Picked-Up Pieces (60 page)

All this symbolic superstructure rests on a realistic base less substantial
than sand. Rand has one amusing, almost lifelike speech. Chance’s sensations when he appears on television, “the cameras … licking up the image of his body,” can be felt. There is one sharp image, of “frosty sculptures,” in rooms of vague furniture. Otherwise, the texture of events is thin, thin, preposterously thin. The rich and powerful may be stupid, but they would not mistake a comatose illiterate for a financial wizard. A hermit might be innocent, but his body would know how to achieve an erection. Fortune may be arbitrary in bestowing her favors, but she is not totally berserk. When a character in the book expresses incredulity at Chance’s abrupt and baseless fame, he is appealing to laws of probability that have been suspended. There is not enough leverage even to spring a laugh. No two things are incongruous, because hardly anything in
Being There
is
there
.

You could say that this is an immigrant’s impression of America, an “other planetary perspective.” But compare Nabokov; also an immigrant, from the same Slavic hemisphere as Kosinski, he assiduously put himself to school with American particulars and came up with a portrait—not only in
Lolita
but in the background of
Pnin
and the poem “Pale Fire”—of the United States grotesquely and tellingly acute in its details. Mr. Kosinski’s portrait expresses little but the portraitist’s diffident contempt for his subject—the American financial and political Establishment. He does not enough hate it to look hard at it; the result is not even a cartoon. Stylized also were the nameless villages of the Polish marsh in
The Painted Bird
, but those scenes were in Kosinski’s blood, and the plausibility gaps were filled with an experienced terror that redeemed the parade of Grand Guignol episodes from being merely sensational. In
Steps
, an adult man’s erotic explorations were interwoven with these same horrific villages, and incriminated in the same sinister cruelty. Perhaps the intention of
Being There
was to transfer this sinisterness to an America befogged by media and ruled by stuffed shirts. The result is feebly pleasant—a dim and truncated television version of those old Hollywood comedies wherein a handsome bumpkin charms the swells and makes good. Unlike Kosinski’s other novels,
Being There
is not painful to read, which in his special case is not a virtue.

Raymond Queneau was born in 1903, in Le Havre; his first novel,
Le Chiendent
, published in 1933, has now been translated into English, by Barbara Wright, as
The Bark Tree
. The dust jacket tells us that Robbe-Grillet
has “hailed” this book as “a new-wave novel twenty years ahead of its time,” and the translator’s introduction presents further testimonials, accrediting
The Bark Tree
as a classic and Queneau as a giant in the generation of modernists that succeeded Proust and Joyce. The book, we are told, evolved from Queneau’s attempt to translate Descartes’
Discourse on Method
into French as it is really spoken, dismissing the “conventions of style, spelling, and vocabulary that date from the grammarians of the sixteenth century and the poets of the seventeenth.” On the other hand, Queneau, a mathematician and a pedant, chose to regulate his excursion into demotic philosophy—which became a novel—with rules as strict as those of a ballade or rondeau; seven chapters, each of thirteen sections, observe within themselves the classical unities of place, time, and action. In addition, there are repetitions of image and phrase planted for the author’s personal pleasure, and the reader can subliminally sense a high degree of coherence and consistency beneath the surface of this rather sprawling and absurd tale.

The main plot concerns Étienne Marcel, a Parisian bank employee who lives in the suburb of Obonne, as he is observed by Pierre Le Grand, a speculative member of the idle rich, while Étienne makes the transition from flat silhouette to substantial human existence and back to flat silhouette. Étienne is the Cartesian man: when he begins to think (he suddenly notices in a store window two rubber ducks floating in a hat to advertise that the hat is waterproof), he is. From the window of his commuting train, he then observes a tiny sign advertising “CHIPS” and determines, as an
acte gratuit
, to visit this place, in the factory slum of Blagny; thereby he puts himself, and his observer, Pierre, and his son, Théo, and his wife, Alberte, and his wife’s admirer, Narcense, in touch with a raffish crowd that includes a concierge, an abortionist, a magician, a sailor, an old junk dealer, and a remarkably presumptuous dwarf. This impinging activates a rumor that the junk dealer, Old Taupe, is a rich miser, and a set of frantic schemes to appropriate his fortune, mainly by means of his marriage to a young waitress, Ernestine, who unaccountably dies during a wedding feast that reminded this dazed reader of the Babar books. And there are love affairs and hangings and dreams and dialogues about the meaning of nothing and, for a climax, a war between the French and the Etruscans.

The Bark Tree
is full, like
Bad News
, of nonsense and, like
Being There
, of naked contrivance. It is superior to both these books in the rigor of its
pattern and in the richness of its matter. A palpable Paris takes shape through a multiplicity of fine strokes:

Queneau’s wonderful gift for simile tempts one to compile a list:

And above these odd events, these overanimated souls and artifacts, a real humanity presides; Queneau not only permits each character the dignity of eloquence but rises himself to a fury of sarcasm when he contemplates the chauvinistic farce of the “Etruscan” war: “even the strategists … said they’d never seen a simpler, easier, more amusing war.”

Queneau’s sympathy peculiarly falls upon the banal—upon the empty routines, that is, whereby human ordinariness propels itself along the quotidian. He says of certain conventional greetings that “their apparent complexity concealed a profound simplicity.” Pierre, overhearing some clichés about the weather, “notes with some bitterness that these banalities
correspond perfectly to reality.” Perhaps, since Flaubert, banality is
the
challenge to serious novelists: the gales of romance have died, and the novelist is a sailor on a close reach, trying to use the constant wind of ordinary living to make some kind of headway against it. The melodrama of Queneau’s plot is manufactured by the characters, as a vacation from boredom; his own vacation comes in the intervals of metaphysical speculation, and these—though he would not have written the book without them—seem rather mannered and pat. When Pierre talks to the reader about his boredom and his masks, or when Étienne drops the aphorism that “there isn’t any gospel, there are only works of fiction,” we are aware of an author pressing his claims upon our intelligence; when Ernestine, dying, formulates death as the disappearance of “the little voice that talks in your head when you’re by yourself,” we are in the presence of human experience and shared terror. Gertrude Stein said it: literature isn’t remarks. What we want from fiction, and what fiction is increasingly loath to give us, is vicarious experience. Exiled from the great naïveté that nurtured the 19th-century masterworks of the novel, Queneau yet is old enough—humane enough—to spin, amid a metaphysics of relativity and uncertainty, affectionate images of human life in its curiosity, rapacity, and fragility. Compared to Queneau, our two other authors seem tired; a distance that cannot be exactly measured in generations or wars separates them from an instinctive belief that men are significant and that art must embody enduring principles.

A note on the translation: Barbara Wright did not set herself an easy task, and her version does permit us to glimpse an original whose prose has not only a poetic economy but, in dialogue, a slangy, punning richness. However, either this text was carelessly proofread or some of her renderings are too subtle by half. “Squite” (for “it’s quite”), “wz” and “shdve” (for “was” and “should have”), “etxras” (for “extras”), and “sore span” (for “saucepan”) are doubtless intentional equivalents of delicate audial distortions in the French; but what about “fairtish,” “neved,” and “everwhere”? These occur in dialogue, and “aand” appears in expository prose, and “becaues” in a letter in which nothing else is misspelled. Something wrong here?

A note on the price: the dust jacket calmly asks nine dollars and fifty cents for
The Bark Tree
. It is two hundred and eighty-one pages long. The Novel may or may not be dead; soon we won’t be able to buy into its casket and see.

T
HE
F
LIGHT OF
I
CARUS
, by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 192 pp. New Directions, 1973.

A
LL
F
IRES THE
F
IRE
and Other Stories
, by Julio Cortázar, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine. 152 pp. Pantheon, 1973.

Modernism, we are told, is passé; the Harvard English Department lists a course, “American Modernism,” that treats of “American writing from 1900 to 1930,” and another, “The Modern Period,” that is “an introduction to the poetry, fiction, intellectual prose, and criticism of the period from 1899 to 1939.” But what has come after? What now? In the uncertain twilight, where the avant garde has become the rear guard, strange loomings and mistaken perspectives bemuse us. Surely, we suppose, Raymond Queneau, a modern whose masterpiece
The Bark Tree
appeared in 1933, is dead and silent. Not so, for here is a lively new novel,
The Flight of Icarus
. And surely Julio Cortázar, the Brussels-born, Paris-dwelling Argentine expatriate who contrived such frolicsome experiments as
Hopscotch
and
62: A Model Kit
, is, as his handsome jacket photograph attests, a young man. Not so, for from the back flap of his latest book to appear in the United States,
All Fires the Fire and Other Stories
, we learn that Sr. Cortázar, with his turned-up raincoat collar and his downy cheeks, was born in 1914. So he, scarcely less than Queneau, harks back to the brave first third of this century, when Literature hobnobbed with Life as an equal, when young Dedaluses set forth to forge in their souls’ smithies the uncreated consciences of their respective races, when innovations in fictional technique could be dubbed “revolutionary,” and when artistic, cerebral excitement carbonated a page of prose so that it tingled in the reader like champagne. The late Pablo Neruda, puffing Cortázar’s stories, describes them as “fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games.” The final phrase puts well the tension between an earnest sense of reality and a playful sense of active mind that modernism brought to such a fine and precarious pitch—especially precarious in this country, where naturalism tends to breed sprawling verbal slums and, in reaction, anti-naturalists of the most antic, heedless, and dandyish sort.

Queneau, in
The Flight of Icarus
, is something of a dandy himself. The novel, written in the attenuated form of a play containing no fewer than seventy-four short scenes, takes place in Paris in 1895, when absinthe is still drunk, the bicycle and the “automobile carriage” are freshly in motion, Reason rules a feast of gourmet dining, and authors busily function as a superior type of tradesman. Icarus, our hero, escapes from a novel being written by Hubert Lubert, “a novelist by profession, by vocation, even, and … of some renown.” Lubert, suspecting a character-napping by his rival Surget, hires the farcically inept detective Morcol (“The man who follows adulterous women and finds lost sheep. He has appeared in many novels under different names. A second Vidocq. A second Lecoq”). Morcol makes a number of brilliant deductions but nevertheless lets the escapee remain undetected under his very nose. Icarus has drifted into a low-life café and, having taken his first “flight” on absinthe, is—so appealingly has Lubert designed him—taken in and supported by a prostitute identified as LN. The plot spins faster: other characters escape from other works in progress; their frantic creators fight duels amongst themselves; Icarus buys from a bookstall by the Seine
The Principles of Mechanics
(“the less he understood it the more he enjoyed it”) and goes to work for the mechanic M. Berrrier (
sic
), while LN turns from prostitution to the production of bicycle bloomers; Morcol retires, though the lost-character business is booming; most of the fictional escapees creep back into their books, or somebody else’s; Icarus and LN attempt flight in a giant kite, and fall. “Everything happened as was anticipated,” Lubert assures us at the end, shutting his manuscript complacently.

It is hard to imagine a novel lighter than this that would significantly engage the mind. Yet
The Flight of Icarus
, though it is continuously absurd, never strikes us as silly. The style is chaste and swift, ornamented with inventions translated as “obnubilating,” “spondulics,” “ostreophagists,” “petroliphagious,” “cantharodrome.” The many threads of the cat’s-cradle plot are complicated and regathered with an impressive efficiency. The literary satire is sharp though good-humored; Robbe-Grillet especially seems the butt of such speculations as