Michel Tournier

Tournier, Michel (1924– ), French author of mythical, multi‐layered narratives for adults and children. He was the son of Germanicists, and his family was deeply affected by World War II. He experienced at first hand the rise of Nazism in Germany, the adulation by some Frenchmen of their conquerers, the appropriation of his home as Nazi headquarters, and the round‐up of fellow villagers for concentration camps. He would later record these reactions and interview prisoners of war in Le Roi des Aulnes (translated as both The Erl King and The Ogre, 1970). He studied philosophy, initially in Paris. After defending his Sorbonne thesis on Plato in 1946, he studied German philosophy at the University of Tübingen and returned in 1950 to take the agrégation (the highly competitive examination leading to secondary‐ and university teaching positions). Ironically, it is because he failed this exam that he eventually turned to literature. He drifted about post‐war Paris for a few years, attended ethnology lectures by Lévi‐Strauss, translated the novels of Erich Maria Remarque, and edited texts at a Paris publishing house. He then became a radio announcer for Europe Numéro Un (which he would later write about in ‘Tristan Vox’, 1978), and from 1960–5 hosted a television series called ‘La Chambre noire’ (‘The Black Box’). Photography remains Tournier's passion: he co‐founded an international photographic society and has written numerous texts to accompany other photographers' work. The photographic image is also a recurrent theme in his short stories and novels like ‘Les Suaires de Véronique’ (‘Veronica's Shrouds’, 1978) and La Goutte d'or (The Golden Droplet, 1985).

It was not until the age of 43, however, that Tournier began his career as a writer. His first novel won the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman for Vendredi ou Les Limbes du Pacifique (Friday or The Other Island, 1967), a metaphysical reworking of Robinson Crusoe by way of Freud, Sartre, and Lévi‐Strauss. Three years later, by the first‐ever unanimous vote, he won the Prix Goncourt for The Erl King, his mythic treatment of Nazism. He is a member of the Académie Goncourt and winner of the Prix Goethe, whose other major works include Les Météores (Gemini, 1975), an intellectual autobiography entitled Le Vent Paraclet (The Wind Spirit, 1977), and fictionalized accounts inspired by history such as Gilles et Jeanne (1983), about Gilles de Rais and Joan of Arc; Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar (The Four Wise Men, 1980), which draws from Bible stories; and Eléazer ou La Source et le buisson (Eléazer or The Spring and the Bush, 1996), a metaphysical interpretation of Moses. He has published travel books about Canada, Madagascar, and Weimar, and written numerous essays on photography (Des Clefs et des serrures (About Keys and Locks, also translated as Waterline, 1979)), reading (Le Vol du vampire (Flight of the Vampire, 1981)), and art criticism (Le Tabor et le Sinai, 1988). Tournier also has several short‐story collections for adults and for children including Le Coq de bruyère (The Fetishist, 1978), Le Médianoche amoureux (The Midnight Love Feast, 1985), and Sept Contes (Seven Tales, 1991).

A multifaceted and prolific author, Tournier borrows his ideas from folklore, fairy tales, literary masterpieces, and the Bible in a process he terms bricolage. He then rewrites these cultural mythologies to reinterpret chapters from Genesis or voyages of initiation. These sources are especially important when addressing juvenile readers, for he uses mythology and familiar texts as a bridge to bring metaphysics to children's literature. Tournier's reworking of his first novel is a case in point. Feeling that one should write concisely and clearly enough for a 10‐ or a 12‐year‐old to understand, he distilled his metaphysical Friday as Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday and Robinson: Life on Esperanza Island, 1971). Not only has it become the second most popular children's book after Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) (see Saint‐Exupéry, Antoine de), but Tournier prefers it to his original text, itself a reworking of Defoe's mythical hero.

In addition to retooling his own novel (a kind of self‐plagiarism), Tournier recycles his short stories for a wider, dual readership of children and adults. His favourite tale, ‘Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit’ (‘Pierrot or the Secrets of the Night’, 1978), has appeared in several of his anthologies and presents the commedia dell'arte characters Harlequin and Pierrot as embodiments of diametrically opposed aesthetics, Platonism and postmodernism, through their courtship of Columbine. Tournier also excerpts intercalated stories from novels and issues them separately and/or in collections. This is the case of ‘Barbedor’ (‘Goldenbeard, or The Problem of Succession’), an Arabian Nights‐inspired story of an heirless, ageing king who magically becomes his own successor, which originally appeared as a tale‐within‐a‐tale in The Four Wise Men and was subsequently reissued for children in a separate, illustrated edition as well as in the collection Seven Tales.

Other ‘oriental’ fairy tales include ‘Barberousse’ (‘Redbeard’) and ‘La Reine blonde’ (‘The Blonde Queen’) from The Golden Droplet, while two republished stories of European influence are particularly important. Swedish folklore colours ‘Le Nain rouge’ (‘The Red Dwarf’), a disturbing tale about an oversexed, malevolent dwarf. While this story is clearly for adults, ‘La Fugue du petit Poucet’ (‘Tom Thumb Runs Away’) appeals to both children and their parents. It is a subversive update of Perrault's ‘Le Petit Poucet’ (‘Little Tom Thumb’) in which the persecuted ogre, a vegetarian hippy/Christ figure trying to save the forests from urbanization, gives a young boy his magical Seven League Boots to escape spiritual suffocation by his father. Like his best stories, it is written in a brief, clear, and naïve style that has been compared to that of La Fontaine, Kipling, and Saint‐Exupéry. Metatextual and multi‐layered, this rewritten fairy tale of social criticism is a prime example of why Tournier is one of the most popular and widely read contemporary novelists today.

Bibliography

• Beckett, Sandra, Des grands romanciers écrivent pour les enfants (1997).
• Bouloumié, Arlette, Michel Tournier. Le roman mythologique (1988).
• Petit, Susan, Michel Tournier's Metaphysical Fictions (1991).
• Redfern, Walter, Michel Tournier. Le Coq de bruyère (1996).
• Roberts, Martin, Michel Tournier. Bricolage and Cultural Mythology (1994).

— Mary Louise Ennis

Tournier, Michel (b. 1923). French novelist and short-story writer for both children and adults. Tournier began his career as a writer relatively late in life after an initial failure to become a philosopher (he failed the agrégation and continued to bear a grudge against his examiners, since he considered himself to be ‘le meilleur de ma génération’). After a period spent as a broadcaster with Europe No. 1, his first two novels— Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967) and Le Roi des aulnes (1970)—won immediate critical acclaim (the former being awarded the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française, while the latter carried off the Prix Goncourt). He has for some time been considered one of the major French novelists of the post-war period.

Born to parents who were both teachers of German, Tournier spent four years studying philosophy in Tübingen after the end of World War, II, returning to Paris to receive the check in his career which ultimately turned him towards literature. He gives his own view of the importance of these matters in his intellectual autobiography Le Vent paraclet (1977). His works bear the clear stamp of his love of ideas and particularly of those forms of systematic thought embodied in the great Germanic tradition of metaphysics. Those French intellectuals who have most influenced his work are Sartre (although Tournier's disillusionment with what followed L' Être et le néant was perhaps as important as the positive side), Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss. As a writer of fiction he must be seen, and presents himself, as being in sharp disaccord with the dominant forms of the novel in France during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, so that here also he owes more to the German tradition of such as Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch.

While many aspects of Tournier's writing have proved provocative, e.g. his reading of Christianity in Gaspard, Melchior, Balthasar (1980), and while his massive novel Les Météores (1975) revelled in scandalous topics, perhaps the area in which he has gained the greatest notoriety is in the view of children, childhood, and adolescence that pervades his work both thematically and formally, since much of his more recent writing refuses to accept the lines traditionally drawn to separate the adult and the non-adult worlds. It is particularly, though not exclusively, in his work as a conteur that Tournier plays upon the multiplicity of readings that superficially simple forms evoke in multiple readers; his first volume of stories, Le Coq de bruyère (1978), with its rewriting and subversion of ancient stories, from Adam and Eve to Perrault's ‘Le Petit Poucet’, provides ample evidence of these. His theory of the nature of the conte—to be found in a volume of reviews and essays, Le Vol du vampire (1981)—holds that the form, being half-way between the opaque realism of the nouvelle and the transparent moralizing of the fable, is especially suited to his conception of the function of the writer, namely to enrich but not to enlighten, to leave the reader in touch with ‘des figures qu'il ne parvient pas à saisir tout à fait’. This form is, for Tournier, ideally suited to the meeting of myth with the familiar world. In one of his most recent works, La Goutte d'or (1985), the story of a North African boy who comes to France as an immigrant worker, this conjunction serves to explore both race-relations in the post-colonial world and the status of the self within the complex interplay of literature and social existence.

While much that Tournier has written is didactic in tone, the reader is well advised never to assume that an authoritative voice is speaking, and to accept that the view being proposed is capable of many inflections and, indeed, reversals, since it is inescapably part of a greater system and its significance will shift as one moves within that system. His works are saved from being dogmatic by their fruitful suspension between—as one critic has put it—‘ “sens” and “écriture”, truth and dissemination, structure and freedom’. They are just as challengingly open to readers of different ages and races as the conte could be in the hands of Perrault.

[Ian Revie]

Bibliography

• S. Koster, Michel Tournier (1986)
• A. Bouloumié, Michel Tournier: le roman mythologique (1988)
• C. Davis, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction (1988)