Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  One small story, originally dedicated to his mother and believed to be based upon her reminiscences of the girlhood years she spent in the Roman convent, is a gem of psychologically plausible hallucination: a group of twelve-year-old convent girls hears beyond the walls the sound of a hunter’s horn, and in the following days they all encounter in the corridors a disembodied blue eye, “making a beautiful azure splash in the darkness.” Gradually, they cease to be frightened of it, and coquettishly seek to be seen: “None of us would have wanted to be seen by the blue eye with our hands spotted with ink. Each did her best to look her best when going down the halls.” The convent holds no mirrors, but some of the doors have panes of glass, and “a section of black apron flattened behind the pane formed an improvised mirror, where quick, quick you’d look at yourself, arrange your hair, and ask yourself if you were pretty.” The blue eye slowly disappears from the halls, having been conjured up by a group need and having served to objectify the first intense flash of budding vanity and sexuality in old-fashionedly cloistered females: “You have never seen the blue eye go by, O little girls of today!”

  The last story, written in 1916, caps a half-hearted and ragged collection with a startling burst of terrible beauty; only a poet could have written it. “The Case of the Masked Corporal, That Is, the Poet Resuscitated” contains some pictographic verbal arrangements like the shaped poems in Calligrammes and also an attempt to round up the characters of the preceding stories, a hurried grab at unity. Like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, the resuscitated Croniamantal, now a soldier, sees everything at once: “He saw the battlefields of eastern Prussia, of Poland, the quiet of a little Siberian town, fighting in Africa, Anzac, and Sedul-Bar, Salonika, the stripped and terrible oceanic elegance of the trenches in Barren Champagne, the wounded second-lieutenant carried to the ambulance, baseball players in Connecticut, and battles, battles.…” The battlefield is evoked with a passion beyond protest: “And the Front lit up, the hexahedrons were rolling, the steel flowers were blossoming out, the barbed wire was growing thinner with bloody desires, the trenches were opening like females before males.”

  Apollinaire had eagerly enlisted. As a foreigner—and one, furthermore, in his mid-thirties—he could have sat the war out in Paris, as did Picasso. His first application to the army, in August 1914, was ignored; he successfully enlisted in Nice, and jubilantly punned, “I so love art that I have joined the artillery.…” Later, he was to leave the relative safety of his artillery unit to become an infantry officer in the front-line trenches. Thus he demonstrated his courage and his loyalty to France, as if these had been in question. His mother, the daughter of a Polish-Russian colonel, approved of his soldiering as of no other aspect of his career. “How beautiful are the rockets that light up the night,” he was to proclaim, in faint echo of “ta mère une nuit.” The Italian Futurists, to whom Apollinaire the critic was attracted after cubism, had a theoretical thirst for violence; though he once wrote, “Ah Dieu que la guerre est jolie,” the letters he poured out as a “soldat de la douce France” show him shedding whatever naïve illusions he held concerning “the simple horror of the trenches.” Yet his war injury, in its fictional rendering, is ennobled by a myth: “The corporal in the blind mask was smiling amorously at the future, when a fragment of a high caliber shell hit him in the head, from which sprang, like pure blood, a triumphant Minerva. Stand up, everybody, to give a courteous welcome to victory!”* Croniamantal has gone from being torn Orpheus to fruitful Jupiter; Apollinaire, who was never quite himself after his head wound, and who weakly succumbed to disease a few years later, has among his laurels a claim to being the last poet to write of war as a theatre of glory.

  Between Pinget’s Ears

  BETWEEN FANTOINE AND AGAPA, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 83 pp. Red Dust, 1982.

  THAT VOICE, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 114 pp. Red Dust, 1982.

  The brave little publishing house called Red Dust, which operates out of a postal box at Gracie Station, keeps issuing, along with the new poetry from Peru and other such bulletins from the scattered legions of the avant-garde, the works of the esteemed contemporary French novelist Robert Pinget. Recently published, in translations by the indispensable Barbara Wright, are Pinget’s first prose work, Between Fantoine and Agapa, and a novel from 1980, That Voice. What can one say of Pinget, as he comes through in Ms. Wright’s loving translations, except that he conveys, amid much willful murk, an impression of integrity, intelligence, and power? He is a dark author, placidly settled amid his favorite village odors of damp stone and rotting wood (anybody who has stepped into an old French farmhouse will recognize the aroma), and mysteriously content to churn and rechurn the chronic garbled rumors of perversion and homicide that make up his plots, if he can be said to have plots. This reviewer had hoped that a consecutive reading of a work Pinget produced in 1951 and one published in 1980 would clarify what the author has been “up to”; and indeed certain differences in texture and machination are apparent. But it cannot be said that Pinget began as anything but oddly, opaquely himself; his surrealism has been constant, though its field of operation has become more rural and, as it were, medieval and hellish.

  One might suppose Between Fantoine and Agapa to have a certain geographical focus and to lay claim to the imaginary territory of provincial France where the later fictions—preëminently, The Inquisitory, still Pinget’s most impressive and cogent work—more or less take place. Alas, one is fooled again, for the little book is a collection of disconnected pranks, or prose poems, which take place not so much between Fantoine and Agapa as between Pinget’s ears. The first chapter, or sketch, or whatever, “Vishnu Takes His Revenge,” deals with the curé of Fantoine, who is bored. “He subscribes to theater magazines. He dips into the fashionable authors. He gleans in learned vineyards. He passes for a scholar, but he’s a rotter.” His parishioners don’t provide much amusement for him: “The inhabitants of Fantoine are hopeless. They drink. They work. They drink. Their children are epileptic, their wives pregnant.” But, then, “luckily, someone from Agapa-la-Ville takes an interest in him and sends a book on Cambodia.” The curé grows interested; he teaches himself the Khmer language; he thinks all day of the ancient temples and sees royal dancing girls in the local population. “The forest of Fantoine becomes populated with yak demons, with Mrinh Kangveal spirits, with Banra trees. Paddy-fields cover the country.” Saying mass, he mistakenly intones, “Hic est enim corpus Yak”; and a gigantic demon “sprang out of the Host, dispatched the curé, and pulverized the church. And Vishnu the Eternal deigned to smile.” In the title story, “Between Fantoine and Agapa,” a man, his wife, and their child prepare to picnic between these two fictional towns when a sign in a field proclaims, “Alopecia-impetrating [patchy-baldness-obtaining-by-entreaty] prohibited”; this makes them so frightened they skip lunch. Later that night, the child vomits jam and the wife’s hair stands on end. “But not for long, because half an hour later she was as bald as a coot.” But for these two tales, there is no mention of Fantoine or Agapa, and the subject matter gravitates toward the mythic and the facetiously geographic—episodes take place in Manhattan, Menseck, the Forest of Grance, and Florence, and characters include Don Quixote, a parrot called Methuselah, Aeschylus and his maidservant Aglaia, and the Persian King Artaxerxes. As he roams through these prankish fancies, the young Pinget reminds us of various comrades in surrealism. Of Alfred Jarry and his frenzies of mechanical precision:

  Everything that touches him, from near or from far, cucurbitaces—I mean: belongs to the gourd family, like the pumpkin—starting with the spirals in shells, cow pats, and velodromes, and ending with his own body, which pullulates with oblate spheroids.

  Of William Burroughs and his gleeful wars and plagues:

  In short, civil war. And one of atrocious cruelty. Once the steak-tracts had been launched, an epidemic of the bacteria of contradiction broke out. Every individual af
fected by the microbe considered that his arm and his head, his eye and his foot, his navel and his spleen, were irreconcilable. He destroyed himself by tearing out, burning, or vivisecting the contradictory organ.

  Pinget also shows something of the antic sunniness of Raymond Queneau and of Beckett’s clownish desolation. His playful dabbling with history and myth suggests a host of experimental modernists, from Borges to Barth, from the Fabrications of the late Michael Ayrton to the Eclogues of our contemporary Guy Davenport. Literary experiment and surrealism have certain natural channels into which to run, it would appear, not so unlike the well-worn grooves of realism; nonsense, being an inversion of sense, is condemned to share a certain structure with it, and a finitude of forms. Pinget, even in this early, rather frolicsome and eclectic work, does look forward to what is to become his mature tone. The last and longest piece in Between Fantoine and Agapa is titled “Journal,” and, though concerned with such absurdities as snowstorms of fingernail clippings and dwarfs sold at auction to be used as candelabra by religious communities, it foreshadows the sinister cruelty and gloom of the later work. An inbred, joyless, cannibalistic sexuality is a recurrent theme in Pinget, and occurs here: “They mate among themselves, without the slightest desire, and give birth to edible daughters who are a kind of saprophyte.” A dreamlike restlessness in the forms of things makes itself felt with a shudder: “Their agricultural work is backbreaking. They … tread down the excrescences that tend to form on the fences. I tried this, with the help of a peasant. But just as I was making an oblique movement over the unexposed part I let go my hold, the excrescence came and knocked on my foot, and the man only just had time to push me back out of the way.” Pinget’s preoccupation with the menace of the organic and with the Stygian stirrings of the dead emerges side by side with characteristic flashes of aesthetic theory: “In a work of art we do not try to conjure up beauty or truth. We only have recourse to them—as to a subterfuge—in order to be able to go on breathing.” And the prose, though indeterminate in its significations, is chiselled in its cadences—so deliberate in its bewildering effects that the intimidated reader, coming upon alphabetical formations like “This has been goiQHQfor so long” and “hnd he passes the laundry again,” doubts whether he is in the presence of a misprint or of an especially refined, albeit obscure, intention.

  That Voice concerns … well, what does it concern? The phrase “manque un raccord” (“a missing link”) is used seventeen times in the French text, the translator claims on the jacket’s back flap, and a phrase rendered as “impossible anamnesis” (“anamnesis” = “recalling to mind”) returns a number of times also, as do “invincible fatigue,” “traces of effacement,” “psspss,” “take a hair of the night that bit you,” and “an invisible manitou.” The author, in a special preface to the American edition, assures us that “the structure of the novel is precise, although not immediately apparent. The different themes are intermingled. One cuts into another point-blank, then the other resumes and cuts into the first, and so on until the end.” The two themes named are “the theme of the cemetery” and “that of the gossip at the grocery.” In the cemetery, evidently, at the intersection of alleys numbered 333 and 777, on All Saints’ Day, near the tomb of the minor belletrist Alexandre Mortin, a young man called Théodore, coming to arrange and leave some chrysanthemums, meets a ghost, or walking dead man, who identifies himself as Dieudonné, or Dodo for short. Dodo, it slowly dawns, is Théo’s uncle. Maybe Théo killed him, for his money. Alexandre Mortin has a brother, Alfred, who perhaps is also called the Master; he seems to be keeping little Théodore in his house by force, according to gossip down at the grocery store, where “that otiose, never-ending story” acquires ever more characters (the servant Magnin, Mademoiselle Passetant, Madame Buvard, Monsieur Alphonse, many of whom we have met before in other Pinget novels, or imagine we have) and effaces itself as it goes, like a slate being covered over and over with new versions, until with the best will in the world the reader starts to feel sandy-eyed and itches to turn on the eleven o’clock news, where things are said once or at worst twice. As we grind along in hopes of things coming clearer or of Pinget’s making one of his graveyard jokes (“Just imagine the state of our necropolis, hygienewise, that’ll discourage the All Saints’ Day fans”), the tale appears increasingly to talk about itself:

  And little by little, just like that, with the passing days, a sort of stupid litany which took the place of a chronicle for us, you see how very backward we were.

  For indeed, the dead do answer.

  Indeed, in such a close-knit village, the dead are not allowed to die; they continue to hold their place in the fabric of gossip, of remembrance, their deaths incidental within the pervasive dissolution of life erasing itself as it goes. The atmosphere is deadly, dank, musty: “Old formulas, old papers, old filth, old chimeras, everything is disintegrating.” Rural France is Catholic France, and on this ground modernism joins hands with the pious macabre, with the supernatural’s Gothic underside, “in touch with putrefaction and decomposition, hence oriented toward the future.” Here voices matter-of-factly proclaim, “I went back into my tomb, where I’m awaiting the resurrection of the dead,” and what may be the author’s voice murmurs, “The life to come, it conditions, it contorts, it confuses, it’s just life.”

  Pinget locates us in the gently moldering, nowhere solid hell† of communal remembering, of mutual awareness, never exact, never erased. “Something else is being prepared beyond people’s consciousness, it had to be reshaped first, we have been at pains to do so.” And we, it must be admitted, have been at pains to read the result. Could the impression Pinget creates be conveyed less exasperatingly, less numbingly? Perhaps not, since its theme, to a degree, is the exasperation and numbingness of our human, social, forgetful, banal existence. But why speculate as to the author’s purposes when he has recently been in New York City and spelled them out? To a crowd gathered at New York University last October, Pinget, reading his lucid French text in a hard-to-hear monotone, explained (as translated by Barbara Wright), “My attachment to the technique of the intermingling of themes and their variations is due to the admiration I have always felt for so-called baroque music.” He is also attached to the concept of the collective unconscious:

  In my eyes, the share allotted to the irrational is one of the ways that may help me to arrive at a personal “truth,” which is only to a very limited extent present in my awareness of it. This is a kind of open provocation to the unconscious.… We are all, indeed, more or less dependent on the collective unconscious, whose nature we can only glimpse by examining as best we can those manifestations of it which we perceive in ourselves.

  Later in this address he mentioned Jung, in connection with his own “approach to the dark face of language, in order to make it easier for unconscious values to break through.” He spoke of his “declared intention, from the very first book, to extend the limits of the written word by replenishing it with the spoken word.” Confusion, contradiction, “all the suggestions, refutations, prolongations and metamorphoses of fragments of speech” are intrinsic to this intention; his reader will have “the impression that the book is being composed, and decomposed, under his very eye.” Not that the books are written for the eye; they are “to be listened to, rather than read.”

  We are put in mind of Finnegans Wake, Jungian in its attempt to show the world-mind in its sleep, and also employing a tone of unremitting gossip, of multiple murmur. Language is, at bottom, a spoken thing. From the overthrow of Latin by Dante’s Italian and Chaucer’s English to the modernists’ rejection of Georgian prosodic proprieties in favor of jagged colloquial rhythms, written literature has deferred to the evolving reality of speech. Defoe, Addison, Wordsworth, Mark Twain, Joyce, Hemingway, Henry Green—all refreshed themselves at the springs of the demotic idiom, and forged their styles in conscious opposition to “literariness.” But the chronic shucking of tired literary conventions is itself a literary maneuver, and
in Pinget’s case a heavy escort of cerebration and deliberate experiment marches with his “fragments of speech.” On the excuse of Alexandre Mortin’s being a minor poet, many abstruse theoretical remarks are interwoven with the voices of That Voice: “And analyzed the whys and wherefores, and finally decreed that poetry had no existence outside a certain system or method.” In his address at New York University, Pinget announced, “I have great respect for the present-day critical methods.” And, moreover, behind his work, with his persistent rumors of the old religion, lies a less orthodox religious impulse:

  The homo religiosus, linked to the essential—if we admit his presence in every one of us—rebels against the lacerations produced by the succession of days, and seeks refuge in the time which knows neither succession nor laceration, that of the Word.

  This comes from a beautiful statement given to the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature on the subject of “literary baggage.” “The sole ‘baggage,’ ” Pinget says, “that helps us to conquer chronological time and to participate in the other, absolute time, is a bouquet of texts.… Light baggage, buzzing with words, which, ever since the world has been the world—and there are many legends that vouch for it—has ensured our passage, without let or hindrance, over on to the other bank.”

  In the meantime, we are on this bank of earthly clay, and this reviewer would be doing less than his duty if he did not admit that he found That Voice, as an experience of readerly immersion in a fabricated world, less compelling and more mannered than, say, Pinget’s Libera Me Domine, which it resembles in ambition and milieu. The sinister, shifting rumors of dark deeds done amid rural stagnation had a force there that here weakly tinges the pleasures of a self-professedly intricate counterpoint. A perfected artistic method can serve, unfortunately, to insulate the artist, to dull his recourse to the ever shifting, ever fructifying actual. Between Fantoine and Agapa, for all its buffoonery, was a venture into the unknown; That Voice is a demonstration of a mastered method, in a territory thoroughly subdued.