SOURCE: "Psychological, Sensual, and Religious Initiation in Tournier's Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit," in Children's Literature, Vol. 18, 1990, pp. 87-100.

[In the following essay, Petit surveys the themes and techniques used by Tournier in his literature for children.]

Michel Tournier frequently writes for children, although he is best known for his adult works, which have received some of the most prestigious French literary prizes, including the Grand Prix du Roman of the French Academy in 1967 for Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday) and the Prix Goncourt in 1970 for Le Roi des aulnes (The Ogre). The French public has accepted enthusiastically both his adult and his children's fiction: his novels always make the best-seller lists, and Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island), a short version of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, seems to have become a staple in French elementary schools. Although success has been slower to come in America, ever since Roger Shattuck called Tournier "the most exciting novelist now writing in French" ["Why Not the Best?" The New York Review of Books, April, 1983], American critics have begun to give Tournier's adult works the attention they deserve. However, his children's fiction is still largely neglected by American and French critics, mirroring the initial difficulty Tournier had publishing it in France, a problem he attributes to conservatism on the part of children's editors. Now, however, his juvenile works have sold so well that Gallimard publishes them in several formats, including tape cassettes on which Tournier himself reads the stories.

Despite the greater acclaim his adult fiction has received, Tournier's fiction for children is no sideline. The greatest literature, he contends, is that which both children and adults can enjoy; therefore, he refuses to divide his work into adult and juvenile fiction. When he is "tired, lazy, not visited by the Holy Spirit, [he writes] books which unfortunately only adults can read" [Sandra Joxe, "Michel Tournier: 'Je Suis un Monstre qui a réussi,'" Autre Journal, November, 1985], but when he is inspired, he writes books accessible to all. Given Tournier's desire to write such fiction, it is perhaps not surprising that he says he "would exchange all [his] other work" for a short tale he first published in 1979, Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit (Pierrot, or The Secrets of the Night), which he says is "the best thing [he has] ever written" ["Writing for Children Is No Child's Play," UNESCO Courier, June, 1982]. Although much of his juvenile fiction is based on his adult novels, he wrote this brief story in a very accessible form to begin with, and though it contains his essential moral and philosophical ideas, it can be understood even by very young children.

Tournier writes to promote his ideas, many of which are unconventional enough to have provoked a few critics into calling certain of his books subversive [Robert Poulet, "Michel Tournier, romancier hors série," Ecrits de Paris, September, 1975], obscene [Robert Kanters, "Creux et plein d'ordures," Figaro Littéraire, April 5, 1975], and even fascistic [Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, 1984]. His children's fiction, having more overt "commitment to particular values" than his adult works, has encountered less resistance, but Tournier has told me that conservative magazines regularly accuse him of "perverting" youth because he writes about children doing things society disapproves of. For example, in "La Fugue du petit Poucet" ("Tom Thumb Runs Away") a little boy drinks, smokes marijuana, and shares a bed with some little girls. Tournier added, "I never said that I recommended doing that. But I talk about it. And one doesn't have a right to do that in children's literature" [Petit adds in an endnote that "these and all other undocumented statements by Tournier come from an unpublished interview he gave me on July 11, 1987"]. More important than such criticism is the difficulty Tournier has had in finding a publisher outside of France for his children's fiction. The Fetishist (the translation of Le Coq de bruyère) includes six of Tournier's children's stories, and this journal published Pierrot, or The Secrets of the Night. But Friday and Robinson is the only one of Tournier's books for children published in English in a juvenile format, and it did not sell well in America, despite its great success in France. Tournier says his children's books have not found a market abroad partly because each country imposes its own type of conformity on children's literature (the United States insisting on a "Walt Disney conformity"), whereas publishers everywhere welcome nonconformist adult fiction.

