Fever

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

‘What d’you mean, do I believe …?’

  ‘Yes. Do you believe the boy can really rest, now? You see, I have the impression he can’t manage to. He keeps still, like that, like he is now, sitting in his chair, doing nothing, as though he were seeing and hearing nothing, but is that really true? Is he resting? I have the impression he’s seeing everything, hearing everything, and that his brain’s working, working harder than ever, that he’s thinking about heaps of things, heaps of things we shall never understand. I have the impression, you understand, I have the impression he’s changing. That he’s changing. That he’s not Martin any longer, but someone else, somebody I don’t know, and who doesn’t know us any more. I even have the impression he’s never been Martin, that he’s going to hate us, or something like that, to hate us … In any case, as you see, he really has changed in the last few months. He never talks to us nowadays. Before, at meal times, he used to explain heaps of things to us. He used to tell us what he’d been thinking about that day, what he’d learnt, what he’d discovered. He used to tell us all that. You remember the day he discovered the divine nature of speech? He explained it to us, at the top of his voice, beside himself for joy, right through the evening. He was so happy, so proud of our pride in him, so happy. He talked. Now—now if he opens his mouth at all it’s only to tell us what time Dr. Mercier’s coming, or the reporters. He hardly mentions the psychotests, or his arguments with Hertz. He never says a word about the way he spent November 22. It’s as though he were ashamed of it. Why? I have the impression that something’s happened …’

  ‘You’re getting ideas,’ was all Torjmann said. ‘Martin’s tired, that’s all.’ But doubt had seized him, in his turn. He went back to the wicker armchair, square in the bright space by the window, and bent over his son.

  ‘Martin? Hey, Martin? Did you hear that? Perhaps you ought to reassure your mother?’

  Leaning forward from the edge of her chair, the mother’s heavy body waited for the answer that would revive her hope. In vain. Martin, still mute, sat solemnly, unmoving, without answering his father’s appeal, without seeing the anxious face that was breathing into his own; sweat was still trickling down his neck and the sides of his vast forehead, his spectacles were white with steam, and out of doors the sun was coming nearer and still nearer.

  The man and woman left Martin in the kitchen; he must be left to himself, to his obstinate meditations, it was like an order from somewhere outside, from all the windows of the block of flats, for example, a confused order, never clearly expressed, but which they obeyed almost instinctively, without a second thought. Martin’s mother went out to do some shopping at the supermarket on the corner. His father stayed in the dining-room and got things ready for the journalists. He made sure the tape-recorder was in working order, put the microphone in the middle of the table, turned towards the wooden armchair where his son usually sat. Then he carefully arranged a pile of books, and right at the edge of the table he put two folders with sheets of paper in them. One contained Martin’s notes, in the other there was blank paper. Between the two he laid a metal ball-point pen, the kind with three colours.

  A bit later Martin’s mother came back, and rang four times. Her husband opened the door, took her shopping-basket and put it down in a corner of the hall. Martin’s mother cautiously opened the kitchen door a crack, and peeped in. Then she closed the door noiselessly and came and sat down in the dining-room, beside Torjmann.

  What’s he doing?’ enquired the boy’s father.

  ‘Still meditating,’ she replied; ‘there are some papers beside him. He must have been writing.’

  ‘The journalists won’t be long now,’ said Torjmann.

  ‘In fact they ought to be here already. It’s after half past.’

  Five minutes later the bell rang. Martin’s mother opened the door and let in a man of about forty, short, balding, who carried a leather brief-case. He introduced himself as Georges Jouffré. Then, one after another, came two more men, Simon Berrens and Bernard Ratto, and a woman, Edith Schmidt. When all four had been seated round the dining-room table, the mother went to the kitchen door, knocked, entered, and walked over to her son.

  ‘They’re here, Martin,’ she said softly.

  Martin didn’t even start; he raised his head calmly, yawned and stood up, stretching himself.

