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Crossing the Borders: The "Children's Books" of Michel Tournier and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.1998.0001

1080-6563

Sandra L. Beckett,

French Literature and Critical Theory

Crossing the Borders: The “Children’s Books” of Michel Tournier and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio Sandra L. Beckett (bio) The art of writing for a dual readership of children and adults is certainly not a new phenomenon in the country that fostered Charles Perrault and La Fontaine. One is, however, struck by the large number of major twentieth-century authors of adult fiction who have written for French children: the poet Jacques Prévert; the playwright Eugene Ionesco; the novelists Marcel Aymé, Henri Bosco, Michel Butor, Jean Giono, Claude Roy, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Marguerite Yourcenar, to name only a few. The works of some of these authors have become children’s classics in France: Marcel Aymé’s Les Contes du chat perché (The wonderful farm), Henri Bosco’s L’Enfant et la rivière (The boy and the river), Jacques Prévert’s Contes pour enfants pas sages (Tales for naughty children). 1 A few have even gained international acclaim and become well-loved favorites beyond French borders, the most notable example being Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). Two of France’s most important contemporary authors, Michel Tournier and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, have also published extensively and quite successfully for young readers, although their children’s books remain virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. 2 Michel Tournier and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio both achieved instant renown in the 1960s with the publication of their first novels. Proclaimed the greatest author writing in French by the readers of Lire in 1994, Le Clézio won the prestigious Prix Théophraste Renaudot in 1963, at the age of twenty-three, for his novel, Le Procès-verbal (The minutes). Tournier, a member of the Académie Goncourt and an author whose works are accessible to a wider general public than Le Clézio’s, arrived on the literary scene much later in life, becoming a novelist only because he was forced to abandon a career in philosophy when he failed the [End Page 44] agrégation (a competitive examination for teachers in France). Tournier’s first novel, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday), a retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, received the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française in 1967. Four years later, he adapted his Robinsonade for children, and the new version, Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island), has become one of the most widely read children’s books in France, surpassed on Gallimard’s list of children’s bestsellers only by Le Petit Prince (Histoire 73). Le Clézio did not publish his first children’s book, Voyage au pays des arbres (Journey to the land of trees), until 1978. Contrary to many “adult” authors who have tried their hand at writing for children and have been content to leave one or two isolated works on children’s bookshelves, both Tournier and Le Clézio have continued over the years to publish for young readers as well as adults. Since the 1970s, they have each published approximately ten titles for children, the most recent being Tournier’s Le Miroir à deux faces (The mirror with two sides) (1994), and Le Clézio’s Pawana (1995). Tournier and Le Clézio share a common paradox: despite their growing corpus of children’s literature over the past twenty years, both emphatically deny that they write for children. Addressing a class of secondary school students in 1986, fifteen years after the publication of his bestselling children’s book, Tournier stated in no uncertain terms: “I don’t write for children. Never. I would be ashamed to do so. I don’t like books written for children. It’s pseudo-literature” (“Lycéens” 21). Le Clézio goes even further by claiming that there is no such thing as children’s literature (qtd. in Beckett, Romanciers 296). 3 The fiction of Tournier and Le Clézio would seem to support the scholars who, pointing to the widespread phenomenon of fiction for a dual audience of adults and children, speculate on the disappearance of children’s literature at the end...