Picked-Up Pieces (59 page)

Mao succumbs, and in the tent recites to her the entirety of the famous conclusion to Pater’s
The Renaissance
, wherein we are entreated to “burn always with this hard, gemlike flame.”

The whole episode is, like others in the book, charming, and it illustrates how well Mr. Tuten handles deadpan fantasy; except for a rare smirk like “her romantic little heart,” a chaste solemnity rules the book. The tone is hard-edged, straight, dry, lyrical—anything but facetious. The tone, and the pamphlet-like type, smooth the different textures of this outrageous collage into an oddly reasonable unity. We never doubt that a lucid intelligence is in control; unlike many experiments of fictional assemblage,
The Adventures of Mao
never sinks into self-display, never becomes the mounted Kleenexes and tangerine peels of an author’s private life. Mr. Tuten, in his jacket photograph, is looking not at us but at the flame of a match that is about to light his cigarette; he is wearing long hair and a wristwatch and has no biography. The contents of his book reveal nothing of him but his attitude.

And what is that attitude? What is
The Adventures of Mao
saying? Is it satirical? In general, when confronted with, say, a giant toothpaste tube of sewn canvas or a silkscreen of soup cans, we are predisposed to assume satiric content; our liberal prejudices and romantic aesthetics (in favor of trees, naked women, sunsets, and bowls of fruit) can accept any number of wry putdowns of our comfortably deplorable mass-trash society. But works viewed this way need only a glance. The more rewarding and plausible assumption, I think, is that the artist was obscurely delighted—“turned on”—by toothpaste tubes and soup cans, and that the ancient impulse of mimesis has led him to lift these things from the flow of transient impressions and to cast them into enduring form. Mr. Tuten
likes
Chairman Mao, is the first message of the novel. The school-book account of the Long March inspires admiration on the flat level of propaganda. Sub-heroically (as Homer dimples Hector’s heroism with glimpses of the private man), Mr. Tuten portrays Mao as sensitive to
criticism of his poetry, as self-doubting and diffident and erotically wistful. In one of the funniest episodes, Mao lies awake coveting Eva Braun and Mussolini’s mistress (“Claretta, what was the marvellous creature but the Mediterranean itself”) but
not
Mrs. Roosevelt and Señora Franco (“a rosary-kissing midget, as sexy as a decayed turnip”). Mr. Tuten seems to be confessing that his Mao is a figment, a poster personality in a whimsical canon; he likes him as the author of the Gospel of John liked Jesus, but with the difference that he knows the Logos is a myth. Still, this is not satire, and in Mao’s spirited championing of the bourgeois avant garde we reach a level of serious statement:

The American interviewer finds this enthusiasm “astonishing” and the Chinese interpreter exclaims, “To be honest, Chairman Mao, hearing all this talk from you confuses and disturbs me.” It is, of course, impossible for Mao to be saying these things, but not—and herein the interest, the seriousness—implausible. When, in the same interview, he asserts that

the statement originates from a profound depth, where the Free World’s youth-proud greening merges with the mind that unleashed the Red Guards upon the entrenched Establishment of Communist China. We are confronted, in this elevation of youngness to a moral absolute, in this denial of any possibility of venerable wisdom and selective conservation, with something truly
other
than the reasonable liberalism and sentimental romanticism that have shaped our radically imperfect world.

The ideological fabric of
The Adventures of Mao
is deliciously complicated
by Mr. Tuten’s heavy reliance, for authority in aesthetic matters, upon fusty old wizards like Hawthorne and Pater—and Pater, it should be said, holds up nobly in this curious context. Another complication is that while the battles of the Long March are presented with the heroic generality of a newspaper recap, vivid and bloody and inglorious episodes of our own Civil War, as described in Whitman’s
Specimen Days
and John William De Forest’s
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion
, are interspersed. The warrior Mao, whose revolution, after all, was bought with millions of lives, is thus displaced, along with the Mao who, on cultural matters, declared (at Yenan in 1942):

For this implacable and dynamic dogmatism Mr. Tuten substitutes a “longing for the great simple primeval things.” Mao’s interviewer tells him, “All your thoughts have given me the desire to be inert.” Tuten’s Mao is a suave decadent, whose languor, nevertheless, has a certain appositeness to revolution. The book’s last sentence (quoted from Oscar Wilde’s
De Profundis
) sounds a call for purification: “I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.”

So, in part, was Dada a call for purification—a purgation of cant through nonsense. Like Pop, it embraced its age’s random materials with a frantic hug that transcended criticism, cynicism, or satire. Such violent gestures seem to ask for revolution in human consciousness; what they achieve is, more modestly, a refreshing of conventional artistic forms.
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March
provides an intelligent, taut, and entertaining change from conventional novels. Its substance is satisfyingly solid and satisfyingly mysterious. Like any work of art, it could not be mindlessly replicated; a sequel might slip into being a mere anthology. Nor would it be easy to locate another symbolic person as fabulous and germane as Mao. As is, Mr. Tuten’s studied scrapbook, like van Ostaijen’s precipitous scenario, contains the live motion of a novel within a jagged form that does “cut the reader into awareness.”

B
AD
N
EWS
, by Paul Spike. 152 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971.

B
EING
T
HERE
, by Jerzy Kosinski. 142 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

T
HE
B
ARK
T
REE
, by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 281 pp. New Directions, 1971.

We have with us this week three, ah, experimental works of fiction. In our struggles to understand them, we shall depend heavily on the dust jackets. The jacket of the first,
Bad News
, by Paul Spike (jacket by Push Pin Studios), tells us that the author, “a member of our youngest generation of fiction writers,” was born in 1947 and that his work, published mostly in the
Columbia Review
, “could be classified as ‘experimental’ à la Borges or Pynchon”—though it is not Borges or Pynchon who comes handsomely through with a puff but William Burroughs, to wit: “… at once a beautiful and disquieting book, in which seemingly commonplace happenings suddenly open into other planetary perspectives.”

Though the jacket is at some pains to avoid creating the (correct) impression that this is a collection of short pieces, it does let slip the word “stories,” and stories they are—nine of them. They do, however, contain recurring characters, and they are wired for cross-currents, and some are so episodic that they might have been sliced another way and still be “stories.” After O. Henry came the epiphany, the kind of short fiction that an irreverent friend of mine use to call the “so what?” story. Now comes its successor, the “so nothing” story. Mr. Spike owes more to Barthelme than to Borges; the “other planetary” perspectives intrude upon a this-planetary texture of
blague
and
Dreck
, of parody and an unimpeachably deadpan tone, of obscene technology and mechanical sex, of stillborn indignations and friendly puzzlements and, at the end, a curt, fishy-eyed stare, as from a cocktail-party companion upon whom one has, with some sudden warmth of interest or desire, unwittingly presumed. Not that Mr. Spike’s cool is perfected yet; there is still something collegiate in his fascination with smelly socks and the word “mess,” in his unfeigned delight at cooking up sexual descriptions, in his imperfectly
concealed worry that prose fiction ought to amount to more than nervous anti-silence, like the overlapping crackle of a radio tuned between stations. Certain persistent messages want to break through the static. Mr. Spike’s generation is one born to riot, and the telegraphy of social concern comes naturally to him:

Certain public events—nothing, naturally, prior to 1947, or even 1957—have sunk into his generation’s consciousness, and they surface with symbolic portent; assassination is a recurring trauma. “Okay then I’m paranoid but maybe if the Kennedy family had been a little more paranoid? … The DIC is responsible for those assassinations, that’s my opinion.… In November, 1963, over 400 New Yorkers fell down with ‘speck attack’ raging in their chests.” And our accursed affluence, of course, takes its licks:

Unexpectedly, the “emptiness that comes in the world’s biggest ice-cream cone” includes the sexual wealth that the post-Korea generation has created:

