by John Updike
The hero is called Chance. He is an illiterate foundling kept by a rich old man known, with a simplicity too ominous, as the Old Man. Chance has two activities: he tends the Old Man’s garden (Madam, I’m Adam) and watches television. After the Old Man dies, lawyers discover that Chance’s existence has generated no external evidence—no driver’s license, no credit cards, no tax records, not even dental records. He is cast out of the garden, and instantly encounters (hello, Eve) EE, the wife of another very rich old man, Rand. Everywhere, Chance creates an excellent impression, and he comports himself very well; gardening and television-watching seem to be at least as adequate a preparation for adult life as a college education. Though he doesn’t know how to read or make love beyond the preliminaries shown on the idiot box, he can make speeches that win the heart not only of EE but of the President of the United States. As the saga ends, Chance, a total nonentity four days before, has the Vice-Presidential nomination in his pocket. No doubt there is a lot in this, from political satire (Chance = Agnew) to philosophical allegory (“being there” = Heidegger’s Dasein). Also, there is some kind of joke on McLuhanite coolness; Chance is a walking television screen: people “began to exist, as on TV, when one turned one’s eyes on them.… The same was true of him.” The dust jacket, helpful to a fault, calls Chance “prelapsarian man” and asks, “Is Chance the technocrat of the future? … Or is he Rousseauesque, with a touch of natural goodness to which men respond?” Tune in next parable. Myself, I prefer to see him as the blind Chance that rules the universe, into which people touchingly read omniscience and benevolence and anthropomorphic Divinity.
All this symbolic superstructure rests on a realistic base less substantial than sand. Rand has one amusing, almost lifelike speech. Chance’s sensations when he appears on television, “the cameras … licking up the image of his body,” can be felt. There is one sharp image, of “frosty sculptures,” in rooms of vague furniture. Otherwise, the texture of events is thin, thin, preposterously thin. The rich and powerful may be stupid, but they would not mistake a comatose illiterate for a financial wizard. A hermit might be innocent, but his body would know how to achieve an erection. Fortune may be arbitrary in bestowing her favors, but she is not totally berserk. When a character in the book expresses incredulity at Chance’s abrupt and baseless fame, he is appealing to laws of probability that have been suspended. There is not enough leverage even to spring a laugh. No two things are incongruous, because hardly anything in Being There is there.
You could say that this is an immigrant’s impression of America, an “other planetary perspective.” But compare Nabokov; also an immigrant, from the same Slavic hemisphere as Kosinski, he assiduously put himself to school with American particulars and came up with a portrait—not only in Lolita but in the background of Pnin and the poem “Pale Fire”—of the United States grotesquely and tellingly acute in its details. Mr. Kosinski’s portrait expresses little but the portraitist’s diffident contempt for his subject—the American financial and political Establishment. He does not enough hate it to look hard at it; the result is not even a cartoon. Stylized also were the nameless villages of the Polish marsh in The Painted Bird, but those scenes were in Kosinski’s blood, and the plausibility gaps were filled with an experienced terror that redeemed the parade of Grand Guignol episodes from being merely sensational. In Steps, an adult man’s erotic explorations were interwoven with these same horrific villages, and incriminated in the same sinister cruelty. Perhaps the intention of Being There was to transfer this sinisterness to an America befogged by media and ruled by stuffed shirts. The result is feebly pleasant—a dim and truncated television version of those old Hollywood comedies wherein a handsome bumpkin charms the swells and makes good. Unlike Kosinski’s other novels, Being There is not painful to read, which in his special case is not a virtue.
Raymond Queneau was born in 1903, in Le Havre; his first novel, Le Chiendent, published in 1933, has now been translated into English, by Barbara Wright, as The Bark Tree. The dust jacket tells us that Robbe-Grillet has “hailed” this book as “a new-wave novel twenty years ahead of its time,” and the translator’s introduction presents further testimonials, accrediting The Bark Tree as a classic and Queneau as a giant in the generation of modernists that succeeded Proust and Joyce. The book, we are told, evolved from Queneau’s attempt to translate Descartes’ Discourse on Method into French as it is really spoken, dismissing the “conventions of style, spelling, and vocabulary that date from the grammarians of the sixteenth century and the poets of the seventeenth.” On the other hand, Queneau, a mathematician and a pedant, chose to regulate his excursion into demotic philosophy—which became a novel—with rules as strict as those of a ballade or rondeau; seven chapters, each of thirteen sections, observe within themselves the classical unities of place, time, and action. In addition, there are repetitions of image and phrase planted for the author’s personal pleasure, and the reader can subliminally sense a high degree of coherence and consistency beneath the surface of this rather sprawling and absurd tale.
The main plot concerns Étienne Marcel, a Parisian bank employee who lives in the suburb of Obonne, as he is observed by Pierre Le Grand, a speculative member of the idle rich, while Étienne makes the transition from flat silhouette to substantial human existence and back to flat silhouette. Étienne is the Cartesian man: when he begins to think (he suddenly notices in a store window two rubber ducks floating in a hat to advertise that the hat is waterproof), he is. From the window of his commuting train, he then observes a tiny sign advertising “CHIPS” and determines, as an acte gratuit, to visit this place, in the factory slum of Blagny; thereby he puts himself, and his observer, Pierre, and his son, Théo, and his wife, Alberte, and his wife’s admirer, Narcense, in touch with a raffish crowd that includes a concierge, an abortionist, a magician, a sailor, an old junk dealer, and a remarkably presumptuous dwarf. This impinging activates a rumor that the junk dealer, Old Taupe, is a rich miser, and a set of frantic schemes to appropriate his fortune, mainly by means of his marriage to a young waitress, Ernestine, who unaccountably dies during a wedding feast that reminded this dazed reader of the Babar books. And there are love affairs and hangings and dreams and dialogues about the meaning of nothing and, for a climax, a war between the French and the Etruscans.
The Bark Tree is full, like Bad News, of nonsense and, like Being There, of naked contrivance. It is superior to both these books in the rigor of its pattern and in the richness of its matter. A palpable Paris takes shape through a multiplicity of fine strokes:
Four, five, six drops of water. Some people, anxious about their straw hats, raise their noses. Description of a storm in Paris. In summer. The timid take to their heels; others raise the collars of their jackets, which gives them an air of bravado. It begins to smell of mud. Many people prudently look for shelter, and when the rain is at its height, all that can be seen are blackish groups, clustered around doorways, like mussels around the pile of a pier.
Queneau’s wonderful gift for simile tempts one to compile a list:
His nose has taken on the fiery color of Campari and his eyes are sparkling like lemonade.
They plunge into their reciprocal destinies, like shrimps into the sand.…
They fill the glasses with wine, which glasses take on the joyous appearance of druggists’ display bottles.
The horizon, that universal castrator …
Bits of vegetables or meat, which had jumped out of the dishes like absurd acrobats, were scattered all over [the table], wilting in little pools of gravy.
And above these odd events, these overanimated souls and artifacts, a real humanity presides; Queneau not only permits each character the dignity of eloquence but rises himself to a fury of sarcasm when he contemplates the chauvinistic farce of the “Etruscan” war: “even the strategists … said they’d never seen a simpler, easier, more amusing war.”
Queneau’s sympathy peculiarly falls upon the banal—upon the empty routines,
that is, whereby human ordinariness propels itself along the quotidian. He says of certain conventional greetings that “their apparent complexity concealed a profound simplicity.” Pierre, overhearing some clichés about the weather, “notes with some bitterness that these banalities correspond perfectly to reality.” Perhaps, since Flaubert, banality is the challenge to serious novelists: the gales of romance have died, and the novelist is a sailor on a close reach, trying to use the constant wind of ordinary living to make some kind of headway against it. The melodrama of Queneau’s plot is manufactured by the characters, as a vacation from boredom; his own vacation comes in the intervals of metaphysical speculation, and these—though he would not have written the book without them—seem rather mannered and pat. When Pierre talks to the reader about his boredom and his masks, or when Étienne drops the aphorism that “there isn’t any gospel, there are only works of fiction,” we are aware of an author pressing his claims upon our intelligence; when Ernestine, dying, formulates death as the disappearance of “the little voice that talks in your head when you’re by yourself,” we are in the presence of human experience and shared terror. Gertrude Stein said it: literature isn’t remarks. What we want from fiction, and what fiction is increasingly loath to give us, is vicarious experience. Exiled from the great naïveté that nurtured the 19th-century masterworks of the novel, Queneau yet is old enough—humane enough—to spin, amid a metaphysics of relativity and uncertainty, affectionate images of human life in its curiosity, rapacity, and fragility. Compared to Queneau, our two other authors seem tired; a distance that cannot be exactly measured in generations or wars separates them from an instinctive belief that men are significant and that art must embody enduring principles.
A note on the translation: Barbara Wright did not set herself an easy task, and her version does permit us to glimpse an original whose prose has not only a poetic economy but, in dialogue, a slangy, punning richness. However, either this text was carelessly proofread or some of her renderings are too subtle by half. “Squite” (for “it’s quite”), “wz” and “shdve” (for “was” and “should have”), “etxras” (for “extras”), and “sore span” (for “saucepan”) are doubtless intentional equivalents of delicate audial distortions in the French; but what about “fairtish,” “neved,” and “everwhere”? These occur in dialogue, and “aand” appears in expository prose, and “becaues” in a letter in which nothing else is misspelled. Something wrong here?
A note on the price: the dust jacket calmly asks nine dollars and fifty cents for The Bark Tree. It is two hundred and eighty-one pages long. The Novel may or may not be dead; soon we won’t be able to buy into its casket and see.
Mortal Games
THE FLIGHT OF ICARUS, by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 192 pp. New Directions, 1973.
ALL FIRES THE FIRE and Other Stories, by Julio Cortázar, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine. 152 pp. Pantheon, 1973.
Modernism, we are told, is passé; the Harvard English Department lists a course, “American Modernism,” that treats of “American writing from 1900 to 1930,” and another, “The Modern Period,” that is “an introduction to the poetry, fiction, intellectual prose, and criticism of the period from 1899 to 1939.” But what has come after? What now? In the uncertain twilight, where the avant garde has become the rear guard, strange loomings and mistaken perspectives bemuse us. Surely, we suppose, Raymond Queneau, a modern whose masterpiece The Bark Tree appeared in 1933, is dead and silent. Not so, for here is a lively new novel, The Flight of Icarus. And surely Julio Cortázar, the Brussels-born, Paris-dwelling Argentine expatriate who contrived such frolicsome experiments as Hopscotch and 62: A Model Kit, is, as his handsome jacket photograph attests, a young man. Not so, for from the back flap of his latest book to appear in the United States, All Fires the Fire and Other Stories, we learn that Sr. Cortázar, with his turned-up raincoat collar and his downy cheeks, was born in 1914. So he, scarcely less than Queneau, harks back to the brave first third of this century, when Literature hobnobbed with Life as an equal, when young Dedaluses set forth to forge in their souls’ smithies the uncreated consciences of their respective races, when innovations in fictional technique could be dubbed “revolutionary,” and when artistic, cerebral excitement carbonated a page of prose so that it tingled in the reader like champagne. The late Pablo Neruda, puffing Cortázar’s stories, describes them as “fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games.” The final phrase puts well the tension between an earnest sense of reality and a playful sense of active mind that modernism brought to such a fine and precarious pitch—especially precarious in this country, where naturalism tends to breed sprawling verbal slums and, in reaction, anti-naturalists of the most antic, heedless, and dandyish sort.
Queneau, in The Flight of Icarus, is something of a dandy himself. The novel, written in the attenuated form of a play containing no fewer than seventy-four short scenes, takes place in Paris in 1895, when absinthe is still drunk, the bicycle and the “automobile carriage” are freshly in motion, Reason rules a feast of gourmet dining, and authors busily function as a superior type of tradesman. Icarus, our hero, escapes from a novel being written by Hubert Lubert, “a novelist by profession, by vocation, even, and … of some renown.” Lubert, suspecting a character-napping by his rival Surget, hires the farcically inept detective Morcol (“The man who follows adulterous women and finds lost sheep. He has appeared in many novels under different names. A second Vidocq. A second Lecoq”). Morcol makes a number of brilliant deductions but nevertheless lets the escapee remain undetected under his very nose. Icarus has drifted into a low-life café and, having taken his first “flight” on absinthe, is—so appealingly has Lubert designed him—taken in and supported by a prostitute identified as LN. The plot spins faster: other characters escape from other works in progress; their frantic creators fight duels amongst themselves; Icarus buys from a bookstall by the Seine The Principles of Mechanics (“the less he understood it the more he enjoyed it”) and goes to work for the mechanic M. Berrrier (sic), while LN turns from prostitution to the production of bicycle bloomers; Morcol retires, though the lost-character business is booming; most of the fictional escapees creep back into their books, or somebody else’s; Icarus and LN attempt flight in a giant kite, and fall. “Everything happened as was anticipated,” Lubert assures us at the end, shutting his manuscript complacently.
