Odd Jobs (130 page)

W
ORSTWARD
H
O
, by Samuel Beckett. 47 pp. Grove Press, 1983.

These forty-seven small pages of very large type extend Beckett’s wrestle with the void to the point where less would be nothing. A personless voice, uttering words of mostly one syllable in sentences of rarely more than five words, urges itself onward in a dim but resistant realm where humanoid apparitions fragmentarily loom and then fade. “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Utmost dim.
Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst.” The dim shapes in this environment most minimal are called shades, and we probably would not be entirely wrong to think of it as an old-fashioned Hades that ends in new-style entropy (“Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther”). A sterile, dreadful exercise, it might be said, and one does not, as Dr. Johnson remarked of
Paradise Lost
, wish it longer than it is. And yet, the words—“How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity!”

S
TIRRINGS
S
TILL
, by Samuel Beckett, illustrated by Louis le Brocquy. 25 pp. Blue Moon Books/John Calder, 1989.

Is Beckett selling out? The price of this latest of his minuscule later works—$1,700—suggests that he’s angling for the big bucks, but its less than two thousand words of baleful text should repel any considerable excess over the two hundred purchasers that this joint British-American limited edition can provide for. One more of those nameless heroes sits around in a characteristically underfurnished universe and manages to make a move or two while longing for the end. The lulling bare-bones prose almost begs to be set to music: “Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.” There is an ashen beauty here, and a heroic willingness to dwell upon the guttering spiritual condition of human life amid our century’s material blaze. More expansive than
Lessness
, less boisterous than
Worstward Ho
, and more easily followed than the segments of
Fizzles, Stirrings Still
will not disappoint hard-core acedia fans. It contains two proper names (Darley, Walther), nine inky lithographs by Louis le Brocquy, and not a single comma. If time is money, and shelf-space precious, this volume is the bargain of the year.

S
TARING AT THE
S
UN
, by Julian Barnes. 197 pp. Knopf, 1987.

The tricky author of
Flaubert’s Parrot
here takes as his subject the rather uneventful but long (ninety-nine years and still counting) life of an Englishwoman, Jean Serjeant. The men in her life—her prankish uncle, her boring husband, her timorous son, and an RAF pilot who boarded with her parents during World War II—are a rather cryptic lot who set her to musing over such marginal items as model airplanes, minks’ will to live, and the five sandwiches Lindbergh took with him when he flew across the Atlantic (he only ate one and a half). Late in life, she flies to China and the Grand Canyon and is impressed by both. This wispy heroine is meant to be an instrument whereby the great existential questions are examined: life, which an epigraph from Chekhov likens to a carrot, and death, which the book’s prevailing metaphor likens to the sun. As a manipulator of motifs, Mr. Barnes is assiduous and brilliant; recurring images weave a wonderful basketwork of implied meaning. But his heroine remains a cipher, and the basket more than half empty.

T
HE
S
TORYTELLER
, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 247 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

T
HE
A
FTERNOON OF A
W
RITER
, by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. 87 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

T
HE
W
RITING
L
IFE
, by Annie Dillard. 111 pp. Harper & Row, 1989.

Harold Ross, the founding editor of
The New Yorker
, was wary of “writer-consciousness,” and would mark phrases and sentences wherein, to his sensibility, the writer, like some ugly giant squid concealed beneath
the glassy impersonality of the prose, was threatening to surface. Writing, that is, like our grosser animal functions, could not be entirely suppressed but shouldn’t be performed in the open. Yet fashions in aesthetic decorum change. Modernism, by the spectacular nature of its experiments, invited admiring or irritated awareness of the experimenting author. Intentionally or not, the written works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway all were exercises in personality, each provoking curiosity about the person behind the so distinctive voice. Postmodernism, if such a thing exists, without embarrassment weaves the writer into the words and the twists of the tale. Philip Roth’s
The Ghost Writer
and its brothers in invented autobiography, the mirrors and false bottoms of Vladimir Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
and
The Gift
, John Barth’s self-proposed and exhaustively fulfilled regimens of taletelling—all place the writer right up front.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s foremost novelist as well as the leading candidate for that country’s Presidency, has never been averse to writer-consciousness; his early, extensive romp,
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
(1977, English translation 1982), pursued its action through a series of parodic soap-opera plots somehow sprouting from the head of a character, the indefatigable scriptwriter Pedro Camacho, and the novel is framed by the relaxed voice of a young man whose literary ambitions, excursions to Europe, and pleasant success match with a breezy closeness those of Mario Vargas Llosa. More recently,
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
(1984, translation 1986) showed the first-person narrator piecing together, chapter by chapter, supposition by supposition, the life of a pudgy schoolmate who had turned into a violent leftist revolutionary. Now
The Storyteller
tells the tale of another schoolmate,
^§
Saúl Zuratas, who went off to become a storyteller among the Machiguenga Indians, in the jungles of the upper Amazon. As in
Aunt Julia
, a tale-teller’s voice alternates with the author’s voice; as in
Alejandro Mayta
, a narrative relativity is invoked, and the imaginative act of speculation takes the place of unquestionable assertion. It
is
asserted that Saúl Zuratas is Jewish and has “a dark birthmark, the color of wine dregs, that covered the entire right side of his face.” He is nicknamed Mascarita—Mask Face. “The birthmark spared neither his ears nor his lips nor his
nose, also puffy and misshapen from swollen veins. He was the ugliest lad in the world; but he was also a likable and exceptionally good person.” We see him, through the nameless narrator’s eyes, as a university student who becomes increasingly fascinated by the Indian cultures surviving on the Amazonian side of the Andes; later, at a greater distance, we hear of him, through an American missionary couple, the Schneils, as a nearly naked storyteller wandering among the small, widely separated units of the Machiguenga tribe.

The narrative’s levels are multiple. In its foreground, the narrator, a writer in no way distinguished from the author, relates how he was diverted into his subject matter from an intended period of study and repose in Florence: “I came to Firenze to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while, and suddenly my unfortunate country forced itself upon me this morning in the most unexpected way.” An exhibit of photographs of the Peruvian jungle, taken by an Italian photographer, has been mounted near “Dante’s restored house … and the lane where, so legend has it, he first saw Beatrice”; these photographs of “the wide rivers, the enormous trees, the fragile canoes, the frail huts raised up on pilings, and the knots of men and women, naked to the waist and daubed with paint,” distract the writer from his plan “to read Dante and Machiavelli and look at Renaissance paintings for a couple of months in absolute solitude.” The writer has frequently before, we are told, attempted to imagine and tell the curious story of Mascarita. So the composition of what we are reading presents itself as a feat, the fruit of a struggle. Two large literary spirits are conjured up to aid the telling: Dante, the singer of an otherworldly geography even more exotic than that of trans-Andean Peru, and Kafka, whose tale “The Metamorphosis,” about a man turned into a giant insect, is the one classic cherished by Saúl Zuratas in his own helpless monstrosity. Saúl’s first name holds another literary reference: to the exemplary convert, whose namesake is similarly stricken—“I can say that Saúl experienced a conversion.… From his first contact with the Amazon jungle, Mascarita was caught in a spiritual trap that made a different person of him.”

Vargas Llosa is a diligent researcher. Anthropology pervades
The Storyteller
, and since the Machiguengas are an actual tribe and the acknowledgments credit a number of scholarly and exploratory institutions, we can take the mythology and lore to be authentic. The Machiguengas call themselves “the men who walk”: their survival tactics in the face of competing tribes and the incursions of the white men (called Viracochas)
comprise constant migratory motion from one temporary settlement after another, in family groups of as few as ten. Amid a situation of potential total fragmentation, the wandering storyteller serves as a news bearer and oral historian, as “the memory of the community, fulfilling a function similar to that of the jongleurs and troubadours of the Middle Ages.” “Storyteller” isn’t quite exact: the Machiguenga word—“a long, loud guttural sound full of
s
’s”—more literally translates as
hablador
, or “speaker.” The narrator of the novel, our modern Peruvian novelist enjoying his Florentine respite, is stirred to think that “storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment.” He is, he confides,

The
habladores
are “the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society.”

The anthropology is more vivacious than the fiction, more plausible than the novel’s premise that a white man could insert himself into a primitive tribe and take on the caretaking of its arcane cultural essence. But it cannot be said that the novelist dodges the difficulties; not only does Vargas Llosa, courtesy of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (real) and the American missionaries the Schneils (fictional), give us a thorough tour of the Machiguenga world as it survives in the state of Peru, but he takes upon himself, in the novel’s tour de force, the voice of Saúl Zuratas as a Machiguenga storyteller. He mimics the concision and the hellish slipperiness of American Indian tales, as recorded and compiled by generations of anthropologists. Nothing quite makes sense or is purely nonsense. The Machiguenga genesis legends have a grandeur and pathos not unfamiliar to those of us raised with the Bible:

As retold by Saúl Zuratas as imagined by Vargas Llosa, the myths are gradually, cleverly infused with novelistic elements. Saúl’s pathetic personal history begins to intrude, a process abetted by the pliable way that Tasurinchi, the god of good, takes, Vishnu-like, many forms, and bewilderingly becomes the hero of almost any tale that is told:

Transformation is the novel’s theme, as metamorphosis is the engine of primitive legend. Saúl, born disfigured, is born transformed, and his self-conversion into a Machiguenga corrects the wrong and completes the cycle. A “talking parrot” in the Zuratas household in Lima during Saúl’s school days is changed, in the jungle, into Saúl’s totem—a pet and guardian who travels on his shoulder, who conjures up a canopy of friendly parrots, and whom Saúl calls Mascarita.

These mock-primitive chapters are the novel’s dark and tangled heart, and they reward a second reading with greater, though not perfect, intelligibility. Enough, perhaps, has been quoted to indicate the fervor and vigor of Vargas Llosa’s powers of invention, and also the strain he has placed upon them. The smell of ink doesn’t quite leave this tale of taletelling. Little seems to fall into place lightly. When the novelist is being himself and not Saúl being Tasurinchi, he can drop vivid casual details,
like the “dark pouches hanging from the palm-leaf roof” that disappear at daybreak and turn out to be “balls of hundreds of spiders that curled up together,” or like the interviewed Spanish writer of romances who stores “thousands of novelettes” in her basement and “finishes one every two days, each exactly a hundred pages long.” This novel could do with a little romance. Saúl Zuratas and the narrator, like the heroes of boys’ adventure books, have no sex lives. And the notion, insistently repeated, that Saúl’s being Jewish makes it easier for him to identify and merge with the persecuted Machiguengas comes to seem too simple. Vargas Llosa, if he has a fault, tends to be programmatic; his prose presents a blunt, masculine texture rarely varied by a touch of the spontaneously sensual, the offhandedly immediate.
The Storyteller
is an animated anthropological, ecological, psychological meditation, admirably intelligent and humane, but not much, strange to say, of a story.