The writer in the mirror of literature or how to place Michel Tournier

Michel Tournier's writing is nouanced and able to assimilate everything. It is based on novelistic language and metaphysics, on myth and fairy tale, and it maintains a permanent and fruitful relationship with literature. This article aims to situate Tournier's work in the composite landscape of contemporary literature and to place it in perspective, in relation to other creative pathways that may contribute to explaining it.
Tournier is an heir who innovates. He cultivates a traditional novelistic but original formula, a naturalist and mystic formula, which combines the ability to observe and document rigorously with an interest in metaphysics, mythology and symbolism, as well as material imagination and poetic reverie. It combines the art of the speech with the richness of the language. In this formula, postmodern elements go hand in hand with a romantic legacy which places the work of Tournier within the new realism inaugurated by the German writers' generation: Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger and Hermann Hesse. Deep structural, conceptual, imaginative, thematic and symbolic affinities link Michel Tournier especially to the latter, but also to Gide, placing him in the horizon of modern French egotism.
From one novel to another, there is a growing interest on the part of the writer in the ego problem. The self conflict between contradictory tendencies and its relationship with the world, with the Other and with self image, actually become the true purpose of Tournier's search. This search, centred on self discovery and metamorphosis and oriented by an ascending dynamism, is a self-search, which aims, through all the imaginary strategies that mobilise, to the recovery of inner balance and to the spiritual fulfilment.

Keywords: Michel Tournier; imaginary; metaphysical naturalism; poetic story; romanticism; Hermann Hesse; opposition; loneliness; otherness; egotism; ego; self search