The Swedish Academy which awards the Nobel Prize for Literature has accustomed us, over the past years, to its policy of selecting unexpected or controversial writers.
This year’s choice, however, raises even more questions. The laureate, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, is unknown internationally and even in his native France, he is relatively obscure. Moreover, Le Clezio’s nomination is seen as reflecting the views expressed by Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Academy. The press widely reported his remarks that American writers are “too isolated, too insular” as well as “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture” to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. Engdahl also believes that Europe remains “the center of the literary world.” This opinion has certainly given fuel to the belief that the Academy’s biased guidelines have not benefited non-European writers. It is ironic that Le Clezio, an avid traveler fascinated with other ways of life, should be at the center of such Eurocentric controversies.
Born in 1940 to a Mauritian doctor with British citizenship and a French mother, he has traveled extensively. At the age of 8, he went to Nigeria with his parents. He grew up speaking both French and English. He later studied two years at the University of Bristol, then went on to work as a teacher in the United States. He has also lived in Thailand, Mexico, Panama and South Korea. He currently divides his time between Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mauritius and Nice.
Le Clezio has been writing since the age of seven. In his childhood, he wrote a story about a long journey to Nigeria which contained a list of his future works. The extensive traveling he did with his parents and his early encounters with other cultures have had an enduring effect on his writing. He became famous at the age of 23 when his first novel, “Le process-verbal,” translated into English as “The Interrogation,” received the Renaudot prize, France’s most prestigious literary award after the Prix de Goncourt.
In the late 1960s, he went to Mexico and Panama where he stayed several months among the Emberas Indians. He believes this experience changed, “his ideas about life and art, ways of being with others, of walking, eating, sleeping, loving and even dreaming.”
Le Clezio has written 43 books in French, including short stories, novels, essays and children’s books. Defying any traditional classification, he became a cult author. A sense of displacement and alienation as well as the bleakness of modern urban European life are among his favorite themes. “The Desert” published in 1980 is considered one of his masterpieces. Set in the Moroccan Sahara, this novel highlights the marginalized but vital lives of African nomads compared with the lonely, unwelcoming and dreary life in Europe’s modern cities. The academy paid tribute to this breakthrough novel and “its magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants.”
In a 2001 interview published in a French magazine, Le Clezio complained that western culture had become too monolithic: “It places the greatest possible emphasis on its urban and technical side, thus preventing the development of other forms of expression, religiosity and feelings, for example. The entire unknowable part of the human being is obscured in the name of rationalism. It is my awareness of this that has pushed me toward other civilizations.”
Le Clezio, 68, has been described by the Swedish Academy as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”. Engdahl also said that Le Clezio’s “works have a cosmopolitan character. Frenchman, yes, but more so a traveler, a citizen of the world, a nomad.”
In 1994 readers of the French literary magazine, Lire, showed that 13 percent of the readers considered him to be the greatest living French language writer. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was largely viewed in the French press as a fitting answer to the controversial essay written by Donald Morrison, “What is left of French culture?”
The French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that Le Clezio “refutes the theory of a so-called decline of French culture” and French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted that Le Clezio is “a citizen of the world who represents the international influence of France.”
So far the greatest challenge has been to find a translation of Le Clezio’s novels. Few of his books have been translated and many are out of print. I was lucky to find “Mondo and Other Stories” published in 1978 which has not yet been translated into English. These short stories, reflecting the beauty of the world, are an invitation to travel. The tone of Mondo is given by the epigraph which is a quotation from “Sinbad the Sailor” set at the beginning of the book. Throughout these stories, the author highlights the poetic role of language and also attempts to present an ideal world based on the recognition of diverse cultures.
The prize will surely increase sales for Le Clezio in English; it will also offer non-Francophile readers a chance to discover a remarkable and multitalented writer. However, the fact that Le Clezio does not live abroad, combined with his mixed background, and his decision to stay away from the French literary scene show that France’s traditional cultural role is changing and shifting to new horizons.
