by John Updike
Illuminating Reversals
FABLE, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 63 pp. Red Dust, 1980.
From this French writer of strange integrity, a work of surpassing strangeness. The hero—“this Miaille or whatever his name is”—finds himself sleeping overnight in a hole in the hay of a barn he seems to recognize. Someone is watching him, but who? The countryside has been devastated by a disastrous war, or has it? Bands of naked men roam around eating corpses. There are allusions to the Crucifixion and the Fall, and overtones of blasphemy, which, the translator tells us in a curt afterword, “the author now disapproves of.” The prose is resolutely abstruse, sibylline, and laconic; it’s a rare paragraph that has more than a single sentence in it. “To move words around, a sublime game,” the author (or an approximation) confides. “To inhabit every utterance so as to give it its own meaning.” After a while, the hero puts out his eyes with a knife, and his name changes slightly, to Miette. The atmosphere of futuristic cataclysm yields to a gossipy lament for the past simplicities of country life in Pinget’s fictional village of Fantoine. His bleak riddling is distinguished from his mentor Beckett’s by a vivid sense of communal voice and surreally filtered regional authenticity. Not for every taste, this fable yet has its resonances, deriving from “these sorts of reversals that throw light on things in depth.”
Michel Tournier
THE WIND SPIRIT: An Autobiography, by Michel Tournier, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer. 259 pp. Beacon Press, 1989.
GILLES & JEANNE, by Michel Tournier, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. 126 pp. Grove Press, 1990.
THE GOLDEN DROPLET, by Michel Tournier, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 206 pp. Doubleday, 1987.
At around the time, in the Sixties, when the intellectual innovations of Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel began to achieve international influence, French fiction ceased to export well. Alain Robbe-Grillet and his nouveau roman suddenly seemed just an idea, and a superficial one at that, producing novels as depthless as movies but on a much smaller screen; simultaneously, it began to appear that Françoise Sagan was not quite another Colette. Though the French literary industry has kept humming away, pinning prizes on itself and generating fodder for the wildly popular bookchat show Apostrophes, the reverberations carry but feebly across the Atlantic. Perhaps, having so heavily imported the ideas of Braudel and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, we have no spare change for the light goods of fiction. It is symptomatic of a depressed market, in any case, that Michel Tournier, arguably France’s foremost living novelist (“France has produced no novelist of real importance in twenty years, except Michel Tournier,” quoth Raymond Sokolov in The Wall Street Journal), has come to be published so marginally here. The English version of his autobiography, The Wind Spirit, has been brought out by Boston’s little Unitarian publishing house, Beacon Press, and Grove Press has performed a very skittish dance with Alan Sheridan’s English translation of a 1983 novella, Gilles & Jeanne: Grove sent bound galleys to prospective American reviewers, then cancelled publication on the ground that the translation was riddled with errors, then turned around and produced an edition after all.
The Wind Spirit, prettily printed, and jacketed with a nineteenth-century German painting of a little shepherd lying on a dune stargazing, would be a good book for the stranger to Tournier to start with. In six lively, digressive, aphoristic chapters, the author presents his life mostly in terms of his opinions and inspirations; only in the first chapter, which sketches his origins and childhood, do biographical facts dominate. This chapter is titled “Born Under a Lucky Star,” Mr. Goldhammer’s translation of “L’Enfant coiffé”; he explains that coiffé means to be born with a caul, a piece of luck equivalent to being born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth, and that the word ties into the epigraph by Saint-John Perse, which runs, “When you stop grooming me / I’ll stop hating you.” Throughout, the translator has added explanatory footnotes to the footnotes provided by Tournier, intensifying the somewhat stern pedagogic atmosphere of The Wind Spirit. It appeared in France in 1977, when Tournier was fifty-three years old. The curious but presently widespread autobiographical impulse in men still enjoying middle age possibly stems from a desire to set the record straight before senility muddles it, and a hope of lightening the ballast for the homeward leg of life’s voyage.
Tournier was born, in 1924 in Paris, in the comfortable upper reaches of the bourgeoisie. His father was “the founder and director of something called the BIEM,” the Bureau International des Éditions Musico-Mécaniques, which “orchestrated the complexities of rights and contracts pertaining to recorded music sold outside the right-holder’s country of origin.” The business was lucrative and complex, involving branches in many countries and feeding with many spare records a small boy’s phonograph. Well-off, immersed in music, and further blessed with “an old-fashioned apothecary” for a grandfather, in the friendly village of Bligny-sur-Ouche, the little boy gathered a surprisingly grim impression of life:
Stripped from his mother’s womb like a fox cub from its lair, the child finds tenuous and temporary shelter in his mother’s arms, nourished by capricious and parsimonious breasts. Subsequently he must abandon this refuge as well, after which he will be allowed only a few minutes a day in that last haven, his mother’s bed, a vast ship, white and shadowy, in which for the briefest of intervals his body again clings to the body from which it sprang. Then comes the final expulsion. Grown “too big,” the child can no longer “decently” lie in its parents’ bed. Thereupon begins a long trek across a vast and terrifying desert.
At the age of four, Michel was “an extremely nervous child, subject to convulsions, hypersensitive, and perpetually ill.” One morning, two white-coated strangers burst into his room and pulled out his tonsils, a bloody deed he has never forgiven: “During the last war prepubescent girls were raped by soldiers. I maintain that they were less traumatized than I was by having my throat slit at the age of four.” The doctor became “the only man in the world whom I have ever hated without reservation, because he did me incalculable harm, having branded my heart at the most tender age with an incurable distrust of my fellow human beings, even those nearest and dearest to me.” By the age of six, Michel had become “a child with an enormous head upon a sparrowlike body, and [he] neither slept nor ate.” Nor was his physical frailty made up in mental brilliance: “I was an execrable student, and rarely did I finish a school year in the same institution in which I began.… I read little and late.” And yet at some point in his resisted education he took a shine to the rarefied Monadology of Leibniz and to Anselm’s ontological proof of God’s existence: “From earliest childhood I had a yen for the constructs of the mind, for subtle proofs, for a rare and technical vocabulary.”
The other unusual yen in Tournier’s developing mind was his Germanistik, a fascination with German culture inherited from both parents: “My father and mother met at the Sorbonne when he was studying for a doctorate in German and she for a master’s.” His father’s qualifying exam had been scheduled for August 1914, and he went to war against the Germans instead, incurring serious facial wounds. But Tournier’s mother—whose uncle, a priest, taught German—“kept faith with her family tradition, and we grew up with one foot in Germany.” As a child, Tournier went on Black Forest vacations with his family. As an adolescent, during World War II, he improved his German while living with twenty-two German soldiers in his parents’ occupied house in Saint-Germain—“I will never forget the smell of the Wehrmacht, a compound of tobacco and boot polish. For me this was the fragrance of happiness.” As a young post-graduate student, he studied for four years (1946–50) at the University of Tübingen, in the French Occupied Zone of what is now West Germany. At the age of twenty, he translated Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, and did not scruple at improving passages of it. Remarque, meeting him, said, “This is the first time t
hat I have been able to converse in my own language with any of my translators. The others … spoke German as though it were a dead language, like Latin or Greek.” Tournier’s enthusiasm for things German is, of course, the animating passion behind his best-known novel, The Ogre (1970), which tells the tale of a French automobile mechanic who finds fulfillment and doom as a German prisoner of war in East Prussia. In his own persona Tournier can seem an alarmingly keen Germanophile:
Dream a little: had there been no Nazi madness, no war and no defeat, Germany and its outposts in Vienna, Zurich, and Prague would have formed an economic and cultural unit comparable in power and influence to France in the seventeenth or England in the nineteenth century. With the barbarians of the East and West held at bay, the world would have continued to be European, and it would have been German.… Because the Americans had won the war, it was their language that one had to speak to become a hotel porter or an airline pilot. But we were not really cheated, for the twentieth century was still built upon a German foundation, or at any rate upon works written in the German language.… There are few places where one can scratch the earth without coming upon the soil of old Germany.… “Old Germany, mother of us all!”
One could almost resent being called a barbarian while the perpetrators of Buchenwald are so rhapsodically extolled.
Tournier’s chapter on The Ogre is the longest, and in the four remaining chapters he discusses his early professional years as translator and radio broadcaster; his growing determination to write apparently naturalistic stories that “would secretly be set in motion by ontology and logic”; his belief that humor and celebration are essential to literature; his first published novel, Friday (1967), “into which I hoped to pour the essence of what I had learned while employed at the Musée de l’Homme, especially under the tutelage of Claude Lévi-Strauss”; his novel Les Météores (1975; translated into English as Gemini), a tangled tale “inspired by a fascination with the super-flesh of twins” and crowned by the formula “twinship untwinned = ubiquity”; and the topic of wisdom itself. These connected autobiographical essays are brilliant and possibly wise, though a certain dark and teasingly perverse streak beclouds the sense of even and impersonal illumination that we expect from wisdom. We cannot ignore the saturnine personality projecting itself in such epithets as “that whining female monster, the crowd,” such epigrams as “ontology when tossed into the crucible of fiction undergoes a partial metamorphosis into scatology,” and such assertions as the one that circumcision keratinizes the epidermis of the glans and makes fellatio “so laborious that it loses all its charm.”
Like Pangloss and Candide, Tournier ends up by cultivating his garden, which he describes in cosmic terms:
Every summer morning, as I toast my bread and steep my tea by an open window through which I can smell the grass and hear the wind in the linden branches, I suddenly become aware that time has been compressed, that space has shrunk to those few square feet enclosed by a stone wall, and that a single living thing—my garden—flourishes in the exorbitant immobility of the absolute.… The present lingers on eternally in a divine improvidence and amnesia.
There is no chasing all the hares that Tournier’s energetic mind starts during the survey of his personal garden. His theories have a glittering Hegelian intricacy that only a formidable patience could subdue to art. He was over forty when he published his first novel; he creates slowly, he tells us, devoting four or more years to a book, and lets the work in progress send him upon mysterious errands of research. “The writer who labors on a book for four years becomes that book and assimilates all its alien elements, which add up to a structure far more impressive, vast, complex, and learned than their author.… The work produces itself and the author is only its byproduct.” The author and his work exist within a matrix of large and ancient forces: “Man is nothing but a mythical animal. He becomes man—he acquires a human being’s sexuality and heart and imagination—only by virtue of the murmur of stories and kaleidoscope of images that surround him in the cradle and accompany him all the way to the grave.… That being the case, it becomes easy to describe the social—one might even say biological—function of the creative artist. The artist’s ambition is to add to or at any rate modify the ‘murmur’ of myth that surrounds the child, the pool of images in which his contemporaries move—in short, the oxygen of the soul.”
After formulations so spacious and humane, the actual work risks appearing minor. A glance at Tournier’s recent fiction does suggest the limits of determined mythicization, of ontology and logic as prime aesthetic movers. Gilles & Jeanne sets itself to construct a connection between the two apparently diverse aspects of Gilles de Rais’s fame: as the devoted comrade-in-arms and royally appointed protector of the saintly Joan of Arc, and as the black-mass orgiast and sodomizing slaughterer of children whom legend has transmuted into Bluebeard, slaughterer of wives. A premise of structuralist thought is that opposites (black/white, good/bad, up/down) share the identity of the conceptual structure that holds them and hence are basically aspects of the same thing. It is, for the adroit and learned Tournier, a matter of little more than a hundred pages to demonstrate that Gilles, possessed by the vision of simple goodness embodied in Joan and revolted by her body’s horrible end at the stake in Rouen, logically seeks her and the absolute in satanism. As Joan, burning at the stake for witchcraft, cries out, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!,” so Gilles, burning for sorcery nine years later, calls out, “Jeanne! Jeanne! Jeanne!”
This stylized equation—Jeanne is to Jesus as Gilles is to Jeanne—forms the bare bones of the novel. What is its meat? The era and its cosmology offer Tournier many convenient ambiguities: Joan’s voices might be angels or devils, Satan is “the image of God,” a town square contains “a statue that was in such a sorry state that it would have been difficult to tell whether it was a Virgin or a Venus,” alchemical experiments are conducted on “the fundamental ambiguity of fire, which is both life and death, purity and passion, sanctity and damnation.” The book’s alchemist, the Tuscan abbé Francesco Prelati (a historical figure, de Rais’s assistant in his diabolical dabblings), construes his master’s psychology in terms of “inversions.” Prelati testifies to the court that a “malign inversion” occurred when Joan was captured and condemned, and then a satanist antidote: “To drive the Sire de Rais to the blackest edge of wickedness, then, by the igneous operation, to subject him to a benign inversion, like the one that transmutes ignoble lead into gold. He was becoming a saint of life!” Prelati’s fancy thinking and talking rather sap Gilles’s and Jeanne’s tale of human interest. The little novel becomes, atrocious as the facts behind it are, bloodless, with nothing in its arch paradoxes as visceral and memorable as Lucifer’s blunt pentameters in Paradise Lost:
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good.
Along with Milton’s epic of elected sin, the English language holds a play, Shaw’s Saint Joan, that juggles ideas at the fifteenth-century crossroads with an impudent facility that makes Tournier seem relatively hard-breathing. Shaw’s drama includes, amid its abundance of historical sidelights, a small part for Gilles de Rais, whom he calls Bluebeard and decorates to suit the name. He characterizes him thus: “Gilles de Rais, a young man of 25, very smart and self-possessed, and sporting the extravagance of a little curled beard dyed blue at a clean-shaven court, comes in. He is determined to make himself agreeable, but lacks natural joyousness, and is not really pleasant.” The mild suggestion, regarding this legendary sadist, that he lacked “natural joyousness” brings us closer to the mass murderer than Tournier’s schematic religious pathology. But as a cultural critic, the French author can be dazzling. Here, for instance, is what perspective in drawing and painting meant to a French priest travelling for the first time in Italy:
It seemed to him that the flat, edifying, worthy image of his pious childhood was suddenly exploding under the impetus
of some magic force, was being undermined, distorted, thrown beyond its own limits, as if possessed by some evil spirit. When he stood in front of certain frescoes or pored over certain engravings, he thought he could see opening up in front of his eyes a vertiginous depth that was sucking him in, an imaginary abyss into which he felt a terrifying temptation to dive, headfirst.
Our modern abyss, as experienced by another unfortified sensibility, is the subject of Tournier’s The Golden Droplet. Published in France two years later than Gilles & Jeanne, it tells of Idris, a fifteen-year-old Berber dwelling in the Algerian oasis of Tabelbala, who is one day suddenly photographed by a scantily dressed blonde who leaps out of a desert-cruising Land Rover. In pursuit of the photograph, Idris travels to Paris. If psychological structuralism shaped Gilles & Jeanne, semiology is the name of the game here. On all sides Idris is confronted by images and signs—which are not, it develops, the same thing. Images—“the opium of the Occident”—bind us to the world, and signs release us from it:
These Moslem adolescents, submerged in the big occidental city, were subjected to all the assaults of the effigy, the idol, and the figure. Three words to designate the same servitude. The effigy is a door bolt, the idol a prison, the figure a lock. Only one key can remove these chains: the sign.… The sign is spirit, the image is matter. Calligraphy is the algebra of the soul craved by the most spiritualized organ of the body, its right hand. It is the celebration of the invisible by the visible. The arabesque manifests the presence of the desert in the mosque. Through the arabesque, the infinite is deployed in the finite. For the desert is pure space, freed from the vicissitudes of time. It is God without man.