Tournier's fiction for children is far from conformist. As he explained in Le Vent paraclet (The Wind Spirit: An Autobiography), when he gave up preparing for a career as a professional philosopher, he turned to literature as a substitute, wanting to write stories "set in motion by ontology and logic." Because Tournier is interested in ethics, his fiction shows how one should live; because he loves metaphysics, his fiction explores the ultimate nature of life. A major ethical concern for him is always sexuality, which he believes should include all sensual aspects of life—except perhaps genital sexuality itself, which usually leads to disaster in his fiction. He says that we must "escape from the sinister alternative of procreation-abortion" by "inventing new erotic paths, cerebral, no longer genital but genial" ["Lewis Carroll au pays des petites Filles," Point, January, 1976]. This view explains his criticism of the Freudian theory that sexuality underlies physical attachment to the mother: Tournier believes the opposite, that love "prepares the way for sexuality" (Wind) and that something is deeply wrong with Western society because it is anti-sensual, "without smell, without taste, without physical contact" [Guitta Pessis Pasternak, "Tournier le sensuel," Monde, August, 1984]. As to the metaphysical, it is virtually fused to the physical in his thinking, for since his childhood he has found in both religion and metaphysics "concrete speculation inextricably intertwined with powerful and brilliant imagery" (Wind). The imagery of Christianity remains powerful for him, but he has come to believe that true Christianity must center on the Holy Spirit, representing divine inspiration, rather than Christ, whom Tournier associates with suffering and death.

In his juvenile as well as his adult fiction, Tournier develops unconventional ideas through traditional fictional forms. Whereas most modern children's fiction in France is realistic, Tournier's stories take their inspiration from fairy tales and myths, the form used by Charles Perrault in his Contes de ma mère l'oie. Even when Tournier modernizes, localizes, and rationalizes fairy-tale elements, he imitates Perrault. And like characters in fairy tales and myths—but unlike the protagonists of most children's literature—Tournier's main characters are not necessarily children, nor do they generally confront "realistic" problems of everyday modern life. Instead, his young protagonists often find themselves at the threshold of maturity, coping with archetypal problems. Tournier uses the fairytale form because he believes children should be initiated into adulthood through a "moral, emotional, indeed magical" education using techniques of myth that appeal to a child's "heart and sensibility" rather than through modern formal education, which he says aims merely at providing a child with information (Wind). Through his fiction for children, Tournier hopes to initiate them into his view of the world by awakening their sensibilities with concrete symbols.

To understand Tournier's approach one must know how myths and fairy tales work for children. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the heroes of myth help develop a child's superego, whereas the ordinary, unheroic people in fairy tales help children find full ego integration [Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, 1976]. The characters in Tournier's children's fiction fulfill both functions, falling somewhere between the anonymous fairy-tale figures whom Bettelheim calls "people very much like us" and the "obviously superhuman" heroes of myth, but the characters in Pierrot are most like those in fairy tales in their quest for ego integration. Bettelheim insists that the message of a fairy tale will not be effective unless the child receives it unconsciously, and Tournier conceives the tale similarly; he believes that it should neither reflect everyday life in a realistic way nor provide too explicit a moral, comparing the tale to a "translucent medium … in which the reader sees figures appear which he can never entirely comprehend," a story with a meaning "which touches and enriches us but does not enlighten us" ["Barbe-Bleue ou le secret du conte," in Le vol du vampire]. Despite these warnings that we should not try to understand everything, Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit gives an excellent picture of what Tournier wants children to feel.

All the key elements of his children's fiction—strong plot, simple characters, whimsical humor, psychological complexity, and a religious theme—are present in this short tale. Like nearly all of Tournier's fiction, it has a literary ancestor: the first stanza of a song all French children know, "Au clair de la lune," in which Harlequin (Arlequin in French) asks to borrow Pierrot's pen in the middle of the night, saying that his candle is dead and his fire has gone out. Once Tournier realized that Harlequin and Pierrot both came from the Italian commedia dell' arte, he could develop the song into a narrative by adding a third character from the same source, Columbine, to create a "perfect adventure-story, with a powerful metaphysical foundation" ("Writing").

