Psychological, Sensual, and Religious Initiation in Tournier's Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit

Michel Tournier frequently writes for children, although he is best known for his adult works, which have received some of the most prestigious French literary prizes, including the Grand Prix du Roman of the French Academy in 1967 for Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday) and the Prix Goncourt in 1970 for Le Roi des aulnes (The Ogre). The French public has accepted enthusiastically both his adult and his children's fiction: his novels always make the best-seller lists, and Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island), a short version of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, seems to have become a staple in French elementary schools. Although success has been slower to come in America, ever since Roger Shattuck called Tournier "the most exciting novelist now writing in French" (218), American critics have begun to give Tournier's adult works the attention they deserve. However, his children's fiction is still largely neglected by American and French critics, mirroring the initial difficulty Tournier had publishing it in France, a problem he attributes to conservatism on the part of children's editors ("Writing" 33). Now, however, his juvenile works have sold so well that Gallimard publishes them in several formats, including tape cassettes on which Tournier himself reads the stories.

Despite the greater acclaim his adult fiction has received, Tournier's fiction for children is no sideline. The greatest literature, he contends, is that which both children and adults can enjoy ("Writing" 33-34); therefore, he refuses to divide his work into adult and juvenile fiction. When he is "tired, lazy, not visited by the Holy Spirit, [he writes] books which unfortunately only adults can read" (Joxe 53), but when he is inspired, he writes books accessible to all. Given Tournier's desire to write such fiction, it is perhaps not surprising that he says he "would exchange all [his] other work" for a short tale he first published in 1979, Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit (Pierrot, or The Secrets of the Night), which he says is "the best thing [he has] ever written" ("Writing" 34; Bouloumié 21). Although much of his juvenile fiction is based on his adult novels, he wrote this brief story in a very accessible form to begin with, and though it contains his essential moral and philosophical ideas, it can be understood even by very young children.

Tournier writes to promote his ideas, many of which are unconventional enough to have provoked a few critics into calling certain of his books subversive (Poulet), obscene (Kanters), and even fascistic (Friedländer 12, 39-45). His children's fiction, having more overt "commitment to particular values" than his adult works (McMahon 166), has encountered less resistance, but Tournier has told me that conservative magazines regularly accuse him of "perverting" youth because he writes about children doing things society disapproves of. For example, in "La Fugue du petit Poucet" ("Tom Thumb Runs Away") a little boy drinks, smokes marijuana, and shares a bed with some little girls. Tournier added, "I never said that I recommended doing that. But I talk about it. And one doesn't have a right to do that in children's literature."¹ More important than such criticism is the difficulty Tournier has had in finding a publisher outside of France for his children's fiction. The Fetishist (the translation of Le Coq de bruyère) includes six of Tournier's children's stories, and this journal published Pierrot, or The Secrets of the Night. But Friday and Robinson is the only one of Tournier's books for children published in English in ajuvenile format, and it did not sell well in America, despite its great success in France.² Tournier says his children's books have not found a market abroad partly because each country imposes its own type of conformity on children's literature (the United States insisting on a "Walt Disney conformity"), whereas publishers everywhere welcome nonconformist adult fiction.³

Tournier's fiction for children is far from conformist. As he...