READING COMMUNITIES

Tournier is a prominent media figure in France. In addition to his fictional output he is an accomplished essayist and expert on photography, and has contributed numerous press articles on subjects ranging from food, to German history, to arms sales. Just as the thematic content of some of his fiction has provoked hostility, so views that he has expressed in articles or during interviews have proved controversial. Inevitably therefore we are invited not only to read his work in the company of other Tournier critics, but also to situate it within the matrix of contemporary society. Tournier is not an artist in the mould of Matisse—who made a virtue of isolation in his relentless pursuit of a personal aesthetic—however much the calculated imbrication of his fiction-writing with critical essays on literature and art, notwithstanding the extensive analyses of the self as writer that have evolved from Le Vent Paraclet through to Des Clefs et des serrures and Le Vol du vampire, may at times encourage us to think of him as a writer obsessed by his own work and its reception. In this section I want briefly to discuss the specialists’ view before extrapolating on the relation of Tournier's fiction to contemporary culture.

The climax to Les Météores appears to betray a desire for some form of elemental unity, a pre-Socratic fusion of language and Being. Critics are agreed that this movement is common to most Tournier narratives. His fiction thus tends to chart two conflicting episteme or bodies of knowledge which must eventually be harnessed and yoked together to form ‘l'impossible mariage des contraires inconciliables’, to borrow Taor's summative assessment of his own life story in Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar (212). Different commentators identify different episteme; for Kirsty Fergusson, Tournier stages and restages the fight between metaphysical system and ironist subterfuge, for Martin Roberts it is a Platonist aesthetic of representation versus the postmodernist veneration of the simulacrum. At whatever level, the emphasis seems to be on opposition and struggle; for Michael Worton, Tournier used to be guilty of authoritarianism, interfering wilfully with the libertarian nature of the intertext, for Colin Davis, the author's self-readings still constitute an obstacle to interpretation.