0 x 1 = 0

THE TRAITOR (304 pp.)--Andre Gorz --Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

To the many hazards of autobiography.

Andre Gorz, French by adoption but a birthright existentialist, has added something new. Austrian-born Author Gorz is not quite sure that he exists. He thus commits himself to a gaseous and perhaps nonexistent subject matter. Nonetheless, this enterprise has set the eyeballs of Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre rolling in a fine frenzy, resulting in 36 pages of introduction, "an honor accorded few books," as the publishers reverently announce. Sample honor: "This hoarse, muffled voice, this breaking voice will live in your ears." Readers who like philosophical teasers will be fascinated by this dubious puzzler that is all clues and no solution. Essentially, it is not an autobiography -- although such facts as may be found in it correspond to Gorz's own personnel file -- for the author is seeking not to establish, but to disclaim, destroy and discard his nature.

The Traitor belongs to that melancholy branch of contemporary literature in which a thousand Jobs, from Silone to Koestler, have pleaded their hardship cases before history's unsentimental court -- the D.P.'s story. Gorz is not just an other displaced person, but a displaced personality. Feeling rejected by history, he responds with a gesture of total repudiation. Says Gorz of himself: "Not to be here; to be only a transparent, ineffable and therefore invulnerable presence . . . this is how he began to be." Indeed, Gorz stands at such a distance from himself that for most of the book he refers to himself as "he," to the admiration of Sartre, who is reminded of Rimbaud's declaration "Je suis unautre [I am someone else]

"Intellectual B.O. In Austria before World War II, Gorz was a Catholic among Jews and a Jew among Catholics. His father, a shuffling businessman, had changed his name on conversion to Christianity. After Anschluss, young Gorz was a "half-caste of the first class." In all the literature of post-Freud antiparent polemic, few have displayed a bleaker childhood. Mother was hateful, wanted him a girl; Father was despicable and despised; at school, his playmates beat young Gorz up, and of course he was a coward. The only things that seem to be lacking in his lifelong dossier of difference from others is that Gorz is neither homosexual nor colored.

Sooner or later (it does not matter, for time, among other things, has been abolished in this book), the reader learns that Gorz became an atheist, a Nazi, a Marxist scholar, a student of chemical engineering in Switzerland. He hankered, like Rimbaud, to exchange Europe's savagery for that of Africa, but unlike Rim baud, did not actually go to Africa. Even in Paris he was a dog of the wrong color; "autre chien" was the French pun for "Autrichien" (Austrian). Someone told Gorz brutally: "You stink intelligence the way some people stink under their arms," another that "You write. That means you don't have to live." The great event on his Damascus road-to-nowhere was his meeting, in a Geneva bistro, with Jean-Paul Sartre, who appears in the narrative as Morel, and whose intellectual B.O. is even more overpowering than Gorz's own. The Sartre double exposure, both as character in the book and character witness for it, has some of the snap, crackle and pop of good Gallic intellectual cooking, but also serves notice that when the French desert their native rationalism, they are capable of talking wilder nonsense even than the Irish.

Green Leaf & Grey. Despite the existentialist flimflam, The Traitor is told with a good deal of force; some readers will be reminded of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground or Henry Miller's confessional shockers, though it lacks the genius of one or the grand gusto of the other.

A more serious defect is involved in Gorz's philosophic intention, a defect that gives weight to Bertrand Russell's dictum that "existence by itself alone is a vicious abstraction." Gorz rejects as "historicity" what most writers jealously collect: the accent of speech, the style of clothes, of house, of gesture--all the million muddled details that together compose the language in which character declares itself.

In fact, it is the real craziness of Gorz's conviction--that he has achieved identity through "nullity"--that gives the book its genuine fascination. It should be good to hear more from Andre Gorz when (like the Biblical character dispossessed of a devil) he is clothed in his right mind. Meanwhile, the reader may suspect that Gorz's rejection of all the things that made him involves a blasphemy against the very substance of life in favor of a featureless landscape of abstractions--something G. K. Chesterton had in mind when he wrote, "There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey." To the irreverent, the final effect of this oddest of contemporary autobiographies is that of Henley's Invictus recited by a passionately sincere but chilblained nudist. Possibly, a more appropriate verse would be:

As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd stay away!

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.