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Trespasser in The Lost Land: Le Grand Meaulnes as Impostor

the hero, then disoriented and exhausted, stumbles onto the strange estate he refers to as the Lost Land. And when he enters this mysterious realm where children hold dominion, his arrival marks the beginning of a quest for the mother topologized as paradise. A destination forbidden as taboo, the Lost Land in Fournier's novel is both proximate and unreachable, familiar and otherwordly. Telescoped as the end of the journey, the mother's lap, her breast, her embrace are also departure points for the child seeker, places impossibly remote yet also tantalizingly close. For Alain-Fournier, as Anne Cousseau affirms, "l'enfance ne peut etre rendue qu'au travers de la conscience de sa perte: le paradis d'enfance ne peut demeurer tel qu'en etant a jamais perdu, comme il n'y a de bonheur qu'inaccessible" (62). When, at the start of the novel, Meaulnes is brought by his mother to live with the narrator, Francois Seurel, and his parents - when Meaulnes is destined to be a student in Monsieur Seurel's classroom - the mother-son relationship is already characterized as an ambiguous one. Information about Meaulnes' history defines him as a child lacking a father on whom to model his identity, and as the son of a woman alternately characterized as frail and apprehensive, then as assertive, proud, and forceful. When she arrives in the Seurels' home, Madame Meaulnes is stooped and self-effacing, but when she starts to talk about her son, she stands erect and speaks boastfully, describing Meaulnes' feats of prowess, his catching pheasants in traps and gathering ducks' eggs on riverbanks. The combination of anxiety and self-assuredness exhibited by his mother is what will disable Meaulnes at one moment, leaving him vulnerable and hesitant, then empower him at the next, endowing him with the valor of a hero. Permeating the places where he had demonstrated his mastery, his mother's confidence maps the world that Meaulnes already had explored, while his uncertainty strands him in uncharted lands where he will go on future travels. In Francois Seurel's description of his childhood hero and friend, Meaulnes is pictured as psychologically damaged by being abandoned by the woman who first praised him for taming nature's treacherous female body and who then reinstilled in him the helplessness of a deserted, fearful infant. While he is later validated by his classmates who give him flattering new names - heralded as Admiral Meaulnes, celebrated as the Great Meaulnes - the novel's hero is also plagued by feelings of inadequacy, convinced he is a fraud who dare not usurp the father's place. As this essay argues, while the novel's intrigue is structured by its spatial division into known worlds and terra incognita, it is also centered on the fracture in the protagonist's identity. Meaulnes' quest to reach the heart of the unknown realm of unmapped womanhood never culminates with a celebration of hierogamous triumph. Since Meaulnes cannot rid himself of the belief that his adventure is an imposture, the inauthenticity of his experience is reflected in a narrative that references its theatrical unreality. Incidental comments made by Madame Meaulnes in the novel's opening chapters establish Founier's hero as a character invested with a sense of childhood omnipotence while also unmasking him as a pretender infirmed by feelings of immaturity and guilt. In