Nature and Civilization as Metaphor in Michel Rio’s Dreaming Jungles

Abstract

Michel Rio has published five novels since 1982, two of which, Parrot’s Perch and Dreaming Jungles, have been translated into English. His most recent work, Archipelago, was published last year with the Editions du Seuil. Rio’s philosophical fiction portrays culture and civilization in crisis, and centers upon questions of aesthetics and the creative imagination. His novels employ the voyage motif as a means and manner of reflection upon a profound morbidity ailing the modern spirit, which in its most extreme form emerges as the suicidal urge, but which attends each moment of the human enterprise as the risk of disorientation and loss of purpose. His literary travels are allegories which permit his peripatetic narrator to conduct a geographical anatomy of melancholy. The cure potentially lies with the heuristic power of the fictional undertaking itself to chart progress, although fiction must first seek to combat the forces of cynicism and the charges of self-involvement of which literature stands accused in the eyes of the iconoclastic characters who populate Rio’s narratives.