PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
The Flood
J. M. G. Le Clézio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice and was educated at the University College of Nice and at Bristol and London universities. His knowledge of English enabled him to work closely with his translator on his debut novel, The Interrogation, which won the Prix Renaudot in 1963. Since then he has written over forty highly acclaimed books and has been translated into thirty-six languages. The Interrogation is published by Penguin and three of his early novels are now Penguin Modern Classics: The Flood, Terra Amata and Fever. Le Clézio divides his time between France (Nice, Paris and Brittany), New Mexico and Mauritius. In 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO
The Flood
Translated from the French by Peter Green
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published as Le Déluge by Editions Gallimard 1966
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1967
Published in Penguin Classics 2008
Copyright © J. M. G. Le Clézio 1966
Translation copyright © Peter Green, 1967
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192839-5
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
AT the beginning there were clouds, and more clouds, heavy, black, blown by intermittent gusts of wind, contained within a ring of mountains on the horizon. Everything began to grow dark, objects took on a regular pattern, lapped scales like thin blades of steel, or chain-mail, that frittered away what little brightness still remained. Other objects, themselves sources of light, began to flicker feebly and unhappily, overwhelmed by the vast proportions of some ill-defined yet imminent happening, made ridiculous by the mere fact of comparison to this enemy (as it were) against whom they had to sally forth and do battle. The movement gradually faltered, not through any loss of intensity or change in approach, but because its impetus was exhausted by the effort to hold up the advance of this freezing universal oblivion—its very stillness imbued with a quality of eternity—now creeping on, and on, biting into the earth, swallowing it inch by inch, infiltrating any manifestation of activity, breaking up the established harmonies of contrast, penetrating to the core of all matter, annihilating the very origins of life itself. Delicate and paper-light, the texture of darkness lay upon every surface, creating a multiplicity of silhouettes, and enhancing the intensity of such brightness as there was to a quite remarkable degree, so that a single point of light, reflected from the broken glass lying along the sidewalk, where the water-truck had crushed it, blazed out for something like a hundred light-years over an area bordering on infinity, and with the fierceness of three or more suns.
Any part of the view—as it might be four hundred square yards of concreted surface, occupied by buildings made with cement and steel girders—now seemed a kind of weird glacial desert—a desert set down on top of the living soil, a tidy, planned desert, at once accommodating and abrasive, and self-contained, that is, equipped with an absolute, all-inclusive scheme of things, in which movement of bicycle + wilderness of streets echoing women’s footsteps + trickle of water seeping along a crack in the macadam + railings in sharp perspective + an almost complete absence of loud, shattering noises + fourteen storeys + cold air in frozen blocks like slabs of marble and a flurry of artificial rain smelling of polythene indicated the exact steps that had to be taken, plotted the rules of the inhuman game.
The various elements—all sorted and classified in their card-index universe—rearranged themselves in accordance with this new factor (time of day, atmospheric pressure, degree of humidity and temperature) and quickly produced a terrible, diabolical image, which allowed for every move being played several times over, an infinite number of times. A children’s maze, in which all the paths converged on the same spot, opposite the site of the buried treasure, where pirate and crocodile lay in wait together. A strange world, hard and infallible, in which not the tiniest rivulet flowed at random, not a single flower protruded through the protective asphalt, not a tree lived, not a door was opened, not one cigarette fell and was stubbed out, unless it was so willed by that vast, solitary, nameless demiurge who parcelled out all things in the world, set his mark upon them, and bound them into the structure of his formal pattern.
A world in which all objects, every atom could be expressed by the letter A, and every happening and construct, of whatever sort, traced out the formula of the magic square:
A A A A
A A A A
A A A A
A A A A
—that is to say, in which they kept up a constant process of simplification and purification, until the moment (impossible to describe it) was reached at which event and object, chain and link, were merged in a single phenomenon, A. The moped moved along the section of street between corner X and street-lamp Y, with a fading sound and reflected light glinting out from its hubs. But the moped as such was limited to this particular stretch of street, to the sound it made, to a glitter of light. In a moment its motion would be arrested, perhaps for a thousand years, or alternatively it might repeat, again and again, that quick, rhythmic passage from corner X to street-lamp Y, till the movement itself became the expression of its being. The rain would always go on falling here, the sidewalk would stretch away to the right for all eternity, yet both would be something different, rain and sidewalk no longer; there would be no more moped, no more corner, no more street-lamps, either lit or unlit, no more peeling walls, no more sounds of chains or wet tyres, no more bleak, chilly smells or dew-heavy smoke-drift hanging in mid-air; instead there would be a small, peaceful, undisturbed picture, a still-frozen image, dead before it had a chance to achieve immortality, part of a game which was no longer understood. Like pictures with such titles as ‘View of Port-Louis and the Pic des Tois-Mamelles’, or ‘The Crossing of the Beresina’, or ‘Engraving of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament’, and so on
. Everything would come to this in the end. Meanwhile the water went on trickling down the gutters, and a whole host of small objects floated this way and that in the puddles along the road. It was the beginning.
