|
Abstract Taking the ″dream writing″ of such literary trends as Romanticism, Symbolism, and Surrealism as a point of departure, this essay examines J.-M.G. Le Clézio's representation of the surreal world in terms of dream and reverie, in an attempt to explore his reflections on the nature of truth and man's relationship with the world. Dream is a kind of unconscious behavior, whereas reverie is ″dream while awake,″ a subjective and imaginative activity that signals the subject's strong will and orientation. On the whole, Le Clézio's writing has gone through a shift of focus from dream to reverie. Prior to the mid-1970s, Le Clézio centers on the modern city where the urban landscape tends to engender a ″dreamlike″ sense in the characters. Closely related to the distortion and repression in the urban landscape, dream reveals modern men's alienation from the world, and the characters' inner stress and anxiety. The ″dream″ feeling intimates the characters' rejection of the real world, and a yearning for a beautiful haven. To a large extent, writing of the dream concerns what Sigmund Freud defines as ″the unconscious,″ which mirrors and distorts the reality, presenting itself as a means to analyze the characters' mind. From the mid-1970s on, Le Clézio has turned from the city to Nature in his works, with the dream motif waning and the reverie waxing. On the one hand, when characters are faced with the natural landscape, a strong sense of physical perception interacts with the power of natural elements so as to bring them into a euphoric state, which forms ″sensual reverie.″ On the other, under the circumstances of being away from the landscape, recollection and retelling of it enable the characters to slide into a world at once real and imaginary, which can be called ″fictional reverie.″ Sensual or fictional, the reverie suggests a temporary separation from the real world, creating an ideal sphere with which the characters merge. The world and its landscape in reverie more often than not manifest a surreal existence, just like some lost paradise or utopia with inimitable beauty. It is therefore reasonable to say that reverie helps the characters obtain an affective compensation|in a world of reverie, the characters eventually find peace of mind. Meanwhile, reverie would lead the characters to some kind of illumination, hence the formation of narrative development. For Le Clézio, reverie resembles greatly its Romantic counterpart. Landscape medium, physical perception, and spiritual redemption - all these elements of reverie poetics lend to Le Clézio's literary world a romantic significance. Critics generally agree that Le Clézio's writing has undergone some rupture in the mid-1970s, to which the shifting tendency from dream to reverie conforms inherently. It represents not only a change in the characters' world view, but a transformation of their relationships with the world as well. An inquiry of Le Clézio's shift from his alienation from the world to integration with it alerts us to a change in the author's philosophical thinking, which actually originates from the influences of Oriental philosophy and the Indian culture on him. The reverie experience in Le Clézio's works is akin in many aspects to meditation in Oriental philosophy|both are essentially concerned with the integration and unity of man and the world. Moreover, it is connected with the poetic dwelling embraced by Mexican Indians, i.e., ″the human experience is embodied in the cosmic experience,″ and man is part and parcel of the universe. In this sense, Le Clézio's writings of dream and reverie come as a result of the author's thoughts about both Western and non-Western cultures.
|
|
|
|
|
|
