Reading Group - STEPPING INTO DANGEROUS TERRITORY
Michel Tournier addresses two equally dangerous subjects- fascism and pedophilia- in his ‘Le Roi Des Aulnes’. He comments on history- that of the Third Republic and the Third Reich- and also, with something approaching an odd respect, on our own spirituality. Just as the book is much more about religion even than it at first seems, so is it considerably more political even than initial appearances would suggest.
This work, despite the carnal overtones, insistent though only implied as they may be, is an exploration of the human soul, and takes us to many of the dark places in it.
‘Le Roi Des Aulnes’ has six chapters and two phases. Phase One, before the Second World War, involves our protagonist, Abel Tiffauges, in France, in that period of the Third Republic which would turn out to be its death throes. Phase Two, after the eruption of continental conflict in 1939, has Tiffauges as a prisoner of war, and then an oddball collaborator, in East Prussia. One might almost describe him as moronically tranquil while he resides at the heart of the viciousness that was Nazi Germany.
The novel is a combination of humour and horror. Michel Tournier revels in taking his readers to the very edge, and possibly invites them to tumble down, down, down. As I progressed extremely uneasily through this book, I found myself awkward, even trembling, with the terror of it. Yet, paradoxically, I had earlier laughed while reading about one of the pranks engineered by the schoolboy Abel and his friend Nestor at their Catholic educational establishment. The piece has almost a cerebral ambience, yet this may be a mere mask to conceal a far more visceral core. Here is a plot switching between various levels. Michel Tournier is doing the most unsafe thing an author is capable of- playing with the reader’s thoughts, feelings, emotions. He is manipulating us.
The novel is almost totally written from two viewpoints- that of the journal, the diary, of Abel Tiffauges, in the first person, and that of a narrator, with Tiffauges shunted into the third person. Again, different levels, multiple viewpoints. Tiffauges reminisces about his schooldays with the anarchic Nestor. The reader is reminded of the film, ‘Zero De Conduite’, by Jean Vigo, a commentary on the rot that was seething in the Third Republic.
At the beginning, set in early 1938, Abel Tiffauges tells us about the only normal sexual relationship he seems to have had- with a Jewish woman, Rachel, whom he met as a customer of his in the garage where he worked.
And what is the first sentence of the first paragraph in ‘Le Roi Des Aulnes’?
‘’You are an ogre,’ Rachel would sometimes say to me.’
‘Ogre’ is one of the leitmotivs of the novel. The depraved Nazi chief, Goering, is described as an ogre- the ogre of Rominten. And Tiffauges is himself denounced by worried parents as the ogre of Kaltenborn- for he removes children to serve Hitler’s warped purposes in a Nazi school, a ‘Napola’.
An ogre is a fairy tale monster who eats the flesh of man. The determinedly strange Tiffauges- in Franc, then Germany- photographs, carries on his shoulders, anoints, children. Is he consuming, devouring, and not truly cherishing and protecting, innocence?
So our macabre author, Tournier, is maybe slyly fidgeting with our sensibilities yet again; we are in his hands, as his readers, and he is as it were kneading into us with a dark, subtle fury.
Tournier is suggesting, terribly quietly, that Tiffauges may have the instincts of a pedophile, but he also seems to possess an overwhelming tenderness- towards schoolchildren, and towards animals- army messenger pigeons, a blind reindeer (or something with antlers, I do not know what) called Unhold, and subsequently towards his own horse, called Bluebeard.
In the twisted conflict of the Third Reich, Tiffauges rises from being a paltry prisoner of war to the status of collaborator- albeit naïve collaborator- with the Nazis.
How are we meant to judge the unfortunate Tiffauges? As a pedophile- although he says there is nothing sexual about his contacts with children? As a collaborator- although, in the end, he turns against the Nazis, and attempts to save a Jewish boy from their grip as the Nazis by 1945 storm through the East Prussia where he had been collecting, hovering up, kids for military indoctrination in a Nazi school?
In this book full of, dedicated to, ambivalence and ambiguity, Tournier is providing this message- that, however unwholesome and disgusting the individual pedophile may be, the true peril is in tyrannical, impersonal, overweening institutions brainwashing and bullying the ‘little people’ of the world. Tournier, as is grimly obvious, is targeting particularly schools, and what they do to children. The brutalizing formality of a Catholic school in France, the unbelievable savage strictness of a Hitlerjugend training fortress in Germany’s East, are being criticized, slammed, with all the venom that Tournier can muster. The ultimate scene in the Napola- where the dead bodies of the suicidal fighting Hitler youth are offered up to the encroaching Soviet tanks- is emphasizing to us most bitterly how badly adults, adult society, must treat the young. Maybe this distorting mirror of a book, in its strange way, is a manifesto for children’s rights.
I referred to the book as ‘weirdly beautiful’, a description with which the moderator, Dominic Glynn, agreed. He- and one of the audience members- alluded to the Freudian concepts that pepper ‘Le Roi Des Aulnes’. Another lady in the audience- Madame Line Playfair - felt that the collaboration of Tiffauges with the Nazis was ‘repellent’.
The characters and the story are certainly not comfortable.
I seem at the moment to be in the Mediatheque, looking at a copy of ‘Le Point’. This magazine from France contains an article on Tournier, who died recently at the age of 91. ‘Michel never left anything to chance,’ declares Franz- Olivier Giesbert. There is almost a sense of theological predestination about ‘Le Roi Des Aulnes’, in which themes- such as the Jew as outsider, the carrying of a child on an adult’s shoulders, or, more crudely, plain excrement- are repeated again and again.
Beginning, middle, ending- everything about this novel is apparently planned. One could at times resent Tournier’s precision.
We ate some Corsican fare, provided by Madame Line Playfair, and laid out on a table in the Salons, and we chatted not altogether nicely about Nazism, the contradictions of Nazism, about Hitler as a two faced fiend- and so we had come to the end of April’s Reading Group, 2016.
ZEKRIA IBRAHIMI (AGED 57)