“The dream thus begins on February 8, 1517, when Bernal Díaz saw for the first time, from the deck of the ship, the great white Mayan city that the Spaniards would call ‘Great Cairo’” (9). It is with this sentence that “The Dream of the Conqueror” opens, the first of the essays that J.-M.G. Le Clézio brought together in The Mexican Dream or Interrupted Thought, and which he published in the Gallimard collection “NRF Essais” in 1989. This collection brings together previously published texts, such as “Nezahualcoyotl or the Speech Festival,” “Antonin Artaud or the Mexican dream,” and unpublished texts. Le Clézio’s interest in Mexico is not new. In 1976, he published The Prophesies of Chilam Balam, (already published by Gallimard, in the “Le Chemin” collection), and in 1984, The Relation of Michoacán, (also published by Gallimard, in the “Traditions” collection). ​​ In “The Dream of the Conqueror,” “The Dream of Origins” and “The Barbarian Dream,” Le Clézio retraces the tragic circumstances which led to the collapse of the Aztec civilization. A drama that played out thousands of years before the arrival of Cortés, with the announcement recorded in the sacred books of the return of the gods.

“The Conqueror’s Dream” chronicles the meeting between the soldier Bernal Díaz and the Mexican world, the mutual astonishment and a tragic mistake: the gastrimagia (greed) of gold and its disastrous consequences. Gold, the metal of the gods precisely; hence, it will come to pass that the Indians will bring so much to the conqueror that they will hasten their end with this same impulse. An encounter, defined as “the extermination of an ancient dream by the fury of a modern dream, the destruction of myths by the desire for power” (11) by J.-M.G. Le Clézio which retraces the stages of the war which pitted modern weapons and rationalism against magic and the worship of the gods. “The Conqueror's Dream” is also the story of the book written by Bernal Díaz: The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, a story of the conquest and memory of a dream before the destruction of the splendor of Mexican cities and the killing of the last kings of the New World: Cortés’s crazy dream of confronting Indian prisoners with their legends. When the Indians understand that the conquerors are not gods, it is too late. If Cortés was able to triumph, it is also thanks to his most effective weapon: speech, embodied by Malintzin, nicknamed by the Indians “our language.” “He owes his first setbacks to the fact that the Mayans did not give him time to speak” (28), explains Le Clézio, who recounts the spells by which a handful of adventurers were able to seize an empire, and reconstructs Moctezuma's unsuccessful attempts to stop destiny while awaiting a final victory, to the point of resignation inspired by the fatal meaning of dreams, prophecies and omens. When, after the massacre of Tlatelolco, the Indians revolted, Cortés's flight only offered them a respite: the Spanish captain and his men returned with 25,000 Indians from satellite states whom he was able to rally against the proud and dominating Mexico-Tenochtitlan. During the three months that the siege lasted, the sound of drums and horns accompanied the sacrifices of the prisoners. When the capital falls, this deafening noise gives way to a silence which is matched only by the oblivion in which the conqueror ensures that this civilization disappears.

“The Dream of Origins” is dedicated to the history of Bernardino de Sahagun and his masterpiece: The General History of Things in New Spain. The destruction of Mexico-Tenochtitlan is followed by a terrible silence. This story aims to rediscover “the memory of the vanished beauty and grandeur” (61) of the people of Mexico. This text describes the encounter of two dreams: that of the Franciscan and that of the survivors of the catastrophe. Le Clézio notes: “In the dream of origins, there is horror, admiration, and compassion all at the same time. By looking for roots, it is his own that Sahagun discovers, which connects him to this world of forgotten legend and splendor” (62). And he pays homage to this man without whom the texts written in Nahuatl which make up an “Indian book” against silence, against oblivion for the men of the future, would have remained unknown to us. Fascinated by the magic and wisdom of the Mexicans, Sahagun demonstrates an authentic quality in these times of intolerance: curiosity. Based on his copious documentation, Le Clézio describes and analyzes the legends, rites, magico-religious acts which link men and gods. It reconstitutes the major Indian cosmogonies, the pantheon of gods. A storyteller, he recounts some of the great founding myths, retraces the actions of Quetzalcoatl, meticulously describes the festivals where songs and dances are "magical scenes which materialize the mysterious forces of the beyond" (104), to render a vibrant tribute to the man thanks to whom a world has not sunk into oblivion.

In “The Barbarian Dream,” J.-M.G Le Clézio recalls that “the origin of civilization is in barbarism” in the sense that one takes shape in relation to the other – admiration, envy, fascination for freedom, absence of order. Drawing his sources mainly from The Relation of Michoacán, J.-M.G. Le Clézio praises these free, untamed, irreducible men. It traces the origins of Tenochtitlan and the Mexican cities, as well as the founding of the pure empire by the Uacusecha. An ethnographer, he describes their myths, customs, cults, festivities, and their relationship to ritual anthropophagy. His observations and analyses attest to an excellent knowledge of the Mayan, Seri, Yaqui, Otomi and Tarahumara ethnic groups.

