A Post-Surrealist Epic
SUNDEL, ALFRED
A Post-Surrealist Epic The Joker. By Jean Malaquais. Doubleday. 319 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Alfred Sundel Fiction writer, contributor to "Perspectives," "Western Review" In a nameless City of...
...But Pierre has other ideas that cancel out a brain-washing...
...What more do you need...
...Just so, the great literary psychologists almost never entered the mind...
...for to save his skin would mean to lose his salt's savor, and he is more than one man—he is the joker in the stack, the individual spirit...
...for the only way we can see if he is right is to become Benjy...
...3) as Pierre is a canvasser (of beauty products) by trade, it is feared by the City that he will spread this "infection...
...Describing himself as a former blower of air up ladies' skirts, he tells Pierre, "I have the detailed record of all the remarks you have made in the past year...
...To absolve himself and regain all he has lost, he has only to allow Babitch to "undress" him...
...they went for the heart...
...that is to say, to conform to the City's ways is a form of death in itself...
...Primarily his internal faculties...
...Aside from Pierre's remembrances of his wife, which offer up some of the finest passages in the book, no one really impinges on anyone else...
...Believing that the destinies of men have become subsumed in the mass, which alone now has a fate, a number in the collectivity has no value to him who has found himself in zero...
...Pierre decides that he never had an existence to begin with...
...This may be due in part to several things, such as hidden meanings that smoke like incense between the lines, and the deliberate deadening of everyone except Pierre, as witness the zombie scene at the end...
...Here, Pierre's heart is not laid bare so much as his mind, for extreme subjectivity—no matter how brilliantly executed ?relies on the principle of transposing the naturalist's accumulation of detail to the thought processes...
...we live emotionally responsive ones...
...Your case is another matter...
...Oh yes, within the limits of our functions . . . like horses in their harness . . . ." For, now that he is removed from all those things that define a man in terms of his society, it is revealed to him that in this City he is "only an office report, couched in impersonal style on indestructible cards handled by objective machines...
...Step by step, he is bereft of all the external earmarks of his identity —in a word, what he possessed (wife, apartment, job, name, fingerprints and signature)—until he becomes, in effect, a corpse...
...the individual and the State...
...With him, everything is done legally...
...Within the space of a few days, the story drives through numerous adventures to a series of dialectical encounters between David and Goliath, e.g...
...For in this City, which is as impersonal as Mondrian's rectangles and squares, it is impossible to persevere without forms, applications and certificates...
...Under a woman's identification that he first snatches like a thief and then obtains her permission to use, he defends himself with the only weapon he has left, his intelligence...
...and we follow Pierre along these planes as his entire battery of emotions drains into hatred and his reason narrows into an obstinate cry of "No...
...Placed in such a predicament, what does a man retain...
...2) mysteriously, they have been collected, printed and set into circulation...
...We are left with the feeling that should the City revoke his sentence and recognize his existence by cracking his bones, Pierre—the modern Prometheus who turns the tables on the modem Zeus, the States—will never accept the pabulum, "I crawl, therefore I am...
...for, as in his last novel, the encyclopedic World Without Visa, Jean Malaquais writes with a seething quality that, like a lion's roar, recurs and underlies his words...
...he is asked...
...to the City's repeated inquisitorial persuasions...
...Isn't it preferable, then, for him to remain in his present existenceless state rather than return to the fold of living dead...
...And, in the struggle between the two, the factor of the multiple cause always is decisive in our motivations...
...Not being a psychologist, Malaquais is weak at the point of motivation...
...The remarks you might have made and did not...
...he builds up a logical case for Pierre to commit an illogical act, something Dostoyevsky, Stendhal and Gide would never do...
...and it is out of respect for Malaquais that we can hold this against him...
...The inquisitor is Dr...
...But merely to trace the outline of The Joker is to deny the author his due...
...whether he robs or rapes, his offenses are catalogued, their price is fixed, and the punishment that strikes him is a part of his rights...
...Babitch, a slightly more intelligent McCarthy of weird sexual connotations (with which the book is strewn...
...Despite the fact that his wife and others will have to pay for him (aren't they dead already...
...As it is explained, "A criminal is a product of the City, and as such has his place in it...
...Between Pierre's Yes and No, the narrative plows a subjective path, and we are treated to a superlative display of stream of consciousness, interior monologue, childhood and adult memories, impressionism and fantasy...
...Because of this, it is surprising and rather incongruous to find a certain romantic strain working hand in hand with a psychological blind spot to sap the author's strength...
...He slowly brings the nature of Pierre's crime to light: (1) Pierre has exerted his will by writing some poems and distributing them anonymously about the City...
...Before you can hope for punishment, you must produce the evidence...
...So then . . . we don't exist...
...At any rate, Malaquais rolls over these pitfalls like a tank...
...When Faulkner takes us inside Benjy's mind, it is not his psychology we applaud, but his imagination...
...as proof, the dialogue at many points reads like two concurrent monologues...
...For in a remarkable style that makes daring use of the figurative and the literal and utilizes many innovations in both literature and modern art, he has here gone beyond surrealism to unfold an epic of our times...
...Pierre will not compromise his essence...
...We do not live wilfully rational lives...
...To this, Pierre's affirmation rings loud...
...Reviewed by Alfred Sundel Fiction writer, contributor to "Perspectives," "Western Review" In a nameless City of parallelepipeds in quincunx, where in order to glimpse the sky "you must lie down flat in the street," Pierre Javelin is mysteriously stripped of his existence...
...Contrariwise, the minor feminine characters work illogically against their own best interests, as if they have nothing better to do with their lives than cast them away on a doomed man they barely know...
Vol. 37 • February 1954 • No. 5
