Odd Jobs (74 page)

At the age of four, Michel was “an extremely nervous child, subject to convulsions, hypersensitive, and perpetually ill.” One morning, two white-coated strangers burst into his room and pulled out his tonsils, a bloody deed he has never forgiven: “During the last war prepubescent girls were raped by soldiers. I maintain that they were less traumatized than I was by having my throat slit at the age of four.” The doctor became “the only man in the world whom I have ever hated without reservation, because he did me incalculable harm, having branded my heart at the most tender age with an incurable distrust of my fellow human beings, even those nearest and dearest to me.” By the age of six, Michel had become “a child with an enormous head upon a sparrowlike body, and [he] neither slept nor ate.” Nor was his physical frailty made up in mental brilliance: “I was an execrable student, and rarely did I finish a school year in the same institution in which I began.… I read little and late.” And yet at some point in his resisted education he took a shine to the rarefied
Monadology
of Leibniz and to Anselm’s ontological proof of God’s existence: “From earliest childhood I had a yen for the constructs of the mind, for subtle proofs, for a rare and technical vocabulary.”

The other unusual yen in Tournier’s developing mind was his
Germanistik
, a fascination with German culture inherited from both parents: “My father and mother met at the Sorbonne when he was studying for a doctorate in German and she for a master’s.” His father’s qualifying exam had been scheduled for August 1914, and he went to war against the Germans instead, incurring serious facial wounds. But Tournier’s mother—whose uncle, a priest, taught German—“kept faith with her
family tradition, and we grew up with one foot in Germany.” As a child, Tournier went on Black Forest vacations with his family. As an adolescent, during World War II, he improved his German while living with twenty-two German soldiers in his parents’ occupied house in Saint-Germain—“I will never forget the smell of the Wehrmacht, a compound of tobacco and boot polish. For me this was the fragrance of happiness.” As a young post-graduate student, he studied for four years (1946–50) at the University of Tübingen, in the French Occupied Zone of what is now West Germany. At the age of twenty, he translated Erich Maria Remarque’s novel
All Quiet on the Western Front
, and did not scruple at improving passages of it. Remarque, meeting him, said, “This is the first time that I have been able to converse in my own language with any of my translators. The others … spoke German as though it were a dead language, like Latin or Greek.” Tournier’s enthusiasm for things German is, of course, the animating passion behind his best-known novel,
The Ogre
(1970), which tells the tale of a French automobile mechanic who finds fulfillment and doom as a German prisoner of war in East Prussia. In his own persona Tournier can seem an alarmingly keen Germanophile:

One could almost resent being called a barbarian while the perpetrators of Buchenwald are so rhapsodically extolled.

Tournier’s chapter on
The Ogre
is the longest, and in the four remaining chapters he discusses his early professional years as translator and radio broadcaster; his growing determination to write apparently naturalistic stories that “would secretly be set in motion by ontology and
logic”; his belief that humor and celebration are essential to literature; his first published novel,
Friday
(1967), “into which I hoped to pour the essence of what I had learned while employed at the Musée de l’Homme, especially under the tutelage of Claude Lévi-Strauss”; his novel
Les Météores
(1975; translated into English as
Gemini
), a tangled tale “inspired by a fascination with the super-flesh of twins” and crowned by the formula “twinship untwinned = ubiquity”; and the topic of wisdom itself. These connected autobiographical essays are brilliant and possibly wise, though a certain dark and teasingly perverse streak beclouds the sense of even and impersonal illumination that we expect from wisdom. We cannot ignore the saturnine personality projecting itself in such epithets as “that whining female monster, the crowd,” such epigrams as “ontology when tossed into the crucible of fiction undergoes a partial metamorphosis into scatology,” and such assertions as the one that circumcision keratinizes the epidermis of the glans and makes fellatio “so laborious that it loses all its charm.”

Like Pangloss and Candide, Tournier ends up by cultivating his garden, which he describes in cosmic terms:

There is no chasing all the hares that Tournier’s energetic mind starts during the survey of his personal garden. His theories have a glittering Hegelian intricacy that only a formidable patience could subdue to art. He was over forty when he published his first novel; he creates slowly, he tells us, devoting four or more years to a book, and lets the work in progress send him upon mysterious errands of research. “The writer who labors on a book for four years becomes that book and assimilates all its alien elements, which add up to a structure far more impressive, vast, complex, and learned than their author.… The work produces itself and the author is only its byproduct.” The author and his work exist within a matrix of large and ancient forces: “Man is nothing but a mythical animal. He becomes man—he acquires a human being’s sexuality
and heart and imagination—only by virtue of the murmur of stories and kaleidoscope of images that surround him in the cradle and accompany him all the way to the grave.… That being the case, it becomes easy to describe the social—one might even say biological—function of the creative artist. The artist’s ambition is to add to or at any rate modify the ‘murmur’ of myth that surrounds the child, the pool of images in which his contemporaries move—in short, the oxygen of the soul.”

