Picked-Up Pieces (61 page)

Queneau’s own characters are more or less aware that they are caught in a novel. Lubert is preparing for Icarus a “melancholy existence”: “I want him to like moonlight, fairy roses, the exotic types of nostalgia, the languors of Spring, fin-de-siècle neuroses—all things that I personally abhor, but which go down well in the present-day novel.” Icarus, however, cries, “A fig for the neurasthenias, the neuroses, and the nostalgias of our contemporary writers!” And, escaping the “dismal or disappointing love affairs, with sessions in cosy, dusty apartments” that his author would have arranged for him, he opts for technology: “personally, I’m much more interested in theoretical mechanics, from the fall of heavy bodies to the mechanism of a lock.” Not only Icarus acknowledges the matrix of novelistic cliché and melodrama; a waiter, observing him and LN in a cafe, predicts (incorrectly) their fate, assuring himself, “I’ve read a great many novels and I know what happens next.” And while the “fictional” characters are attempting, like bumpkins in from the provinces, to make a go of it in mercantile Paris, one “real” woman volunteers to become the heroine of a romantic novel. The confusion is slight. Objecting to the plot’s basic fantasy, the reader might say that one does not meet fictional characters on the street; the answer would be that one is not on the street but reading a book, where one meets fictional characters all the time. The reader’s demand, that is, for reality is turned back upon itself. The characters are uniformly real, “characters” or not. And the milieu is perfectly convincing. We have been there before, in the bicycle-obsessed frenzies of Jarry, in those enchanted pages of Proust where Marcel becomes an Adam among the fresh creations of the telephone, the automobile, the camera. Something in the French spirit embraced with special innocence and energy the inventions—toylike in their first forms—that equip and distinguish the modern age. The same spirit, perhaps traceable to a peculiar delight in Reason and its works, permits the French, uniquely, to produce works of art as intellectual, spare, and impudent as this, as spindly and nakedly theoretical as a primitive machine yet undeniably serious, even majestic.

Julio Cortázar is not so engaging a spirit as Queneau, and the eight pieces in
All Fires the Fire
suffer, in the way of collections, from comparison with one another—the story “Meeting” is less stunning than the title piece, and “Instructions for John Howell” ends less satisfyingly than “The Island at Noon.” But in sum these eight “mortal games” correct
this reviewer’s previous impression (gained by that most thrifty of methods, bookstore perusal) that Cortázar was a decadent avant gardist, a rather desperate innovator snipping autobiography into eye-catching shapes. True, he cannot get started without a gimmick: there is always a fantastic premise or a startling formalistic deviation, and he does not have Borges’ power of persuading us that the strangeness flows from the superior vision of a drastically refined sensibility. But, once the trick is established (and no two devices are alike in this set of eight), Cortázar pushes beyond it with surprising powers of realistic development. The first story, “The Southern Thruway,” supposes that a traffic jam on the Sunday-night rush back to Paris is truly—as traffic jams often feel—of days and months in duration. The same little locality of cars inches forward together a few yards a day; a community develops. Food is shared, leaders emerge, the girl in the Dauphine sleeps with the engineer in the Peugeot and becomes pregnant by him, the man in the Caravelle behind the engineer commits suicide, a Porsche and a Mercury (the characters take on the names of their cars) peddle black-market provisions through the stalled lines, and so on. The conceit is fleshed out with so many solid details that in the end, when the jam mysteriously breaks and the cars, accelerating, separate, the reader feels as well as comprehends the allegorical meaning—the loss of community in this modern “mad race in the night among unknown cars, where no one knew anything about the others, where everyone looked straight ahead, only ahead.”

