Relire Désert (1980) de Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Abstract

Désert (1980) is a landmark novel, first and foremost for personal reasons but also for its location at the junction of several French intellectual and aesthetic dynamics. The work marks a significant stage in Le Clézio’s career as a writer. Whereas his previous novels, from Le Procès-verbal (1963) onwards, evoked contemporary (even futuristic) urban spaces and their perils, Désert (1980) is set between the desert of Morocco and the city of Marseille, from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. The novel engages Le Clézio’s work in a more assertive representation of travel and foreign countries. It also encounters several French intellectual movements: a critical evaluation of colonization, growing ecological concerns, the evocation of the difficult migration from the Maghreb to France, and a fascination for the desert space. Considering all these elements, the paper proposes a socio-critical re-reading of this important novel.