Jacques Monod, Jean- Marie Le Clezio

June 1, 1976 OBITUARY Jacques Monod, Nobel Biologist, Dies; Thought Existence Is Based on Chance By FRANK J. PRIAL Jacques Monod, the Nobel Prize-winning French biologist and director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, died yesterday at his home in Cannes, France. He was 66 years old. Dr. Monod shared the 1965 Nobel award for medicine and physiology with two colleagues at the Pasteur Institute, Francois Jacob and Andre Lwoff, for research on the workings of the living cell. He was probably best known for his book-length essay, "Chance and Necessity," published in 1970. In it he postulated his chilling conviction that all existence is because of chance and that mankind's inevitable recognition of this fact will necessitate a complete revolution in human thought. "Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere," he wrote. "Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution. . . ." Although he flirted briefly with Communism during World War II, he was as harsh on Marxist dialecticians as on what he called the "disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity." 'Postulate of Objectivity' "What I have tried to show," Dr. Monod told an interviewer in 1971, "is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity--that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. "Now this," he went on, "is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product--predictable if not indispensable--of the evolution of the universe. "One of the great problems of philosophy," Dr. Monod said, "is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. "I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible, this is a farce." Dr. Monod maintained that the impossibility of deriving a set of values--the "ought" from blind happenstance, or the "is"--imposes on mankind the obligation to choose a system of values by which to live. But he thought mankind was failing to do so. "There is absolutely no doubt that the risk of the race committing suicide is very great," he said, adding, "In my opinion, the future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations." Dr. Monod said his own values were based on the existentialist ethics of his friend the late Albert Camus--"an ethics based on free choice"--and he denied that his intention was to create a philosophy of pessimism or despair. Hero of the Resistance Indeed, his own life belied the somber reflections his book--a best-seller in France in 1970 and 1971--engendered. A dapper, urbane man who played the cello and loved to sail, Jacques Lucien Monod was also a hero of the French Resistance. He held both the Croix de Guerre and the American Bronze Star. He was born in Paris in 1910, the son of Lucien Monod, a painter, and Charlotte Todd MacGregor Monod, a native of Milwaukee. He studied at the Cannes Lycee and the University of Paris and joined the Pasteur Institute as a zoology instructor in 1931. He was named head of the institute's laboratory in 1945, head of the department of cellular biochemistry in 1954 and director in 1971. Dr. Monod was a professor on the faculty of sciences at the University of Paris from 1959 to 1967 and a professor of molecular biology at the College de France from 1967 to 1972. He was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in 1936, and was named a nonresident fellow of the Salk Institute in 1968. Americans Made Offers He was a frequent and open critic of the French Government for what he saw as its parsimonious treatment of scientific research, particularly of research at the Pasteur Institute. Just after winning the Nobel Prize in 1965, Professor Monod disclosed that most of his and his colleagues' research had been done "in a small, stuffy, sordid attic room," and he said that all three of them had earlier turned down a chance to move to the United States to work. "The Americans did not make this offer in order to deprive France of its researchers," he said at the time, "bout only through generosity to permit us to work in decent conditions with a maximum of efficiency." Dr. Monod could have moved to the United States with relative ease. He spoke English with almost no trace of an accent and he was already a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Appealed for Support In 1973, Dr. Monod visited this country, in an attempt to save the Pasteur Institute from bankruptcy. He noted he had trimmed the staff, patented a new influenza vaccine in the name of the institute, and had appealed for both governmental and private support. The institute was founded by Louis Pasteur in 1888 with public donations including large grants from the Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey and the Emperor of Brazil. Pasteur was buried there in 1895. Eight men who worked or studied there have won Nobel Prizes in medicine or physiology. The institute is divided into a research section and a pharmaceutical-manufacturing section that grosses more than $20 million in sales a year. After taking over in 1971, Dr. Monod dismissed more than 130 scientists and technicians, or about 10 percent of the staff. Dr. Monod, who acknowledged several years ago that running the Pasteur Institute gave him no time for his own research projects, was honored by the Nobel committee for showing how the living cell manufactures the substances of life. Control of Protein Manufacture With Professor Jacob, he demonstrated how the cell's production of proteins is controlled by a feedback process analogous to that by which a thermostat controls the temperature in a room. They found that while one type of gene in a cell's nucleus holds the blueprints for the substances to the manufactured, another gene regulates the rate of production, based on whether a given protein is in long or short supply. This is the mechanism that permits the required coordination of all the molecular manufacturing activities that are the essence of the metabolism and thus of life itself. Dr. Monod was a member of the Washington Academy of Science, the Royal Society of London and the Czechoslovak Academy of Science. His wife, the former Odette Bruhl, whom he married in 1938, died in 1972. Two sons survive.

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French Writer Wins Nobel Prize

By SARAH LYALL

Published: October 9, 2008

LONDON — The French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whose work reflects a seemingly insatiable restlessness and sense of wonder about other places and other cultures, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Le Clézio, 68, as the “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

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Michel Euler/Associated Press

The works of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio reflect a sense of wonder about other cultures.

Related

Excerpts From Le Clézio’s Work (October 10, 2008)

From the Archives: Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (October 12, 2006)

Times Topics: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Citation by The Swedish Academy (nobelprize.org)

Further Reading

Nobel Prizes

Complete coverage, including a list of this year's winners.

Go to the Times Topics Page »

Mr. Le Clézio’s work defies easy characterization, but in more than 40 essays, novels and children’s books, he has written of exile and self-discovery, of cultural dislocation and globalization, of the clash between modern civilization and traditional cultures. Having lived and taught in many parts of the world, he writes as fluently about North African immigrants in France, native Indians in Mexico and islanders in the Indian Ocean as he does about his own past.
Mr. Le Clézio is not well known in the United States, where few of his books are available in translation, but he is considered a major figure in European literature and has long been mentioned as a possible laureate. The awards ceremony is planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm, and, as the winner, Mr. Le Clézio will receive 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.4 million.
At an impromptu news conference in Paris at the headquarters of his publisher, Éditions Gallimard, Mr. Le Clézio seemed unperturbed by all the attention. He said he had received the telephone call telling him about the prize while he was reading “Dictatorship of Sorrow,” by the 1940s Swedish writer Stig Dagerman.
“I am very happy, and I am also very moved because I wasn’t expecting this at all,” he said. “Many other names were mentioned, names of people for whom I have a lot of esteem. I was in good company. Luck or destiny, or maybe other reasons, other motives, had it so that I got it. But it could have been someone else.”
In a news conference in Stockholm after the announcement, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize each year, described Mr. Le Clézio as a cosmopolitan author, “a traveler, a citizen of the world, a nomad.”
“He is not a particularly French writer if you look at him from a strictly cultural point of view,” Mr. Engdahl said. “He has gone through many different phases of his development as a writer and has come to include other civilizations, other modes of living than the Western, in his writing.”
Last month, Mr. Engdahl provoked a wave of indignation when he criticized American writers as “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” Europe, he declared, is “the center of the literary world.” No American has won the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison did in 1993.
Mr. Le Clézio was born in 1940 in Nice and raised in a nearby village, speaking English and French. His father, a British doctor with strong family connections on the island of Mauritius, lived in Africa for many years while Jean-Marie was growing up. When he was 7, Jean-Marie traveled to Nigeria with his family and spent a year out of school, an experience he recalled later in his semiautobiographical novel “Onitsha” (1991).
He studied English at the University of Bristol, graduated from the Institut d’Études Littéraires in Nice, received a master’s degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence and wrote his doctoral thesis for the University of Perpignan on the early history of Mexico. He has taught at colleges in Mexico City, Bangkok, Albuquerque and Boston; has lived among the Embera Indians in Panama; and has published translations of Mayan sacred texts.
His first marriage ended in divorce; he married again in 1975. He and his second wife, Jemia, who is from Morocco, divide their time among Nice, Mauritius and Albuquerque.
Mr. Le Clézio became a literary sensation with his first novel, “Le Procès-verbal” (1963),訴訟紀錄 published in English as “The Interrogation.” The novel follows the meanderings around town of a sensitive young man who winds up for a time in a mental hospital. It has been compared in mood to Camus’s “The Stranger.”
But his style evolved in later books, becoming more lyrical and accessible, and taking on bolder and more sweeping themes, often with an ecological underpinning.
“The latter part has a very contemporary feel,” said Antoine Compagnon, a professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. “It has an openness to others, to other cultures, to the South, to minorities. This is a very current sensibility.”
Bronwen Martin, a research fellow in the French department at Birkbeck College in London, said Mr. Le Clézio’s work had recently become more popular among academics. “I think it’s because of his more explicitly postcolonial work,” said Ms. Martin, who has written two books on Mr. Le Clézio’s writing.
In 1980, Mr. Le Clézio published “Désert,” the story of a young nomad woman from the Sahara and her clashes with modern European civilization. The book was considered his definitive breakthrough, and it became the first winner of the Grand Prix Paul Morand, awarded by the Académie Française.
In the United States, David R. Godine, one of a handful of publishers that have released Mr. Le Clézio’s works in English, plans to issue a paperback edition of “The Prospector” (translated from “Le Chercheur d’Or” in French) and plans to publish “Désert” in English.
In a reminder that politics and culture are closely intertwined in France, the prime minister, François Fillon, said in a statement that the award “consecrates French literature” and “refutes with éclat the theory of a so-called decline of French culture.”
Mr. Le Clézio is not one to seek the limelight. He once described himself in an interview as “a poor Rousseauist who hasn’t really figured it out.”
He said, “I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.”
Asked at the news conference if he had any message to convey, Mr. Le Clézio said: “My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell, Chine Labbé and Basil Katz from Paris, and Motoko Rich from New York.

