Male Maternity in Michel Tournier's: Le Roi des Aulnes

Author(s): Ursula Fabijancic

Source: French Forum , Spring 2004, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 2004), pp. 69-90
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40552326

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Ursula Fabijancic

Male Maternity in Michel Tournier's

Le Roi des Aulnes

Introduction
Inspired in part by the Book of Genesis and Plato's Banquet, Michel
Tournier's myth of Adam before the Fall as an androgynous "porte-
femme et porte-enfant, perpétuellement en proie à une transe ero-
tique - possédant-possédé" (ra 90)1 expresses the author's Utopian
nostalgia for sexual self-sufficiency and wholeness. Marriage, patri-
archy's attempt to solder the three, this "trilogie œdipienne" (Monès
587) - man/woman/child - back together again into the original fam-
ily unit is, in his view, a "solution dérisoire" (ra 26).2 Of all human
bonds between adults, the heterosexual one is the weakest, held
together coercively by inequality and obligatory gender roles, both of
which widen further the already existing rift between differing, if not
incompatible, individuals. Alternative solutions, such as identical
twin, lesbian and homosexual couples, circumvent gender distinctions.
But they prove to be merely pale approximations of lasting self-
containment and one-ness. Lacking always one of the two genders and
of course the child, these couples cannot complete the initial threesome
that was united by a human bond stronger than any other, since it was
both and at the same time erotic and maternal.
In Le Roi des Aulnes (The Eri-King), Tournier turns his attention to
the only other possible human bond, that between an adult and a child,
which he expresses through his image of the pédophore, a man carry-
ing a (male) child on his shoulders. The metaphor is obviously a vari-
ant of that of the "grand ancêtre androgyne" (ra 90), imbued with the
same nostalgic yearning. Tournier explores the similarities between
Adam and Abel Tiffauges with tenderness and a great deal of humor.
Firstly, their gender is ambivalent. While both are male, they are far

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 70 / French Forum/ Spring 2004/Vol. 29, No. 2

from masculine. Adam is hermaphrodite, and Abel, micro génitomor-

phe, "au seuil de l'impuissance" (16). Secondly, although male, both
are "porte-enfant," therefore female. The woman is not so much absent
as she is subsumed. Motherhood is a physical attribute of Adam: he is
a mother (and a father). Through his "perversion"3 and vocation of la
phorie (from the Greekpherein: to carry), Abel too is a mother of sorts.
Tournier playfully exploits the double meaning of "porter un enfant":
to carry a child and to be pregnant. Thirdly, while being adults, both
are also children. Adam is a child: it is one-third of his physical make-
up. Abel too is physically and intimately connected to the child: as the
antlers are part of a stag, so the child on his shoulders seems to him a
continuation, an extension of his body. And by a kind of diffusion, the
child's proximity lets Abel share in its pre-pubescent innocence. And
finally, the child completes them, makes them whole, as men. In the
case of Adam, the child is physical proof of his virility. For Abel, the
child, like the antlers, is the phallus that reaches proudly upward rather
than hides, shrunken, in the lower regions of his body. And so Abel, as
Tournier painstakingly shows, succeeds in attaining to some degree
Adam's Utopian state by the mere holding of a child.
What is the nature of Abel's bond with a child that makes it more
satisfying than any relationship he could have with an adult? In his post-
script to Le Roi des Aulnes, Philippe de Monès points to part of the
answer by defining Abel's phorie as "la vocation suprême de l'homme:
le porte-enfant, l'homme-mère" (Monès 592). The novel does in fact
describe the act of carrying a child as a profoundly maternal one. And
it goes without saying that maternity is first and foremost tender solic-
itude. But, like all mothers, Abel is also a sexual being; the ambiguity
of la phorie resides in the fact that it meets Abel's maternal and erotic
needs. What makes Tournier' s insights into maternity so unique (some
would say skewed) is that they are based on a man's experience of it.
To ascribe to la phorie the paradoxical term of "male" maternity would,
perhaps, not displease Tournier who is in the habit of juggling playfully
with genders. Gender is effaced, or at least rendered inconsequential.
This study proposes to examine Michel Tournier's highly personal,
delicately nuanced, perceptive analysis of maternity and its paradoxes.
His observations can be grouped under the following major headings:
1. maternity as a male experience; 2. nursing and nurturing; 3. the
ambiguities of maternity; 4. eroticism in maternity; and 5. maternity as
sublimated eroticism.

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes / 71

Maternity as a Male Experience

In Le Miroir des idées, Tournier writes that ever since Adam's femi-
nine part was severed from him by God, men have been left with a
"nostalgie de la maternité" {mi 16). This astonishing statement comes
out of his own personal interpretation of Adam's Fall, his myth of
Adam, which he has his character Abel describe in his diary, or "Écrits
sinistres." It is Abel's belief that a mistake was made in the translation
of the Book of Genesis. Rather than "il les créa mâle et femelle," the
Bible should read "il le créa. . . ." In other words, the original Adam
was hermaphrodite, "bardé de tout son attirail reproductif" (ra 25), a
whole and totally self-contained reproductive entity. God did not
remove "la côte" (rib), but his female "côté" (side). Abel then draws
the following important and revealing conclusion: "Dès lors on com-
prend pourquoi la femme n'a pas à proprement parler de parties sex-
uelles, c'est qu'elle est elle-même partie sexuelle: partie sexuelle de
l'homme trop encombrante pour un port permanent, et donc déposée
la plupart du temps, puis au besoin reprise" (24-5). What constitutes
"woman" since the Fall is nothing more than that part of Adam's "atti-
rail reproductif" which made it possible for him to bear a child.
Tournier's "nostalgie de la maternité" is then the longing for Adam's
original androgynous reproductive completeness. Le Roi des Aulnes
explores the possibility of realizing that dream through la phorie,
allowing Abel, a man, to be at the same time a woman (carrying a
child). His feminine part is restored to him. The role of the child is two-
fold: carried, it makes the man also a woman, and it links this
man/woman to it, thereby recreating the original family unit. It is obvi-
ous why Tournier does not express the Fall in terms of a lost original
intimacy with and proximity to the woman herself because in his myth
there never was such a separate, autonomous being. Some critics per-
ceive a certain negativity towards or dismissal of women in what is cer-
tainly a paradox inherent in a longing that excludes woman, while
wishing to take her place.4 Others, even more unforgiving, have gone
so far as to attribute this exclusion to misogyny.5 Such a conclusion is
hasty at best, for it fails to take into consideration two very important
factors that have shaped Tournier's adamic utopia of a self-contained
male world. The first is his sexual orientation. He is no more 'against'
women than lesbians are 'against' men. The second is his categorical
condemnation of heterosexuality. The virility it expects of men is a
source of violence, domination and inequality. He therefore postulates