In the article “Antonin Artaud or the Mexican Dream,” Le Clézio follows in the footsteps of the poet to try to understand what dreams, what truth and what reality inspired him during the journey among the Taharumaras that he made – or not – in 1936? What legend attracted him, after so many others? (D.H. Lawrence, Juan Rulfo or Jacques Soustelle…). The dream of a return to the origins of civilization and knowledge? Starting from the article published in The Nacional on July 5, 1936, “What I came to do in Mexico,” Le Clézio attempts to reconstruct the itinerary as well as the experience lived by Artaud. This journey and this attraction are not only born from the excluded Surrealist's fascination with primitive cultures. On site, disappointment quickly took precedence over fascination; Artaud only found the Mexico he came to seek in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts. That is to say... It is in the direction of myths and rites that he then turns and goes to the Tarahumaras, alone and not as a member of an official mission, and where under the influence of drugs, he engages in the rite of peyote – which Carlos Castañeda will describe in his writings – which encourages him to reconnect with “a theater in its original state,” to the “recognition of the absolute superiority of rite and magic over art and science” (226; 227). Artaud will never recover from this revelation.

“Nezahualcoyotl, or the Celebration of the Word,” originally a preface to an edition of the Songs of Nezahualcoyotl, offers itself as a reflection on the emotion and fascination that these sumptuous and incantatory songs continue to exert on the one who reads or listens to them, half a millennium away. A reflection on poetry, creation, starting from a portrait of Nezahualcoyotl, a complex personality with multiple contradictions, a legislator, poet and philosopher, prince and tyrant. Where does this come from? Because it is a simple and moving poetry, prey to doubt, sometimes worried, attached to the fragility of the things of daily life, giving voice to the echoes of a vanished civilization, reminding us that the Nezahualcoyotl’s songs were “covered by the anguished silence of the conquest” (136).

Le Clézio also explores some “Mexican myths” which powerfully fascinated Europeans. Not the myths produced by Mexicans but the myths anchored in Mexico and then throughout Latin America by the conquistadors: the land of the Amazons, El Dorado, the seven cities of Cibola. It analyzes the way in which Spanish chroniclers discovered, understood and attempted to describe, between horror and amazement, these complex constructions that are Amerindian myths. As an admirer but also as a connoisseur, J.-M.G. Le Clézio, who has read numerous volumes and collections of myths and legends, compares some of the creatures from the European bestiary with their Mexican counterparts, recalling how myths are “the most enduring monuments of men” (144).

Indian thought carried within itself the components of its own end, planned, announced, expected, explains J.-M.G Le Clézio in his concluding essay: “The Interrupted Thought of Indian America.” Measured time, cyclical time, the present time of the Aztecs represents a reprieve before the next destruction to come. This belief is at the origin of the tragic disappearance of the peoples of Mexico and the New World. The conquerors understood this. And the Aztec priests had the misfortune to see in the arrival of these foreigners the revelation of the divine word. In a powerful plea, J.-M.G. Le Clézio denounces the silencing of the Indian world, the stifling of speech, the destruction of customs, of laws... by the methodical elimination of indigenous societies and the dispossession of the Indian of his thought, of his being, of his moral, social and religious order. By destroying Amerindian cultures, it was his own values, his own humanity that the conqueror destroyed, at the moment when these rites and these myths “could give substance to a true philosophy, whose influence on the world could have had the importance of Taoism or Buddhism” (261 and Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio, 2015). As an ethnographer and mythologist, J.-M.G. Le Clézio analyzes the nature of the links between the human world and the divine world in the light of relationships and chronicles. He explains how the opposing concepts governing these two worlds, these two thoughts, were interpreted. He describes ritual ceremonies and their purpose, their perception by conquerors, magical thinking, the various representations of natural forces, the intimate relationship of men with gods and myths. Thanks to the final testimonies of ancient Mexicans, J.M.G. Le Clézio allows us to imagine what these cultures would have created and how they could have “changed European concepts of spirituality, the idea of man, of morality, of politics” (243).

Dominique Lanni

Translated by Keith Moser

(2024)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Les Prophéties du Chilam Balam, Version et présentation de J.-M.G. Le Clézio, Paris, Gallimard, « Le Chemin », 1976 ; Relation de Michoacán, version et présentation de J.-M.G. Le Clézio. Paris, Gallimard, « Tradition », 1984 ; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, Histoire véridique de la conquête de la Nouvelle-Espagne, Paris, La Découverte, 1987 ; Eliade, Mircea, Le Mythe de l’éternel retour. Archétypes et répétition, Paris, Gallimard, 1969. Rééd. Paris, Gallimard, « Folio Essais », 1989 ; Garibay, Angel-Maria et Leon-Portilla, Miguel, Le Crépuscule des Aztèques. Récits indigènes de la conquête, Bruxelles, Casterman, 1965 ; Germoni, Karine et Jauer, Annick, dirs., La Pensée ininterrompue du Mexique dans l’œuvre de Le Clézio, Aix-en-Provence, Presses de l’Université de Provence, 2014 ; Jaulin, Robert, La Paix blanche. Introduction à l’ethnocide, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, « Combats », 1970 ; Las Casas, Bartolomeu (de), Très brève relation de la destruction des Indes, Paris, La Découverte, 1982 ; Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave, Le Rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue, Paris, Gallimard, 1988. Rééd., Paris, Gallimard, « Folio / Essais », 1992 ; Legros-Chapuis, Elisabeth, Le Mexique, un cas de fascination littéraire. Au pays des chiens morts, Paris, L’Harmattan, « Espaces littéraires », 2011 ; Leon-Portilla, Miguel, La Pensée aztèque, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, « Recherches anthropologiques », 1985 ; Sahagun, Bernardino de, Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle-Espagne, Paris, La Découverte, 1981 ; Salazar-Ferrer, Olivier, Le Clézio et la philosophie. Les Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio, no 8, Caen, Passage(s), 2015.