Tournier's characteristic whimsy leavens a simple plot. Pierrot and Columbine, a baker and a laundress, have grown up together in the Breton town of Powdersnap (Pouldreuzic). Everyone expects that they will marry, but their occupations keep them apart, for Pierrot works at night to have bread ready in the morning, and Columbine does her washing in the day to bleach and dry it in the sun. These different actions reflect different attitudes to life, for Columbine fears the basement where Pierrot bakes bread and the night when he works. She loves the sun, but he loves the moon, and he can express his emotions only at night, when he walks about the sleeping town while his dough rises, becoming the "watchman of the village, the guardian of Columbine." In the course of the story, Columbine runs away with Harlequin, an itinerant house-painter; then, when winter comes and their love fades, she returns to Pierrot. To celebrate her return, he shapes some of his brioche dough into Columbine's form, and at the story's end the reunited pair share the freshly baked loaf with Harlequin, who has returned to Powdersnap searching for Columbine. Near the end of the story, Harlequin sings "Au clair de la lune" at Pierrot's door.

Like a fairy tale or myth, the story lends itself to a number of symbolic readings. If it is read as a psychological parable designed to help children integrate their personalities, Pierrot and Columbine can be seen as two parts of a single personality, a common pattern in fairy tales about two siblings, such as Hansel and Gretel [see Bettelheim; and Julius E. Heuscher, A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning and Usefulness, 2nd. ed., 1974]. Although Pierrot and Columbine are not brother and sister, the closeness of their relationship is shown by the fact that they grew up together and wear similar floating white clothes. They represent complementary desires in the same personality: Columbine the desire for summer and light, joy and rationality, and Pierrot the desire for winter and night, peace and emotionality. Only when Columbine begins to realize that night is not black but blue and that Pierrot's oven glows with golden fire can she accept the Pierrot side of herself—the hidden, secret, emotional part.

If Columbine and Pierrot complement each other, Harlequin and Pierrot are opposites. Harlequin represents pleasure based on appearance (as suggested by his multicolored outfit which fades with exposure to the sun); Pierrot stands for inner qualities hidden by an unprepossessing appearance. Harlequin's housepainting merely covers the outside; Pierrot's baked goods comfort the inner self. Harlequin is a nomad; Pierrot is sedentary. Harlequin acts; Pierrot waits. Harlequin loves to speak; Pierrot expresses himself best in writing, particularly in letters to Columbine which he does not dare send. At the end, Pierrot apparently wins: when Harlequin asks for Pierrot's pen and eats Pierrot's bread, his requests imply the baker's superiority to the painter and the writer's superiority to the speaker. But the fact that Columbine becomes for a while a female Harlequin, a "Harlequinette," shows that the choice between the two is not absolute. By welcoming Harlequin into his bakery and gladly sharing the Columbine-loaf with him, Pierrot reconciles the seemingly irreconcilable. Life includes speech and writing, painting and baking, just as it includes Columbine's sunshine and Pierrot's moonlight. Similarly, although Columbine has returned to Pierrot, she does not reject Harlequin, for she invites him to share the bread shaped in her form.

Given this reconciliation, one can read all three characters, and not just Columbine and Pierrot, as representing complementary parts of the same personality. In a Freudian view the dutiful, serious Pierrot would represent the superego, the pleasure-loving Harlequin the id, and the changeable, immature, flighty Columbine the ego, perhaps an unstable adolescent one. Read this way, the story, like some fairy tales, shows a successful personality integration when Columbine, or the ego, symbolically reconciles the superego with the id by sharing the bread with both men.

