SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. “J. M. G. Le Clézio's Désert: The Myth of Transparency.” World Literature Today 71, no. 4 (fall 1997): 703–08.

In the following essay, Knapp examines how the characters in Désert seem to randomly appear and disappear.

The myth of transparency (Latin, trans, “beyond,” + parere, “to appear” or “show through”) lies at the heart of J. M. G. Le Clézio's 1980 novel Désert. The hallucinatory images or visions rising up as if from nothingness at certain junctures in the novel invite the reader to glimpse, but only briefly, a world of imponderables. Since ambiguity and mystery are the essence of myth in general and of Le Clézio's novel in particular, the reader faces a confluence of perpetually vibrating signs, palpating arcana, and sensations that enunciate their livingness in, paradoxically, silent transparencies.

Le Clézio's myth of transparency relates a primordial experience, sometimes personal but...