Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Witty observation and artful phrasing are the rule in Calvino’s subtly arranged sets and subsets of vignettes; some add up better than others, but none falls below a certain high level of intelligence and attentiveness. The world, as it were, is inventoried afresh, by this most generally (and genially) alert of postwar writers. Yet a melancholy, defeated tone seeps through the polish. The albino gorilla is pictured as discovering in an old rubber tire “a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living—investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols.… We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we try to reach some final meaning, which words cannot achieve.” This collection of animated essays tricked out as a novel has a certain upper limit, too; Mr. Palomar’s world offers itself as food for thought too meekly, without fighting back. As in Robert Benchley’s old humorous pieces, the bemused hero can meet no worse fate than embarrassment—looking momentarily like a fool. It would be as if Mr. Sammler, in Saul Bellow’s novel, were allowed to wander through New York thinking his thoughts and never having to cope with the menacing black pickpocket, the outrageous college radical, the distressingly sexy great-niece, the lethal Israeli son-in-law. Even in Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, a book Mr. Palomar considerably resembles, there is more sense of activity and contention; Monsieur Teste has had to hack out his clearing for pure intellection with a heroic, ascetic effort, and in the assembled texts he is seen from the outside, by an admiring friend and a loving wife. “He is tall and dreadful suddenly. The machine of his monotonous acts explodes; his face sparkles; he says things that often I only half understand, but they never fade from my memory.… It took all the energy of a great body to sustain in the mind that diamond instant which is at once the idea and the Thing, both the entrance and the end.” Thus Madame Teste sees her amazing husband, whose name puns not only on the Old French teste for “head” but the Latin testis, meaning “testicle” as well as “witness.” What Signora and Signorina Palomar make of their woolgathering protector is not disclosed.

  Well, Calvino might have argued, the 1980s, when he wrote Mr. Palomar, are not the 1890s, when Valéry created Monsieur Teste, “the very demon of possibility.” The demon of impossibility has replaced that of possibility. We live now in “the era of great numbers,” when humanity “extends in a crowd, leveled but still made up of distinct individualities like the sea of grains of sand that submerges the surface of the world.” If one such individuality chooses to pose on the sand and contemplate the waves, little will come of it for good or ill; in society, Mr. Palomar holds his tongue, and in solitude “no longer knows where his self is to be found.” Can this diminished person be a portrait of today’s Western European intellectual? Backed off from any doctrinal certainty, concerned with words and signs since things are now properly abandoned to science, mellowed by forty years of affluence and peace, his “patch of uneasiness” affably entertains the “dismay of living.”

  In this book’s last chapter, the hero contemplates his own death: “The world can very well do without him, and he can consider himself dead quite serenely, without even altering his habits.” The sadness of this modest reflection is deepened by Calvino’s own death this month, of a stroke, at the age of only sixty-one. Presumably, he had many books still to write and honors still to reap; he had become, with the death (also premature) of Roland Barthes, Europe’s leading litterateur. Thoroughly “up” on all the latest devices of thought and style, Calvino could nevertheless immerse himself for years in Italian folktales; for all his love of complication, his work had a timeless lucidity, a unique unclouded climate, like that of a fall afternoon whose coolness is the small price we must pay for its being so sunny and clear.

  Final Fragments

  SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM, by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh. 124 pp. Harvard University Press, 1988.

  UNDER THE JAGUAR SUN, by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 86 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

  The sudden death of Italo Calvino in 1985 left a number of his ingenious schemata uncompleted. His intended 1985–86 Norton Lectures at Harvard fall one short of the proposed Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The five literary values he did discuss, as exemplified in his own work and that of others, were “Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” and “Multiplicity”; “Consistency” is the ghost of the sequence, the unformulated final virtue. The lectures are marvels of charm, mental adroitness, and casual erudition, drawing upon literary instances in five languages and citing with special affection Italian masters such as Cavalcanti, Boccaccio, Leopardi, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, not to mention Dante. Calvino, the most civilized of postmodern creative spirits, saw his own working method as “the subtraction of weight” and spoke refreshingly of the stimulus exerted upon his imagination by science, comic strips, and folktales, along with modernist writers like Valéry, Musil, Queneau, and Jarry. Calvino read everything, and in his dazzling designs—nothing less than tours de force interested him—made the play of the mind sensuous.

  Under the Jaguar Sun titles another unfulfilled scheme—an intention, from as long ago as 1972, to write a short story for each of the five senses. The three stories he finished, though each is brilliant, are quite dissimilar in texture and approach. “A King Listens” dramatizes hearing through the interior monologue of a timeless, isolated, rather Beckettian monarch. “The Name, the Nose” relates the olfactory sense to eros and death through three interwoven narratives, those of a nineteenth-century Parisian dandy, a Seventies rock musician in London, and a nameless human animal reminiscent of the generic creatures in Cosmicomics. “Under the Jaguar Sun” deals with taste as a matter of Mexican cuisine—from chiles en nogada to ritual Aztec meals of human flesh—as it figures in the relationship of a middle-aged tourist couple; this story, the most realistic of the three, is a delicious fabrication.

  Slogging Sammy

  WORSTWARD HO, by Samuel Beckett. 47 pp. Grove Press, 1983.

  These forty-seven small pages of very large type extend Beckett’s wrestle with the void to the point where less would be nothing. A personless voice, uttering words of mostly one syllable in sentences of rarely more than five words, urges itself onward in a dim but resistant realm where humanoid apparitions fragmentarily loom and then fade. “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst.” The dim shapes in this environment most minimal are called shades, and we probably would not be entirely wrong to think of it as an old-fashioned Hades that ends in new-style entropy (“Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther”). A sterile, dreadful exercise, it might be said, and one does not, as Dr. Johnson remarked of Paradise Lost, wish it longer than it is. And yet, the words—“How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity!”

  Still Stirring

  STIRRINGS STILL, by Samuel Beckett, illustrated by Louis le Brocquy. 25 pp. Blue Moon Books/John Calder, 1989.

  Is Beckett selling out? The price of this latest of his minuscule later works—$1,700—suggests that he’s angling for the big bucks, but its less than two thousand words of baleful text should repel any considerable excess over the two hundred purchasers that this joint British-American limited edition can provide for. One more of those nameless heroes sits around in a characteristically underfurnished universe and manages to make a move or two while longing for the end. The lulling bare-bones prose almost begs to be set to music: “Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.” There is an ashen beauty here, and a heroic willingness to dwell upon the guttering spiritual condition of human life amid our century’s material blaze. More expansive than Lessness, less boi
sterous than Worstward Ho, and more easily followed than the segments of Fizzles, Stirrings Still will not disappoint hard-core acedia fans. It contains two proper names (Darley, Walther), nine inky lithographs by Louis le Brocquy, and not a single comma. If time is money, and shelf-space precious, this volume is the bargain of the year.

  Still Staring

  STARING AT THE SUN, by Julian Barnes. 197 pp. Knopf, 1987.

  The tricky author of Flaubert’s Parrot here takes as his subject the rather uneventful but long (ninety-nine years and still counting) life of an Englishwoman, Jean Serjeant. The men in her life—her prankish uncle, her boring husband, her timorous son, and an RAF pilot who boarded with her parents during World War II—are a rather cryptic lot who set her to musing over such marginal items as model airplanes, minks’ will to live, and the five sandwiches Lindbergh took with him when he flew across the Atlantic (he only ate one and a half). Late in life, she flies to China and the Grand Canyon and is impressed by both. This wispy heroine is meant to be an instrument whereby the great existential questions are examined: life, which an epigraph from Chekhov likens to a carrot, and death, which the book’s prevailing metaphor likens to the sun. As a manipulator of motifs, Mr. Barnes is assiduous and brilliant; recurring images weave a wonderful basketwork of implied meaning. But his heroine remains a cipher, and the basket more than half empty.

  Writer-Consciousness

  THE STORYTELLER, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 247 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

  THE AFTERNOON OF A WRITER, by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. 87 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

  THE WRITING LIFE, by Annie Dillard. 111 pp. Harper & Row, 1989.

  Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, was wary of “writer-consciousness,” and would mark phrases and sentences wherein, to his sensibility, the writer, like some ugly giant squid concealed beneath the glassy impersonality of the prose, was threatening to surface. Writing, that is, like our grosser animal functions, could not be entirely suppressed but shouldn’t be performed in the open. Yet fashions in aesthetic decorum change. Modernism, by the spectacular nature of its experiments, invited admiring or irritated awareness of the experimenting author. Intentionally or not, the written works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway all were exercises in personality, each provoking curiosity about the person behind the so distinctive voice. Postmodernism, if such a thing exists, without embarrassment weaves the writer into the words and the twists of the tale. Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and its brothers in invented autobiography, the mirrors and false bottoms of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and The Gift, John Barth’s self-proposed and exhaustively fulfilled regimens of taletelling—all place the writer right up front.

  Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s foremost novelist as well as the leading candidate for that country’s Presidency, has never been averse to writer-consciousness; his early, extensive romp, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977, English translation 1982), pursued its action through a series of parodic soap-opera plots somehow sprouting from the head of a character, the indefatigable scriptwriter Pedro Camacho, and the novel is framed by the relaxed voice of a young man whose literary ambitions, excursions to Europe, and pleasant success match with a breezy closeness those of Mario Vargas Llosa. More recently, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984, translation 1986) showed the first-person narrator piecing together, chapter by chapter, supposition by supposition, the life of a pudgy schoolmate who had turned into a violent leftist revolutionary. Now The Storyteller tells the tale of another schoolmate,§ Saúl Zuratas, who went off to become a storyteller among the Machiguenga Indians, in the jungles of the upper Amazon. As in Aunt Julia, a tale-teller’s voice alternates with the author’s voice; as in Alejandro Mayta, a narrative relativity is invoked, and the imaginative act of speculation takes the place of unquestionable assertion. It is asserted that Saúl Zuratas is Jewish and has “a dark birthmark, the color of wine dregs, that covered the entire right side of his face.” He is nicknamed Mascarita—Mask Face. “The birthmark spared neither his ears nor his lips nor his nose, also puffy and misshapen from swollen veins. He was the ugliest lad in the world; but he was also a likable and exceptionally good person.” We see him, through the nameless narrator’s eyes, as a university student who becomes increasingly fascinated by the Indian cultures surviving on the Amazonian side of the Andes; later, at a greater distance, we hear of him, through an American missionary couple, the Schneils, as a nearly naked storyteller wandering among the small, widely separated units of the Machiguenga tribe.

  The narrative’s levels are multiple. In its foreground, the narrator, a writer in no way distinguished from the author, relates how he was diverted into his subject matter from an intended period of study and repose in Florence: “I came to Firenze to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while, and suddenly my unfortunate country forced itself upon me this morning in the most unexpected way.” An exhibit of photographs of the Peruvian jungle, taken by an Italian photographer, has been mounted near “Dante’s restored house … and the lane where, so legend has it, he first saw Beatrice”; these photographs of “the wide rivers, the enormous trees, the fragile canoes, the frail huts raised up on pilings, and the knots of men and women, naked to the waist and daubed with paint,” distract the writer from his plan “to read Dante and Machiavelli and look at Renaissance paintings for a couple of months in absolute solitude.” The writer has frequently before, we are told, attempted to imagine and tell the curious story of Mascarita. So the composition of what we are reading presents itself as a feat, the fruit of a struggle. Two large literary spirits are conjured up to aid the telling: Dante, the singer of an otherworldly geography even more exotic than that of trans-Andean Peru, and Kafka, whose tale “The Metamorphosis,” about a man turned into a giant insect, is the one classic cherished by Saúl Zuratas in his own helpless monstrosity. Saúl’s first name holds another literary reference: to the exemplary convert, whose namesake is similarly stricken—“I can say that Saúl experienced a conversion.… From his first contact with the Amazon jungle, Mascarita was caught in a spiritual trap that made a different person of him.”

  Vargas Llosa is a diligent researcher. Anthropology pervades The Storyteller, and since the Machiguengas are an actual tribe and the acknowledgments credit a number of scholarly and exploratory institutions, we can take the mythology and lore to be authentic. The Machiguengas call themselves “the men who walk”: their survival tactics in the face of competing tribes and the incursions of the white men (called Viracochas) comprise constant migratory motion from one temporary settlement after another, in family groups of as few as ten. Amid a situation of potential total fragmentation, the wandering storyteller serves as a news bearer and oral historian, as “the memory of the community, fulfilling a function similar to that of the jongleurs and troubadours of the Middle Ages.” “Storyteller” isn’t quite exact: the Machiguenga word—“a long, loud guttural sound full of s’s”—more literally translates as hablador, or “speaker.” The narrator of the novel, our modern Peruvian novelist enjoying his Florentine respite, is stirred to think that “storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment.” He is, he confides,

  deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys.

  The habladores are “the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society.”

  The anthropology is more vivacious than the fiction, more plausible than the novel’s premise that a white man could insert himself into a primitive tribe and take on the caretaking
of its arcane cultural essence. But it cannot be said that the novelist dodges the difficulties; not only does Vargas Llosa, courtesy of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (real) and the American missionaries the Schneils (fictional), give us a thorough tour of the Machiguenga world as it survives in the state of Peru, but he takes upon himself, in the novel’s tour de force, the voice of Saúl Zuratas as a Machiguenga storyteller. He mimics the concision and the hellish slipperiness of American Indian tales, as recorded and compiled by generations of anthropologists. Nothing quite makes sense or is purely nonsense. The Machiguenga genesis legends have a grandeur and pathos not unfamiliar to those of us raised with the Bible:

  After, the men of earth started walking, straight toward the sun that was falling.… There was no evil, there was no wind, there was no rain. The women bore pure children. If Tasurinchi wanted to eat, he dipped his hand into the river and brought out a shad flicking its tail.… Those who went came back, and entered the spirit of the best. That way, nobody used to die.… After, the earth was filled with Viracochas tracking down men. They carried them off to bleed trees and tote rubber.… “It’s no use trying to escape from the camps,” said Tasurinchi. “The Viracochas have their magic. Something is happening to us. We must have done something. The spirits protect them, and us they abandon. We are guilty of something.”

  As retold by Saúl Zuratas as imagined by Vargas Llosa, the myths are gradually, cleverly infused with novelistic elements. Saúl’s pathetic personal history begins to intrude, a process abetted by the pliable way that Tasurinchi, the god of good, takes, Vishnu-like, many forms, and bewilderingly becomes the hero of almost any tale that is told: