"Cours sur la rive sauvage", roman initiatique, ou la plainte de la totalité

Cours sur la rive sauvage is a novel of initiation : Iven Zohar is following an itinerary, the meaning of which he is to decipher. The first questioning lies in the contrast between transparency and opacity. Reality is merely an appearance, a looking-glass through which one must pass if one is to reach the goal. The triangular interplay between the 3 characters : Iven Zohar and the 2 women who initiative him, Radia and Hellé, illustrates man's relation to his conscience (Radia), on the one hand, and to Nature (Hellé), on the other. The itinerary proper takes the narrator from his own childhood to the collective history of his country : tradition, colonization, revolution, symbolized by 3 towns : "our town", "the foreign town", the "ville-nova" or "new town". After his passing through History, the narrator interrogates the mythes ; this brings about the emerging of the "gaping town" and leads him into exploring the Collective Unconscious and the fundamental Archetypes. If he consents to renounce his own will, and accept to go through a phase of non-knowing to ignore the a priori assertions of religion and philosophy (Reason), the poet in the primary outburst of Dionysian passion will be able to send forth the essential utterance of wind and flame that is the only imperishable testimony. He will then only have to reach the "ville-nova", that Utopia he can't renounce although he knows it is nothing but the projection of his own desire. Our study ends with a rapid analysis of the functioning of the religious concepts of Good and Evil in the novel and of the symbolical value of the figure five.