Sterile Diversions
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing STERILE DIVERSIONS BY PEARL K. BELL Just as Ford Madox Ford's tragic The Good Soldier has been called a French novel written in English, one might better understand Michel...
...On one of his children hunts, Tiffauges finds Ephraim, a Jewish boy with hardly more life in him than the peat-bog mummy, and the giant stealthily nurses the boy back to health in a hidden attic of Kaltenborn...
...the magic testicles of the stags killed on Goering's private game preserve, where Tiffauges is posted for several months as a huntsman...
...As Russian tanks biow up the castle and destroy its young inmates, Tiffauges flees with Ephraim on his shoulders, and is sucked into quicksand while the boy floats free to become "a six-pointed star turning slowly against the black sky...
...Possessed of a prophetic eye, Tiffauges feels that his life must move in "an imperturbable and inflexibly straight line, ordering the greatest world events in accordance with its own ends...
...He has used the same technique of disconnected simplicities and stripped-down sentences in his earlier books and achieved an effect of urgency and dreadAs if stylistic bareness gave him the necessary distance from his emotionally charged material...
...And that infernal city of the death camps, he realizes, "corresponded stone by stone to the phoric city he himself had dreamed of at Kaltenborn...
...The most crucial of these inversions occurs at the beginning of the book, as the result of a seeming accident that renders Tiffauges' right hand useless...
...Christopher at last finds his apotheosis...
...Randall Jarrell once wrote of a singularly ungifted poet that his work seemed to have been composed not so much on a typewriter as by a typewriter...
...the mummy's six-pointed star obviously prefigures Ephraim's Star of David...
...Here the latter-day St...
...But in the finale Tournier inexplicably piles on a last inversion that breaks the novel's back...
...In the end I do not know what Tournier's structure is meant to signify, though its parts are easilytoo easilyGrasped...
...Christopher's, a reference to the giant Canaanite who carried the infant Christ across a flooding river...
...In obsessive obedience to his destiny, Tiffauges loiters near playgrounds, photographing "the masterpiece of creation" that is prepubescent childhood, before the disaster of virility deforms it into adolescence...
...This was especially true in The Painted Bird, about a small boy wandering alone through Poland during the War...
...A mysterious, seductive, oddly impenetrable book by a superbly gifted author, The Ogre at its most accessible level is the story of a French giant, a garage mechanic named Abel Tiffauges, who is taken prisoner by the Germans at the beginning of World War II, becomes a Nazi, and dies with the collapse of the Wehrmacht in 1944...
...That was some 20 years ago, and technological progress being what it is, The Devil Tree reads as though it had been written by a tape recorder, or a Xerox machine, or an unprogrammed computer?in fact, by almost anything except a writer...
...If the cleverly dovetailed ironies of analogy and inversion begin to seem too Germanically ponderous and myth-logged halfway through The Ogre, Tournier nonetheless tells his enigmatic saga with admirable authority almost to the end of Tiffauges' macabre pilgrimage, as it parallels the Totentanz of Hitler's Germany...
...Despite the mayhem and devastation that he crowds into his Wagnerian tableau, Tournier deals with Hitler and his victims as operatic metaphors only, not as the actualities of evil and slaughter that we know them to be...
...In time the giant's mystic quest brings him to the medieval castle of Kaltenborn, converted by the Nazis into a brutal military school for boys...
...In a series of pretentiously simple, apparently unrelated scenes, we learn of his troubles with women, parents, money, servants, bankers, encounter groups, psychiatrists, sex, policemen, property deeds, and more sex...
...What had been a "phoric" celebration of tender innocence has turned into Tiffauges' ogrish surrender to the obscene violence of power...
...Yet for all its dazzling cleverness, Tournier's game is not only artfully strange but repellent...
...A very rich and very dumb young American, Jonathan James Whalen, has come home after years of drug-addicted wandering in Europe and the Far East...
...The name of the school he attended as a boy was St...
...The same word, albeit for very different reasons, can also describe Jerzy Kosinski's new novel, The Devil Tree (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 208 pp., $6.95), such a lumpy bundle of mindless blather that I could scarcely believe my eyes...
...There are faint intimations of madness, deep truth and pathos, but Kosinski's prose is so doggedly flaccid that he reduces everything to a state of trivial inertia...
...All that's missing at this point is a swelling crescendo of movie music accompanying the invisible choir of angels...
...Inevitably, the prettiest of his Lolitas unjustly accuses him of rape and he is sent to prison...
...But the realistic sequence of adventures and change that leads Tiffauges to his end is embedded in an elaborate Gothic edifice of philosophy, allegory, preordained coincidence, archeology, anthropometry, and zoology...
...the eerily well-preserved mummy of an ancient race, with a six-pointed star on its forehead, that is found in a peat bog and dubbed the Erl-King after the Germanic legend of the elf who steals children...
...Compared to that devastating book, The Devil Tree is a vacuous put-on, and the only sensible thing to do is to blame it on some wicked machine...
...Yet this mawkishly melodramatic ending actually fulfills the suspicion aroused earlier in the novelthat Tournier, with oddly Teutonic ardor for a Frenchman, is fascinated more by the abstractly intellectual and formal ingenuity of his fictional house of mirrors than he is by the human implications of the characters and events so cleverly reflected there...
...Through this accidental message of the Gods, Tiffauges learns, to his horror, "that under the Germany exalted and polarized by the War there lay a network of concentration camps forming a subterranean world with none but accidental connections with the superficial world of the living...
...Tiffauges is sucked to death by the swamp that had earlier yielded a pre-Christian corpse...
...Thus, the modern giant, Tiffauges, will become the child-bearer of his own time and in his own way...
...it is also supported by an arcane superstructure of "magical inversions" in which Tournier clearly believes the world abounds...
...By keeping his literally "sinister"left-handeddiary, Tiffauges recognizes that his life has formed, and will continue to form, a pattern of inexorable consistency dominated by the idea of "phoria," or bearing...
...The ingeniously devised and constructed order of his grand idea, the way its well-oiled symbols and portents lock flawlessly into place, ultimately appears to be a sterile diversion rather than a means toward understanding...
...Released the day World War II breaks out, on the condition that he enlist in the Army, Tiffauges is captured several months later by the Germans and sent to East Prussia, where the cold northern landscape gives incandescent clarity to his sense of vocation...
...The Ogre won the Prix Goncourt and has been called by Janet Flanner the most important French book since Proust, but it is in reality a profoundly unforgivable work...
...Tiffauges is shot at by an angry father on July 20, 1944, the day the German generals tried to assassinate Hitler...
...Surrounded by 400 impeccably Aryan specimens of preadolescent youth who are being trained to die a glorious death for Fiihrer and Vaterland, Tiffauges ecstatically embraces his fate by truly becoming the ogre he was once called in jest...
...In contrast, Germany, "more harsh and rudimentary, was the country of strong, simplified, stylized drawing, easily read and remembered...
...Writers & Writing STERILE DIVERSIONS BY PEARL K. BELL Just as Ford Madox Ford's tragic The Good Soldier has been called a French novel written in English, one might better understand Michel Tournier's The Ogre (Doubleday, 373 pp., $7.95) by reading it as a German novel that was written in French...
...He roams the country on horseback, searching for racially perfect boys who had slipped through the Nazi net and carrying them back to Kaltenborn like the Erl-King...
...In another profoundly malign inversion, Tiffauges' original French self gradually takes on the trappings and beliefs of a German, and he is transformed from a would-be St...
...Christopher into a Teutonic worshiper of mythological and racial signs and symbols, conducted by Tournier like an orchestra: the blind elk Tiffauges feeds in the forest...
...Until then his mission had been obscured by "the ocean land of France, shrouded in mists, its lines blurred by receding shades...
...Miraculously, he discovers that his left hand can write with perfectly legible ease, and he staits to keep a journal of the hitherto-buried, spiritual side of his personality his subconscious conviction, dating back to his school days, that his supposedly mundane existence is inextricably entwined with the fate of the world...
Vol. 56 • February 1973 • No. 4
