Ramuntcho - Themes

Themes

According to the French critic w:fr:Patrick Besnier, ( introducing a 1990 edition of the novel), Loti's book is one " shaped by the rapports between father and son - their non-existence, their impossibility.."

In Ramuntcho the Basque country is presented as a quasi-paradisiacal land. Time and history do not weigh upon this Arcadie, the slow passage of days and months is simply a succession of feast days and of rejoicing. The outside world doesn't intrude, even military service is left hazy - the reader learns only that Ramuntcho departs for 'a southern land.' From this Basque paradise, Ramuntcho is going to be excluded; the novel is the story of a fall, and of an exile from Eden. Unwilling at first to do his military service ;" Non, je peux ne pas le faire, mon service! je suis Guipuzcoan, moi, comme ma mère;...Français ou Espagnol, moi, ça m'est égal.. " Yet he does his service, to please Gracieuse, and he chooses a nationality, French. To the lack of differentiation French/Spanish, other themes of borders emerge - for example the border between adulthood and adolescence. According to Besnier, Loti, in his Basque life, lived protected from the realities and cruelties of existence, and in a state of perpetual adolescence. In this happy land, it seems only games and pleasures exist, the two principal occupations being pelota and dancing, and the only 'work' really evoked, smuggling, which itself is a kind of game between police and thieves. When Ramuntcho returns, having symbolically exchanged the 'pantalon rouge' of the military, for the 'tenues légères' of the players of pelota, he is changed. Even those amongst his comrades who have become fathers, continue to participate in their world as before, but not Ramuntcho. "

The sentiment of exclusion from paradise which begins for the hero was one Loti knew. Lost childhood obsessed the writer, he was an exile in the world of adults where he would never truly integrate himself, neither able to take it seriously, nor to conquer the anxiety which it inspired in him. He wanted to ensorcerize it..to live in a universe of a manufactured adolescence.. his celebrated taste for dressing up and costume balls, disguising reality, of which so many photographs give proof - Loti as a Pharoah, Loti as Louis XI, Loti as a berber. " "Time and again in his life Loti travels to a land of possible salvation, that he thinks might know the secret of primitive innocence - time and again follows disillusion, and the traveller understands that, far from him being saved, rather he has brought contagion ('progress', 'civilization') to the dreamed of paradise." In the Basque country too, Loti tried to find his paradise; he learnt to play pelota and began learning the Basque language. He was gendarme, yet wanted to join the smugglers in their expeditions - he had a hatred for all 'official masks'.

A story of rustic games, and with an innocent character, the novel seems to belong in a certain tradition which blossomed at the end of the eighteenth century - the idyllic pastoral novel - works like Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian's Estelle et Némorian or, best known of all, Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Paul et Virginie. The characteristics : young lovers, inexperienced, a mix of naive sensuality and chastity, an exaltation of simple life and frugal ways, a timeless world enclosing one, a beautiful and beneficent Nature, seem to appear again, a hundred years later, in Loti's work. But the critic Patrick Besnier has argued that more than the idyll, Ramuntcho belongs in the Bildungsroman tradition, to the novel of apprenticeship and of formation. "The title is significant. One name. This is Daphnis without Chloe, Paul without Virginie. Ramuntcho is alone. It is the painful story of a birth. And the novel about love in beautiful natural surroundings is only a stage, an appearance of this book, a dark and tragic book.." The apprenticeship is a series of ruptures and of renunciations so that on the last page Ramuntcho appears as une plante déracinée du cher sol basque.