The girl is somewhere down there, now, in a sealed compartment. Her travelling companions are white-masked mercenaries, ruffians carrying the war into the far corners of the globe, devouring each other in the process. She is travelling through all the galleries of the reinforced-concrete shelter, she and the dark glasses of fear, because at that moment, on the surface, a kind of great white bomb is bursting, consuming everything, even the water, with the fierceness of its sudden light. War is the destruction of thought.
The world has begun. Nobody knows where, or how, but the fact remains that it has just come into being. Those who said that its end was near were entirely mistaken, and those who spoke of dotage, decadence, death and so on were speaking for themselves. They were so afraid of youth that they dared not look around.
Today is barely the beginning of the primary era. Great movements ripple over the surface of the earth: great motions of birth, contractions, spasms. Why is it that nobody wants to see these things? Life is striving ceaselessly to emerge from all its enfolding lips, as it burrows its way towards the air.
The war is everywhere. A general state of war means that something is in the process of happening. Volcanoes sprout in the middle of city squares, roads split open, and deep crevasses spurt out a stream of lava and heat and energy. Rock masses shatter into fragments. The sea rages and boils at the foot of the cliffs, scours the echoing caves. There is steam, and electricity, there are clouds, and lightning flashes.
The earth began yesterday. One can still remember with an effort, if one casts one’s mind back. Nothing has changed. The unreal landscape is studded with lumpish, barbaric blocks of cement. The iron pipes of the scaffoldings rise in networks above the ground. Waves run busily through the air. There is bracken higher than a sequoia, there are carnivorous plants, carnivorous animals, carnivorous machines. The machaerodus, the dinotherium, the tyrannosaurus were nothing in comparison. Now there are bigger and heavier monsters whose jaws are armed with sabre-teeth, monsters with claws, and talons, and heels for grinding to dust. There are machines as big as mountains, machines that nothing can kill. They lurch blindly forward, gouging with their caterpillar-tracks, uprooting with their hundreds of arms, breathing flames or deadly gases; they own, not just a single heart or head, but thousands of them. When night falls, the sky turns red and trembles above the wilderness of cement. Powerful lights throw bright beams, tall furnaces burn more enduringly than any volcano. This war is alive. It takes empty buildings, fossilized shells, decaying teeth, and gnaws away at them until they are reduced to powder. There are great gestures that sweep space, there are rending winds. When the sun rises in the east for the six thousandth time, it looks just the same as before, like the dilated pupil of a six-day-old baby. Everything within, everything enclosed, is rising inexorably to the surface. Carapaces break apart, and one can glimpse another skin. Everything is full of substance. What place is this? Where does one live? All one can do is to follow the movements of the underground currents. Language can no longer contain itself, it is longer than any speech, it simply writes what it writes, without any prompting.
Youth and newness are unceasing. Eternal buildings. Eternal roads. Eternal airports. Flames that burn for thousands of years on end. Swift birds that make a noise like thunder as they dart across the white sky. There are so many shapes and forms. Beauty is at balance upon the earth, raising its transparent peaks. The circular motorways are loud with noise, quivering rings that gradually unfurl. The trees of the jungle are growing everywhere, digging their roots into the asphalt crust. Tropical creepers, threads, palm-fronds, glass thorns, celluloid fruit, millions of tiny steel filings, they are all alike. There are so many displays of the aurora borealis in shop windows. There are so many meteors flashing around the crystal domes, surging up from the image-machines. There is so much thunder and lightning. There are so many suns, stars, moons, all moving, crossing each others’ paths, overtaking each other, according to their mechanical courses. But it is not in the sky that they are to be seen: it is here, on the ceilings and walls. There are so many eclipses, spiralling galaxies, opaque nebulae. Clouds trail smoothly across the rooms. Chiffons return the light’s rays: either very hard, and then they are white, or very gently, and, see, they are black.
The world has just begun, as all the cataclysms plainly show. The catastrophe was permanent; that was clear to anyone who knew how to keep his eyes and ears open. When a world is coming into being, there are bound to be these seethings at the core of matter, these blisters disfiguring the skin, these strains and stresses. There are these reddish glows of burning embers, like those of cigarettes, for example; these acrid odours of petrol and oil; these noises of valves and push-rods; these incessant comings and goings. When the world is in the process of appearing, many people encounter death. On the fields of battle, belly pierced by bayonet thrusts, or else kneeling in the mud of the ricefields, face scorched by flame-throwers. Many people have died defending a field, a hut, a bridge. The antediluvian animals kill, and go on killing, and when at last they fall they crush whole towns, whole peoples, beneath them.
All these things are happening all the time. They materialize beneath the feet as one walks down the street, they materialize before the eyes. There are some things that flash and vanish again within a fraction of a second, glowing sparks inside engines and electric light bulbs, microscopic bombardments of slabs of lead. There are things which appear so slowly that no-one knows they are there until generations have come and gone. The war has need of every cell in every brain. Words throng and jostle, covering the sky like bats, multiplying like larvae, spreading their haze of plankton, voyaging far into space. There are stars so distant that they might almost not exist. There are specks of dust so near that they penetrate the body and travel in the bloodstream.
The towns and cities have just come into being. They are still trembling with effort, unsure of themselves, their concrete columns teetering on the edge of cliffs. How low the horizon seems! The deep blue of the sky presses down with all its weight upon the fragile bone structures. There is a great deserted square that has started to sprout white stone cubes with narrow windows, and here a little girl is sometimes to be seen. Her feet planted solidly on the ground, she stands in the centre of this square, her hair glowing in the sun. She looks straight ahead, and her eyes register the flimsy ramparts quivering in the wind, the balloons swollen with air. She looks on, uncomprehendingly, but there are many things that she already knows. There is something written at her feet, in black letters. It says, simply:
DACRYL CLOTHES THE BRAVE NEW WORLD
It has all just begun . . . The seventy-storey buildings sending their tortuous towers soaring into the sky. The buildings with 8,400 windows, rising higher than the surrounding haze. The 433-foot-high buildings floating above Jacksonville. The 840-million-dollar buildings hollowing out their Aeolian rocks. The high plateaux of cement spreading out their deserts in the air. The pyramids in the sand, the white tombs pointing towards the sun, the temples of Thebes, the Acropoles, the Teocalli, the torch-lit fortresses. Streams of lava, waves of steel, wind, light, all flow between their walls. Crumbling stones dribble the dust of decay. Rocks split in the fierce frost, or shatter under the blows of hammers. Whirlpools slowly advance and retreat; the docks at ports are full of black water one moment, and empty the next. Suspension bridges span the gulfs, tunnels thrust into mountain sides. In a single day the building sites destroy whole years of memories. There are innumerable things striving to appear, seeking to overthrow all barriers in their way. All the mouths are straining together to suck in air, thrusting their gasping holes upwards towards the sphere of space, imbibing greedily with a whistling noise. The world is so vast, so animated. Everywhere there are eyes, lungs, sexes, bellies, nerves. It would be an endless task to witness all the movements, read all the thoughts, count all the microbes. One voyages without ever halting, through the cities and across the newly fashioned spaces, one travels up and down all the world’s e
scalators. One flies through the air, above the stationary clouds. One travels over the countless thousands of roads and avenues and outer boulevards. Here . . . there . . . what does it all mean? Over there, elsewhere, and equally, above, below, within. It would be an endless task to tell the story of the earth’s creation. There are not sufficient words in existence, yet, to keep pace with war. They are not strong enough to use for building brick walls behind which one might feel truly safe. Danger lurks everywhere. Fear is dazzling, fear streaks through the mind at the speed of light. Joy and woe, pain and passion break into foam, waves wafting from the far end of time, and in the same instant they have thrown their bridge across to the opposite shore: and she who wants to understand is exactly like a gnat walking on a window-pane. But meanwhile a woman squats down, ejects her child from the depths of her belly, then buries the plasma and the cord in front of the door of her home. Thought emerges tirelessly from the countless thousands of brains, rises in smoke, sparkles on car bonnets and the windows of skycrapers. War is thought.
That is how things happened, then, at the beginning of the primary era. Trees and shrubs grew on the tops of buildings. Tables were littered with strange albums of coloured photos showing women’s faces and bodies. These books would have loved to be mirrors. They would have loved to speak of beauty, of the future, using simple phrases and very pure illustrations. But they remained mere objects among other objects, mere weapons.
The city closes its series of doors and shutters and blinds and grilles and iron curtains. The dark glasses glitter once again. The golden eyelid that confers invisibility closes over the plexiglass helmets.
Someone has made an attempt to understand. One day, someone began thinking about war, wanted to find out what war was all about, and how it would end. Someone has wanted to break windows in order to breathe, has wanted to launch words in quest of this kind of peace. Then, has vanished.
Those who will see peace are not yet there, have not even been conceived.
I myself am not really sure that I am born.
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Epub ISBN: 9781407072586
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Copyright © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1970
English translation copyright © Jonathan Cape, 1973
J.M.G. Le Clézio has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in France under the title La Guerre in 1970 by Editions Gallimard
First published in Great Britain in 1973 by Jonathan Cape
First published in English in the United States in 1973 by Atheneum
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ISBN 9780099530497
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