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The Interrogation: A Novel

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J. M. G. Le Clézio, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2008, sprang to international acclaim in 1963 with this visionary novel, published when he was only 23. Fragmented, enigmatic, and obsessive, it is utterly different from his more recent masterpieces such as ONITSHA and WANDERING STAR. And yet how could one not be drawn to an author who opens with a self-deprecating preface in which he apologizes for the book in hand, and promises to do better next time, perhaps with something in the manner of Conan Doyle?! There is a lightness and humor about the entire book, no matter how abstruse it may get in its philosophy, that kept me reading eagerly and with a smile.

The principal character, Adam Pollo, is an educated man of about 30 whom we see squatting in an empty house above a French seaside town, making occasional forays for "fags, beer, chocolate, stuff to eat" and to take a look around. He is unsure whether he has deserted from the army or escaped from a mental hospital. He writes obsessively in a notebook in the form of letters to Michèle, a young woman who visits him early in the book, despite the fact that he virtually raped her some time before. He follows a black dog around the town. He gets into meaningless conversations with strangers, or overhears scraps of dialogue and has them pullulate in his mind. But most of the time he thinks, with a visionary intensity that is extraordinary.

A friend remarked that the isolated young man in the seaside town may be a reflection of the title character in Camus' THE STRANGER (1942). I myself picked up echoes of the "nouveau roman" movement of the 1950s in the occasional exhaustive listing of physical objects. THE INTERROGATION indeed owes a lot to the French avant-garde literature that preceded it, but unlike Camus' protagonist who cannot feel, Adam feels too much. He has an extraordinary power to penetrate the objects and life around him, involving himself totally in the self-immolation of insects sizzling in his candle-flame, or seeing the sun as "...an immense golden spider, its rays covering the sky like tentacles, some twisting, others forming a huge W, clinging to projections in the ground, to every escarpment, at fixed points. All the other tentacles were undulating slowly, lazily, dividing into branches, separating into countless ramifications, splitting open and immediately closing up again, waving to and fro like seaweed."

Adam's vision, like the author's, is that of a writer. In the middle of the book, he joins a crowd around the body of a drowned man who has been fished from the sea. He goes on to imagine the conversation of the other bystanders: "And of course (since he who writes is shaping a destiny for himself), they little by little become one with those who drowned the chap." This leads to a string of other disconnected stories about people we never see. Later still, he receives a letter from his mother begging him to come back home; she too has made up a narrative about her son in order to contain and control him, or come to grips with his defection. We all live by stories, but stories can also unmake and destroy us. Fragments of novels, newspapers, poems, and printed signs litter the novel like debris. In one chapter, Adam goes from café to café searching for Michèle, only to end up in lists of places from a gazetteer or names from a book index: "It was among them that he should have hunted. Then he'd have found everything, including Michèle seated at dawn in a deck-chair, cold and wet with dew, shivering amid these interwoven forces."

In the end, Adam's tendency to see every tiny piece of his environment as a part of the entire universe -- and also as part of the totality of history, past, present, and future -- reduces him, as an individual, to nothing. He begins to harangue bystanders on the promenade and is arrested and hospitalized. There, he is interviewed by a group of medical students (the Interrogation of the title), but they can do little to penetrate his isolation and completeness. He is alone. He is content.

"The Earth is blue like an orange": the words of a clever poet or of a madman disconnected from reality? J.M.G. Le Clezio explores the legendarily thin line separating the mentally astute from the mentally ill in The Interrogation.

Adam Pollo isn't sure whether he has recently been discharged from a mental institution or from the army. He lives in an abandoned house at the top of a hill, spends his days in a deck-chair by an open window, waiting "without moving, proud of being almost dehumanized," in a state he describes as meditative, watching the shadows of insects and "reconstructing a world of childish terrors." Adam is isolated, but claims he doesn't want to be alone: he wants to "exist with the coefficient 2, or 3, or 4, instead of that infernal coefficient 1." He thinks about and sometimes tries to write to Michele, the woman he met on the beach. Sometimes he follows a dog through the streets. Toward the end of the novel Adam makes a rambling speech to a gathering crowd and later finds himself in an asylum where he's interrogated by students under the disdainful supervision of a psychiatrist.

Although the psychiatrist is quick to attach diagnostic labels to Adam's mental illnesses, the reader is less certain, in part because Adam is so adept at verbal jousting with the students. Adam is disturbed and troubled, but those are traits shared by many who avoid institutionalization. It's clear that Adam doesn't function well in society, equally clear that he doesn't much want to -- his isolation is self-imposed, as evidenced by a letter from his mother -- but in his self-absorbed world, Adam's mind flourishes. Adam finds meaning in random forms of light and shadow, the product of a different way of seeing. This resembles mental illness more than genius, but the novel seems to be asking: who is to say? It is Adam, after all, who calls attention to the poetic phrase "the Earth is blue like an orange," asking why its author isn't regarded as a lunatic. Adam defines life as "a kind of disorder of the consciousness," and despite our ceaseless attempts to impose order on our straying and occasionally irrational thoughts, Adam might be right.

I confess that I found some of the novel's middle passages tiresome, particularly when Le Clezio began playing with the novel's form, changing fonts and lining out text and leaving big blank spaces between brackets. The devices approximate the disorder of Adam's mind, I get it, but after awhile reading disordered thoughts gets to be a lot of work. Other parts of the novel, including the interrogation and Adam's interaction with the students, struck me as brilliant. I would give The Interrogation 4 1/2 stars if I could. Although uneven, the novel is well worth reading for its lyrical prose and biting dialog, as well as its insightful examination of an unusual mind.

An exercise in formal invention from a first time novelist utilizing new approaches to the subject of life,it's randomness,its chaos,its grandeur,its terror.We dispense with plot and character,we delve beneath the layers of convention,the accretions of culture into the philosophising of an extreme nature.Adam Pollo, holed up in a beach house whose owners are away,hoping they don't come back and haul him away; keeps a journal,writes letters to a mystery girlfriend,shamanistically enters into the life of moths,dogs,rats,panthers.He makes journeys to shops,into town or visits the beach or harbour.He spies upon people,sunbathers,beachcombers,receives letters Post Restante from his worried parents who want him to come home.In his interior adventures he discovers ways of being,ways of seeing in his state of exile.He is `not sure whether he has left the army or a mental home'(Le Clezio says in introduction), in a `kind of game or jigsaw-puzzle in the form of a novel'.Le Clezio utilizes techniques of modernism in an experimental and abstract way: we get each chapter starts with a letter of the alphabet,there are quotes from the extracts of novels and newspapers,typographical innovations,including words crossed out.There are Lautreamont flights of lyricism in descriptions of nature,poems, memories of his childhood, the sight of drowned bodies in the harbour, the self interrogation of philosophical speculations: 'Simultaneity is the total annihilation of time and not of movement,an annihilation not necessarily to be conceived as mystical experience,but by a constant exercise of the will to the absolute in abstract reasoning'.He is alienated and his internal dialogues overflow into the public space as he addresses people in the market-place that leads to him being committed for psychiatric observation.The question at the end -is he more sane than his interrogators?This is a richly rewarding novel for the future Nobel laureate,its like a trial run into the future possibilities, mining existential themes it depicts the consciousness of a man trapped between god-like visions and paranoid delusions and sustains what Le Clezio wished for, a'complete fiction' of essential reality.

Fantastic. Beginning can be a bit tedious, but once you get to pg. 60 or so, the book enters another realm entirely.

"How to escape fiction?
How to escape language?
How to escape if only a single time, if only from the word KNIFE?"
- JMG Le Clezio, The Book Of Flights

Having trudged somnambulistically through the labyrinthine constructions of 'The Interrogation', I can step back to regard its architecture. There is, of course, something vaguely familiar about it all- the adamantine opacity of the descriptions are reminiscent of the nouveau roman (in particular Robbe-Grillet), the distant dispassion recalls Georges Perec. Perhaps, then, this is an apt description of the book at large: in "The Interrogation" one finds the disquietingly hypnotic prose of "Jealousy" wedded with the expansive generosity of "Life: A User's Manual". While "The Interrogation" exhibits many of the formal traits of the New Novel, at the heart of the novel is a profoundly affirmative impulse, bringing Le Clezio much closer to Rimbaud and Camus than Sollers and Butor. One also finds several delightful nods towards Lautreamont: "When a big gun goes off, I tell you, it jerks back wiht a graceful, agile movement, just like a shrimp if you stretch out your hand towards it, with your fingers all swollen and red because the water's cold." (43)

Still, perhaps the closest comparison one could draw would be to the subject of Le Clezio's doctoral dissertation, Henri Michaux, whose deadpan, Keatonesque prose poems blurred the boundaries between tragedy and comedy, between agony and laughter.

Like Michaux and Beckett, Le Clezio's focal subject is the inalienable torment of consciousness, the cramping constraints of the cogito. Adam Pollo, novice mystic, is suffocating from an excess of culture and erudition. He is constipated with culture, and all of his efforts are devoted to ridding himself of this crippling sclerosis. Like a good Bataillean, he is searching for what Octavio Paz calls "the state of non-knowledge that is beyond knowledge", where subjective thought breaks loose of its moorings and enters into the infinite. Is "The Interrogation" a bizarre exercise in Zen, as Adam wades through a swamp of koans? This seems to be a plausible interpretation of a novel that is quite literally about nothing whatsoever, where Adam preoccupies himself with 'manufactured problems', compels himself to arouse some affection for an equally disaffected female, imitates stray dogs, aggravates cagebound beasts at the zoo, stares at mould formations on ceilings, disembowels household vermin.

