The Interrogation by J. M. G. Le Clézio

First published:Le Procès-Verbal, 1963 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Para-realism

Time of plot: Summer in the early 1960’s

Locale: Carros, France

Principal characters

• Adam Pollo, a young man
• Michèle, his acquaintance

The Story:

Adam Pollo is almost thirty years old, inordinately tall and thin; he looks disheveled and, like a sick and frightened animal, has found a refuge in a deserted house overlooking the sea. He lies on a deck chair, sunbathing by an open window. He writes in a notebook letters to “dear Michèle.” Adam is tormented by innumerable fears, and he struggles to remember whether he just left the army or just left a mental home. Living alone and surviving on beer, cigarettes, and cookies, Adam has rejected society, its values, and the human interaction it requires.

Generally shy, Adam can be assertive with Michèle. The two are in a café. In spite of Michèle’s repeated efforts to avoid the subject, Adam inflicts upon her a detailed description of the rape she had suffered at his hands. The rape was, apparently, only “in theory,” but Michèle’s public humiliation by the story that Adam insistently tells “for other people’s benefit” is very real. Adam is asserting his virility. He also is seeking confirmation of the rape, a fragment of certainty in his uncertain past. Michèle refuses that confirmation. His attitude, which borders on cruelty, deprives him of the help she could have provided.

Adam does not work; he borrows francs, here and there, from Michèle, and he kills time by doing things such as visiting the zoo or following a dog on a random stroll through town. He discovers a rat in the house where he is living and becomes so disturbed that he launches an epic and victorious battle against the intruder.

For a brief moment, Adam’s interaction with Michèle is beneficial. She visits him, they have a beer, and chat. She calms him down when he anticipates that a war might erupt and shake the world. She sets the record straight and he agrees: “so that’s it. The atomic war has not happened yet,” he tells himself. He repeats that, as she has said, he was too young to fight in the 1940 war. Adam is relieved. His fears evaporate and he sees the world as peaceful. Soon his demons reappear: He analyzes the sentence “What time is it?” grammatically, logically, and metaphysically, and concludes that these four words are killing him; he insults Michèle for interrupting his meditations, throws her on the ground, and then takes her away, “with his mind far away” and concentrated on the potential trajectory of a shark swimming along the coast. Finally, he runs off by himself, stands petrified at the culminating point of the road, and contemplates from there “his own intelligence of the world.”

Adam’s solitude is now complete and his activities, such as asking a salesgirl for a record he knows does not exist, are more futile than ever. He finds entertaining the dragging out to sea of the corpse—like a giant tadpole—of a drowned man. Adam searches for Michèle from bar to bar and nightclub to nightclub. He finds her in a park in the company of an American tourist. Adam is drunk and obnoxious. Michèle soon betrays him; she gives away his hiding place to the police. Adam is chased from his Eden—the house on the hill—the following morning.

Adam has nothing left but his words. He stands with his back to the sea; his voice grows stronger, and passers-by, surprised by his prophetic tone, stop to listen to him. He speaks faster and faster, is more and more exalted, and finally becomes incoherent. “In a second, it was over,” declares the next day’s newspaper: Adam had exposed himself.

Adam likes his little room in the mental home. It is clean and the window bars form a geometrical design, as do the tiles on the floor. Adam meets a group of seven students and the head psychiatrist. The questions asked are innocuous enough, but Adam, in his striped pajamas, feels uncomfortable. A young woman is the only one to show him some sympathy. When she declares that Adam is not insane, the doctor corrects her forcefully by reading the long diagnostic of mental disorders that was established upon Adam’s admittance. Deprived of support, Adam lapses into torpor. He shakes himself up, and out of his mouth comes a bombastic tirade, full of confused and irrelevant scholarly references. Nobody pays attention any longer; Adam feels invisible and becomes even more incoherent; his words sound like rumbling noises. A student writes a conclusion in his exercise book: aphasia. Adam is back in his bed, hoping never to be released.

Bibliography

Amoia, Alba, and Bettina Knapp, eds. Multicultural Writers Since 1945. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. This collection of essays examining the work of postwar multicultural writers includes a five-page introduction to Le Clézio. Basic but useful.

Moser, Keith A.“Privileged Moments” in the Novels and Short Stories of J. M. G. Le Clézio: His Contemporary Development of a Traditional French Literary Device. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. A book-length study of lyrical experiences in Le Clézio’s fiction. Includes the chapter “Adam Pollo’s Alienation and Existential Anguish.”

Redfern-West, Robert. Le Clézio: A Literary Topography of New Departures, Poetic Adventure, and Sensual Ecstasy—The Man and His Works. Palo Alto, Calif.: Academica Press, 2009. A scholarly interpretive study of Le Clézio examining his life—including his global travels—and his works. Develops his main themes and places them in the context of contemporary world literature.

Waelti-Walters, Jennifer R. J. M. G. Le Clézio. Boston: Twayne, 1977. This biographical account of Le Clézio’s life and works covers the period from 1963 to 1975. Includes a clear and complete chapter on The Interrogation.