Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  But what parts they are! Uli’s memories of his life, preponderantly his sexual life, have a mythic size and savagery. As he remembers his first copulation, with a cabaret dancer: “The headboard falls on top of them, but they notice nothing, nor hear the furious shouting of the neighbours below,” and when it is done “he is wet all over, including his hair, as if he had just come out of the sea, even the panes in the skylight are misted.” A homosexual encounter, in an air-raid shelter in wartime Germany, leaves his hand “wet, as if he had dipped it into a bucket of wallpaper paste.” Sweating and shaking, Uli escapes the shelter:

  Outside there is the suffocating night, aflame, frenzied, crackling, the firestorm, the shrieks of people and the sirens of ambulances and fire brigade, houses collapsing in towers of dust—he lets himself fall headlong in the grass: God almighty, what times were these!

  Mulisch has said, “It isn’t so much that I went through the Second World War; I am the Second World War.” He was a teen-ager in the years 1940–45, and his reconstructions of those dreadful times have the glow of nostalgia, of reëntry into a hellish paradise. Just as the hero of The Assault is piecemeal led by the accidents of his postwar life back into the primal furnace of that winter assassination and conflagration, so Uli Bouwmeester is led, by a monstrous encounter with a transvestite whose male genitals have been surgically transformed into “something terrible, something not of this world,” to recall the scene, which he witnessed as a three-year-old child hidden behind costumes and props in a dressing room, of his mother’s death in childbirth: “with both hands she tries to hold something back that is coming out of her, a large thing that splits her apart in the crotch far too wide.” The visceral, psychological core of Last Call splits apart, as it were, the folds of its stagecraft, its ultimately arid postmodern self-reflexiveness. Mulisch is a rarity for these times—an instinctively psychological novelist. He knows our psyches are spun of blood, and builds his plots with a dense and slippery architecture. The persistence of trauma, the rapacity of eros, the fragility of our orderly schemes, the something monstrous at the heart of being alive: “Whereof one cannot speak,” his novel concludes, “thereof one sings.”

  * The first was The General of the Dead Army, published by Grossman in 1972.

  † What is happening, actually? Would Thirties costumes look so scanty, even to Arabs? These women seem clad in the Sixties minimum. Also, at another point the Americans anachronistically seem to produce tape recorders—“small black boxes, which they pressed whenever they got into a conversation.”

  ‡ These facts as given in the novel; in truth, the tower has twenty-eight stories, and Whitman shot and killed fourteen people, wounding thirty-one others, on an August day.

  § Bush, though all his predecessors since Kennedy had issued the same call. Little did any of us dream that, within a few months of this review’s publication, the Wall would come down, and East and West would be no more.

  ODD COUPLES

  A Pair of Parrots

  FLAUBERT’S PARROT, by Julian Barnes. 190 pp. Knopf, 1985.

  PARROT’S PERCH, by Michel Rio, translated from the French by Leigh Hafrey. 88 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

