Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  The young French writer Emmanuel Carrère is also a formidable magnifier, at least in The Mustache. It is his third novel; his second, Bravoure, won two prizes, the Prix Passion and the Prix de la Vocation, and this one comes to translation into English bedecked with Franco-American praise. The tale’s point of departure seems as trivial as a pigeon in the hall: a young Parisian architect, left nameless, decides to shave off the mustache he has been sporting for ten years. Like the bank guard of Süskind’s tale, he is a man of routine, who shaves twice a day, the second time while luxuriating in his bathtub, which is surrounded by mirrors. “He’d prepare a drink, kept within arm’s reach, then lavishly spread the shaving cream on his chin, going back and forth with the razor, making sure not to come too close to the mustache, which he would later trim with a scissors.” Any fictional character with a razor in his hand makes a reader nervous, and our hero’s impulsive, impish decision to surprise his wife, Agnes, by shaving off his mustache feels like a dangerous violation of the quotidian order. So it proves. Returning to their apartment and to her husband, she notices nothing different, though his upper lip is not only bare but paler than his ski-vacation-tanned face. When pressed, she claims that he never had a mustache. His friends and colleagues, too, assert he never wore a mustache, and Agnes maintains this fiction or delusion even while staring at vacation photographs of her husband’s mustached self or when confronted with the mustache’s remnants, rescued from the garbage.

  What has happened? We never quite know, though the permutations of progressively malignant confusion are exquisitely described; in a sense, the book offers a paradigm of marital misunderstanding, with its volatile alternations of tenderness and rage, quarrel and lovemaking, empathy and bafflement. Agnes, who works at a publishing house, does have a history of willful and stubborn lying, even in the teeth of contradictory evidence, but this does not explain the apparent blindness of his colleagues at work and of the café-owner across the street to the hero’s newly clean-shaven condition, or her perfectly enacted appearance of distress at what she construes as his loss of sanity. At one point, when he confronts her with a mustached identity photo of himself, she rubs a wet finger across the mustache and shows him a spot of ink on her fingertip, accusing him of doctoring the photo with Magic Marker. Then she produces a razor blade from her pocketbook and scrapes away the mustache in the photo. As their grapple approaches full-fledged “conjugal guerrilla warfare,” each suspecting the other of insanity, what had been a loving relationship and a thriving conventional marriage reasserts itself in painful oscillations of mood:

  He vacillated between anger and a nauseating tenderness for Agnes, poor Agnes, his wife, Agnes, totally fragile, delicately put together, a sly fox, with a fine line between an active mind and the irrationality that had begun to consume her.… Through the power of love, patience, and tact, he’d tear her away from her demons, row with all his strength to get her to shore. He’d hit her if he had to, for the sake of love, just like you’d knock out a struggling swimmer to keep him from drowning. A wave of tenderness swept over him, facilitating this sudden burst of terrible and disturbing metaphors.

  Agnes’s denials of her husband’s reality grow in scope: she denies that they have ever been on vacation in Java, though a blanket bought there hangs on the wall, and she tells him his father is dead, though he has just heard his father’s voice on the answering machine. Yet the spreading irrationality is not only in her—an old Cary Grant picture that the couple watch together on television turns into a preposterous mélange—and The Mustache is not simply Gaslight with a female Charles Boyer. The irrationality lies in the tale itself, and the author has a nimble job of it to keep his hero away from a character who might restore order. The architect flees, for instance, from a scheduled appointment with a psychiatrist, and he unaccountably cannot find the apartment building where his parents live and where he himself lived for ten years. The Mustache, fine and glossy and inexorable, like a machine with one lost gear-tooth, processes reactions and emotions within a universe whose laws have slipped. The only rational explanation—if one is demanded—is that somehow, at the moment of his shaving off his mustache, the hero and his wife enter parallel universes, which one respectable contemporary school of cosmology holds are generated with every ambiguity of quantum measurement. In the words of physicist Bryce DeWitt, “Every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of copies of itself.”

  But The Mustache is not science fiction; it is a fantasy located just to one side of our world and an alarming commentary upon it. The stability of our personal lives rests upon a consensus of perception and memory that in fact has no guarantee. We are solipsists who in uneasy conjunction with other solipsists construct a society and a shared world. The apparatus and conventions of modern bourgeois life—the credit cards, the answering machines, the vacations by jet, the matter-of-fact sensuality, the days beginning with a shave and a “hiccuping coffee-pot”—glitter familiarly through the slats of Carrère’s subtly distorting, abruptly lowered blind. The relatively exotic settings of Hong Kong and Macao are realistically rendered, with plenty of tourist information, when the maddened hero flees there. The denouement is drastic but, then, so is any dislocation, however apparently minor, in our structure of shared perceptions. The book gets under one’s skin; more than once, I turned to the back of the jacket to ponder, in the photograph of the boyish-looking author, the naked expanse of his prominent upper lip, to see whether something was growing there, or had been recently removed. The Mustache has been likened to “The Metamorphosis,” but in Kafka’s fable, once we accept that Gregor Samsa awakes in the body of a large insect, everything proceeds sturdily, dependably, knitting itself like a healing wound around this initial violation of the ordinary, whereas Carrère’s mise-en-scène deteriorates more and more; it melts away until nothing remains but the hero’s French determination to think, in a world where thought no longer works. Gogol’s “The Nose” offers a closer parallel, since the world of the eccentric Russian master is also slippery and inconsistent. But Gogol’s nonsense is forgiving: he conjures up a Russia so brightly tinted and primitive as to casually permit physical miracles—a nose in a loaf of bread, a blank space where a man can no longer take snuff—and the nose reappears on its proper face one morning as if its interval of absence were a dream. A much grimmer effort is necessary in The Mustache to put everything “back in place.”

