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Saint-Exupéry, The Myth of the Pilot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Joseph T. McKeon
Joseph T. McKeon*
Affiliation:
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky
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Abstract

Saint-Exupéry, whether by artistic design or by stylistic spontaneity, wreathes the pilot, the generic hero of his four novels, Courrier Sud, Vol de nuit, Terre des hommes, Pilote de guerre, in an aura of such hyperbole that the reader, raised on the banalities of the “nouveau roman,” might find such exaggeration naive if not ludicrous. Yet the legend of the Saint-Exupéryian hero is not cased in a rigid matrix. In these four works—the first two fiction, the others essentially true narrative—the imagery that forms the substance of the myth of the pilot undergoes a subtle transformation: legendary, mythological, and mystical in Courrier Sud, it is subtly and successively altered. In the final pages of Pilate de guerre the metamorphcsis is complete, the myth is dissipated in a profession of fraternal faith, and, through its hero, man is seen in his true perspective, more realistic but no less heroic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , October 1974 , pp. 1084 - 1089
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 1089 Léon Werth, La Vie de Saint-Exupéry (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1948), p. 59:

Ce qui est intolérable, c'est que les camarades de la ligne, du moins le croit-il, le rejettent de leur communauté. Il écrit a Guillaumet: “Guillaumet il paraît que tu arrives et j'en ai le cœur un peu battant. Si tu savais quelle terrible vie j'ai menée depuis ton départ et quel immense dégoût de la vie j'ai peu à peu appris à ressentir. Parce que j'avais écrit ce malheureux livre [Vol de nuit] j'ai été condamné à la misère et à l'inimitié de mes camarades. Mermoz te dira quelle réputation ceux qui ne m'ont plus vu et que j'aimais tant m'ont peu à peu faite. On te dira combien je suis prétentieux.”

Note 2 in page 1089 Courrier Sud (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 26.

Note 3 in page 1089 Vol de nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), p. 4.

Note 4 in page 1089 Terre des hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 199.

Note 5 in page 1089 Walter S. Ross, The Last Hero (New York: Harper, 1968), p. 52. “At that time [c. 1922] the life span of an aviator was about nine hundred flying hours.”

Note 6 in page 1089 New York Times, 7 Dec. 1968, p. 61: “Color photographs taken from an aircraft cruising at heights of 4,500 and 9,000 feet above Canadian bean fields are showing scientists certain blight-infection patterns that cannot be seen by people walking through the fields. . . . The experimental pictures . . . showed that aerial photography could be used to survey disease infections . . . and should provide a clear picture of nationwide losses of crops to diseases.”

Note 7 in page 1089 P. 6: “C'était près de Concordia, en Argentine, mais c'eut pu être partout ailleurs: le mystère est ainsi répandu. . . . J'avais atterri dans un champ, et je ne savais point que j'allais vivre un conte de fées.”

Note 8 in page 1089 Pilote de guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 108.

Note 9 in page 1089 Other factors to which allusion has already been made and which could very well also account for the nature of Saint-Exupéry's metaphorical presentation of pilots from Courrier Sud to Pilote de guerre are: (1) a chronological factor—Courrier Sud, published in 1928, was the work of an idealistic and enthusiastic young man on the threshold not only of a literary career but also of a profession still in its infancy, and practiced by only a select coterie of men. Pilote de guerre, which appeared in 1942, was the work of a man disabused and fatigued by the physical and emotional stresses of time, a relatively long career in aviation, and the effects of several aircraft accidents, more than one of which nearly cost him his life; and (2) a historical factor—the final works of Saint-Exupéry were written under the pall of the ominous events preceding World War n and the disaster that overwhelmed his country at the very outset of that cataclysm.