More interesting, in a Jungian reading, the three figures again represent parts of an entire self, but Pierrot assumes the central role. Despite his association with night and the basement, he is called "the clear consciousness of the village" [in an endnote, Petit adds: "This is my translation of 'la conscience claire du village.' Margaret Higonnet translates conscience as the English 'conscience,' but I believe that the passage stresses Pierrot's awareness, or consciousness, rather than his moral values"] and may be taken as the conscious self, or ego, but one which is at first unaware of the other elements of the Jungian self, the shadow and the anima. In Jung's theory the shadow, a same-sex figure in the personal unconscious, carries the "dark aspects of the personality" and is represented here by Harlequin [see Carl G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd. ed., translated by R.F.C. Hull, 1970]. Representing the dark side of the self by a character associated with sunlight is the sort of inversion Tournier delights in, but this inversion goes further: he makes us see that Harlequin's day is dreary, if not actually dark, in contrast to Pierrot's night, which "shimmers with thousands and thousands of silvery scales" and "sparkles with stars," while the moon looks down like a smiling face. Pierrot's night is luminous; Harlequin's day is merely bright. As one would expect of a Jungian shadow, Harlequin is an inverted Pierrot, the contrast being mainly to Pierrot's advantage. Pierrot is repelled by the chemical colors in Harlequin's housepaints, which he says "are toxic, smell bad, and peel," unlike the gold of his own glowing oven and of his fresh-baked bread and the "living blue" of his night. In his role as Jungian shadow, vigorous, demanding, nomadic Harlequin incorporates all the repressed sides of shy, gentle, sedentary Pierrot, who would like to chase Columbine but does not dare. Significantly, Jung describes the shadow as having emotional qualities and thus an "obsessive or, better, possessive quality"—a description that fits Harlequin exactly.

In this same Jungian reading, Columbine is the anima, a projection of the female side of the self which Jung calls both "the solace for all the bitterness of life" and "the great illusionist, the seductress." The anima, a "spontaneous product of the unconscious" of a man, is personified as a woman and represents the "feminine element" in a man (Jung). (Jung says a woman has not an anima but an animus, which has a different though related function.) Unlike Harlequin, who represents a rejected, unconscious side of the self of which Pierrot is the conscious ego, Columbine embodies feminine elements which Pierrot admires and desires, even as he unconsciously projects them onto the anima. Like any anima, Columbine includes elements of mother, child, and lover. She shows her maternal side in feeding the men from the "soft gold of her neck"—really, that of the brioche-figure that represents her. She acts like a child when she returns, exhausted, to Powdersnap and falls asleep in the bakery. And, obviously, she is both the lover of Harlequin and the beloved of Pierrot.

The self is unified when consciousness, or Pierrot, inspired by the anima, feeds the shadow. Pierrot first has to accept Columbine, whom he welcomes as soon as she reappears at his bakery; this act represents accepting the anima by dissolving the projection that is its common form and recognizing it as a part of the self. Accepting Harlequin is harder, for, as Jung says, "no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort" because to do so means accepting the hidden side as "present and real"; nevertheless, accepting the shadow is essential to arriving at self-knowledge. Pierrot's suffering earlier in the story when he was abandoned has given him the strength to accept his shadow. So both Freudian and Jungian readings find psychological wholeness at the story's conclusion.

Related to the theme of psychological wholeness is the story's presentation of sexuality. Conventional sexuality helps motivate Columbine's flight with Harlequin, but Pierrot's sexuality is more mystical; he imagines the full moon as a woman revealing through the mist the roundness of "a cheek, a breast, or even better, a bottom." More symbolic is Pierrot's occupation as a baker; kneading bread is deeply sensual to Tournier, who says that in our antiseptic and deodorized society, of all shops "only the bakery still has smells" (Pasternak). In Tournier's first novel, Robinson Crusoe remembers that as a child he had been fascinated by a baker's boy kneading dough, "that headless body of warm and sensuous matter submitting to the plunging caresses of a half-naked man" (Friday; italics in original), and much the same equation applies to Pierrot, another mitron or baker's boy: his "hands would like to caress the sleeping girl, of course, but it is almost as much fun to pat and make a Columbine out of dough," and the finished bread has "her round cheeks, her pouterpigeon chest, and her cute little round bottom." This sort of sensual writing is unusual in children's fiction, but it could be a welcome "challenge [to] our conceptions of children's self-image" [Margaret R. Higonnert, "Marguerite Yourcenar and Michel Tournier: The Arts of the Heart," in Triumphs of the Spirit in Children's Literature, edited by Francelia Butter and Richard Robert, 1986].