  The book’s ending shocks us, and we are additionally shocked to read, in a notation under the last line, that it was written in five weeks—“Biarritz-Paris / April 22–May 27, 1985.” This is an arrogant miniaturization of Joyce’s dating of his majestic labor on Ulysses—“Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921.” But Candide, it is said, was written in three days, and perhaps The Mustache could only have been rapidly improvised, a nightmare of slippage the author pulled quickly from the placid yuppie trivia of the life around him. His book is, to risk a rather devalued word, stunning—stunning in the speed and agility with which it slices through to its underlying desolation, and stunning in its final impact. In less than a hundred fifty pages, it packs a punch.

  * Amorousness in Apollinaire takes many forms. In the title of this piece, for instance, the “Case” of the title is a pun on the French cas, slang for the penis, and the concluding exhortation has a jubilant phallic connotation, echoing the World War I cry “Debout les morts!” The name Croniamantal was, the poet told Marie Laurencin, a blend of “Cro-Magnon” and “Néanderthal,” in boast of his stone-age priapic powers. I am indebted for these racy tidbits to a letter from Professor Scott Bates.

  † The word stems from the Germanic root meaning “concealed” and originally, like Hades and Sheol, had less to do with punishment than simple bleak survival in a vague netherworld.

  IRIS MURDOCH, PAIRED WITH OTHERS

  Baggy Monsters

  THE NAME OF THE ROSE, by Umberto Ec
o, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 502 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

  THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUPIL, by Iris Murdoch. 576 pp. Viking, 1983.

  Henry James wrote deprecatingly of novels he deemed to be “baggy monsters”; by way of illustration he cited—a grouping that would not occur to many critics these days—War and Peace, The Three Musketeers, and Thackeray’s The Newcomes. But how, this very assortment of titles begs us to ask, can the novel not be somewhat baggy, as its heritage of roles as historical chronicle, adventure saga, social panorama, and personal confession descends to it and ever more self-consciously complicates and thickens? The masterpieces of this century, as represented by Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, and The Magic Mountain, yield nothing in farraginous ambitious bulk to those of the nineteenth cited by James, and the admired American careers of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Thomas Pynchon show that bagginess, if not esteemed as a virtue in itself, is nevertheless deferred to and indulged, like prankishness in young men, as a sign of vitality. For is not the novel a progeny of the epic, by way of medieval romances and Don Quixote? To its already vastly stretched potentialities modernism has added, from Flaubert on, the option that the novel form a marvellously extended prose poem. As philosophy has withdrawn from the epic mode of Hegel and Schopenhauer into an academic language of inscrutable nicety, philosophical messages further bulge the novel’s bag. Indeed, prose fiction has become the one podium where philosophy can speak not in the mincing accents of semantics but in commentary upon our existential lives, along the lines laid down by Plato and Aristotle and Christian theology. The characteristic question of modern philosophy has become “Are we speaking clearly?”; but an atavistic element in us still asks, “How shall we live?” and “Is there Something Else?” When philosophers ask these questions now, it would seem they must ask them away from their lecterns, within that permissive genre which since the Renaissance has offered sanctuary to the otherwise inexpressively, unofficially, less-than-respectably human. The past summer’s airy reading fare has been varied by two baggy and brilliant novels, totalling over a thousand pages, by teachers of philosophy in European universities.

  One of them, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in fact has attained, for all its convolution and erudition and blithely untranslated Latin, the top reaches of the best-seller list here, as it has in Italy, France, and Germany. A many-branched murder mystery set in the Middle Ages, it has won as well a number of literary prizes; not since One Hundred Years of Solitude has there been such a consensual success on the Continent. The fifty-one-year-old Professor Eco is, the American book jacket tells us, “a world-famous specialist in semiotics, a distinguished historian, philosopher, and aesthetician, and a scholar of James Joyce. He teaches at the University of Bologna and lives in Milan.” Now that Roland Barthes is dead, the popularization of semiotics triumphantly continues in this novel, whose title refers to a medieval aperçu: “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.”* The novel purports to be an Italian translation of a nineteenth-century French transcription, by “a certain Abbé Vallet,” of a fourteenth-century manuscript written by one Adso, a Benedictine monk in the Austrian monastery of Melk, recounting events that occurred late in November of 1327 at an Italian abbey situated in “a vague area between Pomposa and Conques, with reasonable likelihood that the community was somewhere along the central ridge of the Apennines, between Piedmont, Liguria, and France.”

  Eco’s introduction, heaped with intricate and musty references, pays open homage to Jorge Luis Borges, mentioning his native city as well as imitating his mock-scholarly style: “But then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess.” And one of the monks in the unnamed abbey that serves as the novel’s mise-en-scène is named Jorge of Burgos. Other such punning allusions are woven into The Name of the Rose, and other literary influences than Borges’s can be detected—Joyce’s Thomistic rigor of organization, for instance, and the playful bookishness and maze-making of Eco’s compatriot Italo Calvino. Calvino’s recent novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, included a character strongly suggestive of Ian Fleming, and Eco is represented in the recently published critical anthology The Poetics of Murder by his analysis of “Narrative Structures in Fleming.” Another structuralist represented in the anthology is Barthes, with two excerpts from S/Z entitled “Delay” and “The Hermeneutic Sentence”; these set forth the principle of suspense behind all “classic” narrative, of which the most stylized form (and the one most readily available to structuralist analysis and avant-garde manipulation) is the detective novel. Borges, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor are among the modernist writers who have come to the detective novel from on high, as it were—out of a certain theoretical attraction, as opposed to those practitioners like Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, and Simenon, who have lifted it toward literary status from below, with no initial condescension. Eco now joins en haut the former ranks, but without disregarding the main requirements of the popular form, and indeed managing to achieve popular success.

  The Name of the Rose, twice as long as the conventional mystery, marshals these conventional ingredients: an eccentric detective given to inscrutable swoops of deduction, an amiable but naïve sidekick who narrates the tale, a closed setting wherein a succession of ghastly murders takes place, a restricted array of characters that must include the murderer, an unsympathetic and bumbling official detective, maps and codes and secret passageways and hidden latches and missing documents, and a final, cleansing elucidation and denouement. The detective is a “learned Franciscan, Brother William of Baskerville”; like the hero of The Hound of the Baskervilles and its companion narratives, William is English, tall, thin, beak-nosed, and takes dope:

  On … occasions a vacant, absent expression appeared in his eyes, and I would have suspected he was in the power of some vegetal substance capable of producing visions if the obvious temperance of his life had not led me to reject this thought. I will not deny, however, that in the course of the journey, he sometimes stopped at the edge of a meadow, at the entrance to a forest, to gather some herb (always the same one, I believe): and he would then chew it with an absorbed look.

  In the manner perfected by Conan Doyle, Eco has William astound his “clients” at the calamitous abbey with an instant feat of apparent clairvoyance: “Come, come, it is obvious you are hunting for Brunellus, the abbot’s favorite horse, fifteen hands, the fastest in your stables, with a dark coat, a full tail, small round hoofs, but a very steady gait; small head, sharp ears, big eyes.” He never quite says, “Elementary, my dear Adso,” though he does patronize his disciple in Holmesian fashion: “My good Adso, during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book.”

  Young Adso (who is recalling these events in highly circumstantial detail toward the end of his life, over half a century later—a medieval miracle of sorts) has been assigned, as a young Benedictine novice, to accompany Brother William on a complicated mission that involves seeking a reconciliation between the Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Bavarian, to whose court William is attached, and the Avignon Pope, Jacques of Cahors—“an old man of seventy-two who took … the name of John XXII, and heaven grant that no pontiff take again a name now so distasteful to the righteous.” Along with the intricacies of the deepening and increasingly gory murder mystery, a strong dose of the multifarious ins and outs of fourteenth-century politics is administered to the reader. The official detective who arrives at the seething abbey is an inquisitor, the venerable bishop Bernard Gui, to whom the Pope has entrusted the command of French soldiers assigned to protect the papal legation that is to meet, at the abbey, with Michael, minister general of the Minorite Franciscans, a body whose resolution in 1322
emphasizing the poverty of Christ had displeased the money-minded Pope and therefore pleased the excommunicated Emperor. Gui succeeds in unearthing some heretics in the lower regions of the abbey’s personnel and leaves satisfied, though crime still rages. “Bernard is interested,” says William ruefully, “not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused. And I, on the contrary, find the most joyful delight in unraveling a nice, complicated knot.”

  No doubt those who like their history lessons wrapped in colorful fiction have joined mystery aficionados in swelling this novel’s international audience. As a paradigm of bloody turmoil and scintillant rot, of the cruellest cynicism confounded with the most extravagant religious passion, the fourteenth century is inexhaustibly fascinating, as Barbara Tuchman recently showed, and Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga before her. A hot issue of the time, according to The Name of the Rose, was the poverty of Christ and by extension that of Christ’s by now notoriously wealthy and corrupt church. The Franciscans were part of a widespread protest movement, which included heretical sects such as the Fraticelli or Friars of the Poor Life, who broke off from the Franciscan order and supported themselves entirely by begging, and the even more radical Pseudo Apostles of Gherardo, who preached disregard of the laws of private property and discounted marriage vows. A disciple of Gherardo, Fra Dolcino, founded a roving band that practiced free love and banditry and urged the complete destruction of the church. When, under Bernard Gui’s interrogation, the cellarer of the abbey confesses to having been a Dolcinian, he cries out: