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The Poetics of Sensation in J.M.G. Le Clézio's Onitsha

Summary French-Mauritian writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008 and has published over forty novels, is little known in the English-speaking academe where there is virtually no critical work available about his work. This article seeks to remedy this gap of knowledge through a close reading of Onitsha (1997), a novel illustrative of Le Clézio's literary project from the 1990s onward. In Onitsha, Le Clézio is primarily concerned with conveying the texture of varying sensations associated with different experiences in order to connect these experiences to the feelings related to “being in the world”. Textually, this is achieved through the evocation of the main protagonist's experience of the world by way of sensation, and I will show that the quality of affect that results stands for something both contained and specific, and with far-reaching implications. The role of affect in Onitsha and how it is focused on sensations results in a thoroughly original coming-of-age tale, located between poetry and prose.