SOURCE: "Initation and Counter-Initiation: Progress Toward Adulthood in the Stories of Michel Tournier," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 151-68.

[In the following essay, Easterlin discusses and praises Tournier's technique of initiating the protagonists of his children's stories—and his young readers—into adulthood.]

In "Michel Tournier's Texts for Children," an article that appeared a few years ago in Children's Literature [No. 13, 1985], Joseph McMahon analyzes some of the differences between Tournier's approach to child and adult audiences. Basing his statements both on Tournier's own remarks about audience and on readings of the fictions, McMahon says:

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 above audiences he addresses.

Since several of Tournier's stories blur the boundary of audience appeal between child and adult, McMahon's definition, although helpful and essentially accurate, is a little too general. It seems to me that a useful way of testing McMahon's definition is to look at a few of Tournier's stories about children and to determine how his technique varies depending on the audience he is addressing. While some stories have been reordered between Le Coq de bruyère, the French edition of the stories, and its English equivalent, The Fetishist, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the three stories about children—"Amandine, or The Two Gardens"; "Tom Thumb Runs Away"; and "Prikli"—are grouped in that sequence and placed in the early part of both texts. McMahon identifies the first two of these as childrens' stories, for so Tournier intended them; but I know at least one adult who finds them well worth reading. Like "Prikli," a tale clearly not to be recommended for the impressionable young mind, "Tom Thumb" and "Amandine" focus on the children's efforts to form suitable responses as they discover aspects of their own sexuality or psychology against the conflicting, or indifferent, or imponderable restrictions of the adult, world. "Amandine" is subtitled "An initiatory story," and "Tom Thumb" "A Christmas Story," but insofar as both stories gently dramatize an aspect of the experience of growing up and offer advice on how to cope with it, they are both, to some extent, initiatory stories. Prikli's tale, by contrast, is one of gruesome counter-initiation. The adults in his life perpetuate a sentimental romanticism that dichotomizes sexual identities, representing woman as an idealized object and man as a debased physical brute. For a small boy of aesthetic sensitivities, the inevitable self-identification with masculinity is traumatic and, once subjected to the vagaries of childish logic, ultimately tragic: Prikli tries to correct the injustice of his sexual fate by self-castration. Hence, for Prikli, formative experiences that should result in psychological and social adaption become the vehicle for regression to primitive mental conceptualization and behavior.

Tournier himself, often ironically evasive, is quite explicit about the child's need for guidance via initiation in his or her "transition from a biological state to a social status" [The Wind Spirit]:

Education in the broad sense of the word prepares a child to enter society and to occupy his place in it. In all times and places it appears to come in two forms, one moral, emotional, indeed magical, the other purely intellectual and rational. The first is called initiation, the second instruction. We have this equation:

education = initiation + instruction.

Of course these two components of education assume many guises, and their importance varies. My view is quite simply that, historically, the relative importance of initiation has been diminishing compared with that of instruction and that for some time now this has passed the point of being harmful.

                                               (W)

To some extent, then, Tournier certainly strives to correct the deficiency of contemporary education through fiction writing. Thus, while the stories are initiatory in their focus on the maturation of young child-characters, they are initiatory in another sense, too, for as Tournier initiates his characters, he simultaneously initiates his readers. In the first two tales, he shows his readers (whether children or adults), how maturation can be a means of self-discovery and a progress through new experiences, an occasion for joy and even wonder at life; in "Prikli," he initiates his readers into the literally and permanently dehumanizing result of outmoded sexual attitudes and of general insensitivity to the child's developmental experience. "Prikli" is additionally horrifying to the reader who has read the stories in sequence, invited at first to read "Amandine" and "Tom Thumb" as McMahon says the child reads, by incorporating them into his own experience and thus reawakening with Amandine and Tom to the ineluctable mystery of life. After this, the damaging nightmare that is realized in Prikli's self-mutilation is all the more perverse and shocking.

Probably Tournier expects his adult readers, whether they have the experience of reading the stories sequentially or not, to note the contrasting treatments of child-characters. As Roger Shattuck, who admires Tournier and deplores his neglect by American critics, nonetheless notes, "Tournier is an incorrigible pedagogue and, having decided not to innovate or experiment with the traditional form of the novel and to maintain the advantages of clear language, falls occasionally into excessive didacticism" ["Locating Michel Tournier," in The Innocent Eye, 1986]. The lessons Tournier teaches stand out dramatically in the short stories, which center on well-defined themes and unfold with great economy. But I think Tournier earns his didacticism in these stories for two reasons. First, Tournier sympathizes with childhood experience without sentimentalizing it, thus demonstrating his genuine concern for children as well as his psychological insight into developing human consciousness. If ignorance and innocence are the standard terms for defining the child's mental state, they are clearly inadequate to the fundamentally dynamic nature of childhood experience as Tournier delineates it. By portraying the child's effort to process information and thus come to grips with the bewildering world around him or her, Tournier implicitly defines the child, given his or her physical and emotional immaturity and lack of logical and analytical skills, as dependent even while striving for self-reliance. Again, Tournier's insistence that the child's emotional and physical dependence on adults not be neglected is hardly whimsical, but stems from an informed psychological perspective; in The Wind Spirit, he points out that:

Freudian psychoanalysis has long persisted in viewing the need for physical contact simply as a libidinal impulse given concrete form by the desire of the newborn for its mother's breast or, later, by genital sexuality. But recently several psychologists have more or less simultaneously proposed a new idea, which, though seemingly of modest import, nevertheless profoundly alters the very foundations of psychoanalysis, namely, the idea of attachment as a primary and irreducible drive.

For Tournier, in short, the adult's obligation to the child is not simply the result of social convention or convenience, but rather stems from a biological imperative. Finally, in addition to the psychological understanding that partially justifies Tournier's pedagogical agenda, his literary artistry makes these stories a success. In all three, he eschews dogmatism, focusing instead on literary technique. Throughout the stories, Tournier manipulates a variety of materials, including: narrative tone; representation of the adult world; man's relation to the animal world; and the destructive and creative potential of myth and ritual.

Of the three stories, "Amandine" is written in the first person and is hence the closest to the child's experience. Told in the form of a ten-year-old's entries into her diary, the story relates Amandine's observations of her cat, Claude, and her curiosity about the mysterious arrival of four kittens. Over a period of several months, the growth of one of the kittens, Kamikat, parallels Amandine's own tentative sexual awakening.

Since it is told in the first person, the story is not only free of adult self-consciousness, but also perhaps of the self-consciousness of the child who knows she has an audience. Amandine sometimes takes up the role of storyteller, but she tends to collapse her own constructions as quickly as she creates them. For instance, she begins like this:

Sunday I have blue eyes, cherry red lips, plump pink cheeks, and wavy blond hair. My name is Amandine. When I look at myself in the mirror, I think I look a little girl of ten. Which isn't surprising. I am a little girl, and I am ten.

From the beginning, the chattering, spontaneous little girl overtakes the more orderly one, who is more interested in factual information than exploration and speculation. In the second paragraph, Amandine dutifully announces, "I have a papa, a mama, a doll called Amanda, and also a cat." But her interest immediately moves away from what are the conventionally appropriate high-priority beings in her life, a mama and a papa, to those that interest her, Claude and the kittens. Catalogued along with her doll and then dropped, Amandine's parents are quickly reduced in status in accordance with her reigning passion.

That Amandine's inattention to her parents may be motivated by more than childish impetuosity, however, becomes evident a little further into the tale. After another few weeks, Amandine describes the world of her parents:

Wednesday I like Mama's house and Papa's garden. In the house, it's always the same temperature, summer and winter alike. And no matter what the season, the lawns are always green and well kept. You might think that Mama in her house, and Papa in his garden, are having a competition to see who can be the neatest and tidiest … I think they're right. Things are more reassuring like that. But sometimes they're also a little bit boring.

Amandine accepts the ordered world of her parents, beginning her diary entry by conferring approval to their domain. In addition, after describing her parents' world, she iterates the propriety of the manicured and static house and garden. As a result, her admission that this order fails to hold her constant interest is thus slightly tinged with guilt, even though Amandine is not apologizing for her own failure of enthusiasm. Yet despite Amandine's personal conflict between tolerance for and boredom with the well-regulated adult world, what is most striking about her parents is their pervasive absence from the story, which attests to their rather negligible participation in her life. As McMahon has noted, Tournier's "implicit criticism of an order which tends its homes and gardens better than its children is presented indirectly"; and it is perhaps Amandine's current absorption in her cats that relegates her parents to a very secondary existence yet, to the adult reader, they seem unaccountably absent. But at the same time, the absence of the parents from the story contributes to its initiatory function for the child reader: in both this story and "Tom Thumb," with parents only vaguely in evidence, the child characters' resourcefulness and self-discovery are positively emphasized. Thus, the absence of parents functions as a social criticism for adult readers while it simultaneously—if somewhat contradictorily—reinforces the self-esteem of the child reader who is invited to participate in the thoughts and actions of a strong, independent child character.

With her parents in the background—either because that is where Amandine leaves them or that is where they choose to be—Amandine must find other beings on whom to focus her inquisitive mind and to serve as the initiators into her sexual self-awareness. Luckily, Amandine is attuned to the animal world, as she indicates when she explains the relationship between the night animals and the day animals:

The owl is in a hurry to go home before the sun comes up and dazzles her, and she brushes up against the blackbird that's just coming out of the lilac tree. The hedgehog rolls itself up in a ball in the depths of the heather just at the moment when the squirrel pokes its head out of the hole in the old oak tree to see what sort of a day it is.

The world Amandine describes is the reverse of her parents' predictably ordered house and garden: between the night animals and the day animals, the natural world is continually in motion, whereas the world of Amandine's parents is static and actually ceases to exist when they are asleep. In the absence of her parents, then, Amandine turns her attention to the dynamism of nature, which both reflects and complements her own curiosity.

Amandine's cats, tied to the natural order that so enthralls her, thus become the agents of her initiation into puberty. The mystery of sexual identity, symbolized in the cats' androgynous names, Claude and Kamikat, intrigues Amandine from the beginning of the story, when she discovers the kittens around Claude. The end of the story mirrors this beginning, as Amandine watches Kamikat grow plumper and guesses that "he" is a female, but the conclusion also marks the progress of her sexual knowledge. In the beginning she says of Claude, as though such a proposition is entirely ridiculous, "anyone might think the four little kittens had been shut up in [Claude's stomach] and just got out!" By the end of the story she understands that Kamikat is pregnant before she sees kittens, partly because she has learned from Claude but also because she has experienced for the first time, with the onset of menstruation, the meaning of her own sexuality.

Because this is a story for children, Tournier presents sexual realities indirectly and emphasizes the pleasure and knowledge the child can glean from observing nature. For instance, Amandine's first menstrual period is described thus:

I go upstairs to my little room. I cry for a long time, very hard, for no reason, just like that. And then I sleep for a while. When I wake up, I look at myself in the mirror. My clothes aren't dirty. There's nothing wrong with me. Oh yes there is, though, there's a little blood. A trickle of blood along my leg. That's odd, I don't have any scratches anywhere. Why, then? Never mind. I go over to the mirror and examine my face from really close up.

Only a child who is emotionally prepared to read the clues in this paragraph will do so; in this way, Tournier carefully avoids alarming his small reader. Likewise, the positive representation of the natural world is intended to offer the adult guidance that the author generally finds wanting in contemporary society. Once again, though, Tournier is elsewhere quite pointed about the insufficiency of this kind of instruction:

Everyone says that young children like to play with dolls and teddy bears, and sometimes they are permitted to play with small animals. It is also commonly said, however, that dogs like bones. The truth is that dogs gnaw on bones when they have nothing else, but you can take my world for it, they would prefer a good cut of steak or a nice veal cutlet. As for children, it is quite simply a dreadful thing that we toss them dolls and animals in order to assuage their need for a warm, loving body. Of course sailors on long voyages sometimes avail themselves of inflatable rubber females, and lonely shepherds in the mountains have been known to mount a lamb or goat. But children are neither sailors nor shepherds and do not lack for human company. Their distress is the invention of a fiercely anti-physical society, of a mutilating, castrating culture, and there is no question that many character disorders, violent outbursts, and cases of juvenile drug addiction are consequences of the physical desert into which the child and adolescent are customarily banished in our society.

                                            (W)

If, then, the child reader has been encouraged to open his or her eyes to nature by "Amandine," perhaps the adult reader has been asked to consider whether Amandine's initiation, its charm notwithstanding, is as complete as it should be by the end of the story. It seems unlikely that she understands her own menstruation, much less makes the connection between this phenomenon and pregnancy. Her realization that the kittens are inside Kamikat is, happily, a correct intuition, but it is not the accurate biological knowledge that, at this point, she might have.

"Amandine" is the most realistic of these three stories, and as such does not make much use of mythic materials. The overrun garden stands in obvious contrast to the ordered garden of Amandine's parents, and consequently Amandine's adventure there symbolizes her confrontation with a new and mysterious aspect of herself. Likewise, the statue of Cupid, the boy-messenger of love, is a kind of double for her, as she attempts to overreach her still-childish interpretations of experience in the effort to confront adult sexuality. "Tom Thumb Runs Away," as its title suggests, is less realistic than "Amandine," incorporating motifs, plot devices, and a narrative tone borrowed from fairy tale into the life of an apparently average young boy. In this story, Tom's father, the captain of the Paris woodcutters, moves his wife and child from a small villa to a Paris high-rise. Tom decides to run away, and during his brief adventure in the woods he meets the magical Mr. Ogre and his daughters. He returns home with the pair of "dream boots" given him by Mr. Ogre.

Even though the tale is told by a third-person narrator who employs more elevated diction than Amandine in her diary, Tournier once again draws a sympathetic child-hero. Like Amandine, Tom is a take-charge sort of child, one that any reader little or big is invited to identify with. Even when Tournier directs irony at his hero, as he does just before Tom runs away, he only makes Tom more attractive. And in this particular instance, Barbara Wright contributes another deft touch, exploiting the phonetic similarity between "o" and "u" in English to underscore the keen but intermittent logic of the child's mind:

They'll say my writing's still babyish, thought Tom in some mortification, reading over his farewell note. What about the spelling? There's nothing like one really stupid, big mistake to rob even a pathetic message of all its dignity. Boots. Should it be u, like in "brutes"? Or does it really have two o's? Yes, it must, because there're two boots.

["Ils vont encore dire que j'ai une écriture de bébé", pense Pierre avec dépit, en relisant son billet d'adieu. Et l'orthographe? Rien de tel qu'une grosse faute bien ridicule pour enlever toute dignité à un message, fût-il pathétique. Bottes. Cela prend-il bien deux t? Oui sans doute puisqu'il y a deux bottes.]

Tom's logic is amusing and of course the reader is invited to laugh at him for a moment but, however faulty, his reasoning does lead him to the right conclusion. Moreover, Tom's concern for expressing himself correctly, his desire to carry out what he realizes is a modest task with dignity, makes him more endearing than his lack of knowledge makes him foolish.

Irony, besides, is an extraordinary relative technique, and it is in comparison to the representations of Tom's parents that the irony directed against him loses any edge of serious criticism. The parent world is more fully dramatized in this story than in "Amandine," but the purpose of dramatizing it seems to be to expose its ridiculousness and thus discount it. The exaggerated portrait of Tom's father as a self-important incompetent once again obliquely contributes to the instructive function of the story by strengthening the child reader's identification with Tom. In his or her identification with the story's unequivocal hero, the child reader imaginatively experiences Tom's temporary independence, and thus anticipates his or her own eventual self-reliance.

Just before Tom's struggle with spelling during the composition of his farewell note, Tom's father has shown himself to be an indubitable boob. Thumb explains the value of a walled-up modern life:

"… anyway, as the President of the Republic himself said: 'Paris must adapt itself to the motorcar, even at the expense of a certain aestheticism.'"

"'A certain aestheticism'—what's that?" asked Tom.

Thumb ran his short fingers through his black, close-cropped hair. These kids, eh—always asking stupid questions!

"Aestheticism, aestheticism … er, um … well, it's trees!" he finally came out with, to his relief. "'Even at the expense of'—that means that they have to be cut down…."

Whereas anyone can sympathize with Tom's effort to penetrate the perplexing rules of orthography, his father's glib disregard for logic exposes him as a know-nothing. Thumb digs a nice hole for himself, first using words he does not understand and then grossly misinterpreting them to suit his purpose. In addition, the narrator certainly helps to tip the scale in Tom's favor with the remark about "stupid questions": obviously, the question here is not at all stupid—only the answer is. As in "Amandine," Thumb's dismissiveness should suggest to the adult reader that a child's questions deserve complete, accurate answers, even while it gives the child reader a much-needed opportunity to laugh at a silly adult.

Tom's father proves himself insensitive as well as ignorant when Tom asks if he will still be getting his boots for Christmas. "Here, I'll make you an offer," says his father. "Instead of boots, I'll buy you a color television." First of all, a television is a rather incongruous substitute for a pair of boots, and secondly, Thumb's "offer" seems rather selfish upon later reflection. At the end of the story, Captain and Mrs. Thumb watch Christmas Eve festivities on "their color television set" in their new apartment. Is this the set they bought for Tom? Whether it is or not, Tom evidently does not need the mass-produced fantasies available there: Ogre's boots, outwardly of more limited value and use than a TV, have for him a power far more significant than the prepackaged fantasies of television programs.

The Paris highrise apartment where Thumb moves his family parallels the perfect order of Amandine's parents' house and lawn in its artificiality and sterility and, like Amandine, Tom has the good sense to know a life closer to nature is more meaningful and lots more fun. Amandine can conveniently ignore the adult world, while Tom must run away from it. Just as Amandine's cats assist her in her discovery of sexuality, Tom's pet rabbits prove immediately useful. While Tom is on the run, a truck driver stops, and "the rabbits [have] a brilliant idea. One after the other, they [poke] their heads out of the hamper. Do you take live rabbits in a hamper with you if you're running away? The driver [is] reassured." Tournier's assumption of a rabbit consciousness commensurate with human consciousness implies a tacit conspiracy between the boy and his pets, as though the animals know Tom is in a quandary and purposely reveal themselves to deceive the driver. A little later, when he is tired and lies down under a tree, the rabbits "[nuzzle] up to Tom, poking their little noses into his clothes." Out in the woods with no shelter, Tom finds a warmth and comfort with his rabbits that does not exist in the Mercury Tower apartment. And again, after he meets Mr. Ogre's daughters and goes to their home, he repeats the experience of being in "a live burrow." The scene of the eight children stripping off their clothes and jumping into bed mirrors the nuzzling rabbits, and in so doing illustrates a positive similarity between the human and animal worlds, the comforting and pleasurable nature of physical contact. In "Tom Thumb," the primary need for attachment of which Tournier writes in The Wind Spirit is met with nearly ideal, if only temporary, fulfillment; whereas Amandine's affection is concentrated solely upon her cats, Tom finds love among both animals and humans. Only his parents are missing.

The Grimm's tale "Little Thumb" ("Tom Thumb" in some English versions) is the obvious analogue to which Tournier alludes. Like his namesake, Tournier's Tom is ever-resourceful, outwitting wicked adults despite the handicap of his age and size; but unlike the doltish father and seemingly nonexistent mother of the new tale, the parents in the Grimm's tale dote on their precious son. His adventure also takes place in the countryside. But beyond this, there are no strong parallels between the tales; rather, the familiar names become amusing when they are applied to contemporary settings and attitudes, and imply that what we conventionally consider long ago and make-believe may in fact be very real and present.

Tournier undoubtedly wishes to stress the interrelatedness of myth and reality, and the necessary and continuous rethinking of both that their inseparability requires. William Cloonan points out that, in pondering Christian myth,

What Tournier discovered in transubstantiation was the confirmation of his belief in transformation: that everything which exists, be it as humble as bread or wine, has the potential to become sacred, a process which occurs when people learn to perceive themselves and the objects which surround them as sources of comfort, beauty and joy.

[see Michel Tournier, 1985, and "The Spiritual Order of Michel Tournier," in Renascense, Vol. 36, Nos. 1-2, 1983–1984]

In "Tom Thumb," Ogre's retelling of the Fall of Man constitutes another use, clearly quite different from that of the Grimm's tale, of mythic materials. Not entirely dissimilar to Tom's father, Ogre is quite glib in his revisionist telling of the myth:

"Encouraged by Eve, Adam makes up his mind. He bites into the fruit. And he doesn't die. On the contrary, his eyes open, and he knows good and evil. So Jehovah had lied. It was the serpent that had told the truth."

In this case, Tournier has taken sacred myth, the most difficult sort to attempt to revise, and made the deity into a hardly very admirable character. The new version of the Eden myth is not offensive, however, in part because it is so extreme, but also because it is Ogre's version. And although he is more credible than Captain Thumb (largely because he is simply kind to the children), Ogre's explanations seem almost as idiosyncratic. Part of the reason for this is that Ogre's own beliefs, which constitute yet another mythic dimension to the tale, conflict with acceptance of traditional Christian myth. He is the follower of an older religion, tree worship.

"Listen to me," he said. "What is a tree? In the first place, a tree consists in a certain balance between aerial foliage and underground roots. This purely mechanical balance contains a whole philosophy in itself. For it is clear that it is impossible for the foliage to spread, to expand, to embrace an ever-increasing portion of the sky if the roots do not at the same time plunge deeper…. So you see, the higher you want to rise, the more you must have your feet on the ground. Every tree tells you so."

Ogre's lengthy philosophical explanation for the tree as the perfect example of balance between inner and outer, restriction and freedom, earth and sky is somewhat overly scientific and overstated. But in contrast to Thumb's assertion that trees have only aesthetic value, Ogre's discourse is symbolically significant. What his speech stresses is not so much the sacredness of trees but the importance of balance and harmony with nature. Tom certainly understands the symbolical nature of the lesson, for it is his ability to incorporate Ogre's speech into his imagination that enables him to experience tree-like balance. At the end of the story, all the mythic elements combine in Tom's transcendent moment when he puts on the boots Ogre has given him: unable to escape physically from the sterile environment of the apartment, his feet are nonetheless symbolically on the ground; he becomes his own savior (this is, after all, "A Christmas Story") and escapes spiritually, retaining his connection to nature and hence his wholeness through his imagination.

Both "Amandine" and "Tom Thumb," then, have numerous similarities—the narrator's close identification with a strong, central child character; the delineation of a sterile, insensitive parent world that is, however, escapable; the beneficial relationship between the child and the animal world; the representation of myth as a dynamic aspect of current reality—that enable the reader to identify closely with the child-hero. The tales, in effect, invite the reader to share, on whatever conscious or subconscious level is suited to his or her age or experience, in Amandine's initiation into puberty and Tom's initiation into the regenerative power of the imagination. In "Prikli," conversely, Tournier reveals exaggerated and even opposite attitudes toward some of the same phenomena of the children's tales, with a result that stresses the seriousness of the child's life and the adult's responsibility to him.

"Prikli" is told in the third person, but the relatively elevated language and consequently formal tone of the prose makes the narrative voice quite distinct from that of "Tom Thumb." The fluent and ordered descriptions of Prikli's perceptions stand in rather striking contrast to the information related, as in this early passage:

The beautiful apartment that Prikli and his family lived in on the rue des Sablons would have had few resources to offer to the child's reveries had it not been for a huge old painting in the Pre-Raphaelite style which had been hung, to get it out of the way, in the narrow corridor leading from the living room to the bedrooms at the back…. This painting depicted the Last Judgment…. The damned were sinking down into an underground passage made of granite, while the chosen, singing and carrying palms, were ascending to heaven up a great staircase made of pink clouds. Now, what the child found particularly striking was the anatomy of each category. For whereas the damned had brown skin and black hair, and their nudity revealed formidable muscles, the chosen were pale and slim, and their white tunics concealed frail, delicate limbs.

The objective tone in which Tournier delineates a typically overwrought piece of Pre-Raphaelite art is humorous, because it implies a reaction to a clearly outrageous object that is equivalent to the reception of mundane actuality. As it exposes the discrepancy between perception and reality such irony is always amusing; in "Prikli," however, it is at the same time rather terrifying. This is, after all, the child's point of view, and phrases like "what the child found particularly striking" combined with logical coordinators like "for whereas" dramatize Prikli's attempt to form a rational understanding of the painting. While the reader can identify with the child's struggle to form an adult response, the fact that the painting is the sole subject of Prikli's reveries, combined with the excessive seriousness of those musings, indicates that something is askew. Through careful control of his irony, Tournier establishes a difficult position for the reader: Prikli, mystified by the adult world, engages sympathy, but he is simultaneously held at a distance by his foreboding tendency to literalize absurd attitudes.

While Amandine's and Tom Thumb's parents offer their children sterile, uninteresting environments but are nevertheless unthreatening in their distance from the child's world, Prikli's parents are another matter. It is safe to say that their abode, graced by the phantasmagoria of a Pre-Raphaelite Last Judgment, is hardly sterile. Rather, it is governed and shaped by a couple who confuse romantic fictions with reality, and are therefore unable to respond to the natural needs of their child. On the one hand, Prikli's father as an adult male represents everything repulsive; on the other, his mother personifies eternally mysterious femininity:

After her lemon tea, which she took alone in her bedroom, she shut herself up in the bathroom for an hour and a half. And when she came out, still dressed in a chiffon negligee, she was already a goddess, the goddess of the morning, as fresh as a rose, anointed with lanolin, very different, it's true, from the great black goddess of the evening, the one who leaned over Prikli's bed, her face half hidden behind a little veil, and who told him: "Don't kiss me, you'll wreck my hair."

While the pathos of a child whose parent denies him affection need hardly be glossed, the idealized image of woman that Prikli is encouraged to adopt adds another dimension to his mother's maternal deficiencies. Perceived as "the goddess" in one of her many transformations, Prikli's mother takes on for her child the unbearable value of the feminine ideal realized, yet still unattainable. When Prikli begs to sleep with her gloves, he is granted contact with the symbol instead of the actual person of his mother. Thus, the substitution of symbol for reality is established early in the story, and implies a perverse method of interpreting the world that in the end becomes explicit.

Like Amandine's and Tom's parents, Prikli's have a tendency to take him for granted; but above and beyond this, their refusal to take their child's experience seriously manifests itself in some rather sadistic remarks. Although he has expressed displeasure at his nickname, it (quite literally) sticks, and he is told:

"But you know, baby hedgehogs don't have prickles—just very soft, very clean down. It's only later. Later, when they grow up. When they become men…."

Prikli may only be a child, but he knows that hedgehogs don't "become men" and hence sees that his mother's remark refers to his own human masculinity. In taunting her child and therefore failing to take him seriously, the mother burdens him with a distorted and disturbing vision of his own future.

Prikli's adventures are limited to the gossamer realm of his goddess-mother and to the garden of the ironically named Desbordes-Valmore Square—places that stand as suggestive images of romantic extremes. If the world of his mother is the interior of a lingering decadence, the square enshrines the spirit of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, whose poetry waxes rhapsodic on such subjects as lost children, deceased mothers, spent youth, and aestheticized nature. At the same time, the square is incongruously decorated with statues representing Greek mythic heroes. Thus overladen with mythical and romantic resonances, the square is clearly no corrective to the home environment and, unlike Amandine and Tom, Prikli has no opportunity to explore nature in its unsentimental reality. As a result, his only impression of the animal world is that which he receives from the adults around him, to whom animals are dirty and barbaric and fatally associated with masculine sexuality. Prikli imagines a hedgehog as "a miniature pig covered with bristles swarming with vermin," a vision entirely antithetical to Amandine's poetic description of the hedgehog going to sleep. The connection between animals and masculinity is moreover reinforced when Prikli overhears Mamouse, the attendant for the restroom in the square, railing against men as "lechers, wild boars, [and] debauchees," a screed he probably little understands beyond the yoking of male and animal in a highly negative context. And later, Prikli's abortive imitation of canine behavior leads him to the inconvenient conclusion that urination itself is an animal, and therefore despicable, act. Unfortunately for Prikli, he is smart, and the accumulated disgust he feels toward anything animal progresses from the perception that men are like animals to the conclusion that men are equivalent to animals.

Finally, Tournier's treatment of myth in "Prikli" reinforces the tensions he has established through distance in narrative tone; rigidly opposed concepts of masculine and feminine, as embodied in the parents; and identification of the natural, animal world with vulgarity and masculinity. Whereas "Tom Thumb" exhibits the playful blending of many myths and asserts the flexibility of all, "Prikli" dramatizes the destructive potential in literalized misinterpretations of myth. On a general level, Prikli's perception of his mother as a goddess, and the underlying assumption that living humans can be goddesses, is an example of this. On a more specific level, when Miss Campbell, the governess of another young child who visits the square, gives Prikli her seemingly half-hearted explanations of the centaur and the minotaur statues, she unwittingly embellishes Prikli's conviction that the keys to reality reside in phantasmagoria. Because she cannot explain, for instance, why Theseus wears "a skirt," Prikli concludes that Theseus is female and the Minotaur male. The irony of this of course is that the mythic Theseus, the preeminent Attic hero who conquered the Minotaur and led the war against the centaurs, was in fact something of a philanderer, while the Minotaur was an imaginary beast without sexual distinction. But there is more to Prikli's mythic misperception:

Miss Campbell had given Prikli quite a long lecture, from which he had vaguely gathered that the man-horse—a scent-tar [sent-fort]—was obliged, in order to marry, to abduct a woman by main force, precisely because of his bad smell, to which he owed his name. Remembering his father's smell, Prikli had been satisfied with this explanation.