Yet this was without importance, because from the moment the game began, the world had ceased to be—and to have been. There was a certain number—a little above the predictable average—of ideal curves and perfect angles. These were the last to fall, since they embodied, over and above such things as ‘Imbert and Phelippeau Building’ and ‘Rue Paganini’ and ‘War Memorial’ and ‘Atlantis Cinema’, various intellectual concepts—not to mention a number of vague and ill-defined smells, such as those of smoke, or earth, or cooking soup, or even smells tout court, adaptable to hundreds of different requirements. In the same way colours, though tagged with a name three-quarters of the time, could conjure up an illusive sense of abstraction. Reds, whites, browns, greens, blues—it was often because of them that the landscape began to split and crack apart.
A patch of white, for instance, might constitute the initial fissure; then, as on a sheet of glass or a frozen lake, other fissure-lines would radiate out around this central crack. Starting from the point of white, the break-up would spread and deepen visibly, gradually disintegrating both the object and its context. The sequence produced: white—round—pale light—3 m. 12 cm.—humming and flickering—heat—steel, bronze, smelting—verticality….
Gently the fissure would expand and encroach, so that, viewed in perspective, one object could break up another by a simple process of superimposition. Similar movements were being set up at countless different points, and the mere prolongation of two straight lines, in accordance with roughly geometrical principles, was enough to do the trick. Each fresh viewpoint increased the fragmentation of matter, so that it became an easy matter to achieve the demolition of a twelve-storey apartment block, with 198 windows, in less than sixty seconds. A series of these windows (the light glinting off them took on a violet tinge) would initiate the movement and then repeat it inexhaustibly, so that the ascending progression became generalized upward motion. This spatial development was accompanied by a parallel phenomenon in the time-factor: the extremities of time were looped together, duration bent into a circle, beginning and end merged together, establishing the perfect sphere. Just as the first and the twelfth window were no longer distinguishable, but both subsumed to the same idealized movement of ceasing-to-be and coming-into-being, so the first and the twenty-fourth hour, the first and the sixtieth second, shaken together by the uncertain rhythm of a no longer forward-moving time-sequence, would come and go, achieve and conclude their existence millions of times over, preserved from any progression by some dark hour, by a particular negative second, the retroactive impulse of which—predictable and inevitable as the next tick of a metronome—exemplified a species of mechanical perfection.
This, or something like it, was what must be taking place now at this point on earth, this complex sub-section of the world. It seemed to be decomposing like an animal’s cadaver, to all outward appearances intact still, but in reality decaying throughout, tortured and gnawed in all its parts. The walls of houses, the surfaces of the streets, the outlines of apartment blocks, the very air and the noises carried on it—all these, when seen from a distance, had a solid quality about them, reminiscent of bronze or marble; and yet the mere proximity of conscious awareness had a somehow stiffening effect on them, so that they revealed the existence of their own internal rottenness. Under one’s scrutiny they swarmed and faded, vanishing darkly behind a veil of clouds and mist. Confusion blurred previously clear outlines, overlaid the colours of down and hair, separated out previously pure elements, broke up the logical order of things, denied the evidence of the senses. Everything was shifting and reverberating simultaneously. There was a sound like the sea, a rumbling stillness, a universal thunderous roar. Mopeds sprouted feathers, men and women were spotted with peacock-eyes, skies took on checkerboard patterns. Hitherto indeterminate colorations formed into patterns of black and white, then regrouped themselves according to their two basic and contrasting characteristics, light against dark. The expression of form was reduced to a schematic minimum—straight line, spiral, angle. Sounds, smells, silhouettes, all hived off into their separate groups, teamed up afresh. Slowly and quietly a kind of vast, meticulous fresco was coming into being, an unchecked, passionless advance by sappers from one redoubt to the next. Anyone overtaken by the freeze-up very quickly cracked and broke apart; his hot and cold elements sloughed off around his feet like a cast skin, and almost at once his naked body could be seen rising from the confusion, sharp and thin as a knife-blade, and setting its mark on the rest of the process, with a series of distorted movements and nervous twitchings that verged on caricature. Then it would take on the semblance of a statue or an engraving; a few bold strokes and there it was, burning like a torch above the world, a world at long last restored to pristine clarity, to the realm of abstract ideas, indescribable in its vividness and beauty, a species of intellectual hell.
