we shall see in one case, do not conform to Tournier's own practice. His first work for children was a revision of a novel published for adults; he has announced his intention of rewriting for a younger public, when he finds the time, two of his other novels. What Tournier seems to espy is a complex situation: children, up to a certain time, bring to their reading a limited amount of experience and many look upon reading as a way of understanding and adding to that experience. What adults bring to reading is an indefinable attitude which in many cases may make reading an act adjacent to their experience, with the consequence that it may or may not become part of their experience. Those different degrees of susceptibility may demand the use of deliberate, alternate strategies on the part of the writer, strategies designed to give him the chance of having the greatest amount of impact on each of the two audiences he addresses.

Obviously, when he is writing for children, Tournier is under several influences. One is the memory of his own childhood, which he says was miserable, and that may perhaps help to determine the subjects he chooses to explore. Another is his appreciation of what he sees as the needs of today's young reader in the industrialized world. In a number of articles and interviews, he has discussed the rebelliousness and boredom of today's youth and its historical causes.

If the child is the favorite prey of that gloomy void, of that bleak anguish, of that nothingness colored in dust, it is doubtless the result of a lack of roots in the course of things, the result of an excess of availability. It is in the nature of his age to await the unexpected arrival of something or someone extraordinary who is going to renew everything, overturn everything, even if that entails a planetary catastrophe.

                              [Des clefs et des serrures]

Complicating that condition is the absence, in the life of the adolescent, of clearly identified, permissible ways of orienting his affectivity and sexuality. Today, Tournier says,

they continue, in official circles at least, to consider that the absolute evil for the child is his sexuality…. If I say that eroticism has never done any harm to anyone, and especially not to children, and that there is no reason why one shouldn't show pornographic films on television on Wednesday afternoons, I am expressing something that is evident; but it runs up against a wall.

                        [Le Monde, October 8-9, 1978]

A third influence on Tournier's intentions is a desire to get away from his own solitude through contact with readers.

A final influence on his intentions is his own experience with children. Though he has never married and has no children, Tournier has been intimately involved in the rearing of at least two youngsters. He told Theodore Zeldin:

The ideal companion for me is a boy because I can do things with him that I cannot do alone: go to the zoo, walk in the woods, light a fire, read books with him, rediscover literature: we are both initiators and initiated to each other. It could equally be a girl, except parents don't trust little girls with bachelors. I do not have sexual relations with my boys. But I like to hold a child in my arms, I like to serve a child, to give him food, to wash him, to put him to bed. It's my maternal side….

When I look at a man of 20, and think of the boy of 10 he used to be, I feel a lump in my throat: it's like a death. I prefer to have not my own children, but all the children of the world.

               ["The Prophet of Unisex," The Observer (London), January 30, 1983]

In the context of the intentions I am discussing, those final observations, which recall some of the judgments made by the narrator of André Gide's L'Immoraliste as well as many made by the narrator of Le Roi des Aulnes, cause problems mainly because they suggest a futile exploitation of children: one takes them through initiatory procedures over the years only to produce, it seems, a condition of being one does not like. A further suggestion is that there is no remedy; accession to adulthood can only be calibrated in losses; to become an adult is to live as a defeated child, unless one associates with youngsters in order to repeat with them the games and other adventures of one's own disappeared childhood. That is the situation which confronts Robinson Crusoe at the conclusion of Vendredi ou la vie sauvage.

Initially, the children's version follows closely the story of the adult version, as its story follows closely the story-line of Defoe's novel. Robinson is shipwrecked and finds himself alone on a deserted, verdant island. Gradually, he overcomes his desolation, resists his temptation to wallow in the parental comfort he claims to find in the mud; he makes a commitment to work and eventually recreates on his island a solid bourgeois world. He names it Speranza and writes a constitution for its governance. After the first intrusion on what he considers his space by Indians, who use the island for their sacrificial rites, he begins to fortify it. All these events, and the pattern of life they create, reinforce in the child who reads about them the value of the deeds brought about through resolve and resoluteness.

In the adult version, those events are interlarded with excerpts from Robinson's Logbook where he meditates about and comes to appreciate some of the basic values of the West and where he also explores the relationship between sexuality and death. Indeed, after assuming a fetal position in one of the island's coombs, he initiates a sexual and fecund union with one of her flowers. Tournier excises that last event from the children's version in much the same way he says society bans sex from the eyes of the young.

Friday's arrival on the island is the occasion of another discrepancy between the two versions, apparently to spare children what they might find to be unsettling behavior by Robinson. In the adult version it is his intention to kill the fleeing Friday in order to avoid the eventual wrath of his pursuers; in the children's version, he aims his gun at one of the pursuers. In both texts, Friday's ensuing time on the island is spent being submitted to the ways of Robinson's civilization. As in Defoe's novel, he is sometimes recalcitrant; but in both of Tournier's texts his obduracy leads to disaster, for, fearful of being discovered smoking Robinson's treasured pipe, Friday tosses it behind him. It lands in the powder magazine; the resultant explosions bring down everything Robinson has constructed on the island and also cause his dog to die of fright.

From this point on, though the basic story remains the same in both, the two versions begin to differ in profoundly significant ways. In the original, Robinson's temptation not to start all over again is at first presented in a vocabulary which suggests that to succumb would be retrogression; he would thereby rid himself of the burden of an administered life and island. Gradually, however, Robinson's decision to embrace Friday's way of life becomes a transformation, a purgation, rather than a retrogression; it is not a question of having exchanged a laboriously established civilized life for a savage condition, but rather of having acceded to a higher perception of and participation in the universe, more particularly in the reign of the sun.

In the derivative version, Robinson makes the decision immediately and confesses that he is happy to be rid of a routine which at bottom bored him; once the decision has been made, he asserts that they are now free and moves on to become an attentive witness of Friday's existence. The subtitles clearly point to this difference; the "limbos" of the first version imply that Robinson has moved beyond civilization, the "savage life" of the second that he has reverted to a precivilized state. That variation in ideological tone continues until the very end of the book. Yet both texts invite the reader to consider a form of existence that is better than the repugnant ways characteristic of civilization; it is a condition which, when internalized, leads Robinson to stay on the island.

Friday's decision to abandon the island, without telling Robinson beforehand, is shattering in several ways. In the original text, no explanation is given for it, probably because it raises questions that are too unsettling. In the second version, Robinson says that Friday has seen the frigate, which could have carried both of them back to England, as a novel, irresistible toy, thereby using a child's instinctive reaction to the enchantingly new to explain a catastrophic event. In both texts, its arrival causes Robinson to think about moving swiftly to his death. But, in the first version, before doing so, he ruminates at length over the several stages of his existence on Speranza; death becomes the path to follow only when he finds he has neither the emotional nor psychological strength to pursue some other recourse. Oddly, he never raises, as many readers must, the matter of the meaning of Friday's decision to abandon him and thus to become a part of the civilized world. The child reader is given a cause, if not a reason; the adult reader is given nothing, and so is left to his own speculations. That is a challenge Tournier will repeat more than once in later texts.

The final event in the story, Robinson's discovery of the ship's cabin boy who has sought refuge on the island from his unhappy maritime existence, is presented in remarkably different ways in the two texts. In the children's version, Robinson is extraordinarily happy:

He now had this little brother whose hair—as red as his own—was beginning to blaze in the sun. They would invent new games, new adventures, new victories. A new life was going to begin, as beautiful as the island which was waking up in the mist at their feet.

Since Friday's life consisted of more than games, adventures, and victories, one can reasonably say that Robinson's vision of the future is the second step in his retrogression. Because the cabin boy has never seen him in the role of an adult, Robinson can recreate daily with the youth a child's world. Growing and aging will, until debility sets in, have no meaning. One can say that the child's version of his novel represents Tournier's description of a world in which the differences between children and adults no longer matter. We are not told what the cabin boy thinks about a life devoted to devising new games.

The original text offers a much more unsettling ending, unsettling because it is really a beginning whose outcome we cannot reliably predict. When Robinson sees the child he has an epiphany: the boy is a postulant from the solar realm, sent to allow Robinson to initiate him into the ways of that form of existence. In the face of that challenge, he feels himself assuming gigantic proportions. The scene is not unlike that of Bacchus arriving on Ariadne's island. Robinson tells the boy, "Henceforth, you will be called Thursday. That is Jupiter's day, the god of the Heaven. It is also the children's Sunday." That announcement is fraught with meaning. For years, Thursday was a half-holiday for French schoolchildren, and many of them devoted it to receiving religious instruction, overwhelmingly in Christian religions. Robinson is thereby announcing a new dispensation and incorporating the boy into it by baptizing him with a new name, chosen for him by Robinson. The lessons contained in Friday's departure no longer count now that Robinson can play the role of God. One of the ways in which that role can be carried out is described in Tournier's next novel, Le Roi des Aulnes, where the protagonist, moved by a belief that he is called to serve children, ends up witlessly participating in the slaughter of some of them.