Still, as sensual as the writing is, it is not sexual in the usual sense. The three characters' happiness in sharing the just-backed bread surpasses any sexual pleasure Columbine and Harlequin could have found together, and the trio of friends has replaced the exclusive couple. Tournier calls Pierrot a "hymn to physical contact" (Pasternak), but it is contact in which "genial" sexuality (represented by the baker's craft shown in the Columbine-loaf) has replaced "genital" sexuality (the relations between Harlequin and Columbine). Readers may not prefer "genial" over "genital" sexuality, and some may even charge Tournier with "sidestepping" the issue of sexuality by presenting it so indirectly, but this theme is a constant in his fiction [see Joseph H. McMahon, "Michel Tournier's Texts for children," in Children's Literature 13, 1985].

Bread, however, is not only sensual; as Tournier's Crusoe also knows, it is "food of the soul, according to the Christian tradition" (Friday; italics in original); that is how Tournier can consider Pierrot "a treatise on ontology" as well as on "morality, and a lesson in loving" (Pasternak). Pierrot owes its "powerful metaphysical foundation" ("Writing") to being a "reflection on the idea of dough, of substance. Bread has a color, a softness, a smell: that's ontology" (Joxe). Like C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, this story is a religious parable; it reflects Tournier's heterodox version of Christianity and suggests his ideal church, which he has called "sumptuous, subtle, and erotic" (Wind). To make the parable work, he uses the same device that he finds in Perrault's "Bluebeard": an "archetypal mechanism," a symbolism which the reader may not see consciously ("Barbe-Bleue"). Perrault uses Adam's fall in "Bluebeard," and Tournier uses the Last Supper in Pierrot.

As Jean-Bernard Vray has pointed out [in "L'Habit d'Arlequin," Sud, 1980], the Eucharist is suggested when Columbine says, "come taste, eat this good Columbine! Eat me!" The bread representing her body corresponds to the Host, the bread of the Last Supper which is Jesus' body (Matthew 26:26). Catholics consider the Host "an antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and preserved from deadly sin" ("Holy Communion"). Similarly, it is through sharing the Columbine-brioche that the three characters symbolize their reconciliation and mutual forgiveness. In this reading, Columbine stands for one of the three persons of the Trinity. She is not Christ, as one might expect from the fact that the bread represents (or is) her body; other elements in the story make it clear that she must be the Holy Spirit. The most obvious indication is her name: "everyone called her Columbine the White Dove"—colombe meaning "dove," the usual symbol for the Holy Spirit (Matthew 3:16).

To understand why Tournier associates communion with the Holy Spirit and to discover what Pierrot and Harlequin represent in this reading, we need to know Tournier's view of the Trinity, which he presents in greatest detail in Les Météores (Gemini). In that novel, the central theological argument is made by a heterodox Catholic priest called Thomas Koussek, whose ideas, Tournier says, he originally intended to make central to the book (Wind). Koussek insists that to be saved "Christ has to be superseded" by the Holy Spirit (italics in original). He describes Christ as having "died on the cross, mutilated and despairing," and concludes that a Christ-centered religion is necessarily a "religion of suffering, of agony and death"; by contrast, the true church will center on the Holy Spirit. Although Koussek identifies the Holy Spirit, quite orthodoxy, with a divine wind—the ruach mentioned in the Old Testament—he draws the heretical conclusion that Christ is unnecessary for salvation, and he decries the doctrine of Filioque, which assert that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father. For Koussek, Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection serve primarily to provide a "certain depth of color, warmth, and grief" without which we would lack religious art, forbidden by the Mosaic law; they are otherwise not important.

Although one cannot always ascribe the views of a fictional character to the author, the working out of the plot of Les Météores justifies Koussek's theology, for Paul Surin, theoretically the book's main character, finds happiness through post-Christian revelation, whereas his uncle Alexandre, a much more interesting character, suffers because the Catholic beliefs he rebels against dominate and constrain him. Besides the evidence in Les Météores, it is clear that Tournier agrees at least in part with what Koussek says, for he has often attacked Catholicism in much the same way. Not only did he name his spiritual autobiography for the ruach when he called it Le Vent paraclet (literally, The Paraclete Wind), but he too wants to banish the crucifix from the church (Wind). He has said that a "morbid taste for suffering" fuels the cult of the crucifix [Des Clefs et des serrures], that Christ on the cross was "deserted by the Word" to the benefit of the Holy Spirit and the apostles (Clefs), and that Catholicism in France was "a false Church serving only the institution of bourgeois society" (Hueston).

Keeping in mind Tournier's conception of Christ, we see that the brightly dressed Harlequin, like Alexandre in Les Météores, provides the story's "color, warmth, and grief"—the qualities that Koussek associates with Christ (Gemini). Like Koussek's version of Christ, who figuratively brings "color" to the world, Harlequin literally brings colors. Not only does he repaint Columbine's house in bright tones, but the story says whimsically that colored linens have invaded the white goods market only since Harlequin inspired Columbine to be not just a laundress (in French, a blanchisseuse, literally a woman who bleaches), but a dyer also: Harlequin's romance with Columbine has brightened the whole world. And in token of the idea that Christianity abrogated Mosaic law and thus permitted representational art, a theme Tournier has treated most fully in Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar (The Four Wise Men), Harlequin paints a life-size portrait of Columbine on the facade of her building. If Harlequin, then, represents Christ, Pierrot represents God the Father. Not only does he give the town its daily bread, but his creating of a Columbine from dough imitates God's molding of Adam from clay, a theme Tournier has often returned to, most recently in his novel of the magi (Four Wise Men). Significantly, Pierrot and Columbine are present from the start, like God the Father and the Holy Spirit (in the form of the ruach) in the Old Testament; the absence of Harlequin implicitly denies Filioque, the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father.

The importance of the Holy Spirit to Tournier's theology explains why the bread represents Columbine, who stands for the Holy Spirit, rather than Harlequin, the Christ figure. Tournier had previously suggested communion with the Holy Spirit in Le Roi des aulnes when Abel Tiffauges, a colombophile or pigeon fancier, believed that he fed "his soul through intimate communion" with three of his pigeons when he ate them (Ogre). Although that act is perverse—Tiffauges eats his beloved pigeons to satisfy the ogre side of his personality—it does anticipate Tiffagues's ultimate salvation, which is sealed in part by his eating a Seder with a Jewish refugee from Auschwitz. Another Seder, the Last Supper, is crucial to Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar. The main character, Taor, arrives late at the Last Supper, but he eats the crumbs and drinks the leftover wine, thus becoming the first communicant (Four Wise Men). Because angels carry him to heaven immediately thereafter, he is saved before (and therefore not by) Christ's death on the cross; it must be the Holy Spirit that has saved him. Tournier's association of communion with the Holy Spirit underscores the centrality of the Holy Spirit in his theology, just as Columbine's role as savior explains why she is a laundress: to Tournier, it is the Holy Spirit that washes away sins.

Pierrot ou les Secrets de la nuit seems simple, but its psychological and religious subtexts give it the depth of the best fairy tales. Tournier could have summarized it much as he did his story "Le Coq de bruyère" ("The Woodcock"): "A gentleman and a lady … fight, and reconcile, which makes children yawn with boredom. Me too, in fact. But I take the subject as a challenge" [Jean-Jacques Brochier, "Dix-huit questions à Michel Tournier," Magazine Littéraire, June, 1978]. Rising to this challenge in Pierrot, Tournier has written a story of psychic unification and non-genital sexuality. Also, by bringing together sensual and religious meanings in the communion scene, Tournier anticipated a major theme of Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, the relationship between food and Christianity. Pierrot represents a major stage in the development of Tournier's fiction, not only reflecting ideas from Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, and Les Météores but preparing for the concerns of Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar. It is also a major step in his stylistic development, for his subsequent fiction shows greater simplicity and limpidity and a reduction in authorial comment: Tournier increasingly lets plot, character, and symbol present his ideas. La Goutte d'or (The Golden Droplet), his most recent novel, is a major breakthrough for Tournier, for it is a long book which both young people and adults can read and enjoy. Tournier achieved this goal first, and perhaps best, in the very short Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit.