Between here and there: a displacement in memory.

Ridon, Jean-Xavier

Between here and there. These two terms which make up my title also serve to shape the concept of separation. Thus, they represent that distance which lies between two points, and whose indeterminacy puts beyond our reach the comfort of fixed coordinates or the clarity of a definition. Let "here" stand for the point from which I become conscious of the space which surrounds me, which I occupy, that place which is now, where the being that I am may assume its voice. "There" then becomes that other point, the place where I have yet to be; it offers the awareness of an absence that I wish to reach, the perception of a difference that I wish to make mine. "There" is the abyss into which my words are cast. Here and there are, thus, so tightly bound that one may actually become the other. There, once one has reached that point, becomes here, so transforming the place where I was formally present into a there now consigned to my memory as another moment lost, which may or may not be found again. No longer is it possible, as an individual, to define oneself around a fixed point while this point is constantly subverted and opened up by its opposite pole. This definition must be made instead within that movement which takes us from one point to the other. It is this which the adverb between asks us to consider. The in-between is home to a relocation within which the elements of an identity become more difficult to pinpoint; as such, it calls into question our relationship with the other.

It is inside this relocation that I wish to situate the work of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Each of his books may, indeed, be seen as a reflection on those problems of identity particular to the multiple forms of movement associated with the modern era. Due to factors ranging from the convenience and speed of the modes of transport, which have enabled industrialized nations to transform travel into a commodity, to the migratory movements which are increasingly causing the shift of sizable communities from poor countries to wealthy ones, the modern world can no longer be discussed from the cozy perspective of fixed geographic and cultural divisions. Terms such as hybridity, Creolism, Beur culture, and francophone, as well as the emergence of the postcolonial texts and studies which are now the object of critical discourse - these bear testament to the need for a reformulation of our position in space. Throughout both his novelistic work and his essays, J. M. G. Le Clezio's part in these reflections is manifested by his portrayals of "displaced persons" who seek, each in his or her own way, to find their place in the world.

Indeed, the marginality of Le Clezio's characters is often linked to the movements in which they are involved. The 1969 novel Le livre des fuites(1) follows the around-the-world peregrinations of J. H. Hogan, a young man who slides from one space to the next in search of a different form of self-expression. More, then, than some sort of guided tour, travel is here a place of loss, loss of an identity which is no longer capable of expressing itself. Desert (1980)(2) focuses on the final throes of a nomadic civilization fallen victim to Western imperialism, finding a parallel in the modern-day tale of a young Arab girl, Lalla, who discovers life as an immigrant in the town of Marseille. The short stories of La ronde et autres faits divers (1982)(3) describe the fates of displaced persons in the suburbs of our modern megalopolises. Etoiles errantes (1992)(4) tells of the movements of two young girls whom the tide of history forces to flee from one country to another, thereby confronting the reader with the problems of the Jewish and Palestinian diaspora. And lastly, in La quarantaine (1995)(5) we have the journey of two brothers toward their mother country, Mauritius, a journey over the course of which the dream of an original space falters as they experience exclusion in the form of an epidemic. Clearly, this list is by no means exhaustive, putting aside as it does those other stories, those other movements which I shall not have the time to deal with here. That which Le Clezio discerns in these cases of marginality is a vision of difference, of another place, in relation to which it becomes possible and indeed necessary to question our actuality.

But how does one go about locating the origins, the beginnings of these multiple forms of movement? Can it be that there is a fixed point from which to depart? Le Clezio seems to suggest that this departure has always already begun. It is thus that the people he offers for our examination often have no origin. The little boy of L'inconnu sur la terre(6) has no name, has no history prior to his presence in the text. In this way, he eludes the writer or the reader at every step; he is always somewhere other than where the analytical mind seeks to define him. Similarly, it is in the following terms that Le Clezio introduces Mondo (the protagonist of the short story of that name)(7) to the reader:

Personne n'aurait pu dire d'ou venait Mondo. Il etait arrive un jour, par hasard, ici dans notre ville, sans qu'on s'en apercoive, et puis on s'etait habitue a lui. . . On ne savait rien de sa famille, ni de sa maison. Peut-etre qu'il n'en avait pas. Toujours quand on ne s'y attendait pas, quarid on ne pensait pas a lui, il apparaissait au coin d'une rue, pres de la plage, ou sur la place du marche. (Mondo, 11)

The presence of Mondo already signifies movement inasmuch as he cannot be tied down to any one place. With no history, Mondo escapes any attempts to define him. In the eyes of those who meet him, he is the reification of "there."

When, on the other hand, Le Clezio's narratives depict a family history, it is under the sign of separation that this is presented. In Desert Lalla, descendant of the ancient nomadic tribes of the desert, is separated from her past not only by the death of her mother but also by the disappearance of her ancestors' culture. In La quarantaine Jacques and Leon are the two sons of a couple forced to leave Mauritius, their birthplace. Here too, the place of origin is a point distant in both time and space, a concept, a dream even, to which the two brothers will be drawn. In each novel, all that is left to the protagonist(s) is a tale, a means of maintaining a grip on his or her identity through a history. In Le Clezio, therefore, "here" as place of origin is always to be read as "there"; it marks a painful absence which has to be filled. From this point, then, "there" becomes a focus for the projection of a desire of the other, that place whence emanates a kind of exoticism. In this respect, it assumes mythical proportions. That which ought to lead back to another dimension of the same thing, this distant place of origin, becomes in fact that other space which produces the source of energy capable of instigating departure. This voyage of (re)discovery can be seen in La quarantaine.

The narrative of La quarantaine revolves around the accounts of two characters bearing the same name: Leon Archambeau. The first Leon locates the story in 1891; his is the tale of his voyage to Mauritius in the company of his brother Jacques and his sister-in-law Suzanne. The second Leon brings us back to 1980. And he it is who narrates the story proper; he attempts to reconstruct the life of his great-uncle in a tale where the latter appears in the first person. This second Leon also invites the reader along on a journey which he himself makes to Mauritius with the aim of retracing the history of his ancestors. But it is also around family heritage that the first Leon's own desire to leave for Mauritius arises. Because he left the place of his birth when he was only a year old, his attachment to this location is in essence imaginary. His only access to the reality that is Mauritius has been through the stories told to him by his older brother Jacques; this accounts for the island's status as exotic space. Leon's hold on an identity is only made possible by the elaboration of a tale in which he projects his desire for a space that is other.

Suzanne et moi, nous ecoutions, nos yeux brillaient, c'etait la magie. Les champs de canne a l'infini, jusqu'aux montagnes, le sentier le long de la mer a Eau-Bouillie, l'anse de Flic-en-Flac, et au nord, la riviere Belle-Isle et la domaine de la Thebaide, La Mecque. Ces noms designaient des endroits qui ne pouvaient exister que dans les songes. (247)

In Leon's eyes, Mauritius is the doorway to a space of escape: escape from the misery and loneliness of the boardinghouse where he lives in France. In this respect, his dream of the other is not far removed from the colonial dream in which fields of sugarcane would come to symbolize the greener grass of happiness beneath the tropical sun. The names of these distant lands are enough to conjure up a vision of somewhere brighter. This is the dream of the grandson of a settler in which the realities of colonial exploitation are blissfully overlooked. But Leon's voyage takes an unexpected turn, and the visions which fill his dreams are quickly shattered, or at least exposed for the dreams they are.

Instead of directly reaching Mauritius, the travelers are actually put ashore on two nearby islets, Gabriel and Flat Island. A case of cholera on board ship forces them into quarantine on these islets. The return to an imagined homeland ends in an experience of exclusion: they assume the humiliating position of plague-bearers, shunned by all. Disease comes into the text as a radical symbol of their exteriority to the dream; in so doing, it also serves to expose a policy which played no part in this dream.

Flat Island, whither they are deported, reconstructs, albeit somewhat clumsily, a model of the colonial world. It becomes, in fact, a caricature of a system trying to reproduce outside the colonies the economic and social structures upon which these colonies were built. The island is thus divided into different zones: one for the pariahs, one for the Indians, and one devoted to Westerners. Each group occupies a territory seemingly enclosed, as if by an unwritten law, in an inviolable ostracism. However, the colonial hierarchy, which puts the Indian immigrants at the bottom of the social ladder and the white immigrants at the top, functions, to all intents and purposes, in a void, since the islet is above all a place of incarceration, everybody on it made prisoner by the pervasive presence of the disease.