Tournier's later and shorter works for young readers are more directly related to the experience of children and are presented through their eyes. In "La Fugue du petit Poucet" (Tom Thumb's Escape) [in Le Coq de bruyère], we follow the adventures of a young Parisian boy who is disturbed by his father's desire to be thoroughly abreast of modern ways of living; the father is an advocate of shopping malls, car parks, and tall buildings. Indeed, as head of the tree-cutters of Paris, he makes a steady contribution to the creation of those spaces and is proud of his participation. When he announces his intention of moving his family to the twenty-third floor of a building whose climate is completely controlled and where the family can profit from the joys of color television, Pierre rebels, gathers his rabbits together, and runs away from the family abode in the direction of some milieu better suited to his vague aspirations. Warmed by wine he receives from a truckdriver, who has given him a lift out of the city, the boy finds himself in a forest where he is soon surrounded by enchanting young girls.

They lead him off to their home, where he finds a world quite different from that enjoyed by his father. Here he finds a place of marvels, where the father stays home and the mother goes to work; here he sees a poster on the wall which urges its viewers to make love instead of war; here he meets the girls' father, Logre, who turns out to be a more genial ogre than others in some of Tournier's works. Indeed, unlike Robinson, and unlike the main character of Le Roi des Aulnes, he acts as a source of counsel for the young rather than serving as the provider of diversions and dangers. From him, Pierre learns that the grand curse of men is that "they have left the vegetable kingdom. They have fallen into the animal kingdom…. What you find there is hunting, violence, murder, fear. In the vegetable kingdom … you find the calm growth in the union between the earth and the sun." The idea recalls some of Robinson's thoughts in Vendredi, especially in the version for adults. Logre goes on to say that a good example of that union is a tree: it needs sunlight in order to grow and raise its branches toward the heavens, but it also needs to be ever more deeply rooted in the earth in order to remain sturdy. He derives a counsel from the tree's example: "The more you want to raise yourself up, the more is it necessary to have your feet on the ground. Every tree tells you that."

The authorities do not approve of such sentiments; they approve even less of trying to indoctrinate young, impressionable children with them; and so they come to charge Logre with corruption of youth and to take him off to jail. Before being carried off, he tells Pierre to take a gift from the house. The boy chooses a pair of oversized boots like those his father had promised but failed to give him. Obliged to return to his parents' newfound high-rise flat, Pierre is not completely discouraged, for he has learned, as did Rousseau two centuries earlier, to have recourse to his imagination. While his parents watch television in an adjacent room, he stretches out on his bed, his newly acquired boots close by him; and there he dreams of being an immense tree and also, probably, of growing tall enough to fit into those boots.

"La Fugue du petit Poucet" recalls Tournier's detestation of his own childhood years in Paris, his belief that Paris is not a city for children, and his suggestion that a history of cities would be also the history of the possibilities of growth they have made available to the young, and of the good and the harm they have done.

Tournier's next tale, Amandine ou les deux jardins (Amandine, or the Two Gardens) has a similar didactic cast. As its subtitle indicates, it is meant to be a story about initiation, one of Tournier's recurrent preoccupations in those interviews where he has discussed the formation of children; it is such, though, only by way of absence. Initiations suggest rites and ceremonies, carefully prepared by someone, so that their intent will be known and eventually assumed by those being initiated. What happens to Amandine is that she makes a series of discoveries and undergoes a few events which lead her toward evidence of another world from that she has known—a world she must try to put together on the basis of the new data she has acquired. In the absence of established initiation procedures, she must assume the initiative in putting things together.

She lives comfortably enough in the two realms represented by her parents. Her mother's world is inside, in the house she keeps; her father's is outside, in the garden he patiently tends. In her diary, where she writes entries only on Sundays and Wednesdays, Amandine inserts descriptions of novel events in her life. Her cat has kittens. Amandine is able to give the male kittens away, but no one wants the sole female. The mother cat begins to show a certain distance from the girl; the remaining kitten is indifferent to Amandine as it goes about exploring the precincts. The child eventually perceives that the kitten's explorations lead it away from Amandine's sphere and into stretches she has never examined; she concludes that the kitten is living in two worlds, the domesticated world of Amandine's home and the wild world found in the other garden.