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 72 / French Forum/ Spring 2004/ Vol. 29, No. 2

maternity as the opposite of virility. Monès rightly calls Tournier's lit-

erary world "un univers masculin de tendresse maternelle" in which "le
sexe viril, simple référence instrumentale à la femme, est annulé"
(Monès 595). In his male world, the matrimonial trap is avoided at all
costs in order that man be not "attelé ... au lourd charroi de la propa-
gation de l'espèce" (ra 105). Fathering a child is therefore out of the
question, and paternity, even symbolic, is not maternal enough!
Tournier is left with the absurd and quite understandable solution of cre-
ating a fictitious world in which a man can at the same time be a woman
in order to experience motherhood. He goes to great lengths to describe
the physical metamorphosis of Abel Tiffauges, from a puny weakling
to a powerful giant whose body is suited to carrying: a hunched back
("dos de portefaix," 341), fleshy buttocks that evoke the rump of a
horse, big hands ("phoriques, quoi," 341). This swelling of the body is
not unlike that during pregnancy. For Tournier, motherhood is not gen-
der specific and cannot be reduced to a rigidly defined concept. Para-
doxically, it is this broad view of motherhood that is at the root of Abel's
(and Tournier's) frustration with the physiological constraints that pre-
vent him from being a mother in the biological sense of the word.

Nursing and Nurturing: From alma mater to almus pater

Michel Tournier recounts witnessing two incidents that awoke in him
a strong desire to nurse a child. One was a touching scene in India of
a group of children surrounding an old tank truck (un camion-citerne):
"Des groupes d'enfants haillonneux se groupaient sagement derrière la
citerne. Le chauffeur descendu actionnait un gros robinet qui lâchait
une bouillie de riz dans le petit bol que tendait un enfant" (es 36). He
remembers envying the driver. But to be the truck was his dream: "et
telle une énorme truie aux cent tétines généreuses, donner mon ventre
en pâture aux petits Indiens affamés" (36). The second incident, the
inspiration for his tale "La Mère Noël" in his collection Le Coq de
bruyère, was a Christmas scene in which Santa Claus was a disguised
mother who pushed her "beard" aside to nurse her crying infant. Asked
on numerous occasions if he identified with his character Alexandre (a
flamboyant outspoken homosexual in Les Météores), he replied: "Non,
non. Moi, je suis la Mère Noël. [. . .] Ce Père Noël écartant sa grande
barbe de coton, sortant un sein blanc et gigantesque pour donner la
tétée au petit enfant qu'il tient dans ses bras, c'est celui de mes per-

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes 1 73

sonnages dont je suis le plus proche. C'est l'homme qui réalise pleine-
ment sa vocation maternelle" (Braudeau 156). But of course this Santa
Claus was not a man at all, but a woman. In Le Vagabond immobile,
Tournier admits in the frankest terms his inconsolability for being bio-
logically deprived of the purest and most intimate act of maternal love,
that of nursing an infant: "Mon petit conte 'La Mère Noël' [. . .] traduit
la frustration du pater nutritor incapable de devenir almus pater. La
fellation ne compense pas cette infirmité malgré l'évidente affinité du
sperme avec le lait" (vi 79). The very real pleasure he gets from feed-
ing an older child and thereby creating a bond between them that he
affectionately calls a little marriage is not enough.
And so in his novel Le Roi des Aulnes, he explores ways in which
a man who has a maternal instinct (Ariette Bouloumié calls it a "com-
plexe maternel," Michel Tournier: Le Roman mythologique 101) can
compensate for this male "handicap." He describes Abel Tiffauges as
being such a man: "un géant doux, inoffensif, assoiffé de tendresse,
qui tend ses grandes mains, jointes en forme de berceau" (ra 140). The
closest Abel comes to expressing his natural maternal tenderness,
devotion and self-abnegation through nursing is, as "colombophile
militaire," to chew the food that he feeds to a baby pigeon. The
pigeons are his "enfants chéris" (237). Then, as a happy prisoner of
war of the Nazis (he feels it is his destiny), he is sent to the fortress of
Kaltenborn in Ostpreussen, headquarters of a "Napola" (Nation-
alpolitische Erziehungsanstalt), where his initial task is the provision
of the boys, who are trained here to serve the Vaterland, with fresh
supplies of food. Having already discovered before the war his love
of children that had manifested itself in an ogre-like "eu-phoria" (a
term Tournier defines in terms of phorie) of holding them and, failing
that, of snatching their very essence by taking their photos or record-
ing their voices, "il ressentait ce rôle de pourvoyeur d'aliments, de
pater nutritor, comme une très savoureuse inversion de sa vocation
ogresse" (258). His perversion, la phorie, finds in the carrying of food,
an indirect and harmless outlet.
Concern for the physical well-being of her child makes a mother
intimately familiar with its body. She feeds, cleans, clothes, carries,
cradles, examines it constantly. She knows it and handles it knowl-
edgeably. Abel has this motherly knowledge. As his duties and respon-
sibilities to the children increase with the acceleration of the war, he

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 74 / French Forum/Spring 2004/Vol. 29, No. 2

assists in the weighing and measuring of their bodies. His big hands,
thanks to their "vocation oiselière" (340), know how to handle a child
and the child immediately senses this knowledge and becomes docile.
Tournier likens this intimate physical rapport to that between a cat and
its kitten:

Ma destinée surnaturelle m'a doué d'une connaissance infuse du poids de l'enfant,

de l'équilibre de son corps, de ses centres de gravité, de toutes ses articulations et
flexions, frémissements de muscles et dureté mouvante d'os. La chatte emporte
sans précaution le chaton par la peau du cou. Comme un paquet. Mais le petit chat
ronronne de plaisir, car ces apparentes bourrades recouvrent une entente intime et
maternelle. (340)

He watches over them at night, and describes in great detail the three
sleeping positions of children. He lines them up and puts salve on their
chapped lips. And, like a mother, he worries: "[il] pensait, la gorge ser-
rée, à toute cette jeunesse fauchée dans sa fleur [. . .]" (205).
All of these gestures, acts and emotions express the unambiguous
side of Abel's maternal vocation, a vocation traditionally associated
with women: the urge to feed and protect. But just as Abel's gender is
not clearly defined, so his relation to his children mirrors his sexual
ambiguity. Through Abel, Tournier develops a complex concept of
maternity that takes us to the heart of the ambiguity of adult relation-
ships with children. It is both chaste and erotic, selfless and possessive,
gentle and violent.

