The present chapter investigates in greater depth the nature and effects of the third spaces created in New Caledonia in the encounters between Kanak and Caldoche (Caledonian) cultures; a mixing given various labels including métissage and, to use the term coined by Nicolas Kurtovitch, ‘interfaces’. Principally concerned with ‘intertexts’, that is, texts shared between cultures, whether borrowed, mimicked, appropriated, re-configured or re-possessed, the chapter will follow the mixed fortunes of the sharing of the story of ‘Le Maître de Koné’ [The Master of [the Land of] Koné]. The consideration of ‘interfaces’ has been narrowed principally to two linked themes central to all of the literatures of New Caledonia: the themes of nature and culture. Both nature and culture, and the symbiotic relationship between them, are imaged variably in ‘Le Maître de Koné’ by the ‘violent earth’ (terre violente) and the ‘peaceful kingdom’ (séjour paisible) – tropes that were, not coincidentally, central to our earlier study of the topoi of exile and of home.

Earlier chapters noted that the Other (that which the Self/Europe is not, and which allows the definition of the European Self) is either misrecognized as the ‘Barbarian’, the human lacking civilization or culture or the ignoble dark cannibal, or idealized as Pure Nature or Noble Savage. The trope of the noble savage derives from very early (classical) representations of a Golden Age of mankind: an Eden of moral goodness and sexual liberality, or a Utopia of equality in a primitive/ non-technological society. Almost all of the colonial and modern New Caledonian texts, including indigenous texts themselves, continue to stage, contest, or modify these early myths as the old naturel becomes the new ‘indigenous’ or the ‘eco-savage’. Déwé Gorodé's L'Epave, for its part, deconstructs this exoticized indigenous figure from within Kanak culture.

Jean Guiart's work outlines two tendencies present in European imaginative representations of non-technological societies: the first, a society dominated by the fear of the Other, by preparation for war, massacre, and institutionalized cannibalism; and the second, a culture based on consensus, will to harmony, and search for balance (Guiart, 1996).