Nomad Love and the War-Machine: Michel Tournier's "Gilles et Jeanne"
1991; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3684968
ISSN1527-2095
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
ResumoIN THE SECTION OF MICHEL TOURNIER'S intellectual autobiography, Wind Spirit, entitled The Mythic Dimension, Tournier reminisces about association with Gilles Deleuze at the Lyc~e Carnot in the early 1940s: All the tired philosophy the curriculum passed through him and emerged unrecognizable, but rejuvenated, with a undigested, taste that we weaker, lazier minds found disconcerting and repulsive (128). This perspective the Deleuzian fresh, undigested, taste newness has been vastly enlarged, not only in Deleuze's philosophical works and in the ambitious project he has undertaken in collaboration with Felix Guattari entitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia (AntiOedipus and A Thousand Plateaus). This bitter taste newness also emerges in Tournier's work in the tension between ecriture and sens, in what Colin Davis calls his simultaneous identification with both nomad and sedentary, when the former values the journey and the latter only the destination (205). It is the connection between nomadology (proposed by Deleuze and Guattari to conceptualize philosophical, political, ethical and textual multiplicity) and Tournier's re-mythologizing in the short recit, Gilles et Jeanne, that I propose to explore. In Tournier's tale, Jeanne d'Arc's quest and martyrdom are depicted for the transmutation they incite in the life and soul her notorious comrade-in-arms, the sire Gilles de Rais.' Through the brief but intense period military campaigns which Jeanne and Gilles share, the chevalier is transformed from merely one of those country squires from Brittany and the Vendee who had thrown in their lot with the Dauphin Charles (5; 9), into an isolated, tormented warlord waging own private, roving battle with forces known only to him and to henchmen. Tournier's reinscription the myth Gilles de Rais likens this transformation to an alchemical process becoming, ignited by the initial contact with Jeanne d'Arc and perpetuated through subsequent phases. It is from the perspective this becoming and its relation to nomadology that I will map out the textual coordinates, plotted through
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