THE FAUX-NAÏF

Few critics have addressed seriously the role of the child in Tournier's fiction. However, in his recent monograph David Gascoigne devotes an entire chapter to this, the most contentious issue in Tournier criticism. Gascoigne alights on a personal anecdote recorded at the start of Le Vent Paraclet in which Tournier relates the story of his grandfather who, as a six-year-old child at the time of the Prussian invasion of 1871, was made to hold up a heavy volume of music for the conductor of the German military band. The story seems to justify the placement of a typical Tournier epigraph—‘un enfant en larmes caché par l'oeuvre qu'il porte’—to which Gascoigne accords special importance. He argues suggestively that not only Le Vent Paraclet but ‘the whole of Tournier's oeuvre is . . . sustained by the figure of the suffering child’. Referring to Vendredi and Le Roi des aulnes, Gascoigne shows how Tournier asks his readers to juggle with metaphor in order better to appreciate his novelistic presentation of ‘two of the uglier products of civilisation, colonial violence and mechanised warfare, as expressions of child-adult conflict’.

Gascoigne's reading is consonant with Tournier's dislike of an allpervasive bourgeois morality, which the latter often parodies in the invective of his own celebrated ‘provocations’, both literary and nonliterary. 3 Tournier argues that a peculiarly nineteenth-century morality—‘La pudibonderie qui ne triompha nulle part autant que dans l'Angleterre victorienne’ (VP, 61)—has brought about a large-scale sanitisation of the modern educational programme in most western countries. Historically, the eighteenth century was the point of transition, the point at which Diderot, Voltaire and the other ‘moderns’ argued vociferously for a new system of education which should focus on learning about the philosophy, literature, and social and political structures of the modern world, rather than on gaining knowledge of the Classics. These critical interventions, which were intended to produce the active citizen rather than the passive ‘clerc’, have resulted, according to Tournier, in the marginalisation of what he calls ‘une éducation morale’, the idea associated with the Jesuit colleges that education should be about the formation of the whole person, that any system of education should attend to the spiritual and moral development of the child as well as to his or her intellectual and social needs.