We may recall Michel Foucault, who begins his analysis of the panopticon(8) by referring to the system of quarantining put in place during the periods of epidemic in seventeenth-century Europe. As a philosopher, he analyzes how political power structures seize upon these moments of uncertainty in order to institute legislation and to fragment urban space under the pretext of combatting the disease. Foucault describes the space that is the quarantine in these terms: "Espace decoupe, immobile, fige. Chacun est arrive a sa place. Et s'il bouge, il va de sa vie, contagion ou punition" (Surveiller et punir, 198). But on Flat Island there is no longer any need, or justification, for the surveillance which is in place, since the island has no further contact with the outside world. There is no single space which can escape from the spread of the illness. Furthermore, there is nothing to administrate, nothing to bring to order, and that which the territorial frontiers of the different groups serve to formularize is in reality the horror of contamination. Defensive reflexes are generated which, translated across the barriers of racial difference as a language of separation, give a fear of disease all the trappings of an exorcism of evil. It is always that which is foreign that threatens, challenging the unity of a group and transmitting its viruses. It is for this reason that Leon's first excursions into the Indian village result in his expulsion. For this reason too, Veran de Vereux, who of the passengers from the Ava probably represents more closely than anyone the colonial spirit, decides to make the curtailment of spatial movement official policy. Thus, by drawing up an edict, he establishes a curfew and outlaws the crossing from one territory into another. Although remaining skeptical, the other Westerners, with the exception of Leon, bow to this absurd administrative coup: "En acceptant l'edit de Veran de Vereux, en voulant se preserver du contact avec les Indiens pour quitter plus vite la Quarantaine, les passagers de l'Ava se sont enfermes dans leur prison" (123).

In spite of these efforts, the Westerners have no power here over the Indian immigrants, and all that actually remains to uphold the system is racial prejudice. In fact, the only person who seems to have any real power on this island is the Syrdar who organizes the day-to-day life of the Indian community. This experience of exclusion which is the lot of immigrants in the colonies casts clouds over the dream space of Leon and Jacques now that they are forced to live it for themselves. For the epidemic does not take sides and spreads throughout the populations of all the communities present. So it is that all those who are infected are transferred to the other islet, Gabriel, where they wait to die. There, territory has no further meaning; Westerners and Indians have no more reason to mark their difference. The effect of disease, then, is to expose the arbitrary mechanisms of the power structure, thus causing it to operate in a void.

What the quarantine reveals in the eyes of the narrator, Leon, is a profound and disturbing feeling of injustice: that of power and its realization in the hands of the landowners of Mauritius, who are ready to import a great number of people to work on their plantations but who do not hesitate to cut them off completely, to the point of starvation, when there is a risk of disease. The lack of interest in the fate of these immigrants which is displayed by the local authorities in Mauritius is no isolated incident: there are several references made to another quarantine which was implemented in 1856.

C'est Jacques qui m'a parle du millier d'immigrants venus de Calcutta a bord du brick Hydaree, abandonnes cette annee-la sur Plate en raison de la presence de variole et de cholera a bord. Comme nous, ils ont attendu jour apres jour, scrutant l'horizon vide, la ligne de Maurice, dans l'espoir de voir venir le bateau qui les emmenerait. . . . Quand enfin le gouvernement de Maurice a decide d'envoyer du secours, trois mois s'etaient ecoules, et ceux qui arriverent sur l'ile ne trouverent que quelques rares survivants, et la terre jonchee d'ossements. (149)

Those responsible for this marooning are the members of the "Patriarch Club," an association comprising the major landowners of Mauritius. This is the realization of a megalomaniacal dream of an elite whose justifications are race and money. Now, one of the founding members of this group is Alexandre, the uncle of Leon and Jacques. For this reason the two brothers feel doubly betrayed: to begin with, they are abandoned like all the other immigrants, and furthermore, that which has driven their dream of somewhere that is other - that is, their attachment to that space through family ties - turns out to be a lie. For their dream had been built around an absence of memories, in particular those regarding the very reason for their exile in France. In fact, their parents had to leave Mauritius in large part because of their mother's Eurasian origin. In the colonial world, founded as it is upon the idea of white supremacy, "half-castes" are set apart: they are already pariahs, outcasts; theirs is the life of the quarantine. On this subject Leon makes the following pronouncement: "Mais c'etait mon sang, le sang mele de ma mere. Ce sang que l'oncle Alexandre haissait, qui lui faisait peur, et pour cela il nous avait chasse d'Anna, il nous avait rejetes a la mer" (182). From the outset, theirs is the ground in between; they occupy a position that is neither here nor there, a position which signifies their failure to belong to either group. Leon says about his brother, "Comme s'il n'etait venu sur cette ile avec Suzanne, que pour ezztre exile de Maurice a jamais" (356). Further on, he adds the following: "Nous n'avons plus de famille" (357). The space of the in-between can be seen as the moment of a negation, the confrontation with a space which no longer has an identity to offer. The space of a disappearance: "Quand Antoine et Amalia ont quitte Maurice il y a pres de vingt ans, nous avons cesse d'exister. Maintenant il ne reste plus qu'a nous effacer, comme les coolies de l'Hydaree au printemps 1856" (111). To pass, as it were, out of sight is to enter a place that is nowhere - i.e., a space where life or the existence of a "here" or a "there" is no longer possible. This is a place of standstill, a foretaste of death itself where one can no more be present before the regard of the other. Quarantine is a place of negation created by a civilization which desires the power to remove all who stand in its path. As for those who would speak out, they lose their voice. Quarantine is place of silence.

Jacques is not prepared to pass out of sight. He clings to the dream, still wanting to believe in a place of his own. Leon, for his part, decides to pass over to the other side; that is to say, he assumes his place as the character to whom the text of the second Lion often refers as "the one who disappeared." The retraction of Lion into the body of the family history is mirrored by the disappearance, in him, of that very history. He says of himself, "Je n'ai plus de memoire, je n'ai plus de nom" (398). Along with his name, Lion loses the thread which connected him to a lineage. His meeting with the young Indian girl, Suryavati, acts as a catalyst: thus, he passes into the other. His disappearance, then, is into the silence of his family history.

Suryavati lives on Flat Island, in the camp of the pariahs. Her life bears a striking resemblance to that of Lion. Indeed, her mother, Ananta, was found as a child, lying on the body of her nurse, who died where she fell in the riots of Kanpur in the Indies. Thus, Ananta is English by origin and is adopted by the Indian woman who finds her. Both of them go on to join the group of immigrants bound for Mauritius. Therefore, for Suryavati, as for her mother, England is the land of dreams, the place of that exotic elsewhere. In those dreams, England represents the space of a lost beginning from which they were torn by the horrors of history. Thus, in Leon, who knows England, Ananta and Suryavati see a possible key to the door of their story. In the movement that is his disappearance from inside his own history, Leon becomes an opportunity for these two women to find theirs. With them as his audience, Leon attempts to tell a tale: "Elle restait penchee vers moi, elle attendair. Meme Ananta semblait attendre que, grace a cette musique d'ange, je retrouve la clef de sa memoire, le nom de sa mere et de son pere, l'endroit ou elle etait nee, sa maison, sa famille, tout ce qui avait ete englouti dans la tuerie de Cawnpore" (223). But in this too, the place of origin is a myth, a family history impossible to unearth. It is for this reason that, after her mother's death, Suryavati disappears along with Leon. The fiction which he churns out, however, does make possible the actualization of something far more fundamental than history. What he discovers is memory.

