Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
Calligraphy lessons form the happy ending of The Golden Droplet: the child of the desert, lost in the evil land of images, of cinema and advertising and hair dyed blond, reclaims his semiotic heritage of pure emptiness. A complicated fable of the “Blond Queen,” whereby a bewitching human portrait is reduced to a salutary pattern of calligraphed quotations, cinches the moral, which would seem to be that words are better than things.
The Golden Droplet has a denser texture than Gilles & Jeanne: the oasis, the trip north through progressively larger and more Westernized cities to Oran, the boat trip to Marseilles, the African quarter of Marseilles, and then the Maghrebi worker environment in Paris are all conscientiously presented. So conscientiously, indeed, that each chapter feels like a discrete essay. In a postscript the author acknowledges his many sources, from Dominique Champault’s study Tabelbala—“a model of what the ethnological monograph should be”—to Hassan Massoudy, author of Calligraphie arabe vivante and a “master calligrapher … who enabled me to approach a traditional art whose beauty is indistinguishable from truth and wisdom.” It is edifying and pleasing, of course, to be guided by Tournier from one oasis of research to the next, and to view, on our tour, sights that range from a traditional Berber wedding, complete with “a troupe of dancers and musicians from the High Atlas Mountains,” to the grisly, exotic insides of a Parisian sex shop, peep-show, pinball palace, mannequin factory, and abattoir. As so often on an educational tour, though, the sights pile up but do not accumulate into an adventure. Idris, our Berber Candide, remains innocent and blank throughout—himself a mere sign, with a significance special to France, where a long involvement with North Africa and a large immigrant population of North Africans form a hot, recurrent issue. The novel’s French title, La Goutte d’or, is also the name of a neighborhood of Paris, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, populated by Africans and full of l’ambiance africaine. Like William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, Tournier’s book is a bold attempt to empathize with an underclass, but it is carried out (unlike Styron’s) behind an impervious screen of intellectual play.
There are, in the stretches of description and sociology, few events in the sense of happenings that invite suspense and pose an outcome which can grieve or gratify us—few moments when the narrative acquires a mind of its own. In one of them, Idris’s nomad friend Ibrahim abruptly falls into an old well, which collapses and buries him alive: this sudden non-academic development startles us, and breaks Idris’s last emotional link with his desert life. In another, Idris, having fallen under the spell of the filmmaking magus Achille Mage, is stuck with a camel used in a television commercial for a beverage called Palm Grove, and wanders Paris with the signal creature. In the fashionable districts, people pretend not to see him; only the lower classes allow themselves to express curiosity—“Once again, as the tissue of social relationships became less compact, the camel had become visible.” The animal finally, to the reader’s considerable relief, finds a haven in the zoo, a collection of living emblems where it is greeted by a female of its species (“Their morose, disdainful heads met very high up in the sky, and their big, pendulous lips touched”) and is outfitted for children’s rides by “adolescents dressed as Turks.” In general, however, even mild emotional involvement is forestalled by the bristle of forked signifiers, and Tournier’s pageant of incidents seems not so much a novel as a cunningly wrought image of one—calligraphy aping portraiture aping appearances.
These books made out of other books—are they what the future holds? To “read up” on an area of geography or history and then be clever and cool about it—is this all the postmodern novelist can do? Italo Calvino managed to include something of himself in the intricate package, a self that in his last novel, Mr. Palomar; became poignant, almost pleading. But of Michel Tournier, or of Patrick Süskind, the author of the much-admired Perfume, or of Julian Barnes, the concocter of such elegancies as Flaubert’s Parrot and Staring at the Sun, we can guess a little but have, as it were, nothing. Joyce and Mann did their research also, but left a palpable weight of personal impulse if not confession in their constructions, whether as elaborate as Finnegans Wake or as limpid and light as Royal Highness. Their fictions have a presence and a voice that are humbly human; their books give off the warmth of a proximate body. To be fair, Tournier did show warmth in such earlier novels as Friday, his anti-colonialist gloss on the Robinson Crusoe story, and The Ogre, his masterpiece. The Ogre is a thick outpouring of arcane facts and involved feelings, a complex but sensual fable of loneliness and desire and perception that seems, as Roland Barthes said of classic literature, “replete”—a book saturated in its own completely fulfilled tendencies. Like Gilles & Jeanne, it is concerned with inversion and pedophilia; like The Golden Droplet, it equates purity with nothingness and points out that “the human soul is made of paper.” Unlike both these flimsy fictions, it compels interest and arouses dread and pity. But how much of its engaging warmth, I wonder, derives from the entwinement of its intricate parable (a gloss of Goethe’s poem “The Erl-King”) with its fascinating facts about World War II? Göring’s sybaritic hunting-lodge in The Ogre, and the four hundred child-warriors martyred to Hitler’s fanaticism, and the East Prussian mud that the Ogre treads belong to an epic we never weary of hearing, and Tournier’s peculiarly intense mental inhabitation of France and Germany enabled his matter, for once, to make an equal contest with his mind. The trouble with the French love of pure thought is that thought must operate upon something—the world as it impurely exists, an apparently ill-thought-out congeries of contradictory indications and arbitrary facts. The novelist must be thoughtless, to some degree, in submitting to the world’s facts: he must be naïve enough, as it were, to let the facts flow through him and unreflectingly quicken recognition and emotion in his readers. And this the French find difficult to do.
Small Packages
PIERROT MON AMI, by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 159 pp. Dalkey Archive Press, 1988.
THE PIGEON, by Patrick Süskind, translated from the German by John E. Woods. 115 pp. Knopf, 1988.
THE MUSTACHE, by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by Lanie Goodman. 146 pp. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988.
In an era when nobody has enough time to read and the world is running out of trees, you would think small novels would be the thing. But the popular, or folk, sense of the novel is that to earn its keep it should be big, and, with few exceptions, the front tables at Waldenbooks groan under opuses thicker than a strong man’s wrist. The three short novels about to be reviewed all come from Europe, and all, oddly enough, take place in France, though one is written in German. Perhaps France, with its fast trains, topless bathing suits, and habit of aphorism, is the last country in the West where anything can happen in less than two hundred pages.
A great deal happens in Raymond Queneau’s Pierrot Mon Ami, and yet as far as the inner development of the hero is concerned nothing happens. But this is Queneau’s perennial point: the banality and cheerful nullity of experience. We always feel good reading a Queneau novel; he is the least depressing of the moderns, the least heavy, with something Mozartian about the easy, self-pleasing flow of his absurd plots. Pierrot Mon Ami (what sort of translation is that? what would be wrong with Pierrot My Friend or My Pal Pierrot?) is centered, fittingly, on an amusement park; Uni Park lies in the northwest of Paris, toward Argenteuil, near the Seine, in a drab region of factories and vacant lots. Pierrot, when we first meet him, has been newly hired to work in the Palace of Fun, where his principal duty, and that of his colleagues Petit-Pouce and Paradis, is to steer young women over the vents that blow their skirts up, to the edification and delight of paying voyeurs called “philosophers.” Queneau’s preening, rather professorial language puts a strange glaze on this rude material:
[In the Palace of Fun] maliciously-calculated indignities pursued the buffs’ every step: staircases whose steps collapsed horizontally, planks that jumped up at a right angl
Pierrot’s task encounters obstruction, however, when some pimps accompanying their women cagily hold the billowing skirts down, to the enragement of the philosophers, producing a small riot, with the result that the Palace of Fun is closed by the police. That same evening Pierrot falls in love with a girl, Yvonne, who turns out to be the daughter of Uni Park’s proprietor, Eusèbe Pradonet; our smitten hero offends Pradonet by running him over with a bumper car, and is thereupon fired. His next unsuccessful job is as assistant to a fakir, Crouïa Bey, whom Pradonet’s mistress, Madame Prouillot, recognizes as the brother of her long-lost love, Jojo Mouilleminche. Our hero faints when Crouïa Bey/Sidi Mouilleminche begins to pierce his cheeks with hatpins, and so he loses that job. His next involvement is with the mysterious Arthème Mounnezergues, who owns a piece of land, in a corner of Uni Park, on which he has erected a chapel to the memory of a Poldevian Prince, who might, it turns out, be the reputedly dead Jojo Mouilleminche, who also seems to be a Monsieur Voussois, an animal-trainer in the Midi to whom Pierrot, once again gainfully if briefly employed, is trucking a wild boar called Pistolet and an ape named Mésange. There’s much more to the story, too, such as an affair between Yvonne and Paradis, and the machinations of Pradonet to obtain for Uni Park the plot of land Mounnezergues has consecrated to the alleged Poldevian Prince, but all these intrigues and coincidences generate in their whirl no more heat than a swarm of fireflies. Queneau, without cracking a smile or dropping a stitch of his parody of a plot, demonstrates—Q.E.D., Queneau est demonstrator—how futilely feverish human activity is.
Not only our outer but our inner lives are genially reduced to absurdity. The French have traditionally prized the life of the mind, and Queneau attentively reports Pierrot’s mental states:
Leaning comfortably on his elbows, Pierrot was thinking about the death of Louis XVI, which means, specifically, about nothing in particular; his mind contained nothing but a mental, light, and almost luminous mist, like the fog on a beautiful winter morning, nothing but a flight of anonymous midges.
Pierrot continued on his way and thought about nothing, which he managed to do with some facility, and even without meaning to; in this way he reached the embankment.
During this journey, he thought, among other things, that it was high time he got his skates on and found a job. This thought was quicker than a flash, though, and he didn’t dwell on it; and the rest of the time he thought a little about Yvonne and a lot about nothing.
The vagueness and triviality of thought extend to memory, whose powers were so impressively extolled by Proust. Pierrot brings Proust down to earth when he reflects upon his past: “He was thinking that it isn’t funny to have had a childhood like his, it goes sour on you, it goes mouldy, and the good bits where you can look back and see you were so nice and so full of hope are forever tarnished by the rest.” Madame Pradonet tells her daughter, “When you have a past, Vovonne, you’ll realize what an odd thing it is. In the first place, there’s whole chunks of it that have caved in: absolutely nothing left. Elsewhere, there’s weeds that’ve grown haphazard, and you can’t recognize anything there either. And then there’s places that you think are so beautiful that you give them a fresh coat of paint every year, sometimes in one color, sometimes in another, and they end up not looking in the least like what they were.”
Such deflationary psychological realism is temperamentally one with Queneau’s scrupulous inventory of a shop window: “Gathering dust … were sticks of licorice, ceramic figures sitting on chamber pots, spools of thread, and illustrated publications, both Gallic and juvenile. Crippled tin soldiers threatened one another with their sabers or their buckled rifles, while authentic old Épinal prints were yellowing to the point of turning russet.” Like James Joyce, Queneau recognized that the texture of daily life for Western man has become predominantly commercial; the contents of shop windows excite his characters to thought in the way flowers and stars prompted exclamation in Romantic poets. Pierrot is fascinated by a ball-bearing manufacturer’s display of “little steel spheres mathematically rebounding on drums made of the same metal,” and Étienne, the meditative hero of Queneau’s first novel, The Bark Tree (1933), broods over “two little ducks floating in a waterproof hat that had been filled with water in order to demonstrate its primary quality.” Without his oddly ardent precision, Queneau’s playfulness and sly rigor would not hold us; along with the anti-intellectual intellectual-ism that dubs rowdy voyeurs “philosophers,” he has a real affection for the surface of life as it is, in its sweet vapidity and farcical appetites.
One might add that Pierrot Mon Ami was published in 1942, in an occupied France surrounded by a war alluded to only, and very obliquely, by the destruction of Uni Park, which is consumed in a conflagration spread by fiery planes flung from the “chairoplane” tower. And that Queneau’s frequent translator, Barbara Wright, has waltzed around the floor with the Master so many times by now that she follows his quirky French as if the steps were elementary.
Patrick Süskind, born near Munich in 1949, became a writer of international note with the publication of his first novel, the widely successful Perfume. As a performance, Perfume was dazzlingly expert and thrillingly cold: a tough act to follow. His new offering, The Pigeon—a long short story prettily gotten up as a book by Knopf—though certainly destined for nothing like Perfume’s success, deepens my affection and respect for this author; he shows here, after his brilliant exercise in eighteenth-century monstrosity, a willingness to work within the range of the normal and contemporary, and to derive startling colors from a freshness of angle rather than from another century’s susceptibility to fabulation.
Freshness remains the fiction writer’s problem; in an age when the old romantic and moral largenesses are so worn and coarsened as to be fit for little but parody and best-sellerdom, the microscopic offers fresh territory. The massive minutiae of Proust and Joyce and the circling, semi-paralyzed sensibilities of Faulkner and Kafka offer ample modernist precedent for a fiction of magnification. The story of The Pigeon is almost nothing: Jonathan Noel, an unmarried Parisian bank guard in his fifties, encounters a pigeon in the hall outside the tiny room he has occupied since 1954, and for the next twenty-four hours wrestles with the terror that this modest disturbance of his life of seclusion and routine causes him. The hundred pages in which Süskind traces his obscure hero’s overreaction are crowded with enlarged details:
[The pigeon] laid its head to one side and was glaring at Jonathan with its left eye. This eye, a small, circular disc, brown with a black center, was dreadful to behold. It was like a button sewn onto the feathers of the head, lashless, browless, quite naked, turned quite shamelessly to the world and monstrously open; at the same time, however, there was something guarded and devious in that eye; and yet likewise it seemed to be neither open nor guarded, but rather quite simply lifeless, like the lens of a camera that swallows all external light and allows nothing to shine back out of its interior. No luster, no shimmer lay in that eye, not a spark of anything alive. It was an eye without sight. And it glared at Jonathan.
We murder to dissect, Wordsworth said; and under the scalpel of Süskind’s sharply observant prose all objects yield a redolence of death, even the bodies of the young girls whom the hero of Perfume kills to extract their complex, enchanting aromas. The pigeon’s lifeless button-eye makes almost understandable the bank guard’s hysterical fear; and the fraction that we do not quite understand leads us to read on. The guard’s day of standin
After only a few minutes he could feel the burden of his body as a painful pressure on his soles; he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again, sending him into a gentle stagger and making him interpolate little sidesteps to keep his center of gravity—which until now he had always held on classical plumb—from slipping off balance.
When he eats lunch, his tense mood inflames the simple act of swallowing:
It took an eternity before the bite got to his stomach, it crept down his esophagus with snail-like slowness, sometimes almost sticking there and pressing and hurting as if a nail were being driven into his chest, till Jonathan thought he would choke to death on this nauseating mouthful.
And when, in his distraction, he rips his trousers on the back of a park bench, the little tear becomes a crevasse:
It also seemed to him that the rip—it was still echoing in his ears—had been so monstrously loud that more than his trousers had been torn, that the tear had ripped right through him, through the bench, through the whole park, like a gaping crevasse during an earthquake, and it seemed as if all the people roundabout must have heard it, this terrible rip.
As with the contemporary work in German of Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, rage lurks beneath the taut surface of Süskind’s world. Jonathan, as the sun climbs higher, spitefully exults in his sweating and itching: “The suffering suited him fine, it justified and inflamed his hate and his rage, and the rage and the hate in turn inflamed the suffering, for it set his blood surging ever more fiercely, continually squeezing new ripples of sweat from the pores of his skin.” The bank guard has not always lived insulated from the agonies of his times; we are told at the outset that his parents disappeared in World War II, he became a farm laborer in the tyrannical care of an uncle, and as a young man he served and was wounded in Indochina. But, more than Handke and Bernhard, Süskind balances his dark side with a healing, comedic tendency: The Pigeon ends not unhappily, after Jonathan’s recognition that even he needs people and his return, “on the wings of bliss,” to the rain-puddled innocence of his childhood. In the course of its tiny adventure, the novella seems to run through most of the relations a man can strike with the world, and, by virtue of Süskind’s acute powers of focus, achieves a surprising largeness.