It is hard to imagine a novel lighter than this that would significantly engage the mind. Yet The Flight of Icarus, though it is continuously absurd, never strikes us as silly. The style is chaste and swift, ornamented with inventions translated as “obnubilating,” “spondulics,” “ostreophagists,” “petroliphagious,” “cantharodrome.” The many threads of the cat’s-cradle plot are complicated and regathered with an impressive efficiency. The literary satire is sharp though good-humored; Robbe-Grillet especially seems the butt of such speculations as
Perhaps that is how it will be for all of us, one day. We won’t have any more characters.… The novel will perhaps not be dead, but it won’t have characters in it anymore. Difficult to imagine, a novel without characters. But isn’t all progress, if progress exists, difficult to imagine?
Queneau’s own characters are more or less aware that they are caught in a novel. Lubert is preparing for Icarus a “melancholy existence”: “I want him to like moonlight, fairy roses, the exotic types of nostalgia, the languors of Spring, fin-de-siècle neuroses—all things that I personally abhor, but which go down well in the present-day novel.” Icarus, however, cries, “A fig for the neurasthenias, the neuroses, and the nostalgias of our contemporary writers!” And, escaping the “dismal or disappointing love affairs, with sessions in cosy, dusty apartments” that his author would have arranged for him, he opts for technology: “personally, I’m much more interested in theoretical mechanics, from the fall of heavy bodies to the mechanism of a lock.” Not only Icarus acknowledges the matrix of novelistic cliché and me
lodrama; a waiter, observing him and LN in a cafe, predicts (incorrectly) their fate, assuring himself, “I’ve read a great many novels and I know what happens next.” And while the “fictional” characters are attempting, like bumpkins in from the provinces, to make a go of it in mercantile Paris, one “real” woman volunteers to become the heroine of a romantic novel. The confusion is slight. Objecting to the plot’s basic fantasy, the reader might say that one does not meet fictional characters on the street; the answer would be that one is not on the street but reading a book, where one meets fictional characters all the time. The reader’s demand, that is, for reality is turned back upon itself. The characters are uniformly real, “characters” or not. And the milieu is perfectly convincing. We have been there before, in the bicycle-obsessed frenzies of Jarry, in those enchanted pages of Proust where Marcel becomes an Adam among the fresh creations of the telephone, the automobile, the camera. Something in the French spirit embraced with special innocence and energy the inventions—toylike in their first forms—that equip and distinguish the modern age. The same spirit, perhaps traceable to a peculiar delight in Reason and its works, permits the French, uniquely, to produce works of art as intellectual, spare, and impudent as this, as spindly and nakedly theoretical as a primitive machine yet undeniably serious, even majestic.
Julio Cortázar is not so engaging a spirit as Queneau, and the eight pieces in All Fires the Fire suffer, in the way of collections, from comparison with one another—the story “Meeting” is less stunning than the title piece, and “Instructions for John Howell” ends less satisfyingly than “The Island at Noon.” But in sum these eight “mortal games” correct this reviewer’s previous impression (gained by that most thrifty of methods, bookstore perusal) that Cortázar was a decadent avant gardist, a rather desperate innovator snipping autobiography into eye-catching shapes. True, he cannot get started without a gimmick: there is always a fantastic premise or a startling formalistic deviation, and he does not have Borges’ power of persuading us that the strangeness flows from the superior vision of a drastically refined sensibility. But, once the trick is established (and no two devices are alike in this set of eight), Cortázar pushes beyond it with surprising powers of realistic development. The first story, “The Southern Thruway,” supposes that a traffic jam on the Sunday-night rush back to Paris is truly—as traffic jams often feel—of days and months in duration. The same little locality of cars inches forward together a few yards a day; a community develops. Food is shared, leaders emerge, the girl in the Dauphine sleeps with the engineer in the Peugeot and becomes pregnant by him, the man in the Caravelle behind the engineer commits suicide, a Porsche and a Mercury (the characters take on the names of their cars) peddle black-market provisions through the stalled lines, and so on. The conceit is fleshed out with so many solid details that in the end, when the jam mysteriously breaks and the cars, accelerating, separate, the reader feels as well as comprehends the allegorical meaning—the loss of community in this modern “mad race in the night among unknown cars, where no one knew anything about the others, where everyone looked straight ahead, only ahead.”