  What is a novel? Increasingly, in these days of cavalier labelling, a novel seems to be whatever is called a novel, whether it is a collection of linked short stories (Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; Sarah Phillips, by Andrea Lee) or a pumped-up piece of reportage (The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer). If Flaubert’s Parrot is, as its dust jacket shyly claims, “a novel in disguise … a novel that constantly surprises,” it is the most strangely shaped specimen of its genre (that I have read) since Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. On the other hand, if it is a biographical-critical treatise on a dead writer, it is the oddest and most whimsical such since Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol. Written by an English television critic in his late thirties, Flaubert’s Parrot arrived on these shores heavily garlanded by British praise (“An intricate and delightful novel”—Graham Greene. “Endless food for thought, beautifully written”—Germaine Greer. “Handsomely the best novel published in England in 1984”—John Fowles) and quickly acquired a headful of American posies as well (“I read it with a continuing chuckle”—Leon Edel. “Delightful and enriching”—Joseph Heller. “A gem”—John Irving. “Flaubert’s Parrot, c’est moi!”—Fran Lebowitz). The book is indeed conceived with a dashing originality and does impart a great deal of odd data about Flaubert: his statue in Trouville has lost some of its thigh and mustache, his brother Achille’s doctoral thesis was titled “Some Considerations on the Moment of Operation on the Strangulated Hernia,” his novel Salammbô provided the name for a new brand of petit four, he sent camellias to the Empress Eugénie in 1864, he was born in such sickly condition that his father had a small grave dug in preparation for his body, his saliva was permanently blackened by mercury treatment for syphilis, his play Le Candidat was such a flop that the actors left the stage with tears in their eyes, he found a business card from Rouen at the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in 1849, he detested trains, he couldn’t dance, he assured Louise Colet that he was thinking seriously of becoming a bandit in Smyrna, he did not appear on a French stamp until 1952, and in 1876, to facilitate his writing of “A Simple Heart,” which deals of course with a servant woman who in dying confuses a beloved pet parrot with the Holy Ghost, he borrowed from the Museum of Rouen a stuffed parrot, which can now be seen on exhibit in two separate sites, the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen and Flaubert’s writing pavilion in Croisset, both relics identified as the actual bird borrowed over a century ago. The novel consists, if “novel” and “consists” are not putting it too bluntly, of wide-ranging reflections tangential upon this curious parrot-doubling as they occur in the mind of a Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite, a sixty-plus-year-old Essex physician, widower, and ardent amateur Flaubertian who likes travelling to France and who participated in the Normandy invasion. Dr. Braithwaite, though verbal and clever to a fault, does not like to talk about himself, and pieces of his meagre self-description are still falling into place after page 100.

  As an inventive and erudite treatise on Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert’s Parrot is praiseworthy, hilarious in many of its details and yet serious in its search for clues to Flaubert’s elusive and repellent character. Some of its facts and correlations should be news even to professors of Romance languages. The late Dr. Enid Starkie, “Flaubert’s most exhaustive British biographer,” comes in for several whacks, at her French accent as well as her scholarship, and, though Jean-Paul Sartre’s accent escapes criticism, his unfinished life of Flaubert does not. In a multiple send-up of academic techniques, Geoffrey Braithwaite, or his consonant creator Julian Barnes, finds an abundance of ways to skin the Flaubertian cat: various chapters consist of a three-hour examination paper, a “dictionary of accepted ideas” in echo of Bouvard and Pécuchet, three chronologies of Flaubert’s life (each with a different moral), a thorough inventory of bird and animal imagery in Flaubert’s life and work, a survey of trains as they impinged and still impinge on his world, a definitive essay on Madame Bovary’s shifty eyes, an imaginary monologue by Louise Colet, an encounter with a mythical American college instructor who claims to have discovered and destroyed Flaubert’s letters to the mysterious Juliet Herbert, and a listing of the numerous books that Flaubert thought of writing but didn’t. In sum, all this scattered, avid attention fleshes out an image of “the first modern novelist” rather more heroic and lovable than the haughty customary daguerreotype; beyond that, a certain excitement over artistic workings is communicated by Mr. Barnes’s elaborate, antic, clicking, shuddering apparatus of exposition.

  But as a novel? What is, indeed, the story, with its beginning, middle, and end, of Flaubert’s Parrot? The self-abnegation of the loquacious narrator (“Three stories contend within me.… My own is the simplest of the three—it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence—and yet I find it the hardest to begin.… I hope you don’t think I’m being
enigmatic, by the way. If I’m irritating, it’s probably because I’m embarrassed”) implies shame, something to hide. Dr. Braithwaite’s unspoken secret, the motive for his tantalizing coyness, presses behind his screen of Flaubertian trivia, and occasionally pokes through. He finds it suspiciously difficult to speak of his late wife, Ellen: “My wife … Not now, not now.” His tongue teases the subject like a sore tooth: “As for my wife, she was not sensible. That was one of the last words anyone would apply to her. They inject soft cheeses, as I said, to stop them ripening too quickly.” The story finally emerges, and shall be left unrevealed, except to say that Dr. Braithwaite’s shame is not unlike that of another medical man, the officier de santé Charles Bovary. No doubt this helps account for his passionate interest in the French author and his masterpiece; no doubt we are meant retrospectively to see that his frantically resourceful discourse on Flaubert is a way of talking around his own life. A mask both hides the real face and yet conforms to it. Braithwaite’s frequent denials (“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Ellen’s secret life led her into despair. For God’s sake, her life is not a moral tale. No one’s is”) echo Flaubert’s proud negations; Braithwaite’s conspicuous shyness within his own narrative acts out Flaubert’s famous dictum that “an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