After formulations so spacious and humane, the actual work risks appearing minor. A glance at Tournier’s recent fiction does suggest the limits of determined mythicization, of ontology and logic as prime aesthetic movers.
Gilles & Jeanne
sets itself to construct a connection between the two apparently diverse aspects of Gilles de Rais’s fame: as the devoted comrade-in-arms and royally appointed protector of the saintly Joan of Arc, and as the black-mass orgiast and sodomizing slaughterer of children whom legend has transmuted into Bluebeard, slaughterer of wives. A premise of structuralist thought is that opposites (black/white, good/bad, up/down) share the identity of the conceptual structure that holds them and hence are basically aspects of the same thing. It is, for the adroit and learned Tournier, a matter of little more than a hundred pages to demonstrate that Gilles, possessed by the vision of simple goodness embodied in Joan and revolted by her body’s horrible end at the stake in Rouen, logically seeks her and the absolute in satanism. As Joan, burning at the stake for witchcraft, cries out, “
Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!
,” so Gilles, burning for sorcery nine years later, calls out, “Jeanne! Jeanne! Jeanne!”

This stylized equation—Jeanne is to Jesus as Gilles is to Jeanne—forms the bare bones of the novel. What is its meat? The era and its cosmology offer Tournier many convenient ambiguities: Joan’s voices might be angels or devils, Satan is “the image of God,” a town square contains “a statue that was in such a sorry state that it would have been difficult to tell whether it was a Virgin or a Venus,” alchemical experiments are conducted on “the fundamental ambiguity of fire, which is both life and death, purity and passion, sanctity and damnation.” The book’s alchemist, the Tuscan abbé Francesco Prelati (a historical figure, de Rais’s assistant in his diabolical dabblings), construes his master’s psychology in terms of “inversions.” Prelati testifies to the court that a “malign inversion” occurred when Joan was captured and condemned, and then a satanist antidote: “To drive the Sire de Rais to the blackest edge
of wickedness, then, by the igneous operation, to subject him to a benign inversion, like the one that transmutes ignoble lead into gold. He was becoming a saint of life!” Prelati’s fancy thinking and talking rather sap Gilles’s and Jeanne’s tale of human interest. The little novel becomes, atrocious as the facts behind it are, bloodless, with nothing in its arch paradoxes as visceral and memorable as Lucifer’s blunt pentameters in
Paradise Lost:

Along with Milton’s epic of elected sin, the English language holds a play, Shaw’s
Saint Joan
, that juggles ideas at the fifteenth-century crossroads with an impudent facility that makes Tournier seem relatively hard-breathing. Shaw’s drama includes, amid its abundance of historical sidelights, a small part for Gilles de Rais, whom he calls Bluebeard and decorates to suit the name. He characterizes him thus: “
Gilles de Rais, a young man of 25, very smart and self-possessed, and sporting the extravagance of a little curled beard dyed blue at a clean-shaven court, comes in. He is determined to make himself agreeable, but lacks natural joyousness, and is not really pleasant
.” The mild suggestion, regarding this legendary sadist, that he lacked “natural joyousness” brings us closer to the mass murderer than Tournier’s schematic religious pathology. But as a cultural critic, the French author can be dazzling. Here, for instance, is what perspective in drawing and painting meant to a French priest travelling for the first time in Italy:

Our modern abyss, as experienced by another unfortified sensibility, is the subject of Tournier’s
The Golden Droplet
. Published in France two
years later than
Gilles & Jeanne
, it tells of Idris, a fifteen-year-old Berber dwelling in the Algerian oasis of Tabelbala, who is one day suddenly photographed by a scantily dressed blonde who leaps out of a desert-cruising Land Rover. In pursuit of the photograph, Idris travels to Paris. If psychological structuralism shaped
Gilles & Jeanne
, semiology is the name of the game here. On all sides Idris is confronted by images and signs—which are not, it develops, the same thing. Images—“the opium of the Occident”—bind us to the world, and signs release us from it:

Calligraphy lessons form the happy ending of
The Golden Droplet:
the child of the desert, lost in the evil land of images, of cinema and advertising and hair dyed blond, reclaims his semiotic heritage of pure emptiness. A complicated fable of the “Blond Queen,” whereby a bewitching human portrait is reduced to a salutary pattern of calligraphed quotations, cinches the moral, which would seem to be that words are better than things.

The Golden Droplet
has a denser texture than
Gilles & Jeanne:
the oasis, the trip north through progressively larger and more Westernized cities to Oran, the boat trip to Marseilles, the African quarter of Marseilles, and then the Maghrebi worker environment in Paris are all conscientiously presented. So conscientiously, indeed, that each chapter feels like a discrete essay. In a postscript the author acknowledges his many sources, from Dominique Champault’s study
Tabelbala
—“a model of what the ethnological monograph should be”—to Hassan Massoudy, author of
Calligraphie arabe vivante
and a “master calligrapher … who enabled me to approach a traditional art whose beauty is indistinguishable from truth and wisdom.” It is edifying and pleasing, of course, to be
guided by Tournier from one oasis of research to the next, and to view, on our tour, sights that range from a traditional Berber wedding, complete with “a troupe of dancers and musicians from the High Atlas Mountains,” to the grisly, exotic insides of a Parisian sex shop, peep-show, pinball palace, mannequin factory, and abattoir. As so often on an educational tour, though, the sights pile up but do not accumulate into an adventure. Idris, our Berber Candide, remains innocent and blank throughout—himself a mere sign, with a significance special to France, where a long involvement with North Africa and a large immigrant population of North Africans form a hot, recurrent issue. The novel’s French title,
La Goutte d’or
, is also the name of a neighborhood of Paris, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, populated by Africans and full of
l’ambiance africaine
. Like William Styron’s
Confessions of Nat Turner
, Tournier’s book is a bold attempt to empathize with an underclass, but it is carried out (unlike Styron’s) behind an impervious screen of intellectual play.