In 1970, just as post-war Europe embraced a consumerist lifestyle, the Cold War and the nuclear threat took hold for good. Le Clézio wrote: "War has begun. No one knows where or how, but it is so" (p. 7). It is "on its way to last ten thousand years, longer than the history of mankind. There is no escape, no denial" (p. 7). These opening statements point to a demanding style of writing and a difficulty in generic categorization. For although there are characters in the text, they appear above all as paradigmatic figures. A young woman, a young man; it could be anyone. Masks rather than psychology. Above all a thematic, even theatrical, work that attempts to grasp, through literary writing, a form of latent warfare, War also presents an initiatory tale featuring a young girl, Bea B., grappling with her existential becoming and her complex and thwarted desire embodied by a shadowy young man, Mr. X. War is not exactly a novel, then, unless you cling to the notion despite the shattering of rules that were encouraged in those days.

The narrative, however thin, still allows us to understand this premise: Bea B. left her family home three or four years ago to come and live in Paris. There, she first experienced a heightened sociality, going out often and meeting many young people. She worked as a journalist for a publication presumed to be one of those popular women's magazines so popular in France at the time (see Sullerot 1966). Through her work, she met Henri, a photographer who illustrated several of her articles. He wanted to marry her and have children. But Bea B. gradually became detached from her professional environment, feeling less and less intellectually invested in it. Then, from one day to the next, she chose to "disappear" (p. 27) "to have time to look at what's really going on" (p. 26). So, living alone, she oscillates between the raw observation of the urban and technical world around her, the ineffable hope for a completely different life free from the constraints of work and the monotony of everyday life, and the taste for unbridled adventure, embodied here by the intriguing Monsieur X.

In a small notebook (which she carries everywhere), her "practical weekly planner," Bea B. writes: "I spend my time between classes, the library, cafés, and my room. [...] I go to the movies" (p. 28). She is a reflection of her generation: urban, educated, employed; she is exposed to the "sex stories" that obsess her contemporaries, even though she finds it "idiotic" (p. 29). She smokes American cigarettes and brushes her teeth. Le Clézio seems to have wanted to make his heroine the average prototype of the rising young generation of the time, the post-war generation to which the author belongs and which, caught up in the high-paced modernization that France has been experiencing since 1945, is calling into question the moral foundations and traditions on which society had hitherto rested. Le Clézio tries to represent this rampant modernity in a variety of ways (see Salles 2007). Disrupting customs, facilitating certain tasks, but also profoundly transforming time and space, it both frightens and fascinates.

Demonstrating some familiarity with the technocritical discourse of the Situationists or Socialisme ou Barbarie, and before them Georges Bernanos and Jacques Ellul, Le Clézio strives to represent, through striking imagery, the threat of the total encroachment of the Earth by synthetic materials and the replacement of natural elements with technical artifices. The following passage provides a good glimpse of this: "The Earth is a sheet of asphalt, the water is cellophane, and the air is nylon. The sun burns in the center of the hardboard ceiling, with its big 1,600-watt bulb. [...] The world is polished and new, smelling of chlorophyll and benzene. [...] Steel rivets gleam everywhere, and the sky turns on itself very slowly, pivoting on its immense hinges" (p. 31-32).

While Monsieur X is associated with speed, with the roaring engine of his powerful motorcycle, he also takes on a face of death, through which the writer identifies him with the threat that modern technology represents in his eyes. In an emblematic manhunt scene, the reader finds this character at the wheel of a large American automobile. Bea B. is also on board, although she has been drawn into the affair somewhat unwillingly. In the middle of the night, the car, headlights off, mows down a man walking along a country road. This absurd death scene illustrates the violence of modern machines and the destructive behavior they can provoke in their users, as if the energy they release and the power of movement they allow were inevitably turned against others. "Thought had been driven out of the world, just like that, easily, by the movement of cars rolling from one end of the boulevard to the other. Noise had annihilated truth and words" (p. 202), writes Le Clézio. War is written against the danger of the annihilation of thought by technology.

An important aspect of War is the representation of the female condition. Allied to the theme of total, civilizational war, the representation of women's social fate reveals its tragic dimension under the writer's pen. Thus, we read: "Since childhood, the girl had been fleeing, but she didn't know it. They were all chasing her. They had unleashed their packs of wild dogs on her, they had forced her to run, to run... But there is no escaping war [...] War closes its traps on the young girl" (p. 100). Le Clézio attaches great importance to portraying this feminine feeling of being hunted down, of being perceived as prey and, consequently, of feeling hunted down and threatened. Focusing on binary gender relations, the author keenly observes the symbolic violence that men exert over women, whether through their seduction techniques or, more indirectly, through the market, which reduces the young girl to wanting to conform to the images seen in shop windows or magazines. Thus, the female body becomes the site of a symbolic investment, a war of domination and control. "Perhaps the war has already got the better of her, petrified her. [...] Perhaps she lives automatically," writes Le Clézio, reducing the young girl at this moment to the reflections she sees in merchandise and liberal propaganda: "And her thoughts, her words: needle-heel marks on the asphalt, cigarette butts, reflections on car bodies, pages of magazines with nothing but photos of strangers" (p. 33).

Beyond the real social advances made around May '68 in favor of women's emancipation, Le Clézio seems to want to bear witness to a deeper reality by linking the condition and fate of his heroine to the specter of war. In a disturbing nightmare-like scene (pp. 257-264), Bea B. seeks to escape from an invisible, encircling threat. As voices from who knows where revile her, she cannot utter a word; she's trapped: "exhausted, she can no longer breathe." She tries to flee, but stumbles, and shreds of skin are torn off with each stride, until her legs are reduced to "hideous stumps." Suddenly, behind her, a man-car emerges: "It's a deep, menacing vibration, a thunderous sound at ground level. It's both a car with a roaring engine, and a man breathing." The man joins her; he "speaks to her with his engine." Then his "shadow stretches over her;" "the man's hands tear off her clothes;" "the man's mouth presses against hers and suffocates her." She senses that her "end is near." "The man's hands roam over her body, up and down, exploring the folds of her body," while around her, "bipeds rage against each other with club blows that shatter skulls." The scene takes an allegorical turn: both raw and hallucinatory, it seems to symbolize two simultaneous levels of war.

However, Le Clézio harbors doubt as to the nature of this scene. Is it rape? harbors doubt about the nature of this scene. Is it a rape? Is the young girl consenting? The Interrogation already depicted, insensitively from the male perspective, the rape of Michèle by Adam. Here, Le Clézio seems to take the opposite side, forcing us to experience with her the violent assault that Bea B. suffers at the hands of Monsieur X. "The young girl still struggles against the body that crushes and penetrates her. [...] There's nothing she can do about it;" "It's as if concrete had been poured into her uterus," writes the author. The scene takes on an initiatory hue, in which male domination and sexual assault appear as civilizational fatalism: "She knows that this is how it is, that at the end of all pursuits there must be this crushing, this pain." Yet the text speaks of a "pain that becomes increasingly burning, increasingly precise, until it reaches orgasm." The ambiguity of the physical relationship is coupled with an existential ambiguity, for at the end of the scene, "the young girl is dead on her mattress," even though she lives on in the next chapter.

Ook Chung has produced a very interesting analysis of the prophetic dimension of Leclerc's writing at this time. He notices In War the sustained presence of an apocalyptic discourse. The rape of the young girl could thus be seen as an allegorical illustration of the fate of humanity and the course of history, whose perpetuation and progress seem never to have been free of both symbolic and physical violence. In this respect, the fertile girl represents an important resource in this regard, whose mastery is crucial; her womb appears to be the site of all struggles for survival. Thus, "[t]he war is that itself: the act of being born" (p. 15). The work thus takes on the air of a fable about human existence and its possible end. Chung describes Bea B. and Monsieur X as an "ontological couple:" their relationship is one of "polarity made of attraction and opposition, desire, and terror. They cannot escape the fate that drives them to mate" (Chung 2001, p. 189), and are thus paradigmatic representatives of humankind. This confirms the idea that the writer wanted to present, in his own words, "a vision from beyond life, total, brutal, a vision from within life" (p. 202).

Ultimately, we'll remember "Monsieur X's curse," a true apocalyptic imprecation that overdetermines all the images presented in the text. Le Clézio’s discourse acknowledges the profound transformations brought about by technological modernity, but far from being reactionary, it is visionary to the extent of foreshadowing, through some striking images, the major disturbances of the current climate disruption: "Cities will soon explode. They will consume centuries of energy and thought in a flash. [...] We are inside blast furnaces, and the incandescent heat is slowly rising, degree by degree" (p. 240).

Excessive, dazzling, and pessimistic, the singular writing and thinking that characterize War are resolutely experimental and are bound to disconcert the uninitiated reader. Yet it is clear that Le Clézio found a new creative inspiration at the beginning of the 1970s, which will continue and intensify brilliantly in The Giants three years later.

Simon Levesque

Translated by Thierry Léger

(2024)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

CHUNG, Ook, Le Clézio. Une écriture prophétique, Paris, Imago, 2001 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.M.G., Le Procès-verbal, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Le Chemin, 1963 ; La Guerre, Paris, Gallimard, coll. L’imaginaire, 1993 [1970] ; « Préface » (1967), in Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, éd. H. Juin, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Poésie/Gallimard, 1973, p. 714 ; MOSER, Keith, J.M.G. Le Clézio : A Concerned Citizen of the Global Village, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2013 ; MURAT, Michel, « Michel Murat relit La Guerre de J.M.G. Le Clézio », Fixxion, n° 2, 2011, p. 154-160 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio, « peintre de la vie moderne », Paris, L’Harmattan, coll. Critiques littéraires, 2007 ; La Tour, Les Choses, La Guerre : Hélène Bessette, Georges Perec, J.M.G. Le CLézio, Caen, Passage(s), 2018 ; SULLEROT, Évelyne, La presse féminine, 2e éd., Paris, Armand Colin, 1966 ; THIBAULT, Bruno, « Errance et initiation dans la ville postmoderne de La Guerre (1970) à Poisson d’or (1997) », Nottingham French Studies, vol. 39, n° 1, 2000, p. 76-109.