  The artistic strategy of Flaubert’s Parrot employs the ancient magical technique of substitution; just as in Pale Fire Kinbote reads his own mad life into John Shade’s poem on quite another subject, Braithwaite smuggles his own tragedy into the facts about Flaubert. The effect is ingenious but not, quite, moving. The blatant forestallment of revelation begins to nag as well as tease; as one disparate chapter of mock-scholarship succeeds another—each chapter a fresh insult, as it were, to our natural curiosity concerning the shadowy Braithwaite—readerly fatigue and irritation set in. By the time the narrator comes clean, we are tired of his voice, by turns arch, quarrelsome, curt, cute, and implausibly literary. Braithwaite’s wickedly witty list of types of novels that he wants banned is surely a London culturati’s, not a provincial physician’s, and some of the metaphors are foppishly spun out:

  The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes.

  Emma/Ellen; Bovary/Braithwaite/Barnes: the partitions between them are permeable; author and persona too smoothly merge. Too many epigrams on art and life—“The past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report,” “Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t”—keep reminding us that we are only reading a book. While the novel as a form certainly asks for, and can absorb, a great deal of experimentation, it must at some point achieve self-forgetfulness and let pure event take over. In Flaubert’s Parrot, that point arrives too late, and brings too little. The attempt, I think, is to remind us that, as our narrator insists, “Books are not life, however much we might prefer it if they were”; that is, his real-life misfortune remains raw and rough, and resists sublimation by literature. But so much artifice in establishing the priority of the “real” feels artificial, and leaves us cold. Whatever we want from novels, we want more than conversation with the author, however engagingly tricksome.

  Parrot’s Perch is, at eighty-eight pages of large print, too small to be called a novel, though it is called that on the dust jacket. Michel Rio is about the same age as Mr. Barnes. Born in Brittany, he lives now in Paris. He confesses on the jacket’s back flap to “a special affection for Conrad and Chomsky,” and his two previous novels both won French literary prizes. (How many of those prizes are there?) This is the author’s first work to be translated into English. His version of the “real” looms at the outset, in an introductory page that explains the title:

  Parrot’s Perch—Widely used torture technique in Latin America. The victim is hung upside down naked, so that the whole weight of his body rests on his forearms. Soon he becomes convinced that his fingers will explode. His arms seem to be breaking. The parrot’s perch is usually only a starting point for other tortures.

  (Commentary from the film The Year of the Torturer)

  We brace ourselves, torture being the thing above all from which we wish to avert our eyes. The book begins with a sermon, a commentary on the Eucharist given in a French monastery near the Atlantic coast by a guest there, a young priest from Latin America, Joaquin Fillo. His remarks are announced as “about pain, about the cult of pain which is one of the bases of our religion.” He begins with the Passion of Christ, an agony “indissolubly linked … to the greatest good, which is the Redemption and the Life. The two blend indistinguishably in a fabric woven of blood and love, suffering and joy, the garden of tortures and the garden of delights, the victim and the executioner; and these produce a breed of man who is both his own victim and his own executioner.” He proceeds to a harrowing litany of the martyrs, with the specifics of their cruel deaths (“Quentin, who was placed on a rack, flogged, burned with oil, pitch, and quicklime, and impaled. Euphemia, who was beaten, hung by her hair, and run through with a sword. Leger, who had his eyes and tongue torn out, and was decapitated”) and proceeds to the paradox of Christian cruelty in turn: “whoever the torturer, whoever the tortured, suffering remains the route to Redemption. And for centuries the Holy Inquisition considered it a charitable duty to torture, burn, and destroy bodies in order to save souls.” Father Fillo briefly describes his own acquaintance with torture, after becoming a radical priest in his native land and then being “arrested and tortured by people who claimed to defend the values of Christianity.” He ends by renouncing, before the assembled monastery congregation, Christianity: “I reject that religion, a religion in which love has mixed with too much blood. I reject in it what is despicable, and so must also reject its sublimity. It reeks of human cunning, of the didactic imagination. For me God is other, or He doesn’t exist.… I want to make you feel the pointlessness of the pain and humiliation that gave rise to despair, to my despair—you who practice discipline and humility, in which you place your hope.”

  These are huge themes, and it is no very severe criticism of Parrot’s Perch to say that the rest of the book isn’t up to them. Michel Rio, like Dostoevsky and Bernanos, Graham Greene and Shusako Endo, has posed a question—the problem of pain, of God’s apparent indifference to the pain of living—to which no novel can present a persuasive answer, though it may tend to confirm answers the reader has arrived at in the intimacy of religion and personal philosophy. There is no answer on earth, and the novel form is earthbound, properly and beautifully (as Henry James would say) confined to human perspectives. The body’s answer to the problem of pain is brute endurance, mitigated by the numbness of shock and the eventual mercy of death; the average secular citizen’s answer is stoicism, a narrow focus, and full use of the modern armory of anesthesia, ranging from alcohol to morphine. In The Brothers Karamazov, the troubled answer offered to Ivan’s indignation over the death of children is the saintly life, as exemplified by his brother Alyosha. The Book of Job ends by appealing to the opaque, inimitable magnificence of Creation: the Creator will not be brought, philosophically, to heel. In Parrot’s Perch, Father Fillo, having delivered his devastating homily, broodingly strolls in the countryside, enjoys several impossibly stilted conversations with people he encounters, gazes at the sea, and succumbs to his own creator’s portentousness.

  The language proceeds from stately to awful: “He had cut himself off from his own reasoning, whose calamitous progress had contained the seed of its own negation, the possibility of a return or at least a detour in his rationalized
trudging to the abyss.” The priest’s considerations begin to savor of too many graduate courses in epistemology, and of Beckett’s existential Gothic: “He also thought that consciousness might freeze forever in contemplation of its own absolute incapacity: not-seeing, not-tasting, not-touching, not-hearing. A total impotence that recognized itself as such. And in that paradox of a consciousness that would have to suffer because it could not experience, he sensed the ultimate melancholy.” He is overtaken on his walk by the abbot, who cheerfully seems to believe rather less than Teilhard de Chardin, if a bit more than Jacques Monod. “I don’t believe in original sin,” says the abbot. “How can one believe in the guilt of amino acids and of protein, the origins of life and consciousness?… In denying the assumption of guilt, I logically deny its consequence, which is Redemption; and like you I admit the gratuitousness of suffering.” Even burnt-out Father Fillo flares up, and asks what the abbot does believe in. “In the permanence, perfection, and universality of the Spirit” is the liberal answer. “And I believe in the morality of Christ, which is a morality of love.” The young apostate is not coaxed back into the monastery, however; a little farther in his walk, past an old canal laboriously described as “straddling the line between the vulgarity of the functional and the nobility of ruin, between the moribund affirmation of its artificial character and its final submersion, by a kind of slow chromatic melding, into its natural surroundings,” he encounters a nameless woman operating the canal lock. “Her whole being emanated a kind of contained generosity, a spontaneous warmth held in check by a willed reserve.” She had been in the congregation and heard his disavowal, yet greets him and invites him into her house. “Here were a man lost in a dark, inner space and a lonely woman—uneducated, vivacious, and intuitive.” Yet no dialogue, no exchange develops; she sits utterly mute while the disillusioned priest pours nihilism into her ears. As one of the book’s better sentences puts it, “Her own, inarticulate hope had vanished in his void, and she saw now that she could expect nothing from this man save perplexity.”