Return To Nature

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (1940-) is an important contemporary French author. He was born in Nice and has known the primitive civilizations since his childhood. His personal experience allows him and his works to break the limit of Western main current ideas and create negative and revolutionary characters. He began to write since23years old. His first novel Le proces-verbal has got the French literary prize Renaudot which brought him a great fame in French academic circle. Then, he started to publish short stories, essays, critical articles in Nouvelle Revue Francaise and Cahiers du Chemin. However, he hasn’t got wider readership due to the marginal character in his works. Yet, Le Clezio as a prolific writer publishes almost one work every year, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, reviews, and translation works. He even wrote preface and postscript for his favorite marginal novels. He has won a number of awards in French and abroad and his works has been translated into a number of languages. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in2008which won him prestige around the world.The upsurge of Le Clezio studies began in the90s of the last century with stable quantity, multiple themes, contributed by world wide researchers. But the study of the theme "return to nature" is rare, much less the research aiming at all works of Le Clezio. We can only find very few which discuss separately the theme of return to origin and the theme of nature such as studies of some natural elements or the relationship between nature and human being. In Le Clezio’s works, nature is object of all quests. The return to nature is the process of the writer to pursue the verity that he seeks in his writing and he presents by his literary creation. Return lays stress on the action to find, to recall, to uncover and to be reunited with the past and the lost time, state and situation. It implies return to the childhood, the family root, the origin, even the primeval time of universe. The term nature contains the universal nature, i.e. the ensemble of our external environment, and the human nature. In Le Clezio’s works, his ideal human nature is identified with the universal nature. Therefore, the quests of childhood, root and origin are entirely boiled down to nature. And the present thesis discusses the perpetual theme in all works of Le Clezio:return to nature.This paper uses mainly the method of textual analysis which leads to a comprehensive review of more than40books of Le Clezio. I gather the material of nature and synthesize his concept of nature and his attitude of life so that the contours of his pursuing of the original verity and his return to nature through the writing can be sketched. With regard to the type of his text, I want to emphasize that the description in his works surpasses simple functions of decoration, information, narration, etc. It needs to be considered as the main object of our studies. In Le Clezio’s writing, the description plays no longer a subordinate role as Philippe Hamon contests but the main role of narration:the description of city, human and nature surpasses the value of structure of fiction and guide the plot development. So the description has the same narrative function with characters, the temporary and spatial distribution, and the plot. The analysis of description in his writing gives prominence to a description merging with the other essential factors of his novels. Le Clezio’s world of animism reconstructed by the vision of enchantment and the poetics of dream provides a new dimension for the novel writing. Besides, the theme of nature passes through all works of Le Clezio and implies a system of symbols constructed by author. The study in theme perspective will help to reveal the poetics in his works.This paper has generally two parts which correspond to the two stage of Le Clezio’s creation. The first part deals with his early works. In this period, the form and the content of his works are both affected by Nouveau Roman. His writing focuses on denaturalization in urban space, i.e. the absence of nature. The second part discusses his later works which return to the traditional form of the novel. The substance of these works turns to the other world in an attempt to reconstruct his ideal universe, i.e. the return to nature. In view of the variety of Le Clezio’s works like an "encyclopedia", I use for reference several critical perspectives such as genetics, sociology, philosophy, ethics, psychology and anthropology, so that the textual analysis can be deepened and broadened.The first part includes four chapters. Chapter one focuses on the paint of city in Le Clezio’s early works. Referring to modern western theory of sociology, I induce and analyze the variety of phenomenon in order to expose the absence of nature in urban space of modern western society:the confinement of prison of modern city, the city similar to industrial production and merchandise, the process and the domination of irresistible modernization. Chapter two explores the human nature in urban space with references to Western Marxist theories of alienation in the interest of demonstrating the self-isolation of human, the abyss of intern world, reduction, absence and alienation of human nature in industrial, consumer and mechanical society, which leads to the domination of others as result of the quest of balance. Chapter three is established in Edgar Morin’s sociological perspective. It aims at the exile of the natural elements in urban space, reveals the degradation, demonisation and modernization of nature, and then clarifies the antagonism between natural objects and artificial objects in urban space. In chapter four, I borrow Lacan’s theory of "Stade du miroir" to explain the similarity among city, human nature and nature in urban city. It all boils down to "mirror effect", i.e. the "imagos" in psychoanalysis. Thus, I demonstrate the falsity and the mendacity of consciousness, existence and language. Then I discuss Le Clezio’s tendency to quest the other world so that the second part of this paper-return to nature, is introduced.The second part is composed by three chapters. Chapter five studies Le Clezio’s works of transition stage and aims at the exploration of the ideological roots of this change:the reference to Oriental philosophies, especially Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and "pensee sauvage" of the American Indians. Those works published in transition stage reserve the form of the early works while the substances and the themes are extremely referential to his later works. In chapter six, I follow the classical elements of the pre-Socratic philosophers to analyze the intact nature in Le Clezio’s world. Comparing with the nature in chapter three, I try to reveal the ideal nature of Le Clezio:water, fire, earth, air, animal, vegetable and their representative space. I use Bachelard’s "poetique de la reverie" as psychoanalytical reference in order to clarify the system of symbols in Le Clezio’s creation. The last chapter studies the most important part of human nature in contemporary society, the identity, which equals to nature. In this way, I try to restore Le Clezio’s ideal identity, i.e. the natural identity. In this chapter, I pay close attention first to the writer’s identity and then to the characters’. The analysis of "actants" is based on Greimas’s "semantique structurale" for the sake of demonstrating the correlation between the functions of characters and the quest of identity. The truth of Le Clezio’s ideal identity and his poetics are interpreted in the end so that a circle from losing nature to returning to nature is closed.Throughout this paper, firstly I determine the procreative and vital position of the theme of nature with the synchronic and diachronic studies of main works of Le Clezio. Secondly, I reveal that the revolutions of his literary creation and his thoughts are related to his quest of identity. Thirdly, I demonstrate Le Clezio’s poetics by analysis of the text construction method especially description and characters. At last, with the reference to the contemporary currents and the philosophies of the other world, I reconstruct Le Clezio’s concern of human existence and environment and his conception of an ideal society.