  ‘All of them?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, all of them,’ said his mother …

  And they went into the dining-room together.

  The introductions were carried out, and then they all sat down; Martin, according to plan, took the wooden armchair on the right side of the table, while the journalists sat in a row on the left side. The man who had arrived first asked if he might take a few photographs. Martin nodded, and the woman journalist, too, produced a camera. Both reporters took several snapshots of Martin, sitting alone at the table. Then the woman asked his parents to come up behind their son, and more photos were taken. They took the mother with her hand on the boy’s shoulder, and then the father in the same pose. But when they asked Martin to stand up so as to show he was still wearing knickerbockers, he was annoyed, and refused. So the man and woman took some other photos, for a few seconds, and then thanked him and sat down. The parents returned to their seats at the far side of the dining-room, and the conversation began.

  School-leaving Certificate at twelve

  ‘You are twelve years old, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, I am twelve years old,’ said Martin.

  ‘Can you tell us what point you have reached in your education?’

  ‘It has been broken off for the last three months,’ said Martin; ‘I was ill for a time, and as the thing was quite possible I asked for special permission to take the lower school certificate right away.’

  ‘And you were given permission?’

  ‘Yes, of course, there was no difficulty about that … At present I’m working for the first part of the baccalauréat. I’ve applied to the Ministry of Education for another special permit, and I’m waiting for the reply.’

  ‘And you think they’ll give you the permit? To take the school-leaving certificate at twelve years old?’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Martin simply; ‘they gave me permission for the lower certificate all right, and I wasn’t even twelve then …’

  ‘It would really be exceptional,’ said Bernard Ratto; ‘I don’t think such a thing has ever happened in the whole history of education.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to me to be anything really exceptional about it,’ said Martin; ‘there’s nothing exceptional in school work for a human brain; on the contrary. It’s all a matter of knowing how to work, and of understanding. Personally, I think everything a man is taught at present could be learnt in, let’s say, two years. If the teachers knew how to set about it, and if the pupils really wanted to get on, to shake off childish slowness and understand quickly, very quickly, what was happening around them. It needs a certain intellectual maturity, of course, but I think one has that, quite definitely, by the age of ten or twelve. The rest is a question of method.’

  ‘And you don’t—’

  ‘Incidentally, from that point of view, I consider myself to be rather behindhand in my education. But that’s due to the conventional short-sightedness of the educational system. They have constantly put stumbling-blocks in my way, instead of helping me to get on.’

  ‘ What do I want to do with my education?—Nothing.’

  ‘And what do you mean to do later on?’

  ‘What do you mean by later on?’

  ‘Well, later on, I mean when you’ve finished?’

  ‘Finished what?’

  ‘Well, your education, for instance?’

  ‘But I shall never have finished! I’ve told you before that education, for me, is a way of gaining time, of showing officially what I’m made of. A means of earning respect. What do I want to do with it? Nothing. Anyhow, there is nothing to be done with knowledge as it’s understood here in Europe. And in other parts
of the world too, probably. No, if I understand your question correctly, you’re meaning to ask something like “what do you intend to do later on, when you grow up?” ’

  ‘No, what I—’

  ‘Yes. Of course that’s it. Why deny it? Isn’t that the natural question to ask any boy of twelve? And what will you be when you’re big, my boy? A butcher. An architect. An airman. A rest pilot. That’s it, and people are proud of the little fellow who knows so definitely what he wants to do, who’s already thirsting to work in the community, who’ll embroider on what other people have taught him, who will help to preserve our full, beautiful, materialistic society with what’s called his “Vocation”! That was what you meant, wasn’t it? Well, no, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you: I shall never be “bigger”, I shall do nothing with what I’ve learnt, I shall be of no use in the world. There you are. You understand, I consider that at twelve years old one is a man. A grown-up man, with nothing left to learn.’

  ‘So you have no vocation? No hopes?’