Excerpts From Le Clézio’s Work

Published: October 9, 2008

French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has written more than 40 books, 12 of which have been translated into English, an exotic canon of novels, essays and children’s books. Below are excerpts from a few of his works.

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Related

French Writer Wins Nobel Prize (October 10, 2008)

In the beginning of summer most of the children were like little savages — sunbrowned faces, arms and legs, bits of grass tangled in their hair, torn, dirt-smudged clothes. Esther loved going out with the children every morning, in that mixed group of boys and girls, Jewish children and children from the village, all rowdy, tousled — Mr. Seligman’s class. With them, she ran through the still-cool, narrow village streets, then across the large square making dogs bark and old people sitting in the sun grumble. They followed the street with the stream down toward the river, cut through the fields to reach the cemetery. When the sun burned down hot, they bathed in the icy waters of the torrent. The boys stayed down below and the girls climbed up the torrent to hide behind the huge boulders. But they knew the boys came into the bushes to spy on them, they could hear their muffled snickering and they splashed water around haphazardly and let out shrill shrieks.
Esther was the wildest of them all with her black curly hair cropped short, her brown face, and when her mother saw her come home for lunch she said, “Hélène, you look like a gypsy!” That pleased her father and so he said her name in Spanish, “Estrellita, little star.”
He was the one who’d first shown her the vast grassy fields high above the village, above the torrent. Still farther up began the road leading to the mountains, the dark forest of larches — but that was another world. Gasparini said that in winter there were wolves in the forest and if you listened at night, you could hear them howl far off in the distance. But as hard as she listened at night in her bed, Esther had never heard their howling, maybe because of the sound of the water that was constantly streaming down the middle of the street.
— from “Etoile Errante” (“Wandering Star”) (1992), translated from the French by C. Dickson.
John, from Nantucket:
It was in the beginning, at the very beginning, when there was nobody on the sea, nothing more than birds and sunlight. Since childhood I had dreamed of going there, to this place where all began and all ended. They spoke of it as though of a secret, like a treasure. In Nantucket they all spoke about it, talking as though drunk. They said that over there in California there existed a secret place in the ocean where the whales went to birth their young, and where the old females went to die. There was this reservoir, this immense shallow in the sea, where they gathered by the thousands, the youngest along with the oldest, and the males formed a protective circle around them to prevent orcas and sharks from entering, and the sea roiled under the crash of fins, the sky grew misty with the spray of blowholes, with the cries of the birds sounding like a forge.
This is what they said. They all told stories of this place as though they had seen it. And I, on the piers of Nantucket, I listened to them and also remembered as though I had been there.
And now it all has disappeared. I remember it, it is as though my life has been this dream alone, in which everything that was beautiful and new in the world was undone, destroyed. I never returned to Nantucket. Does the ripple of this dream still exist?
— from “Pawana” (1992), translated from the French by Christophe Brunski.

la Fiévre 發燒
前言
寫作就是用詞語探索
深入細緻地研究並描繪
毫不通融地刻畫現實



諾貝爾文學獎得主勒‧克萊喬，對台灣讀者來說是陌生的名字。皇冠曾在2000年與2006年，出版他的小說「金魚」與「偶遇」，並未引起注意。拜得獎之賜，皇冠將緊急換上新書腰，重新上市。
皇冠編輯沈書萱形容克萊喬是「寂寞的大師」。他在法國無人不知，在台灣卻連法文系學者也未必了解。她認為，克萊喬的寫作風格安靜而內斂，筆下故事情節簡單、人物不多。他擅以白描手法細細描述主角的內心變化，「需要安靜下來慢慢體會」，在眾聲喧嘩的台灣書市容易被忽略。
克萊喬在多元文化的環境中成長。祖先在18世紀自法國布列塔尼移居模里西斯島，成為英國公民。父親長年在英屬喀麥隆和奈及利亞行醫，母親則是法國人。克來喬生於法國尼斯，由祖母和母親撫養長大，她們培養了克萊喬對閱讀及寫作的喜好。
克萊喬擁有豐富的旅行經驗。他的第一次寫作經驗便發生在八歲時，從尼斯坐船到非洲和父親相聚。為了打發坐船的無聊時光，他寫了第一篇故事，異國風情和漂泊氣息因此成為他小說的主調。
克萊喬小說常以漂泊不定的邊緣人物為主角。「金魚」描述從小被人口販子抱走的北非少女，15年在世界各地四處流浪的故事。
「偶遇」則敘述12歲的小女孩娜希瑪喬裝成小男孩，偷偷登上停泊在自由港的豪華遊艇「秘密」，與過氣電影製片默格一起展開一段追尋自由與自我的航程。書中娜希瑪的醫生父親凱加斯，為個人自由拋家棄女，與克萊喬到非洲行醫的父親頗為類似。
「偶遇」的第二篇作品「安格利‧馬拉」，源於巴拿馬的印第安古老傳說。描述印第安青年巴維托從小在城市長大，18歲時決定重回出生地尋找生命源頭，最後因為愛人被殺，他殺光仇人後退化為野人。
為「偶遇」寫導讀的中原大學應用外語系講師張慧卿表示，克萊喬是說故事能手，讀者經常可以在他的小說中「嗅到孤獨、沉默、漂流的氣息，看到人類對探求生命 源頭和追求心靈自由的強烈慾望及堅毅力量」。他關心的主題還包括少數弱勢民族、人類與大自然的關係、過度膨脹的城市對自然文化的破壞等。

本屆諾貝爾文學獎公布之前幾天，瑞典學院常務秘書賀拉斯．恩格道爾在接受美聯社的訪談時說：世界文學的中心仍然是歐洲，而不是美國，這是一個無法否認的事實。這種歐洲中心主義在瑞典學院是根深柢固的。
其實在2005年，諾獎評委主席由看重第三世界文學的維斯特伯（Per Wastberg）院士接任，這在一定程度上，代表著瑞典學院內部一種轉移「歐洲中心」的傾向。也因此，今年頒獎給法國作家勒．克萊喬（Jean- Marie Le Clezio），我們可以看到評委的「歐洲中心」主義與諾貝爾遺囑要求的「世界文學」眼光之間一種微妙的平衡。
瑞典學院公布的得獎作家小傳一開始就提到：勒．克萊喬的父母和家族與前法國殖民地非洲島國模里西斯有密切聯繫，二戰後的1948年，他八歲即隨父母移居尼日。瑞典學院獎掖的，是這位「新啟程的、詩意的冒險和有感官狂喜的作者，在主流文明之外和之下的人性探索者」。
勒．克萊喬獲獎，並不出乎瑞典文學界的預測之外，因為他被譯為瑞典文的著作有十多本，頗受瑞典讀者歡迎。瑞典最大報《每日新聞》文化版10月8日預測可能 得獎人，刊出十位作家及照片，其中除了大眾熟知的美國作家菲利浦．羅斯、敘利亞詩人阿都尼斯、南韓詩人高銀等，這位法國小說家勒．克萊喬也在名單之列。
瑞典學院頒獎給勒．克萊喬後，贏得一片掌聲，沒有往常發生過的那種噓聲。瑞典筆會主席林奈（Bjorn Linnell）表示稱許。瑞典電視台報導中強調他作品中的歷史記憶，因「人們不能沒有記憶而活著」。女記者稱讚作品涉及到許多殖民和後殖民的議題。好幾 位評論家認為實至名歸。