The next story, “The Health of the Sick,” supposes, far from incredibly, that a large family in Buenos Aires, to spare Mama the news that her son Alejandro has been killed in Montevideo, fabricates letters from him, and then invents an attendant string of lies and impostures as his absence lengthens into years, Mama’s expected death being slow to arrive. A situation that could be broadly comedic, or politically satirical about the self-delusions of the bourgeoisie, instead deepens in a rather poignant direction: Mama, dying at last, reveals, as the reader has guessed some pages before, that she knows the truth and has been herself protecting the protective perpetrators of the illusion. The survivors then, receiving the last of the forged letters from the phantom Alejandro, find themselves wondering how they can break to him the news that Mama is dead. So something rather tender as well as eerie has been said about the fond and prevalent deceits of family life. Cortázar, though his methods can be jagged, is not mordant. “Nurse Cora,” with its initially
exasperating device of an interior monologue that shifts from person to person without so much as a paragraph indentation to signal transitions, in the end quite movingly portrays the death, in a hospital, of an adolescent boy as refracted through other minds (his nurse, his mother, his doctor) and reflected in the boy’s own subtly traced surrender of pride, desire, and vitality. Another kind of dying concerns “Meeting,” wherein the interior soliloquy of Che Guevara is imagined during the rebel invasion of Cuba; all seems lost, and the hopes of the revolution, the music of Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet, and the interweave of tree branches meet in the resigned mind of the exhausted revolutionary: “But it was enough to look at the treetop to feel that the will again put its chaos to order, imposed on it the sketch of the adagio that would someday pass into the final allegro and accede to a reality worthy of that name.”

Juxtaposition is Sr. Cortázar’s creative habit, and perhaps he is most himself when the juxtaposition is most harsh and least explained; an abyss, narrow as a black knife, gleams in the schizoid split. In “The Other Heaven,” a man evidently walks back and forth between his stockbroker’s job in Buenos Aires and a sinister arcade district of Paris. In “All Fires the Fire” (and there must be a better way of translating this), without even the rationale of daydream, a Roman gladiatorial fight and the breakup of a modern affair are alternately, accurately described; both events involve a sexual triangle and the cool cruelty of hedonism, and both end in a conflagration, as if a spark had leaped from the striking together of these two flinty worlds. There is also a third world—a far-off voice overheard during the telephone conversation of the modern couple, a “distant, monotonous voice” dictating numbers to “someone who doesn’t speak.” This little cross-connection reaches our own inner ear with the penetration of a symbolic detail (numbers, minutes, time is the final consuming fire) that is first of all a recognizable, common experience. Cortázar, sparing with his imagery, can achieve masterstrokes of sensation, especially when the sensation involves a gulf. In “Instructions for John Howell,” a member of a theatre audience is suddenly enlisted as an actor in the play; a moment before he is pushed onstage, he feels to his left “the great cavern, something like a gigantic contained breath, which, after all, was the real world, where white shirt fronts and perhaps hats or upsweeps were gradually taking shape.” And in “The Island at Noon” an airline steward, Marini, every other day at noon on the Rome–Teheran run looks down upon a little Greek island, Xiros, shaped like “a
turtle whose paws were barely out of the water.” The island becomes an obsession; “everything … was blurred and easy and stupid until it was time to lean toward the tail window, to feel the cold crystal like the boundary of an aquarium, where the golden turtle slowly moved in the thick blue.” The sensation of looking down from a jet cannot be more beautifully described than that; the serene terror of jet travel—a tubular sample of the cheerful, plasticized mundane floats apparently motionless above an actual
mundus
reduced to the scale of a map and viewed from the top of a towering transparency that is, potentially, death—finds its fable here. And at his most intense Cortázar floods the gaps and mysteries of his tricky structures with a potent negativity—death, that invisible possibility, made electric and palpable, like the atmosphere before lightning. Whereas a curious immortality, the eternal sprightliness of pure mind, fills the airy spaces of Queneau. Both men convince us that surrealism has been elicited from them by the extremity of their ardor for reality—“the reality,” Nathalie Sarraute has written, “to which we always return, in spite of our momentary betrayals and deviations, thus proving that, when all is said and done, we … prize it above all else.” Their games repay our playing.

YOUNG AMERICANS

D
ANCE THE
E
AGLE TO
S
LEEP
, by Marge Piercy. 232 pp. Doubleday, 1970.

S
INGLE
F
ILE
, by Norman Fruchter. 177 pp. Knopf, 1970.

“First Novels” are almost a genre to themselves;
Time
used to refer solemnly to a “First Novelist” with the same capitalization it employed for “First Lady” and “First Baseman.” Second novels lack this irksome mystique; they are just supposed to be not as good—scrimped follow-ups of that first furious spending, strained variations on what came naturally. And, true, the two second novels at hand do seem less assured, less exuberantly annunciatory, than the first productions of their gifted young authors. Yet the flaws and deformities show stress
in a direction
and hint at why, in a historical moment when private concerns have lost moral priority to public awareness, it is difficult for an earnest spirit to write novels at all.

Marge Piercy’s
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
describes—through the experiences of four major characters—the birth, short and somewhat blissful life, and violent death of a youth movement that one might call a nightmare version of S.D.S. The Piercy group is named the Indians, and early this year Bernardine Dohrn issued from the happy hunting ground of her hiding a proclamation “to express ourselves … as tribes at council.” Miss Piercy places her history in a futuristic time (there has been a government shelling of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a President called the King of Clubs has been succeeded by one called the White Knight, a compulsory
period of national service called the Nineteenth Year of Servitude has ben initiated), but the styles and equipment and brand names are all of our time, and at one point the author specifies that for “twenty-five years” the American people “had been sold a crusader’s world of Armed Might Versus the Red Hordes.” Twenty-five plus 1945 equals 1970. No matter. The futuristic conceit frees her to work on a large scale, to set her characters in the context of armies and headlines and—crucial to public-spirited agonists—
publicity
. The novel as the saga of private lives, soul journeys invisibly pursued under the heel of power (a tradition that Erich Auerbach’s
Mimesis
sees originate in the anecdotes of the Gospels), does not suit our Roman times, when only kings and gods matter. Miss Piercy’s heroes would be kings; that attempt failing, she caricatures them as gods. “Shawn felt useless and yet full of energy and light, a turned-on bulb, a ridiculous helium-taut balloon.” “The blade hit [Corey] with its dull weight, making him fall. As it rolled over him smashing his bones, his heart burst free like a rising crow, and he fainted.”

Shawn has been a member of a screamingly successful rock group. Corey is the part-Indian founder of the Indians; his pilgrimage begins with a vision of a buffalo who tells him (I drastically abridge this bisonian peroration):

The movement thus inspired begins by seizing a high school somewhere in the Midwest and progresses to rioting in Manhattan. It achieves
publicity: “The media discovered them … 
Esquire
put Shawn’s face on the cover in feathered headdress, and inside had a snotty article heavily laden with psychoanalytical insights.” These insights, unlike the buffalo’s, are not quoted.
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
fails as a novel of ideas because “the system” is never allowed to have a cogent, let alone persuasive, spokesman. The policemen are uniformly faceless and brutal, the schoolteachers are all “frustrated, embittered lumps.” The adults in the book are either venal or oppressed—Brand X and Brand Y of the system, summarily dismissed in the very tone of presentation. “His father was a partner in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. His mother owned buildings, had studied psychology and been analyzed by Jung, and was still beautiful in a gaunt silvery way.” Or: “His father was a pale gray drag. Started out as a high-school math teacher and ended up as a middle-echelon man in a company specializing in auto insurance.” Anything genial in middle-class life is dismissed as “co-optative softness.” Fascinating suggestions pass unchallenged: research scientists have no alternative to participation in nerve-gas projects, Che and Mao will deliver us from toilet training, all people over twenty-five hate all people under twenty-five because television commercials present youthful beauty as an ideal. The actions of the government, as it blitzkriegs the movement into smithereens, pretend to no rationale beyond the author’s desire to allegorize the Vietnam war. Comic-book heroes like Captain Marvel and Plastic Man are frequently invoked, and the climactic chapters strongly savor of comic-book art; one can almost see
BLAM
and
RATATATAT
in jagged balloons, and (when Corey is hyper-symbolically crushed by a bulldozer)
AEEIIII
trailing off into the next panel. The government becomes one of those almost omnipotent syndicates of evil that Superman did battle with. No mitigating circumstances are allowed in the Piercy condemnation—no historical causality, no suspicion that the system is a self-admittedly imperfect patchwork of changeable human devices, no comparison with other systems, living or dead. The system is never seen in operation; nobody functioning within it has any reality. This is not true of Miss Piercy’s first novel,
Going Down Fast
, wherein some of the manipulators of an urban-renewal boondoggle are substantially, if unsympathetically, realized. It is even less true of—to cite a masterpiece, as magnanimous as it is devastating, of political disaffection—Solzhenitsyn’s
The First Circle;
here the author’s compassion moves outward from the jailed to the jailers and does not exclude even
the ultimate jailer, Stalin, as he scuttles through his suite of cells beneath the Kremlin, beset by dogma and paranoia.