NOTES ON THE IRREFRAGABLE INDIVIDUAL

...Taken as a body, in their effect en Kien, they are a One, "a higher type »f animal...

...Luckily, the psychiatrist decides that his patient is adjusted, leaves the scene and Kien's madness recurs...

...Canetti abjures sex and regards anything that is not individual, intellectual, rational, as destructive...

...By John LaCerda...

...It isjust incomplete...

...Seats of these (such as the systematic and skillful adaptation of Chinese culture, the ancient origin of Japan's "inferiority complex," the medieval roots of Japanese nationalism, etc...

...For Kien, people do not exist, only books...

...In a brief 192 pages (plus index) he has produced a concise and highly readable review of Japanese history up to and including the opening phase of the Allied Occupation...

...are really the keys to an understanding of present-day Japan...

...But both men faced the crisis of our times: the attack upon the personality of man, the enforced synthesis of the many personalities into the One...

...There are few parallel, iu modern literature for this book, although the feeling it projects is authentically that of modern man on the precipice regarding the pit with schizoid detachment...

...George Kien is a psychiatrist and one of his p tients is a gorilla-man who sequesters r scantily clad blonde and worships the earth...

...THE CONQUEROR COMES TO TEA...

...this Is a calculated effect, a great .littce, a closed form...

...Another, is the lack of multi-level ambiguity...

...Rutgers I'nivertity Prf...

...The sole exception is the psychiatrist, an actor who lives parasitically by assuming the roles of his patients and who vicariously enjoys their aberrations...

...Certainly in the Vienna of the Isst decade— where this novel was first puhlixhed-the mob iu man was as evident to a sensitive person as s universal motivation as the sex drive was to Freud in tho Vienna of bis day...

...against all womankind and illustrates feminine venality by expounding on the moral trickery of the goddesses and mortal women in the "Odyssey"—Canetti be...

...And there is the same nausea in the face of the debacle of our society...

...427 page...

...Something of the novel's ruin is saved...

...E«rew»rd by Sir George Sansom...

...George Kien, the protagonist s brother, what has been high irony sags to the level of burlesque...

...On t could assign meanings to each of the»a characters: the housewife could atand far woman and the acquisitive instinct, the caretaker could be Cain, the dwarf might symbolise the entrepeneur tendency in man, the policeman might illustrate the essential narcissism of thosj kIii embody authority...

...He is completely isolated from the wot I 1 within the strong wall of his intellectual construction...

...The novel concerns itself with the first crack in that wall — hi* marriage with his monomaniac, illiterate housekeeper — the slow invasion of tli« real world into his ideal world, the encroachment of the mob on the man, thj gradual destruction of his personality...

...educated in Paris, Tokyo, Peking, and Korea...

...The resolt, as Sanw»m remarks, was "plenty of learned treatises on this or that, but nothing to give the average educated reader what be needed...

...The humor of the book, the mordant, fist-clenching irony of it, is not unlike the fiiiiiiniess of seeing a drunk struggle to deal logically with an hallucination that is invisible to everyone else...

...and both men created in their novels heroic, irrefragable individuals...

...Kafka, indubitably, is a primary influence, yet I believe the similarities could be overstressed and the dissimilarities are hard to overlook...

...But the referrents of the mob-characters are basically unimportant, no matter bow illuminating they may be incidentally—it is a proper characteristic of a work of art that even its facets should throw aft light like a well-cut gem—since it is their fcxfalt that matters...

...Rut Canetti, like some of Fraud's disciples, seems to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in abandoning the sex instinct in favor of newer, timelier theories of masochism, sadism and the group tendencies of man...

...ic action, in each movement of the adversaries: the mob and the man...

...The Conqueror Comes to Ten (more rationally subtitled Japan Under MacArthur) is apparently a reworking of dispatches which John LaCerda sent to th< Philadelphia Evening Bulletin during the period he served as correspondent in post-surrender *Japan...

...It is a chimera wit, a perverse play on progress...

...Furthermore, Kien's construction, the citadel of his personality, is academic and impractical...

...Trl E novel has its flaws...

...Ther.< is nothing InaerurRto about the licture that emerges...

...Being a satire, it must strike out I at some human failing;, and since its author's values stem from a theory of a mass unconscious, what it strikes out at is "the desire of men to rise into a higher type of animal, into the mass, and to lose themselves so completely as to forget that our man ever existed...

...What had been a protest against the destruction of the individual, now seems to be petty-minded misanthropy...

...Some men are almost all mob-self, incapable of imaginative, individual responses...

...trays himself by endorsing the petulant distrust of maternal ism of the misogynist...

...200 pages...

...It would be grossly unjust to relate details of the magnificently phantasmagoric plot here, since there is a genuine joy of discovery, of recognition, in each symbol...

...He fail- but in failing he has long discursive colloquys with Peter in which tSe theme of the novel and its applications to our time are made explicit What previously, in representation, had been convincing, now, in exposition, seems fanatic...

...The reader gets the impression that Mr...

...The task has challenged (and defeated) the efforts of more than one scholar...

...recently with the Army's G-2 and the State Department's Office of Fit Eastern Affairs) all the avers remarkable...

...f N his foreword to Edwin 0. lte"ischauer*s Japan Post and Present, Sir George SanI som (now British member of the Far Eastern Commission) comments on "the re-¦¦ luarkable fact . . . that before the outbreak of the war in the Far East there was no single short book which gave a lucid and tolerably complete picture of Japan's early history and her development in modern times...

...But, in the weakest part of the book—the section entitled "Warywise Odysseus" in which his protagonist rail...

...There also is a temptation to liken this novel to Existentialism, or, perhaps, to Albert Camus's metaphor of the absurd...

...e-t*>HE TOWER OF BABEL" is ¦ satirical novel...

...One, there is the absence of any regard for the supernatural, any searching for authority other than that of the construction itself, any hint of a desire for grace...

...It foams, a huge, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal...

...I think the only likeness is that Canetti, Sartie and Camus are all writing about modern man in extremis...

...LaCerda, obviously an astute observer, Is entirely aware of the larger Issues and forces In the background, but that dentin* directly with them lay outside the scope of his Journalistic assignment...

...This doctor, by means of a plot machination that is unpleasantly obvious, learns >f his brother's impending madness and rushes from Paris to Austria to be st his side and attempt a cure...

...Anthropology has yet to prove, that the unconscious drives that determine European man are seminal in all human nature...

...He lives in his highly specialized library of thousands of volumes, devoting his entire life to his research, and writing an occasional paper that is always received as the final word on its subject by his colleagues...

...t you look, you will find concrete referrents for all phenomena, rational explanations deriving from recognizable human motivations for all actions...

...However, Sanson's book makes no attempt to treat Japan's modern era...

...Alfred A. Knopf...

...By Edwin O. Ktischaner...

...2.75...

...Lawrence, of course, looked back upon a common sexual mystery, looked forward to a free society based on sound sex mores...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Spotlight on Japan Reviewed by JAMES HONAHAN JAPAN PAST ASD PRESENT...

...A* for the satire itself, the style In which it is couched and the actual comic invention— surrealism, that overworked and much misunderstood term, Is probably the best word...

...Reiechauer (born in Tokyo in 1010...

...Kien's final self-destruction is appropriate and supplies us with a last, brilliant symbol — the auto-da-fe...

...This reveals an additional weakness—that may be mistaken for a strength—the author's insistence that the drive toward the m group in man Is the basic motor of human nature...

...3.50...

...Not that this hook is a free fancy, or that Its Inventions ari Ihn accidental images of automatic writing...

...The book has cTi of the lively interest snd, unfortunately, the superficiality of a feature story...

...Peter Kien is a sinologist, the greatest living authority on China...

...Mankind,'" he writes, "has existed as a mass for long before it was conceived of and watered down as an idea...

...And he has chosen to focus his satire through the lens of a disintegrating intelligence, that of an academiran and genius, Peter Kien, "for educ tion is itself a cordon snnitaire tor the individual against the mass in his own soul...

...LaCerda produces some colorful eopy on MacArthur and his lieutenants, on the antics of the GI in this land of "love without kisses," on the Emperor ("Charley"), and on such quaint figures as Hitnshi Nsrikawa, who "continues to run the girl market in Japan...

...But Canetti hei gone to school among the porta and surleslist* of our time, as well as among the psychologists, and has chosen to u%>» the valuable core <vf their affusions: th« inational tantasy These characters, oria and all, dream their lives...

...Canetti seems to accept the necessity for a system as the least of two great evils: he does not believe in intellectuality, he only distrusts it less than he does his emotions...

...Trmuslalrd from the German by C V. Wedgwood...

...and the d«gree of their domination by the mass is inversely proportional to the degree of tbeir submersion in their constructions...

...certainly it is too early to claim similar scope for the "instinct" of self-absorbtion in the mass...

...This deficiency in our literature concerning a nation which consistently (although for varying reasons) has been a provocative force in world affairs since the turn of the century was partially compensated by San som'i own Japan : A Short Cnlturnl History, published in 1831 and revised in 1043, which is still the standard work ia English on Japan up to the Meiji Restoration in 1868...

...In other words, Elms Canetti satirises the totalitarian impulse, which he thinks has always been u part of human personality, underlying even the sex drive...

...And, noting this, one recalls that the most frequent conflict in the book is that of sadist-masochist—each of the mob-characters dominates Kien, the individualist, in turn...

...D. H. Lawrence was unequivocally anti-intellectual - Canetti subscribes to the intelligence by default...

...The lew pages which he devotes to Japan's language difficulties, for instance, will bo worth the price of tbe book to many readers who are certain to be puzzled during the next twleve months by news stories reporting the joint efforts of Japanese educators and SCAP officials at "language reform" in Japan...

...It is safe to say that the mob is represented by various characters: the housekeeper with her great hips and blue starched skirt, the caretaker who beats up beggars an I disciplines canaries, the dwarf who imagines himself to be the world's greateat chess-player, the policeman who is obsessed with the size of his nose...

...What should commend the book particularly to tho average reader Is the lucidity with which the author analyses many of the complexities of the d*>vrlopment of the Japanese nation...

...And it is also true that Canetti, although he advocates the construction as the vessel of individuality, recognizes its absurdity...

...The average reader today, aware that most of Japan's current social, political, and economic problems have their roots in ber "unique" past, wants a book which places contemporary Japan in the perspective of Japanese history...

...2.«0...

...tbey are aware of each ether and interpret each other's actions in terms of convention- at least part of the time, but Kien interprets all stimuli in terms of his construction...

...Actually, all of these characters have their fantasies, too, although, unlike Kien's, their constrsm'tions are not their whole lives...

...But it seems to me that a more profitable comparison would be to stand this novel beside, if not the work, then the ideas and underlying values of D. H. Lawrence...

...Unfortunately, with the introduction of a new character, Dr...

...True, all but one of the characters in the book are inescapably what they dream themselves to be while, at the same time, not being what they dream because they have not attained their goals which are unattainable...

...it, too, does not escape the satirist's bludgeon...

...It was Lawrence who wrote: "For every man has a mob-self and an individual self, in varying proportions...

...This makes the present achievement of Dr...

...It enables him to confront the problem of totalitarianism, surely a dominant on* of our times ;but it seems to me to he something of a generalization from the particular...