Mythomania

THE OGRE by MICHEL TOURNIER translated by BARBARA BRAY 373 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

The novel of ideas often suffers a fate similar to that of the goose destined for pate de foie gras. Both are force-fed; both die sluggishly for the sake of a few rich morsels. Michel Tournier's The Ogre is engorged with ideas, which is one reason why it waddled off with France's 1970 Prix Goncourt. With unanimous praise from the critics ("The most important book to come out in France since Proust," said Janet Planner), the novel became a bestseller. It is not too difficult to see why. Its setting is World War II and with existentialism temporarily mined out. M. Tournier proves a clever exploiter of the current enthusiasm for mysticism and mythology.

The Ogre himself, a huge, nearsighted man, is named Abel Tiffauges. He is one of those tiresome people who see mysterious significance in every little occurrence. He is variously a Parisian auto mechanic, a keeper of military carrier pigeons, a P.O.W. assistant to the chief forester at Hermann Goring's hunting preserve, and a youth scout for a Nazi eugenics program. Each of these jobs gives Tiffauges a chance to spread his mythic wings. As Abel, he recalls the

Bible's first shepherd, slain by brother Cain, a jealous tiller of the soil. As a stand-in for St. Christopher, the bearer of the young Christ, Tiffauges must carry Tournier's most cumbersome load. This is the burden of innocence, the surprisingly heavy weight of the holy child, who is shouldered above the flood but also protects his carrier from sin and danger.

Tiffauges is the patron saint of his own travels. The war takes him out of France, with its overripe cynicism, to Germany, the northern lands celebrated in Greek mythology as a realm of clear light and cool reason. The fact that Germany is now controlled by such barbarians as Hitler and Goring rounds out the Hyperborean myth by offering an inevitable opposite.

Like a good Hegelian, Tournier presents his thesis and antithesis. But he is also a good Jungian. Signs, symbols and archetypes are pried from every incident and lofted chaotically into the mythological vacuum of the modern world. The presumption is that these fragments are awaiting a supersign that will unify them into some sort of new mythic order. When this in fact occurs in Tournier's book, the effect is one not of artistic revelation but of melodramatic kitsch: a young Auschwitz refugee turns into a Star of David; the star, in turn, spins off to the heavens as a more generalized mandala symbolizing a harmonious universe.

Without at least a mail-order course in triadic dialectics, it is best to forgo analysis of Tournier's synthesis. Enough said that it has much to do with his notion that symbols have lives of their own and possess a diabolical potential. Yet in The Ogre, in contrast with his last book, Friday, Tournier seems incapable of expressing an idea without sacrificing art to pedagogy. As an old East Prussian aristocrat says just before the Russians do a Goetterdammerung on his castle, "When the symbol devours the thing symbolized, when the cross-bearer becomes the crucified, when a malign inversion overthrows phoria, then the end of the world is at hand."

Barbara Bray's translation cannot be entirely blamed. Rather, it seems as if a little malign inversion has seeped into the novel. Why else does it invite laughter in places where it is supposed to be most serious? qedR.Z. Sheppard

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