By David Platten
Michel Tournier is a author who explores advanced philosophical questions within the guise of concrete, imagistic narratives. This complete research privileges the inspiration of literary reference, through which the realm of textual content is known or skilled in metaphorical relation to the realm open air of it. Metaphor, within the context of Tournier's fiction, indicates how the glorious merges with the true to supply new views on many different points of the fashionable international: the Crusoe delusion, Nazism, the worth to society of artwork and faith, and the character of schooling. This ebook elucidates a cultured of Tournier's fiction that encompasses the writer's said ambition to move past literature.
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Additional resources for Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction (Modern French Writers)
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Since then there have been numerous borrowings, rewritings,1 and, interestingly, 41 42 Michel Tournier adaptations in the form of childrens’ books of Crusoe’s story, to the extent that the character of Robinson has passed into western mythology. 3 Selkirk was said to have inhabited a Pacific island off the coast of Chile, as does Tournier’s Robinson; the nearest mainland to Defoe’s Crusoe is the Venezuelan coast. He is also said to have wrestled with a goat on a cliff-top, narrowly avoiding death as the goat’s body cushioned his fall.
There is a strong sense that this debate about language, which is, properly speaking, a metaphysical dichotomy, subsumes the other battles that are played out in the narrative. The matter is not, as we 28 Michel Tournier shall see, resolved conclusively. This poses a problem, for Les lieux-dits exhibits not only a desire for order, but a desire for a natural order. Mathematics is held up as a possible model. In Milan Kundera’s work seven is a magical figure; in Les lieux-dits, as in Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur—both could be read as circular narratives—the figure eight and its multiples is a primary structural motif.
There is a narrator, who is closely identified with the chief protagonist, named in the text as ‘Olivier Lasius’. The latter is engaged in a quest for meaning. How to interpret the painting? What happened to the painter, Albert Crucis? Was he taken away in an ambulance? Was the ambulance involved in a crash, and was everything, including the body of Crucis, incinerated in a fire which was caused by the crash? Or was Crucis killed by a pyromaniac who had Perspectives on Metaphor and Literary Fiction 29 escaped from a mental institution?