À la recherche de l’île perdue: Le Clézio à Maurice

The evocations of Mauritius in Le Clezio’s work are often part of a quest of identity that refers the reader to the author’s family history. Beyond the referential framework, those biographical fictions, in particular the novel Le Chercheur d’Or (1985), develop a representation of the island that is deeply indebted to the psycho-emotional crucible of the author’s childhood. Does Mauritius as it appears in the novel respond to such an intention? Does the narration in its deceptive configuration only display the patterns of a primordial imaginary? This is issue that will be worked out by the present paper. Beyond the common semantic theories and according to Jean Burgos’ Poétique de l’Imaginaire, this study will consider the imaginary as a creative dynamic whose internal logic structures the mimetic immersion process involved in the advent of the fiction