When Amandine finally climbs over the wall, she finds a space entirely the opposite of the one her father tends—it is a virgin forest, no garden at all, really. On her return to her garden, she exclaims: "How clear and well-ordered everything is here!" Some hours later, having cried long and hard over nothing, she discovers some drops of blood on her leg; when she looks into the mirror, she notices that she no longer looks like the young ten-year-old she had been. In the entry for the following Wednesday, she tells us that she has discovered that her kitten has become a full-fledged cat and is expecting a litter of its own.

Tournier's points are all clear enough; they profit from being stated mutely, by which I mean that he presents the phenomena of the onset of puberty in ways which would not upset those who had not made Amandine's observations and which might help those who had, but who had been baffled by their meaning. Even the implicit criticism of an order which tends its homes and gardens better than its children is presented indirectly. In a way, that criticism is not present until the reader makes it and derives some wisdom from it, which may lead to more attentive ways of helping children understand more clearly what they see all around them.

"La Mère Noel" (Mother Christmas) [in Le Coq de bruyère] is little more than an anecdote with ambition. It tells of the Christmas-time rivalry between secular and religious forces in a small French village who conduct competing ceremonies at the same time. For years the local curé has been celebrating a vigil Mass at 6 p. m. on Christmas Eve; its highlight is a live Nativity scene. For years, at the same time, the local schoolteacher has been impersonating Father Christmas and distributing gifts to the schoolchildren. When the teacher retires and is replaced by a divorced woman with two children, the villagers begin to wonder if the longstanding rivalry will now come to an end. It does not. The woman announces her intention to continue the tradition and to take the part of Father Christmas. She also agrees to have her baby play the role of the Christ Child in the Nativity scene. There is some perplexity in the village over the situation, and there is consternation when the baby begins to cry, as the Mass gets underway, and cannot be satisfied except by the arrival of his mother, summoned from her distribution of gifts in order to nurse her hungry child and thereby to add another vital element to the live tableau. With the hindsight provided by one of his later novels [Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar], one can discern larger reaches in this brief tale, for the infant's need of his mother and the instant response on the part of both congregation and mother to that need point to the power of a child to effect harmonies and perhaps to remind rivals of what the coming of Christ was for a long time taken to mean: the establishment of peace on earth as an ideal worthy of being pursued by human beings.

Tournier's next book, Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit (Pierrot, or the Secrets of the Night), is, he says, his favorite book, and one which he worked on for six or seven years…. He says it is an example of what he would have liked to do had he continued with his early career in philosophy. "I would have liked to teach philosophy to children of 10, and that is what I am now trying to do in my books for children." [Zeldin, "The Prophet of Unisex"]. He told another interviewer that the teaching of philosophy to the young "is not done and that's a shame. My little book Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit is metaphysics for 10-year-olds" [Blume, "A Laughing Provocateur"].

What is often made deliberately obscure or ambiguous in Tournier's writings for adults is presented straightforwardly here as a matter of choices and values. The story is also an extension of the concerns expressed in Amandine, for here it is a question of how couples are formed in social partnerships and of the information which guides the decisions by which those partnerships are set up.

Tournier's story deals with a Pierrot who succeeds, not only in drawing Columbine back from Harlequin and vagabondage, but also in bringing about a victory for his own stable and domestic values. When he writes to the absent Columbine in his effort to win her back, he tries to explain the meaning of the colors of his world in order to allay her belief that they are sinister hues.

Columbine inspires Pierrot to create a lifesized brioche in her image, which reveals to her other dimensions of her being. Before 1979, Tournier had not written anything so forthright in defense of the values and continuities of the domestic order. In fact his Météores, published four years earlier in 1975, had raised serious questions about the attractiveness and viability of that order. Yet this apparent defense of the domestic life—of the washing of linen and the baking of bread—does not go as far as the reader might have expected—though it may go further. We do not read at the end of a marriage between Pierrot and Columbine. Instead we have what appears to be a reconciliation of all the opposed elements in the story. Harlequin returns to ask for the warmth and the hospitality of Pierrot's hearth; his request is honored; the two men watch with fascination as Columbine touches the breasts of the brioche portrait of herself and then invites them to join her in tasting and eating the good Columbine. The text tells us at its conclusion: "They are happy. They would like to laugh, but how can you do that with your cheeks swollen with brioche?"

Tournier is settling a number of matters in this tale which he has not settled as assuredly in his adult texts: the pacification of the nomad as a result of admiration for the security and strength of the sedentary baker, the celebration of the domestic and admiration for the maternal, the union of opposites which is often expressed in the difference between night and day, the absorption of cannibal instincts, whether physical or psychological, in eucharistic ceremony. But he sidesteps one of the main problems he has seen to be of central importance in the world of his readers—their initiation into sexual understanding and performance. What does a young reader make of this conclusion, which either suggests a union of the three or leaves unresolved Harlequin's more distant future? There is something of Marie Antoinette's alleged indifference to the people's hunger in a conclusion which suggests that youthful sexual rivalries can be satisfied by proximity to hot ovens and by the joyous consumption of tasty brioche. In Plato's world, one was encouraged to move from image to form; the same can be said of the world of sex; and Tournier chooses to remain silent about how that passage will occur and whether what it leads to will last.

What Tournier is trying to do in Barbedor (Goldenbeard) his recent book for children, puzzles me, though, as we shall see, it has some direct ties to the conclusion of the adult version of Vendredi. It is an oriental tale about a not too earnest king who sports a luxuriant golden beard, which each day is brushed and waved by a woman barber; male barbers have been excluded from service because their manner of care involves trimming and cutting. One day the king discovers a single silver whisker in his beard; it is a sign of his age which reminds him that, after two infertile marriages, there is no heir to his throne, and that he has not paid adequate attention to that matter. He thinks of adopting a little heir "who will look strikingly like me … like a little twin brother." During his siesta, he feels something like a bite and, on awakening from his nap, discovers that his silver hair has been plucked. The same event happens day after day, reducing the richness of his beard and serving to remind him that his life is passing by. Eventually, he discovers that a bird is the ravisher of his beard. When the last hair has been taken, the bird leaves behind a feather from its plumage; it turns out to have the properties of a compass and leads Barbedor to the nest the bird has made from his beard. There he finds a beautiful gilded egg which he takes from the nest with the intention of bringing it back to the seat of his kingdom. He is stopped by one of his own foresters, who accuses him of a form of poaching. Barbedor discovers at that moment that he has become quite little and is easily able to elude his accuser. He continues on his journey and, as he nears the city, takes note of a great funeral procession in an outlying cemetery. When he arrives at the gates of the city he finds them closed. As he stands before them, the egg begins to open, and a white bird flies out, singing: "Long live the king! Long live our new king!" The transformed Barbedor thus becomes his own successor and repeats fully the events of his earlier reign, even in the matter of marrying the two barren women. At the point in his second reign where his golden beard begins to sprout, he forgets the history of the boy before the gates, the bird flying up from the egg, and the ensuing cry of "Long live the king!"

There were traces of that kind of longing in Robinson's aspiration to become part of the solar reign, to introduce the cabin boy to it, and thus to find a line leading toward immortality. A similar hankering led Paul, one of the narrators of Les Météores, to spin out extravagant theories in an attempt to project himself as an integral part of meteorological events. Here Tournier is going even further in his description of the process whereby an undeserving man is visited by renewal and restoration; here he allows for the possibility of a cyclical return of youth. He does not at the same time resolve the problem of how youth can move on to a purposeful, energetic adult life. One ought not to push that reading too far. Perhaps one should assume that what Tournier wanted was something simpler: to turn his hand to the creation of a magical, languorous world where troubling events become marvels, even for those who have not taken full advantage of their own promise and who have not wholly met their responsibilities.

There is a progression discernible in Tournier's works for children and an ever more visible commitment to particular values which are not as certainly appreciated in his writings for adults: sane integration into the natural world, the reconciliation of adversaries who need not be in conflict, the celebration of routines and rituals which enrich understanding of the worth of a serene life, an appreciation of enchantment as opposed to insanity. When Tournier writes about children, rather than for them, he depicts a world in which such values are absent or have been set seriously askew. Fortunately, one has the children's works as the assurance of Tournier's belief that those absences and dislocations are the results of abuses and that the child's world does not have to be a place of suffering and confusion, especially if adults attend to their obligations and writers attend to filling in whatever gaps may be created by negligence of those duties.