Revolutions
Revolutionen is a novel by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio , which was published in French in 2003 by Gallimard under the title " Révolutions " and in German in 2006 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . He plays with the main character, the young Jean Gildas Marro, in Nice , London , Mexico City and Mauritius in the 1950s and 1960s . It goes back to the French Revolution via a narrative thread in which an ancestor tells the story of the main character . The term " revolution " is used in a broader sense, where the plural in the title is explained.
content
The novel plot is thematically located on several levels:
- The life path of the protagonist Jean Gildas Marro between the ages of 16 and 28.
Three further storylines are assigned to his portrayal:
- The life path of Jean Eudes Marro from the age of 18 in 1792 to 1825
- Three generations of the life of black Africans between the slavery that still existed in 1817 and the later life in freedom
- The life story of Jean Gildas Marro's great-aunt, which begins in Mauritius in 1890 and ends in Nice in 1968
These storylines are followed in 7 chapters alternately or with interruptions or only starting later. The forms of representation alternate between the narrative in the third person, the first-person narration, the diary and letters.
Jean Gildas Marro
Jean is the author's alter ego and son of parents whose lives follow lines similar to those of Fintan's parents in Onitsha or The African . Raymond Marro, who was born in Mauritius in 1907 and served as a British officer in Malaysia , but called colonialism " the greatest disgrace of our age " (p. 32) and switched sides, failed not in Africa but in Ipoh , where he did Lee Meng, a Chinese-born communist revolutionary who had been declared a terrorist , helped (p. 368).
Jean is born in Ipoh, after the birth his mother takes him to France, where she comes from. When he was 8 years old, Jean visited his father in Malaysia for a year. He then comes to Nice, broken and ill, which remains anonymous but is identified with some circumstantial evidence, and lives there with his family. Jean only feels at home in a few places in the city. The grammar school remains abhorrent to him.
Highlights in the life of the 16-year-old are his visits to his great-aunt Catherine Marro, who in 1910 had to give up the beloved property "Rozilis" with her family branch for economic reasons, in which the name of the ship with which the first ancestor emigrated from France , and his dealings with the older student Santos Balas of Andalusian - Moroccan - Jewish origin. His aunt familiarizes him with her memories of her childhood and youth, experienced as paradise, and sees in her great-nephew the continuation of the Marro family that began with Jean Eudes: "(...) you have the same blood in your veins, he and you, you are one and the same ”(p. 49 f.) - Santos, who appears adult and also paints, becomes a conversation partner for an exchange about their joint reading of Heraclitus , Parmenides and Anaxagoras . “ Anaxagoras will be ” is Santos 'magical formula, which follows on from Parmenides' twice quoted sentence: “ Wherever I begin, beings are and remain; because I will keep coming back to that. “In contrast to Aunt Catherine's thinking about reincarnation , which for her includes the promise of freedom, Santos says of Jean that he doesn't yet know who he is, but will one day know what he is looking for (p. 151).
In Nice, Jean not only comes into contact with the war via the refugee ships from Algeria arriving at the port , but also has to experience how his friend Santos falls as a conscript in this colonial war. Another older schoolmate tells him during a vacation about the warfare practices there. Jean not only records in a diary which films are showing in the cinemas, but also how many arrests and rebels killed in the media.
After graduating from high school and his first sex and love experiences that were no longer binding on him, he uses his English citizenship , which he owns in addition to the French, to be deferred from military service until he is 26, and goes to London to study medicine. There he lives in the east on the multiethnic Jamaica Road, befriends a German and a Cossack-born Ukrainian ex-soldier who is stateless and temporarily lives in his room, and has a love affair with a nurse for which " he is just a banal, everyday and at the same time hygienic interest ”(p. 349), to whose warm body he still clings at night“ so as not to be washed away ”(p. 352). Without a final degree, he leaves London after 5 years - " You don't belong in this city, you don't belong to anyone, (...) you have to go away " (p. 350) -, stays briefly in Nice, learns the 18- know and love year-old Kabylin Mariam, who fled Oran before the Algerian war and is currently finishing high school. Jean thinks she is from nowhere like him (p. 384).
However, fearing that he would still be called up for military service, he leaves France without notice and goes to Mexico .
There he made ends meet with English lessons and was able to connect to the “ Institut français d'Amérique latine ”. He lives in the indigenous quarter " Colonia Guerrero ". A cynical former Resistance fighter and current French embassy attaché shares his perspective on the solution to the problems in Mexico: “ As long as the Indians are not exterminated, this country will always remain underdeveloped ” (p. 475). Meanwhile, Jean is friends with Indians and helps them if they want to join the stream of migrants to cross the border into the United States . An " old war " plays here (p 487) and culminates before the 1968 Summer Olympics in Tlatelolco massacre . Jean writes a letter to Mariam about it. After his quick departure from Nice, he now informs her just as suddenly, “ that we will get married and have children, the first child we will have will be called Jemima-Jim in memory of Jeanne Odile (consort of Santos) and Santos. Jemima, if it's a girl, Jim, if it's a boy ”(p. 469 f.).
