Michel Tournier, French Novelist Who Fused Myth and Philosophy, Dies at 91
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Version 0 of 1. Michel Tournier, a French novelist who blended myth and philosophy in prizewinning novels that revisited “Robinson Crusoe,” Goethe’s elf king and the biblical tale of the Three Magi, died on Monday at his home in Choisel, near Paris. He was 91. His death was confirmed by Laurent Feliculis, his godson, and by the mayor of Choisel, Agence France-Presse reported. Mr. Tournier, a failed philosopher, came late to literature — his first novel, “Friday,” was published in 1967, when he was 43 — but got off to a running start. The Académie Française awarded its grand prize to that novel, his retelling of Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” in which the English castaway, rather than imposing civilization on his desert island, sheds his Western skin and finds enlightenment in the worldview of Friday. “Ogre” (published in England as “The Erl-King”), the twisting story of a French prisoner of war who ends up procuring boys for an elite Hitler youth camp, won France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1970. For the first time since the prize was created in 1903, the vote was unanimous. “It illustrates precisely what is almost totally absent from current English fiction: the willingness to take major emotional and philosophical risks,” the critic George Steiner wrote in The Sunday Times of London. Mr. Tournier went on to write several more novels, along with literary and art criticism, that explored large themes in a style he called “hyperrealist,” an approach that made him a closer cousin to writers like Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie than to the leading French writers of his day. “My work as a novelist consists of making accessible, through a popular and symbolic form, the great lessons of philosophy,” he told the journal Phosphore in 1987. Michel Édouard Tournier was born on Dec. 19, 1924, in Paris. His parents met as graduate students of German at the Sorbonne, and he became fluent in German as a child. The family was well-to-do, thanks to a company founded by his father that collected royalties for recording artists. Michel, a nervous, sickly child, did poorly in the many schools he attended. In his intellectual memoir, whose English title was “The Wind Spirit” (1988), he wrote that World War II came as a relief from his miseries and satisfied his adolescent “desire for disorder and disaster,” which the family got more than its share of when 22 German soldiers were billeted at their house in the suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. While the rest of the family moved to the ground floor, Michel camped out with soldiers in the attic. “I will never forget the smell of the Wehrmacht, the compound of tobacco and boot polish,” he wrote. “For me this was the fragrance of happiness.” His school performance improved, and he enrolled in the Sorbonne, where, entranced by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, he took a degree in philosophy and law. Four years of German philosophy at the University of Tübingen followed. But when he returned to France in 1949, he failed the philosophy exam that would have certified him as a university teacher. With an academic career beyond reach, he began producing radio and television programs and writing literary journalism. He was, for a time, the press agent for a new radio station, Europe 1. He was fired after four years but landed on his feet, becoming the literary director of Editions Plon, a large publishing house. In the meantime, he began working on the novel that would become “Ogre,” his attempt to deal with Germany and World War II in fictional terms. Fascinated by the idea of the Nazi regime as a devourer of children, especially in the Hitler Youth, he created an ambiguous French protagonist who combined the attributes of the medieval child murderer Gilles de Rais, Goethe’s predatory Erl King and, paradoxically, St. Christopher, who according to legend transported the infant Jesus across a swollen river. The scope and the complexity of the novel caused him to put it on the shelf while he completed “Friday.” “It took me 15 years to reconcile fiction and philosophy using myths as a vehicle,” he told the reference work World Authors. The novelist Raymond Queneau read “Friday” in manuscript at the prestigious firm Gallimard and urged it on his fellow editors. The firm’s investment earned dividends when Mr. Tournier went on to collect prizes and, in 1972, join the jury of the Prix Goncourt. He returned to “Friday” and produced a simpler version, published in English in 1973 as “Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island.” Marketed to young readers, it sold in the millions. In “Gemini,” he told the story of identical twins whose fused identity opens the way to an elaborate investigation of duality in various forms. The quasi-sexual relationship of the twins, like the overtones of pedophilia in “Ogre,” reflected Mr. Tournier’s interest in what he called “the sordid supernatural.” This predilection resurfaced in the story collection “The Woodcock,” published in English in 1984 as “The Fetishist,” and raged unchecked in “The Motionless Wanderer” (1984), a series of scabrous anecdotes and aphorisms that most critics found unreadable. His brand of mythic realism lent an irresistible luster to “The Four Wise Men,” a retelling of the biblical tale of the Three Magi. In Mr. Tournier’s version, each traveler goes to Bethlehem on a personal quest. The fourth wise man, his own addition, is an Indian prince in search of the perfect recipe for rahat loukoum, a pistachio sweet. His other novels included “Gilles and Jeanne” and “The Golden Droplet.” His articles on literature and art were collected in “The Flight of the Vampire” and “Mount Tabor and Mount Sinai.” Mr. Tournier, who never married and leaves no immediate survivors, wrote his own obituary in the 1979 collection “Keys and Locks.” “If he had had a tomb,” he wrote, “here is the epitaph he would have wanted engraved: ‘I adored you, and you returned my love a hundredfold. Life, I thank you!’” |