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Introduction
Many critics have pointed out the importance of Revelation by John of Patmos as an intertext in Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes (cf., for example, J. Poirier 8, Jean-Bernard Way 82-6, Susan Petit 1991:37 and Colin Davis 56). They normally refer to the apocalyptic ending of the novel as the most obvious link with the Johannine text. This connection is obvious not only because the final scene is the destruction of Kaltenborn castle with all its inhabitants (and by extension the destruction of the entire Third Reich), but also because there are direct references to Revelation in Tournier's text (e.g., Tournier 539). However, the importance of Johannine discourse goes well beyond this overt intertextuality.
In his discussion of Tournier's use of the Bible in general, David Gascoigne writes: "[The biblical] intertext becomes a narrative generator in its own right, when the Biblical analogy is at the root of the construction of a character, as indicated by the symbolic nomenclature (Abel, Thomas etc.), or central to the conception of an event (the fall of the Third Reich as Apocalypse)" (98). I would argue that this is the very mechanism at work in the relationship between Le Roi des Aulnes and Revelation: John's text is the kind of 'narrative generator' that Gascoigne is talking about. The 'fall of the Third Reich as Apocalypse' is the event that projects Revelation backwards to the entire novel. And as a result 'the Biblical analogy is at the root of the construction of a character': Abel Tiffauges. As I intend to demonstrate, this is the key point of contact between the two texts. The "apocalyptic weight" of Le Roi des Aulnes stems as much from the connections between John and Tiffauges as from the calamitous events in question. Tiffauges is John's antitype primarily because both visionaries assume a certain moral stance toward life in society and then allow this stance to govern their whole existence.
Apocalyptic Fiction
David Bethea argues that certain works of literature are so fundamentally indebted to Revelation that they form a class which he calls "apocalyptic fiction." Although Bethea develops this notion with respect to examples from Russian literature, his concepts apply equally well (if not even more so) to Tournier's novel:
an apocalyptic fiction...