When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2008, he unintendedly found himself
embroiled in a controversy. A month before the prize was announced, Horace Engdahl, the
permanent secretary of the prize jury, opined that the United States was
"too isolated, too insular" when it came to literature. That
"ignorance," Engdahl said, exists in part because American publishers
"don't translate enough" [foreign literature]. So, when Le Clezo, a
writer virtually unknown in America (or, for that matter, anywhere else in the
world) won the Nobel a month later, it was interpreted, depending on one’s view, as further proof (if needed) of the Nobel committee’s anti-American bias, or
further evidence (if needed) of the American insularity. However, to be fair to
the Americans, the reaction of many in the English speaking world when the
prize was announced was: Jean-Marie who?
An added bonus of the Nobel Prize is it is a great fillip to the
sales of the winner’s work. For example, when the octogenarian Doris Lessing
won the award a year before Le Clezio, many of her books, long since out of
print, enjoyed, for a few weeks, prominent spots in the High Street bookshops.
Le Clezio, a widely travelled man—he spent long periods with an Indian tribe in
Panama—has written over 40 books, including children’s books. Some of these
have been translated into English, and, needless to say, were out of print of
years before he won the Nobel.
‘Le procès-verbal’ was the first published novel of Le Clezio, in 1963, when he was
twenty-four. It won the Prix Renaudot. Paris Express to declared that Le
Cleizo was the literary revelation of the year.
The novel was translated into English under the title The
Interrogation, which is a bit of a misnomer; the original French title
refers to the written report of an accident or of some important happening.
The protagonist of The Interrogation is a young
man named Adam Pollo, who is not sure whether he has just left the army or a
mental home. It transpires later in the novel that he has run away from his
family (for reasons that are never made clear). It seems that Adam wants to be
away not just from his family, but also from humanity; he has had enough of
civilization. He lives in an empty house—its owners have probably gone away for
summer holidays— on the top of a hill, near a beach. He lolls about whole day
on a deck-chair near a window, smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and spends his
time in deep introspection. When he is not sitting, for all outward appearance,
catatonic, in his deck chair, Adam writes cryptic observations and enigmatic
letters in an exercise book full of yellowed pages. His letters are written to
a woman named Michele who he thinks is his girl-friend but is not sure. He is
also not sure whether he has raped her or not. Occasionally Adam saunters into
the nearby town. One day he visits the local zoo where he annoys a panther
named Rama. The panther snarls at him (which you’d expect a wild beast
to do if you annoy it) and Adam retreats, paralyzed with fear by the ‘devilish brute’. It all ends, sadly but predictably, with a
lengthy public oration—full of strange metaphors, vaguely menacing prophesies, weird
logics, strange associations, loosening of associations, disintegrating
sentences—which leaves the reader praying for the swift arrival of the local
mental health team.
If you are struggling to make sense of
any of the above, then I apologize. My (feeble) defence is that I struggled to
make sense of what was going on in the novel as well. That is because I think
Adam—how should I put this delicately?—if he is
not entirely out of his mind, he is not fully within it either. He might have some contact with reality, but the connection is weak. As you read
this strange novel you become increasingly convinced that it is the asylum and
not army from which he has escaped.
If you keep this in mind at all times—that
the protagonist is mentally unhinged—you might be better placed to make sense
of what goes on in this novel. That’s not quite correct; it is near-impossible
to make sense of the novel, because it is nonsense, really, but you might be
able to appreciate why it is nonsense.
Adam Pollo is voluble narrator. He babbles
on and on; about nothing in particular. (There is one whole chapter on a rat
when Adam thinks he is turning into a white rat.) Quite what all of it is supposed
to mean was not clear to this reader. The Interrogation can be viewed as
an account of the disintegration of human mind (and an indirect endorsement of
antipsychotic drugs). Adam Pollo, for reasons that are not clear has become
increasingly cocooned in his fragmentary world, alienated not only from the
society but also from reality (but then again there isn’t always a reason
behind mental breakdown, I guess).
The prose of The Interrogation is
manneristic and the narrative is self-consciously tortuous and conflated. (At
least the English translation is. It is always difficult to comment on the
prose in translated work, as so much depends on the quality of translation.)
In the decade after the publication of ‘Le procès-verbal’, Seven of Le
Clezio’s increasingly experimental, esoteric (and difficult to read) novels
were translated into English and were remaindered quicker than you can say the
author’s name. By the time he announced that he had drastically changed his
style, after the mid-seventies, with his breakthrough novel, Desert—his
novels began to explore different themes from those of his earlier work and
became more accessible—the English publishers, unfortunately, had lost interest
in him. With the prestigious Nobel under his belt, one hopes that the
Publishers’ interest will be rekindled and we shall be able to get hands on
something more than the juvenilia of the Nobel Laureate.
