A critical trilogy on the consumer society by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Abstract

Becoming by fact and paradoxically a ‘national writer’ thanks to the Nobel Prize in literature in 2008, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is since the end of the 1970’s an excellent example of an author knowing how to integrate his work of ‘French language’ into world literature, merely thanks to an optimist vision of the cultural globalization. However, an interesting part of his work, written at the turn of the 1960’s and 1970’s, quite neglected by by the French literature researchers, interrogate vividly the violences of the economical globalization. With Le Livre des fuites (1969), La Guerre (1970) et Les Géants (1973), Le Clézio has proposed a trilogy opposed to his actual image (the one of an author flashed by the beauty of a planet with multiple cultures) in which the world has an inevitable thirst for wars, manipulations, oligarchy, subjugations. His writing then becomes so radical as to include advertising, slogans and logos – in order to better question the logos,  one might think – but also the critical discourse on the globalization of capitalism, while his trilogy wears out its Romanesque effect to offer a confusing mixture of formalist issues and political commitment. If this was just a phase in a work that had softened its harsh criticism of global alienation, this set appears inseparable from the rest of the production of an author who belonged to his time, before its wide public success. Which is why it could be relevant to include it into a general reflection on the national writer and globalization, by proposing to study how it has expressed the rejection of humanity as well as the dangers of multinational capitalism, before any love of cultural diversity can be told.