The Ambiguities of Maternity

Tournier delights in ambiguities. Through Abel, via Adam, he can disre-
gard the sharply defined binary oppositions in man (male/female,
adult/child), for what is to him the far more interesting gray zone which
marks their common boundaries, revealing their similarities. "La
dichotomie," writes Tournier, "ne doit pas être maniée comme une hache
de bûcheron, mais nuancée au contraire jusqu'à l'effacement" (w 218).
The highly ambiguous metaphor of la phorie (porter/emporter) allows
him to bring together in one person (Abel) two opposite creatures: Adam,
that harmless, lethargic and contented ancestor, a harmonious compos-
ite of dualities, and his direct opposite (or inversion maligne), that is to
say Goethe's Erlkönig, the insatiable, devious ogre who desires, lures
and abducts children. Abel, though basically bénigne, is disturbing and

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes 1 75

unsettling because he "forces the reader to abandon a comfortable dual-

ist position" (Bouloumié, "Germanic Variations" 137), in particular with
regard to good and evil, which are so intimately linked here.
The double meaning of the French verb porter (to carry and to bear
a child) links la phorie to maternity, imbuing it with its ambiguities.
On the one hand, "la phorie [. . .] définit l'idéal entre adulte et enfant"
(ra 309). This is mainly because "il y a de l'abnégation dans la phorie"
(122). To carry a child is to hold it in one's arms with tenderness and
a desire to soothe, cradle, protect. But to hold is also to grip and hold
tight, to carry off. This ambiguity puts a shadow of doubt over the
motives for self-sacrifice and service that lie at the heart of maternity
itself. To serve is also to possess and dominate. Mother and child, not
unlike master and slave, act out the dialectics of all human relation-
ships based on inequality.6 Tournier explains it this way: "Le fond de
la phorie est équivoque et rejoint le drame humain de la possession.
Car si elle est service rendu humblement, elle est aussi enlèvement,
rapt. Saint Christophe porte, tel une bête de somme, l' enfant-Dieu. Le
Roi des Aulnes emporte, tel un oiseau de proie, l'enfant vers la mort.
Plus généralement, servir c'est asservir: on serre toujours ce que l'on
serf9 (Tournier, "Petit lexique" 22). Tournier demystifies maternal love
when he gives as an example of this equivocation a "fils couvé par une
mère abusive" (22).
Through his affinities with both the Roi des Aulnes and St. Christo-
pher, Abel Tiffauges becomes the personification of the ambiguity of
la phorie: ogre and savior. Interestingly, almost the entire novel
emphasizes the former. Playful allusions to Abel's growing appetite for
"la franche nudité de la chair" (ra 76) - raw oysters, sardines, minced
meat - suggest that Abel's "hunger" or love is increasingly ogre-like.
"Quand je dis: 'j'aime la viande, j'aime le sang, j'aime la chair,' c'est
le verbe aimer qui importe seul. Je suis tout amour. J'aime manger de
la viande parce que j'aime les bêtes" (77). Cannibalism is described
here tongue in cheek as the most possessive expression of love. A
mother is an ogre who loves her child so much she could eat it. Abel's
"affectueux appétit" (77) anticipates his tender and possessive love for
his 'children.' He is a mother/ogre: a devouring nurturer, a loving kid-
napper, a tender predator. His obsession is such that it takes him a long
time to become aware of the dreadful irony of his newly assigned duty:
to scour the area for more children to replace those who have been

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 76 / French Forum/ Spring 2004/ Vol. 29, No. 2

killed in the war. In his mind these children, although parented by oth-
ers, are really his. They are all his. Monès points out that snatching a
child from its parents is, paradoxically, motivated by his maternal
instinct: "Cette 'part impitoyable' de lui-même est une composante de
son âme maternelle" (Monès 598). Abel himself comments on this
insatiable hunger or "volonté d' exhaustion" ( 102) that he says he
shares with Don Juan, and that is motivated by the yearning to capture
the very essence of child and woman respectively: "N'en avoir qu'un
seul, c'est n'en avoir aucun. En manquer un seul, c'est les manquer
tous" (98). Abel's joy increases in direct proportion to the increased
weight of the child he is holding. He discovers that the body feels heav-
ier when the child is asleep and heavier still when it is dead. The more
limp and "abandonné" the body, the more absolute its possession. Abel
describes holding the sleeping twins: "Mes grandes poupées moites et
souples, je n'oublierai pas la qualité particulière de leur poids morti
Mes mains, mes bras, mes reins, chacun de mes muscles en ont appris
ajamáis la gravité spécifique à nulle autre comparable [. . .]" (352).
Tournier disturbs hallowed ground by delving into the darker (he
would say truer) side of motherhood, its possessive and obsessive love.
He unmasks it in order to reveal beneath its socially constructed
'purity' ("le vitriol de l'âme," vlp 14), its perverse innocence. David
Gascoigne praises this anarchistic bent that explodes norms and ideals
painstakingly constructed by a society that, according to Tournier, is
"farouchement antiphysique, mutilante et castratrice" (vp 26). "It is in
Le Roi des Aulnes" writes Gascoigne, "that the complex and disturb-
ing compounds of pity and sadism, of idolatry, oppression and un-
avowed desire are most subtly explored" (Gascoigne 152). Tournier
shows that nurturing, predatoriness and violence cannot always be
clearly separated. Similarly, the distinction between motherly affection
and eroticism is not obvious. The constant shifting from one to the
other undermines still further the sanctity of motherhood.

