Innocence Abroad
KIRK, DONALD
Tangled in the Brambles SIGNS AND WONDERS By Francoise Mallet-Joris Translated by Henna B riff aid t Farrar, Straus & Giroux 408 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Editor, "Canadian...
...Both writers are psychologically disturbed, both have missed love and fear it...
...Nicholas is simply a cliche victim of the mid-20th century...
...This makes it all the more curious to encounter, in 1967, a French novelist of some standing returning to the inter-war preoccupations of Gide and Huxley...
...Signs and Wonders, by Francoise Mallet-Joris, has been described by one critic as "in the tradition of Emile Zola...
...Nicholas, who goes off with a woman journalist, Marcelle, on an assignment by a dubious magazine (it never achieves publication) to investigate French refugees from post-liberation Algeria...
...The influence of Les Faux Monnayeurs was considerable in France...
...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Editor, "Canadian Literature...
...author, "The Writer and Politics...
...Even as a thriller the novel fails...
...in England there was one notable disciple work, Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, which imitates Gide's structure very closely even down to the author's diary...
...On the other hand, she does seem to be trying to popularize for the 1960s what Gide and Huxley did for the cognoscenti in the 1920s...
...He dignified only one of his novels with the grander title of roman, by which he meant a work of elaborate structure (he used Dostoevsky's larger works as examples), bringing together many characters and many lines of action and interest, so that, instead of a moral situation, a whole moral world is presented...
...The emotional troubles of a novelist hero (one cannot regard them as more than sub-spiritual) sustain the strong plot structure, and as in Point Counter Point a reactionary organization (this time the Secret Army Organization) plays its part in the background...
...Les Faux Monnayeurs is interesting as Gide's one great??indeed splendid??failure, and Point Counter Point is undoubtedly Huxley's most pretentious and artificial novel...
...She is not even attempting to be Zola...
...The lmmoralist and Strait is the Gate were Gide's most typical works in this category...
...Novelists today often wonder where novelists should go...
...Mallet-Joris may at times attempt to imitate Zola's realism, she may like him produce crowded works, but the breathtaking structure of apocalyptic symbolism which Zola built in his best novels are beyond her...
...Signs and Wonders has none of the intellectual sparkle of its models from the '20s, and by now the inclination of writers to probe themselves or their caste-brothers has lost its appeal...
...This Gidian roman was Les Faux Monnayeurs, whose intrinsic elaborateness the author complicated with further devices of his own, including an intricate mirror structure: One of the characters is writing the same novel he appears in, and like Gide himself, is keeping a working diary of its composition...
...She even drops hints...
...Today one can assess the experiment as self-conscious and hardly successful...
...A writer hero must be an exceptionally interesting case for us any longer to become more than bored with him...
...For Huxley, too, regards the workings of a writer's mind as a proper concern of literature, though he does not close the solipsistic circle with looking glasses...
...Andre Gide made a distinction, which still has some force in French writing, between two forms of fiction: the recit and the roman...
...Mallet-Joris, in her retracing of steps, has merely tangled herself in the brambles choking a path long due for abandonment...
...Nothing of the kind...
...Not only is Huxley mentioned in Signs and Wonders??a rare piece of recognition in France??but a flute player rendering Bach's Suite in B Minor is a key character in this novel, as is a similar figure playing the same music in Point Counter Point...
...Gide's gang of counterfeiters, striking reflection after reflection as his novel progresses, present in the end a whole crystalline view of the society of their time...
...The first is a short, sparse tale with a limited number of characters, a one-road plot and a simple symbolic structure...
...The story is the tale of a novelist...
...Nicholas' progress toward the breakdown that will end ??with too neat predictability??in his suicide, is precipitated by his horror at discovering that his mother, who disappeared into a German concentration camp during the War, is now living with one of the former camp guards...
...Mallet-Joris' oas is filled with paper villains, and whatever allegorical significance they may have is certainly not related in any convincing way to the rest of the novel...
...A number of more or less interesting subplots are intertwined with this main action...
Vol. 50 • October 1967 • No. 20