Flight was out of the question: each object and being was caught by surprise, in mid-flight. There was an instant when chaos began, a day on which light began to fade and the outlines of every feature were scribbled, as though in charcoal, on a surface more virgin than paper and harder than any stone. All was enmity and watchfulness; the circle closed little by little, it was as though great ramparts were there, growing thicker, moving closer to one another. The universe was being transformed into a room, its windows opened on to other windows. Men’s eyes fabricated a kind of impenetrable barbed-wire entanglement. What had previously been free and variable was now locked in a mad immutable pattern. Objects were replaced by sharp, angular figures, trees were transformed into Turkish scimitars, houses into sharp mountain ridges, flowers to jagged, bristling peaks. The four corners of the horizon swung in towards one another, tilting up vertically. It was like being cut off in a fortress, with the drawbridges going up on every side. It was now that the banked up clouds appeared on the scene, now that the first skirmishing movement towards shadow and darkness began. Cut off from the horizon in every direction, the town now writhed round on itself like some mortally stricken rhinoceros. The wind had turned to stone; though it blew still, there was no movement in it. It had become a monument erected to the memory of movement, and its downward-dragging gravity held a dead weight of millions of tons. In one quarter of this shattered town the forces of cold and silence had established themselves. A two-dimensional boulevard, its chaotic movement frozen into stillness, hung poised in mid-flow. Bare trees renewed the sap in their branches for all eternity. Adjacent blocks of flats gaped vacantly into the void, not yet in ruins, but no longer habitable. The windows that opened from those wan walls still grouped themselves in a regular pattern, but their character had changed; now they were nightmare freaks of fancy, a spectacle as sinister and mechanistic as the windows of a train moving past in a station. They hinted at a phenomenon as disturbing as it was powerful; they were dream-figments of an exhausted brain, which had somehow contrived to by-pass the pitfalls of stupor and oblivion: monotonous, blackened, repetitive features of this burnt-out landscape, ubiquitous and eternal.
There was no further relationship between them save in the context of these endlessly forming vertical or horizontal brick courses. All that had been done at other times and in other places was still contained in them. It was there, automatically, undeniably, on the façade of this apartment block; it offered a totality of vision, built up from the cumulative sum of various experiences, various likely inferences, which was self-perpetuating and progressively narrowing down its field. From town to town, from porch to porch, from tree to Cadillac, to railings, back-alleys, streets, corners, finally arriving at this vast white regular plane surface, this wall with its twelve storeys, 198 windows, eighteen doors; with its bustling corridors, its elevators (movements downwards, upwards, sideways), its diagonals, zigzags, lozenges, crosses, and the rest of it.
This was where the trail had led to, this many-sounding wall (broken murmur of the rising tide, trains whistling in tunnels, tapping of feet on stone steps, hum of traffic, police car sirens, squeal of tyres, whining jet aircraft). It was there, amongst other places, that the great noisy hall, a kind of ghost-stadium, had come into being: a hall in which the loudspeaker, like a collective mouth, had carved out its particular niche.
Later the façade itself had collapsed. The elements of existence had, if that was possible, contracted still further: the world was shrinking in on itself, like a pool of spilt and evaporating petrol, that seems to move upwards towards some point in the sky as its total area diminishes. It had retreated from the outer edges of the building, withdrawn its frontiers until they comprised only a few rows of windows. For a while it had been contained between the eighth and second horizontal rows, and the tenth and the third vertical ones. Then it had retreated still further, slipping along the wall, tearing loose fragments of light and sound as it went. Now it had reached the last window on the third floor, window number thirty-nine. It was here that life had chosen to maintain itself, an intense and blindingly bright life, a star that concentrated within itself all the hundreds and hundreds of square yards which made up the town. On this square of violet-tinted glass the world had formed a sheer, outjutting mountain, endlessly toppling, collapsing, reforming, marking time, gleaming in rainbow iridescence. Here time still moved on, perhaps, in a film-strip of memories, unleashing its rough blows against the glass, fighting its profound and mysterious battle. It was the core of what used to be termed relativity, colours without colour, nameless names, inaudible sounds, transparent and volatile odours. Window number thirty-nine had stripped bare an entire world, leaving its inhabitants dead or naked, uncovering the harsh peaks and reefs, the bones of existence, all around it. Elsewhere all was blanched white: skeleton squares and streets, the fossil remains of men and dogs lay abandoned here and there beneath the scorching sun of awareness. They aged gently, powdered over with dust and sand, like so many huge shells cast up by the sea. Window number thirty-nine in the block—blacker and more concentrated than a child’s eye—drew them irresistibly to itself, sparked off their powder-trails of desire. Parched hair-lines converged on its centre like so many luminous rays. The rain drummed down on these bony relics with a soft, caressing hiss; and between each separate drop of water, each sonorous explosion, there sprang up a spinning vortex of wind which redirected the centrifugal elements towards the centre of the window-pane. The earth’s scales were hard and insensitive, like those on a fish’s sides. Torpor swam in the air; the great cavern of silence extended its vaulted roof still further. Like a loudspeaker in reverse, the window’s gullet swallowed up the sum of all noises in the town, and left nothing but tragic calm behind. No one could look steadily at it without flinching: it was a second sun, black and mournful, spreading out its rays of darkness. Within its globe matter fused, boiled, endlessly bubbling over and through itself. Ice had formed at the heart of the volcano’s turbulence: the tension on the glass was so strong that the whole earth seemed to tremble because of it, and the slightest thing, one felt, might trigger off the explosion.
The Flood Page 1