The medicine of love unsettlingly merges with the diseases of pollution and aggression:

But these thematic glimpses are mere footsteps in the underbrush of verbal celebration, a young man’s luxuriant revenge on the media that have nearly driven him mad. His gifts of mimicry are keen. They range from college-humor jesting (“The Conference Man”) to mock letters (“Box 456”) and memorabilia (“The Diary of Noel Wells”) and computer tapes (“Multi”) to a fluid, sprightly Surrealism (“Specks Saga,” “A Good Revolution”). The manner of presentation amounts to more than the things presented; the most tactile imagery, apart from the bodies of the young ladies who are handled, comes in the inventory of the hardware store where one of the young heroes works. The language, especially in the takeoffs of detective fiction, drolly bursts with exasperation at saying, after trillions of words of written English, anything at all:

Bad News
is as much a protest against fiction as it is fiction, and since it lacks pitiable characters, a sustained action, and an earnestly felt theme, we do not wish it—as Dr. Johnson said of
Paradise Lost
—longer than it is. Yet it has its poetry and its fidelity to the discontinuous, over-packaged, pre-trivialized way we live now. “The problem is,” Spike himself explains, intruding to discourse with one of his characters, “there is a bomb here made out of leftovers.” The character responds, “I have nothing to do.” “Right” is Spike’s answer. “But there is something here,” the character insists. Such an affirmation is even weaker than that of Beckett’s minimal pilgrims. News is what fiction—nouvelles, novels—once was; Mr. Spike’s title implies that since “good” (coherent, morally convinced) stories are impossible, bad news is better than none.

The dust jacket of
Being There
tells us that the author, Jerzy Kosinski, was born in Poland in 1933, and that the first of his two earlier novels,
The Painted Bird
, has been translated into thirty-two languages, and the second,
Steps
, into twenty-nine. One wonders what the missing
three are—Urdu? Korean? Arawak?
Being There
, simultaneously with its American publication, is being published in England, Holland, Germany, and France, and the flap copy, with its promise of a “modern parable” and a “quintessential anti-hero,” seems to be warming up an international audience in easy Esperanto. The description of the book, however, is twelve lines shorter than the description of the author, and, bizarrely, at the end of the novel the typography suggests that Kosinski’s biography is the last chapter—two pages’ worth of his degrees, his fellowships, his professorships, his awards, his translations. In short, the author, not the novel, is the product being pushed. Which is shrewd, since the novel, like its hero, barely exists.

The hero is called Chance. He is an illiterate foundling kept by a rich old man known, with a simplicity too ominous, as the Old Man. Chance has two activities: he tends the Old Man’s garden (Madam, I’m Adam) and watches television. After the Old Man dies, lawyers discover that Chance’s existence has generated no external evidence—no driver’s license, no credit cards, no tax records, not even dental records. He is cast out of the garden, and instantly encounters (hello, Eve) EE, the wife of another very rich old man, Rand. Everywhere, Chance creates an excellent impression, and he comports himself very well; gardening and television-watching seem to be at least as adequate a preparation for adult life as a college education. Though he doesn’t know how to read or make love beyond the preliminaries shown on the idiot box, he can make speeches that win the heart not only of EE but of the President of the United States. As the saga ends, Chance, a total nonentity four days before, has the Vice-Presidential nomination in his pocket. No doubt there is a lot in this, from political satire (Chance = Agnew) to philosophical allegory (“being there” = Heidegger’s
Dasein
). Also, there is some kind of joke on McLuhanite coolness; Chance is a walking television screen: people “began to exist, as on TV, when one turned one’s eyes on them.… The same was true of him.” The dust jacket, helpful to a fault, calls Chance “prelapsarian man” and asks, “Is Chance the technocrat of the future? … Or is he Rousseauesque, with a touch of natural goodness to which men respond?” Tune in next parable. Myself, I prefer to see him as the blind Chance that rules the universe, into which people touchingly read omniscience and benevolence and anthropomorphic Divinity.