Eroticism in Maternity
Michel Tournier offers two definitions of "eroticism," sometimes used
interchangeably with sexual desire or sexuality. In the first one he
describes it in very broad terms as the "fontaine de joie et de création,
ce bien suprême, cette raison d'être de tout ce qui respire" (ra 85). If
allowed to be totally free, "disponible" (vlp 1 19), it can appear in the

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes 1 77

most unlikely places. It is the most natural and innocent source of the
physical expression of love and tender intimacy between a mother and
her child: the touch. In Le Vent Paraclet, as elsewhere in his work and
his interviews, he denounces vehemently society's "fausse morale -
conservatisme et antiérotisme - " (vp 61) that condemns any sexuality
which is not channeled towards the propagation of the species. To sup-
press all physical contact, what he describes as "la relation d'érotisme
vague et tendre entre enfants, entre enfants et adultes" (63), does
immeasurable and long-lasting harm to a child's physical and emo-
tional well-being. Theodore Zeldin reports that, in their interview,
Tournier discussed the erotic nature of the symbiotic relationship
between a mother and child, claiming that with her child a mother is
"'far more intimate than with her husband.' Tournier would like the
word eroticism to be used to include all the tenderness that motherhood
implies" (Zeldin 45). To a certain degree, Tournier's comment on "la
sexualité proprement gémellaire" (vp 246) (intimacy between identi-
cal twins) aptly describes the close physical relation between a mother
and her child: "Chacun possède du corps et des nerfs de l'autre une
connaissance innée, divinatrice, infaillible" (ibid). The body of her
child is the object of a close study by a mother. Gaining knowledge of
its body through the senses is a way of possessing it, sensually and erot-
ically. The maternal and erotic, these two separate and distinct expres-
sions of love, are inextricably linked here by their overlapping
similarity, their "solidarity" (Bouloumié, "Germanic Variations" 137).
Abel's close examination of the minutest detail of his children's bod-
ies (shape, size, weight, hair and skin color, etc.) is both a maternal and
a highly erotic activity. Comparing himself to a geographer and their
skin to a map - a "carte pileuse" (ra 339) - he studies with a magni-
fying glass the different patterns formed by the surface hair.
But the sense of sight, while a precise enough tool, cannot bring
him close enough to the objects of his study. Touch, smell and taste
meet his particular sensorial needs in a far more satisfying way: "[. . .]
on peut en avoir une connaissance immédiate - et combien plus
touchante! - en passant rapidement les lèvres sur la peau" (339). This
allusion to the lips brings us to Tournier's second definition of sexual
desire: "[. . .] le désir sexuel est une faim de l'autre, et ressemble par
bien des côtés à une pulsion cannibalesque. Le goût violent de la chair
d'autrui, de son odeur, des humeurs qu'elle secrète a un aspect

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 78 / French Forum/ Spring 2004/ Vol. 29, No. 2

évidemment anthropophage" (mi 131). Tournier's metaphoric allusions

to the voracious appetite of the ogre to define Abel's love for the chil-
dren gains its full significance when it is considered in the light of this
definition. The hunger of the ogre is the love of a mother for her child.
And that hunger, that love, is erotic. Smell is the sense that immedi-
ately precedes taste. Being short-sighted and "olfactif" (ra 114), like
all ogre giants, Abel "knows," can distinguish, the smell ("l'odeur de
suint d'enfant," 346) of the shorn hair of each child. Having collected
it all, he spends the night, as in a nest, submerged in it. This nocturnal
proximity and intimacy (albeit vicarious) is both maternal and highly
erotic, at the junction of the two: "Ils étaient tous là, mes adulés, et je
les reconnaissais l'un après l'autre en serrant contre mon visage des
poignées de cheveux. [. . .] Puis je les ai mêlés, brassés, pétris pour les
serrer massivement dans mes bras. Alors j'ai été secoué de sanglots
convulsifs [. . .]" (346).
Through the metaphor of laphorie, which he links to maternity and
eroticism, Tournier exhausts the complexities and paradoxes of Abel's
love that finds its ultimate expression in total possession (just short of
devouring). Despite (or perhaps because of) a short-lived ungratifying
heterosexual relationship, Abel is sexually a child. His desire, like a
child's, has not been definitively programmed and channeled by soci-
ety, but remains instead an undifferentiated "force vierge et spontanée"
(vp 1 17), in other words, eroticism in its original innocence. The quite
accidental discovery of his particular "perversion," the unexpected joy
he feels when he picks up and holds a child for the first time, places
him in the quite paradoxical role of both child (sexually speaking) and
mother (the one who carries the child). And we have seen that the
mother in Abel is a most ambiguous person, both nurturer and preda-
tor. Tournier further claims that Abel's relation to the objects of his
desire is "pré-sexuelle, proto-sexuelle" (117); it is certainly not geni-
tal. As Tournier puts it: "la passion pédophile du roi des aulnes est
certes amoureuse, charnelle même. Il s'en faut qu'elle soit pédéras-
tique" (119). Abel is no more paederastic than Tournier's mythical
Adam or a mother. However, the phallus is very much present in la
phorie: it is the child on Abel's shoulders. The child compensates for
his small penis; it completes him sexually, in a way that is not alto-
gether clear. Daniel Bougnoux offers this explanation: "Tiffauges ne
porte pas de sexe, mais accomplit la sexualité dans le portage. Les cerfs

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes 1 79

de Rominton lui avaient confirmé, s'il en doutait, qu'il ne faut pas con-
fondre sexualité et organes génitaux" (Bougnoux 537). Since antlers
are a part of the male anatomy of a stag, the obvious answer is that the
child completes Abel as a male. Monès, on the other hand, sees in Abel
a woman holding her child in her arms and dreaming "qu'elle serre
dans la chair de sa chair le phallus qui lui manque" (Monès 594)!
Through the child, the "man" and the "woman" in Abel are reunited
and made whole sexually, recreating the original adamic family unit.
Adam was not, it would seem, three-in-one; he was simply one, a self-
sufficient totality. In Paradise, there was no gender (and no age) dif-
ferentiation and Adam partook of man, woman and child or rather what
became, after the Fall, man, woman and child.
It is not surprising therefore that Abel's non- virile, non-genital, erotic
rapture, felt when he picks up a child for the very first time, is reminis-
cent of Adam's diffuse state of bliss, his "transe erotique." It is a quies-
cent surrendering to a sensation too strong and pleasurable to resist:
"[. . .] quelque chose a fondu sur moi, d'une intolérable et déchirante
douceur. J'étais sidéré par une foudroyante bénédiction tombée du ciel.
[. . .] Un fleuve de douceur coulait majestueusement dans mes veines"
(ra 88). Described in contrasting terms of pleasure and pain, evoking on
the one hand the flowing gentleness and sweetness of water that sub-
merges, subdues and melts the will (later he refers to a "fleuve de miel,"
97), and on the other its intolerable, searing, renting acuteness, this
euphoria has clearly the intensity of an orgasm. But Tournier stresses that
Abel's "extase" (89) is infinitely more satisfying than "la volupté ordi-
naire étroitement et obscènement localisée" (90) because its "vague de
béatitude" flows through his entire body. A similar suffusive bliss may
pervade the body of the mother holding or nursing her child. Its source
is the weight of the child, "[u]ne manière de lévitation provoquée par une
pesanteur aggravée" (91), that stills the motherly anxieties of loss or dan-
ger, replacing them with peaceful submission, passiveness, a willingness
to be dominated, a blissful lethargy. La phorie is steeped in a maternal
contentment more ancient than that experienced by women: it is the ful-
fillment of our androgynous ancestor, Adam.
Critics such as Monès, Bougnoux, Gascoigne and others have
understood that by identifying the eroticism of maternity, defining its
particular "perversion," and allowing it male expression, Tournier does
not disparage or misinterpret motherhood. Quite to the contrary. He