  ‘I have no earthly hopes—If I have a vocation, it’s more in the nature of a divine command: to pray, to preach, to suffer.’

  ‘But what about the community?’

  ‘I don’t consider that. For me, man is merely a transition.’

  Like a prince

  ‘You are a rebel?’

  ‘That’s just a word, again. Most people use it to describe the dissatisfaction felt by someone who discovers he has been duped. But—’

  ‘Who has duped you?’

  ‘No one, really. I mean, on the contrary, everybody’s been very kind to me. They’ve applauded me, arranged receptions for me, admired me. I’ve been treated like a prince, sometimes even like a minor prophet. But it was all false, false in its essence, eaten up from within like a rotten fruit. You understand, one’s dealing with a complete structure, with the whole thing, with society, and the rotten aspect of it is that one has to reckon with society and at the same time to leave it out of the reckoning. I mean to say, it’s like a permanent structure made up of impermanent elements. And it’s impossible to live inside it—impossible to so without suffering from its instability, from its mass of lies. And then, you understand, you suddenly feel afraid to make use of the smallest detail that partakes of this instability. That’s what rebellion is. You doubt the value of words, of gestures, of what words denote—of ideas, simple associations of ideas, of dreams, and even of realities, of the clearest and most acute sensations. You even doubt your own doubt, the organization it takes over, the form it adopts. You’re left with nothing, nothing at all. You’re nothing any more, you’re a chameleon, an echo, a shade. That’s what society does to you, you understand?’

  ‘You’re a misanthropist?’

  ‘No. Why should I be? In fact it’s more serious than that, for I submit to being a man.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of politics? That’s a way for a man to commit himself to the community.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a way … And one of the cleanest that exist. But I consider that in that respect I still have some way to go; when one thinks of it, to believe in God is perhaps in itself a political commitment. But I have things to forget …’

  ‘To forget?’

  ‘Yes—lucidity, for example.’

  ‘Do you feel as though you had wasted your childhood?’

  ‘Yes, don’t you have a slight impression that—er—your childhood has been thrown away?’

  ‘My childhood? I don’t know.’

  ‘When did you begin working?’

  ‘When I was two.’

  ‘What were you learning, in those days?’

  ‘Latin, Greek, a few other languagues.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘And later on?’

  ‘When I was three I began to read the Greek and German philosophers. I began literature too, but I realized in a vague way that for me literature could only be a matter of examples, nothing more than examples. Science, chemistry, algebra, drawing, all came much later. I was—yes, I was six or seven by then.’

  Elmen

  ‘And you never stopped—’

  ‘Seven was the critical age for me. You understand, I’d assimilated too much, too quickly. I had to sift all that knowledge, to make it really my own. And besides, I still had no practical experience, nothing in the nature of a critical method. I was living solely for the sake of knowledge. To get to know more and more things, to feed on knowledge. But when I was seven I really began to understand. I knew that everything I was doing was my life, my personal life, my property. So then I began to think things over, and to write.’

  ‘What did you write?’

  ‘Everything and nothing. I took sheets of paper, the biggest I could find, and covered them with writing, almost without noticing it, almost at random. But it had no literary style, it was just writing.’

  ‘What did you do with the pages?’

  ‘I kept them for a very long time, thinking they might come in useful one day. Then, two years ago, I threw them in the dustbin. You understand, it wasn’t poetry, or essays, or novels, simply writing in the raw. For the pleasure of writing, or rather, from the need of that pleasure. In fact, as soon as I began to write in an organized way, I was disappointed. But that period, between the ages of seven and nine, was my great period. It was my first period of thinking, of thought in a state of nature, if you like, though not yet separate from the act of thinking, something painful and yet extremely agreeable. A groping, a determination to pin down something that was inside me. It was more like drawing than writing, as a matter of fact. The words were not yet connected up, they were pure concepts, they were free, they came in crowds, at a chaotic speed resembling that of life and matter; the sentences had practically no grammatical construction.’

  ‘Automatic writing, in a way?’

  ‘No, just the contrary. Automatic writing is more an attempt to find a universe that lies beyond concepts, by means of words. By means of images. Whereas what I was doing was more like an attempt to pass from the field of reading to the field of writing. Later on I tried to get back to this transition phase by inventing a language. I called it Elmen. Elmen was a language where words never had the same meaning twice. “Man” or “table” might be Bagoo, and then Stirnk, and then Ex, Tiplan, Azaz, Willahotosgueriynn, etc., just like that, indefinitely, according to the moment and the context. And it was a language, because for at least one person in the world it had something expressive, and something expressed. The result was that there were never two words the same, and never two that meant the same thing. A table was never a table—as is obvious in real life. I wrote some pages in Elmen too. But as it was impossible to re-read them, and they were merely pure writing, I soon gave it up. But I’ve always regretted that period, when writing meant nothing, was only a succession of approximations; nowadays I find human languages so meagre.’

  ‘Up to what age did you read the philosophers?’

  ‘I still read them.’

  ‘And metaphysics?’

  ‘At about eight or nine I had my scientific period too. Figures, you understand. Figures are ideograms, and to that extent they held my attention much more closely. I found something grand, something satisfying, in the abstractions of algebra and trigonometry. I spent a few months like that, learning theorems and applying them. But in the long run I realized it was merely a mechanism, and I soon got fed up. But all the same I retained a liking for the abstract, in a general way.’

  ‘And the practical sciences? Have you —?’

  ‘Those interested me too. Chemistry, zoology, physics. But I had no way of doing experimental work. Nobody would have allowed me into a laboratory, two or three years ago. And now it’s too late. I’ve lost the desire to launch into experimental groping, to take part in research myself. Although I really feel strongly that the whole concept of progress is bound up with science. But I prefer to look on, in detachment. To watch. To act without being drawn in.
’

  ‘And what line are you following at present?’

  ‘How do you mean, what line am I following?’

  ‘I mean, how do you see your future?’

  ‘But I told you that already: I don’t see anything. Observation is a gift in its own right. Why should I take up a profession?’

  ‘Then why did you agree to take part in “Double or Quits”?’

  ‘Oh, that—that happened a long time ago. It was a mistake. But in those days I didn’t know how degrading, how debasing it can be to make use of one’s brains to amuse a circus audience. Besides, my parents needed money, so I was under an emotional pressure. But I’ve regretted it since.’

  ‘All the same, that’s what has made it possible for you to—’

  ‘To do what? To become celebrated? To give lectures? Do you really suppose that’s what matters to me? No, no, it happened that way and that’s that, there’s nothing I can do about it; but I could have got along just as well without fame and money.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘…’

  ‘I was born believing’

  ‘When did you recieve faith?’

  ‘I never received it … I think I’m right in saying that as far back as I can remember, I’ve always had faith. I was born believing.’

  ‘Have you had any periods of uneasiness, of doubt?’

  ‘Never. It was when I was about eight or nine that I became really aware of religion, and of the possibility of being irreligious. Something left its mark on me; in those days I used to go to a very beautiful church where mass was sung marvellously. And strangely enough it wasn’t a sense of injustice that brought home to me the fact of the irreligious spirit, but a sense of perfection, of beauty, of the sublime. I was plunged alive into the divine universe, bathing in joy, and yet still here, on earth, a man, nothing but a man, small, petty, devoid of infinity! It was chiefly this apparent paradox that made me suffer. How was it possible to feel so completely what God must be, and to remain a man? But suffering never caused me to doubt, never. Until then I had been content to read the scriptures and certain religious books. But I had lingered chiefly on the admirable Ruysbroek. Scotus Erigena I found overwhelming, too. But it was chiefly Ruysbroek who formed me, so far as religion is concerned.’