The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Mirror of Ideas by Michel Tournier
James Sallis

Michel Tournier. The Mirror of Ideas. Trans. Jonathan F. Krell. Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1998. 137 pp. $25.00.

One’s response to the work of Michel Tournier is likely to fall on either side of a great divide, drawn there by political as much as by literary considerations. For thirty-plus years Tournier has gone his headstrong way, out of step with much of contemporary literature and in direct opposition to virtually every dominant strain in the French novel. Failed philosopher, earnest didact, nonbeliever in human progress, the man’s a puzzle. However one feels about Tournier, no one quite knows what to do with him.
Much of the force of novels such as Friday and The Ogre derives from his play with contraries, suspension bridges hung between sens and écriture, structure and freedom. Tournier ever longs to entrap in the single event, in the single thought or word, both the elemental and cultured, historical and perverse, anarchic and fascistic.
So it is with The Mirror of Ideas, fifty-eight brief essays exploring such dualities as “Man and Woman,” “The Willow and the Alder,” “Act and Potency,” “The Absolute and the Relative.” Most run a page and a half, the longest just under three. This, for instance, is his one-page summary of all Western philosophy: “In the game of Being and Nothingness, one can state that the Being of Heraclitus is eaten away by Nothingness like a piece of fruit by a host of worms.” Speaking of Gaston Bachelard, this book’s dedicatee, Tournier has written that “one approaches the absolute by means of laughter.” One imagines the two of them tipping hats as they pass one another in the street, this Absolute and this Tournier, both of them laughing. [James Sallis]