After Jean and Mariam get married, Jean will have to do military service before he can finish his studies at the Medical Military Academy, they make a trip to Mauritius. Jean still recognizes traces of Aunt Catherine's stories, finds the place of her favorite stay and the grave of the first immigrant Marro family. As he later learns from Mariam, it was the night after the grave visit that she became pregnant and will give birth to a child, " a new face on the flow of her story ", which is a bridge of names to his childhood friend and widow will beat.
The other storylines
Jean Eudes Marro between 1792 and 1825
Jean Eudes is a supporter of the French Revolution and, at the age of 18, volunteered in 1792 to defend it against the allied European aristocratic power. He takes part in the Valmy cannonade . After the victory he had to go to Brittany as a sergeant in 1794 , where he was to requisition food for the republic . In view of the poverty of the population and the centralized treatment of the Bretons, who are to be deprived of their language , he quits his service. He marries his childhood sweetheart Marie Anne , falls into a clash with an officer because of his long hairstyle, sees no more livelihood for himself because of his lack of property and, like many other Bretons, wants to emigrate. Since Brittany lost its independence from France in 1488 , it had degenerated into an impoverished area, as Jean Gildas found out in a search for clues in 1969 (pp. 535-539).
The ship “ Rozilis ” - the same name that the Marros estate in the interior of Mauritius later bears - brings Jean Eudes with his wife and first daughter to the “ Isle de France ”, as Mauritius was called until the conquest by the English. The arrival is disillusioning. They end up in a colonial slave-holding society (p. 226 ff.), In which it is difficult for them to find supporters for their literacy projects, for example . All slave liberation attempts are left to individual initiative and are punished accordingly. This did not change under English rule, so that slavery was only abolished after several uprisings and a devastating island storm in 1825. The Marros left the coast in 1825 and built the “ Rozilis ” property inland , from where they grew wood and ran a sawmill. The distribution of profits and the freedom to work are contractually stipulated (p. 516 f.).
Slavery in Mauritius
The admirable nature already described by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (pp. 230, 239), in contrast to the romantic, idyllic depiction of the novel in " Paul et Virginie " based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau , does not correspond at all to the social conditions. It is not even possible for a French woman of Creole may marry mongrel origin without expatriated and deported to (p 239). Since the colonization by the Dutch, runaway slaves have lived in the mountains and unsettled the population because they are constantly being inflicted. In the four sections entitled “Kilwa”, three generations of black Africans are presented up to their life in freedom. It starts with Kiambé who kidnapped as a 10-year-old from the interior of Africa and by the thieves to a Marabout is sold, the they Arusha and Zanzibar in Kilwa Kisiwani to a Europeans sold the slaves to Mauritius supplies. Kiambé works for a French woman in the household, then has to cut sugar cane and marry a slave before she can flee to the Maroons in the mountains. There she becomes the leader's companion and lives in constant fear of the militiamen who cut off the hand of the runaway slaves. The leader is betrayed by his own kind, executed in public in the capital, and his severed head is displayed on a stake. While his body is being buried in an unknown place, his head, soaked in alcohol and mummified, is said to have enriched the souvenir collection of an English pharmacist (p. 504). Kiambé is sent to an asylum, but is released and can carry the child of her executed companion to term. Her granddaughter receives her necklace, a gift from her lover, as a bequest.
Catherine Marro, * 1890; † 1968
Catherine first lived in Paris as a young woman after leaving Mauritius, lost her younger sister, who was also single, and has now been living alone for 20 years, almost blind and arthritic on the top floor of the run-down apartment building “ La Kataviva ”. When Jean comes to visit her, she likes to feel his facial features like in a ritual before he prepares tea and asks her to tell about her childhood and youth. He has the impression that only her time in “ Rozilis ” has left traces in her life. While listening, Jean can dream of a paradisiacal childhood (“ A dreamed childhood ” is the title of the first chapter). With a friend of Indian descent, we go to a place on the river which, like another chapter, is called “ End of the World ”. There the people fall silent and the plants speak.
When Catherine weakened and went to a nursing home, Jean knew so much by now that he could entertain the dumb aunt with her own stories. When she dies, he receives the last part of her diary, in which there is no entry after 1910.
One floor below Aunt Catherine's apartment in “ La Kataviva ”, Jean sometimes meets a little older, beautiful but deaf-mute Vietnamese woman who was brought back from the Indochina War by a general from Hanoi . Jean falls in love with her, but can hardly see her as she can only leave her family's apartment to go shopping. One day she disappeared. Jean learns that she was sold to a man and was later admitted to a home depressed and addicted to drugs.
On the title "Revolutions"
In the German translation, the word "Revolution" disappears in some places where it is in the original and is replaced by "Aufstand". So Kiambé speaks of the " révolution des esclaves " and of " révolte des esclaves ", which also belongs to the word family of "revolution". In another context, in which the concept of “revolution” is important from the point of view of the meaning, “period of rotation” stands. When Jean returns to Nice from London and wants to visit places known to him, he only finds them disfigured, or they have disappeared due to construction work: “ The sun of philosophy had entered its darkened phase. Jean thought that the orbital period would be very long ”(p. 423). In the original it says: “ Jean pensait que longue serait la révolution. "
reception
The French criticism sees “ Revolutions ” as a renewed examination of the issues presented in the debut “ The Protocol ” from 1963, namely the experience of being different from the socially accepted codes, which, however, lead to psychiatry in the main character Adam Pollo. This corresponds to a self-statement by Le Clézio, who thinks that he has been writing his autobiography since “ The Protocol ”. In addition, following the “ Onitsha ” novel, which is also valued in this way, the motif of the initiation journey is worked out, for which Le Clézio set some metaphors following Mircea Eliade . So one day wandering around the city leads to a swim in the sea. In doing so, because he swims too far out, his life is in danger and at the late turning point he encounters a sunfish (p. 98 f.). His interaction with the pre-Socratics is considered a further step, namely as a spiritual initiation into cosmogonic gnosis . His journey with Mariam to Mauritius and his washing in the spring water of the rediscovered river is interpreted as a journey to the ancestors . However, it does not lead to the resumption and continuation of the same, but contains an important cultural reorientation in that Jean also integrates otherness as part of his own subjectivity.
In Kindler's Literature Lexicon the novel is presented as “ monumental ” and following three previous novels that also deal with Mauritius - “ La quarantaine ” (Eng. “ A place far from the world ”), “ Le chercheur d'or ” (Eng . " The gold prospector ") and " Voyage à Rodrigues " - integrated into the " Mauritius project ". The central theme is the connection between family and colonial history, between primitive myth and the collective past. The author Laetitia Rimpau sees opposing characters in the résumés of Jean Eudes and Jean Gildas Marro: “ On the one hand, the dynamism of visionaries who can cause revolutions, and on the other hand, the indifference of the uprooted who only dream of rediscovering lost ideals ”.
Christoph Vormweg sees in the novel a polyphonic, sensitive and also catchy description of border crossers, in which a lot of human experience is captured. “ Nowhere is there the security of a distant, omniscient perspective. What counts is only the individual point of view, be it that of the stolen Kiambé, who is abducted as a slave in 1817 to Mauritius, which has meanwhile been occupied by English, where she takes part in an uprising; be it that of the French Le Pelletier, whose marriage to a black woman is declared invalid by the authorities and who is also being forcibly deported as a punishment for breaking colonial laws. Due to the multitude of figures - not only the victims but also the perpetrators - Le Clézio achieves a high degree of differentiation: slaves not only appear as helpless, but also as collaborators with those in power; and colonialists not only as cynical exploiters, but also as champions for tolerance and equality. “The protagonist is not a figure to identify with in an exotic entertainment novel, because the exotic is as broken for Le Clézio as it was in Jean Eude's time. This can also be seen in the description of the island of the ancestors, where traces of Catherine's stories can only be identified with difficulty after the “ furor of exploitation of the colonialists ”.
literature
- Bruno Thibault: JMG Le Clézio et la métaphore exotique , Amsterdam-New York (NY) 2009, ISBN 978-90-420-2646-9 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ This is based on the paperback edition ISBN 978-3-462-04120-0 from 2008, also published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch .
- ↑ Lee Meng 2007 and Colonialist Disputes in the Malaya Federation .
- ↑ Passages that allude to these Greek philosophers can be found on pp. 85, 92, 95–97, 99, 139, 144, 151, 196, 204, 211 f., 278, 280, 422, 526 f.
- ↑ In the French as well as in the German version there is an erroneous "1968"; but then Jean Gildas was still in Mexico.
- ↑ There she visits Jean. There she later finds a man with whom she is starting a family (p. 480).
- ↑ "Révolutions" and "Le procès-verbal"
- ↑ Le Clézio in an interview on “Revolutions” ( Memento of the original from March 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Bruno Thibault: JMG Le Clézio et la métaphore exotique , Amsterdam-New York (NY) 2009, p. 14; ISBN 978-90-420-2646-9 .
- ↑ Bruno Thibault, 2009, pp. 154–159.
- ↑ "Revolutions" in the KNLL ( Memento of the original from March 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Ch. Vormweg about "Revolutions" on Deutschlandradio on July 2nd, 2006