Miss Campbell's creative abilities notwithstanding, her freedom at inventing what she does not know is another example of the unwitting negligence of the adults surrounding Prikli. Like Prikli's mother, she betrays the child's utter faith in the adult's word. Could she have known that her interpretation was precisely the wrong one to give Prikli? In the statue of the centaur, Prikli sees an embodiment of what he has already learned to link, the animal and the masculine, and Miss Campbell's free definition of "scent-tar" reinforces the connection. And while the degree of misinterpretation is certainly no help to Prikli's weird cogitations, the simple fact that neither Marie, Prikli's family's maid, nor Miss Campbell explain that the centaur is a fictional being perpetuates Prikli's tendency to see real men as monsters of mythic proportions. An explanation that pointed out the once-upon-a-time aspect of the myth, placing it back in the days when men wore "skirts," would have suggested to Prikli the difference between artistic representation and reality, and allowed him to avoid his dangerous logic. Instead, it is the disastrous connection that Prikli makes between these "facts" and the revelation that "man" and "animal" are only different terms for the same thing that leads him ultimately to the formulation that "the link between the brown meat of the man in the urinal and Mamouse's saucepan [of giblet broth], was forged by Theseus' sword."

In the end, Prikli's drastic act of self-mutilation displays the total sum of a child's efforts to weave some fabric of reality from many mismatched threads. Through his fear of the unavoidable bestiality that he sees as the primary characteristic of adult masculinity, he regresses to a psychologically primitive state. In The Golden Bough, Frazer recounts several instances of ritual castration, and hypothesizes that, according to the superstitions of some primitive tribes, self-castration constituted a transfer of power:

[Some] Asiatic goddesses of fertility were served … by eunuch priests. These feminine deities required to receive from their male ministers, who personated the divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions: they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy before they could transmit it to the world.

In a world where all beauty resides in the femininity that has been denied him, Prikli wants nothing to do with brute strength, and sacrifices his masculinity to the goddess-image of his mother. The disconcerting parallels between his behavior and primitive ritual castration underscore the barbarism that lies just beneath the perverse myths the adults around him continually enact in the name of high civilization. Thus, Prikli's self-castration registers not only his own psychological disturbance, but that of his whole culture; with this counter-initiation, it is as though much that holds itself up as civilization is lost.

Tournier's essay about his visits to French schools, "Writer Devoured by Children" [translated by Margaret Higonnet in Children's Literature 13, 1985], attests to his enormous sensitivity to the experience of childhood. As always, he tells the tale of his conversations with the children with gentle irony:

We pass from animals to nature, to ecology, to the quality of life, and then, quite simply, to happiness. Children are not afraid of the big questions. In fact they do not order problems hierarchically. What do you eat for breakfast? Or, How can one be happy? They throw out such questions without making any distinction. One must know how to answer. We may skip breakfast. But what about happiness? "Happiness? Very simple. There is only one condition, but it is absolutely essential: you must passionately love something or someone."

At the same time that he is delighted by the spontaneity of the children's questions, Tournier acknowledges that the adult is not free to exercise the same spontaneity: "One must know how to answer." Prikli's case is an extreme example of the failure to fulfill what for Tournier is the imperative responsibility of adults, guiding the child so that he or she can learn to discriminate and evolve personal possibilities of order. Tom and Amandine are lucky enough to learn this mostly on their own, with the help of their animal friends and, in Tom's case, Ogre. And I think, finally, that Tournier shows what children can give adults as well as vice versa: all three stories suggest that the child's capacity for wonder need never be lost in the adult, but instead can ameliorate the series of initiations into maturity, and thus provide the enthusiasm and self-assurance to "passionately love something."