Odd Jobs (73 page)

That Voice
concerns … well, what
does
it concern? The phrase “
manque un raccord
” (“a missing link”) is used seventeen times in the French text, the translator claims on the jacket’s back flap, and a phrase rendered as “impossible anamnesis” (“anamnesis” = “recalling to mind”) returns a number of times also, as do “invincible fatigue,” “traces of effacement,” “psspss,” “take a hair of the night that bit you,” and “an invisible manitou.” The author, in a special preface to the American edition, assures us that “the structure of the novel is precise, although not immediately apparent. The different themes are intermingled. One cuts into another point-blank, then the other resumes and cuts into the first, and so on until the end.” The two themes named are “the theme of the cemetery” and “that of the gossip at the grocery.” In the cemetery, evidently, at the intersection of alleys numbered 333 and 777, on All Saints’ Day, near the tomb of the minor belletrist Alexandre Mortin, a young man called Théodore, coming to arrange and leave some chrysanthemums, meets a ghost, or walking dead man, who identifies himself as Dieudonné, or Dodo for short. Dodo, it slowly dawns, is Théo’s uncle. Maybe Théo killed him, for his money. Alexandre Mortin has a brother, Alfred, who perhaps is also called the Master; he seems to be keeping little Théodore in his house by force, according to gossip down at the grocery store, where “that otiose, never-ending story” acquires ever more characters (the servant Magnin, Mademoiselle Passetant, Madame Buvard, Monsieur Alphonse, many of whom we have met before in other Pinget novels, or imagine we have) and effaces itself as it goes, like a slate being covered over and over with new versions, until with the best will in the world the reader starts to feel sandy-eyed and itches to turn on the eleven o’clock news, where things are said once or at worst twice. As we grind along in hopes of things coming clearer or of Pinget’s making one of his graveyard jokes (“Just imagine the state of our necropolis, hygienewise, that’ll discourage the All Saints’ Day fans”), the tale appears increasingly to talk about itself:

Indeed, in such a close-knit village, the dead are not allowed to die; they continue to hold their place in the fabric of gossip, of remembrance, their deaths incidental within the pervasive dissolution of life erasing itself as it goes. The atmosphere is deadly, dank, musty: “Old formulas, old papers, old filth, old chimeras, everything is disintegrating.” Rural France is Catholic France, and on this ground modernism joins hands with the pious macabre, with the supernatural’s Gothic underside, “in touch with putrefaction and decomposition, hence oriented toward the future.” Here voices matter-of-factly proclaim, “I went back into my tomb, where I’m awaiting the resurrection of the dead,” and what may be the author’s voice murmurs, “The life to come, it conditions, it contorts, it confuses, it’s just life.”

Pinget locates us in the gently moldering, nowhere solid hell
^†
of communal remembering, of mutual awareness, never exact, never erased. “Something else is being prepared beyond people’s consciousness, it had to be reshaped first, we have been at pains to do so.” And we, it must be admitted, have been at pains to read the result. Could the impression Pinget creates be conveyed less exasperatingly, less numbingly? Perhaps not, since its theme, to a degree, is the exasperation and numbingness of our human, social, forgetful, banal existence. But why speculate as to the author’s purposes when he has recently been in New York City and spelled them out? To a crowd gathered at New York University last October, Pinget, reading his lucid French text in a hard-to-hear monotone, explained (as translated by Barbara Wright), “My attachment to the technique of the intermingling of themes and their variations is due to the admiration I have always felt for so-called baroque music.” He is also attached to the concept of the collective unconscious:

Later in this address he mentioned Jung, in connection with his own “approach to the dark face of language, in order to make it easier for unconscious values to break through.” He spoke of his “declared intention, from the very first book, to extend the limits of the written word by replenishing it with the spoken word.” Confusion, contradiction, “all the suggestions, refutations, prolongations and metamorphoses of fragments of speech” are intrinsic to this intention; his reader will have “the impression that the book is being composed, and decomposed, under his very eye.” Not that the books are written for the eye; they are “to be listened to, rather than read.”

We are put in mind of
Finnegans Wake
, Jungian in its attempt to show the world-mind in its sleep, and also employing a tone of unremitting gossip, of multiple murmur. Language is, at bottom, a spoken thing. From the overthrow of Latin by Dante’s Italian and Chaucer’s English to the modernists’ rejection of Georgian prosodic proprieties in favor of jagged colloquial rhythms, written literature has deferred to the evolving reality of speech. Defoe, Addison, Wordsworth, Mark Twain, Joyce, Hemingway, Henry Green—all refreshed themselves at the springs of the demotic idiom, and forged their styles in conscious opposition to “literariness.” But the chronic shucking of tired literary conventions is itself a literary maneuver, and in Pinget’s case a heavy escort of cerebration and deliberate experiment marches with his “fragments of speech.” On the excuse of Alexandre Mortin’s being a minor poet, many abstruse theoretical remarks are interwoven with the voices of
That Voice:
“And analyzed the whys and wherefores, and finally decreed that poetry had no existence outside a certain system or method.” In his address at New York University, Pinget announced, “I have great respect for the present-day critical methods.” And, moreover, behind his work, with his persistent rumors of the old religion, lies a less orthodox religious impulse:

This comes from a beautiful statement given to the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature on the subject of “literary baggage.” “The sole ‘baggage,’ ” Pinget says, “that helps us to conquer chronological time and to participate in the other, absolute time, is a bouquet of texts.… Light baggage, buzzing with words, which, ever since the world has been the world—and there are many legends that vouch for it—has ensured our passage, without let or hindrance, over on to the other bank.”

In the meantime, we are on this bank of earthly clay, and this reviewer would be doing less than his duty if he did not admit that he found
That Voice
, as an experience of readerly immersion in a fabricated world, less compelling and more mannered than, say, Pinget’s
Libera Me Domine
, which it resembles in ambition and milieu. The sinister, shifting rumors of dark deeds done amid rural stagnation had a force there that here weakly tinges the pleasures of a self-professedly intricate counterpoint. A perfected artistic method can serve, unfortunately, to insulate the artist, to dull his recourse to the ever shifting, ever fructifying actual.
Between Fantoine and Agapa
, for all its buffoonery, was a venture into the unknown;
That Voice
is a demonstration of a mastered method, in a territory thoroughly subdued.

F
ABLE
, 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.”

T
HE
W
IND
S
PIRIT:
An Autobiography
, by Michel Tournier, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer. 259 pp. Beacon Press, 1989.

G
ILLES
& J
EANNE
, by Michel Tournier, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. 126 pp. Grove Press, 1990.

T
HE
G
OLDEN
D
ROPLET
, 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: