SOURCE: "Tournier's Ultimate Perversion: The Historical Manipulation of Gilles et Jeanne," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 72-88.

In the following essay, Levy discusses Tournier's alteration of historical fact in Gilles et Jeanne, comparing the novel's portrayal of the main characters with scholarly accounts of the historical figures upon which they are based.

The contemporary French novelist and short story writer Michel Tournier has on numerous occasions stressed the various ways in which his works appropriate material from earlier literary texts, both those of others and his own, and from the multi-layered stories he describes as myth. He radically alters the configurations of his borrowings and incorporates them into what both he and many critics describe as perverted re-tellings that depict his own evolving obsessions and reveal the scope of his originality. Beginning with the Robinson Crusoe story, which acts as a springboard for...