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 8o / French Forum/ Spring 2004/ Vol. 29, No. 2

celebrates it, by giving it back its human dimensions. He shatters the

sacrosanct mold into which society had cast it, frees it from the fetters of
"purity" and restores its innocent "désintéressement."7 Without the exu-
berance of eroticism, maternity is a stale and lifeless concept, a mere
function, a duty defined by society that is by no means disinterested.

Maternity as Sublimated Eroticism

Throughout Le Roi des Aulnes, Tournier hints that the darker side of
Abel's perversion, a trace, perhaps, of the violence of virility to which
he never totally succumbs lurks just below the surface of his tenderness:
obsessive interest in the "lips" of wounds, the thrill of the hunt, the
numerous heartless and ruthless abductions and the seeming indifference
to their consequences, his "instinct de puissance" (336) over his charges,
his insatiable "hunger" and feverish desire ("tremblement tétanique,"
(303) for young bodies. Seen from this angle, laphorie, considered as a
channel of erotic desire, is predatory and potentially sadistic. As an
expression of maternity, it is utterly selfish in its possessiveness: snatch-
ing a child away from its mother in order to mother it. But towards the
end of the novel, in a complete reversal of the master/slave duality,
the child (victim) saves the loving tyrant from himself. Abel yields to the
child because he knows, and has always known, that the child is supe-
rior to the adult: "Sur la ligne qui va de l'animal à l'homme, l'enfant se
situe [. . .] au-delà de l'adulte et doit être considéré comme suprahumain,
surhumain" (328). Abel has gravitated towards children in order to bathe
in their youthful innocence, share their pre-pubescent chastity, bask in
the radiance of their superior beauty. By lingering outside schools, in the
playground, in the "hypnodrome" (350), in the shower room where his
"peau brune et souillée d'adulte" (352) contrasts with "cette fleur de
farine" (349), in all the places where the "densité atmosphérique" (348)
is the most pronounced, Abel betrays a profound nostalgia for his own
childhood, his natural affinity with the young and his adoration of their
beauty: "Je songe à la résurrection de la chair que nous promet la reli-
gion, mais d'une chair transfigurée, au plus haut degré de sa fraîcheur et
de sa jeunesse" (349).
Paradoxically, Abel's seemingly insatiable hunger will satiate him.
Through his love and desire for the unsullied flesh of the child, through
his "volonté d' exhaustion" (102) to possess all the bodies of all the
children and thereby "l'essence même de l'enfant" (106), its "poids

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes / 81

brut" (304) or "lingot charnel" (303), he will overcome his need for the
body and rechannel his eroticism. His hunger must first be exhausted
utterly; only then can enlightenment occur. Tournier therefore pushes
him to the point of unbearable satiety, to the furthest limits of his per-
version, to the brink of death (murder?). His burden, the supreme
source of his pleasure, must get heavier and heavier, the flesh denser
and ever more "déspiritualisée," the child ever more "dépersonnalisé"
(304). His obsession with the "gravité spécifique" (352) of each child
and its "poids mort" (ibid) must become that of a hunter so that his
maternal instinct will finally admonish him. His dreadful discovery
that the body of the headless child weighs three, four times its live
weight brings Abel to a halt. One cannot repeat the experience of such
total submission, such absolute physical possession, of the body as
pure mass, without becoming an ogre in every sense of the word. There
is no "chair plus grave, plus marmoréenne" (365) than that of a corpse.
He writes: "Je sais maintenant pourquoi le pouvoir absolu du tyran finit
toujours par le rendre absolument fou. C'est parce qu'il ne sait qu'en
faire" (366). The body has given up all its secrets and riches. There
seems to be nothing left for his phorie to discover. But the desire
remains, "cette soif plaintive qui concerne aussi le coeur" (365). It
takes the explosion of the body of the boy Arnim, its complete disin-
tegration, leaving Abel's arms nothing to cradle, his shoulders nothing
to carry, his hands nothing to touch and stroke tenderly, yet immersing
him in the boy's blood, that marks his conversion from phallophore
to astrophore, the complete redirection of his frightful hunger, its
complete sublimation: "Un manteau de pourpre a pesé d'un poids
intolérable sur mes épaules, attestant ma dignité de Roi des Aulnes"
(368). The four short paragraphs, from "Un grand soleil rouge [. . .]"
to "Et ce manteau était Arnim le Souabe" (ibid) form a prose poem
marking baptism, initiation, illumination, epiphany, coronation. The
unbearable weight is no longer that of a body, but that of the destiny
towards which Abel has been heading all his life and which he is about
to assume: that of becoming St. Christopher, the inversion bénigne of
Goethe's ogre: "ce farouche baptême a fait de moi un autre homme"
(368). The "signs" of his destiny had always been there, but inverted
by the evil of the Nazi regime; the "other man" had manifested him-
self many times through gestures of altruistic tenderness and devotion,
but had been overpowered by the one driven by hunger and lust.

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 82 / French Forum/ Spring 2004/ Vol. 29, No. 2

Abel's con-/in-version is immediate, absolute and irreversible. All

traces of the abductor are washed away. Gone are the "volonté d' ex-
haustion," the search for "densité atmosphérique"; gone the furor and
frenzy of stalking and chasing, grabbing and snatching; gone, finally,
the imperious need to possess. His discovery, quite by accident, of the
Jewish boy Ephraim, emaciated and close to death, signals to him the
start of "une ère absolument nouvelle" (373) in his phoric vocation, or
astrophorie - an allusion to the Star of David on the child's clothing:
"Ce n'était plus la chevauchée tumultueuse qui ramenait Tiff auges à
Kaltenborn après une chasse fructueuse, serrant dans ses mains une
proie blonde et fraîche. Il n'était pas porté par l'ivresse phorique
habituelle qui lui arrachait des rugissements et des rires hagards"
(ibid). The body of this "enfant Porte-étoile" (ibid) is reduced, almost
non-existent, inspiring in Abel, not erotic desire, but maternal com-
passion: "il eut le coeur serré de le trouver si incroyablement léger,
comme s'il n'y avait rien dans le ballot de tissus grossiers d'où sortait
sa tête" (372). On the other hand, the child's wisdom inspires a new
kind of love in Abel, bordering on awe. Tournier's intentions are obvi-
ous: Ephraim is in every respect the exact opposite of the ideal Nazi
child (strong body, average intelligence): "la débilité physique con-
trastait avec la précocité mentale" (374).
One is tempted to conclude here that by contrasting the phenome-
nal heaviness of the headless body of Hellmut and the lightness of
the (almost) bodyless Épraïm, Tournier is rehashing the body/mind
duality, the former negatively charged, the latter positively, and some
of the many binary opposites that have come to be associated with
it: death/eternal life, earth/heaven, matter/air, heaviness/lightness,
imprisonment/freedom. The originality of its imagery notwithstand-
ing, Abel's explanation regarding the phenomenal weight of the head-
less Hellmut certainly seems to reflect that tradition:

J'ai toujours soupçonné la tête de n'être qu'un petit ballon gonflé d'esprit (spiri-
tus, vent) qui soulève le corps, le tient en position verticale, et lui retire du même
coup la plus grande partie de son poids. Par la tête, le corps est spiritualise, désin-
carné, éludé. Décapité au contraire, il tombe sur le sol, soudain rendu à une incar-
nation formidable, doué d'une pesanteur inouïe. (364)

The temptation to elicit the deeper meaning of the novel by placing it

squarely within the framework of the body/mind duality is therefore

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes 1 83

quite understandable. One might then attribute to Tournier the whole

range of ethical values that have come to attach themselves to that dual-
ity. For example, one might conclude that Tournier ascribes more
worth to a man's everlasting spirit than to his mortal body. Or one
might claim that he wishes to assess the "merit" of a man's life in the
morally charged terms of impurity/purity. Abel's story could then be
read as a spiritual quest, an initiatory journey leading gradually from
one to the other, from the "impurity" of eroticism (heterosexual and
homosexual) to the "purity" of agape. Some critics do indeed interpret
Abel's experience and metamorphosis in terms of a well-defined and
morally charged duality. Worton writes that Abel "eventually finds
his salvation" (Worton 43), in other words the successful transcen-
dence of an impure perversion. Bouloumié also interprets heavy/light,
body/spirit dualities in terms of salvation: "La phorie doit son efficac-
ité salutaire à cette victoire sur la pesanteur. [. . .] Tiffauges guidé par
l'enfant Ephraim est le symbole de la matière accédant à un statut spir-
ituel" (Bouloumié 1986: 29).
If it were Tournier's intention to express, through the lightness of
Éphraïm's body, Abel's gradual victory over "la pesanteur" which must
be overcome to attain salvation, then how is one to explain the final
scene of the novel, in which Abel's last phorie is so difficult that both
he and Ephraim, as they travel through the marshes to escape from the
approaching Russian tanks, sink into the mud and die? For Tournier
writes: "il sentait l'enfant - si mince, si diaphane pourtant - peser sur
lui comme une masse de plomb" (ra 392). Clearly, there is another
inversion at play here, and heaviness is not necessarily associated with
matter but with the spirit. All through the novel, Tournier has been blur-
ring and muddling the traditional dualities of body and spirit, weight
and weightlessness. The body is light, but Abel's destiny, his spiritual
mission weighs as heavily on his shoulders as did St. Christopher's as
he carried the boy Jesus across the river. The lightness of the body does
not lighten the burden; on the contrary, it accentuates its "gravity."
There are several reasons why one must proceed with caution in
ascertaining what in fact are the opposites in Tournier's work. Firstly,
his propensity towards ironic inversions of binary oppositions, the
good becoming bad, the guilty innocent, etc. precludes attaching
absolute and rigid moral values to them. Secondly, there is his already
mentioned fascination with the proximity of so-called opposites, with

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 84 / French Forum/ Spring 2004/ Vol. 29, No. 2

the gradations leading from one extreme to the other, with the ambigu-
ous zones where opposites meet and sometimes overlap, that is,
between the points of convergence and divergence. This tendency
makes it difficult to identify the very terms of the oppositions. And
finally, and most importantly, Tournier 's hostility towards most of soci-
ety's moral views, in particular with regard to sexuality, is reflected in
his redefinition of familiar ethical terms. For example, transgression of
socially accepted virtues becomes a virtue, normality becomes suspect,
the duality purity/impurity is exploded and replaced with a new one:
innocence/purity. There is no evidence in Tournier' s work that for him
body and mind, or flesh and spirit, although distinct, are in conflict. For
him, the body is not the source of evil or of the corruption of the spirit.
He repeats again and again, both in the novel and in Le Vent Paraclet,
that Abel Tiffauges is an innocent man, as a child is innocent, and that
his "perversion" is innocent.
All the above considerations must be taken into account in order to
determine the metaphoric significance Tournier attributes to the terms
"heavy" and "light" in the four transformations that Abel Tiffauges'
perversion undergoes in rapid succession at the end of his voyage. As
we have seen, these transformations manifest themselves in the sensa-
tion of heaviness in the case of Hellmut's headless body, of "intolera-
ble" weight in that of the blown up body of Arnim, of surprising
lightness in that of Éphraïm's, followed a little later by its leaden
weight as Abel struggles in vain to keep himself and the boy from sink-
ing. Up to this point in the novel, Tournier has been describing Abel's
phorie as the act through which the intimate union of maternal love and
eroticism is expressed. He shows that the two are so inextricably linked
as to make them virtuously inseparable; their ambiguous nature lies
partly in the fact that they share the same need to possess the body of
the child. In both, the adult assimilates the child; its physical proxim-
ity (willing or unwilling) makes the adult whole. The euphoria springs
directly from the confirmation of this wholeness, that is from the sen-
sation of heaviness as the weight of the child presses on the adult's
body. The two bodies are fused. Gratification is immediate. It matters
little who the child (or beloved) is. All that matters is that there be one.
Gascoigne calls this tendency in Abel his "deindividualisation" (Gas-
coigne 73) of the child. Although Abel's hunger expresses itself phys-
ically in these instances, to call it a purely physical need would be a