I should like, at this point, to consider the term memory as being the site of a relocation. Of particular pertinence is the distinction between Memory and History which Pierre Nora establishes in the introductory text of the collective work Les lieux de memoire.(9) By analyzing these two terms, Nora offers us this definition of memory:

La memoire est la vie, toujours portee par des groupes vivants et a ce titre, elle est en evolution permanente, ouverte a la dialectique du souvenir et de l'amnesie, inconsciente de ses deformations successives, vulnerable a toutes les utilisations et manipulations, susceptible de longues latences et de soudaines revitalisations. . . . La memoire est un phenomene toujours actuel, un lien vecu au present eternel; l'histoire, une representation du passe. (Les lieux de memoire, xix)

Although it is not the negation of historical fact, neither is memory the search for a past: its aim is not to recover the chronology of events that have taken place. In this respect, it does not seek to determine a founding moment or even an origin which might foster an idea of authenticity. We are told that it is fragile, that it may disappear at any time, subject as it is to its bearer's tendency to forget, or himself disappear. Memory does not produce archives; its gifts are in the form of a presence, and, for this reason, Nora posits it on the side of life. Memory always retains the possibility of being different from how it is, since it is always open to a margin of interpretation, tending to vary according to the imagination of whoever holds or discovers it. This means that it is not bound to one geographic point as it changes location with its bearer.

Memories travel, then, both in the true sense of the word and in the sense that ideas travel, being passed from one person or one culture to another. In fact, one of the ways in which memory travels is via storytelling, with all the inaccuracy and scope for interpretation that this term implies. What Leon, the narrator of the novel, discovers, through the story told about the first Leon and the quarantine where he winds up, is the living memory of those immigrants forgotten not only by the authorities on Mauritius, but also by the history of these lands as it has been painted by the West. This history has subsequently been overtaken itself by the discourse of tourism, which has tended to function with the same partiality. It is for this reason that memory appears as a form of resistance against the official voice of history and, consequently, against quarantine itself. It is by withholding a part of their memory (through their use of language, Creole, and their oral tradition) that peoples such as those of Mauritins or the West Indies have fought against the presence of the English or the French and that they are now able to construct their difference in terms of their Creolism. Edouard Glissant has the following to say on this matter in Le discours antillais: "Il est possible que la fonction du conte soit ici de combattre l'action parlois paralysante du desire historique, de nons sauver de la croyance que l'Histoire est la premiere et fondamentale dimension de l'homme, croyance heritee de l'Occident ou imposee par lui" (151).(10)

In the West Indies, the tales which are the vehicle of a cultural memory descend the generations as the stories of the oral tradition, and in this sense their movement follows the same model as that which has just been outlined for memory. Memory it is, then, which ensures that destruction, death, and silence will never achieve their ultimate ends. Moreover, memory (like the folktale) is often shared by a group of individuals; it binds people together in a sense of belonging and community, which imply an idea of recognition and identity. It is nevertheless subject to exchange and can also offer a kind of otherness. It cannot be reduced to a possession principle, as, example, History is when used to build a sense of national identity. This is because, first of all, memory is never fixed, succumbing as it does to the dynamic of forgetting and remembering; and second, because it moves in a space where it is exposed to a cultural other. On Flat Island, Leon discovers a memory while trying to help Suryavati and her mother find their own. The power of memory is increased all the more by the means of dispersal it has at its disposal: it tells its tale to all who will listen and offers its difference to those who recount what they have heard; all this it does against those very people who wished to destroy it. And as memory moves from place to place, it becomes the area of movement of another. It must, therefore, find the structure of its account - i.e., the principle of its movement.

Perversely, it may be its potential for being forgotten which allows memory to survive the effects of the silence which people at times wish to impose upon it. For it is the very act of forgetting which lies behind the need to reformulate a presence and to breathe new life into that which seemed to be lost. Conversely, a monument gives permanence to an account, institutionalizing memory by marking its passage into History. In our text, where natural erosion has wiped the inscriptions from the tombstones and destroyed the buildings, Flat Island represents the white space of oblivion. However, memory is present in this place, since it is out of this void that Le Clezio's account arises. It is in this sense that one must understand the narration of the second Leon, the storyteller who goes in search of the man who was his great-uncle, the man who has become synonymous with his own disappearance. Here again Leon is driven by the desire to reconstruct a family history; he wants to learn the identity of the man whose name he bears. But the links are too tenuous for him to retrace the steps of his great-uncle, and those who could testify to his existence have either disappeared or have nothing to say. This prompts the following from Leon: "Ceux que je cherche n'ont pas vraiment de noms, ils sont des ombres, des sortes de fantomes qui n'appartiennent qu'aux routes des reves" (421). The narrator is left to tread the road of fiction along which he imagines the final movements of his great-uncle's life, the time before his disappearance and after his experiences of the quarantine. In the absence of a history, it is a memory which the text provides. It is this memory-fiction which the narrator elaborates around the gaps in his story in order to construct an account of others' memories. The text does not, then, offer an origin, but the possibility of reinventing a place of origin, one which lies within the white space through which one must clear the pathway toward the discovery of memory.

It is to this discovery that Le Clezio devotes a large part of his work. In La quarantaine he presents his readers with a third story about Mauritius. Following Le chercheur d'or(11) and Voyage a Rodrigues,(12) La quarantaine offers a new attempt on the part of the author to discover his Breton ancestors, and to retrace the path that led them to Mauritius in the course of the last century. From this perspective, his choice of the name Leon for his main protagonists is by no means gratuitous: the dedication to Le chercheur d'or reveals this to be the name of Le Clezio's grandfather. Here too, then, family history becomes pretext for the discovery of other memories, notably those of the Indian immigrants which may otherwise have disappeared with their bearers. The need to make this discovery is felt as a necessity: "Pour que nous n'oublions jamais l'autre cote, la foule silencieuse des immigrants, leur faim, leur peur, au bout du voyage" (133).

Le Clezio's writing is constantly in motion, always looking to discover other presences, to establish fresh links with voices lost in time. It is also for this reason that his work is often concerned with making space, his own words moving aside that others' voices might take the stand. An example of this would be Sirandanes,(13) a collection in which he relates in native Creole, with an accompanying French translation, the game of questions and answers which is a popular pastime among the children of Mauritius. Similarly, in his preface to the Relation de Michoacan(14) he sends us back to the myths of the Porhepecha Indians. The final way in which he fulfills this role is as editor, for Gallimard, of the series "L'Aube des peuples," which for more than ten years now has brought us texts alive with the memories of peoples long since disappeared. Thus, we can relive, among others, the myths of Iceland in the Edda and those of the Maya in the Pop-vuh. In this instance, the author's choice of silence represents a moment of coming into being whereby the absence of the other's voice is transformed into a new presence. This void it is which enables Le Clezio to write his story, building around the emergence of another memory. And it is this process of exchange which offers a viewpoint from which the oeuvre as a whole may be more fully understood.

University of Nottingham

1 J. M. G. Le Clezio, Le livre des fuites, Paris, Gallimard, 1969.

2 J. M. G. Le Clezio, Desert, Paris, Gallimard, 1980.

3 J. M. G. Le Clezio, La ronde et autres faits divers, Paris, Gallimard, 1982.

4 J. M. G. Le Clezio, Etoiles errantes, Paris, Gallimard, 1992.

5 J. M. G. Le Clezio, La quarantaine, Paris, Gallimard, 1995.

6 J. M. G. Le Clezio, L'inconnu sur la terre, Paris, Gallimard, 1978.

7 J. M. G. Le Clezio, Mondo et autres histoires, Paris, Gallimard, 1978.

8 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Paris, Gallimard, 1975.

9 Pierre Nora, "Entre Memoire et Histoire: La problematique des lieux," in Les lieux de memoire, vol. 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1984.

10 Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais, Paris, Seuil, 1981.

11 J. M. G. Le Clezio, Le chercheur d'or, Paris, Gallimard, 1985.

12 J. M. G. Le Clezio, Voyage a Rodrigues, Paris, Gallimard, 1986.

13 J. M. G. Le Clezio & J. Le Clezio, Sirandanes (followed by a short lexicon of Creole and ornithology), Paris, Seghers, 1990.

14 Relation de Michoacan, presented and translated into French by J. M. G. Le Clezio, Paris, Gallimard, 1984.

JEAN-XAVIER RIDON holds degrees from the Sorbonne and the University of Illinois at Urbana. An Assistant Professor of French at the University of Nottingham, he is the author of Henri Michaux, J. M. G. Le Clezio: L'exil des mots (1995) and has published articles on Breton, Mandiargues, Derrida, and Pennac. Currently he is working on a book analyzing the relationship between cities and the construction of Western identity.