Perhaps the tragicomedy and pathos of Le Clezio's virgin novel stem from his contempt for the spiritual bankruptcy of Western civilization. The novel is, after all, a hilarious concatenation of mystical misadventures- Adam, aspiring psychonaut, fails utterly in his attempts to plunge into the heart of life. When he tries to violate Michele in the woods, seizing her in a savage act of sexual violence, he is unable to consummate the act. When he tries to merge with the feral panther in the zoo, to engage in an act of shamanistic metamorphosis, he is chastised by the parochial zookeeper. He spends a day trailing a dog, immersing himself in its umwelt and learning to read the odors that populate its universe, only to be abandoned by the canine as it returns to its safe suburban kennel. The dog, Adam realises, is another servile sycophant, 'man's best friend'. Where have all the wild beasts gone? All we are left with are a few abject, domesticated specimens of animality, a sad, humiliated menagerie appropriated for human consumption (ergo Adam's quip against anthropormophism/quote of the book: "It's neither pretty nor bad-tempered, it's just a marmoset!").

This is where we encounter Le Clezio the didact. Camus had called Meursault "the only Christ we deserve", and it appears to me that Le Clezio is similarly unreserved in offering Adam Pollo as the harbinger of good tidings. Pollo's outburst in the town square is as forthright as Mr X's tract in "War", and I suspect that there is no irony in his excoriations of human insipidity. In effect, Pollo becomes Le Clezio's mouthpiece, as he pours seething invective upon the heads of the astonished populace:
"Do you know something, do you know something? My brothers. We possess the earth, all of us, just as we are, it belongs to us. Don't you see how it resembles us? Don't you see how everything that grows on it and everything that lives on it has our faces and our style?...For instance, just look around you, to left and right. Is there one single thing, one element- within sight, which isn't ours, which isn't yours and mine? Take that street-lamp I see reflected in the shop-window. Eh? That street-lamp belongs to us, it's made of cast-iron and glass, it's upright as we are, and topped by a head like ours. The stone jetty down there by the sea belongs to us as well. It is built to the scale of our feet and hands...And I tell you, eh, I give my word, there is no difference between the sea, the tree and television. We make use of everything, because we are the masters, the only intelligent beings in the world." (171)

In a novel characterised by angular, tangential prose, such scathing obloquy seems a bit jarring. Le Clezio also makes sure to state the closing moral in no uncertain terms: "There's hardly any simplicity left in us, we're croakers, half-portions. Weary Willies, You'd think we'd been invented by some writer of the thirties, who'd wanted us to be affected, handosome, refined, full of culture, fully of filthy culture...You know what's happening? I'll tell you, just you. What's happening is that people are living there, there and everywhere, quietly at home, in the evening. What's happening is that there are still people who are unhappy, because their wife's left them, because their dog is dead, because their little boy chokes when he swallows. You know- and we, we, why do we have to put our oar in!" (217)

Adam begins to froth at the mouth, and, in his disarmingly sincere imploration, it is almost as though one could hear the fragile voice of Bardamu. It is all very moving, but one could hardly be prepared for Le Clezio's concluding sleight of hand:
"Because it's literature. Just that. I know we're all more or less literary , but it won't do any longer...One feels obliged to put everything forward in a perfect form. One always feels called upon to illustrate the abstract idea by an example of the latest craze, rather fashionable, indecent if possible, and above all- and above all, quite unconnected with the question...I've had enough of it! That's enough psychopathology for today- I mean- there's nothing left to understand. It's all over. You're you and I'm me. Stop trying to put yourself in my place all the time. The rest is balls. I've had enough of it, I- do please stop trying to understand." (215-217)

In short, dear reader, you've been had. You've been baited, ensnared, beguiled into chasing an elaborate masquerade. If I have read this passage correctly, it might be said that "The Interrogation" is one of the great practical jokes of French literature.Here is self-reflexivity at its finest- for the love of literature, stop psychologizing, let's have an end with interiority already! Even Robbe-Grillet makes a show of dispensing with anthropomorphisms in lieu of pure surfaces- of course, the likes of 'Jealousy' and 'The Voyeur' take the psychological novel to its logical conclusion, proving that one cannot evacuate the perceiving, phenomenological subject from the premises, that the self persists in spite of every attempt at epoche.

Of course, "The Interrogation" is so much more than a party trick, a mere show of formalistic fireworks. Already in his first novel, we discern the concerns that would guide his other works, themes that Le Clezio treats with the high seriousness that they deserve: the ecological consequences of late capitalism, a neo-surrealistic desire to penetrate new vistas of human consciousness, an inordinately excessive passion for life. This, I think, is far from his best work, but it is much, much more subtle than it appears.

I'm not sure about this book. Nice words. Very, very dark. I guess that is what a sick mind can be about.