Etc.: No End to Interpretation of Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur la terre

Abstract

A critical reappraisal of Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur terre may bring a realization that the text itself is the itinerant traveler, a vagabond temporarily sheltered in readings accorded to it while it awaits entry into heaven, where its meaning is revealed. A tale incorporating inhospitable interpretations, Le Voyageur sur terre charts a journey toward an impossible homecoming, where the confusion of narrative voices, origins, and identities is finally resolved in a celestial illumination of perfect clarity. As this paper argues, evidence of Green's protagonist Daniel O'Donovan's deliverance from the world is the exile of his narrative in the realm of incomprehension. What testifies to the integrity of the meaning of Green's story is the certainty that it cannot be grasped by confused and earthbound readers. The object of Green's Voyage is never to arrive but to pursue its endless journey through wrong interpretations, while maintaining a belief in a conclusive exegesis whose accuracy is a function of not being of this world. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol22/iss2/7 Etc.: No End to Interpretation of Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur terre Robert Ziegler Montana Tech A critical reappraisal of Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur terre may bring a realization that the text itself is the itinerant traveler, a vagabond temporarily sheltered in readings accorded to it while it awaits entry into heaven where its meaning is revealed. A tale incorporating inhospitable interpretations, Le Voyageur sur terre charts a journey toward an impossible homecoming, where the confusion of narrative voices, origins, and identities is finally resolved in a celestial illumination of perfect clarity. As Green's hero is doubled by a secret self whose automatic writing intends its own destruction, Green's story calls attention to its increasingly precarious status, thematizing its gradual dispersal and equating its dynamic with the exhaustion of its premise. As his work aims at its extinction, Green joins other contemporary authors for whom la finality de ecriture n'est peut-titre pas . . . le projet de ressusciter, dans un mouvement de creation et de recreation, le reel, mais bien plutOt de s 'en debarrasser, de l'epuiser 'the finality of writing is perhaps not the project to resuscitate, in a movement of creation and re-creation, the real, but rather to be rid of it, to exhaust it' (Rabate 133).' But whereas Dominique Rabate sees Proust and Camus deriving aesthetic satisfaction from their subject's annihilation in the act of writing, Green's conversion of an obscure self into transparent expression remains a trip that cannot conclude: 1' epuisement n'est pas un donne, it est quete, un chemin 'exhaustion is not a given; it is a quest, a path' (11). Indeed, in positing its reading as eschaton, Green's work does not subordinate its death to the production of new art but insists that it survive until its significance is complete. Inextricably woven into Green's text are both a reflection on the religious life and an interrogation of the value of the literary enter1 Ziegler: Etc.: No End to Interpretation of Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur Published by New Prairie Press 358 STCL, Volume 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1998) prise. Critics like Kathryn Wildgen have therefore tended to agree on the self-reflexive nature of Green's novella: this story with so much emphasis on reading and writing and making up stories . . . have we not a long meditation on the creative process written by a man still wracked with doubt about the suitability, even the morality, of his chosen profession? (213). Defined as a miscellany of the Biblical and Gothic tales that he reads, Daniel O'Donovan is also apprehended as the text he leaves behind. In this way, Green's story not only identifies its genre affiliation as the supernatural/fantastic; it also foregrounds as its subject the problematics of its reception. Recirculated among readers as its erroneously attributed meanings, Daniel's errant manuscript travels in search of understanding. Green's work thus becomes a corollary of God's creation, monde . . . livre dans son inachevement meme 'a world delivered in its very incompleteness' (Rabate 129). Distorted by the stupidity and malice of its audience, condemned to wander eternally, the story defines its correct interpretation as the one it never receives. Finding no asylum in the world, it remains an ouvrage abandonne, une creation imparfaite qui n'est jamais en passe de devenir oeuvre 'an abandoned work,' an imperfect creation which is always on the way to becoming an oeuvre' (Rabate 129). As Daniel projects the perfect interlocutor as his Doppelgtinger Paul, who burns the books that had prevented Daniel from achieving self-knowledge, Green's book defines its ideal reader as the God who sees but never responds and whose silence is a guarantee of interpretive lucidity. Since conditioning his textual address is the essential feature of Green's protagonist, Daniel's loneliness motivates him to create Paul as the blank page which, when written, will provide him temporary sanctuary. [Monologue exterieur qui cherche a susciter presence manquante d'autrui pour accueillir sa confession 'an exterior monologue which seeks to provoke the presence of a missing other in order to receive his confession' (Rabate 17), Daniel's manuscript is a plea to which an unexpressed compassion is the answer. But as this paper argues, evidence of Daniel's deliverance from the world is the exile of his narrative in the realm of incomprehension. What testifies to the integrity of the meaning of Green's story is the certainty that it cannot be grasped by confused and earthbound readers. The object of the Voyage is never to arrive but to pursue its endless journey through wrong interpretations, while maintaining a belief in a conclusive exegesis whose accuracy is a function of not being of this world. 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 22, Iss. 2 [1998], Art. 7 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol22/iss2/7 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1447