J.M.G. Le Clezio's Terra Amata: A micro-fictional affection for the real

Romanic Review, May 1999 by Racevskis, Roland

In 1967, with Terra Amata, J.M.G. Le Clezio posed a venerable literary question--that of how to live--in a new way. As its title suggests, this novel is about the earth and more specifically about a certain way of approaching the world's concrete realities. The work centers on the perceptions and activities of its protagonist, Chancelade, whose pronounced interest in small, seem- ingly insignificant things leads him and the novel's narrator through numerous sensorial and contemplative adventures which yield unexpected insights on humankind's situation in the universe. The fictional account of Chancelade's experiences offers simultaneously a prescription for how to live, a critique of the social and cultural institutions that have traditionally determined modes of living, and an example of a new kind of literature that brings attention to some of the earth's most minute details and reveals what can be learned from them about the relationship between humans and the earth they inhabit.

In L'Extase materielle, a collection of essays that theorize explicitly many of the principles put into literary practice in Terra Amata, Le Clezio expresses his fondness for small things: "Je suis amoureux des details. Jaime bien tout ce qui est petit, j'ai comme du respect pour les animaux, pour les objets. Plus ils sont tenus, plus ils me plaisent."1 This enthusiasm for tiny objects takes on a special significance for Le Clezio's sentimental and philosophical inquiry into the nature of physical reality: "Je ne suis jamais autant emu que par les choses microscopiques. C'est en elles que je disparais le mieux. Ce sont elles qui me revelent le plus exactement la verite de la nature solide" (EM, 113). The emotional excitement expressed in L'Extase materielle for microscopic particles and minor details of material reality plays an important role in the development of the affective relationship to the earth proposed by Terra Amata. Just as the "amoureux" and "emu" cited above highlight a certain aspect of Amata, the importance of the minuscule phenomena that fascinate Le Clezio can help illuminate his conception of Terra.

The earth is frequently represented in Terra Amata by a microscopic focus on its tiniest elements. Though the novel contains unforgettable macrocosmic metaphors of the world as "un corps de geant couche" or "une sorte de peau recouverte de tics," much more often the text concerns itself not with the earth as a whole, or even with smaller geographical subdivisions of it, but rather with very small parts of the surface of the planetz2. Tiny grains of dust or sand, insects, blades of grass, and pebbles abound in this novel, whose main character's often microscopic attention to the world gives him an unusual sensitivity to what can be learned from the most diminutive details of earthly existence.

An exegesis of the minuscule in Terra Amata produces shifts in cosmic perspective, variations in the sets of parameters that define what a world is.

The tiny portions of material reality that fall under Le Clezio's magnifying lens are interesting in what they as self-contained systems can reveal about the cosmos in general: "chaque chose porte en soi son infini" (EM, 16). Small specks of reality point to much larger structural analogies of themselves; our point of view on miniature worlds implies that an analogous perspective on our own world might consider us a microcosm. Thus a conception of the universe as a succession of cosmic levels, combined with meticulous attention to phenomenal detail, provides new ways of conceiving the situation of humans on the earth.

The first instance of a multi-cosmic understanding of reality occurs in the chapter "Je suis ne," in which Le Clezio turns our attention to Chancelade as a child, as "cet homme miniature" (TA, 145) whose intense curiosity leads him to examine a group of doryphores, garden beetles, quite closely. Chancelade's enthusiasm for the spectacle of the beetles' "aventures minuscules" (TA, 21) is complemented by a precocious philosophical self-reflexivity through which he envisions a cosmic arrangement that places him in the position of a tiny object being observed by a giant version of himself: "Et on avait aussi sa vie A soi, bien close, bien tiede, comme s'il y avait eu quelque part quelqu'un assis sur les marches d'un escalier gigantesque, penche en train de vous regarder sans penser a rien" (TA, 21). The contemplation of the macrocosmic image of a giant observing human life leads Chancelade to the re- alization that his own perspective on the doryphores makes of these insects a microcosm, a miniature self-contained system over which he exercises absolute control as "le dieu des doryphores" (TA, 21).

The structure of this diminutive insect population becomes more defined as Chancelade arranges 30 of the beetles in the quadrants of a grating. At this point, the formerly amorphous world of which he is god has become "comme une ville qu'on avait sous les yeux, comme une vraie ville de beton et de fer" (TA, 22) upon which he then visits acts of destruction. Chancelade's brutal punishments and eventual annihilation of the beetle-city lead to this observation by the narrator: "Ils etaient la, tous, les cataclysmes et les guerres. Dans les corps eclates des doryphores, dans les entrailles repandues, dans le liquide epais et rouge giclant sur les barreaux tranchants de la grille" (TA, 26). Al- though one colloquial valence of the word "doryphores" refers specifically to German footsoldiers of World War II, with their rounded, buglike helmets, here the insect parts clinging to the grating represent in miniature form all of the calamities, natural and political, of human history. Strangely, in the child's game, human tragedy takes the grotesque form of insect innards. Conversely, the deaths of bugs assume the ethical status of calamity. The image of an illfated miniature city of doryphores thus blurs the evaluative boundaries be- tween insect life and human life, between the death of one type of specimen and the other. The unusual perceptual and imaginative intensity of a small child's games produces an intriguing and disturbing relativization of values through a destabilizing self-referential perspective. Violence, catastrophe, and the interconnectedness of life forms all become objects of contemplation in a game both childish and deadly serious.