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes 1 85

gross oversimplification and distortion of Tournier's thoughts on both

eroticism and maternity. Yes, both erotic and maternal love originate
in the body. But the body is not just the conduit through which this love
expresses itself. It is also the necessary medium through which it must
pass in order to be refined, transformed alchemically, as it were, or sub-
limated into a more altruistic and less selfish form. In other words, the
body cannot be ignored or bypassed. Abel is a man starved of human
warmth and tenderness since childhood; it is natural that he seek them,
at first, in the most immediately gratifying way possible: through touch
(laphorie).
However, in his last four phoric acts, the three children suddenly
emerge from the anonymity of flesh to become individuals. This time
the sensation of touch is not merely caused by the weight of the child,
but paradoxically by the fragility of its body, its mortality. In the first
of these four acts, the sensation of increased heaviness of the dead child
in his arms is not solely the result of limpness that death imparts to the
child's body. That is, it is not merely a physical sensation and the
"extase" of eroticism is tinged with a deep melancholy. Suddenly, he
is carrying not only the child but himself in an empathetic communion.
In the second phorie, there is nothing to hold, nothing to possess. The
weight is not localized on his shoulders or in his arms; instead, it is
evenly distributed as the shattered body envelops him as with a heavy
red cloak. There can be nothing physical about this "intolerable" heav-
iness. It inspires no erotic pleasure. The sensation comes from an
excess of love for that particular child, and this love is maternal, a noble
instinct when it is absolutely selfless. To conclude that eroticism has
been transcended would not be quite accurate. Since for Tournier eroti-
cism and maternity overlap, it is impossible to know where the one
leaves off and the other begins. Instead, one could say that having
exhausted all avenues of its perversion, its energy and exuberance have
been redirected, transformed or sublimated into a more altruistic sen-
timent, agape. 8 That such sublimation has occurred becomes very clear
in Abel's third phorie, the carrying of Ephraim. What happens here is
not, as Mairi MacLean claims, the transcendence of the opposition
"between carnal and spiritual" (MacLean 249). Tournier, as we have
seen, does not consider them opposites, much less distinctly different.
Eroticism, which he calls a "fontaine de vie" (vlp 119), is the source
of life, creativity and spirituality. It cannot be transcended. It can only

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 86 / French Forum/Spring 2004/Vol. 29, No. 2

be temporarily suppressed in the name of 'purity.' Gascoigne comes

closer to describing what takes place when he writes: "The dynamic of
desire, for Tournier, leads beyond the body to the Spirit, uniting the
two" (Gascoigne 89).
With this third phone, the need to subjugate and possess a child
through acts of maternal abnegation is definitively replaced by the
humble joy of serving. With motherly anxiety, "avec acharnement" (ra
373), he nurses Ephraim back to health. Because the child is too weak
to walk, and to cheer him up, he takes him on piggyback rides through
the attic. Ephraim jokingly calls him Behemoth ("Cheval d'Israël").
Abel willingly assumes the modest role of beast of burden. And his bur-
den is the lightest of them all. In that lowly capacity, Abel carries
Ephraim away from the fortress, away from the danger of the
approaching Russians. This is his last phorie, his first and last act of
self-sacrifice for another. This time the child on his shoulders, this priv-
ileged being, bestows, not youth, not vigor, not erotic pleasure, but a
blessing and the possibility of redemption. Abel shares with St.
Christopher the full ambiguity of this act of reparation: "se mettre sous
la protection de l'enfant qu'[il protégeait] en même temps, se sauver
en sauvant, assumer un poids, charger [ses] épaules, mais un poids de
lumière, une charge d'innocence" (61). Only the body of the young
Jesus, growing heavier with each step through the water, could draw
from the uncouth giant the only love that could bring about his own
salvation: the love that serves and does not waver in the face of death.
It is to this "berger christophore portant I' Agnus mundi" (Bouloumié,
Michel Tournier: Le Roman mythologique 174) that Tournier compares
Abel in the last moments of his life as he struggles in vain to keep from
sinking under the intolerable weight of Éphraïm's fragile body. Man
and child, the blessed couple, are eternally united and will lie together
undisturbed in the maternal embrace of the earth.9 Such perfect union
and peaceful sleep recall once more the contentment and fulfillment,
entirely physical, that innocence bestowed on Adam before the Fall.

To lay claim to motherhood for men is, for Tournier, to mark the pos-
sibility of a definitive victory over virility. Considered in this light,
Abel's "maternage" of Ephraim is quintessential. With Ephraim, there
is no need to subjugate in order to mother him, to force his tenderness
on "his" child out of his own need for love, as he used to do when he

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 Fabijancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes I 87

captured and caged pigeons so that he might have them at his complete
disposal to touch them whenever he needed to be touched. The com-
plex and ambiguous master/slave relationship ("assservir/servir") had
always left him with an unappeasable yearning, since the healthy,
robust children of the Napola had never really needed his mothering.
He had imposed it on them selfishly, as an overly protective mother
smothers her child. Such love is seldom reciprocated, therefore inten-
sifying the urge to elicit it by force in a vicious circle. The circle is bro-
ken when, after enduring a type of apprenticeship of motherhood that
takes him through the disturbing, albeit harmless and symbolic 'per-
versions' of cannibalism, necrophilia and vampirism, Abel, in turn
ogre, alma mater and mater dolorosa, learns the most important lesson
about love, that one cannot possess another human being. Tournier
links these perversions to motherhood in so far as motherhood reflects
the potential flaws of love in general: possessiveness, obsessions with
the body and its functions, domination, selfishness, cruelty.
The fact that possession is proven impossible does not mean that the
body, the object of this illusory possession, ceases to be required to
express this love. For Tournier, love has no vehicle of expression outside
of the body. And eroticism is its driving force. Perfect love, he writes, is
"la parfaite fusion du désir physique et de la tendresse" (m 258). This def-
inition applies also to maternal love. As Serge Koster writes, it is both
and at the same time "[é]rotisation et sublimation du corps" (Koster 79).
In other words, it is a sexually charged sublimation of (homo)sexuality.
For Tournier, laphorie, carried out in all humility, is the closest approx-
imation of the physical and emotional joy of maternity that a man can
know. He writes this from experience: photos showing him holding a
child on his shoulders reveal how profoundly touched he is. No adult can
fill the gap that will make Abel whole, since he is fundamentally a mater-
nal being. He compares himself to his horse Barbe-Bleue when it is com-
pleted by its rider who gives it dignity and purpose: "je ne suis
moi-même, regonflé et flambant que harnaché par le corps d'un enfant,
sanglé par ses jambes, sellé par son torse, colleté par ses bras, couronné
par son rire" (ra 353). Without the child he is "triste et emprunté" (ibid),
an awkward freak whose body serves no purpose. Horse and rider, man
and child, form an Utopian "closed plenitude" (MacLean 248), a perfect
fit, each willingly accepting his role. The child is master and teacher; the
adult, servant and pupil. The former leads, the latter follows.10 The man

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 88 / French Forum/ Spring 2004/ Vol. 29, No. 2

offers no resistance to the child; rather he accepts its privileged position

and yields gladly and humbly to it.
However, Tournier was not impelled to give such a detailed account
of male maternity solely to prove that victory over virility is possible.
Given his hostility towards society's tyrannical control over gender
roles, one can understand his evident enjoyment at shocking those
readers for whom the very idea of male maternity is abhorrent. But the
harshness of his latent criticism is softened by humour and irony.
Tournier is giving the finger to society in a playful, laughingly irrever-
ent way. Rabelaisian elements throughout Le Roi des Aulnes make real-
ity grimace, but also save the novel from becoming a dry political
statement. Of course Abel is an aberration, a misbegotten, fantastical,
sexually ambiguous social misfit whose perversion is suspect and
whose feminine nature exposes him to ridicule, contempt and perse-
cution. That is the point: he is the very embodiment of what society
considers "unnatural." There is not a single norm to which Tournier has
him conform, and he condemns a society that derides and ostracizes
such a gentle, vulnerable being in time of peace, but finds his attributes
expedient in wartime. What raises Abel above the "norm" is not just
the laughter of the child that crowns him like a king. It is the rare abil-
ity to laugh at himself irreverently, to see himself with irony. He wears
his difference artlessly and with courage. In the end it is not he who is
the monster.

St. Francis Xavier University

Notes
^elerences to Tournier s works are abbreviated as follows: es {Des cies et des serrures), cb
{Le Coq de bruyère), GMB {Gaspard, Melchior & Balthazar), M {Les Météores), Ml {Le Miroir des
idées), RA {Le Roi des Aulnes), vi {Le Vagabond immobile), vlp {Vendredi ou les Limbes du Paci-
fique), VP {Le Vent Paraclet), w {Le Vol du vampire). See "Works Cited" for publication details.
throughout his work and in his numerous interviews, Tournier consistently condemns het-
erosexuality, society's "procréationnisme à tout va" {gmb 261).
3For Tournier, this term is by no means pejorative. On the contrary, its meaning comes close
to Oscar Wilde's transgression, an infinite source of creativity. Art would not be possible with-
out rebellion, sexual and otherwise, against the social order.
4Daniel Bougnoux sees in laphorie a way to bypass and thus to eliminate woman: "Laphorie

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 Fabiiancic: Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes I 89

consisterait à se procurer immédiatement l'enfant, sans passer par l'intermédiaire féminin [. . .]"
(Bougnoux 536). Goethe's Eri-King snatches the child directly from the arms of its father. In a
similar vein, David Gascoigne feels that la phorie is an expression of Tournier's "disqualifica-
tion of woman" as the child-bearer (Gascoigne 71). Bénédicte Mauguière, discussing the "désir
de materniser ou d'avoir des enfants" (Mauguière 50) in both Vendredi ou les Limbes du Paci-
fique and Les Météores, offers the possible explanation of womb envy. Françoise Merllié looks
more closely at this "envy." A mother, she argues, is bisexual. Her child replaces the phallus,
depriving the father of his virility: "Deprived of maternity, man also finds himself deprived of his
sexual organ [. . .]" (Merllié 59). Men, she continues, "end up desiring to assume maternity for
themselves" (58), that is, "to accede to androgyny" (60). Abel' 's phorie is "the only means avail-
able to a man of imitating the female uterus" (62). To carry and thus possess a child allows Abel
to be a mother, therefore to dispense with the woman by taking her place and regaining his viril-
ity (phallus/child) all at the same time.
5Richard Cobb calls Tournier's work "a literature atrophied and amputated, in that it not only
essentially is masculine, a man's world for men only, but tends to be contemptuous of women
[. . .]" (Cobb 759-60).
6Tournier analyses at great length the ambiguity of the master/slave relationship in Vendredi
ou les Limbes du Pacifique.
'See "L'image erotique" in Des clefs et des serrures (pp. 103-8) for Tournier's rapproche-
ment of eroticism, innocence and "désintéressement."
8Gascoigne points out that Tournier's views on the link between eroticism and agape are Pla-
tonic. "Agape [is] sublimated Eros," writes Gascoigne, referring here to Herbert Marcuse's inter-
pretation of Plato's "celebration of the sexual origin and substance of culture and spirituality"
(Gascoigne 92).
9Monès sees in this willingness to sacrifice himself for Ephraim a yearning for death, what he
calls "la tentation christique" (Monès 599), Christ's Passion. And he compares Abel not to St.
Christopher but to Christ himself, whom he describes as "l'homme-mère dans sa plénitude, à la
fois Agneau de Dieu et Bon Pasteur" (ibid); in other words, both child and mother ("porte-enfant").
And it is not too far-fetched to call Abel's destiny "suicidaire" (598), leading him irremediably
away from the violent turbulence of desire towards the peace of eternal sleep with his beloved.
10It is from Ephraim that Abel learns, for example, that Auschwitz, this "Anus mundf (375),
this "Cité infernale" (378), is, down to the last detail, the inversion maligne of his "Cité phorique"
(ibid) of Kaltenborn. His contribution to the infernal scheme of the Nazis is brutally clear.

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