‘An organist’s improvisation’. The composition of A. de Saint-Exupéry’s novel The Wisdom of the Sands [Citadelle] through the prism of M. Mamardashvili’s philosophy

Abstract

The study examines the composition of A. de Saint-Exupéry’s unfinished novel The Wisdom of the Sands [Citadelle] through the prism of M. Mamardashvili’s ideas about the poetics of ‘productive’ literary texts he referred to as ‘meaning-shaping machines.’ At the time of Saint-Exupéry’s death, the novel existed as a collection of random fragments, their order determined later and in the absence of the novelist’s instructions. Mamardashvili’s concept helps to recognize a special form of aesthetic accomplishment in the book’s unfinished nature. As a ‘productive product,’ the text evokes a certain state of consciousness. Such works of literature possess the following poetic traits: unfinishedness, a fragmentary nature, non-linear narrative, a very high word count, musicality (a leitmotif-driven structure), a unique subjective structure, and the narrator’s meta-reflection. The Wisdom of the Sands is interpreted as a circuitous history of the Berber king’s ideas about the concept of a ‘divine knot that ties everything together.’ The concept multiplies through its variations, extending to the system of characters and perceived at a meta-level. The purpose of such meditations is to encounter the concept in the narrator’s, author’s, and reader’s personal experiences.